The Antipodean Laboratory

HCCI Seminar: Anna Johnston (Queensland),

“The Antipodean Laboratory and the ‘Sea-Girt Prison’: Print Culture on Norfolk Island, 1840-44.”

(1 September 2023)

This event was held as part of NSW History Week 2023.

The Australian settler colonies were shaped by distinctive kinds of knowledge. Convicts, humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples, and natural history: each topic generated streams of correspondence written by those keen to participate in a global print culture and knowledge economy that united colonies and imperial centres. This paper examines some of the foundational texts that underpinned Alexander Maconochie’s innovative, if controversial, mark system at Norfolk Island in the early 1840s and the rich archive of convict narratives that emerged in response to these radical experiments on a remote penal laboratory on an off-shore island. This case study shows how modern ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan spaces, and circulated (and hotly debated) through imperial and colonial print culture. Anna Johnston is Associate Professor in English Literature in the School of Communication and Arts, and was Deputy Director of UQ’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2018-20. Anna worked at the University of Tasmania, where she was Director of the Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath (2013-16) and an ARC Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow (2007-14). In 2014-15, Anna was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo. She has particular interests in settler colonialism, travel writing, and missionary writing and empire. Anna recently completed her ARC Future Fellowship: “The Laboratory of Modernity: Knowledge Formation and the Australian Settler Colonies (1788-1900)”, which traced how knowledge created in the early Australian colonies was circulated by print culture through imperial networks. Her forthcoming monograph, The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) stems from this work. Anna’s other publications include The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (UWA Press 2011), and she is co-editor of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier (Sydney University Press 2021). From 2016-2020, she was also a member of the multi-institutional ARC grant “Intimacy and violence in Anglo Pacific Rim settler colonial societies, 1830-1930” (University of Newcastle), in which she focused on evangelical missionaries and colonial settlers who studied Indigenous languages in Australia and the Pacific.

Unless otherwise noted, seminar content © the presenter. Recording © The University of Newcastle. All rights reserved. HCCI Website: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/humanities-creative-industries-social-sciences/groups/hcci