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In early colonial prints of coastal profiles and inland surveys, wisps of smoke uncoil in uncharted territory, signalling human presence on this continent. From today's perspective, since our reprisal of the doctrine of terra nullius, they can be seen as place markers of Indigenous sovereignty. Before European incursion, we have recently learned, traditional burning practices had kept the Australian landscape 'parklike' and flourishing for millennia. Once emptied of their custodians and carers, these Indigenous estates became overgrown, fire-prone and unable to sustain their distinct and varied ecologies. This article shows settler perceptions of Indigenous fire practices as graphically depicted in a selection of early engravings by convict artists and explorers. How do we view these colonial artworks of Aboriginal traditional burning through the retrospective lens of a belated recognition of its role in managing bushfire? Images of Aboriginal smoke plumes in colonial topographies, and the changing technologies of print that produced them, offer new ways to reflect on recent Australian bushfires, with their many layers of loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 1852 the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado took two Yued Noongar boys to a Daguerreotype studio in Naples and had their portraits taken. They were among five Yued Noongar children taken to Europe by clergy, none of whom survived. Unlike the adults whose care they were entrusted to, they were not so much networkers but caught up in network's not of their making and carried along through these vast colonial circuitries; in this case child migration, monastic evangelising and ecclesiastical print. In this paper I chart the movement of these children within the context of the mobility of racialised childhood and its cultural renderings, in the engravings and letters of the boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The current anthropogenic climate crisis presents unique challenges to the higher education classroom. Pedagogy in the context of climate change must be attuned to complex and varied student experiences that can contend with feelings of anxiety, disconnection, distress and hopelessness. As educators and researchers, we collate our pedagogical approaches in the humanities and social sciences to progress ongoing discussions about climate pedagogy and highlight possibilities for action from Australia. Drawing on the inherent interconnectedness of our disciplines, we offer an interdisciplinary agenda for teaching in the climate crisis that is attuned to framing, positionality and reflexivity; multiple temporal and spatial scales; other ways of living and knowing; and creative action and activism to cultivate an affective classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorical analysis pervades scholarly research. Yet types, and the typologies that catalogue them, have been unexamined frameworks in cultural histories. Types certainly pervade studies as types, yet the typologies they are nested within, as overarching and conjoined descriptive orders, remain largely unexamined outside the social sciences or histories of ideas. As such social kinds are rarely historicized or theorized beyond documenting their meaning, presence and less often, their recurrence. While it is widely accepted that categories and standards pervade knowledge and language systems, from comparative anatomy to linguistic etymology, colloquial typecasting is yet to be considered as a discursive practice. Yet since the voyages of exploration the arrangement of new botanical specimens into networked zoological categories was accompanied by the designation of racial kinds through typecasting, and these popular types were often transcribed into print, and very often credited with the empiricity of natural history. The purpose of this collection is understanding the operation of types and typologies in colonial thought and inaugurating theories of types that can account for the transferral of categories across knowledge registers. The ideas canvassed seek to account for the material basis of types in print, and their valencies across epochs, and the ways they impact on one another and how they interact with invaded cosmologies. The intention of this collection is to account for the classificatory tendencies, or taxonomic fields, which colonial types can be situated within and query whether the cultural tendency for typologies was intensified within colonial perceptual relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reynell Eveleigh Johns held various posts in the public service in central and northeastern Victoria. From 1858 to 1903 Johns maintained five scrapbook volumes, amassing some sixty-five articles and engravings from newspaper cuttings on Aborigines. Concurrently European and ‘native’ bodies were partitioned and aggregated into raced and gendered identities through clothing and adornment. The shift in textile manufacture from workshop to factory, and spinning frames to water-powered mechanized looms, coincided with the development of the steam-driven cylinder press, typefounding, typesetting and paper-making machinery. This essay is concerned with patterns of meaning, created by the assemblage of component parts, as inscripting topographies of racialized literacy. It argues that surfaces, either raised or recessed, tenured understanding to the economies of print and textile within colonial perception. The industrialization of print and textile overlapped chronologically with the exploration, settlement and expansion of frontiers in Australia, from 1780 to 1840. These technologies created distinct impressions and provided various forms of coverage. Their facility for reproduction and reiteration entrenched the colonial social matrix from which racial identities and their divisions emerged. By reiterative marks across various surfaces, the moveable parts of press and loom assembled social categories that were aggregated and imprinted, or woven, into the colonial imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the emergence and circulation of the term ‘Lubra’ as a referent for aboriginal women in Australia. The article ranges across contemporary classificatory systems or the typologies that supported the use of ‘Lubra’, narratives of inter-racial encounter, early settler dictionaries of vernacular languages, nineteenth-century anthropology, journalism and visual tropes in advertising and print media. This wide-ranging survey provides the basis to assess the recurrence of racialised types in white imaginings and their role in understandings of human difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development coincided with, and underpinned, colonial modernity. Racialized child types such as the Piccaninny were put to work in the colonial imagination to set down very distinct claims to land ownership, inheritance, dispossession and eradication. While a number of such child types reflect ideas of inheritance in colonial discourse, such as the Bush Baby, Wild Child, Street Urchin, Drover's Boy, Half-caste and Lost Child, this paper concentrates on the Piccaninny type, tracing its recurrence and meanings in Australian cultural forms. It accounts for the recurrence of this figure of childhood as a racialized type, and examines the ways Australia put images of Indigenous children to work in producing a mythology of national identity and tenure. The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance—either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these children's disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-a-brac. The Piccaninny denoted racialized children and, this paper argues, was deployed in colonial discourse to outline the lineage of inheritance, particularly in land tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional use of the colonial visual archive as evidence and historical illustration is undergoing a significant shift, giving way to creative interventions by Indigenous Australians. The ferment surrounding the 'history wars' has led artists and scholars to rethink the colonial archive as a contested site productive of dynamic and archaic revisions. Departing from the memory ruts that have become entrenched in the national imaginary, these disruptions, reappraisals and refigurings importantly foreground Indigenous Australia's relationship with the colonial archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorises a discourse of settler homelands in which a dichotomy of lived interior and exterior was transferred to ideas of racial difference. Settlers depended on a range of perceptual relations, of looking, documenting and publishing, to convey a notion of racial asymmetry through the divide of built and 'undeveloped' surrounds. Settlers carefully observed the 'landmarks', or spatially-grounded signs of difference, often blind, or unable to assimilate the marks of Indigenous habitation to their systems of knowledge. These perceived differences of dominion were central to legitimating a discourse of settler homelands and to discrediting Indigenous tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]