A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
Positioning the North: Making British Geographical Knowledge of Australia in the Mid- Nineteenth Century
Authors: Skurnik Johanna
Editors: Duarte da Silva Matheys Alves, Haddad Thomás A. S., Raj Kapil
Publisher: Routledge
Publication year: 2023
Book title : Beyond Science and Empire: Circulation of Knowledge in an Age of Global Empires (1750-1945)
First page : 73
Last page: 91
ISBN: 978-0-367-41072-8
eISBN: 978-0-367-81454-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367814540
Web address : https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367814540
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/180480355
This chapter examines the formation of geographical and cartographical knowledge about the Australian continent by British actors in the mid-nineteenth century. These bodies of knowledge were constructed through the knowledge-work of several individuals and institutions spread across the globe. The central role played in this process by imperial civil servants stationed in the colonies and in Britain has been insufficiently remarked. The chapter investigates how, as part of wider bureaucratic developments, the civil servants functioned as knowledge-brokers as they facilitated, controlled, and coordinated the movements of material containing geographical and cartographic information. The chapter examines the circulation of information deriving from Augustus C. Gregory's government-funded North Australian Expedition (1855–1856). A term of comparison is provided by the regimes of mobility of the material originating from John McDouall Stuart's privately funded expeditions undertaken between 1859 and 1863. The chapter analyzes how the mediation of information via letters, manuscript and printed maps, newspaper clipping, and reports affected the processes of knowledge-making in different locations. The examination of the mobility of the material deriving from these expeditions illustrates the social and material processes that enabled or impeded the circulation of knowledge between different spaces of knowledge-making inside and beyond the British Empire.
Downloadable publication This is an electronic reprint of the original article. |