One of the most famous themes of Australian colonial history is the doomed search for the inland sea. Due to some spurious theories about the source of the rivers, or perhaps just human optimism, or perhaps just an inability to believe that such a big piece of land could be totally dry and desert-like, the early explorers were mostly convinced that there was an inland sea somewhere at the centre of Australia.
What has thus-far been ignored, however, is the screamingly Freudian aspect of this episode. The imagined inland sea? Those beardy old colonials were looking for nothing more than a womb to crawl back into - for that surely is the ultimate “inland sea”. Everyone knows the colonials were obsessed with Mother England, and whether they made the return passage or not, they all wanted to go back to Mum one way or another. The interior exploration caper was just one of the more extravagant expressions of this.
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