Mobility, body and space: emigrant voyages to Australia, 1830s–1880s

Abstract

This article uses nineteenth-century migration-themed texts and images as a starting point for investigating the production of various patterns of seaborne mobilities en route to colonial Australia from the 1830s to the 1880s. Within the mobility framework, the floating world of emigrant ships provides a major venue for truthful representations of passengers’ daily practices on board ship in general and maritime historiography in particular. It is argued that the interplay between body and space at different scales enables us to foreground the mobile, therapeutic, and affective dimensions of migration along the lines of class and gender. To this end, the article considers the production of seaborne mobilities within a larger context of maritime culture by engaging with four central thoughts: ship-based mobilities and mobile bodies, bodily motion and spatial mobilities, bodily health and therapeutic mobilities, as well as bodily senses and affective mobilities. These central thoughts, the article further asserts, direct us towards considering how the ship comes to be the prime site for evoking the imagery of mobile Britons, especially with regard to the various ways in which every-day mobilities are intrinsically embodied, practiced and performed through a body in transit.