The Imagined Desert

The following analysis of the Australian Outback as an imagined space is informed by theories describing a separation from the objective physical world and the mapping of its representative double through language, and draws upon a reading of the function of landscape in three fictions; Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899), Greg Mclean’s 2005 horror film Wolf Creek and Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 cinematic adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright2. I would like to consider the Outback as a culturally produced text, and compare the function of this landscape as a cultural ‘reality’ to the function of landscape in literary and cinematic fiction.