AustLit

'The term “Atlantic archipelago” was coined by an Antipodean historian, J. G. A. Pocock, whose country, New Zealand, consists of two main islands and a few smaller islands. It shares a significant relationship with its neighbour, Australia, as well as many other islands and archipelagos in the Pacific (including eastern Polynesia, from which Māori, the country's indigenous people, originated). Pocock understood the relationality of nations, continents, islands, and archipelagos, and used the term to replace the phrase “British Isles” and “United Kingdom.” In doing so, he brought attention to the “plural history of a group of cultures situated along an Anglo-Celtic frontier” (Pocock 1975, 606), approaching these cultures not as dominant or subordinate nations, or colonised and colonising countries, but as nexuses of exchange and reciprocation. As John Kerrigan writes in Archipelagic English, this way of thinking can “recover the long, braided histories played out across the British-Irish archipelago between three kingdoms, four countries, divided regions, variable ethnicities and religiously determined allegiances” (2008, 2). It seems apt, then, that the travel journal of Georgiana Kennedy (1805–1843) should be held in an archive in Australia, the world's largest island, given that this journal describes the journey which twenty-three-year-old Kennedy undertook with friends in 1828 by steamboat through the islands and peninsulas of an archipelago on the other side of the world: Scotland.' (Publication abstract)