Between 1770 and 1870 the Australian colonies provided the setting for the development of new kinds of knowledge and influenced the development of the fields of humanitarianism, prison reform, and botanical science. So argues Anna Johnston in The Antipodean Laboratory, an impressive history grounded in extensive reading and archival research.
Johnston painstakingly traces how networks of European writers transmitted knowledge drawn from their experiences of the colonies. Key protagonists wrote books, reports, and letters, compiled lists of words, sent specimens, published journals, and experimented in their treatment of prisoners and efforts to “help” Aboriginal and Pasifika peoples. Johnston uses the metaphor of the laboratory to refer to Botany Bay and the colonial towns that sprang up over the next one hundred years, arguing that they enabled Europeans to undertake “experiments in various fields…in radically different ways because of the distance from European social norms and oversight” (p. 16). While,...