ocean encounters
PANEL 14
ocean encounters
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
10:00 - 11:30 am
Location: ROOM 101A
Panel Speakers:
Lynette Russell
David Haworth
Leonie Stevens
Moderated by: Lani Hanna
Oceans as Archives. Archives of Oceans I
This panel is composed of team members of the Australian Research Council’s Laureate Program, Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples: 1000 Years of Australian History. Australia is an island continent until very recently you could only get here by sea. The researchers in the Global Encounters project are using a variety of archives to explore and interrogate ocean travel over the past millennia. We use the term archive in its broadest sense; it includes European language materials (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and French), First Nation textual sources (oral histories, material culture), botanical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence, amongst other traditional and non-traditional archival sources. The papers in this panel session will explore a range of historical and ongoing maritime engagements, and their archival traces.
Planning for the unknown, and unexpected.
Ocean archives and voyages from the deep past to the eighteenth century
Lynette Russell
Recent computer modelling has shown that the first voyagers to Australia, like the later European and Makassan ones, were deliberate and purposeful. What can we understand about human behaviour from the desire to sail across vast distances across aeons?
Lynette Russell is an anthropological historian. She is a descendant of the Wotjabaluk people of southeastern Australia. She has published more than a dozen books on topics as diverse as museums and museum displays, Aboriginal faunal knowledge, colonial history, and the early Australian whaling industry. She has held fellowships at both Cambridge and Oxford. Her work is frequently collaborative and interdisciplinary.
“Marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics”:
The Galapagos Tortoise as a Palimpsest of Island, Ocean and Maritime Histories
David Haworth
The giant tortoises of the Galápagos have become emblems of a precarious, vulnerable isolation—and yet they have never been entirely isolated. This paper examines the ways in which the lives of the Galápagos tortoises have been intertwined with and shaped by an assemblage of human and more-than-human forces: island geographies and ecosystems, ocean currents and wind patterns, maritime and whaling histories, and changing human-animal relations.
David Haworth is Senior Research Officer for the ‘Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples’ program at Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. In 2021, David completed his doctoral thesis in English Literature at the University of Melbourne, focusing on depictions of non-human artfulness and creativity. His academic publications and presentations have explored such topics as the artfulness of scientific illustration, the ‘feral’ or animal-reared child, illusion and mimicry in nature and art, and the cultural histories of the black swan.
Oceans and deserts in the imaginary:
decolonizing settler expectations through non-traditional archives
Leonie Stevens
From the South Pacific Gyre, which is often depicted as a desert, to early ideas about the probability of an inland sea in Australia, this presentation explores Eurocentric notions of ocean as desert and desert as ocean.
Leonie Stevens is a settler-descendent writer and historian based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). After a career as a writer, with six novels and a range of short fiction published, she became more interested in true stories, and studied history and archaeology. Her most recent book is ‘Me Write Myself’, which focuses on the activism of palawa (Tasmanian First Nations Peoples) during their exile on Flinders Island in the 1830s and 40s.