Cultural References
The majority of cultural references to the Houtman Abrolhos relate to the islands' shipwrecks, particularly the Batavia. The events surrounding the loss of the Batavia is one of the most celebrated episodes in Australian popular history; in the words of Henrietta Drake-Brockman:
"In Australia, poets and schoolboys, artists and historians, have been inspired for half a century by the tragedy of an ancient shipwreck, a disaster that piled horror upon horror yet revealed so much of human fortitude as to invite comparison with the epic tales of Greece."The story has spawned a massive body of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as numerous works in other media.
Other shipwrecks, notably the Zeewijk (also spelled Zeewyk), have also become the subject of books and other works. Shipwrecks aside, however, cultural references to the Houtman Abrolhos are rare. By far the best known book on the Houtman Abrolhos itself is Malcolm Uren's Sailormen's ghosts: The Abrolhos islands in three hundred years of romance, history, and adventure. First published in 1940, this book saw numerous editions published in the 1940s, and was even republished in 1980 as a "West Australian classic". In it, Uren tells both the history of the islands and the story of his own visit to the islands.
Other books include William Bede Christie's 1909 Christmas on the briny: the innocents abroad, or, a holiday trip to the Abrolhos islands, and Alison Louise Wright's 1998 Abrolhos Islands Conversations. The latter, a book of interviews and portraits of the people of the Abrolhos, won the Special Award in the 1999 Western Australian Premier's Book Awards.
The islands featured in the first episode of Surfing the Menu, an eight-part food and travel series produced for the ABC in 2003, and the following year were featured on Getaway, Australia's longest-running and most popular holiday and travel television programme. They were the subject of a motion picture entitled Eye opener, published by The Film Centre WA in 1981, and of a piece of classical music entitled Abrolhos: A ceremonial overture, written by William Stewart in 1988 under commission to the Geraldton Town Council.
Read more about this topic: Houtman Abrolhos
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)