XIIth DAVID NICHOL SMITH CONFERENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES
New Voyagings on Old Seas: Performances in Honour of Professor Greg Dening

Venue

Venue: National Library of Australia
Parkes, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Dates

SPEAKERS AND ABSTRACTS

(as at 22 June 2004)

Paul Arthur
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Social and Community Research / Interactive Television Research Institute, Murdoch University, Western Australia

Staging Cross-Cultural Encounters

A southern continent had featured in the European imagination since the first speculations that a great southern land mass must exist to balance those of northern hemisphere. Over many centuries, European writers gave various shapes to this mythical space of the ‘antipodes’, in imaginative projections which illustrated their fascination and curiosity as well as their frustration at the lack of actual knowledge. By the seventeenth century, Europeans were viewing the region of Australia and the Pacific using a colonial mode of imaginative projection which sought to find, in those far away land spaces, social and geographical attributes which were deemed suitable and desirable to Europeans. In this paper, I focus on the interface of myth and reality in eighteenth century representations of Australia and the Pacific. I discuss the changing historical relationship between technologies of travel, trends in cartography and evolving European narrative forms, including the modern novel. Both the early realist novel and the tradition of speculative cartography satisfied, in different ways, the same goal of trying to make sense of unknown places on European terms. My discussion shows that many of the fictional images of the antipodes were just as powerful as those produced by ‘scientific’ records of exploration and discovery.

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Jo Diamond
Maori Art History, Dept. Art History and Theory, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

A Woven History Unfolds: Raranga-based discourses, the Rex Nan Kivell Collection ... and beyond?

This paper engages with raranga (Maori weaving), some of its various discourses (historical, technical and philosophical, to name a few) and their relationship to the National Library of Australia’s Rex Nan Kivell collection. Somewhat contrary to the historical relegation of raranga in favour of other forms of Maori cultural production, this paper proposes raranga as an important basis for historical re-investigation. It draws on my Ph.D thesis that is entitled Revaluing raranga: weaving and women in Trans-Tasman Maori cultural discourses.

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Kate Fullagar
University of California at Berkeley

Visitors from the South Seas to Britain, 1774-1794: Savagery, Commerce, and Empire

When Omai, the first indigenous visitor from the South Seas to Britain, arrived in London in 1774 he met with wide acclaim. He gained an audience with George III; he mixed with the most glamorous literati of the day; and he inspired scores of poems, squibs, paintings, and treatises. The conventions of fascination, however, had already been laid down for him by Native American visitors. Omai was merely the most celebrated instance in a long tradition of British interest in ŒNew World¹ visiting peoples. Such peoples in the period were regarded chiefly as archetypal Œsavages¹; they played complex roles in debates about contemporary change, and especially about change caused by commercialization and the growth of empire. Other visitors from the South Seas followed Omai to Britain into the 1780s, but each now to diminishing interest. By the time Bennelong and Yemmerrawanie, the first representatives of Europe¹s newest New World, Terra Australis, arrived in Britain in 1793, they generated next to no response at all. Why did the appeal of the New World savage decline at the end of the eighteenth century? This paper is part of a larger project of investigation into visitors from the New World generally from 1710 to c.1800. It looks at the question of decline in relation to ideas about expansion and identity.

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Stephen Gapps
University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)

Historical Re-enactment: The Castle Hill Uprising & Battle of Vinegar Hill

Greg Dening is one of the few academic Historians to analyse historical reenactment. The live performance of history by self styled ‘historical reenactors’ increasingly occupies the ‘outdoor stages’ where people learn about the past such as museums, schools, historic sites, parades, anniversary events, retracing voyages and local festivals. Considering reenactments are such public, social theatres of history-making where memory is enacted, constructed and often ignited by visceral ‘re-performances’, it is surprising historians and cultural analysts have paid relatively little attention to this theatre of theatre.

My paper will describe the politics of representation in staging the ‘re-fight’ of a battle between Rebels and Redcoats. In March 2004 I scripted, cast and directed a pageant of 300 performers for the 200th Anniversary commemorations of the 1804 (Australian) Battle of Vinegar Hill. From the role of ‘Pageant Master’ and Convict Rebel leader William Johnson, I will interpret this re-performance of such a dramatic, 18th century theatre of revolutionary rhetoric and mass escape, where Thomas Paine’s calls for independence rang out across suburban Western Sydney as cries of ‘Death or Liberty’ from passing car windows.

I will describe how the Vinegar Hill reenactment negotiated local politics that wanted to anchor it to Blacktown or Baulkham Hills as the true ‘birthplace of democracy and mateship’ in Australia; how ‘treacherous’ Redcoats were to be avoided in commemorations; how Irish national struggle was to be aligned with Indigenous resistance; and how the staging of a re-fight turned into an argument over ‘skirmish’ versus ‘battle’, which was ultimately turned on its head.

Five Western Sydney local councils came together in advertising for an events company to produce an ‘authentic reenactment’ of the Castle Hill Uprising and Battle of Vinegar Hill. This paper is my story of being contracted by Local Government to coordinate the reenactment of the battle. It will recount some of the impossibilities of conducting re-enactment and explore some of its possibilities.

Biography:

Stephen Gapps was awarded his PhD from UTS in 2003 titled ‘Performing the Past: A Cultural History of Historical Reenactment’. He currently works as a consultant historian and part time academic historian. Stephen has been immersed in the practices of historical reenactors for over ten years and recently formed a History Events Management Company Historica to coordinate the 200th Anniversary commemorative reenactment of the 1804 Battle of Vinegar Hill.

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Tom Jones
School of English, University of St Andrews

The linguistic turn in eighteenth-century English literary studies

This paper discusses the common assertion in literary studies that social practices are, or may be analysed as, languages, and suggests that a questioning of the orthodox linguistic history of the period would throw new light on this assertion.

Over the last twenty years there has been an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity in eighteenth-century English literary studies. An interest in revisionist and material history has produced many important studies on, for example, women’s roles in the production and consumption of literary texts, and on texts as commodities that have their place in an unstable economy of free market trade and speculation. One of the recurrent tactics of such studies is to assert that gender and economics, to continue with those examples, are discourses or languages that are available to the same kind of analysis as literary texts, and that by a close study of the vocabulary of those fields one might disclose the operations of power within the field, show how the logic of those fields deconstructs itself. This tactic depends on a view of language that remains unquestioned: language is a tool that should reflect social reality, but is in fact used by those with power to impose a particular reality on those without, and the analysis of which subverts the pretended logic of those in power. This view of language as a sequence of references that goes awry, and by doing so allows for corruption, reaches back from post-structuralist theory to John Locke and beyond.

A slightly different field of research is opening up in which readers of eighteenth-century literature question what language is itself, beginning with a historical reconstruction of what various writers in the eighteenth century might have believed it to be. By questioning the nature of language, particularly literary language, this field of inquiry reassesses the relationship between literary and other forms of discourse. Taking a different view of language necessitates taking a different view of the social relations with which it may or may not be comparable. If, for example, one places George Berkeley’s view of the phenomenal world as a language next to Pope’s Essay on Man, that poem may seem less like a conservative attempt at restricting people to their allotted station than a more radical attempt to find meaning in the interaction between human linguistic consciousness and the phenomenal world, as the confusion of Walter Harte’s Essay on Reason for a work by the then anonymous author of An Essay on Man might suggest. Literary historians of the eighteenth century are beginning to ask again what language is and was thought to be in order to make the most of the suggestion that other behaviours and institutions operate as languages.

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Nicolle Jordan
Department of English, Ashland University

Anne Finch and the Matter of Deforestation

This paper focuses on the representation of landscape architecture in a poem by Anne Finch, "Upon My Lord Winchilsea’s Converting the Mount in His Garden to a Terras." I read Finch’s poem as one particular instance of a general feature of the discourse of landscape improvement: its capacity to maneuver among competing models for the value of the land and the trees that grow upon it. Finch’s poem articulates a transition in the development of this discourse, a moment when the naturalized link between property ownership and social position is called into question. The materiality of the landscape is especially significant in this poem; the poem's condemnation of cutting down trees in order to "improve" the landscape demonstrates both the symbolic and material value of timber on the Finch family estate, and in England in general. I will also explore how literature about landscape improvement exposes the countervailing forces that inflect narratives of progress, and how the materiality of trees figures into the specific progress narrative embedded in the discourse of landscape improvement.

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J. Kehaulani Kauanui
American Studies Centre, Wesleyan University

Critical Thoughts on a Kanaka Maoli Research Agenda in the Context of Hawaiian Nationalist Struggle

Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars are engaged in intellectual work addressing indigenous issues within a wider framework of self-determination that includes a politics of decolonization, where our research and writing strives to affirm and advance our sovereignty as a people and nation. Moreover, we produce our scholarship within a charged political climate in which there are three key politics divisions: Hawaiians and allies supporting an independent nation-state of Hawai`i, Hawaiians who are proponents of U.S. federal recognition of an indigenous governing entity within existing policy for Native Americans, and non-Hawaiians in Hawai`i who oppose both of these political movements in the name of "equality," where they assert that anyone in Hawai`i is "Hawaiian" by virtue of their residency.

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Christa Knellwolf
National Europe Centre, ANU

Picturesque Atlases and Costume Galleries: the Eighteenth-Century Publication Industry Seeks to Capture the Entire World

In the second half of the seventeenth century, the publication industry took advantage of the recent advances in printing technology so as to produce lavishly illustrated books about “all the Kingdoms and Dominions in the Four Regions” of the Earth. Even though knowledge about remote demesnes was still fragmentary, the vast amounts of information brought back by individual travelers and various journeys of exploration inspired shrewd entrepreneurs like John Ogilby and John Speed to print illustrated descriptions of foreign lands. When Ogilby advertised one of his expensively produced folio volumes as “a New Model of the Universe, an English Atlas” he articulated an objective that was to move into the foreground towards the end of the eighteenth century. In response to the ethnographic emphasis of late eighteenth-century voyaging, the general public called for books that portrayed the inhabitants of all parts of the earth. Regardless of whether these publications contained randomly chosen descriptions of curiosities or systematic accounts of landscape, fauna and peoples, they pursued the objective of capturing all worthwhile information about the world in one book, or one set of books.
This paper examines the processes by which the Enlightenment period came to understand the world as a single entity that could be subjected to a single Eurocentric interpretation of its nature and purpose. It investigates the cultural politics of a whole range of immensely popular books that purport to grasp the essence of all parts of the earth. Interrogating the globalizing tendencies of these publications, I will show in what ways the act of erasing local specificity and exaggerating stereotypical views promoted the interests of empire.

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Jonathan Lamb
Vanderbilt University

Will speak about Greg Dening’s History Writing, and Historical Re-enactment

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Iain McCalman
Federation Fellow, Australian National University

The Little Ship of Horrors. Re-enacting Extreme History

Iain McCalman will present a short paper outlining his experiences as a failed sailor on a BBC re-enactment called 'The Ship', a televised retracing of James Cook's voyage on The Endeavour sailing up the East Coast of Australia from Cairns to Indonesia. He will discuss the shortcomings of extreme history and the reality television format, and speculate about what, if anything can be redeemed from this genre. After this, he will show a short video film called 'Scuttlebutt', made with the help of Kim Mackenzie at CRIO. In it, three historians who were on the voyage, Iain McCalman, Jonathan Lamb and Alex Cook, conduct a series of anti-nostalgic and boozy discussions of the voyage and the genre of extreme history.

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Robert Markley
Editor, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Professor, Department of English, University of Illinois

Identity, Performance, and Abjection: Acting European at the Courts of the Far East

Drawing on Greg Dening's work on cross-cultural contacts in the Pacific, this paper examines the performances of two European officials at imperial courts in the Far East at the end of the seventeenth century: Alexander Hamilton, a Scots merchant at the Mogol's Court in Agra (1690-1), and Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician employed by the Dutch East India Company, who has an audience at the Shogun's Court in Tokyo (1692).

In both cases, the Europeans are conscious of the roles that are prescribed for them as foreign “barbarians” at Court, and both men record at length the ways in which their performances differ from and resist the expectations of, respectively, Aurengzeb and the Shogun. The roles that Hamilton and Kaempfer assume—scripted by diplomatic protocol, ritual forms of submission to imperial authority, and the overriding need to maintain trading relations in India and Japan--lead both men to comment incisively on the theatricality that marks the performance of European abjection in the East. Their experiences provide a means to explore some of the implications of Dening's "poetics of history" for understanding the reciprocal anthropology of European-Asian relations in the long eighteenth century.

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Cassandra Pybus
Professor, School of History & Classics, University of Tasmania

'As thoroughly Jacobin as if they had been trained and educated in Paris:' Black Refugees of the American Revolution

From slavery to freedom; from deference to equality, is the traditional United States narrative of the American Revolution and one that even now holds sway over most interpretations of its course and consequences. This paper seeks to consider how these notions played out in the wider Atlantic world, specifically in the lives of runaway slaves who fled their patriot masters to the British during the Revolution and were subsequently evacuated in 1782-3. The runaway slaves who took British ships from America and subsequently settled in Sierra Leone confounded and, indeed, contradicted American claims of equality, as well as British claims of a benevolent Atlantic empire. The paper will consider how the struggle of these slave runaways to make the rhetoric of liberty a reality in their lives led them to articulate, in words and actions, a radical political position which confounded and infuriated their abolitionsist sponsors. The aim is to resituate historical consideration of the so called ‘Black Loyalists’ to place them alongside the most radical revolutionaries of the Atlantic World.

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Tom Ryan
University of Waikato

The First 'Australians': Genealogy of a Naming

Greg Dening’s reflections on the history of Oceania have often dwelt on the performative and symbolic aspects of the ‘discovery’, ‘possession’, and ‘naming’ of Polynesian islands and peoples by European explorers. His unrivalled capacity for unravelling the layers of signification and meaning in such events has influenced the work of many other Pacific-centred scholars – including my own studies of Cook’s 1774 (re)naming of Niue as ‘Savage Island’ and its inhabitants as ‘Savage Islanders’. In this paper, however, I shift focus from the singular naming-events that typify the history of small, isolated, Antipodian terrains and populations to the multiple naming-events that marked early modern European imaginings of and contacts with the vast continental landmass, and its multifarious human occupants, that by the opening decades of the 19th century were known respectively as ‘Australia’ and ‘Australians’. While such a multi-eventful and multi-sited approach may not have been specifically pursued by Dening, his discerning accounts of the discovery, possession, and naming of parts of the ‘Marquesas’, ‘Society’, and ‘Sandwich’ archipelagos are its inspiration.

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Katerina Teaiwa
Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai'i

Between our islands: a cinematic approach to history, place and culture

This multimedia presentation will explore Katerina Teaiwa's PhD research completed at the ANU in 2002 under the supervision of Margaret Jolly, Greg Dening and Gary Kildea. Her thesis was a multi-sited ethnography of the Banaba/ Ocean Island phosphate mining industry that connected Kiribati, Fiji, Britain, Australia and New Zealand for much of the 20th century. Teaiwa's research was presented in text and 7 short visual studies on DVD.

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Ty P. Kawika Tengan
Ethnic Studies and Anthropology, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Hui Panala'au: Performances in the Pacific Theater of Empire

Between 1935 and 1942, the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Interior 'colonized' the islands of Jarvis, Howland, Baker, Canton, and Enderbury, five uninhabited coral islands in the Equatorial Pacific. In an effort to claim these islands for the development of trans Pacific air routes and as strategic military points, the U.S. government employed over 130 young men from Hawai'i to 'occupy' the islands as American 'colonists'. The majority of them were Native Hawaiian, though many were also Portuguese, Caucasian, Asian, or of mixed ancestry.

Although this historical episode fell into obscurity shortly after the War, a recent exhibit at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu has recuperated and re-presented the memories and stories of the group men that came to be known as Hui Panala'au, 'Society of Colonists'. In this presentation, I will discuss different performances of their history/ies and the ways that race, class, gender, and nation come center stage in the Pacific theater of empire.

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Paul Turnbull
Professor of History and Historical Informatics, James Cook University

South Seas: working with Historical Complexity in the Networked Environment

South Seas is an on-going research venture exploring the technical, conceptual and intellectual challenges for historians of the eighteenth century wanting to produce new kinds of scholarly artifacts in the networked information landscape.

The primary focus of South Seas to date has been the creation of an online edition of the complete text of the holograph manuscript of James Cook's Endeavour Journal, together with the full texts of the journals kept by Joseph Banks and Sydney Parkinson on the voyage, and the text of all three volumes of John Hawkesworth's Account of the Voyages undertaken . . . in the Southern Hemisphere...(1773). Readers are able to compare and contrast how occurrences on the voyage struck key participants. These accounts of Cook's momentous first Pacific voyage have been interconnected with a wealth of maps, historical images and explanatory commentaries, short articles and reflective essays.

In creating South Seas, we have sought to adopt digital preservation and interoperability standards developed by leading cultural heritage organizations such as the National Library of Australia. Of particular concern to us has been the development of techniques by which research by historians and other scholars of the eighteenth century can incorporate and interpret digitized materials by using metadata, interoperability protocols and persistent identifier systems.

Working in networked digital media presents new possibilities of representing the complexity of historical phenomena. Yet it also poses challenges of various different kinds that I will reflect upon in this paper, drawing upon my experiences in creating South Seas over the past four years.

Enquiries:

Paul Turnbull (Paul.Turnbull@jcu.edu.au)
Paul Picekring (Paul.Pickering@anu.edu.au)

For mailing list addition: Leena Messina, Programs Manager, Humanities Research Centre, ANU
Leena.Messina@anu.edu.au