DOCSLIB.ORG

1 Finding the Silences: Encounters in the Greg

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
1 Finding the Silences: Encounters in the Greg FINDING THE SILENCES: ENCOUNTERS IN THE GREG DENING ARCHIVE Abstract Pacific historian and anthropologist Professor Greg Dening (1931-2008) was a man of many silences. A trawl through the large archive of his papers echoes with the silences that were also Greg's fascination. In Greg Dening's metaphors of beaches and islands, the silences of the encounters between Native and Stranger were compelling. In this paper, my reflection on the Dening Archive, at once both voluminous, yet enigmatic, invites an interrogation into the poetics of engagement with archive, memory and the entangled politics of personality. Archives of the Mind In his 2004 book Beach Crossings, Greg Dening wrote “My study is an archive of my mind, an archaeological site of my spiritual and intellectual voyaging. The books that surround me are those that have taken me on my journey. …. Then there are my files. There has never been a lecture that I have heard or given, a book that I have read, or written, not an article or a chapter or a document that has not its relic in these files” 1 French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds us of the Greek origin of ‘archive’, arkhaeion, ‘initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded’.2 Here, it might be imagined, the Greg Dening Archive, housed in the mighty vaults of the State Library, is presided over by archivist-gatekeepers. The magisterial authority of these librarian-curators determines the ordering of the Archive. In this imaginary scheme, this Archive is raw material, a collected body of facts, an artefact of ‘truth’, passively awaiting the authoritative imposition of structure, form, and meaning by its custodians. This of course is a world away from the reality; I sail with freedom through the State Library’s Dening Archive, revelling in its disorder and randomness, bringing my own sense of meaning to the collection. Like a bricolage, or an assemblage, I peruse this collection, roaming its extraordinarily creative contents. There is no orderly chronology here. As I re-assemble it to produce something new, I imagine this as the archive of Greg’s mind. Is the archive a unitary body of knowledge, presenting a seamless, unquestioned collection of information? Or should we instead be more attentive to the ruptures we find in it, the fragmentations, the silences and the indeterminacies? In his essay ‘The Library of Babel’, the great Argentinian writer Borges imagined a universe of labyrinthine galleries, shelves, stairways, and mirrors. In this classic imaginative story, Borges dreams of the infinite, of the infinite possibilities of seekers of knowledge. The library’s neatly bound and ordered volumes offer profound possibilities for imperfections, uncertainties, and the infallibilities that belie their surface appearances. Borges wrote “If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder - which, repeated, becomes order; the Order.” 3 The State Library of Victoria’s Greg Dening Archive is a large collection, some eighty boxes, acquired in 2013. There is also a substantial collection of Greg Dening papers in the Melbourne University archives, which includes several boxes of correspondence, mostly from the period Greg was the Crawford Professor in the University’s History Department. But my interest is not only in what the archive contains, to see the collection as an unquestioned, and seamless source of information about Greg Dening’s life and work. I also want to understand what is absent from the collection and why; to explore the gaps, repetitions, the apparently random order of the material, and the silence. Here then, I am faced with two major collections of Greg Dening papers, in two of Melbourne’s most important cultural institutions, separated by a busy stretch of Swanston Street: the State Library, and Melbourne University, both founded by Redmond Barry in the nineteenth century. 1 Each of these collections has been shaped by their respective politics of archival acquisition, institutional politics, and management and accessioning over different periods of time. Not a Biography of Greg Dening The facts of Greg’s work and life are well known. There are many very fine articles and tributes written about his life and work by former students and colleagues, including Tom Griffiths, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bronwen Douglas, David Hanlon, and Ivan Brady to name just a few. In 1994 Melbourne University’s History Department published a collection of essays edited by Donna Merwick honouring Greg’s work.4 A special issue of the journal The Contemporary Pacific, edited by his long-time colleague and friend David Hanlon at the University of Hawai’i was published in the Fall of 2009. Titled ‘Remembering Greg Dening’, it contained moving recollections by many of Greg’s former mentors, students, colleagues and friends. And of course, there is the brilliant published work of Greg, in his many books, articles and papers. Greg was born in 1931 in Newcastle, New South Wales. He received an education with the Jesuits in Perth and Melbourne, and entered the order at the age of sixteen, and later was a priest for a while. He obtained his Master of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and then a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. He taught at La Trobe University before taking up the Crawford Chair in the History Department at Melbourne University in 1971, where he remained until his retirement. The following years were very productive ones, as Greg was now free to pursue his love of research and writing, and he also ran workshops and seminars as an adjunct Professor at the ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research during these years. Together with other notable historians Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, Inga Clendinnen, and Bronwen Douglas, Greg was part of what became known colloquially as the ‘Melbourne School’ of ethnographic history. Greg’s award winning publications demonstrate his extraordinary imagination and innovation in writing history: Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion and Theatre on the Bounty (1992); his book of essays Performances (1996); History’s Anthropology: the Death of William Gooch (1988); Readings/Writings (1988), and his last Pacific book Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (2004). There were also his outstanding works on institutional histories, of the Church, and of Xavier College – further examples of Greg’s fascination with ethnographic history. One of Greg’s former students, Tom Griffiths, now one of the leading environmental historians in Australia, reflected that ‘all Greg’s teaching … was directed towards empowering the creative imagination of his students’.5 Griffiths suggests that ‘Greg’s advocacy of the creative imagination was shaped by his engagement with two different worlds’, and that Greg ‘liked being “in- between”, and this was another of his beaches’. These two worlds that Greg inhabited were those of the academy, and of public literary culture’.6 Yet, in the light of all that is known of Greg’s life and work, the silence of the archives echoes. Greg was always present in his writing; his style one of juxtaposing personal reflections, observations, and meta-commentaries on his writing and research. And yet, like the silences that so fascinated him, for all his passion for the performance and theatre of history for understanding the crossing beaches, cultures, disciplines, islands and oceans, he was a shy and private man, as I glean in conversations with some of those who knew him well. MS Dening: the Silence in the Archive I wander in search of the intriguing silence in the Greg Dening archive. Trawling through the many boxes, I find a rich body of material beyond what is known in the public record. It tells a story of the creative process of Greg’s work, of his thought processes and creative imagination, of his busy scholarly life, and of his religious life. We can learn something too of his studies at Harvard, and of his discussions with publishers, reviewers, and conference and seminar organisers. Correspondence with his wide circle of colleagues, mentors, students, friends, and acquaintances, as well as letters from people seeking advice, offering information, or simply making contact, all contribute to an 2 emerging portrait of Greg. And conversations with some of the many who knew Greg offer additional valuable insights, often informal and anecdotal. But after all this journeying, I still find the archive puzzlingly silent on the inner person: Greg’s private thoughts, reflections, meditations remain somehow elusive. I ponder the absence of Greg’s personal letters, diaries, and journals, field notebooks of his work in the Pacific. The silence is also in that the majority of letters in the archive are those that Greg received; it is like a one-sided conversation. These silences are compelling. Always given to reflection, Greg himself reflected on silences. He wrote in 1998, in his book Readings/ Writings, about his attempts to learn photography while preparing in 1974 to visit the Marquesas Islands: I had crossed a beach and found what all the beach-crossers find, my own otherness. I called the book I was writing about the land and its people Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land. By the time I had finished it, though, I did not know whether the silence was in the land or in myself. 7 Greg’s book Islands and Beaches, published in 1980, established a major new approach to Pacific history: here was ethnographic history brilliantly done. Here too was reflective history – another of Greg’s consistent passions. I find the Dening archive tells a story about the process of making Greg’s books; the research, the writing, various drafts, and his correspondence with publishers.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • J Writing Histories
    :J WRITING HISTORIES IMAGINATION AND NARRATION EDITED BY ANN CURTHOYS AND ANN MCGRATH .;, MONASH University ePress (Jor 7/1 ffI S-r'Z ZCf· ?·o., Updated edition published in 2009 by Monash University ePress 0 CONTENTS Building 4, Monash University Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia www.epress.monash.edu.au vi Acknowledgements vii Preface to the electronic edition © Copyright 2009 viii Introduction © Copyright of individual chapters remains with the authors. © Copyright of this collection: Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath. Chapters All .rights .reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia's Copyright Act 1968, T he poetics and practicalities of writing - Tom Griffiths no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permis­ 2 The Broken Years: Australi~n soldiers in the Great Wa r 1914-18 sion from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. - Bill Gammage 3 Postmodernity and the relea se of the creative imagination DESIGN - Donna Merwick AKDesign (www.akdesign.com.au) 4 Writing from fragments - John D ocker 5 Fantasy upon one note - Peter Read COVER IMAGE 6 Writing: praxis and performance - Greg Dening © M andy M arcin and Tom Griffiths. Detail from Flood below the Shearing Shed. 7 Reflexivity and the self-line - Ann McGrath 16 February. 1999. Oil, ochre, pigment on linen. 90x330 ems. The painting is from 8 Writing place - Deborah Bird Rose the environmental project: Watersheds; the Paroo co the Warrego 1999. 9 The personal is historical: writing about the Freedom Ride of 1965 www.mandy-martin.com
    [Show full text]
  • Humbled by History >
    HUMBLED BY HISTORY Nicolas Rothwell The Australian 25 June, 2016 In his superb assessment of our best-known historians, Tom Griffiths has produced a manifesto for a new understanding of Australia, writes Nicolas Rothwell The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft By Tom Griffiths Black Inc, 376pp, $34.99 For all the multiplicity of his interests and the many fine gradations in his thinking, environmental historian Tom Griffiths is a man possessed by a single idea: the dream of a specific Australian kind of history, a new way of seeing the continent. This dream has substance, for in recent years a revolution in historical thought in this country has been under way: the discovery of the Aboriginal past. Griffiths has made this revolution and its consequences his special subject: it serves as the red thread running through his new assessment of Australian historians, the touchstone, the index that clarifies the evolution of their theories and ideas. Indeed it shapes his account of the lives and aspirations of his predecessors and close contemporaries into something much more than a mere sequence of character sketches and intellectual excavations. The Art of Time Travel is in fact a manifesto for a new understanding of Australia, a new sense of country. In painstaking, subtle fashion, crystallising without simplifying, Griffiths tracks the ad-vances made across the past half-century by a range of remarkable thinkers and researchers in the fields of history, ecology and archeology - a band of brothers and sisters joined together by a shared goal. Their names are well known to inquiring readers, for many of them are public intellectuals as much as specialists in their scholarly domains.
    [Show full text]
  • Dispelling the Myths Farewelling Greg Dening
    THE AUSTRALIAN IRISH HERITAGE NETWORK No 4, June 2008 PRINT POST APPROVED PP 336663/00047 Dispelling the Myths Patricia O'Connor Farewelling Greg Dening Peter Steele S.J. ! ! ! " R$ % &S R% ( %S )* +, &)* +, & R$ - S . / 0 . 1 / 2 ) 3/ +4,, 554 678 Tinteán No 4, June 2008 Tinteán is a publication of the Contents Australian Irish Heritage Network Regulars 2 Letters: The Lass of Aughrim; Compliments & Corrections PO Box 13095, Law Courts, 3 Editorial: Celts in the British Isles, Patrick Morgan Melbourne, 8010 4 News Tel 61-3-96708865s 6 What’s On Email [email protected] 7 Bolg an tSolatháir/Odds and Ends, Val Noone 8 The Evolution of linguistic groups, Stuart Traill Web http://www.tintean.org.au 10 Future of the Irish Language, Éamon O’Cuív Published four times per annum 12 Financials: Ease Liquidity Pressures, Simon Good. ABN 13643653067 32 Poetry ISSN 1835-1093 44 Tinteán Update, Rob J.F. Butler Features Editor: 14 A parent’s tribute, Michael Costigan Liz McKenzie 16 Emeritus Professor Greg Dening (1931–2008), Peter Steele S.J. Deputy Editor: 19 Dispelling the myths, Patricia O’Connor Felicity Allen 20 Quintessential Australians, Bill Hannan Business Manager: 22 Lost Your Census? Mattie Lennon Rob Butler 23 Hard-bitten fi ghting men, Michael Doyle Advertising: 24 John Walshe and the Irish Land League, Patrick Naughtin 25 The Kellys Again, Terry Monagle Marie Feeley, tel 03 5996 3343 26 Royal Hospital for Incurables, Donnybrook, Stephen McCormick and Kate Press Production: 27 Cancer among the Irish in Britain, Felicity Allen Andrew Macdermid 28 From Co.
    [Show full text]
  • Greg Dening: a Tribute
    Greg Dening: A Tribute Dipesh Chakrabarty Death came to Greg Dening (b. 1931) on 13 March 2008 and took away one of the most imaginative, original and reflective minds working in the fields of history and historiography. Dening retired in 1990 from the Max Crawford Professorship of History that he held at The University of Melbourne from 1974 and was an Adjunct Professor at the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University for the last twelve years. He started out as an innovative historian of the Pacific and went to contribute to historical thinking in general. He was the author of many books including Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774-1880 (1980); The Death of William Gooch, History’s Anthropology (1988; reprint, 1995); Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Power, Passion and Theatre on the Bounty (1992); Performances (1996); Beach Crossing. Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (2004); and Church Alive! Pilgrims in Faith, 1956-2006 (2006). He was and will remain an inspiration and an intellectual guiding star to many. Dening and his wife Donna Merwick - a gifted historian in her own right - formed part of a group once known as the “Melbourne School of ethnographic history” that also included Rhys Isaac and Inga Clendinnen, two other scholars of international repute and Dening’s former colleagues at La Trobe. Together, they pioneered in Australia the “anthropological turn” in the writing of social history that occurred globally in the nineteen seventies. Dening combined a degree in history from The University of Melbourne with a doctoral degree from Harvard in anthropology.
    [Show full text]
  • The French in the South Seas
    Welcome to the electronic edition of Discovery and Empire. The book opens with the bookmark panel and you will see the contents page. Click on this anytime to return to the contents. You can also add your own bookmarks. Each chapter heading in the contents table is clickable and will take you direct to the chapter. Return using the contents link in the bookmarks. The whole document is fully searchable. Enjoy. Discovery and Empire This book is available as a free fully-searchable PDF from www.adelaide.edu.au/press Discovery and Empire the French in the South Seas edited by John West-Sooby French Studies, School of Humanities The University of Adelaide Published in Adelaide by University of Adelaide Press Barr Smith Library University of Adelaide South Australia 5005 [email protected] www.adelaide.edu.au/press The University of Adelaide Press publishes externally refereed scholarly books by staff of the University of Adelaide. It aims to maximise the accessibility to the University’s best research by publishing works through the internet as free downloads and as high quality printed volumes on demand. © 2013 The Authors This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission. Address all inquiries to the Director at the above address.
    [Show full text]
  • Montgarrett Julie Thesis
    TEMPORARY ALIGNMENTS: Between Fraught Fictions and Fragile Facts © Julie Montgarrett 2015 TEMPORARY ALIGNMENTS: Between Fraught Fictions and Fragile Facts SUBMISSION OF THESIS TO CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY: Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CANDIDATE’S NAME: Julie Montgarrett QUALIFICATIONS HELD: Master of Arts (Visual and Performing Arts), Charles Sturt University, 1997 Graduate Diploma of Embroidery, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1985 Higher Diploma of Teaching (Secondary Art and Craft), Melbourne State College, 1976 FULL TITLE OF THESIS: TEMPORARY ALIGNMENTS: Between Fraught Fictions and Fragile Facts MONTH AND YEAR OF SUBMISSION: November 2015 Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1 - Temporary Alignments: between fraught fictions and fragile facts 1 Research Issues Arising: 4 Recognition of Creative Practice as Research Performative Aspects of the Research Process Additional Terminologies and Critical/Theoretical Location of Research Conceptual Organisation of the Exegesis Chapter 2 - Guessing Games in Borrowed Spaces 24 Precedents towards practice 24 Methodologies of Creative Practice to unsettle the past in the present 27 Accumulating Identity: Acknowledging origins 30 Unfinished sentences trailing little narratives 33 Bearing witness: respective histories 35 Aesthetic Practice That Allows Such Strangeness To Be 41 Logistics of Methodology and a Practical Epistemology 44 Problematic Aspects of the Research 46 Place Settings: Country, Circumstance and Consequence 47 I Am Neither A Historian Nor An Illustrator of Certain Conclusions
    [Show full text]
  • Kon-Tiki Theory’
    Melander, V. 2019. David’s Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Reception Bofulletin the History of Archaeology of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki Theory’. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 29(1): 6, pp. 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bha-612 RESEARCH PAPER: ASIA/PACIFIC David’s Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Reception of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki Theory’ Victor Melander From the late 1930s to his death in 2002, Norwegian adventurer and amateur ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl struggled to find academic acceptance for his Pacific Islands settlement theory. He even went as far as using the biblical story of David and Goliath as a metaphor for his struggle against academia. However, there are numerous reasons to question the accuracy of Heyerdahl’s description of his relationship to the scientific community. This paper discusses the reception of Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki theory’ among Pacific scholars in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By analysing contemporary reviews of Heyerdahl’s 1952 book American Indians in the Pacific and comments on early drafts of the theory, this paper demonstrates that the material substantially differs from Heyerdahl’s own claims. He was not excluded by the Pacific scientific community, but welcomed and encouraged. Above all, reviewers of Heyerdahl’s theory praised the importance of the challenge he had posed to the established research narrative. However, Heyerdahl’s academic amateurism failed to convince the scientific community of the accuracy of his theory. Introduction 170–214). The theme was hardly new and had already From the late 1930s to his death in 2002, Norwegian been adopted by Heyerdahl as a narrative driving force in adventurer and amateur ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl the 1940s (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • EDWARD ROBARTS Memoir and Marquesan Vocabulary, 1824 Reel
    AUSTRALIAN JOINT COPYING PROJECT EDWARD ROBARTS Memoir and Marquesan vocabulary, 1824 Reel M400 National Library of Scotland George IV Bridge Edinburgh EH1 1EW National Library of Australia State Library of New South Wales Filmed: 1959 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Edward Robarts (b. c. 1770) was born in Barmouth, Wales. He became a seaman and as a young man took part in the slave trade between Africa and Jamaica and Santa Domingo. He also sailed to Rio de Janeiro and Saint Petersburg. In 1797 in London he joined the crew of the New Euphrates as a cook and steward and, as far as is known, he never returned to England again. Deserting the ship in the Marquesas Islands, he became one of the earliest beachcombers and one of the first Europeans to write about the people, language and culture of the islands. Robarts married a Marquesan, Enaoata, and remained in the islands until 1806. He and his family then lived an itinerant life, travelling to Tahiti, New Zealand, Fiji and Penang, before settling in Calcutta in 1810. In Penang he was connected with Thomas Stamford Raffles and in Calcutta he initially found a patron in John Leyden. However, in the years that followed he was only able to obtain temporary employment, an attempt to obtain land in New South Wales was unsuccessful, he experienced poverty and witnessed the deaths of two wives and six of his seven children. Robarts completed his memoir and Marquesan vocabulary in 1824. Almost nothing is known of his later life. From 1822 to 1831 his name appears in the East India Register as a police constable.
    [Show full text]
  • J Writing Histories
    :J WRITING HISTORIES IMAGINATION AND NARRATION EDITED BY ANN CURTHOYS AND ANN MCGRATH .;, MONASH University ePress (Jor 7/1 ffI S-r'Z ZCf· ?·o., Updated edition published in 2009 by Monash University ePress 0 CONTENTS Building 4, Monash University Clayton, Victoria, 3800, Australia www.epress.monash.edu.au vi Acknowledgements vii Preface to the electronic edition © Copyright 2009 viii Introduction © Copyright of individual chapters remains with the authors. © Copyright of this collection: Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath. Chapters All .rights .reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia's Copyright Act 1968, T he poetics and practicalities of writing - Tom Griffiths no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permis­ 2 The Broken Years: Australi~n soldiers in the Great Wa r 1914-18 sion from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. - Bill Gammage 3 Postmodernity and the relea se of the creative imagination DESIGN - Donna Merwick AKDesign (www.akdesign.com.au) 4 Writing from fragments - John D ocker 5 Fantasy upon one note - Peter Read COVER IMAGE 6 Writing: praxis and performance - Greg Dening © M andy M arcin and Tom Griffiths. Detail from Flood below the Shearing Shed. 7 Reflexivity and the self-line - Ann McGrath 16 February. 1999. Oil, ochre, pigment on linen. 90x330 ems. The painting is from 8 Writing place - Deborah Bird Rose the environmental project: Watersheds; the Paroo co the Warrego 1999. 9 The personal is historical: writing about the Freedom Ride of 1965 www.mandy-martin.com
    [Show full text]
  • ENDEAVOUR and HOKULE'a: the THEATRE of RE-ENACTMENT HISTORIES Public Lecture, April 23, 1997
    GREG DENING 33 ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A: THE THEATRE OF RE-ENACTMENT HISTORIES Public Lecture, April 23, 1997 FIGURE FIGURE 2 Endeavour Replica in Port Phillip Bay Hokule'a approaching Maui from Honolulu It is my honour and my privilege to have University of Melbourne. Since that day been invited by this University to be the concerns of cross-cultural studies Adjunct Professor in the Centre of Cross- have been my life. cultural Research. I am most I have a reflection this evening on two appreciative of the warm welcome and icons of cross-cultural research: the care for our needs by the administrative Endeavour replica, here in a place the staff of the centre: Julie Gorrell, Anne- original Endeavour had never been, Maree O'Brien and Jenny Newell. My first Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. And Hokule'a, association with the ANU was in 1964 the replica of an Hawaiian voyaging when Jim Davidson and Harry Maude canoe, here undergoing sea-trials in offered me a position as research fellow 1975 off the north shore of Oahu in the in Pacific history. But it was forty years Hawaiian islands. ago almost to the day that I began my work in cross-cultural history under the My reflection is about re-enactment tutelage of John Mulvaney at the histories, the sort of social memory 34 GREG DENING evoked by these replicas. I won't be thing to be said about cross-cultural focusing so much on their history, the research, I think. It always begins with a accuracy or otherwise of their replica- little giving, whatever way one crosses.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Islands and Beaches': the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the Long
    ‘ISLANDS AND BEACHES’: THE PACIFIC AND INDIAN OCEANS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY Convenor: Dr. Sujit Sivasundaram, Gonville and Caius College, [email protected] Sailing Chart of the Marshall Islands, donated to the Royal Colonial Institute, 1875, now in the Royal Commonwealth Society Collection at Cambridge University Library. ‘Oceania is vast. Oceania is expanding. Oceania is hospitable and generous. Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still. Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the oceans, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces which we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed place, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom.’ From ‘Our Sea of Islands’ in Contemporary Pacific, 1994, by Epeli Hau’ofa (1939-2009), Tongan writer and anthropologist. Islands were critical in birthing our modern world, and yet they have often been forgotten in our accounts of world history. Because of their rigid boundaries and small territories, islands were subject to intensive processes of cultural encounter, political annexation and settlement, making them particularly revealing and tragic places to observe the impact of colonialism and globalisation. This paper returns to the history of the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the long nineteenth century, by viewing these large expanses of water as constellations of islands. In these seas, islands served amongst other things as garrison states, laboratories of science, sites for the exclusion of the diseased and penal colonies.
    [Show full text]
  • A Reflection on Greg Dening's Mr Bligh's Bad Language and Its
    A Reflection on Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language and Its Relation to the Pitcairn Island Language Joshua Nash University of New England I should say that the language of Pitcairn – surely a sign of socialising forces – was English, well, English enough to be recognised and understood by visitors from outside. Out of a polyglot of dialects – Philadelphian American English, London cockney, Aberdeen and Ross-shire Scotts, as well as dialects of the North Country, Guernsey Island, St Kitts in the West Indies, Cornwall and Manx – came an English that has delighted phonologists. But it was not Tahitian. And we have the puzzle that English was the language of power – shall we say of the Sea? – and Tahitian the language of everyday social life – shall we say the Land? (Dening 1992: 322) Fiction is too disrespectful of the generations of archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians and scholars of all description who have helped us to know what we know. (Dening 2004: 9) What Oceans Say In this speculative essay I review what Greg Dening’s (1992) volume Mr Bligh’s Bad Language and its association with all things Bounty might offer research into the Pitcairn Island language generally and my own work specifically. The writing style is submitted as an entrée to a larger work I intend to write in the coming years dealing with the linguistics, sociology, and spatiality of Pitcairn Island place and people. I assess how Bounty is posed and presented vis-à-vis language in Dening’s treatise of and on Mr Bligh’s and the Bounty’s language.
    [Show full text]