Scholar Talk: Landscaping Eastern Australia through the Colonial Survey

For most of the nineteenth century the ground under the feet of colonists in eastern Australia defied comprehension. Until the 1880s, settlers struggled to keep pace with environmental change, the revisions of geological assessment, and their own anticipation. This talk addresses the development of colonial geology in eastern Australia and reveals how it eventually incorporated these challenges. Re-grounding a series of surveys, it shows that colonial geology was a compromised product of environmental agency, Indigenous knowledge, and settler adjustment.

Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian with an interest in settler colonial geologies and photographies. He is the Program Manager of the New Earth Histories Research Program at UNSW and an Honorary Postdoctoral Associate at Macquarie University. His book, Visions of Nature, is forthcoming with University of California Press.