Review of Mapped But Not Known: The Australian Landscape of the Imagination, ed. P .R. Eadcn and F.H. Mares

Abstract

This festschrift in honour of Dr Brian Elliott is to be doubly welcomed, as a tribute and as a valuable collection of essays and poems on an important topic, 'Australian landscape of the Imagination'. It is only recently that the pioneers of the teaching of Australian literature, and in Elliott's case Australian Studies, in which he was Reader for many years at the University of Adelaide, have been honoured. And honoured not formally by the Academy in which they spent their working lives, or by civil honours, but by colleagues, students, friends and admirers. I am thinking of Cecil Hadgraft. T. Inglis Moore, and A.A. Phillips as well as Elliott. There were no academic Chairs for these scholars, no notable public honours. Hadgraft is also the subject of a festschrift, Moore of a biography in progress by Elizabeth Perkins and Moore's daughter, Pacita Alexander. All three teacher/writers helped to shape the history of their professed subject and became in turn part of its yet to be written history. Dorothy Green is another teacher and writer of wide influence and has received the Order of Australia for her work. The honouring of these scholars marks a legitimation of the teaching and study of Australian literature, and it also where legitimation can be looked for and how far it has developed.