The Tossmania : an Anthology of Irish Poetic Imaginings of Australia Philip Harvey Paper delivered at the 13 th Irish-Australia Conference Thursday 30 th of September, 2004 Redmond Barry Building, University of Melbourne 1. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) The charts in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ map the coastlines of countries unvisited by the European explorers of the time. Largely blank rectangles of space are inscribed with Jonathan Swift’s imaginings. 1 Lilliput is south-west of Sumatra and north-west of Van Diemen’s Land, for Swift, like all residents of Ireland in 1726, was unaware of continental Australia or that Tasmania is an island. All the nations Gulliver visits contain premonitions of the vast land that the Irish, amongst others, would start settling some sixty years later. Everything is slightly different there. Small is large and large is small. Modes of government behave at times like satires of British rule. The Enlightenment god of material measurem...