The Pacific
| The Pacific collections in the University and the Hocken Libraries are far too significant to reduce to a single case. The items displayed here are less well-known and less physically imposing than the lovely quartos from the major voyages, but no less interesting for what they tell us about readers' abiding interest in the lands down under. |
Frere's travels
A later work by a woman traveller, Frere's travels convey her sense of
British superiority and entitlement at the height of the empire, as well
as providing a glimpse of travel at a very different pace in the company
of servants. Lucien was an Indo-Portuguese footman who had served her
family in Bombay and was now promoted to factotum. Her account of early
colonial New Zealand is far from flattering, but it is interesting to
find her using 'mate' as a linguistic marker of the place, a usage that
came into British English only in the 1860s.
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Mutiny on the Bounty
Unlike the exciting image on the wall
above, the written account of the Bounty mutiny always strikes a first-time
reader as incredibly unemotional and surprisingly detailed, given the
stress of the moment. Bligh strove for precisely such calm accuracy to
convince the Admiralty that he was not the one who should swing from the
yard-arm, and he succeeded. Sir John Barrow, an Admiralty secretary and
a principal founder of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, compiled
this account, and it has remained the most popular version of the famous
mutiny.
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Settlement of Australia
The frontispiece to this gorgeous volume captures the adventure associated
with the settlement of Australia. Though the documents do not constitute
a travel narrative, their connections with the moment of origin provide
their intended readers with the same sense of national pride and discovery
that attracted readers of the contemporary accounts.
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| Frontispiece. Rutter,
Owen, 1889-1944. The first fleet : the record of the foundation of Australia from its conception to the settlement at Sydney Cove ... Golden Cockerel Press, 1937. Stack Bliss + VT/R |
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