Mapping Australia felix : maps, myths and mitchell

This investigation into the oeuvre of Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor-General of New South Wales from 1827 to 1855, intends to reveal the remarkable opus of work he produced and enquire how he achieved it. The feat that won him fame was his discovery of the rich pasturelands and picturesque landscapes in an area that is now western Victoria, which he called Australia Felix. He matched this enthusiastic name with a finely illustrated and densely detailed two-volume journal of his three exploratory journeys - ostensibly to find where the River Darling met the Murray River. Mitchell learnt his trade as a surveyor and mapmaker in Wellington’s army fighting the French in Spain and Portugal, that theatre of the Napoleonic Wars termed the Peninsular War. The objective of this thesis is twofold. The first is the exposition of a rare and remarkable atlas of battlefield plans he was commissioned to survey at the conclusion of the war, a task which took him five years in the field, but was only completed and published 25 years later. There are only two known copies of this immense tome in Australian public libraries. The parallel plan is to relate it to the wealth of imagery with which he illustrated the journal of his expedition in 1836 that discovered Australia Felix. By the artifice of fusing the magnificent maps and landscapes in the atlas with the illustrations in the journals, together with his unpublished artwork, and commissioned structures, a metaphorical map of the new Promised Land can be attempted. Set in a period of revolution and European expansion, it is a study encompassing histories of nationalism, exploration, cartography, colonisation, indigenous relations, warfare, art, and theories of landscape art, architecture, neoclassicism and romanticism, and the aesthetics of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque.Doctor of Philosoph