Abstract: ‘She is Eutopia, she is Hy-Brasil.’ It is a strange and luminous thing to say of Australia. Hy-Brasil was the phantom island of Irish legend, glimpsed intermittently through Atlantic mist and long associated with westward longing, prophecy, and imagined renewal. In Bernard O’Dowd’s long Federation poem ‘The Bush,’ however, this drifting Irish island is relocated onto the Australian continent. A legend of apparition and non-arrival becomes a name for settlement, arrival, and national destiny.
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