Abstract
In recovering some particular ways of imagining Australasia, this volume has both traced the history of a spatial imaginary that was entangled with imperial aspirations and charted the cultural traffic that produced a particular kind of cartographic consciousness. Inevitability, it is incomplete, but the chapters gathered here provide important vantage points on these histories, recovering a range of voices and offering glimpses of people and ideas in motion. It repeatedly returns to the restlessness of the 249peoples that made their homes in these southern lands in the shadow of empire, how they made sense of their world, and imagined future possibilities for these southern lands and peoples. While those visions were rarely fully realized, they offer important windows into the aspirations of earlier generations who were convinced that they had both the right and capability to remake the world.