Bernard Smith is widely recognized as one of Australia's leading intellectuals in the fields of anthropology and art history. Peter Beilharz argues that Smith's work also contains a social theory or a way of thinking about Australian culture and identity. Smith enables Australians to think about matters of place and cultural imperialism through the image of being not Australian so much as antipodean. This is the first book-length analysis of Bernard Smith's work. It is both an introduction to Smith's thinking and an important interpretive argument about imperialism and the antipodes.
Reviews
'In writing Imagining the Antipodes, Peter Beilharz has had access to both Smith's unpublished papers and to the man himself. It is the first study of Smith's achievement and as such is certainly worthwhile.' The Times Literary Supplement
