This chapter analyses the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science (1841–1849), the first Australian scientific periodical. Although Lieutenant-Governor John Franklin was the journal’s patron, Jane Franklin used the Tasmanian Journal to pursue her interests in botanical science, domestic experiments with Indigenous children and educational reform. The Tasmanian Journal was a material record of the Franklins’ efforts to use science and education to change colonial culture. It reveals the scientific endeavours undertaken by local collectors and visiting scientists, and provides an insight into the scissors-and-paste construction of periodical publications. Notable contributors included the scientist and explorer Paul Strzelecki, the New Zealand missionary botanist William Colenso, the ornithologist John Gould and Dr Edmund Hobson who studied the platypus and, with his wife Margaret, identified marsupial megafauna fossils. Local collectors used science to further their social status, and local elites used scientific print culture to further their political and intellectual interests. Colonial and imperial politics intersected with scientific print culture, in which race, gender and knowledge played complicated roles. Alongside the scientific journal, colonial newspapers and Indigenous letter writers and petitioners from Flinders Island used Tasmania’s distinctive print culture to raise pressing questions about colonial governance, Indigenous welfare and the settler colonial public sphere.

The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.

The introduction showcases colonial officials, missionaries and natural history collectors who, alongside Indigenous interlocutors and metropolitan advocates, sought to collect and use Antipodean information. Three key fields of knowledge emerged from the Australian colonies, and they reveal the relationship between knowledge formation and print culture. Part 1, Imagining Settler Humanitarianism, examines key debates about convictism, race and morality. Part 2, Regulating Settler Society, focuses on convictism and the forms of knowledge about reforming the self and regulating society that emerged from penal experiments. Part 3, Inventing Settler Science, shows how the scientific novelty of the Australian colonies attracted attention from the Endeavour voyage onwards, and inaugurated networks of correspondence, collection and publication that struggled to account for the Indigenous knowledge and participation that characterised the colonies.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century textual records about the Australian colonies, from the early British press reports of the establishment of the penal colony at Port Jackson to the accounts of religious personnel such as the first colonial chaplain Richard Johnson. It reveals how convicts and Indigenous people were represented in texts designed for metropolitan audiences. The isolated voices of evangelical reformers provided rich accounts of the problems and failures of the penal colony. They questioned the morality of the military governance of the penal colony and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Evangelical accounts from New South Wales became part of a global knowledge economy and a thriving print culture; they provided evidence that thickened, and at times contradicted, official accounts that circulated in the British media.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter analyses colonial botanical collection to reveal the role of non-elite collectors and Indigenous interlocutors in providing knowledge that underpinned British science. The Endeavour brought the new taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to the Southern Hemisphere. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson recorded findings and took over 30,000 plants back to London, many of them viewed for the first time by Europeans swept up in the rage for botany. Knowledge production after James Cook’s first voyage was exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences. New kinds of scientific writing also emerged from the controversial publication of Parkinson’s journal, and scientific bodies used innovative magazines to broaden access to and public support of science in the service of empire. Reliable collectors in the settler colonies worked with Indigenous collaborators to identify novel plant and animal materials, and send them to Britain. These included George Caley who worked with the Eora youth Daniel Moowaatin. The history of colonial science was informed by diverse participants, interests and motivations, and it changed how field work was conceived and scientific authority was established.

This chapter examines linguistic studies to explore colonial knowledge production as a shared, cross-cultural process between Indigenous people and European interlocutors. Colonial officials learnt languages from trusted individuals, such as the surveyor and astronomer William Dawes and the Indigenous woman Patyegarang in the 1790s. Nineteenth-century linguistic collection was undertaken by amateur settlers with a variety of intentions. Collected on the frontier, and often in the midst of massacre and violent dispossession, wordlists, songs and grammars contain evidence of traditional Indigenous knowledge as it was translated and transcribed into new forms. The Revd Lancelot Threlkeld’s Awabakal language collaborations with Biraban from the 1820s were circulated to imperial exhibitions and Sir George Grey’s library in Cape Town. Indigenous languages enabled Eliza Hamilton Dunlop to write poetry on Indigenous themes in New South Wales in the 1840s that publicised settler violence and massacres. Harriott Barlow’s language records of southwest Queensland were published by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain in 1873. Distributed, published and consumed far from their frontier sites of collection, linguistic studies from the Australian colonies were influential in major world theories of language, race and culture.