Durable Monuments

Nineteenth-century Australian settlers, in an architectural, cultural and intellectual claiming of their new land, filled their landscape with durable monuments -allusions of visual, textual, linguistic kinds to a remembered, imagined, idealised, far-distant homeland. This book chronicles how colonists adjusted to surroundings that were without everyday signifiers of European civilisation; where it was self-assuring to create one's own references to an ancient cultural inheritance, and also to claim to be of the land - becoming indigenous, in fact, by constructing a locality with its own symbolic references to a past that was meaningful for them.