Generations of Australian schoolchildren learned to describe their homeland as ‘the world's largest island and the world's smallest continent’. It is such a pleasing construction. It comprehends the two major topographies of land, islands and continents, in a reversed relation of scale, for islands are meant to be small and continents large. This inversion of the norm fits well with the concept of Australia's upside-down status when viewed from the boreal perspective of Europe. Despite the implicit judgement of that northern perception, there is nevertheless an enchantment that attaches to living in such a perverse space: Australia is the biggest and the smallest as well as upside down and inside out.

These statements of geographical ‘fact’ and legend are also inherently literary: the juxtaposition of opposites is an oxymoron; it is also a paradox in that it requires the interconnection of opposing terms for its effect and these qualities are underscored by the syntactical repetition of the isocolon (a statement that repeats the same phrase structure). Further, the reflexivity of these two sets of binaries casts the construction as a chiasmus, for there is an inverted parallelism in the two statements of topography. In summary, this perception of Australia is of a space that interconnects geographical and rhetorical contradiction and inversion, a space that contains an otherness within itself. Such a space promises to be endlessly baffling and, hence, philosophical and creative.

This book examines predominantly Australian literature in view of the shifting cartographies of modernity and their constructions of space. Representational dynamism is no more or less a feature of Australian cartography than anywhere else, but Australia's unique status as an island continent and the particular terms of the relationships among its geography, politics and history present an especially fascinating dilemma of especial relevance to the Australian context with the potential to reframe broader questions about the lived and imaginary experience of space. Australia's status as an island continent has certainly occupied the Australian literary imagination, which has not only responded to this spatial particularity but profoundly shaped its imaginary energy. At various historical junctures since the European invasion of Australia, Australia has been described as being more one topology than another: sometimes the island-continent is more of an island; at others, more of a continent.