The Island of Brazil: a baroque travelogue

'The Island of Brazil' offers a critique of nationalist historical and spatial mythologies by drawing on the agility and flexibility of creativecritical methods. Operating at the intersection of fictocriticism, memoir and travel writing, the essay is both an extension of the author's previous writing on South America and a journey into the unknown. This entangled mixture is not [just] an aesthetic exercise; rather, the interwoven analysis, description and narration reflect the author's concern with transnational histories of colonisation-specifically, those analogous forms and metaphorical resonances which have otherwise been separated by modern, nationalist histories and their restricted vistas of representation. 'The Island of Brazil' proposes an antithesis of Australian conquest by recalling a neglected lineage of Australian poetics-here represented by Patrick White's Voss, a novel that is emblematic of colonialist literature but, in its complexity, contradictions and expressionism, powerfully subverts many colonialist tropes. Like Voss, 'The Island of Brazil' revives baroque, counter-modern strategies by constructing a series of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and discordia concors (a combination of dissimilar images, or even the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike). Accordingly, vast distances and times are collapsed or overlaid. After all, Australia once had its own Amazon: millions of years ago, nourished by frequent rain and great webs of rivers, a rainforest of similar size spread throughout the centre of the continent. As Australia dried out, however, rainfall over central Brazil increased, and what vanished in one place re-emerged somewhere else. The essay suggests, therefore, that what we might have assumed is unique to Australia is not so unique after all; going further, Australia, like Brazil, might not be anywhere at all. In these lands that are not ours, the sacred is immanent to matter and its obscure forces, but the divine lies only in the half-seen images of dream. The author's account, if not his entire subjectivity, must explode into myriad fragments, then, but in each fragment are labyrinths of biology, cryptography and geology; the crisis of sensory experience goes hand in hand with unending series of remarkable discoveries. Beings badly awakened from their flesh, travellers merge with fiction, and the fictions of the past; Voss sets out to find the Outback but loses himself in the Amazon.