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Australia saw a rush of utopian fiction in the late nineteenth century. Speculative accounts of futuristic Australian cities or otherworldly societies were used to explore the social and ethical issues facing the colonies. It was in this hopeful…

When editor Joseph Fraser is asked to publish the diaries of a local merchant, he can hardly believe what he is reading. Adam Jacobs has been leading a strange double life: split between the harsh struggles of colonial Melbourne, and the wonders of a…

Writing of colonisation in the Americas, utopian studies scholar Lyman Tower Sargent observed that the “colonies produce utopias for the colonists and dystopias for the colonized.” This certainly holds true in the Australian context, where the…

What kinds of futures did nineteenth-century Australian writers imagine? From stories looking forward to better, utopian societies, to those warning against dark, dystopian turns, this body of literature engages with a broad range of contemporary…

The research behind this paper was motivated by Lyman Tower Sargent’s keynote address on Australian utopian literature, presented at the Demanding the Impossible: Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction conference, held at Monash University in 2007. In…