Sailing to Australia in the late 18th and early 19th century was a disturbing and sometimes unsettling experience for most travellers. In some cases they recorded they experiences and thoughts in diaries and journals which will be the objects of our seminary. What kind of stories do these journals tell, how did they help to make sense of the passage from the ‚centre of civilization‘ to an only recently discovered territory at the other end of world? Did the travellers need to reinvent themselves and were the journals and the writing process part of this transformation? Did migrants to early Australia need some sort of self-fashioning? We will work with printed and manuscript material from the National Maritime Museum/London and the Immigration Museum/Melbourne.
Tamson Pietsch, Bodies at sea: travelling to Australia in the age of sail, in: Journal of Global History 11 (2016), 209-228.
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