My first island adventures were imaginary travels with Enid Blyton’s Fives and Sevens to rugged Scotland. Islands were adventurous places for humans, but home for wheeling, wailing gannets, fulmars, gulls and kittiwakes. Only later did I discover Robert Louis Stevenson’s tropical island paradises: by then my ‘default’ islands were always black, bleak, cold and windy, like Surtsey, the island born in my own lifetime.
The idea of knowing a place from its origins, and knowing all about a place is compelling. In her Atlas of Remote Islands (2010), the German cartographer Judith Schalansky depicts ‘50 islands I have not visited and never will’, each gorgeously rendered, a topographically shaded landmass on a plain blue page. As the British author Pico Iyer has noted, some islands fall off the map altogether, perhaps especially if, like Paraguay and Bhutan, they are girt by land.
In Australia – the largest island, the smallest continent – we have our own peculiar fascination with island thinking. The ‘nation for a continent’ sometimes overlooks its own islands, even Tasmania. And the continental imagination almost always excludes Christmas Island, Heard Island, Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island, and Macquarie Island, all beyond our continental shelf. These are the places Australia controls, but sometimes disowns, as asylum seekers in leaky boats discover to their peril.
Australia is so large, it is continental in behaviour. It is so big, it is described as having islands within its landmass
- Surtsey Island in 2006.Photo by Arctic Images/Corbis
I learned the shape of my nation from the small plastic silhouette of Australia that was in the pencil cases of children in the 1960s and ’70s. Now, as an adult travelling abroad, I have no trouble sketching an outline of my country, an approximation of that plastic stencil, whenever I need to explain where I’m from, or where some event occurred. (I add an ‘apple’ for Tasmania below the bottom right corner). This nation is defined by its coastline. People from land-locked places envy the recognisable shape of my country. They have trouble drawing their own national boundaries, and seldom have a ‘national shape’ in their heads as clear as mine.
Australia is so large as an island that it is continental in behaviour. It is so big that it is sometimes described as having islands within its landmass, particularly in the vast desert interior (70 per cent of the nation is ‘arid zone’). The idea of oases, or islands of biological activity around the waterholes in desert seas, dates back to the writings of the English explorer Edward John Eyre, who ventured inland in 1840. It is echoed in the more recent ecological idea of ‘pulse and reserve’ or ‘boom and bust’ where the island refuges grow and shrink with climatic shifts. In Islands in the Interior (1993), the archaeologist Peter Veth argued that Australia had isolated human populations, cut off from each other over long periods in the super-aridity of the last glacial maximum.
Island-mindedness is born in island places, but the islands of the mind have a broad appeal. Is this hard-wired? Recognising an island of safety and refuge might have enabled our hominin ancestors to find stepping stones out of Africa in times of environmental stress. The concept of the island has long been prominent in literature and useful in science: biologists and geographers, national park managers and archaeologists, linguists, geneticists and evolutionary theorists have all turned at times to the model of the island. Yet it might no longer be a great model for the new needs and concerns of our rapidly globalising century.