Australia's place in the European imagination is squarely on the precarious fault lines between Antipodality and imperialism. Given the utopian spatiality that Australia holds as a result of its cosmographic significance as Europe's imaginary counterpart, this means for one thing that Australia is inherently antagonistic and critical to imperial ideology. But it also means that Australia is an emblem of the European desire to explore, discover and conquer, a desire which, as this book has documented, expressed itself long before any European caught sight of the Australian continent. This was seen in the strong discourse of Arcadianism which developed gradually out of ancient and medieval visions about mythical lands at the other end of the world. In one rendition of this Arcadian dream, which was especially propelled forward by Captain Quirós, the Antipodal utopia turned out to be built on the highly ideologically inflected trope of bounty, which implicated it deeply in the ideologies of European imperialism and expansionism. In another but related rendition, the Arcadian utopia was found to be conscripted into the civilising mission, the narrative central to modern forms of imperialism and settler colonialism. However, in the form of Arcadia the Antipodal utopia also stands as a direct and critical counterpoint to the unsustainable excesses and emotional poverty of European modernity, and as such provides concrete-utopian content that was highly appealing in the past and rings all the more true in today's era of late capitalism and climate change. The dialectical tension between Arcadia and imperialism becomes even stronger when it is remembered that imperialism essentially represents, as Bill Ashcroft commented at the beginning of this book, the expansionist arm of European modernity.

Arcadianism, however, was just one form of the Antipodal utopia. The principle of Antipodal inversion, as this book has attempted to show, is theoretically capable of producing an infinite number of utopias, each of which interprets the Antipodal relationship between Europe and Australia in different ways and with different emphases. If, as Marx and Engels write in the German Ideology, ‘in all ideology humans and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura’, then Antipodal inversion turns ideology's distortion on its head again – not to produce, so to speak, an upright representation of reality, but to provide a negative of ideology's inversion, in which its topsyturvyness comes fully to the fore.