Table of Contents

1. The land is a map: the Aboriginal relationship to the desert; 2. Forms, images, imaginings: European myths of the desert; 3. The 'hideous blank': imperatives for discovery; 4. Geography is never innocent: or, what the explorers thought they saw; 5. Perspectives on the desert: the art of exploration; 6. 'On the tracts of thirst and furnace': dead explorers and national identity; 7. Ripping yarns at the outpost of empire: the desert as adventure; 8. From 'dead heart' to 'red centre': travellers' tales and the lure of gold; 9. Seeing red: twentieth-century art of the desert; 10. A gothic desert: psychodrama in fiction and film; 11. Revisioning the explorers in twentieth-century art; 12. Transforming myths: the explorers in twentieth-century literature; 13. Seeing through biology: contemporary artists examine the desert; 14. The desert in the Age of Aquarius: environmentalism and renewal; 15. The art of reconciliation.