Unearthing the Optics of War

Book review: Unearthing the Optics of Wa

Rewriting Quarantine: Pacific History at Australia's Edge

There is no doubt that the historical geographies of quarantine and racial nationalism overlapped at Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station. To conflate these practices into a single narrative of immigration restriction, however, obscures other stories and agendas. Drawing upon inscriptions left in the Sydney sandstone by those detained at North Head, we argue that for many Pacific voyagers, quarantine was merely a temporary interruption rather than an exclusionary endpoint or affront. Citing the shuttling trade of ships and crews from New Zealand, Japan and China, this article re-locates North Head from a continental gateway to a Pacific outpost.The research upon which this article is based is supported by an Australian Research Council grant, LP120200259, ‘The archaeology and history of quarantine’. We are grateful to our industry partner, the Mawland Group, for supporting the ongoing archaeological and historical research at North Head Quarantine Station.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2015.107186

Geographies of commemoration: Angel Island, San Francisco and North Head, Sydney

Memorialising lives, deaths and events in landscapes can be authorised, official and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites encompass multivalent histories of defence, quarantine, immigration and leisure. Both also host a continuum of mark-making practices, from informal graffiti to monuments aspiring to direct national narratives. Elaborating the rich and complex layering of histories at each site, we trace the semiotic and emotive circuits marked by their endorsed and vernacular inscriptions. In particular, we question the work done when individual or even surreptitious texts are appropriated – or marketed – within formal narratives of inclusiveness, reverence and homogeneous nationalism. Drawing upon scholarship from archaeology, history, geography and heritage studies, this analysis argues that formalised commemoration never escapes the potential for counter-readings – that authority and authorship never entirely coincide

A History of Now

The connection between history and COVID-19 might appear counter-intuitive. We are used to being told by media outlets and employers, government officials and friends that we are ‘living in unprecedented times’. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the rhythms of our daily lives, but not every response to COVID-19 has been new. It has also been understood through history. This article comes from a roundtable discussion that was held as part of NSW History Week on 11 September 2020. Bringing together historians, curators and archivists, this panel explored the way that history has been used to understand COVID-19. Particular attention was paid to attempts to record and archive our experiences through the pandemic, comparisons between COVID-19 and the ‘Spanish’ flu as well as shifting understandings of temporality during the pandemic. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has ruptured our quotidian experience, it is not a moment beyond history. This panel examined how history is being used as an anchor point, a source of inspiration and an educational tool with which to tackle ‘these uncertain times’

Venom and vivisection in the colonial antipodes, 1788–1914

This thesis tracks venomous animals across the colonial landscape, from European arrival to World War I. It explores how these creatures and their toxins were known in the antipodes, from Indigenous testimony and folkbiology to the nascent structures of settler science and medicine. Following a chronological structure, the six chapters focus primarily on snakes in the Australian colonies, including the isolation of their venom as an autonomous ontological agent. New Zealand spiders and animated exchanges with British India also proved pivotal, both to comprehending venomous creatures and to competing formulations of scientific medicine. My central tenet is that colonial understanding of venom was underpinned by vivisection, a practice which was frequent, widespread and prominent throughout the Victorian era. Defined as experimentation upon living animals for nominally heuristic purposes, vivisection was undertaken primarily to characterise envenomation – and hence venomous creatures. Undertaken by lay, scientific and medical practitioners, these performances commonly employed domesticated animals, especially dogs. Such practices appeared ethically and philosophically unproblematic across the colonial world, yet in 1881 the Colony of Victoria became only the second legislature worldwide to formally regulate animal experimentation. This dissertation therefore disrupts several orthodoxies of nineteenth-century vivisection: that animal experiments rarely occurred beyond Europe; that they were overwhelmingly undertaken by scientists; and that profound barriers inhibited physiological extrapolation from ‘the brute creation’ into humans. Engaging with the historiographies of science, medicine and animal studies, I argue that the co-colonisation of Australasia by familiar creatures structured a unique series of hierarchies and equivalences governing human-animal relations. In particular, I analyse venom and vivisection to elaborate the epistemological role and moral status of animal subjects within this colonial animal matrix