Plains and Prairie Space, History, and The Literary Imagination, In Australia and The United States

In 1825 a space observer orbiting the earth could have looked down on two enormous land masses separated by more than 7000 miles. In the southern hemisphere the great body of land was Australia, an insular continent surrounded by the southern seas. In the northern hemisphere the great body of land was the United States, framed on east and west by oceans, bordered on the north by the even greater land of Canada and on the south by the lesser land of Mexico. Australia and the United States were roughly the same size, some three million square miles