He was not very different from Dr. Banks’ description of the Australian Aborigines as being “but one degree removed from the Brutes” (Inventing Australia, p. 8) and placing them just one step above the animal kingdom the chain of beings. In fact not only Dr. Banks, but also later visitors to New South Wales, even as late as in 1840s, reinforced his views. People like Augustus Earle, the artist, believed that the Australian aborigines were the last link in the chain of existence which united the man with the monkeys, and Peter Cunningham suggested that these aborigines should be placed right at the beginning of civilization, to act as the connecting link between the monkey tribe and man. Yet this place, which was seen as the possible nurturing ground of the species linking the monkey and the man, had its other uses too. Most prominent among them was as a dumping ground for the …show more content…
8, Ovid was summoned to leave Rome and settle on the edge of the empire, in the wilderness. He was aged fifty and had enjoyed more than thirty years of acclaimed fame as poet and writer. Augustus himself is said to have ordered Ovid’s exile, which was never discussed in the Senate or a court. The reasons why the historicall Ovid was banished and why the emperor decided to take action in person are not clear. In fact Malouf himself acknowledges that little is known about Ovid’s life and even lesser is known about the reason for his exile. But interestingly Malouf says that this dearth of facts was useful for his writing the fiction. His primary decision for writing the novel on the imaginary life for Ovid is based on the understanding that history is synecdochic and that our sense of the past is partial and full of gaps. It is as Russel West said “More compelling, however, than this recognition- which is not extraordinary, after all- is the writer’s response to it, his clear sense that the facts of history, whether meagre or plentiful, require a work of synthetic