History - the much less than final frontier, and the story of Thea Astley's Short Stories in "It's Raining in Mango"

Abstract

[Extract] How ironic and innocent it now seems when we hear Captain Kirk intone in his commanding American voice that space is the final frontier. The teleology of conquest implied by that statement is buttressed by the naive idea that all the spots on the map are now filled and found - the only place to push on is out. Star Trek's representation of the future is itself now a relic of the past, dated not only by the waning ce1ebrity status of William Shatner and his Velcro costume, but more importantly by the fact that its narrative based on progress and expansion has been fundamentally called into question by late twentieth-century theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism. As postcolonial theory adopted a rigorously critical position toward expansion and conquest in general, a critical turn to the past took hold, and the attempt to understand the past gained considerable momentum. In Australia in particular, this historical turn assumed the stature of fun-blown history wars over which so much ink was spilled that one more essay or book on the topic is itself haunted by the spectre of belatedness.