An account of the role of Lancelot Edward Threlkeld of the London Missionary Society, as an examp... more An account of the role of Lancelot Edward Threlkeld of the London Missionary Society, as an example of the work of colonial missionaries, particularly their ambivalent relationship with Aboriginal people.
Collectively and severally, the essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the me... more Collectively and severally, the essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who administered the British Empire in Australasia and India. The essays had their genesis in an interdisciplinary conference held at Osmania University, Hyderabad, in 2007, which was jointly convened by the University of Tasmania's Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath and School of English, Journalism, and European Languages, and the Department of English at Osmania University. “Administering,” as the essays in this volume amply reveal, involves many forms of activity – managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policy – across diverse domains of practice (the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems, and so on). Administrative arrangements, as the various essays show, involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. In the two parts of this book the authors, from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, look at the way colonial administrations in Australia, New Zealand, Pitcairn Island, and India – and with inevitable reference back to Britain and other parts of the British Empire – call into being the spaces under their control, and how they do so through the accumulation and management of information and knowledge.
The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the B... more The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the British Empire in Australasia and India, and those who were subject to their administration. As these essays demonstrate, administrative arrangements involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. Colonial administration involves diverse domains of practice the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems and many forms of activities, including managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policies. In the two parts of this book, the authors from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain examine the ways colonial administrations accumulated and managed information and knowledge about the places and peoples under their jurisdiction. The administration of colonial spaces was neither a simple nor a unilinear project, and the essays in this book will contribute to key debates about imperial history
The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770-1870, 2023
Accounts of convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples and cult... more Accounts of convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples and cultures streamed out from Southern correspondents across the first hundred years of Australia's settler colonial history. Geographically, the massive island continent may have seemed distant from the European centres that had imagined its presence as a Southern counterweight, but from exploration voyages onwards, strong tendrils tethered Australian
Travelling by nostalgically hyper-modern monorail, I arrived at Suita in Osaka in search of Austr... more Travelling by nostalgically hyper-modern monorail, I arrived at Suita in Osaka in search of Australian modernity. The 1970 World Exposition site is now a commemorative park, dotted with concrete infrastructure and Metabolist architecture amongst gardens filled with autumnal colour, or spring sakura, depending on season. Its entrance is marked by an enormous two-armed primitivist sculpture—The Tower of the Sun (1970) by Taro Okamoto—that looms 70 metres above the viewer, with three faces whose lit-up eyes prove a disconcerting sight for night-time arrivals. The Osaka Commemorative Park is also home to the National Museum of Ethnology (known as Minpaku), which houses an extraordinary collection of ethnological artefacts from around the world and a well-stocked anthropology library.
Friendly Mission generates intense reactions in its readers. Responding with fascination or revul... more Friendly Mission generates intense reactions in its readers. Responding with fascination or revulsion, readers repeatedly invoke the experience of reading it. Several of the authors in this volume narrate their first engagement with Friendly Mission with the resonant glow of a foundational moment. Writing independently of each other, these authors attest to Friendly Mission ’s status as an artefact, a multivalent icon of colonial and postcolonial culture, a meeting place between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Like other colonial artefacts forged in conditions characterised by intense curiosity and unequal power relations, Friendly Mission represents an ambiguous and often uncomfortable meeting place. Somewhat akin to local translations of the Bible in colonial contexts, Friendly Mission means much to a range of constituencies, but its meanings are neither singular, stable nor entirely predictable. Reading Robinson explores how we might read Friendly Mission in the twenty-firs...
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook was probably the most popular and best-known of the many... more The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook was probably the most popular and best-known of the many household guides for Anglo- Indian memsahibs published in the late nineteenth century; it was translated into the vernacular and between 1888 and 1917 it went into more than ten editions. It is a domestic ethnography in miniature (Chase and Levenson 80), which drew upon Flora Annie Steel's experiences to provide an insight into the home life of the British in India. Immediately after her marriage on 31 December 1867, Steel (1847-1929) went to India with her husband, Henry William Steel, a member of the Indian Civil Service. She spent the next twenty-two years of her life in Punjab, in remote districts as well as in the larger stations, accompanying her husband wherever he was posted, and rarely spending more than a year in any place. During that time the strong-willed, autocratic memsahib, ignoring the often restrictive conventions of the Raj community, learnt to speak, read, and write Punjabi (including the dialects of the various districts in which she lived), and proceeded to build a career for herself as an educationalist. In 1884, she was appointed Inspectress of Girls' Schools in the Punjab, and between 1885 and 1888 she served on the Provincial Education Board. She also acted as a selftaught doctor to local women and children, designed the town hall in Kasur, and for a time was Vice-President of the “Victoria Female Orphan Asylum” in the Punjab
Brings together essays from Australian & international historians, in an analysis of the monument... more Brings together essays from Australian & international historians, in an analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals & Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-34, edited by NJB Plomley, 2008. Extends Friendly Mission from parochial particularity & situates it within international contexts. Rolls & Johnston, Uni of Tasmania.
An account of the role of Lancelot Edward Threlkeld of the London Missionary Society, as an examp... more An account of the role of Lancelot Edward Threlkeld of the London Missionary Society, as an example of the work of colonial missionaries, particularly their ambivalent relationship with Aboriginal people.
Collectively and severally, the essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the me... more Collectively and severally, the essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who administered the British Empire in Australasia and India. The essays had their genesis in an interdisciplinary conference held at Osmania University, Hyderabad, in 2007, which was jointly convened by the University of Tasmania's Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath and School of English, Journalism, and European Languages, and the Department of English at Osmania University. “Administering,” as the essays in this volume amply reveal, involves many forms of activity – managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policy – across diverse domains of practice (the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems, and so on). Administrative arrangements, as the various essays show, involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. In the two parts of this book the authors, from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, look at the way colonial administrations in Australia, New Zealand, Pitcairn Island, and India – and with inevitable reference back to Britain and other parts of the British Empire – call into being the spaces under their control, and how they do so through the accumulation and management of information and knowledge.
The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the B... more The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the British Empire in Australasia and India, and those who were subject to their administration. As these essays demonstrate, administrative arrangements involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. Colonial administration involves diverse domains of practice the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems and many forms of activities, including managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policies. In the two parts of this book, the authors from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain examine the ways colonial administrations accumulated and managed information and knowledge about the places and peoples under their jurisdiction. The administration of colonial spaces was neither a simple nor a unilinear project, and the essays in this book will contribute to key debates about imperial history
The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770-1870, 2023
Accounts of convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples and cult... more Accounts of convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples and cultures streamed out from Southern correspondents across the first hundred years of Australia's settler colonial history. Geographically, the massive island continent may have seemed distant from the European centres that had imagined its presence as a Southern counterweight, but from exploration voyages onwards, strong tendrils tethered Australian
Travelling by nostalgically hyper-modern monorail, I arrived at Suita in Osaka in search of Austr... more Travelling by nostalgically hyper-modern monorail, I arrived at Suita in Osaka in search of Australian modernity. The 1970 World Exposition site is now a commemorative park, dotted with concrete infrastructure and Metabolist architecture amongst gardens filled with autumnal colour, or spring sakura, depending on season. Its entrance is marked by an enormous two-armed primitivist sculpture—The Tower of the Sun (1970) by Taro Okamoto—that looms 70 metres above the viewer, with three faces whose lit-up eyes prove a disconcerting sight for night-time arrivals. The Osaka Commemorative Park is also home to the National Museum of Ethnology (known as Minpaku), which houses an extraordinary collection of ethnological artefacts from around the world and a well-stocked anthropology library.
Friendly Mission generates intense reactions in its readers. Responding with fascination or revul... more Friendly Mission generates intense reactions in its readers. Responding with fascination or revulsion, readers repeatedly invoke the experience of reading it. Several of the authors in this volume narrate their first engagement with Friendly Mission with the resonant glow of a foundational moment. Writing independently of each other, these authors attest to Friendly Mission ’s status as an artefact, a multivalent icon of colonial and postcolonial culture, a meeting place between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Like other colonial artefacts forged in conditions characterised by intense curiosity and unequal power relations, Friendly Mission represents an ambiguous and often uncomfortable meeting place. Somewhat akin to local translations of the Bible in colonial contexts, Friendly Mission means much to a range of constituencies, but its meanings are neither singular, stable nor entirely predictable. Reading Robinson explores how we might read Friendly Mission in the twenty-firs...
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook was probably the most popular and best-known of the many... more The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook was probably the most popular and best-known of the many household guides for Anglo- Indian memsahibs published in the late nineteenth century; it was translated into the vernacular and between 1888 and 1917 it went into more than ten editions. It is a domestic ethnography in miniature (Chase and Levenson 80), which drew upon Flora Annie Steel's experiences to provide an insight into the home life of the British in India. Immediately after her marriage on 31 December 1867, Steel (1847-1929) went to India with her husband, Henry William Steel, a member of the Indian Civil Service. She spent the next twenty-two years of her life in Punjab, in remote districts as well as in the larger stations, accompanying her husband wherever he was posted, and rarely spending more than a year in any place. During that time the strong-willed, autocratic memsahib, ignoring the often restrictive conventions of the Raj community, learnt to speak, read, and write Punjabi (including the dialects of the various districts in which she lived), and proceeded to build a career for herself as an educationalist. In 1884, she was appointed Inspectress of Girls' Schools in the Punjab, and between 1885 and 1888 she served on the Provincial Education Board. She also acted as a selftaught doctor to local women and children, designed the town hall in Kasur, and for a time was Vice-President of the “Victoria Female Orphan Asylum” in the Punjab
Brings together essays from Australian & international historians, in an analysis of the monument... more Brings together essays from Australian & international historians, in an analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals & Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-34, edited by NJB Plomley, 2008. Extends Friendly Mission from parochial particularity & situates it within international contexts. Rolls & Johnston, Uni of Tasmania.
Travelling Home provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century W... more Travelling Home provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century Walkabout magazine made to Australia’s cultural history.
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