Visions of Australia: Impressions of the Landscape 1642-1931 by Eric Rolls

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Mark on tail foredge. Sunning to foredges. Body text and binding are still very good.

This book records the opinions of one hundred people who saw the land in its unchanged state one to two hundred years ago, and the cities as they developed. The book remakes the conception of Australia.

Henry Lawson, Adam Lindsay Gordon and others wrote well enough to daub a permanent drab coat over the loveliness that was Australia. They saw it through the eyes of settlers trying to build farms with insufficient land, money, and knowledge.

The casual first observers of the country and the city found them beautiful. They transform the modern notions of a harsh landscape into a garden of wildflowers. They transform the wood-and-canvas huts fronting streets of mud and dust of early towns into buildings both costly and economical of extraordinary elegance. They transform the European people from drunken, licentious convicts and opportunists into members of an intelligent, vigorous, adaptable, and proud society. They transform Aboriginal Australians into highly intelligent people with great artistic ability. (back cover)