This new blog article reaches you form Germany. On the 21st of December, I arrived back from my over three-month research stay and took a second christmas break (after the one week summer break in Sydney). After spending almost three months in Aotearoa/New Zealand between 16th September and 2nd December, I flew to Melbourne to Australia in order to visit the “Marine World of the Long 18th century” Conference at the FitzRoy Campus of the Catholic University of Melbourne.
Three keynotes from Prof. Dr. Lynette Russell (Monash University), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Kevin Dawson (University of California, Merced) as well as of Dr. Miranda Staynton (University of Melbourne) accompanied the various panels throughout the three days. You can read the full conference programm here:
On the following PDF, you can read a compilation of the other panels, presentation titles as well as their submitted abstracts:
Together in a panel with another PhD researcher Shameer T.A. from the University of Hyderabad in India, I also contributed a paper to the Conference in the Panel “Whaling and Fishing in the Global South”. I titled my presenation as “The whaling industry and the Tasman World” and provide you hereby with my abstract:
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“When the Englishman James Cook and the Polynesian Tupaia left the Australian continent and the Aborigines in 1770, they, unintentionally, revealed the differential and diametric temporalities of the Tasman Sea (Alison Bashford 2021). While Cook and Tupaia only ‘perceived’ the door (1770), Lit-Gov. King and Tuki/Huru ‘opened’ the door (1793); this paper demonstrates that it was the whaling industry which eventually ‘passed’ through the door, and so enabled the alleged connecting factor of the Tasman World.
Between 1790 and 1840, Port Jackson, Norfolk Island, Hobart, and the Bay of Islands emerged as important stopover places for the transoceanic whaling industry. Rangatira of the Ngāpuhi Iwi actively fostered the interactions with whaling ships by providing supplies and young men’s labour. Many of these whaling ships were either captained or financed by Quakers in the Atlantic world. This industry enabled a new form of mobility, which crucially connected the Tasman World as an interaction space.
This paper builds on Alison Bashford’s thoughts (2021) and argues that it was the transoceanic scale of the whaling industry which contributed to the formation of the Tasman Sea. With its manifold maritime interaction spaces, the whaling industry played a crucial role in shaping the Tasman Sea.”
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In my presentation, I adopted on a recent journal article of Prof. Dr. Alison Bashford (University of NSW Sydney).1 and highlight the connecting and disconnecting contributions of the whaling industry to the notions of a “Tasman World”. For this, I used a case study of one whaling family.
- Bashford, Alison (2021): World History and the Tasman Sea,
in: The American Historical Review, vol. 123 (3), pp. 922-948. https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/126/3/922/6424130?redirectedFrom=fulltext [↩]