Conference program
Wednesday 2 March
9.15 – 9.45 Registration – Pre conference coffee/tea
9.45 – 10.00 Acknowledgement of Country
Official Welcome: Dr John Vallance, NSW State Librarian
10.00 – 10.30 Robert Clancy
This presentation follows the cartographic record of discovery, pushing the limits of the Pacific ever south to the Antarctic coastline. Milestones include Spain’s foray into the southern Pacific with voyages by Mendana (1567; 1595) and de Queiros (1605); Dutch exploration south of Tierra del Feugo by Le Maire and Schouten (1616); and Cook’s circumnavigation confining any southern land to within the Antarctic Circle (1772-1775).
Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy has had a distinguished career as a clinical immunologist, however alongside his professional medical interests, he has long been involved in historical research, particularly in the areas of medical history and cartographic history. Professor Clancy has been awarded an AM for service to cartography as a collector of early maps of Australia, and to the field of immunology.
10.30 – 11.00 Stephen Martin
Martin uses several whaling maps and projects relating to whaling maps to discuss the motivations and purposes of mapmakers creating maps that show whaling grounds, migration routes and sites of whaling stations. Whether depicting territorial or commercial claims, historical or scientific sources, these maps reveal fascinating insights into the story of whales and whaling in the Pacific.
Stephen Martin is an historian and researcher with an interest in maps. He has published many books and articles, including The Whales Journey and A History of Antarctica, both of which examined the fascinating story of southern whaling. His two decades of working as a history lecturer and tour guide with cruise companies has taken him to whaling grounds and stations in New Zealand, Australia, Antarctica, Falkland Islands and South Georgia. Stephen is organising the State Library of NSW collection of papers, documents and maps of internationally renowned cetacean zoologist William Dawbin who worked on the science and history of whaling in the SW Pacific and Southern Oceans.
11.00 – 11.30 Morning Tea
11.30 – 12.00 Ian Hoskins
The small sea mount of Norfolk Island played a pivotal but largely unappreciated role in the early history of Britain’s occupation of Australia. It was not the catalyst for colonisation, as Geoffrey Blainey argued in 1966, but rather a place for the critical overflow of population and then provision as the original settlement at Sydney Cove teetered on the edge of starvation. In the process it accommodated a very different, even alternative, form of community. That difference emerged because of the stark environmental and political contrast with the mainland.
Norfolk Island was uninhabited when occupied in 1788. Its soil was rich where Sydney’s was poor. It was a natural paradise which supported the nascent settlement as if by ‘providence’. It was an island with no safe harbour. The wreck of HMS Sirius there in 1790 was momentous.
The State Library of NSW holds several maps and charts from this period, from Cook’s first map of the island in 1774 to surveys of land holdings. Some were official documents. Others, like the work of George Raper, were the result of forced exile following the wreck of the Sirius. This paper explores these documents in the context of Norfolk's remarkable early history.
Dr Ian Hoskins has worked as an academic and public historian in Sydney for 30 years, during which time he taught US history at Sydney University, worked as a curator at the Powerhouse Museum and, since 2003, has been the North Sydney Historian. His research focus throughout has been material culture and cultural landscapes.
He is interested too in the intersection between local and wider history. Water has emerged as a theme since starting work for local government in North Sydney, primarily because of the significance of the harbour front in that area. Sydney Harbour: A History and Coast: a history of the NSW edge both won major awards. Rivers: Lifeblood of Australia was commissioned by the National Library of Australia and published in 2020. He was the CH Currey Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales in 2019 focusing on their Pacific collections. Australia and the Pacific: a history was published in October 2021
12.00 – 12.30 Catherine Akeroyd
In 1522 the Victoria and the surviving crew of Ferdinand Magellan’s three-year circumnavigation of the world returned to Spain with news of the first-ever European crossing of the Pacific.
The reports of the voyage’s survivors had an immediate impact on cartography and the way the Pacific was represented on maps. Spanish mapmakers such as Diego Ribero showed the true scale of the vast ocean on his manuscript world map of 1529, while others such as the Norman mapmakers compressed its size. Others scattered it with real and imaginary islands, sea monsters, mermaids, sailing ships, navigational instruments and occasionally cartouches. While such imagery is sometimes considered to be merely decorative embellishment or a technique employed to identify oceanic space, this view disregards the possibility that the imagery and the cultural work it performs might be more substantial.
An examination of some of imagery in the Pacific on a selection of 16th and 17th century maps will be used to illustrate how scientific, cultural and political arguments were advanced to claim the Spice Islands, commemorate Magellan’s accomplishment, advertise the mapmaker’s technical skills, and proclaim that the way was open for commercial and colonial activities
Catherine Akeroyd is a professional art collection manager and conservator. In her role as the collection manager for a large private organisation in Sydney, she completed a two-year cartographic project, resulting in the development of a map exhibition with an accompanying website titled Shaping Australia. An important collection of original maps recording the European discovery of Australia’s coastline.
Catherine is presently completing a PhD under the auspices of the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her thesis focuses on a comparative study of southern continent imagery on world maps produced in the Low Countries, Italy and France between 1527 and 1619 and its role as a source of historical and cultural meaning to contemporary map viewers.
12.30 – 1.30 Lunch
1.30 – 2.00 Matthew Edney
Archetypes of the global imaginary, world maps enable readers to “see” the earth in a manner that cannot be achieved in reality. This paper contrasts two global imaginaries, and reinterprets the supposed Enlightenment reformation of mapping as entailing not the displacement of imagination by experience but a shift in cultural dominance from one imaginary to the other.
Most early modern world maps and globes positioned the earth within the cosmos, as part of a traditional system of cosmographical knowledge concerned with the geometrical interrelationships of the earth to the sun, moon, planets, and celestial firmament. Geographical practice relied on those interrelationships, from determining latitude and longitude (a celestial coordinate system transferred to the earth), to measuring the earth’s size, to understanding the distribution of flora and fauna.
Double-hemisphere world maps proliferated after 1600 in large part because their spandrels could be filled with cosmographical imagery, whether artistic or scientific. After 1700, mapping of strictly sub-lunar features by the nascent earth and social sciences—of magnetism, winds, oceans, mountains, demography, economics, etc.—directed attention to the “terraqueous” globe. This alternate global imaginary isolated the earth as a self-contained entity independent of the cosmos
Matthew H. Edney is Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, University of Southern Maine, and he also directs the History of Cartography Project, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
He studied geography and land surveying at University College London (BSc hons. 1983) before pursuing graduate studies in cartography and the history of cartography at UW (MS 1985, PhD 1990). He is broadly interested in the history and nature of maps and mapping practices, originally in British India (Mapping an Empire [1997]), and then in British North America (e.g., essays on John Smith’s 1616|7 map of New England, and John Mitchell’s map of 1755).
His most recent books are Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (Chicago, 2019) and Cartography in the European Enlightenment (copyright 2019) that he edited with Mary Sponberg Pedley. He is currently working on a historiography of map studies. He blogs at mappingasprocess.net, where one can find a full bibliography.
2.00 – 2.30 Dick Pflederer
For many, the key achievement of the three-year project of Ferdinand Magellan and his fleet is embodied in the fact of circumnavigation, even if only one of the five ships that departed in 1519 actually returned to Spain.
Truly, this amazing feat of leadership, seamanship and perseverance fully deserves its esteemed place on the list of maritime achievements in the field of European exploration. But in fact, circumnavigation was never an objective of the Magellan project. The primary goal of the voyage was to establish that the Moluccas were located within the Spanish hemisphere as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas, thus allowing Charles V to claim the vast and potentially very rich portion of the globe. Navigating the South Pacific while maintaining a detailed and accurate track of his fleet was the fundamental requirement.
By examining surviving navigational materials related to the question of the longitudinal dimension of the Pacific and the position of these islands, this paper aims to explain in layman’s terms the navigational methodology and conclusions of Magellan.
Richard Pflederer is the author of ten reference books, two Commentaries accompanying facsimile productions and numerous articles, focusing on portolan charts. He won the Caird Fellowship of the National Maritime Museum in 2005 and has conducted other long term research projects while resident at other libraries: British Library, Bodleian Library, Library of Congress and the Archivio di Stato (Florence). He serves as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of the Washington Map society, The Portolan.
He is a member of the Society for the History of Discoveries and the Steering Committee of the Phillip Lee Phillips Society at the Library of Congress. He has lectured on related subjects at venues around the world, including Chicago, Washington, Miami, Guatemala City, London, Vienna, Verona and Sydney. In 2009 he founded the Williamsburg Map Circle, a group of map enthusiasts whose aim is to promote the understanding of maps within the community. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, The Key Manager Program at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, the Executive Program of Columbia University. He now shares his time between Williamsburg, Virginia and Montepulciano, Tuscany.
2.30 – 3.00 Margaret Sankey
In early European exploration of the southern regions of the globe, the French, focussing on the Indian Ocean, were relatively late in coming to the Pacific.
In this paper Margaret explores how from the late seventeenth century, the French search for Terra Australis Incognita delayed French interest in the Pacific Ocean, and then conditioned the nature of the French scientific voyages of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Margaret Sankey is Professor Emerita in French Studies at the University of Sydney. Her interests include early French exploration of the Southern Hemisphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is coordinator of the ARC-funded Baudin Legacy project.
Margaret also works on early French notions of Terra Australis and is at present preparing a translation of the seventeenth century memoir by the Abbé Jean Paulmier, an important influence on early French voyages of exploration to the Southern hemisphere
Thursday 3 March
9.00 – 9.30Pre conference coffee/tea
9.30 – 10.00 Richard Pegg
Marco Polo’s (1254-1324) The Travels of Marco Polo was penned around 1298 by his prison cellmate in Genoa, Rustichello da Oisa (fl. Late 13th c). It represents the first descriptions of a European spending more than sixteen years seeing a range of countries and civilizations across Asia. The subsequent numerous editors and copyists, some 140 extent manuscripts thus far, have misspelt toponyms and modified texts in ways we can never clarify. Two hundred years later, in the sixteenth century when the Age of Discovery produced maps of the world, Polo’s toponyms and descriptions were an accepted source of reference for map makers
Richard A. Pegg is currently Director and Curator of Asian Art for the MacLean Collection, an Asian art museum and separate map library located north of Chicago Illinois
10.00 – 10.30 Katherine Parker
Perhaps the most ubiquitous and quotidian legacy of Magellan’s ground-breaking circumnavigation is the eponymous toponym used for the straits between Atlantic and Pacific. While he was the first known European to traverse them, Magellan was certainly not the last and these later navigators left their own marks on the understanding of these strategic waterways.
This paper will investigate the mapping and description of the straits by English/British voyages. The first, that of John Narbrough in 1669-1671, was the first Royal Naval expedition to the South Seas; he transited the straights east-to-west and west-to-east. His journal and maps influenced later expeditions and their willingness to enter the straits, including that of George Anson, who led a circumnavigation in 1740-1744. Anson avoided the straits but still offered opinions about the area that would have an enduring impact.
The paper will end with the large-scale exploratory expeditions of the 1760s, which solidified the Pacific as part of the British imperial sphere. However, that sphere did not necessarily include the straits, as they preferred to enter the Pacific via Cape Horn. This paper thus investigates how this decision was reached via the examination of manuscript, textual, and cartographic representations of Patagonian space.
Katherine Parker is an Intellectual and cultural historian of Pacific exploration and early modern print culture with an emphasis on Britain. Interested in history of the book, history of cartography, Pacific studies and history, British history, imperial history, and naval history, all within transnational frameworks.
10.30 – 11.00 Mirela Altić
In this paper, we analyse the Spanish contribution to the exploration of the South Pacific at the time of Captain James Cook. Our interest is focused on three expeditions. The expedition of Captain Don Felipe González de Ahedo arrived on Easter Island in 1770, two years before James Cook. González claimed the island in the name of the Spanish Crown and, with the help of his navigator Juan Hervé, conducted detailed mapping of the island. The said navigator would play a key role in the next two Spanish expeditions sent to the South Pacific by the Viceroy of Peru, Manuel de Amat y Junyent
Dr. Mirela Altić is a chief research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences and full professor in the Department of History, University of Zagreb. She specializes in social history of maps, cross-cultural knowledge exchange and early modern encounter. Recently she focuses on Jesuit cartography and missionary contribution to the history of mapping and exploration. Her book Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas is scheduled to be published by University of Chicago Press in 2022.
11.00 – 11.30 Morning Tea
11.30 – 12.00 Maggie Patton & Dana Kahabka
In 1642 Abel Tasman was commissioned by Anthony van Diemen, head of the Dutch East-India Company in Batavia, to explore the landmass south of the Dutch East Indies, investigate opportunities for trade and look for a possible route across the Pacific. This expedition was the earliest European exploration of the Pacific from the west.
During the first voyage 1642–43, the south coast of Tasmania, the west coast of New Zealand, and parts of Tonga and Fiji were charted. On the second voyage in 1644 Tasman charted the south-west coast of New Guinea and much of Australia’s northern coastline. The only 17th century map documenting these two voyages is the Bonaparte Tasman Map, acquired in 1891 by Prince Roland Bonaparte, the great-nephew of Napoleon I, and presented to the Library in 1933.
More than 12 months of conservation work went into preparing the Library’s Tasman Map for its first public outing in 10 years. Conservator Dana Kahabka consulted international experts and developed an eco-friendly solvent to remove varnish without damaging the map. The 380-hour operation used 6000 cotton swabs, 2400 pieces of abaca tissue and three litres of the solvent. It is the first time anything like this has been attempted by the Library’s conservation team. The work revealed previously obscured details and subtle markings on the manuscript map.
Maggie Patton is the Manager, Research & Discovery at the State Library of New South Wales. She is responsible for leading the curatorial team in the delivery of projects that develop, interpret, and promote discovery and engagement with the significant and unique State Library collections. Maggie has specialist expertise in rare books and maps.
Dana Kahabka is a paper conservator in the Collection Conservation Branch at the State Library of NSW. Dana holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in the Conservation of Cultural Materials from the University of Canberra and completed an internship at The Centre for Cultural Material Conservation, University of Melbourne, 1998.
Dana has worked in several Australian cultural institutions where she has maintained an active publication record including three in the area of maps conservation with the most recent submitted for publication this year, “Old materials, new ideas: the use of concentrated solutions of hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) to remove an aged glossy varnish on a 17th century Dutch map”.
12.00 – 12.30Lynette Russell & Leonie Stevens
This paper traces the multiple meanings of the Tasman Map, from a 17th century Imperialist celebration of the achievements of the Dutch East India Company, to object of desire for 19th century gentleman-anthropologists, to source of intrigue and brinksmanship by a 20th century public institution asserting cultural identity in an evolving nation.
Professor Lynette Russell AM is one of Australia's leading historians and an internationally recognised expert on Indigenous histories. She has published over twelve books on topics as diverse as museums and museum displays, Aboriginal faunal knowledge, colonial history, and the early Australian whaling industry. She has held fellowships at both Cambridge and Oxford.
Her research focus is on developing an anthropological approach to the story of the past, challenging not only what we know but how we know it. Her work is frequently collaborative and interdisciplinary. She is deputy director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Heritage, and leader of the ARC Laureate project Global Encounters and First Nations Peoples: 1000 years of Australian History.
Dr Leonie Stevens had a previous career as a writer, with six novels and a range of short fiction published. A settler-descendent of multiple generations, the Culture Wars of the early 2000s ignited a passion for the kinds of true stories not taught in school. She studied history and archaeology, and her PhD focused on the activism of Tasmanian First Nations Peoples during their exile on Flinders Island in the 1830s and 40s. leonie.stevens@monash.edu
12.30 – 1.30 Lunch
1.30 – 2.00 Erica Persak
The Kerry Stokes Collection has a strong commitment to the narrative of Australia’s foundation and subsequent development. Within the Collection the elements of fine art, history and natural science are not considered in isolation but merge together with early maps to present a complete and fascinating story of Western Australia and the broader history of the Australian and Antarctic continents. The cartographic items in the Collection range from globes, atlases, manuscript and published maps. The maps in the Kerry Stokes Collection chronicle the early discovery and exploration of Australia. The Collection documents European contact with Australia and specifically with Western Australia, and contains seminal maps that record Dutch, and 19th century French and English contact with the western edge of the continent
Erica Persak was the Assistant Director Collection Services, at the National Gallery of Australia from 1998–2007, where she is responsible for the management of the conservation, registration, imaging resources and the research library at the Gallery. She has an Arts Honours Graduate (History) from the Australian National University, Canberra) a Graduate Diploma of Librarianship, a Graduate Certificate in Management Studies from the University of Canberra and Post Graduate degree in Art History from the Australian National University.
In October 2007 she took up the position of Collections Manager for the Kerry Stokes Collection where her main focus is the map and antiquarian book collections. Erica has been involved in the cultural sector for over thirty years, working in the area of collections management. She has been Registrar at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Australia. erica.persak@acequity.com.au
2.00 – 2.30 Isabella Alexander and Mark Leeming
When Captain James Cook returned from his first Pacific voyage in 1771, the public clamoured to hear the stories of his explorations, and to see the curiosities brought back by Joseph Banks. The Admiralty, keen to protect its investment, wished to control the narrative with an official account.
Having little faith in Cook’s literary abilities, John Hawkesworth was engaged to produce it but, before he could do so, non-official accounts began to enter the market. A similar problem arose when Cook’s journals (but not Cook) returned from his Third Voyage. In both cases, the “official” publisher, and the Admiralty, sought to use the relatively new law of copyright to prevent the circulation of alternative accounts and to stamp out what they considered to be literary piracy.
This paper explores the manner in which the courts sought to tread a finer line between allowing the new knowledge generated by the voyages, and paid for out of the public purse, to be circulated and upholding the property rights of copyright owners.
Isabella Alexander PhD (Cantab) BA (Hons) LLB (Hons) (ANU) is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. She teaches and researches in intellectual property law and legal history.
She is the author of Copyright and the Public Interest in Nineteenth Century Britain (Hart Publishing, 2010). Her current research looks at the history of copyright and maps and is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. She is also lead CI on a second ARC Discovery Grant looking at the intersection between art, technology and law.
The Honourable Justice Mark Leeming was appointed a Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 2013. He has degrees in Arts and Law, and a PhD in Pure Mathematics.
Before joining the Supreme Court, he practised at the New South Wales Bar for 18 years, including as senior counsel from 2006. He has taught, part-time, at the University of Sydney for 26 years, where he is the Challis Lecturer in Equity.
His most recent books are Authority to Decide - The Law of Jurisdiction in Australia (2nd ed 2020), and The Statutory Foundations of Negligence (2019); he is also a co-author of standard Australian works on the law of equity and trusts. He has a longstanding interest in history and legal history, including his works "Lawyers' uses of history", Australian Bar Review, p.199-226, 49, 2020 and, relevantly to this conference, "Hawkersworth's Voyages: The First 'Australian' Copyright Litigation", Australian Journal of Legal History, Vol. 9, No. 2, p. 159, 2005.
2.30 – 3.30 Collecting and Curating
Featuring map curator-librarians from institutions on both sides of the Tasman. This session will provide an opportunity for a discussion on the future of map collections and map expertise in libraries, with an opportunity to ask questions from the floor. Find out what mapping is being collected, and how it will be made accessible in an increasingly digital landscape.
The Curators: Igor Drecki @National Library of NZ; Sarah Ryan @State Library Victoria; Maggie Patton @State Library NSW; and Dr Martin Woods formerly @National Library of Australia.
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