Speaking, Listening, Writing, Reading: Communications and Colonisation

19 May 2009

Dr Tony Ballantyne

A large body of scholarship has suggested that the production and circulation of knowledge was fundamental to British empire building.  Rather than exploring colonial knowledge as a body of texts or through the lens of representation, this lecture will examine the practices, structures, and processes that shaped knowledge in southern New Zealand in the nineteenth century.  In particular it will explore how various forms of communication molded the dynamics of community building at the most distant edge of empire as well as determining the pattern of relationships between local Maori communities and recently arrived Euro American colonists.  It will also consider how shifting patterns of cross-cultural communication shaped debates over race, land, and the place of Maori in colonial politics.  This discussion will open out into a broader consideration of the place of knowledge and communication in a range of colonial sites and historiographies.

This was the 2009 Allan Martin Lecture.

Allan Martin (1926-2002) was an intellectual, institutional, and social pioneer whose career as a historian spanned the second half of the 20^th Century.  When most Australians went to England for their postgraduate work, he chose ANU, where he was the first doctoral student in History in the Research School of Social Sciences.  He accepted the Foundation chair in History at LaTrobe University in 1966 and returned to RSSS as a senior fellow in 1973.

Broad Topics: Arts and Social Sciences

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Dr Ballantyne's research focuses on the interconnections between South Asian and British history, with a particular emphasis on the intellectual and cultural networks that reshaped South Asia in the long nineteenth century, incorporating the region into a larger imperial system of exchange and mobility.  In addition to exploring the construction of colonial knowledge within South Asia, his work has traced important connections that linked India to the Pacific, Southeast Asia, Ireland and Britain itself.

Presented by the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences

Part of the 2009 Toyota-ANU Public Lecture Series