Biennial Conference of the Society for Australian Studies 2021

Activity: Participating in or organising an event typesContribution to conference

Description

Keynote Address: Planning for the Unknown and Unexpected

When Europeans set out to “discover”, map, exploit, and tame Terra Australis Incognita they were setting out into a great unknown. Possibly a few hundred years earlier Makassan fishers had ventured into Australia’s northern waters in search of trade items, turtle shell, trepang, and other. These were certainly not the first people to arrive “downunder”, as the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians had arrived at least seventy millennia earlier. Recent computer modelling has shown that these first voyagers, like the later European and Makassan ones, were deliberate and purposeful.

Human beings are explorers, they want to know what lies over the horizon and are driven to map the world as it is encountered. What can we surmise about these voyages and their participants? What did they bring with them? How did they provision their trips: what food and tools did they need to place in their boats to ensure they did not perish? What can we understand about human behaviour from the desire to sail across vast distances? What happened when these worlds collided however briefly? In this paper, I will explore the shifting phases of visits to Australia up to the mid-nineteenth century, and consider the
interactions, impacts, and relationships of sea-based encounters.
Period30 Sept 20212 Oct 2021
Event typeConference
Conference number17th
LocationTrier , Germany, Rhineland-PalatinateShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Seascapes
  • First Nations Histories
  • First Nations Peoples
  • Global Exploration