Since even before British settlers began to arrive in numbers on its shores at close of the eighteenth century, Australia has exercised both fascination and repulsion on the European mind. The wide, open horizons, fertile and ripe with possibility, were yet inhabited also by strange and lethal creatures, not to mention inscrutable people. Europeans gazed upon the great southern continent with ambivalence, uncertain whether to fear or love it. This ambivalence manifested itself in a variety of ways. Let us ponder, for a moment, a phenomenon as superficially unremarkable as the existence of black swans. From the composition of Juvenal’s…