ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Peter Bishop focuses on the Nullabor Plain, for many years a disregarded region of Australia that runs along the southern edge of the continent for a thousand kilometres. At the heart of this vast region lies a 200,000 square kilometre plateau of limestone, virtually devoid of trees; consequently, this area has been seen as a landscape grossly deficient in significant features and means to support life. Edward Eyre's desperate sea voyage of 1840–41 along the coast of the Great Australian Bight, the large open bay located off the central and western portions of the southern coastline of Australia, was the first non-indigenous report of what seemed to be a wasteland: he described the part of the Nullarbor Plain that borders the coastal waters through which he sailed as “a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams”. By land, the Nullarbor was crossed first by the overland telegraph, crude tracks and then, in the early twentieth century by a railway; it is now traversed by a sealed highway. Its use during the 1950s as a site for testing Britain's atomic bomb was dramatic confirmation of its lowly status in non-indigenous imagination, virtually a non-place.
Over the past half century, however, new paradigms have emerged throughout Australia that facilitate a reimagining of this region—including environmentalism, tourism, recognition of indigenous rights, and the need for reconciliation. Peter's chapter discusses the psychological process of the imaginal repopulation and re-envisioning of this unique Australian landscape.
