Paul Arthur » History

Literary and Cartographic Projections

Paul Arthur — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:54:06 +0000

The early novel was based upon and drew upon the textual traditions of descriptive travel writing, with the narrative structure of the novel mimicking the activity of travelling. The connection is so strong that travelling can be aligned with characteristics of narrative itself. As Paul Carter puts it, “voyaging and storytelling go together” (1998, p. 19). According to another critic, novels share a “spatial metaphor” with the accounts of voyages. The early novel, “more than any other genre,” is “spatial” (Freedman, 1968, p. 72). The spatial impulse is also illustrated when the protagonist takes on the role of the intrepid explorer, a position that removes the character from the familiarity of home and its known geographies and places them in unknown geographies as a discoverer.

Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia

Paul Arthur — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 01:00:40 +0000

Almost a decade in the making, the Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, edited by Jenny Gregory and Jan Gothard, is now the most up to date and authoritative composite portrait of the state’s history. This work is a remarkable achievement. It is the result of a sustained collaborative effort that is a credit to the skill and energy of the editorial team and to the more than three hundred contributors, along with hundreds of expert readers. In 1912 J. S. Battye, the well-known State Librarian of Western Australia, produced the Cyclopedia of Western Australia: An Historical and Commercial Review, Descriptive and Biographical Facts, Figures and Illustrations, which remained a central reference resource for WA history throughout the twentieth century. The highly regarded volumes of the sesquicentenary series appeared in 1979, followed in 1981 by the influential A New History of Western Australia, edited by Tom Stannage.

Toward a Global Digital History

Paul Arthur — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:16:14 +0000

Digital history spans disciplines and can take many forms. Computer technology started to revolutionize the study of history more than three decades ago, and yet genres and formats for recording and presenting history using digital media are not well established and we are only now starting to see large-scale benefits. New modes of publication, new methods for doing research, and new channels of communication are making historical research richer, more relevant, and globally accessible. Many applications of computer-based research and publication are natural extensions of the established techniques for researching and writing history. Others are consciously experimental. This chapter discusses the latest advances in the digital history field and explores how new media technologies are reconfiguring the study of the past.

Exploration and Endeavour

Paul Arthur — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:32:40 +0000

Exploration & Endeavour: The Royal Society of London and the South Seas celebrates the society’s 350th anniversary by bringing together a selection of iconic objects and original documents that highlight the society’s key role in European maritime exploration and discovery in the Pacific. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, was founded on the premise that knowledge should be subject to independent verification—‘freeing oneself from unexamined opinion, particularly through the study of empirical data’, as Andrew Sayers puts it in his introduction to the beautifully produced accompanying book publication. The society’s motto, Nullius in verba (‘Take no-one’s word for it’), attests to this commitment to independence of thought, underpinned by methodologically rigorous inquiry. Fellows of the society include larger-than-life figures who in many cases have revolutionised their field: Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Christopher Wren, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Albert Einstein, Dorothy Hodgkin, Francis Crick, James Watson, Stephen Hawking and, with particular relevance in the Pacific context, James Cook and Joseph Banks.

Making Them Live

Paul Arthur — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:39:37 +0000

The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is the premier reference resource for the study of the lives of Australians who were significant in Australian history. Its 50 year anniversary was celebrated in 2009 with a special symposium ‘Between the Past and the Future’, which brought together past employees of and contributors to this important national project. Seventeen volumes of the dictionary and one supplementary volume have been published under the Melbourne University Press imprint, with Volume 18 (covering people who died between 1981 and 1990, surnames beginning L to Z) due to appear in 2012. The editorial unit that produces the ADB has been led by General Editor Professor Melanie Nolan since 2008. In that year, the National Centre of Biography (NCB) was established at the Australian National University to extend the work of the ADB and to serve as a focus for the study of life writing in Australia, supporting the highest standards in the field, nationally and internationally.

Gallipoli Online

Paul Arthur — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:42:20 +0000

At the heart of the national narrative in Australia is the potent and enduring story of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers—the ANZACs—who fought at Gallipoli, in Turkey, in the First World War, against impossible odds. It is a story that has taken on legendary significance. Each year, on the anniversary of the catastrophic Gallipoli conflict of 25 April 1915, there is a national holiday and Australians in ever-increasing numbers attend Anzac dawn services—conducted at memorials across the nation—to honour the dead of this and later wars. The role of the Gallipoli: The First Day website is not only to repeat and reinforce the Anzac message and make it more accessible, but also to offer a new assemblage of information utilising the 3D visual power of the digital environment.

Life Sentences

Paul Arthur — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:46:20 +0000

Hung parliaments at the Federal level in Australia are very unusual. The first such political stalemate since 1910 occurred at the onset of World War II. The Federal election of 21 September 1940 was held 70 years prior to the 2010 ballot that ultimately confirmed Julia Gillard as prime minister of a minority Labor government. The Australian Dictionary of Biography tells the story of the 1940 election that led to Robert Menzies being returned as Prime Minister of a minority coalition government—followed by its downfall the next year—through the lives and careers of the key political players. These included Prime Ministers Joseph Lyons, Robert Menzies, Arthur Fadden and John Curtin, along with the two conservative Victorian Independents, Arthur Coles and Alexander Wilson, who held the balance of power in the House of Representatives.

Virtual Voyages

Paul Arthur — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 01:39:32 +0000

Born out of an ancient geographical theory of balance, the term ‘antipodes’ was first used to refer to the vast uncharted underworld of the southern hemisphere from a northern perspective. The principle behind this belief, as described in the Quarterly Review in the nineteenth century, was ‘that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe’. The idea of the antipodes as a counterbalance, though now remembered only as a peculiar, discredited theory, has been surprisingly influential as an imaginative concept. An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the foundations for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within. The region of the antipodes has been occupied by European settlers and their descendants for a relatively short time. And yet, this brief period is set against a backdrop of one of the longest recorded histories of imagining prior to geographical discovery.

Digital Fabric, Narrative Threads

Paul Arthur — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:47:19 +0000

The traditional crafts of quilting, embroidering and weaving may appear to be a world away from the high tech fields of computer networking, digital interface design, and database development. However, the old and new are increasingly being linked through metaphors that reveal a great deal about changing attitudes to digital technologies as they become more established and widely accessible [...] Today’s communication networks are structured around “patchwork” designs, software glitches are fixed with “patches,” computer processors are being described as “multi-threaded,” and over the past decade other “material metaphors” have been embraced as a means of conceptualising and giving form to our new world of amorphous digital texts. In particular, the quilt motif has been used in a variety of ways, including as a means of visualising interaction and information flows and as a template for digital interface design.

Fictions of Encounter

Paul Arthur — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:52:06 +0000

The “imaginary voyage” was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy farfetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome.