The Antipodean Laboratory and the ‘Sea-Girt Prison’: Print Culture on Norfolk Island, 1840-44

Hybrid seminar, and Video

The Historical, Cultural and Critical Inquiry Group at the University of Newcastle (Australia) is pleased to announce the next paper in our 2023 seminar series, co-hosted with the Centre for the Study of Violence, on Friday 1 September, from 10-11am Australian Eastern Standard Time (UTC+10). The seminar will be simultaneously held on campus and broadcast live via Zoom. (Details and Zoom link below.) Our presenter is:  

Anna Johnston (Queensland), “The Antipodean Laboratory and the ‘Sea-Girt Prison’: Print Culture on Norfolk Island, 1840-44.”

The Australian settler colonies were shaped by distinctive kinds of knowledge. Convicts, humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples, and natural history: each topic generated streams of correspondence written by those keen to participate in a global print culture and knowledge economy that united colonies and imperial centres.  This paper examines some of the foundational texts that underpinned Alexander Maconochie’s innovative, if controversial, mark system at Norfolk Island in the early 1840s and the rich archive of convict narratives that emerged in response to these radical experiments on a remote penal laboratory on an off-shore island. This case study shows how modern ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan spaces, and circulated (and hotly debated) through imperial and colonial print culture.  

Anna Johnston is Associate Professor in English Literature in the School of Communication and Arts. She has particular interests in settler colonialism, travel writing, and missionary writing and empire. Anna has published widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, focussing on literary and cultural history, including The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2023), and The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (UWA Press 2011). She is also co-editor of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier (Sydney University Press 2021).   

For in-person attendance: Room W202, Behavioural Science Building, Callaghan Campus, University of Newcastle (Australia).  

For online attendance:  

Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272 (Open from 9:45pm)
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09

This event will be recorded. Presentation recordings will be available from our YouTube channel, History@Newcastle:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiju7vKLANeSX4QxBpMwJow on Monday 4 September.