The Making and Remaking of Australasia: Mobility, Texts and ?Southern Circulations? (Empire?s Other Histories)

This book explores the emergence of ‘Australasia’ as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. ‘Australasia’ emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of ‘Australasia’ shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica. The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how ‘Australasia’ has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.

Tony Ballantyne is Professor of History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His recent publications include Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (2014) and co-edited with Antoinette Burton Empires and the reach of the Global: 1870-1945 (2009).

Victoria K Haskins is Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Director of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre, she works on histories of gender and colonialism, domestic service, and women's cross-cultural relationships. She is the author of One Bright Spot (2005), Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914-1934 (2012), Living with the Locals: Early Europeans' Experience of Indigenous Life (with John Maynard, 2016), and Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel, 2019).

Emily Manktelow is Senior Lecturer of Imperial and Global History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier and co-editor of Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder i the British Colonial World (2015).

Fae Dussart is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK. She is author, with Alan Lester, of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014), and of In the Service of empire: domestic service and mastery in metropole and colony (Bloomsbury 2022). Her work explores the meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places.