Australian geography seen from afar: through a glass darkly

Abstract

Having been invited to contribute an external view of Australian geography, I concluded that such a task was impossible—that geographers elsewhere do not have a general view of Australian geography. I maintain that this is neither surprising nor significant, setting the argument within the context of a discipline fragmented along four major cleavage lines. Because of these cleavages, most geographers (like most other academics) work in small intellectual communities which are necessarily ‘parochial’: as a consequence, the discipline is characterised by a series of parts that do not make a coherent whole.

Key Words:

• Intra‐disciplinary cleavages
• Australian geography
• intellectual communities