The Making and Remaking of Australasia: Mobility, Texts and ‘Southern Circulations’

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:
Part 1: Framings Introduction: Southern Circulations and the Making and Remaking of Australasia, Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago, New Zealand) 1. Framing Australasia: Empire, Colonization and the Cartographic Imagination, Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago, New Zealand) Part II: Circulating People and the Production of Space 2. Circulating Texts on Circulating People: Mobilities, Epistemic violence, and the Creation of the Imagined Australasian, Rachel Standfield (University of Melbourne, Australia) 3. Triangular Formation: Fiji, New Zealand and Australia, Frances Steel (University of Otago, New Zealand) 4. ‘A Splendid Thing’: Imagining Australasian Federation, Frank Bongiorno (Australian National University, Australia) 5. Cosmopolitan Pacific: Pan-Pacific Internationalisms in the Mid Twentieth Century, Fiona Paisley and Helen Gardner (Griffith University and Deakin University, Australia) 6. ‘We seem to shake hands across the seas’: Dora Meeson Coates and the Lost World of Australasian Suffrage Activism, James Keating (University of New South Wales, Australia) 7. Circulations of belonging: Chinese British subjects in Australasia, 1880–1920, Kate Bagnall (University of Tasmania, Australia) Part III: Environmental Transformations 8. We Keep Down Our Remorse: Anthony Trollope and the Emotional Politics of Australasian Agriculture, Grace Moore (University of Otago, New Zealand) 9. Brooch Clams and Blind Lobsters: HMS Challenger in the Australasian Pacific, 1874-5, Gillen D’Arcy Wood (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA) 10. Gorse is People, Thomas McLean (University of Otago, New Zealand) Part IV: Texts in Motion 11. Antipodean Perspectives: The Politics and Economics of Being Topsy-Turvy, Sarah Comyn (University College Dublin, Ireland) 12. Pedestrian Touring, Racial Violence and Bad Feeling in Trans-Tasman Settler Fiction, Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin, Ireland) 13. When Detection Goes South: Ngaio Marsh’s Wartime “New Zealand” Novels, 1937-1945, Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA) Conclusion: Perpetual Flight: Relationships in Space and Time, Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago, New Zealand) Selected Bibliography Index