Abstract: This article examines the interpretive framework of “mobility” and how it might usefully be extended to the study of the Australasian colonial world of the nineteenth century, suggesting that social institutions reveal glimpses of (im)mobility. As the colonies became destinations for the many thousands of immigrants on the move, different forms of mobility were […]

Abstract: Recent years have seen numerous contemporary Indigenous artists contribute to global art exhibitions. A growing Indigenous-centred literature unpacks the particular critical agenda of this global Indigenous art, while also contextualising it in within the wider field of contemporary art. This article enters into dialogue with this literature through a close reading of a multimedia […]

Abstract: This article suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, underexamined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey during the mid-19th century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces […]

Abstract: The inauguration of a steamship route between Canada and Australia, described as the “missing link,” was envisaged to complete Britain’s imperial circuit of the globe. This article examines the early proposals and projects for a service between Vancouver and Sydney, which finally commenced in 1893. The route was more than a means of physically […]

Abstract: The late nineteenth century saw a wave of Indian migrants arrive in Victoria, many of whom took up the occupation of hawking. These often-described “turban-clad hawkers” regularly became visible to settlers as they moved through public space en route to the properties of their rural customers. This article explores how the turban became a […]

Abstract: From the 1860s, the colonial settlement of Beltana in the northern deserts of South Australia emerged as a transportation hub atop an existing, cosmopolitan center of Aboriginal trade. Viewing a colonial settlement on Kuyani land through a mobilities paradigm, this article examines intersecting settler and Aboriginal trajectories of movement through Beltana, illuminating their complex […]

Description: What do we know of masculinities in non-patriarchal societies? Indigenous peoples of the Americas and beyond come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine, concepts that were unimaginable and shocking to Euro-western peoples at contact. “Indigenous Men and Masculinities”, edited by Kim Anderson and Robert Alexander Innes, brings together prominent thinkers […]