IF the new theory of linear perspective attracted the eyes of European artists to Florence in the 1500s, it was not just for the associated trick of imaging three dimensional reality as projected on to a plane surface, but because it was in itself a seductive image of a nascent mode of thought as an account of vision it is inadequate to such binocular, mobile, memorious and desirous creatures as ourselves, for it tells, only how the world would appear to a single eyeball frozen in position. But in its reductive and clarifying power it marched in step with cartography, Galileo's new mechanics, and the whole scientific and appropriative project later associated with the Enlightenment; it even underwrites the keyhole consciousness through which the Cartesian mind engages with his (I use the pronoun, advisedly) material world.
The parallel drive to construct, a reality amenable to this fixed eye culminates at Versailles should the Sun King rise to answer a call of mortality before, his official levee and happen to put a bleary eye to his frosty windowpane, the entire landscape would be there like an army of parade, awaiting the nod to march over the horizon and spread his rule to the ends of the earth.
All this - which has been usefully oversimplified as "the Western Gaze" - was at its most deathly when deployed on "virgin territory". The colonist, armed with this mental rake, flattens all obstacles to the vision of progress, notably the natural "lie of the land" and any aboriginal understanding of it. Thus in atlases, Australia and America remind one of the diagram of the unfortunate cow displayed in butcher shops, marked out as prospective cuts.
Paul Carter's book comprises three long, subtle, elusive and fitfully beautiful ruminations on certain counter stories to the grand and terrible narrative caricatured above. The first and third concern figures in Australian history (the author is a senior fellow of Melbourne University).
T.G.H. Strehlow, son of a Lutheran pastor, collected and published the songs in which the natives sang the landscape on to which his father's mission station had so disruptively been imposed, liked to think of himself as one of the tribe, and looked forward to a post colonial culture in which, as Carter puts it, "the past was . . . the ground beneath one's feet.
William Light had published albums of Italian views, including Pompeii, before coming to South Australia as Surveyor General and laying out the city of Adelaide on a plan like a collage of three or four scraps torn out of grid like colonial settlements, and disturbingly reminiscent of an excavation reports' diagram of stratified ruins in his last days he kept a diary of less and less, other than weather and the flux of his tuberculosis.
Carter's central meditation for these pieces demand to be read at the most thoughtful and inward of paces - concerns Giorgione, whose painting La Tempesta radiates old Venice's delight in its own opulence, turned in on itself from the linear expansionism of his times. Slights departures from perspectival correctness make objects in the painting appear to turn towards and adumbrate a space curved around the spectator, a nurturing space, in which the central figure of a woman suckling her baby is, to my eye, herself foetally enfolded.
These three instances hint at alternative visions, fluid, tender and responsive to the ever double of the lie of the land, Carter's imagery associates them with the dimension not reducible to "rationally apprehensible level, ground", that of the weather, the flight of birds, the ripple of water. (Perhaps his use of "the third dimension" as a trope for all this is a little cramping, for the vertical is as open to colonisation by rectilinear thought as the level plain some reference to the fractal complexity of the earth's surface might have been in order.)
Carter's limber stride across a vast range of culture is impressive, and his elegant prose wonderfully enacts his ultimate subject matter. Only occasionally does his highly analogical style coagulate into a froth of mixed metaphors, as in the rather overworked description of La Tempesta on the other hand, his sparkling recall of the sills of the riverbed at Strehlow's mission station proves that the ground itself, prior to all interpretations, is present to him a sense that is missing from Schama's much praised The Landscape of Memory, for instance.
But on the basis of a hasty scanning, the early reviewer can only add a few twitters to the dawn chorus of this work's reception, trusting that, much later on, the Bird of Wisdom will take due note of it.