The architecture of colonial jurisdiction: the annexation of Queensland's offshore islands

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This paper explores the relationship between architecture and colonial sovereignty. It considers the case of the British colony of Queensland’s offshore islands, which existed somewhere between competing colonial jurisdictions and international waters following Queensland’s separation from the colony of New South Wales in 1859. The discussion situates this nineteenth-century moment within a broader history of British colonial occupation and development along Australia’s eastern seaboard dating to the late eighteenth century. This paper argues that anomalies of colonial law did not constitute an impediment to colonial sovereignty — rather, they were its very modes of articulation. Whereas Queensland’s offshore islands had previously constituted a maritime frontier that was actively exploited by private enterprise, as a result of the Queensland Coast Islands Act 1879, the Great Barrier Reef and Torres Strait Islands were gradually transformed into a geography of regulation that assisted in governing the political community of the colony as a whole. This paper adopts an infrastructuralist analysis, reading the architecture of colonial development alongside other technologies and media as instruments in the implementation and clarification of colonial jurisdiction.