Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, colonial powers frequently used the rhetoric of ‘empty lands’ to justify their actions. Almost always, of course, such rhetoric was nothing but myth: used to legitimate violence and dehumanise Indigenous inhabitants. In one continent, however, colonial powers laid claim to a territory that really was empty: Antarctica. The southern continent is the coldest, the windiest and the driest place in the world. More than 98 per cent of its land surface is covered in ice and there is perpetual darkness over much of the continent during the long Antarctic winter. Uniquely among the world’s continents, Antarctica has no Indigenous human population. Although the surrounding oceans teem with life, the continent itself supports no flora or fauna larger than a flea. In a sense, there is nothing to appropriate but space itself.
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Notes
Stephen Martin, A History of Antarctica (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996).
See Brigid Hains, The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Myth of the Frontier (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002). The discourse of Australian Antarctic exploration was highly gendered and highly racialised.
Herbert George Ponting, The Great White South (London: Duckworth & Co., 1922).
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Quoted in Peter Beck, The International Politics of Antarctica (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 26.
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Sara Wheeler, Cherry: a Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1st US edn (New York: Random House, 2002).
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Howkins, A. (2010). Appropriating Space: Antarctic Imperialism and the Mentality of Settler Colonialism. In: Mar, T.B., Edmonds, P. (eds) Making Settler Colonial Space. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277946_3
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