Book review: Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby, eds., French Designs on Colonial New South Wales: François Péron’s Memoir on the English Settlements in New Holland, Van Diemen’s Land and the Archipelagos of the Great Pacific Ocean. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The British Colonization of Australia: An Exposé of the Models, Impacts and Pertinent Questions
Decolonizing Through a Peace and Conflict Studies Lens, 2018
By adopting the purview of Peace and Conflict Studies and the expository approach of historical archaeology of colonialism, this paper succeeds in enumerating the models the British used to establish and perpetuate colonial violence on the Indigenous Australians, and the traumatizing impacts the violence is exerting on them. The sole essence of the paper is not only to re-establish that the British colonization of Australia was deliberate, just as the heinous models they used. Most essentially, the paper identifies the following institutions: Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), the UN and challenges them to move from their current inert condemnation of colonial violence and adopt effective, concrete and practical frameworks that will “overthrow” the Australian colonial violence. Their sincere disposition and uncompromised commitment to this cause is important and imperative. In conclusion, the paper poses some pertinent questions to prove that colonialism is a dispensable evil.
A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period, 1788–1901
International Review of Social History, 2018
During the British colonial period, at least eleven islands off the coast of Australia were used as sites of “punitive relocation” for transported European convicts and Indigenous Australians. This article traces the networks of correspondence between the officials and the Colonial Office in London as they debated the merits of various offshore islands to incarcerate different populations. It identifies three roles that carceral islands served for colonial governance and economic expansion. First, the use of convicts as colonizers of strategic islands for territorial and commercial expansion. Second, to punish transported convicts found guilty of “misconduct” to maintain order in colonial society. Third, to expel Indigenous Australians who resisted colonization from their homeland. It explores how, as “colonial peripheries”, islands were part of a colonial system of punishment based around mobility and distance, which mirrored in microcosm convict flows between the metropole and the...
Shima, 2020
The #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement, which has seen the felling of statues of white invaders, colonisers and slave traders, has highlighted the racist legacy of slavery and the inequities, racism and ongoing impact of colonialism throughout the world. The toppling of statues sits within an ongoing historical push to remove visible tributes to colonial violence from the land. The colonial project, however, in its consumption and transformation of the colonised space, has seen the settler narrative firmly imprinted on the landscape. While knocking down statues is a powerful demonstration of resistance, the layers of embedded colonial presence in and on the landscape and in the national narrative remain. In this article, in the spirit of the BLM movement and through both decolonial/activist historiography and a creative/poetic interpretative approach to history writing, I challenge and topple the colonial narrative surrounding Didier-Numa Joubert, 19th Century Franco-Australian trans-imperial entrepreneur and slave trader with interests in and across islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. A man of routes but also of roots, Joubert’s legacy is embodied not in a statue but in the topography and European architecture of Hunters Hill, the Sydney suburb he ‘founded’. I reveal how the ostensible Frenchness of Hunters Hill, ‘islanded’ between two rivers, conceals a complex history of island connection to far-flung sites of colonial exploitation and forced labour in the French and British empires.
International Journal of Research, 2020
The #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement, which has seen the felling of statues of white invaders, colonisers and slave traders, has highlighted the racist legacy of slavery and the inequities, racism and ongoing impact of colonialism throughout the world. The toppling of statues sits within an ongoing historical push to remove visible tributes to colonial violence from the land. The colonial project, however, in its consumption and transformation of the colonised space, has seen the settler narrative firmly imprinted on the landscape. While knocking down statues is a powerful demonstration of resistance, the layers of embedded colonial presence in and on the landscape and in the national narrative remain. In this article, in the spirit of the BLM movement and through both decolonial/activist historiography and a creative/poetic interpretative approach to history writing, I challenge and topple the colonial narrative surrounding Didier-Numa Joubert, 19th Century Franco-Australian trans-imperial entrepreneur and slave trader with interests in and across islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. A man of routes but also of roots, Joubert's legacy is embodied not in a statue but in the topography and European architecture of Hunters Hill, the Sydney suburb he 'founded'. I reveal how the ostensible Frenchness of Hunters Hill, 'islanded' between two rivers, conceals a complex history of island connection to far-flung sites of colonial exploitation and forced labour in the French and British empires.
International Review of Social History
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deploy...