Through the rear view mirror: landscapes, legends and literature on the Australian road

Abstract

This essay explores the way Australians have approached motoring journeys from the early to late twentieth century through analysis of both published and unpublished non-fiction travel narratives. It argues that an increasing tension is evident between the desire to embrace an emerging modern urban industrial Australia and its representative technology, including the motor vehicle, and nostalgia for an earlier, fading rural-pastoral era. While travellers embraced the motor car as the ideal means by which to discover the ‘real’ Australia in outback and rural regions, many also expressed ambivalence and resistance towards the new technology and the transformations it wrought. That ambivalence was manifested in a tendency to look backwards, continually seeking to perpetuate national foundation mythologies such as the bush and pioneer ‘frontier’ legends in the face of modernising modes and conditions of travel. Australia's history as a settler colonial society has strongly shaped experiences and representations of road travel in the motoring era. A study of road narratives provides an insight into the relationship between travellers, vehicles and the road, revealing changing attitudes towards modernity, landscape and nation.