'Virtual Voyages' offers a unique perspective on the complex links between the forgotten genre of the 'imaginary voyage' and European exploration, discovery, and colonisation in Australia and the Pacific during the eighteenth century. Ancient mythologies of antipodean inversion and strangeness deeply influenced both explorers and creative writers in the eighteenth century. Developing side by side over two centuries, documentary and fictional accounts of travel to the antipodes borrowed from each other and were sometimes indistinguishable. By exposing the hidden relationship between fact and fantasy in travel writing in the setting of the antipodes, the book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history