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Melancholia
(2019)
The making of Tupaia’s map
(2019)
Tupaia’s Map is one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from the early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. It was drawn by Tupaia, an arioi priest, chiefly advisor and master navigator from Ra‘iātea in the Leeward Society Islands in collaboration with various members of the crew of James Cook’s Endeavour, in two distinct moments of mapmaking and three draft stages between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. Drawing in part on archival material hitherto overlooked, in this long essay we propose a new understanding of the chart’s cartographic logic, offer a detailed reconstruction of its genesis, and thus for the first time present a comprehensive reading of Tupaia’s Map. The chart not only underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very different wayfinding systems and their respective representational models.
Schomburgk’s Chook
(2018)
Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.
'...just as it would have been in 1861' : stuttering colonial beginnings in ABC's outback house
(2010)
The Pacific Solution meets Fortress Europe : Emerging Parallels in Transnational Refugee Regimes
(2007)
Historical narratives play an important role in constructing contemporary notions of citizenship. They are sites on which ideas of the nation are not only reaffirmed but also contested and reframed. In contemporary Germany, dominant narratives of the country's modern history habitually focus on the legacy of the Third Reich and tend to marginalize the country's rich and highly complex histories of immigration. The article addresses this commemorative void in relation to Berlin's urban landscape. It explores how the city's multilayered architecture provides locations for the articulation of marginal memoriesand hence sites of urban citizenshipthat are often denied to immigrant communities on a national scale. Through a detailed examination of a small celebration in 1965 that marked the anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish republic, the article engages with the layers of history that coalesce around such sites in Berlin.
"The greatest son of our Heimat": reading German Leichhardts across the National Socialist era
(2015)
The article discusses German commemorations of Ludwig Leichhardt (1813-1848) in the National Socialist era when officials, journalists, educators and writers, spurred by the double anniversary of the explorer's 125th birthday and the 90th anniversary of his disappearance, began to re-imagine the explorer's life and fate in the light of the ideological imperatives of the day. Our analysis of this period pays particular attention to how these reimagined Leichhardts emphasise or neglect some of the key elements that make up his story to this day, among them: Leichhardt's ethnicity; his sense of attachment to place and home; his homosocial relationships; his evasion of Prussian military service; his role in the British colonial project; and finally, his engagements with Aborigines. On the one hand, our analysis reveals, how Leichhardt was portrayed first on the local and, later, the national level in ways that increasingly sought to elide ambiguous aspects of his life and deeds. However, it also uncovers some of the ideological labour required to render him useful to the National Socialist cause. Often enough, these re-imagined Leichhardts escaped party politics, and cast up some of the logical inconsistencies and limits to key terms in National Socialist thinking.