“It Was Chiefly by Our Intimacy with the Natives That We

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‘“It was chiefly by our intimacy with the natives that we succeeded in getting so many new birds”: Travelling Knowledges, Indigenous/European Encounters, and Colonial Science: Case Studies from Australia and Aotearoa in the wake of Cook’ Dr Michael Davis Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Sociology and Social Policy The University of Sydney [email protected] Continuing a long line of imperial scientific collecting voyages in the wake of James Cook, in 1850 John MacGillivray, naturalist on the British survey ship HMS Rattlesnake, which travelled to northern Australia and Papua New Guinea during 1846-1850, wrote to the ornithologist John Gould, ‘It was chiefly by our intimacy with the natives that we succeeded in getting so many new birds’. Only a few years earlier, on his many botanical collecting expeditions into the interior of New Zealand’s North Island, William Colenso, like MacGillivray, also acknowledged the role of local Indigenous knowledge. In one journey in December 1842, Colenso observed that ‘in the houses of the natives at this place a quantity of a thick succulent species of Fucus hung up to dry which they informed me was used as an article of food’. Colenso had a reflective sensibility, engaging Cook’s 1769 voyage as a point of reference for his own botanising. He wrote in December 1841, while in Tokomaru Bay, that this was ‘a spot which by the Naturalist will ever be contemplated with the most pleasant association of feeling, for here it was that Sir Joseph Banks and Dr Solander first botanized in October 1769. This bay was called Tegadoo by Cook’/ In this paper I interrogate writings from these two mid-19th century natural history collectors – one coastal voyager, the other predominantly inland explorer - to contemplate the complex entanglements between local Indigenous, and intruding Western, scientific knowledge systems in the decades following Cook and Banks, and inquire into the ways these knowledges melded together in situated encounters in time and place, to result in new knowledge formations. The paper contextualises these specific narratives of encounter, botanical collecting and voyager knowledge production in the wake of James Cook, to consider wider questions about entwined local, Indigenous knowledges, with the fashioning of colonial science-in-place, the global circulation of specimens, and competing, contested and integrated epistemologies. Biographical information Michael is an independent historian working across the humanities and social sciences. His research interests include Indigenous knowledge, biodiversity, heritage and environment, and ethical guidelines and protocols for Indigenous research. Michael’s publications include ‘Encountering Aboriginal knowledge: explorer narratives on north-east Queensland, 1770 to 1820’ (Aboriginal History 37, 2013), and Writing Heritage: the Depiction of Indigenous Heritage in European-Australian Writings (2007, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, and National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra). .

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