Australian literary history of the nineteenth century provides an especially clear example of two contrasting styles of travel writing. It was a time when, on the one hand, explorers still could travel to genuinely uncharted territory and attempt to describe their findings as objectively as possible. Often their explicit goal was to assess the worth of the new lands for human occupation or exploitation. At the same time, the Romantic aesthetics of the time encouraged subjective, experiential accounts of what George French Angas called "savage life and scenes" in the antipodes. The Romantic writers exploited the pure exoticism of place for the sake of pure experience. One of the greatest contrasts between the two types of writing, therefore, is in the narrative personae developed and revealed in each kind of account.
Among the travel accounts, I will consider George French Angas's Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (1847), Marcus Clark's "Preface" to Gordon's Poems (1876), and Francis Adams's The Australians: A Social Sketch (1893) as examples of Romantic travelers. In contrast, I will treat the accounts by some Australian explorers (Cook, Grey, Mitchell, Eyre, Sturt, and Leichardt) as examples of personae created in a more natural and dynamic fashion.
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