The Cowpastures, just like an English landscape.
The Camden Historical Sociey is hosting a talk and slides by University of Wollongong historian Dr Ian Willis at its meeting on Wednesday 8 February 2017.
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| The colonial settlers in the Cowpastures made the countryside look like a Little England (I Willis) |
The topic of the talk is 'The Cowpastures, just like an English landscape' where he will speak about how the early colonial settlers of the Cowpastures re-shaped the Australian countryside into an English-style landscape.
Talk and Slides
Camden Historical Society
Talk and Slides
Wednesday, 8 February 2017, 7.30pm
Camden Museum, 40 John Street, Camden.
Speaker
Topic
The Cowpastures, just like an English landscape.
Summary of talk
The early colonial European settlers in the Cowpastures were
the key players in the story of creating an English-style landscape along the
Nepean River.
The settlers took possession of the countryside from the Dharawal Aboriginal people and
re-made it in their own vision of the world.
They constructed a cultural
landscape made up of an idealised vision of what they had left behind in the
‘Old Country’.
For the European settlers the new continent, and particularly
the bush, had the elements of the Gothic with its grotesque and the demonic,
and the English-style landscape aesthetic they created was one attempt to
counter these forces.
Settlers used the
aesthetic to assist the creation of a new story on an apparently blank slate
and in the process dispossessed and displaced the Indigenous occupants.
The new
landscape was characterised by English placenames, English farming methods and
English settlement patterns, with only cursory acknowledgement of Indigenous
occupation.
The early settlers had such a profound impact on the countryside
that their legacy is still clearly identifiable today even after 200 years.
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