Registrations for Mapping Pacific Places, ANZMapS’ 2020 conference, are now open.
Join us online via Zoom on Thursday 10 September for a series of talks taking place over three sessions about the Pacific from ‘Magellanica’ to the present.
The full schedule of talks is outlined below.
Each talk has its own Zoom registration link, and conference attendees will need to follow these links to register for each talk they wish to attend. To attend multiple talks, you will need to register for each individual talk via its unique registration link. A pdf of the conference schedule and further information can be found here.
Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and other First Nations people are advised that the content of some sessions may contain names, images, and references to deceased people and other content that may be culturally sensitive. Owing to the nature of this conference, many sources and descriptions featured reflect the source author’s attitude or that of the period in which the item was created and may now be considered offensive. The content and information expressed in each of today’s sessions is derived from the work and research of each sessions’ respective speaker and is not affiliated with the National Library of Australia.
Session One – A World Divided
- East by South West: Navigating with Magellan + Conference Welcome
Presented by Granville Allen Mawer
9:30am AEST
Bookings: Register here
Dr Martin Woods, Senior Curator Maps and Research at the National Library of Australia and past-president of the Australian & New Zealand Map Society welcomes attendees to the 2020 ANZMapS Conference, Mapping Pacific Places, followed by Allen Mawer as he explores the Pacific according to Magellan; initially as he sought to persuade the King of Spain to commission his voyage and then as he dealt with the navigational realities he encountered.
- A World Divided
Presented by Ian Burnet
10:10am AEST
Bookings: Register here
After the discovery of the America’s, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal divided the world in half. The two Iberian powers were now in a race to reach the Spice Islands, sailing in opposite directions around the world. Yet neither of them could accurately measure longitude and know in whose half of the world the islands were actually located.
- Finding the Antipodeans
Presented by Robert J King
10:50am AEST
Bookings: Register here
The antipodean southern continent described in 1526 on the basis of discoveries made by Amerigo Vespucci and Ferdinand Magellan inspired generations of subsequent geographers and mapmakers, and eventually led to the establishment of an antipodean colony by Great Britain in New South Wales.
- The French ‘discovery’ of the Pacific: New Worlds in the South
Presented by Margaret Sankey
11:30am AEST
Bookings: Register here
In early European exploration of the southern regions of the globe, the French, focusing on the Indian Ocean, were relatively late in coming to the Pacific. In this paper Margaret explores how from the late seventeenth century, the French search for Terra Australis Incognita delayed French interest in the Pacific Ocean, and then conditioned the nature of the French scientific voyages of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Session Two – Pacific Places
- Place, Race, Genome: ‘Polynesia’ in Deep Historical Perspective
Presented by Bronwen Douglas
12:30pm AEST
Bookings: Register here
In 1520, Magellan’s Mar Pacífico (Pacific Sea) contained only two tiny uninhabited islands and the islands of Guåhån (Guam) and Luta (Rota) in the archipelago he slandered as Islas de los Ladrones (Islands of Thieves). The great ocean remained regionally undifferentiated until 1756, when French writer Charles de Brosses applied the term ‘Polynesia’ to over a thousand islands in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. Bronwen traces subsequent usages of Polynesia by early 19th-century geographers, to the region’s human inhabitants, as Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians—the global norm after 1900. These deep histories of place and race are a largely ignored aspect which still inhabit some modern studies in biological anthropology and genomics.
- Maps and the European understanding of Fiji toponomy 1643-1840
Presented by Paul Geraghty
1:10pm AEST
Bookings: Register here
In this presentation, Paul will point to a number of unexpected features of the early European understanding of the geography and toponomy of the Fiji Islands. First, the earliest visitors who compiled maps of parts of Fiji (Tasman in 1643, Cook in 1774, Bligh in 1789 and 1792, Wilson in 1797), had no contact with Fiji islanders, so all the toponyms listed on maps were of European origin. Second, there were published lists of Fiji toponyms (Anderson 1777, Fanning 1808) before any appeared on maps. Third, because Fiji was commonly approached from Tonga, most of the early toponyms, and many of those that appeared on maps, were exonyms in Tongan, some of which have persisted to this day in official use.
- Naming Places: Dutch Voyagers and Toponyms in the Fifth Part of the World, 1616-1722
Presented by Jan Tent
1:50pm AEST
Bookings: Register here
The European history of the Southern Ocean emphasises the explorations of the British (Cook, Bligh etc.) and the French (de Bougainville, La Pérouse and d’Entrecasteaux), but little attention is given to Dutch exploration. Still, they entered the Southern Pacific Ocean long before the British and French, and in many ways were trailblazers by shaping contemporary geographical knowledge for those who followed.
Session Three – Pacific Connections
- Pacific Virtual Museum Pilot Project
Presented by Tim Kong / Libby Cass
3:00pm AEST
Bookings: Register here
The Australian Government, National Library of Australia and Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, the National Library of New Zealand, are working with colleagues from across the Pacific to develop a shared online place that seeks to make visible and accessible the digitized records of Pacific cultural heritage, held around the world, so that people in and of Pacific can connect with their stories. Talofa! Ulufale mai! Kia orāna! Ni sa bula! Fakaalofa atu!
- Mapping Banaba-Ocean Island
Presented by Katerina Teaiwa
3:40pm AEST
Bookings: Register here
In this presentation, Associate Professor Katerina Teaiwa discusses her long-term work on the history of Banaba in Kiribati and the impact of phosphate mining on the island and culture of its people. Also known as Ocean Island, Banaba was mined from 1900 by companies co-owned by Australian, New Zealand and British shareholders before the three governments took over as co-owners in 1920 and continued mining till 1980. The Banabans were displaced to Rabi in Fiji as a result of mining operations and the impacts of World War II when it was targeted for Japanese occupation. Associate Professor Teaiwa’s work in the archives utilises maps, photography, and film to reflect on the changes to the landscape and to the culture and lives of the indigenous Banabans, including her own family.
- Mapping the Creative Revolution of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific + Conference Closing Remarks
Presented by Talei Luscia Mangioni
4:20pm AEST
Bookings: Register here
The historical latticework of nuclear colonialism perpetuated by American, British, and French powers over the past century demonstrates that the Greater Pacific has borne the brunt of the atomic age. Frequently evoked as the region’s first grassroots political movement, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP), owing to the foundational work of Against Testing on Muroroa (ATOM) in Fiji and the earlier Nuclear Free Pacific conferences, connected a radical constellation of activists standing for the people across church, university, womens and trade union groups.
According to Teresia Teaiwa, the ‘NFIP operate[d] on the premise that whatever happens in one part of the Pacific Ocean affects the whole ocean, the continentals living on the edge of it, and the Islanders living in the middle of it’ (1994, 101). To chart the expansion of this deeply relational and holistic worldview firmly grounded in a place-based regional identity, here Talei examines notions of Pacific kinship and futurities through historical ethnography and creative storytelling. Braiding archival research, talanoa semi-structured interviews and the arts, Talei will reveal how these ‘counter networks of empires’ have in some ways redefined a collective Pacific identity through a creative revolution that moved beyond the local (Banivanua-Mar and Rhook 2018).
