Extremity : theorizing from the margins

Much like Great White North, Australia's Wide Brown Land is a rich and resilient myth of nation. Said to sit tenuously on both sides of the North-South divide, Australia is often characterized as a Western country under southern skies in a Third World environment. It is the flat, scorched land of far horizons and endless skies whose narrative force finds its inverse congruence in the rugged and icy terrain of Arctic Canada. If landscape is a key mode of human signification, Great White North and Wide Brown Land are its defining instances, all the more dramatized in the characteristic staging of their antipodality. From furthest north to deepest south, ice storm to heat wave, cold feet to sunburnt noses, these iconic categories share in the spatialized trope of extremity. How might this be so? And what matters of concern does it call up?