Resumen de A 1950s re-imagining of the seventeenth-century search for Terra Australis: James Mcauley’s captain Quiros (1964)
In 1960 Australian poet James McAuley completed an unlikely modern epic re-imagining two late-Renaissance exploratory voyages westward across the Pacific in searchfor the fabled Terra Australis, led by Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós(Quiros). McAuley’s reflection on history was driven by contemporary preoccupations with identity arising in a western nation situated at the periphery of the west. Theepic departs from the customary Anglo-Saxon trope of Australia’s discovery ( JamesCook) to embellish an English translation of the Spanish chronicle of Quiros’ littleknown Pacific voyages.Drawing on post-colonial readings, this paper focusses upon the representation in PartI of Quiros’ encounter during the first 1695 voyage with the seemingly utopian “NewWorld” island community in the Solomon Islands. It also addresses Quiros’ later deathbed vision of futurity in Panama in 1614 before the failed third expedition (Part III),including how McAuley, a recent convert to the then minority faith of Catholicism,uses Quiros as mask for exploring utopian projections. The apocalyptic death-bedvision adds new material, drawing from the author’s understanding of colonial andalso mid-twentieth century European history. It examines how the arguably authorialpersona of Part III meditates on ways forward for a nation beginning both in “exile”and in troubled relations with the Other.
