Abstract
Footsteps mark the land as people walk through the north eastern Queensland tropics. Here, in the mid-1800s, botanical explorers from the survey ship HMS Rattlesnake scour their newly encountered environment for species that will be sent as specimens to the growing collections in London. Local Aboriginal people walk with them, perhaps as guides, possibly interpreters. The narratives for this voyage refer to some individual Aboriginal people who accompanied the Europeans as cotaiga, companion – a word from one of the Cape York Peninsula languages. Meetings and encounters between these voyagers and the local people take place around conversations and communications concerning local environmental knowledge. In this paper I look more closely at these ‘knowledge encounters’, to consider the complex poetics of entanglements between local Indigenous knowledges and Western modes of knowledge and representations of the local environment. Interrogating the voyaging narratives for their depictions of these encounters-in-place, my paper will meditate upon philosophies of movement, of walking and being in place, and of place making in the tropics. The paper will also ask questions about the role of historical representations of entangled tropical knowledge formations in present day concerns about climate and environmental change.
Highlights
Footsteps mark the land as people walk through the north eastern Queensland tropics
We started heavily laden with provisions, water, arms and ammunition, besides boxes, botanical paper and boards, and other collecting gear; and taking it very the fatigue of walking in a sultry day, with the thermometer at 90 [degrees] in the shade, afforded a sample of what we had afterwards so often to experience during our rambles in tropical Australia (MacGillivray, 1852, I, p. 55)
MacGillivray is walking though the bush in tropical Australia, intent on adding to his collection
Summary
Attending to the textual depictions in voyaging narratives of the multiple ways in which British voyagers and local Aboriginal people collaborated in walking through the tropics, enables some insights to be gleaned into modalities around representative practices concerning environmental knowledge. Close scrutiny of MacGillivray’s Narrative and other voyaging texts, offers a glimpse of a historical environment and climate, that might be used as a basis for comparing changes over time – and potentially of use in evaluating and addressing current and future trends in climate change. This is especially critical for Cape York Peninsula, where fragile and eroding coastal environs threaten Indigenous peoples’ lives
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