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Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Unease and Disease : Redrawing the Boundaries of Colonial Madness
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'OVER THE COURSE of eight years I researched and wrote a book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, about colonial madness in Australia. I read the records generated by the projects undertaken here – endeavours at every scale, from simple survival through to the efforts of empires to mobilise labour, capital and morality. Letters scratched out by the two outsized, Crown-appointed spiders working from the stone house on the rise above the eastern shore of Warrane (Sydney Harbour) and transmitted to the buildings thrown up around the edge of the water; the second settlement at Parramatta; the outstations in contested areas; the penal stations on far-flung islands; and the lair of the hulking old beast half a world away on Downing Street. I read case notes scribbled by half-trained doctors, case law by half-trained lawyers, editorials and newsprint written in the same inflated, pompous register in which it seems that many of the better-heeled colonists prosecuted their lives. The spiders spun without cease a taut, geometric thing strung over the uneven, ungainly contours of the colony, over the actual life of the world I was working to reconstruct. Somewhere within this close web, and the stray silken threads spun silent across the water by every person with access to ink and paper and language, somewhere within and inside all this lovely, suffocating gossamer lay the monstrous and mundane matter of colonisation: a thing so ordinary anyone could do it and so special some felt called to it and so awful that it continues to poison the land and everything on it.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Griffith Review States of Mind no. 72 April 2021 21724506 2021 periodical issue

    'IN THE FIRST months of 2020, the vibrations of the Earth changed. As monitored by a global network of seismologists, the average daily displacement of the surface of the planet – measured in nanometres, or increments of one billionth of a metre – fell around the world, from Nepal to Barcelona to Brussels. In Enshi, in China’s Hubei province, and in New York City, average ground displacement fell to less than one nanometre from pre-pandemic levels of 3.25 nm and 1.75 nm respectively'. (Ashley Hay : Introduction) 

    2021
    pg. 122-131
Last amended 5 May 2021 16:18:30
122-131 Unease and Disease : Redrawing the Boundaries of Colonial Madnesssmall AustLit logo Griffith Review
Subjects:
  • Sydney Harbour, Sydney, New South Wales,
  • Botany Bay, Botany area, Sydney Southern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,
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