March 13, 2024 • 49 mins
Professor Alison Bashford and Dr Jarrod Hore,
Chair: Dr Frances Flanagan
Alison Bashford and Jarrod Hore reflect on New Earth Histories and how the history of geosciences and different world cosmologies can be brought together.
History Now seminars explore current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. It is a long-running series of public talks and discussions, bringing new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice.
In 2024, the series, curated and directed by Dr Jesse Adams Stein, is a partnership event between the History Council of NSW, the Australian Centre for Public History (UTS) and the State Library of NSW.
The History Council of NSW is supported by the NSW Government via a grant from Create NSW.
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Episode Transcript
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Dr Jesse Adams Stein (00:05):
My name is Jessie Adams Stein and I'm here
in my capacity as the ProgramDirector for History Now 2024,
and I represent both the HistoryCouncil of New South Wales and
the Australian Centre for PublicHistory at UTS.
Thank you so much for comingalong to the first session of
History Now 2024, new EarthHistories.
Before we begin, I'd like tostart by acknowledging the land
(00:28):
upon which we meet here.
At the top of the hill onGadigal Country, looking out to
Warren Sydney Cove andWogan-Migulia Farm Cove, we are,
of course, not far from one ofthe key sites of colonial
invasion.
I'd like to acknowledge theGadigal as the traditional
custodians of the land uponwhich we are standing and pay my
(00:50):
respects to elders past andpresent, and acknowledge that we
are on stolen land.
Today we will be hearing a lotabout time and about how we come
to know the earth, and I thinkit's important that we start by
acknowledging the incrediblevalue of indigenous knowledge
about the past and about country, and I'm sure we'll hear more
about that soon.
(01:10):
I just wanted to say a littlebit about what History Now is as
a program.
So it's actually a long runningtalk series.
It's been going for quite awhile in many different
iterations and it's gone throughmany different hands as well,
so it gets passed long.
Often it's in person, of course, during the COVID years it's
been online, and so 2024 HistoryNow is being coordinated by me
(01:34):
in my multiple hats capacity,both at the History Council of
New South Wales and as a memberof the Australian Centre for
Public History at UTS, and wealso have venue support, of
course, from the State Libraryof New South Wales, who have
been very accommodating.
I'd like to introduce you tothe chair of tonight's event,
(02:03):
the fantastic Dr FrancisFlanagan.
Francis is one of those publicintellectuals whose expertise
sort of overflows beyondconventional boundaries, so it
makes it hard to describe, butshe's a lecturer at UTS Law,
she's an environmental labourexpert, industrial relations
expert and an historian as well.
So thank you, francis, foragreeing to chair today's event,
(02:24):
and Francis will introduce thespeakers.
Thanks.
Dr Frances Flanagan (02:32):
Thank you so much, jessie.
Well, it is my immense pleasureto chair tonight's discussion
of New Earth, histories,geocosmologies and the making of
the modern world.
Now there's a physicalmanifestation of this book that
I think you can look at on thetable there.
This is a book that offers aprofound rethinking of the
question of how we come to knowthe earth.
(02:55):
The questions that it asks areof a scope and a scale that are
simply dazzling.
It asks how different ideasabout the sacred, the animate
and the earthly changed themodern environmental sciences,
how different world traditionsunderstood human and geological
origins, how the inclusion ofmultiple cosmologies changed the
(03:17):
meaning of the Anthropocene andthe global climate crisis.
And the context for answeringthese questions are also
enormous, encompassing Chinese,pacific, islamic, south and
Southeast Asian conceptions ofthe earth's origin and its make
up.
It uses diverse methods, too,from cultural history to
ethnography, geography andindigenous studies.
(03:37):
This is a deeply imaginative,extremely complex and also
unsettling book.
Nothing and no one iscomfortably either local or
cosmopolitan, or secular orsacred.
In this text, we're constantlyreminded that earth knowledge is
always and has always emergedfrom very historically specific
(03:58):
situations, so it will be a bookof interest to all of you,
especially if you are like meand you've become convinced of
the urgency of keeping it in theground, as the saying goes,
when it comes to fossil fuels,this book reminds us that our
conception of what the ground isand what it is, and what our
agency is in relation to it, isdeeply historically contingent.
(04:20):
Okay, so let me now introduceour speakers.
To begin with, professor AlisonBashford, science Professor in
History and Director of theLaureate Centre for Earth and
Population at UNSW.
She is the editor, along withEmily Kern and Adam Bobet, of
New Earth Histories, and herwork connects the history of
science, global history andenvironmental history into new
(04:42):
assessments of the modern worldfrom the 18th to the 20th
century.
She is the author of many, manypublications, which I will not
list, but most recently theprize-winning and intimate
history of evolution the storyof the Huxley family.
Now second speaker is Dr JaredHall, an environmental historian
(05:02):
of settler colonial landscapes,nature writing and geology.
He is currently a postdoctoralfellow at the New Earth
Histories Research Program atUNSW and his work on earthquake
geology, wilderness photography,early environmentalism and
logistics of the natural historytrade has been widely published
.
He's also the author of theaward-winning book Visions of
Nature how Landscape PhotographyShaped Settler Colonialism, a
(05:26):
physical copy of which is alsoavailable on the table to have a
look at too.
So our speakers will speak for20 minutes and then we will have
some questions.
20 minutes each, I should say.
Thank you very much.
Prof Alison Bashford (05:53):
Thank you, jesse.
I wish you had written theintroduction to the book.
Actually there is a really niceand generous summary.
This microphone is okay, yep,great.
So thank you.
Thank you History Council andUTS and the State Library, and
thank you for the invitation totalk about New Earth Histories,
(06:16):
which is has this manifestationas a book which came out late
last year, which was a pleasureto edit with Emily Kern and Adam
Abett, who were then postdocs,who now have scattered to other
parts of the, to othercontinents and it, but it
continues.
New Earth Histories continuesas a research program that Jared
(06:38):
Hoare and I run together atUniversity of New South Wales
and really, as you were talking,jesse, I was trying to think
back through how I became ahistorian of Geosciences,
because my own background as ahistorian of science generally
for many, many years and formany projects, including the
(06:59):
Huxley book and Interest andInterment History of Evolution,
was much more about the bioworld, biological history of
biological sciences, historiesof eugenics.
I've done history ofreproduction, history of history
of biological sciences, historyof evolutionary sciences, which
is what the Huxley book reallyis about, and so really for two
(07:21):
decades now that that world ofbiological sciences and its past
has been my focus and at somepoint I don't really I'm
scratching my head trying tothink what made me cross over to
that other scientific side tostart thinking about geological
sciences and start to thinkabout the people in the past for
whom inorganic rocks were corebusiness.
(07:45):
And I think I got thereprobably as a world historian.
So you know many of you herewill understand that in the last
10 years or more, the scalethat modern historians have
worked on has become larger andlarger and there's been a what's
a while ago, people to call theplanet return in lots of
(08:08):
humanities scholarship, but alsoin in for historians, where we
started to have to think aboutthe whole globe, how we think
about that historically, how wethink about the planet
historically.
And it still stuns me that I Ican still remember historians
starting to talk about theplanet as something, as a whole
(08:31):
thing that we can historicize ashistorians, not as scientists
for the first time, and itseemed revolutionary, but now
it's an ordinary, if notessential thing to discuss.
So it's maybe via that routethat I started to think about
earth sciences.
But then the thing that caughtme and what is really still at
(08:52):
the core of this project for me,conceptually and historically,
is how, for all of ourcolleagues and maybe some of you
here who work with apparentlyinorganic rocks, strata,
minerals in the earth, when welook back historically not very
(09:13):
long ago, not very manygenerations ago, geologists were
the precisely the scholars whowere most likely to be
theologians, who were mostlikely to think about the age of
the earth and how that is to bealigned with biblical
scholarship.
They were the people.
Geologists were more likelythan the life scientists or even
(09:34):
the evolutionary theorists, orpossibly them, to be thinking
about how rocks told the time ofthe earth and how that didn't,
didn't align with Genesis, howthe Christian story needed to be
rethought by evidence thatrocks themselves, so to say, and
(09:58):
stratigraphies of the earthwere revealing.
And so I became reallyfascinated with how this whole
linking as we've got in oursubtitle here of geology on the
one hand and cosmology on theother, the beginning of the
earth, the many people still now, but obviously for much of
human existence, a kind of adivine birth, so to say, of the
(10:21):
earth, sat right up close to andwith geology, in the sense that
I think it's clarified most inthe number of leading geologists
in the 18th and 19th century,who were themselves theologists
as well, and these two thingsjust sat really closely.
(10:42):
And so I think that's for me.
There's something even in thevery limited and very particular
history of European sciencegeology and cosmology.
You don't have to scratch veryfar back in time or below the
surface to find these two thingstwinned.
And it was always interestingto me that you know it was
(11:05):
historically the scientists whowere most interested in the
apparently inanimate, for whombig scriptural, biblical
cosmological stories were alsocore business.
And so for me I think that mademe wonder, as all historians of
(11:26):
science do now, how particularthat story is, how European or
North American or even perhapsNorthern Hemispheric that story
is, and how stratigraphies ofthe earth or the lithosphere of
the earth, or rocks of the earth, particular minerals,
particular gemstones, even tobring the scale right down, also
(11:49):
had cosmologies attached tothem.
And so the purpose of theongoing program in this
particular book was really tostart looking in other
directions, in other kinds oftraditions for geological and
cosmological stories.
And I learned things, like youknow, on the larger scale.
(12:12):
I learned through this projectthat, although as someone who
comes out of a tradition of thehistory of classic European
geological sciences in thisinstance, where we know that
Western science has the capacityto imagine itself as the
(12:34):
universal story, and that's, youknow, a very familiar claim to
make and a very familiar claimto criticize, now that it
imagines itself as universal andthe only truth.
What I learned in this projectwas the number of other
locations and places and ways ofknowing the earth that also
claimed a kind of universalstatus, and so there's a really
(12:58):
fantastic.
The first chapter in the bookis by Sumathi Ramaswamy, who's a
really great historian of howthe earth came to be imagined as
a globe shape and what othertraditions of universalizing
understanding of the earth weredisplaced in order for that to
become normal.
I learned from the chapter thatCatherine Dit, who's a
(13:21):
historian of Neu-en, really 18thcentury Vietnam.
I learned from her thesecompletely different ways in
which the earth, let's say theglobe, was understood to belong
to a universe.
In that 18th century Vietnamesetradition it was the analogy of
(13:42):
an egg shell, and so there's asoft earth at the center and
nine layers, if I remembercorrectly.
Some of you here may know ninelayers of increasingly hard
matter until you get to the eggshell outside of the universe.
That's a universalizing idea,and so really the book was
partly about what othertraditions, what other ways in
(14:05):
which, what other ways has theglobe, earth and a kind of a
universe been imagined?
So that's the large bookproject.
But let me talk to you for alittle bit about a spin-off
project that may give youanother sense.
(14:25):
It's an example really of howwe might think about classic
geological histories, but howthey have cosmological or
spiritual, one might say, orcertainly cultural histories
behind and around them that areexciting to lay on top of the
(14:46):
scientific histories.
So one other project, and thisis an example of how, once I've
started to think, what are thenew ways in which we can think
of, let's say, the history ofgeology, all kinds of things
open up.
And one of the things that'sopened up for me and a team and
Jared is also involved in thisproject is a history of Gondwana
(15:08):
, and you will all know Gondwanaland as the once linked,
continentally linked SouthernHemisphere that broke up,
started to break up about 200million years ago to form, as
you see there, broadly SouthAmerica, africa, india or South
Asia, antarctica and Australia,and parts of which of course
(15:33):
geologists here will know, arestill on the sea floor and I
started to think about what arethe other?
What is the geological history,what are the history of ideas
that gave rise to this thesisabout Gondwana land, which
(15:54):
prefaced the idea of wanderingcontinents, and then, very,
quite late in the, quiterecently, the idea of plate
tectonics, and I think Jared maytalk more about this.
Behind all that was quiterecent I mean 1870s, 1880s
(16:14):
speculation initially aboutthese continents in Southern
Hemisphere of the Earth beingconnected, and that speculation
had a tiny start.
This is little glossopterousfossil leaf, quite common
actually, so my colleagues herein the Israeli Museum tell me
still being unearthed quiteconstantly.
(16:36):
And Scottish geologists inIndia that will become important
started to pick up this fossilleaf.
They knew from its pattern thatit was already called a
glossopterous fossil and theywould say to one another to
condense this story oh, I'veseen this somewhere else and
(16:58):
they're together in centralIndia.
I've seen this somewhere else,I've seen this in New South
Wales, I've seen this inSouthern Africa.
And it's from this evidence,this fossil evidence that was
scattered across they knew quitequickly was scattered across
various continents that thethesis of a linked Gondwana land
(17:18):
emerged.
And then, as geologicalscientists went to other, to
other continents.
The glossopterous fossil leafcontinued to reveal linked
continents.
So in a way there is a reallyfascinating, just plain history
(17:39):
of geology about Gondwana landhow the idea emerged, who
thought of it, where theythought of it and how it led
eventually I'm very lateactually to plate tectonics,
that we now understand the wholeearth to be formed around.
One of the reasons why to kindof put the new on that old Earth
(18:00):
history, one of the reasons whythis took my fancy as a
historian, was that, aseverybody in this room I'm sure
understands, gondwana land andGondwana has a very particular
Australian resonance.
It is the case, I think you'dagree, that most people on the
street would have some sensethat Gondwana land was an
(18:22):
ancient continent, thatAustralian was part of it.
They may not layer beyond thatMany people would, but it's a
very familiar Australian ideaand when I started speaking to
my colleague historians in othercontinents, they were puzzled
that it has a particularAustralian purchase and that
(18:43):
made me think why is that thecase?
But just to demonstrate, it'san Australian purchase.
So why would this huge supermega-continent that once was the
entire southern part of theEarth become so especially
resonant to us here in thiscontinent, but just to
demonstrate its resonance thereis at the moment when you look
(19:04):
up.
Why would you?
Let me just tell you ABN, whichI do probably once a week,
because I'm obsessed with theuse of Gondwana as a term.
There are hundreds and hundredsof companies in Australia that
use the word Gondwana in theirtitle, and so it's got a.
If it could have beencopyrighted and patented, it
would have been, and they rangefrom everything to this kind of
(19:31):
indigenous connection.
Gondwana Dreaming Tours thechoirs, of course, is probably
one of the most well-known useof the term.
There is not one, but quite alot of indigenous art galleries
that are called Gondwana ArtGalleries.
There are also, at the otherend of the ABN list, a resource
(19:55):
extraction, mineral extractioncompanies called Gondwana
Resources.
That's just one example.
Or the Gondwana Coal Company.
It goes on and on and on.
There's Gondwana BotanicalGardens, there's Gondwana Day
Spars, there's Gondwana the folkgroup from the 80s.
Some of you may remember.
Maybe they still exist, I don'tknow, I probably should.
(20:17):
So I became really interested inwhat's the cultural history
that made Gondwana so particularto Australia, and in research
that we've done, it is clearthat in fact, most Australians
will understand Gondwana ashaving some special purchase to
hear.
But not only that.
They will say it's.
(20:38):
They will say something like oh, it's an indigenous word, I'm
not quite sure where, fromacross the continent, but it's
an indigenous word.
And if you all think that too,right now you are in the
majority.
Most people have thatunderstanding of Gondwana.
However, the term Gondwana landdoesn't come from here at all.
(21:00):
It comes from Gondwana, whichis a central province, was a
central province formerly knownin Mughal India and in early
British India, and Gondwana isin the across the centre of
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India.
It's where the Scottishgeologists were.
They found this fossil leaf.
They were in a place calledGondwana.
They called it Gondwana land.
So this thing that Australianshave so embraced and are
ironically nationalised in facthas an Indian origin.
But not only that, of course.
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There is no state in India anylonger called Gondwana, but
there are Gond people registeredin Indian terms as a tribal
group, and Gond peopleunderstand their homeland as
Gondwana.
They've been generally forcedoff their homeland.
(22:04):
There's a big resource.
This is where these earthhistories start to fold into one
another.
There's a big resource historyhere first clearing for trees.
Then guess what?
That fossil leaf turned intoCoal, fossil fuses, a lot of
mining, so there's a lot ofdisplaced Gond people and
essentially, in our terms, aland reclaiming politics.
(22:27):
And here's an amazing humans ofGondwana, facebook.
Not only that, and this is wherethe project, this is where I
think Gondwana is a nice secondproject for me anyway, because
the standard old earth history,the history of geology, doesn't
catch any of this and it doesn'tcatch what Gondwana land now
(22:49):
means or came to mean for theGond people.
So for me, the kind of mostexciting thing about thinking
about something like an ancientmega-continent in its modern
iterations and as a cosmology,we can see in these posters.
These are posters from the1970s, jared, would that be?
(23:12):
That's what I think, the 1970sgond political posters arguing
for the restatement of a statecalled Gondwana, which is their
home territory.
So it's a land reclaimingpolitics and there are several
gond politicians in the Indianparliament.
(23:33):
But for me and for us today,what I hope is interesting is
the mobilization by gond peoplethemselves of this phenomenon.
Gondwana land, the southernhemisphere of the earth, and you
can see it depicted here,obviously, but also, really
interestingly, here, whereLaRaysia, the northern
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hemisphere, is distinct fromGondwana land and this project,
mark II project in New Earthhistories.
We have anthropologists andhistorians and geophysicists as
well, all involved.
And one of our colleagues,who's the anthropologist, does a
lot of work with gond peopleand she told us at a meeting all
(24:17):
up to a year ago now.
She presented work where shesaid that gond people themselves
understand themselves as theoriginal people of Gondwana land
.
And so one of our colleaguessaid oh, so gond people are like
the first nations of Gondwanaland.
And so for me there was such afascinating folding of this 200
(24:43):
million year ago history withnot just 1880s Scottish
geologists, which is interestingenough in itself, but classic
geological sciences, butactually this cosmology for gond
people in India, after whomGondwana land is named, who have
, let's say, appropriated, takenon the idea of a southern
(25:07):
hemisphere continent andimagined themselves as the
original people of that.
And I did say to my Uriyaanthropologist colleague hang on
, are you saying to me that thatmeans gond people understand
themselves as original peoplevis-a-vis other indigenous
people across the southernhemisphere?
(25:28):
And she said yes, that is thecase.
So there's all these reallyinteresting origin stories that
are often deep or not even thatdeep, in fact not even deep at
all inside histories of geology,and that's the kind of way in
which I hope New Earth historiescan take a well-known story,
(25:50):
actually of something likeGondwana land, a phenomenon
that's obviously well-known,deeply researched, and think
through its other meanings.
It has a completely differentpolitics, but also cosmology, to
the gond people.
And last story, one of myfavorite.
Oh, before I get to my favoritestory, should I stop?
(26:15):
Ok, two minutes is easy.
So before we think, oh, it'sthe gond people who have a
particular cosmologicalrelationship to this thing
called gondwana land, let'sthink again.
Here we have Ernst Heckel, thekey German Darwinist in the late
(26:39):
19th century.
So you don't get anybody morecard-carrying as a scientist in
the 19th century and he'sstarting to think, as they all
did what is the dispersal ofhumankind and where did Ernst
Heckel put the origin ofhumanity?
(27:01):
Right here in the bottom,underneath South Asia, in the
Indian Ocean, and in fact hecalls it Lemuria.
And Lemuria is actually amythic, sunken continent, mythic
, it's like Atlantis.
(27:22):
But I became really it's notjust so to say the gond people
who are imagining these things.
I don't know this, but I suspectthat those political posters
are partly derived from theseideas absolutely at the core of
(27:43):
Western science, at the core ofDarwinism in the 19th century
that also understand this as akind of a human origin point.
And so, on the one hand, thisis where I get once.
This is the kind of opening Isuppose is one way of putting it
(28:03):
as someone who's trained inclassic history of sciences,
which is what did scientiststhink in the past?
But once I've started to thinkabout what are new Earth
histories, what are new ways ofthinking, that in fact the
folding and refolding of allthese much larger and bigger
(28:25):
stories, especially in Earthsciences, come together, and
it's the Gondwana land projectat the moment.
That is case number one, Isuppose, for a large project
folding out of the New Earthhistories project.
30 seconds, for my favorite partof this story, which we're
(28:47):
still researching, is that notonly did there's another Lemuria
story to tell, not only didErnst Heckel, darwinist in
Germany, imagine an origin forhumans which in fact on the sea
calls paradise interestingly,that's the point as well in the
Indian Ocean but our colleaguealso tells us that in the
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mountains of former Gondwanathere are re-workings of
pilgrimagees that completelytake the Gondwana land story to
heart and have now manifestedsince the 1970s, 80s and 90s as
(29:32):
pilgrimages of thousands andthousands of people and she
showed us wonderful slides ofthis up through the mountains in
Gondwana, including to theplace where the Glasopteris
fossil leaf was first discoveredby the Scottish geologists.
And so there's a sacralizing ofthat geological story of
(29:55):
Scottish geologists picking upthe fossil leaf and starting to
piece Gondwana land together hasbeen folded into this curious,
wonderful sacralizing of thatparticular history.
So I think I should leave itthere, but I hope that gives you
something of a taste of whatour ambitions are to rethink
(30:20):
really wonderful old-earthhistories into new-earth
histories.
Thank you, thank you.
Dr Jarrod Hore (30:48):
Hello everyone and thank you for coming along
tonight to hear more about NewEarth Histories.
The next 20 minutes I'mplanning to give you a brief
insight at building offAllyson's presentation, a brief
insight into the book I'mcurrently working on,
tentatively titled Earth Sciencefrom the Geological South
surveying a revolution inplanetary history.
(31:10):
So thank you for being the testaudience for this.
So in this book I'm developingan account of one of the major
shifts that defined 20th centuryEarth science by focusing on a
series of specific materials andsites outside of the highly
storied geologies of the UnitedKingdom and North America.
(31:30):
Placing things like coal fromWest Bengal, which we just heard
a little bit about, or from theHunter Valley, or diamonds from
the Kimberley or from Brazil,or oil from the Somali Peninsula
, at the centre of this history,I think can help us explain how
geologists went fromunderstanding the Earth as
relatively stable, unchangingunit in the 1830s to accepting
(31:54):
it in the 1960s that the Earthwas so dynamic that the very
continental shapes that defineour world are contingent and
temporary, albeit in deepplanetary history.
So more on this soon, but firstI wanted to reflect a little on
the fact that this work hasbeen totally conceived of and
partially written at this stageanyway, within the frames of
(32:15):
reference provided by New EarthHistories, and it forms a part
of, and has developed with thesupport of, an Australian
Research Council Discovery Grantcalled Empty Podenean Geology,
of which Allison and AlessandroAntonello from Flinders
University are the chiefinvestigators.
So these two things togetherNew Earth Histories and what we
call the Gondwan Land Project,have defined the outlines of
(32:38):
this project, and at the core ofit all is a provocation to
approach the history ofgeoscience, as we've heard, as a
product of a whole range ofdifferent ways of thinking about
the Earth.
In the New Earth Histories book, allison, emily and Adam make
the important argument that thegeological and environmental
sciences emerge fromcosmopolitan exchanges and
(32:58):
colonial encounters, and thiscreated new ways of knowing the
Earth and its history whichcarry the signatures,
importantly, of diverse origins.
What a powerful conceptualapparatus, I figure.
So applied to the history ofwhat is perhaps one of the
master sciences of the 20thcentury plate tectonics.
(33:18):
Simply put, plate tectonics isthe label for a theory that
describes the geography of theEarth, how the geography of the
Earth is defined by the long runconsequences of large slabs of
crust being pushed over themantle by Mino-Ocean ridges when
new crust is generated.
After its acceptance in the1960s, it elegantly solved a
(33:40):
whole range of geologicalmysteries that have persisted
within older models of the Earth, which emphasise the fixity of
continents and oceans.
Now, within the history andphilosophy of science, plate
tectonics is one of the mostfrequently cited instances of
Thomas Kuhn's model of ascientific revolution.
Trained geologist and historianof science Naomi Uresci
(34:02):
described it in nature as anidea that simply clicked, the
product of a long process ofconvergence between evidence and
theory.
Perhaps we can get into thedetails of all this later in
discussion, but for now I thinkit's enough to say that scholars
interested in the history ofthis moment have overwhelmingly
focused on one part of thisconvergence, and that is the
(34:23):
theory.
Of course, this work isfundamental, and it does
contextualise the keygeophysical triggers of revision
.
Marie Tharp's discovery andmapping of Mino-Ocean ridges in
the 1950s has rightfully been apride of place, and Frederick
Weyne and Drummond Matthews'diagnosis of alternating
magnetic polarity in oceanbedrock is also very prominent.
(34:45):
However, this literature tendsto marginalise the problem of
older or more establishedevidence of a dynamic Earth,
which I've become much moreinterested in as a result.
So I want to begin to open upthis problem by showing you this
photograph.
So on your screen here is animage of two people meeting in
Hungary in 1907.
(35:06):
On the left is Bailey Willis,who at this stage was working
for the United States GeologicalSurvey as a consulting surveyor
and as an earthquake geologist.
Willis went on to conduct fieldwork in an incredible array of
different sites across the globeand developed very important
theories of energy transferwithin the crust and within the
(35:27):
interior of the Earth.
Although he remained anopponent of ideas like
continental drift, passing awayin 1949, he was nevertheless one
of the first scientists tosubstantiate the idea of an
energetic, a gentile planet.
On the right, seated across, isEdward Seuss, an Austrian
geologist who may as well havebeen from a different age
(35:48):
entirely.
Seuss was born in 1831 andspent his career assembling
correspondence from a worldwidenetwork of geologists and
savants to compose hismonumental account of universal
geology, das Anlitzter Erder, orthe face of the Earth.
It was in the course of thiswork that he coined the
geological term Godwana land,using the name for a
(36:09):
stratigraphic sequence in WestBengal to describe a connected
southern hemispheresupercontinent.
Now, seuss' vision of the faceof the Earth might seem quite
similar to the kind of thinkingthe defined Willis' era and its
inheritors in the world of platetectonics, and Seuss' often
referred to as an earlyvisionary.
(36:30):
However, there are some majordifferences.
Probably the most important oneis that Seuss' work was in the
mode of old geology.
He had radical ideas aboutmountain chains, land bridges
and raised plateau, but theywere made sense of using the
trick of old geology unlimitedtime In this geology in many
(36:51):
ways respected uniformitarianism.
Like Charles Lyle and otherleading 19th century geologists,
he argued that the face of theEarth had changed many times
over.
He accepted that geophysicalconstraints, such as very slow
rates of change and the relativeposition of the five continents
, were stable.
Now I want to suggest thatpeople like Willis and his
(37:12):
understanding of a dynamic Earththen must have come from a
different tradition, and the keypurpose of the book is to show
that one important thread ofthis tradition that sustained
different views of a dynamicplanet around the turn of,
around the middle of the 20thcentury.
It runs firmly through a seriesof colonial sites that I'm
referring to as a geologicalsouth.
(37:34):
So between the 1830s and 1960sI'm aiming to show how colonial
surveyors in India, australia,southern and Eastern Africa and
South America found evidence ofdramatic geological changes in
coal seams, diamond mines, riversediments, stone quarries and
oil fields.
These finds challenged theconventional understandings of
(37:58):
old geology, gradually forcingreassessments of important
junctures in planetary history.
Over a more than a hemisphere,from the Himalaya to the High
Belt and from the Andes to theAustralian Outback, surveys were
made to account the geophysicalfacts that contradicted
orthodoxy.
What did it mean, for instance,that coal seams in West Bengal
(38:19):
and in New South Wales were morerecent than the great
carboniferous seams of Yorkshireand Pennsylvania?
What exactly were the giantcone-shaped structures that
punctured the crust of thediamond fields around Kimberley
in the Northern Cape?
What could the millions ofmicro fossils retrieved from oil
wells around the Red Sea tellgeologists about the
paleogeography of North Africa,the Middle East and South Asia?
(38:41):
And by engaging with questionslike these, by formulating them
and by thinking about and withthe resources that inspired them
, colonial surveyors andgeologists became some of the
most forceful advocates of adynamic earth, well before the
1950s.
Now, to try and contextualisesorry the emergence of this
(39:03):
thinking, the book adopts theperspective of figures working
within a range of colonial sites.
These include the coalfrontiers of India and Australia
from the 1840s, thediamond-bearing locales of South
Africa and Brazil, the hugeriver basins of the Rio de la
Plata and Amazon, and the faultsystems of the Great Rift Valley
.
Now these are the sites I'mtrying to capture when I use the
(39:25):
phrase geological south,defined by a unique set of
geopolitical investments andinformation economies.
Some of these sites were orbecame colonies between the
1830s or 1960s, and others wereindependent nations, in part
defined by their coloniallegacies.
I'm interested in making a casehere that the historical
conditions of this geologicalsouth are an essential part of
(39:48):
assessing the development ofmodern earth science.
This story, I argue, isultimately about the study of
resources and a series ofseparate but comparable
struggles over their location,description, extraction and
value, and I want to go througha few of these now.
So, as we've heard, thisprocess of engagement with
(40:10):
resources and thinking about thedynamic earth began during the
1830s, during the colonialmapping of coal seams in India,
australia and Southern Africa.
Here surveyors closely engagedwith Permian deposits and the
materials surrounding them.
Those Scottish geologists,thomas Oldham, henry Medleycott
and William Blandford, mappedthe whole sequence of shales,
(40:32):
coal, sandstones and glacialdebris in West Bengal, in
Gondwana, in the 1860s.
Oldham predicted that thisformation had equivalence in
Southern Africa and in the 1870s.
Medleycott's naming of thisseries triggered reappraisals of
similar Permian coal basins inNew South Wales, those in the
Hunter that were linked to thosein India by the distinctive
(40:53):
glossopterous fossil leaf.
As I also mentioned, this studyof the Gondwana Coals can fit
within a fairly conventionalhistory of old geology, a fairly
conventional history ofeconomic geology too.
But I'm more interested in howthis study of the Gondwana Coals
was part of a drastic, repeatedand extensive thinking about
(41:15):
environmental change.
Geologists in the UnitedKingdom had confronted one part
of this problem already, but theexistence of coal from the
Permian period in these colonialsites, not from the
Carboniferous, meant that theplanet had experienced multiple
and separate coal ages.
Metropolitan geologists hadalso never had to reckon with
the geographical extent that shedistanced between West Bengal,
(41:39):
the Hunter Valley and Verenigingin South Africa, of the
stratigraphic continuities thatmarked a mass extinction in the
strata.
Here, I think, is where myenvironmental history background
comes in and why I've becomeinterested in these geologists.
The shift of perspective is torecognise these colonial
geologists as environmentalthinkers working on a planetary
(42:01):
scale, well before figures likeWillis and Modern Earth Science
more generally adopted thisposition.
Each successive subject, then,that I fold into this history of
modern earth.
Science advances and reinforcesthis argument about colonial
geologists and theirinterlocutors.
How am I going for time,francis Great?
(42:21):
So from the 1870s, for instance, in the middle part of the map,
the pattern established bythese colonial geologists
studying coal and shale wasreplicated in other fields of
economic geology.
In this case, it was among,amidst a diamond rush in the
Kimberley in South Africa'sNorthern Cape, which focused
(42:43):
worldwide attention on theorigin and distribution of these
precious minerals, anAustralian geologist trained in
Victoria, edward Dunne, was oneof the first to assess the area,
focusing on both coal reservesand on the intrusive geology
that generated diamonds.
These formations were namedthen Kimberlite pipes, and these
(43:03):
two soon became relevant to theunderstanding of continental
comparison and connection.
By the 1920s, after nearly threedecades working on the diamond
fields and for debirs, the greatgeologist of continental drift,
alexander Dottoy sought tocompare and link the diamond
geology of Southern Africa withmuch older sources of diamonds
in Brazil and in India.
(43:24):
Diamond geology, however,differed from coal geology in
important ways.
The rocks where diamonds arefound are igneous and intrusive
rather than sedimentary, andtherefore the theories generated
through the close engagementwith these sites triggered new
thinking about the interior ofthe planet, its massive energy
flows and the consequences ofthis.
On the surface Again, thesestudies stitched sites within
(43:48):
the book's geological southtogether, both through the way
they focused and texturedthinking about the planet and
via the increased circulation ofscientists and knowledge about
the earth.
I'm sorry, there's a coal seam.
We'll come back to that.
New places within the geologicalsouth were drawn into this
established pattern of resourcegeology in the 1920s, when the
(44:10):
search for another hydrocarbonoil focused scientific attention
on ocean basins and othermarginal zones.
One of the figures swept up inthis search was the Cambridge
hydrogeologists and for aminifera expert, william
McFadden.
So it was around this time thatgeologists realized that these
fossil for a minifera, which aretiny, ancient single-celled
(44:31):
marine organisms fossilized insedimentary rocks, could be used
to indicate the likely presenceor absence of oil.
The skills of McFadden in thismoment, who was a specialist in
water, rock and life, were inhigh demand then, in a set of
British possessions andinterests in the Middle East, he
(44:52):
worked for British Petroleum,the Anglo-Egyptian oil fields
one of a map of which is on thescreen, the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company and the SomalilandPetroleum Company.
In Somaliland, in particular,he drilled wells for water, for
oil and conducted agriculturalsurveys.
And throughout all of this hesent thousands of rock samples
(45:12):
back to Cambridge, which are nowheld in the Sedrick Museum of
Earth Sciences.
And although the oil neverreally flowed in Somalia,
mcfadden's research there ledinstead into debates about the
shape and the distribution ofthe continents and seafloors.
Hundreds of millions of yearsago, because his micro-fossils
provided an index of ocean floorecology, geologists began to
(45:34):
use them to argue that India andEast Africa were once much
closer together.
Part of the northern edge ofGondwana land Now.
Histories such as these, I think, can illuminate exactly how the
colonial search for resourcescontributed to the development
of modern ideas about theEarth's deep history.
Coal surveyors challengedestablished timelines of coal
formation and planetary climate.
(45:56):
Geologists and engineers indiamond fuels traced out a new
kind of vertical force.
Consultants and scientistsworking on oil prospecting
created an index of the ancientEarth.
Now my expectation here is thatthis research can establish
that it was no accident thatmany of these significant
studies were situated incolonial worlds.
(46:19):
Not only were geologists such asBlanford, datoi and McFadden
highly mobile and occasionallytransient, but they were always
working in marginal sites wherephysical conditions were in flux
due to the operation ofextractive projects.
By starting with these sitesand the minerals and materials
that formed the basis ofcolonial economies, I think we
(46:39):
can effectively draw newconnections between, for
instance, the particularcolonial histories of West
Bengal, bahanta Valley, theKimberley and Somalia and the
new environmental orders past,present and future that modern
Earth science enabled andarticulated.
And I think that this work candemonstrate how a sequence of
geological engagements withcommodities, resources and
(47:00):
materials between the 1830s andthe 1960s created, in fact, the
only scene on which the granddrama of modern Earth science
could be played out, and thiswill place a connected colonial
world right at the centre ofthis history, providing new
ground for thinking about thegeopolitics of a dynamic planet
and the deep histories that havebecome animate in the
Anthropocene.
Dr Jesse Adams Stein (47:21):
Thank you, thank you so much again, alison
and Jared and Francis.
I really appreciate all of youcoming and joining in and
(47:44):
presenting so beautifully.
I just wonder we'll so closeoff this event and I'll just
pull up some slides because theyhave logos and important things
like that Very quickly.
But there's some fun stuffcoming up because I'm going to
tell you about what's happeningwith the next History Now event.
(48:04):
So first of all I do want toacknowledge the History Council
of New South Wales team,catherine Shirley, amanda Wells
and Laura Sale, as well as ourExecutive Committee.
I also want to acknowledge theState Library of New South Wales
for providing the venue and theevent support and the
Australian Centre for PublicHistory.
Thank you to Anna Clark, tamsinPeach and Freya Newman.
(48:26):
Also the History Council.
I've always acknowledged ourcultural partners, which you can
see acknowledged here.
But I will mention the NewSouth Wales Government via
Create New South Wales.
And finally, I want to give youa sneak peek to the next three
History Now sessions coming upOn the 3rd of April Histories of
Capitalism Now with HannaForsythe, sophie Loy Wilson and
(48:50):
Mike Beggs as Chair.
Same place here, 5pm on the 3rdof April, and the registration
for that will be up pretty soonon the State Library website.
Oh, it could just come.
But yeah, the first of May, mayDay, special Aboriginal
Political Histories with HeidiNorman, john Maynard and Linda
June Coe, and on the 5th of June, histories of Mental Health
(49:13):
with Catherine Colvone and JamieDunck.
So that's the next three.
There's more beyond that, butthat's probably enough for now.
I hope to see you again atthose events and, yeah, thank
you for being such a wonderfulaudience.
I'll say that's enough.
Bye, bye.
My name is Jessie Adams Stein and I'm here
in my capacity as the ProgramDirector for History Now 2024,
and I represent both the HistoryCouncil of New South Wales and
the Australian Centre for PublicHistory at UTS.
Thank you so much for comingalong to the first session of
History Now 2024, new EarthHistories.
Before we begin, I'd like tostart by acknowledging the land
(00:28):
upon which we meet here.
At the top of the hill onGadigal Country, looking out to
Warren Sydney Cove andWogan-Migulia Farm Cove, we are,
of course, not far from one ofthe key sites of colonial
invasion.
I'd like to acknowledge theGadigal as the traditional
custodians of the land uponwhich we are standing and pay my
(00:50):
respects to elders past andpresent, and acknowledge that we
are on stolen land.
Today we will be hearing a lotabout time and about how we come
to know the earth, and I thinkit's important that we start by
acknowledging the incrediblevalue of indigenous knowledge
about the past and about country, and I'm sure we'll hear more
about that soon.
(01:10):
I just wanted to say a littlebit about what History Now is as
a program.
So it's actually a long runningtalk series.
It's been going for quite awhile in many different
iterations and it's gone throughmany different hands as well,
so it gets passed long.
Often it's in person, of course, during the COVID years it's
been online, and so 2024 HistoryNow is being coordinated by me
(01:34):
in my multiple hats capacity,both at the History Council of
New South Wales and as a memberof the Australian Centre for
Public History at UTS, and wealso have venue support, of
course, from the State Libraryof New South Wales, who have
been very accommodating.
I'd like to introduce you tothe chair of tonight's event,
(02:03):
the fantastic Dr FrancisFlanagan.
Francis is one of those publicintellectuals whose expertise
sort of overflows beyondconventional boundaries, so it
makes it hard to describe, butshe's a lecturer at UTS Law,
she's an environmental labourexpert, industrial relations
expert and an historian as well.
So thank you, francis, foragreeing to chair today's event,
(02:24):
and Francis will introduce thespeakers.
Thanks.
Dr Frances Flanagan (02:32):
Thank you so much, jessie.
Well, it is my immense pleasureto chair tonight's discussion
of New Earth, histories,geocosmologies and the making of
the modern world.
Now there's a physicalmanifestation of this book that
I think you can look at on thetable there.
This is a book that offers aprofound rethinking of the
question of how we come to knowthe earth.
(02:55):
The questions that it asks areof a scope and a scale that are
simply dazzling.
It asks how different ideasabout the sacred, the animate
and the earthly changed themodern environmental sciences,
how different world traditionsunderstood human and geological
origins, how the inclusion ofmultiple cosmologies changed the
(03:17):
meaning of the Anthropocene andthe global climate crisis.
And the context for answeringthese questions are also
enormous, encompassing Chinese,pacific, islamic, south and
Southeast Asian conceptions ofthe earth's origin and its make
up.
It uses diverse methods, too,from cultural history to
ethnography, geography andindigenous studies.
(03:37):
This is a deeply imaginative,extremely complex and also
unsettling book.
Nothing and no one iscomfortably either local or
cosmopolitan, or secular orsacred.
In this text, we're constantlyreminded that earth knowledge is
always and has always emergedfrom very historically specific
(03:58):
situations, so it will be a bookof interest to all of you,
especially if you are like meand you've become convinced of
the urgency of keeping it in theground, as the saying goes,
when it comes to fossil fuels,this book reminds us that our
conception of what the ground isand what it is, and what our
agency is in relation to it, isdeeply historically contingent.
(04:20):
Okay, so let me now introduceour speakers.
To begin with, professor AlisonBashford, science Professor in
History and Director of theLaureate Centre for Earth and
Population at UNSW.
She is the editor, along withEmily Kern and Adam Bobet, of
New Earth Histories, and herwork connects the history of
science, global history andenvironmental history into new
(04:42):
assessments of the modern worldfrom the 18th to the 20th
century.
She is the author of many, manypublications, which I will not
list, but most recently theprize-winning and intimate
history of evolution the storyof the Huxley family.
Now second speaker is Dr JaredHall, an environmental historian
(05:02):
of settler colonial landscapes,nature writing and geology.
He is currently a postdoctoralfellow at the New Earth
Histories Research Program atUNSW and his work on earthquake
geology, wilderness photography,early environmentalism and
logistics of the natural historytrade has been widely published
.
He's also the author of theaward-winning book Visions of
Nature how Landscape PhotographyShaped Settler Colonialism, a
(05:26):
physical copy of which is alsoavailable on the table to have a
look at too.
So our speakers will speak for20 minutes and then we will have
some questions.
20 minutes each, I should say.
Thank you very much.
Prof Alison Bashford (05:53):
Thank you, jesse.
I wish you had written theintroduction to the book.
Actually there is a really niceand generous summary.
This microphone is okay, yep,great.
So thank you.
Thank you History Council andUTS and the State Library, and
thank you for the invitation totalk about New Earth Histories,
(06:16):
which is has this manifestationas a book which came out late
last year, which was a pleasureto edit with Emily Kern and Adam
Abett, who were then postdocs,who now have scattered to other
parts of the, to othercontinents and it, but it
continues.
New Earth Histories continuesas a research program that Jared
(06:38):
Hoare and I run together atUniversity of New South Wales
and really, as you were talking,jesse, I was trying to think
back through how I became ahistorian of Geosciences,
because my own background as ahistorian of science generally
for many, many years and formany projects, including the
(06:59):
Huxley book and Interest andInterment History of Evolution,
was much more about the bioworld, biological history of
biological sciences, historiesof eugenics.
I've done history ofreproduction, history of history
of biological sciences, historyof evolutionary sciences, which
is what the Huxley book reallyis about, and so really for two
(07:21):
decades now that that world ofbiological sciences and its past
has been my focus and at somepoint I don't really I'm
scratching my head trying tothink what made me cross over to
that other scientific side tostart thinking about geological
sciences and start to thinkabout the people in the past for
whom inorganic rocks were corebusiness.
(07:45):
And I think I got thereprobably as a world historian.
So you know many of you herewill understand that in the last
10 years or more, the scalethat modern historians have
worked on has become larger andlarger and there's been a what's
a while ago, people to call theplanet return in lots of
(08:08):
humanities scholarship, but alsoin in for historians, where we
started to have to think aboutthe whole globe, how we think
about that historically, how wethink about the planet
historically.
And it still stuns me that I Ican still remember historians
starting to talk about theplanet as something, as a whole
(08:31):
thing that we can historicize ashistorians, not as scientists
for the first time, and itseemed revolutionary, but now
it's an ordinary, if notessential thing to discuss.
So it's maybe via that routethat I started to think about
earth sciences.
But then the thing that caughtme and what is really still at
(08:52):
the core of this project for me,conceptually and historically,
is how, for all of ourcolleagues and maybe some of you
here who work with apparentlyinorganic rocks, strata,
minerals in the earth, when welook back historically not very
(09:13):
long ago, not very manygenerations ago, geologists were
the precisely the scholars whowere most likely to be
theologians, who were mostlikely to think about the age of
the earth and how that is to bealigned with biblical
scholarship.
They were the people.
Geologists were more likelythan the life scientists or even
(09:34):
the evolutionary theorists, orpossibly them, to be thinking
about how rocks told the time ofthe earth and how that didn't,
didn't align with Genesis, howthe Christian story needed to be
rethought by evidence thatrocks themselves, so to say, and
(09:58):
stratigraphies of the earthwere revealing.
And so I became reallyfascinated with how this whole
linking as we've got in oursubtitle here of geology on the
one hand and cosmology on theother, the beginning of the
earth, the many people still now, but obviously for much of
human existence, a kind of adivine birth, so to say, of the
(10:21):
earth, sat right up close to andwith geology, in the sense that
I think it's clarified most inthe number of leading geologists
in the 18th and 19th century,who were themselves theologists
as well, and these two thingsjust sat really closely.
(10:42):
And so I think that's for me.
There's something even in thevery limited and very particular
history of European sciencegeology and cosmology.
You don't have to scratch veryfar back in time or below the
surface to find these two thingstwinned.
And it was always interestingto me that you know it was
(11:05):
historically the scientists whowere most interested in the
apparently inanimate, for whombig scriptural, biblical
cosmological stories were alsocore business.
And so for me I think that mademe wonder, as all historians of
(11:26):
science do now, how particularthat story is, how European or
North American or even perhapsNorthern Hemispheric that story
is, and how stratigraphies ofthe earth or the lithosphere of
the earth, or rocks of the earth, particular minerals,
particular gemstones, even tobring the scale right down, also
(11:49):
had cosmologies attached tothem.
And so the purpose of theongoing program in this
particular book was really tostart looking in other
directions, in other kinds oftraditions for geological and
cosmological stories.
And I learned things, like youknow, on the larger scale.
(12:12):
I learned through this projectthat, although as someone who
comes out of a tradition of thehistory of classic European
geological sciences in thisinstance, where we know that
Western science has the capacityto imagine itself as the
(12:34):
universal story, and that's, youknow, a very familiar claim to
make and a very familiar claimto criticize, now that it
imagines itself as universal andthe only truth.
What I learned in this projectwas the number of other
locations and places and ways ofknowing the earth that also
claimed a kind of universalstatus, and so there's a really
(12:58):
fantastic.
The first chapter in the bookis by Sumathi Ramaswamy, who's a
really great historian of howthe earth came to be imagined as
a globe shape and what othertraditions of universalizing
understanding of the earth weredisplaced in order for that to
become normal.
I learned from the chapter thatCatherine Dit, who's a
(13:21):
historian of Neu-en, really 18thcentury Vietnam.
I learned from her thesecompletely different ways in
which the earth, let's say theglobe, was understood to belong
to a universe.
In that 18th century Vietnamesetradition it was the analogy of
(13:42):
an egg shell, and so there's asoft earth at the center and
nine layers, if I remembercorrectly.
Some of you here may know ninelayers of increasingly hard
matter until you get to the eggshell outside of the universe.
That's a universalizing idea,and so really the book was
partly about what othertraditions, what other ways in
(14:05):
which, what other ways has theglobe, earth and a kind of a
universe been imagined?
So that's the large bookproject.
But let me talk to you for alittle bit about a spin-off
project that may give youanother sense.
(14:25):
It's an example really of howwe might think about classic
geological histories, but howthey have cosmological or
spiritual, one might say, orcertainly cultural histories
behind and around them that areexciting to lay on top of the
(14:46):
scientific histories.
So one other project, and thisis an example of how, once I've
started to think, what are thenew ways in which we can think
of, let's say, the history ofgeology, all kinds of things
open up.
And one of the things that'sopened up for me and a team and
Jared is also involved in thisproject is a history of Gondwana
(15:08):
, and you will all know Gondwanaland as the once linked,
continentally linked SouthernHemisphere that broke up,
started to break up about 200million years ago to form, as
you see there, broadly SouthAmerica, africa, india or South
Asia, antarctica and Australia,and parts of which of course
(15:33):
geologists here will know, arestill on the sea floor and I
started to think about what arethe other?
What is the geological history,what are the history of ideas
that gave rise to this thesisabout Gondwana land, which
(15:54):
prefaced the idea of wanderingcontinents, and then, very,
quite late in the, quiterecently, the idea of plate
tectonics, and I think Jared maytalk more about this.
Behind all that was quiterecent I mean 1870s, 1880s
(16:14):
speculation initially aboutthese continents in Southern
Hemisphere of the Earth beingconnected, and that speculation
had a tiny start.
This is little glossopterousfossil leaf, quite common
actually, so my colleagues herein the Israeli Museum tell me
still being unearthed quiteconstantly.
(16:36):
And Scottish geologists inIndia that will become important
started to pick up this fossilleaf.
They knew from its pattern thatit was already called a
glossopterous fossil and theywould say to one another to
condense this story oh, I'veseen this somewhere else and
(16:58):
they're together in centralIndia.
I've seen this somewhere else,I've seen this in New South
Wales, I've seen this inSouthern Africa.
And it's from this evidence,this fossil evidence that was
scattered across they knew quitequickly was scattered across
various continents that thethesis of a linked Gondwana land
(17:18):
emerged.
And then, as geologicalscientists went to other, to
other continents.
The glossopterous fossil leafcontinued to reveal linked
continents.
So in a way there is a reallyfascinating, just plain history
(17:39):
of geology about Gondwana landhow the idea emerged, who
thought of it, where theythought of it and how it led
eventually I'm very lateactually to plate tectonics,
that we now understand the wholeearth to be formed around.
One of the reasons why to kindof put the new on that old Earth
(18:00):
history, one of the reasons whythis took my fancy as a
historian, was that, aseverybody in this room I'm sure
understands, gondwana land andGondwana has a very particular
Australian resonance.
It is the case, I think you'dagree, that most people on the
street would have some sensethat Gondwana land was an
(18:22):
ancient continent, thatAustralian was part of it.
They may not layer beyond thatMany people would, but it's a
very familiar Australian ideaand when I started speaking to
my colleague historians in othercontinents, they were puzzled
that it has a particularAustralian purchase and that
(18:43):
made me think why is that thecase?
But just to demonstrate, it'san Australian purchase.
So why would this huge supermega-continent that once was the
entire southern part of theEarth become so especially
resonant to us here in thiscontinent, but just to
demonstrate its resonance thereis at the moment when you look
(19:04):
up.
Why would you?
Let me just tell you ABN, whichI do probably once a week,
because I'm obsessed with theuse of Gondwana as a term.
There are hundreds and hundredsof companies in Australia that
use the word Gondwana in theirtitle, and so it's got a.
If it could have beencopyrighted and patented, it
would have been, and they rangefrom everything to this kind of
(19:31):
indigenous connection.
Gondwana Dreaming Tours thechoirs, of course, is probably
one of the most well-known useof the term.
There is not one, but quite alot of indigenous art galleries
that are called Gondwana ArtGalleries.
There are also, at the otherend of the ABN list, a resource
(19:55):
extraction, mineral extractioncompanies called Gondwana
Resources.
That's just one example.
Or the Gondwana Coal Company.
It goes on and on and on.
There's Gondwana BotanicalGardens, there's Gondwana Day
Spars, there's Gondwana the folkgroup from the 80s.
Some of you may remember.
Maybe they still exist, I don'tknow, I probably should.
(20:17):
So I became really interested inwhat's the cultural history
that made Gondwana so particularto Australia, and in research
that we've done, it is clearthat in fact, most Australians
will understand Gondwana ashaving some special purchase to
hear.
But not only that.
They will say it's.
(20:38):
They will say something like oh, it's an indigenous word, I'm
not quite sure where, fromacross the continent, but it's
an indigenous word.
And if you all think that too,right now you are in the
majority.
Most people have thatunderstanding of Gondwana.
However, the term Gondwana landdoesn't come from here at all.
(21:00):
It comes from Gondwana, whichis a central province, was a
central province formerly knownin Mughal India and in early
British India, and Gondwana isin the across the centre of
(21:20):
India.
It's where the Scottishgeologists were.
They found this fossil leaf.
They were in a place calledGondwana.
They called it Gondwana land.
So this thing that Australianshave so embraced and are
ironically nationalised in facthas an Indian origin.
But not only that, of course.
(21:42):
There is no state in India anylonger called Gondwana, but
there are Gond people registeredin Indian terms as a tribal
group, and Gond peopleunderstand their homeland as
Gondwana.
They've been generally forcedoff their homeland.
(22:04):
There's a big resource.
This is where these earthhistories start to fold into one
another.
There's a big resource historyhere first clearing for trees.
Then guess what?
That fossil leaf turned intoCoal, fossil fuses, a lot of
mining, so there's a lot ofdisplaced Gond people and
essentially, in our terms, aland reclaiming politics.
(22:27):
And here's an amazing humans ofGondwana, facebook.
Not only that, and this is wherethe project, this is where I
think Gondwana is a nice secondproject for me anyway, because
the standard old earth history,the history of geology, doesn't
catch any of this and it doesn'tcatch what Gondwana land now
(22:49):
means or came to mean for theGond people.
So for me, the kind of mostexciting thing about thinking
about something like an ancientmega-continent in its modern
iterations and as a cosmology,we can see in these posters.
These are posters from the1970s, jared, would that be?
(23:12):
That's what I think, the 1970sgond political posters arguing
for the restatement of a statecalled Gondwana, which is their
home territory.
So it's a land reclaimingpolitics and there are several
gond politicians in the Indianparliament.
(23:33):
But for me and for us today,what I hope is interesting is
the mobilization by gond peoplethemselves of this phenomenon.
Gondwana land, the southernhemisphere of the earth, and you
can see it depicted here,obviously, but also, really
interestingly, here, whereLaRaysia, the northern
(23:54):
hemisphere, is distinct fromGondwana land and this project,
mark II project in New Earthhistories.
We have anthropologists andhistorians and geophysicists as
well, all involved.
And one of our colleagues,who's the anthropologist, does a
lot of work with gond peopleand she told us at a meeting all
(24:17):
up to a year ago now.
She presented work where shesaid that gond people themselves
understand themselves as theoriginal people of Gondwana land
.
And so one of our colleaguessaid oh, so gond people are like
the first nations of Gondwanaland.
And so for me there was such afascinating folding of this 200
(24:43):
million year ago history withnot just 1880s Scottish
geologists, which is interestingenough in itself, but classic
geological sciences, butactually this cosmology for gond
people in India, after whomGondwana land is named, who have
, let's say, appropriated, takenon the idea of a southern
(25:07):
hemisphere continent andimagined themselves as the
original people of that.
And I did say to my Uriyaanthropologist colleague hang on
, are you saying to me that thatmeans gond people understand
themselves as original peoplevis-a-vis other indigenous
people across the southernhemisphere?
(25:28):
And she said yes, that is thecase.
So there's all these reallyinteresting origin stories that
are often deep or not even thatdeep, in fact not even deep at
all inside histories of geology,and that's the kind of way in
which I hope New Earth historiescan take a well-known story,
(25:50):
actually of something likeGondwana land, a phenomenon
that's obviously well-known,deeply researched, and think
through its other meanings.
It has a completely differentpolitics, but also cosmology, to
the gond people.
And last story, one of myfavorite.
Oh, before I get to my favoritestory, should I stop?
(26:15):
Ok, two minutes is easy.
So before we think, oh, it'sthe gond people who have a
particular cosmologicalrelationship to this thing
called gondwana land, let'sthink again.
Here we have Ernst Heckel, thekey German Darwinist in the late
(26:39):
19th century.
So you don't get anybody morecard-carrying as a scientist in
the 19th century and he'sstarting to think, as they all
did what is the dispersal ofhumankind and where did Ernst
Heckel put the origin ofhumanity?
(27:01):
Right here in the bottom,underneath South Asia, in the
Indian Ocean, and in fact hecalls it Lemuria.
And Lemuria is actually amythic, sunken continent, mythic
, it's like Atlantis.
(27:22):
But I became really it's notjust so to say the gond people
who are imagining these things.
I don't know this, but I suspectthat those political posters
are partly derived from theseideas absolutely at the core of
(27:43):
Western science, at the core ofDarwinism in the 19th century
that also understand this as akind of a human origin point.
And so, on the one hand, thisis where I get once.
This is the kind of opening Isuppose is one way of putting it
(28:03):
as someone who's trained inclassic history of sciences,
which is what did scientiststhink in the past?
But once I've started to thinkabout what are new Earth
histories, what are new ways ofthinking, that in fact the
folding and refolding of allthese much larger and bigger
(28:25):
stories, especially in Earthsciences, come together, and
it's the Gondwana land projectat the moment.
That is case number one, Isuppose, for a large project
folding out of the New Earthhistories project.
30 seconds, for my favorite partof this story, which we're
(28:47):
still researching, is that notonly did there's another Lemuria
story to tell, not only didErnst Heckel, darwinist in
Germany, imagine an origin forhumans which in fact on the sea
calls paradise interestingly,that's the point as well in the
Indian Ocean but our colleaguealso tells us that in the
(29:12):
mountains of former Gondwanathere are re-workings of
pilgrimagees that completelytake the Gondwana land story to
heart and have now manifestedsince the 1970s, 80s and 90s as
(29:32):
pilgrimages of thousands andthousands of people and she
showed us wonderful slides ofthis up through the mountains in
Gondwana, including to theplace where the Glasopteris
fossil leaf was first discoveredby the Scottish geologists.
And so there's a sacralizing ofthat geological story of
(29:55):
Scottish geologists picking upthe fossil leaf and starting to
piece Gondwana land together hasbeen folded into this curious,
wonderful sacralizing of thatparticular history.
So I think I should leave itthere, but I hope that gives you
something of a taste of whatour ambitions are to rethink
(30:20):
really wonderful old-earthhistories into new-earth
histories.
Thank you, thank you.
Dr Jarrod Hore (30:48):
Hello everyone and thank you for coming along
tonight to hear more about NewEarth Histories.
The next 20 minutes I'mplanning to give you a brief
insight at building offAllyson's presentation, a brief
insight into the book I'mcurrently working on,
tentatively titled Earth Sciencefrom the Geological South
surveying a revolution inplanetary history.
(31:10):
So thank you for being the testaudience for this.
So in this book I'm developingan account of one of the major
shifts that defined 20th centuryEarth science by focusing on a
series of specific materials andsites outside of the highly
storied geologies of the UnitedKingdom and North America.
(31:30):
Placing things like coal fromWest Bengal, which we just heard
a little bit about, or from theHunter Valley, or diamonds from
the Kimberley or from Brazil,or oil from the Somali Peninsula
, at the centre of this history,I think can help us explain how
geologists went fromunderstanding the Earth as
relatively stable, unchangingunit in the 1830s to accepting
(31:54):
it in the 1960s that the Earthwas so dynamic that the very
continental shapes that defineour world are contingent and
temporary, albeit in deepplanetary history.
So more on this soon, but firstI wanted to reflect a little on
the fact that this work hasbeen totally conceived of and
partially written at this stageanyway, within the frames of
(32:15):
reference provided by New EarthHistories, and it forms a part
of, and has developed with thesupport of, an Australian
Research Council Discovery Grantcalled Empty Podenean Geology,
of which Allison and AlessandroAntonello from Flinders
University are the chiefinvestigators.
So these two things togetherNew Earth Histories and what we
call the Gondwan Land Project,have defined the outlines of
(32:38):
this project, and at the core ofit all is a provocation to
approach the history ofgeoscience, as we've heard, as a
product of a whole range ofdifferent ways of thinking about
the Earth.
In the New Earth Histories book, allison, emily and Adam make
the important argument that thegeological and environmental
sciences emerge fromcosmopolitan exchanges and
(32:58):
colonial encounters, and thiscreated new ways of knowing the
Earth and its history whichcarry the signatures,
importantly, of diverse origins.
What a powerful conceptualapparatus, I figure.
So applied to the history ofwhat is perhaps one of the
master sciences of the 20thcentury plate tectonics.
(33:18):
Simply put, plate tectonics isthe label for a theory that
describes the geography of theEarth, how the geography of the
Earth is defined by the long runconsequences of large slabs of
crust being pushed over themantle by Mino-Ocean ridges when
new crust is generated.
After its acceptance in the1960s, it elegantly solved a
(33:40):
whole range of geologicalmysteries that have persisted
within older models of the Earth, which emphasise the fixity of
continents and oceans.
Now, within the history andphilosophy of science, plate
tectonics is one of the mostfrequently cited instances of
Thomas Kuhn's model of ascientific revolution.
Trained geologist and historianof science Naomi Uresci
(34:02):
described it in nature as anidea that simply clicked, the
product of a long process ofconvergence between evidence and
theory.
Perhaps we can get into thedetails of all this later in
discussion, but for now I thinkit's enough to say that scholars
interested in the history ofthis moment have overwhelmingly
focused on one part of thisconvergence, and that is the
(34:23):
theory.
Of course, this work isfundamental, and it does
contextualise the keygeophysical triggers of revision
.
Marie Tharp's discovery andmapping of Mino-Ocean ridges in
the 1950s has rightfully been apride of place, and Frederick
Weyne and Drummond Matthews'diagnosis of alternating
magnetic polarity in oceanbedrock is also very prominent.
(34:45):
However, this literature tendsto marginalise the problem of
older or more establishedevidence of a dynamic Earth,
which I've become much moreinterested in as a result.
So I want to begin to open upthis problem by showing you this
photograph.
So on your screen here is animage of two people meeting in
Hungary in 1907.
(35:06):
On the left is Bailey Willis,who at this stage was working
for the United States GeologicalSurvey as a consulting surveyor
and as an earthquake geologist.
Willis went on to conduct fieldwork in an incredible array of
different sites across the globeand developed very important
theories of energy transferwithin the crust and within the
(35:27):
interior of the Earth.
Although he remained anopponent of ideas like
continental drift, passing awayin 1949, he was nevertheless one
of the first scientists tosubstantiate the idea of an
energetic, a gentile planet.
On the right, seated across, isEdward Seuss, an Austrian
geologist who may as well havebeen from a different age
(35:48):
entirely.
Seuss was born in 1831 andspent his career assembling
correspondence from a worldwidenetwork of geologists and
savants to compose hismonumental account of universal
geology, das Anlitzter Erder, orthe face of the Earth.
It was in the course of thiswork that he coined the
geological term Godwana land,using the name for a
(36:09):
stratigraphic sequence in WestBengal to describe a connected
southern hemispheresupercontinent.
Now, seuss' vision of the faceof the Earth might seem quite
similar to the kind of thinkingthe defined Willis' era and its
inheritors in the world of platetectonics, and Seuss' often
referred to as an earlyvisionary.
(36:30):
However, there are some majordifferences.
Probably the most important oneis that Seuss' work was in the
mode of old geology.
He had radical ideas aboutmountain chains, land bridges
and raised plateau, but theywere made sense of using the
trick of old geology unlimitedtime In this geology in many
(36:51):
ways respected uniformitarianism.
Like Charles Lyle and otherleading 19th century geologists,
he argued that the face of theEarth had changed many times
over.
He accepted that geophysicalconstraints, such as very slow
rates of change and the relativeposition of the five continents
, were stable.
Now I want to suggest thatpeople like Willis and his
(37:12):
understanding of a dynamic Earththen must have come from a
different tradition, and the keypurpose of the book is to show
that one important thread ofthis tradition that sustained
different views of a dynamicplanet around the turn of,
around the middle of the 20thcentury.
It runs firmly through a seriesof colonial sites that I'm
referring to as a geologicalsouth.
(37:34):
So between the 1830s and 1960sI'm aiming to show how colonial
surveyors in India, australia,southern and Eastern Africa and
South America found evidence ofdramatic geological changes in
coal seams, diamond mines, riversediments, stone quarries and
oil fields.
These finds challenged theconventional understandings of
(37:58):
old geology, gradually forcingreassessments of important
junctures in planetary history.
Over a more than a hemisphere,from the Himalaya to the High
Belt and from the Andes to theAustralian Outback, surveys were
made to account the geophysicalfacts that contradicted
orthodoxy.
What did it mean, for instance,that coal seams in West Bengal
(38:19):
and in New South Wales were morerecent than the great
carboniferous seams of Yorkshireand Pennsylvania?
What exactly were the giantcone-shaped structures that
punctured the crust of thediamond fields around Kimberley
in the Northern Cape?
What could the millions ofmicro fossils retrieved from oil
wells around the Red Sea tellgeologists about the
paleogeography of North Africa,the Middle East and South Asia?
(38:41):
And by engaging with questionslike these, by formulating them
and by thinking about and withthe resources that inspired them
, colonial surveyors andgeologists became some of the
most forceful advocates of adynamic earth, well before the
1950s.
Now, to try and contextualisesorry the emergence of this
(39:03):
thinking, the book adopts theperspective of figures working
within a range of colonial sites.
These include the coalfrontiers of India and Australia
from the 1840s, thediamond-bearing locales of South
Africa and Brazil, the hugeriver basins of the Rio de la
Plata and Amazon, and the faultsystems of the Great Rift Valley
.
Now these are the sites I'mtrying to capture when I use the
(39:25):
phrase geological south,defined by a unique set of
geopolitical investments andinformation economies.
Some of these sites were orbecame colonies between the
1830s or 1960s, and others wereindependent nations, in part
defined by their coloniallegacies.
I'm interested in making a casehere that the historical
conditions of this geologicalsouth are an essential part of
(39:48):
assessing the development ofmodern earth science.
This story, I argue, isultimately about the study of
resources and a series ofseparate but comparable
struggles over their location,description, extraction and
value, and I want to go througha few of these now.
So, as we've heard, thisprocess of engagement with
(40:10):
resources and thinking about thedynamic earth began during the
1830s, during the colonialmapping of coal seams in India,
australia and Southern Africa.
Here surveyors closely engagedwith Permian deposits and the
materials surrounding them.
Those Scottish geologists,thomas Oldham, henry Medleycott
and William Blandford, mappedthe whole sequence of shales,
(40:32):
coal, sandstones and glacialdebris in West Bengal, in
Gondwana, in the 1860s.
Oldham predicted that thisformation had equivalence in
Southern Africa and in the 1870s.
Medleycott's naming of thisseries triggered reappraisals of
similar Permian coal basins inNew South Wales, those in the
Hunter that were linked to thosein India by the distinctive
(40:53):
glossopterous fossil leaf.
As I also mentioned, this studyof the Gondwana Coals can fit
within a fairly conventionalhistory of old geology, a fairly
conventional history ofeconomic geology too.
But I'm more interested in howthis study of the Gondwana Coals
was part of a drastic, repeatedand extensive thinking about
(41:15):
environmental change.
Geologists in the UnitedKingdom had confronted one part
of this problem already, but theexistence of coal from the
Permian period in these colonialsites, not from the
Carboniferous, meant that theplanet had experienced multiple
and separate coal ages.
Metropolitan geologists hadalso never had to reckon with
the geographical extent that shedistanced between West Bengal,
(41:39):
the Hunter Valley and Verenigingin South Africa, of the
stratigraphic continuities thatmarked a mass extinction in the
strata.
Here, I think, is where myenvironmental history background
comes in and why I've becomeinterested in these geologists.
The shift of perspective is torecognise these colonial
geologists as environmentalthinkers working on a planetary
(42:01):
scale, well before figures likeWillis and Modern Earth Science
more generally adopted thisposition.
Each successive subject, then,that I fold into this history of
modern earth.
Science advances and reinforcesthis argument about colonial
geologists and theirinterlocutors.
How am I going for time,francis Great?
(42:21):
So from the 1870s, for instance, in the middle part of the map,
the pattern established bythese colonial geologists
studying coal and shale wasreplicated in other fields of
economic geology.
In this case, it was among,amidst a diamond rush in the
Kimberley in South Africa'sNorthern Cape, which focused
(42:43):
worldwide attention on theorigin and distribution of these
precious minerals, anAustralian geologist trained in
Victoria, edward Dunne, was oneof the first to assess the area,
focusing on both coal reservesand on the intrusive geology
that generated diamonds.
These formations were namedthen Kimberlite pipes, and these
(43:03):
two soon became relevant to theunderstanding of continental
comparison and connection.
By the 1920s, after nearly threedecades working on the diamond
fields and for debirs, the greatgeologist of continental drift,
alexander Dottoy sought tocompare and link the diamond
geology of Southern Africa withmuch older sources of diamonds
in Brazil and in India.
(43:24):
Diamond geology, however,differed from coal geology in
important ways.
The rocks where diamonds arefound are igneous and intrusive
rather than sedimentary, andtherefore the theories generated
through the close engagementwith these sites triggered new
thinking about the interior ofthe planet, its massive energy
flows and the consequences ofthis.
On the surface Again, thesestudies stitched sites within
(43:48):
the book's geological southtogether, both through the way
they focused and texturedthinking about the planet and
via the increased circulation ofscientists and knowledge about
the earth.
I'm sorry, there's a coal seam.
We'll come back to that.
New places within the geologicalsouth were drawn into this
established pattern of resourcegeology in the 1920s, when the
(44:10):
search for another hydrocarbonoil focused scientific attention
on ocean basins and othermarginal zones.
One of the figures swept up inthis search was the Cambridge
hydrogeologists and for aminifera expert, william
McFadden.
So it was around this time thatgeologists realized that these
fossil for a minifera, which aretiny, ancient single-celled
(44:31):
marine organisms fossilized insedimentary rocks, could be used
to indicate the likely presenceor absence of oil.
The skills of McFadden in thismoment, who was a specialist in
water, rock and life, were inhigh demand then, in a set of
British possessions andinterests in the Middle East, he
(44:52):
worked for British Petroleum,the Anglo-Egyptian oil fields
one of a map of which is on thescreen, the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company and the SomalilandPetroleum Company.
In Somaliland, in particular,he drilled wells for water, for
oil and conducted agriculturalsurveys.
And throughout all of this hesent thousands of rock samples
(45:12):
back to Cambridge, which are nowheld in the Sedrick Museum of
Earth Sciences.
And although the oil neverreally flowed in Somalia,
mcfadden's research there ledinstead into debates about the
shape and the distribution ofthe continents and seafloors.
Hundreds of millions of yearsago, because his micro-fossils
provided an index of ocean floorecology, geologists began to
(45:34):
use them to argue that India andEast Africa were once much
closer together.
Part of the northern edge ofGondwana land Now.
Histories such as these, I think, can illuminate exactly how the
colonial search for resourcescontributed to the development
of modern ideas about theEarth's deep history.
Coal surveyors challengedestablished timelines of coal
formation and planetary climate.
(45:56):
Geologists and engineers indiamond fuels traced out a new
kind of vertical force.
Consultants and scientistsworking on oil prospecting
created an index of the ancientEarth.
Now my expectation here is thatthis research can establish
that it was no accident thatmany of these significant
studies were situated incolonial worlds.
(46:19):
Not only were geologists such asBlanford, datoi and McFadden
highly mobile and occasionallytransient, but they were always
working in marginal sites wherephysical conditions were in flux
due to the operation ofextractive projects.
By starting with these sitesand the minerals and materials
that formed the basis ofcolonial economies, I think we
(46:39):
can effectively draw newconnections between, for
instance, the particularcolonial histories of West
Bengal, bahanta Valley, theKimberley and Somalia and the
new environmental orders past,present and future that modern
Earth science enabled andarticulated.
And I think that this work candemonstrate how a sequence of
geological engagements withcommodities, resources and
(47:00):
materials between the 1830s andthe 1960s created, in fact, the
only scene on which the granddrama of modern Earth science
could be played out, and thiswill place a connected colonial
world right at the centre ofthis history, providing new
ground for thinking about thegeopolitics of a dynamic planet
and the deep histories that havebecome animate in the
Anthropocene.
Dr Jesse Adams Stein (47:21):
Thank you, thank you so much again, alison
and Jared and Francis.
I really appreciate all of youcoming and joining in and
(47:44):
presenting so beautifully.
I just wonder we'll so closeoff this event and I'll just
pull up some slides because theyhave logos and important things
like that Very quickly.
But there's some fun stuffcoming up because I'm going to
tell you about what's happeningwith the next History Now event.
(48:04):
So first of all I do want toacknowledge the History Council
of New South Wales team,catherine Shirley, amanda Wells
and Laura Sale, as well as ourExecutive Committee.
I also want to acknowledge theState Library of New South Wales
for providing the venue and theevent support and the
Australian Centre for PublicHistory.
Thank you to Anna Clark, tamsinPeach and Freya Newman.
(48:26):
Also the History Council.
I've always acknowledged ourcultural partners, which you can
see acknowledged here.
But I will mention the NewSouth Wales Government via
Create New South Wales.
And finally, I want to give youa sneak peek to the next three
History Now sessions coming upOn the 3rd of April Histories of
Capitalism Now with HannaForsythe, sophie Loy Wilson and
(48:50):
Mike Beggs as Chair.
Same place here, 5pm on the 3rdof April, and the registration
for that will be up pretty soonon the State Library website.
Oh, it could just come.
But yeah, the first of May, mayDay, special Aboriginal
Political Histories with HeidiNorman, john Maynard and Linda
June Coe, and on the 5th of June, histories of Mental Health
(49:13):
with Catherine Colvone and JamieDunck.
So that's the next three.
There's more beyond that, butthat's probably enough for now.
I hope to see you again atthose events and, yeah, thank
you for being such a wonderfulaudience.
I'll say that's enough.
Bye, bye.
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