The Antipodean Laboratory

Reviews / Votes

'In this highly readable yet nuanced analysis, Anna Johnston, one of the most original thinkers on Australian colonial culture, shows how texts on, from and about an Australia being colonised, reconfigured both knowledge and social reform endeavours across the Anglophone world.' Alan Lester, University of Sussex and Professor of History, La Trobe University 'This wonderful book evokes the tremendous pleasures of reading - but also the crucial work literacy performed in creating imperial knowledge. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Johnston's study of print cultures and their global circulation makes a distinctively original contribution to imperial history that is at once incisive and a joy to read.' Jane Lydon, The University of Western Australia 'From Johnston's balanced and comprehensive navigation of the now extensive and conflicted field of settler colonial studies, as well as from the evidence she provides in her detailed studies of often overlooked texts relating to her three 'experimental' fields of enquiry in colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land - humanitarianism and Indigenous welfare; convictism and penal reform; and natural history networks - it is clear that no one has thought so carefully about the relationship between knowledge and power in colonial locations, while at the same time paying close analytical and ethical attention to the lived conditions of the production and circulation of various kinds of knowledge, to their mutual dependencies and tensions, and to the collateral and ongoing effects of cross-cultural knowledge exchange.' William Christie, Australia National University '... makes a significant and original contribution to the cultural and intellectual histories of the British Empire, illuminating the influence of the Australian colonies to the global evolution of social and scientific ideas and practices. Johnston's work is scholarly - fittingly given its subject of knowledge-making - and she writes with assurance and an elegant turn of phrase. This brief review cannot do justice to the richness of the archival material and Johnson's careful and reflective discussion of a remarkable range of individuals and the texts they produced and read about early colonial Australia.' Kate Darian-Smith, Australian Literary Studies