Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes

Description

In the tradition of Dava Sobel and Longitude, award-winning writer Martin Edmond uses his extraordinary intellectual breadth and imaginative reach to elegantly and lucidly execute his most ambitious project to date - the history of 4,000 years of the Western imagination and the Antipodes, Great Southern Land, Zone of the Marvellous. Australia and New Zealand were imagined for thousands of years before they became real. From Plato's Atlantis to Dante's Mount Purgatory, from Sinbad the Sailor to Abel Tasman, travellers, writers, mapmakers, charlatans have dreamt of a fabled land on the far side of the world. In this far-ranging cultural history - 'from Gilgamesh to Shane Cotton' - Martin Edmond traverses vast territories of time and space, of human fortitude and imagination. While Ptolemy imagined a Great South Land to balance the weight of Northern Hemisphere continents on his maps and Phoenecian, Greek, and Roman sailors began voyaging down the African coast, thinkers from Plato to Dante, Milton, and Defoe were imagining paradise (or its opposite) at the bottom of the South Seas. Would you find pearls or purgatory or lost tribes in the antipodes? And whose fantastic tales should one trust? Even after the South Seas have long been discovered and settled, Edmond finds the tradition of the antipodes as 'Zone of the Marvellous' still exerts a powerful hold, over artists such as Sydney Nolan, Colin McCahon, Fiona Hall and Shane Cotton and writers such as James K Baxter and Janet Frame.

Ohakune-born Martin Edmond is now based in Sydney but is often in New Zealand. Four of his books have been shortlisted in the national book awards; his Chronicle of the Unsung won the biography category of the 2005 Montana NZ Book Awards. He was the 2004 Writing Fellow at The University of Auckland and in 2007 won a CLL Writers' Award of $35,000 to support writing Zone of the Marvellous.

"Edmond's exploration of the idea of the Antipodes is pure magic. A must-read for anyone who wonders how we got here." --Laura Kroetsch, Dominon Post "This book does much more than just build a case: it is an entertainment of the best kind." --Jane Westaway, New Zealand Books "If Martin Edmond has ever written a dull book, I've not come across it." --Gordon McLauchlan, New Zealand Herald "Compressing 4000 years of history into 250 pages is a formidable task, but maverick essayist Martin Edmond is up to the challenge." --Iain Sharp, Metro