Travel / Australian History
Book Details

The Pursuit of Wonder

How Australia’s landscape was explored, nature discovered and tourism unleashed

Julia Horne

Imagine an Australia before the tour buses and well-trodden bushwalks, a wild and often daunting country that did not easily yield the secrets of its natural beauty.

Opinion

A beautifully produced gem for the coffee-table or festive stocking of a special traveller: read how the Australian landscape has been explored, interpreted and celebrated from the 19th century onwards. Sydney historian Julia Horne includes examples of early travel writing and promotional material, and the range of archival photographs and illustrations, reproduced on high-quality paper, is exceptional.
(Susan Kurosawa, The Australian, November 4th 2005)

“Julia Horne is an authoritative, entertaining and thought-provoking pilot and guide.”
(Warwick McFadyen, The Sunday Age, 6/11/05)

About this Title

Imagine an Australia before the tour buses and well-trodden bushwalks, a wild and often daunting country that did not easily yield the secrets of its natural beauty. Into this landscape early Europeans ventured, 'discovering' nature at its most Romantic-sublime lakes, ancient mountain ranges, awe-inspiring caves and plunging waterfalls. Scenery that is now a familiar part of the Australian landscape-the Blue Mountains and the Jenolan Caves in New South Wales, Lake St Clair in Tasmania and Wilsons Promontory in Victoria, Mount Tamborine in Queensland and Mount Lofty in South Australia-stirred in these visitors a sense of awe.

The Pursuit of Wonder follows colonial tourists such as Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie, Eugen von Guérard and Louisa Atkinson as they rolled up their sleeves or loosened their corsets in pursuit of nature. Imagining herself in their dusty shoes, historian Julia Horne explores the beginnings of environmental tourism, and the influence of European ideas of travel, nature and art on the Australian landscape. She eloquently demonstrates that it was not only the untouched nature of the places these early tourists visited but the visitors' own cultural conditioning that unleashed such a powerful response in them to Australia's rugged beauty, as shown in their travel writings, sketches and paintings.

Richly illustrated, The Pursuit of Wonder is a celebration of travel in its many rambling, striving, inspiring guises and a revelation of a natural world that we now take for granted. Rediscover the wonder.

About the Author

Julia Horne is University Historian at the University of Sydney. She has
also taught history at UNSW, worked as a curator at the Powerhouse
Museum, pioneered local history outreach programs and spent hundreds of
hours interviewing people about their lives as Head of the Oral History
Program in the UNSW Archives. She is the author of Not an Ivory Tower
(1997) and Jenolan Caves: When the Tourists Came (1994).

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978-0-522-85166-3