Mellon Sawyer Seminar

The Antipodean Laboratory

Humanity, Sovereignty and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009

Generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Sydney

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The Seminar

The University of Sydney is the proud host of the first Mellon Sawyer Seminar to be held in Australia. The seminar will run roughly from March 2009 to August 2010, consisting of eight special seminar sessions and one international conference. Its theme is "The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009."

The Sydney Sawyer Seminar explores the history of how the Antipodes - and especially the Indo-Pacific lands and oceans - has constituted a laboratory for the Atlantic world over a broad intellectual, geographical and temporal scale. Our seminar covers three centuries from 1700 to 2009, and focuses on Atlantic-derived conceptions and experiences within the Antipodes that bear especially on the themes of humanity and cultures, of sovereignty and imperialism, and of environment and ecology. Our prime method is comparative: the intellectual and social colonization of the Antipodes was never a simple one-way process of control and exploitation. Ideas also flowed in reverse, moving from periphery to metropole, from Indo-Pacific fields to Atlantic worlds, and with consequences that could be conservative, subversive or much else. In short, we examine the reciprocal exchange of selected discourses and practices between these two great geo-political spheres from the early modern period to the present. At the same time we investigate whether, and to what extent, local concerns and ideas have been able to achieve autonomy from the long reach of Atlantic influence.

Chief Themes

Many of the concerns of our proposed Sawyer seminar remain unfinished business: rapid globalization has brought the fates of the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific peoples into unprecedented connection. The tradition of mounting scientific expeditions of inquiry into the great southern ocean laboratory associated with the ages of Cook and Darwin has continued into our own era. We see their counterparts in Australian geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor's 1910s investigations of climate and evolution in Antarctica; in the American-Australian Arnhem Land Scientific Expedition of 1948; in post-World War II American biological, medical and anthropological work in the Philippines; and in American-born Daniel Carleton Gajdusek's Nobel-prize-winning medical inquiries of the 1960s into Kuru brain disease among the Fore people of New Guinea. All entailed discoveries engendered within the Indo-Pacific field that made their way back influentially to the Atlantic world.

Similarly, many key, supposedly Atlantic-determined, developments of modern times have been played out in the Antipodes in peculiar and unexpected ways. The processes of migration and decolonisation in the Indo-Pacific, for instance - especially in hectic entrepots like Hawai'i or between certain nations of Africa and Australasia - entail unique twists to the general tale. In the same manner, experiences of forging state stability, national identity, and indigenous and sexual justice have also had particular histories in southern lands.

Our Sawyer seminar will explore all these topics as they arise in investigations centred around three main thematic foci: the problem of humanity as a divisible, philosophical, and increasingly ecological concept in modern history; the problem of sovereignty in an age of empire and mass movement; and the problem of environment in a time of apparent planetary collapse.

Seminar Organisation

The Seminar is convened in the first instance by a committee of 12 scholars from the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. The committee is chaired by Prof. Iain McCalman AO.

Seminar sessions are convened by one or two members of the committee. They are intended to bring together scholars from the Australasian region to forge a local community with interests in the field. The major international conference of the seminar, to be held in mid-2010, will be convened by the Chair and committee together. It is intended to connect our local community to international scholars working in the field. Most sessions and the conference are expected to be held in venues of the University of Sydney.

The seminar also employs a one-year postdoctoral fellow and a part-time administrative assistant