Abstract

This article describes and discusses a late-nineteenth century utopian text, The Curse and Its Cure, set in the city of Brisbane, capital of the state of Queensland, Australia. The first half of this book by Dr. Thomas Pennington Lucas posits how Brisbane was utterly destroyed in the early twentieth century so that by the time at which the story is set—in the year 2000—little remains of the abandoned city except scattered ruins overrun with weeds and vermin. In the second half, Lucas postulates how, by the year 2200, Brisbane had become the New Jerusalem in the South Pacific, a true Utopia leading the world to morality, affluence, peace, and sanity. The Curse and Its Cure has long been out of print and, as far as can be discovered, only one full copy and one partial copy remain, both held by the John Oxley Library, Brisbane. I uncovered it as part of my research into Australia's utopian literature. Although other Australian scholars such as Nan Albinski, Vincent Buckley, Verity Burgmann, Andrew Milner, Bruce Scates, Richard Trahair, and Robyn Walton (as well as an American academic, Lyman Tower Sargent) have all written about the prodigious amount of Australian utopian literature, none of them discovered Lucas's text.