« Settler colonial panopticons: Emily Lanman, ‘Panopticons in the antipodes: why Bentham’s reforms found success in Western Australia’, Journal of Bentham Studies 24, 1, 2026

Suburban settler colonialism: Sean Tyler, ‘The Settler-Suburban Imaginary: Improvement, John Claudius Loudon, and Colonial Dispossession in the Swan River Colony’, Fabrications, 2026

25Oct26

Abstract: This article examines how a settler-suburban imaginary organised land, labour, and legitimate possession in the Swan River Colony on Whadjuk Noongar Country, where relationships to Country precede and continue beyond colonial occupation. It traces the emergence of an ideology of landscape improvement and follows its legal and aesthetic translation through British colonial property regimes. Situating John Claudius Loudon’s writings within this process, the article shows how his suburban ideals provided settlers with a vocabulary that bound moral and intellectual cultivation to domestic landscape improvement. Loudon’s texts circulated alongside seeds as well as reports between Britain and the Swan River colony, demonstrating a bi-directional exchange of knowledge concerning the ideal landscaping of the suburban garden. I argue that the suburban condition in Swan River was not simply a by-product of urban growth, but a foundational mode of dispossession through which landscape improvement was reorganised at the scale of the individual allotment, garden, and dwelling.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed