The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870

In this compelling study, Anna Johnston shows how colonial knowledge from Australia influenced global thinking about convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples. These were fascinating topics for British readers, and influenced government policies in fields such as prison reform, the history of science, and humanitarian and religious campaigns. Using a rich variety of sources including natural history and botanical illustrations, voyage accounts, language studies, Victorian literature and convict memoirs, this multi-disciplinary account charts how new ways of identifying, classifying, analysing and controlling ideas, populations, and environments were forged and circulated between colonies and through metropolitan centres. They were also underpinned by cultural exchanges between European and Indigenous interlocutors and knowledge systems. Johnston shows how colonial ideas were disseminated through a global network of correspondence and print culture.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: settler colonialism and its forms of knowledge; Part I. Imagining Settler Humanitarianism: 1. Morality, violence and sentiment: precarious lives on colonial frontiers, 1788–1797; 2. Language, poetry and song: reading indigenous wordlists and grammars, 1770–1874; Part II. Regulating Settler Society: 3. 'Virtuous curiosity': penal practices and social theories, 1791–1843; 4. Prison letters: reading and writing from Norfolk Island, 1834–1860; Part III. Inventing Settler Science: 5. Collecting practices: Botany, print culture and empire, 1768–1988; 6. Creating colonial readers and imperial networks: the Tasmanian journal of natural science, 1841–1849; Conclusion: knowing the colony, knowing the world.

About the Author :
Anna Johnston is Professor in English Literature at University of Queensland whose research explores the history and aftermath of the British Empire, especially in Australia. She is the author of Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (2003).

Review :
'In this highly readable yet nuanced analysis, Anna Johnston, one of the most original thinkers on Australian colonial culture, shows how texts on, from and about an Australia being colonised, reconfigured both knowledge and social reform endeavours across the Anglophone world.' Alan Lester, University of Sussex and Professor of History, La Trobe University 'This wonderful book evokes the tremendous pleasures of reading - but also the crucial work literacy performed in creating imperial knowledge. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Johnston's study of print cultures and their global circulation makes a distinctively original contribution to imperial history that is at once incisive and a joy to read.' Jane Lydon, The University of Western Australia 'From Johnston's balanced and comprehensive navigation of the now extensive and conflicted field of settler colonial studies, as well as from the evidence she provides in her detailed studies of often overlooked texts relating to her three 'experimental' fields of enquiry in colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land - humanitarianism and Indigenous welfare; convictism and penal reform; and natural history networks - it is clear that no one has thought so carefully about the relationship between knowledge and power in colonial locations, while at the same time paying close analytical and ethical attention to the lived conditions of the production and circulation of various kinds of knowledge, to their mutual dependencies and tensions, and to the collateral and ongoing effects of cross-cultural knowledge exchange.' William Christie, Australia National University '… makes a significant and original contribution to the cultural and intellectual histories of the British Empire, illuminating the influence of the Australian colonies to the global evolution of social and scientific ideas and practices. Johnston's work is scholarly - fittingly given its subject of knowledge-making - and she writes with assurance and an elegant turn of phrase. This brief review cannot do justice to the richness of the archival material and Johnson's careful and reflective discussion of a remarkable range of individuals and the texts they produced and read about early colonial Australia.' Kate Darian-Smith, Australian Literary Studies 'Johnston's study is deftly written, deeply researched, and beautifully argued. The Antipodean Laboratory is a model of scholarship in that it connects fields of research in surprising and productive ways, allowing readers to perceive larger patterns of thinking - in particular the interconnectedness of the three seemingly distinct fields of study: humanitarianism, penal reform, and natural science. Johnston makes an important and compelling case for the Australian colonies as central to some of the most meaningful developments in nineteenth-century culture and history.' Jason Rudy, Victorian Studies