ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the intellectual lineage of Terra Australis with particular attention to the concept of the antipodes. In particular, the idea of the antipodes consisted of a set of theoretical propositions about the lands and people's on the other side of the earth which retained the possibility of contemplation without action. Classical Greek science devised three fundamental starting points for the theory of the antipodes. The antipodes were necessary for the dominant modes of describing the world in its entirety, but for obvious reasons such a space could be apprehended only by means of reasoning: by hypothesis, but also by imagination. In the twenty-first century the idea of the antipodes continues to spark creative expression around the idea of dislocation. Terra Australis retained many of the tropes familiar from classical and medieval formulations of the antipodes: reversal of perspective, mirroring, but also reticence in the face of the unknown.
