Excavating Racial Capitalism in London's West India Docks

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment.     

'The Holiest Campus', its Decline and Transformation: The University of New England, 1946–79

In the mid-1960s and possibly earlier the University of New England (UNE), located at Armidale in rural New South Wales, was reputed to be 'the holiest campus' in Australia. The article finds a considerable body of evidence to give credibility to this view. It argues that UNE was relatively religious because it drew more of its students from the most devout social groups in Australia than other universities and because those students were then proselytized by religious societies that operated effectively and with strong clerical support in a small, cohesive institution. The ethos of UNE was broadly Christian, perhaps more so than that of metropolitan universities.
After 1965 there was a substantial decline in religious practice, belief and influence at UNE, as apparently at other Australian universities and in Australia as a whole. In the case of UNE, secularization was more than a decline in civil or social religion, more than a process of decline through differentiation: in the first half of the 1960s over half of the student body was highly religious but by the late 1970s the proportion had fallen to one-fifth to one-quarter. Associated with this decline was a transformation of religious activity marked by the reassertion of Christian denominationalism and the emergence of a non-Christian spiritual sensibility.     

Gender and the Australian Parliament: Putting the Political Scientist into the Picture

This paper draws on a study of gender and politics in the Australian parliament in order to make a contribution to methodological debates in feminist political science. The paper begins by outlining the different dimensions of feminist political science methodology that have been identified in the literature. According to this literature five key principles can be seen to constitute feminist approaches to political science. These are: a focus on gender, a deconstruction of the public/private divide, giving voice to women, using research as a basis for transformation, and using reflexivity to critique researcher positionality. The next part of the paper focuses more specifically on reflexivity tracing arguments about its definition, usefulness and the criticisms it has attracted from researchers. Following this, I explore how my background as a member of the Australian House of Representatives from 1987 to 1996 provided an important academic resource in my doctoral study of gender and politics in the national parliament. Through this process I highlight the value of a reflexive approach to research.     

“The Evil State of Tepidity”: Mass‐Going and Absenteeism in Nineteenth‐Century Australian Ecclesiastical Discourse*

This paper sets out to explore how the Australian Catholic Church's perceptions of Mass‐going and absenteeism evolved in the mid‐to‐late nineteenth century. By examining the Lenten pastorals of Archbishop John Polding of Sydney, along with various mission sermons, the paper argues that a decisive shift is discernible after the 1860s. Where previous emphasis had fallen on absenteeism as a breakdown in the individual's relationship with God, later understandings introduced a dominant ecclesial imperative: Catholics who failed to attend Mass were also weakening the Church and effectively aiding hostile secular and Protestant forces arrayed against her. This shift was itself the product of a critical transformation in the field of ecclesiastical discourse as it gravitated inexorably towards more agonistic expressions.     

Ringforts or Fairy Homes: Oral Understandings and the Practice of Archaeology in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

Ringforts, the most numerous archaeological monument in the Irish landscape, have a dual character as places of early medieval habitation and as supernatural points of access to a fairy Otherworld. In my paper, I examine how these understandings interacted with, challenged and reinforced each other in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how oral perceptions had a significant if generally unacknowledged role in determining supposedly scientific archaeological perceptions of these monuments.     

Disastrous hydropower,uneven regional development,and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands

Sikkim, a small Eastern Himalayan state in India has twenty-seven hydropower projects proposed under the Indian Power Ministry's hydropower initiative that envisions the Himalayan region as the country's "future powerhouse" (Dharamadhikary 2008; Kohli, 2011). In 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sikkim, the epicenter of which was located eerily close to two under construction dams and the Dzongu reserve, revered as sacred by Sikkim's Indigenous minority Lepchas. Drawing on interviews with Lepcha residents of Dzongu, and state geologists and disaster management officials, I center my analysis on their encounters with disasters and hydropower infrastructure. Building on decolonial theorizations and scholarship on Himalayan borderlands, I argue that disastrous hydropower forms on historical terrains shaped not only by geophysical conditions but also generations of uneven regional development, and the racialized colonial and postcolonial governance of the Eastern Himalayan frontier. In placing ‘disastrous’ as a prefix to hydropower, I follow my interlocutors who implicate state and private developers in producing disaster conditions in Sikkim even as they evade culpability by discursively shifting blame onto the region's “inhospitable terrain” (GoI 2008: 27). I demonstrate that despite key differences in their relation to state power both Dzongu Lepchas and Sikkimese technocrats, forward a materialist, place-based understanding of precarity, differential vulnerability, and uneven regional development. Centering Indigenous and regionalist critiques, I argue that the recent entry of hydropower development in the Eastern Himalayas, conceptualized by colonial authorities as India's “Mongolian Fringe” (Baruah, 2013), requires a closer attention to the entanglements of frontier-making and racialization in India. More broadly, I demonstrate how disastrous hydropower development in a racialized frontier region offers a productive entry into decolonial theorizing in the Indian context.     

Pigments from the Zuiddorp (Zuytdorp) ship sculpture: red,white and blue?

SUMMARY: The Dutch East India Company ship Zuiddorp (also known as Zuytdorp) met its demise in 1712 at the base of steep cliffs along the Western Australian coast. Material from the shipwreck includes an extraordinary example of a caryatid herm from the ship’s stern counter. A recent study of this sculpture and the pigments found on its surface demonstrates Zuiddorp’s archaic stern construction and adornment, which is more of a late 17th-century, than an early 18th-century, Dutch Indiaman. This paper discusses the results of this study and emphasizes how the smallest pieces of evidence can broaden our understanding of contemporaneous regional Dutch East India Company shipbuilding practices.     

Radio Ministries: Religion on Australian Commercial Radio from the 1920s to the 1960s*

This article examines the first forty years of religious broadcasting on commercial radio in Australia, a subject largely neglected by historians of Australian religion and the media. It reveals the diversity of religious broadcasting on Australian commercial radio, the ambiguities of the regulatory framework within which it operated, the influence of American religious broadcasting in Australia, and the challenges confronting religious broadcasters, particularly in the decade between the introduction of television and the emergence of talkback radio. The article concludes in the second half of the 1960s, when religious programming faced mounting commercial pressures, as well as a new opportunity in the shape of “talkback” radio.     

‘The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: a Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity,Memory and Place

In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Australian context. The nexus of memory, place and cultural identity is central to my analysis. I give particular attention to the ways in which cultural memories are inscribed in some very specific and very ordinary places, and how these places become site‐markers of the remembering process and of identity itself.     

Searching for the Land of the Golden Cocoa-Nut: Australian Travel Writing about Commercial Enterprise in the Pacific Islands

Pacific Island trade and commerce was a prominent theme in travel writing produced within Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This reflected the long history of European commercial exchange between the Australian continent and the Pacific Islands, and a European literary legacy that idealised the region’s economic potential. This article explores popular perceptions of commercial enterprise in the Pacific Islands as expressed in travel writing, focusing on authors with a significant connection, by birth or affiliation, to either the Australian colonies or the Australian nation. The formation of a distinctively ‘Australian’ vision of the Pacific that evolved since European exploration is traced. The voice that took shape in literary form in the Australian colonies during the late 19th century contributed to a national narrative in the early 20th century that imagined the Pacific Islands as a region for Australian investment, profit and colonial enterprise.     

Fucking geographers! Or the epistemological consequences of neglecting the lusty researcher’s body

This article investigates the dichotomy within research on sexuality between the desiring body of the informant on the one hand and the non-desiring body of the researcher on the other. Despite earlier calls to acknowledge and include the eroticisms of the researcher, accounts where the desiring researcher’s body is a central focus remain exceptions to the rule. The main goal of this intervention is to investigate why the absence of the lusty researcher’s body seems to endure. I will first explore some of the reasons researchers might feel inhibited to self-disclose their desires, to continue with uncovering some of the techniques used to sustain the cover of the asexual, disembodied researcher. Afterwards, I will discuss my own experiences as a (junior) researcher in the field, mainly my own discomfort and embarrassment to be perceived as a desiring woman-researcher, and trace how this has informed my own research trajectory. I conclude by suggesting that writing down our negotiations between the validity of our research versus how much we are willing to self-disclose might be a first step towards an improved inclusion of lust and desire in sex research.     

Improvisation and Hybrid Genres: Reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

ABSTRACT

In the first section I ask two questions: what sort of a poem is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and what is the immediate experience of reading it in sequence? These two questions are the practical equivalents of the main terms of my title. I try to answer them by reconstructing a first reading of the poem in the light of my own experience and the imagined one of the first readers of the poem. I suggest that two terms—accretion and elimination—are helpful here and that, in some ways, the structure and sequential experiencing of the poem resemble the structures of extended nineteenth-century musical forms. In the second section, I reverse perspective and take a position at the end of the poem. From such a point, it is easier to find what the poem has included and eliminated and this, in turn, suggests the kind of poem that it is. In the third section I tackle the terms “improvisation” and “hybrid genres” directly, link them with my earlier arguments, and engage with some theorists, especially Bakhtin. In particular, I argue against the view that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage dissolves genre but argue that genres are nevertheless “open categories.” My conclusion is less definite. I confess to difficulties that still bother me.     

Feminist protest in the desert: researching the 1983 Pine Gap women's peace camp

This article examines the rich symbolism offered by the central Australian desert, and what happens when it becomes a site of feminist protest, as happened in 1983 when Australian women mounted a women-only peace camp at the Pine Gap military facility. The desert holds iconic status as both the ‘centre’ of Australia and ‘the middle of nowhere’, evoked as the ‘heart’ of the country and yet represented as dangerous and deadly. Its ambivalent meaning for white Australia unsettles Pine Gap as a site of protest, and also differentiates it from more traditional protest sites like urban streets, as well as from the most famous women's peace camp at Greenham Common in England. This account is made more complex by my own formative relation to central Australia, where I lived as a child and left in 1983 around the same time as the protest. The impact and limits of situated knowledge and feminist writing practice thus form part of this research as it also intimately addresses the formation of my feminist self through the remembering and remaking of meanings for this landscape of my childhood.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

Some recollections of my early days in research

Sir Granville Beynon's lecture course entitled “The Ionosphere” first introduced me, in the late 1940s, to topics which have interested me ever since and have had a major influence on the subsequent development of my own career. Electromagnetic theory, radioscience, electronics (especially radars), plasma waves, space physics and satellites are typical key words which spring to mind. Here I recount some of my early interactions and experiences while working in his research group and in the period which followed. Although our interests later diverged, the knowledge gained during my time with Sir Granville re-surfaces from time to time and serves as a reminder of the basic grounding which he gave his students.     

The Impossible Aesthetic: the Abelam,the Moa Bird and Me

This paper explores the ramifications of encounters which two Abelam men and the author had in the Australian Museum and Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 1982. Rather than place a ready-made analytic framework on the men's experiences and rather than removing myself from the frame, as is usual in much anthropological analysis, I have chosen to explore the effects of these experiences on my own imagination. In the latter part of the paper I explore the way in which the imaginative entanglement of the Zoo and Museum experiences with my own memories has acted as a path of clues. This path has led to the development of the notion of sign which includes the idea of efficaciousness and transformation.     

The politics of Australia's international economic relations: Adjustment and two‐level games

Economic adjustment, a political priority for Labor governments throughout the second half of the 1980s, and in contrast to earlier Australian scholarship and practice, is now recognised to be an internationally, as well as a domestically, determined and constrained enterprise. Theoretical developments in international political economy in North America of late have provided a variety of approaches for conceptualising this twofold enterprise. Taking two cases (the development of the Cairns Group and its activities in the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations and the development of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) this paper looks at two of these approaches—to show how they can contribute to the understanding of international economic policy under Labor in the late 1980s and early 1990s.     

Telling stories: Exploring research storytelling as a meaningful approach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community‐based participatory research

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.