ABSTRACT
As this example shows, imperialism and colonial control extended European landscape conventions and ways of seeing landscape into other parts of the world. Just as environments close to home were quickly assimilated into the mode of seeing and value systems of dominant groups, then exotic environments like the Pacific islands were also opened to interpretation using the conventions of European landscape aesthetics. Early European visitors presented Tahiti as a Claudian style paradise and New Zealand as a romantic wilderness complete with exotic ‘banditti’ (Maoris). Banditti were romanticised images of rogues, robbers and highwaymen that peopled the pictures of Salvator Rosa. In Australia, as Paul Carter (1987) showed, the picturesque, and trees in particular, became highly valued elements in the landscape as settlers tried to come to terms with new landscapes and impose a familiar set of values on new environments. Similarly Europeans re-imagined the Kandyan Highlands of Ceylon by using picturesque, romantic and utilitarian aesthetics, sometimes in combination (Duncan, 1999). This example from L. De Butts’ Rambles in Ceylon (1841, 161; cited in Duncan, 1999, 159) combines picturesque and utilitarian perspectives:
Figure 6.5 shows how the environment of the African savannah was represented to Europeans in complex images drawing carefully on both familiar conventions and unfamiliar images. By doing so, Africa was ultimately transformed into the familiar terms of the aristocratic leisure pursuit of hunting. It is taken from Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa by François Le Valliant (1790); probably the most widely read eighteenth-century account of travel in the Southern African region and a major best seller in England.
