The Making and Remaking of Australasia

Mobility, Texts and ‘Southern Circulations’

Tony Ballantyne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350264212
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350264182
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

This book explores the emergence of 'Australasia' as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history.

'Australasia' emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of 'Australasia' shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica.

The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how 'Australasia' has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Framings
• Introduction. Southern Circulations and the Making and Remaking of Australasia
• 1 Framing Australasia: Empire, Colonization and the Cartographic Imagination
• Part Two Circulating People and the Production of Space
• 2 Circulating Texts on Circulating People: Mobilities, Epistemic Injustice and the Creation of the Imagined Australasian
• 3 Triangular Formation: Fiji, New Zealand and Australia
• 4 ‘A Splendid Thing’: Imagining Australasian Federation
• 5 Cosmopolitan Pacific: Pan-Pacific Internationalisms in the Mid-Twentieth Century
• 6 ‘We Seem to Shake Hands across the Seas’: Dora Meeson Coates and the Lost World of Australasian Suffrage Activism
• 7 Circulations of Belonging: Chinese British Subjects in Australasia, 1880–1920
• Part Three Environmental Transformations
• 8 We Keep Down Our Remorse: Anthony Trollope and the Emotional Politics of Australasian Agriculture
• 9 Brooch Clams and Blind Lobsters: HMS Challenger in the Australasian Pacific, 1874–5
• 10 Gorse is People
• Part Four Texts in Motion
• 11 Antipodean Perspectives: The Politics and Economics of Being Topsy-Turvy
• 12 Pedestrian Touring, Racial Violence and Bad Feeling in Trans-Tasman Settler Fiction
• 13 When Detection Goes South: Ngaio Marsh’s Wartime ‘New Zealand’ Novels, 1937–45
• Conclusion. Perpetual Flight: Relationships in Space and Time
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright