Norman Etherington. Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007. 220 pp.p Illustrations. $31.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-9802964-4-0.

Reviewed by Alan Lester
Published on H-HistGeog (September, 2008)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew (University of Bristol)

Cartography and Conquest: Comparative Perspectives

This richly illustrated and beautifully presented book, edited by Norman Etherington, examines cartography and other forms of visual representation as a set of power-laden discourses in the colonial histories of southern Africa and Australia. In a useful if perfunctory introduction, Etherington notes that the cartographic histories of these two regions have received relatively little academic attention, and points to the ways that European colonial mapping exercises tended to erase traces of indigenous societies in the landscape and leave debts to indigenous assistance unacknowledged. While some chapters focus on either Australia or southern Africa alone, others are comparative, and one or two trace direct connections between them.

In the first substantive chapter, Vivian Louis Forbes and Marion Herock show how the activities of the Royal Navy’s Hydrographic Service were shaped by the imperatives of trade and commerce, as well as scientific enquiry, during the nineteenth century. When writing about trans-imperial flows of people, ideas, and materials, as many scholars have now begun to do, it is all too easy to overlook the ways in which these flows were determined by the practicalities of maritime mapping. This chapter brings these practicalities very much to the forefront. Particular emphasis is placed here on the role of certain individuals, such as John Barrow, in fostering hydrographic cartography and the extensions of trade, science, and conquest that followed. Captain James Cook’s patronage of networks of surveyors within the Royal Navy may have received less attention than his own feats of navigation and exploration, but as Forbes and Herock point out, it was no less significant for the expansion of empire. 

The following chapter is something of a contrast. Rather than dealing with the most practical and "applied" of all maps, the hydrographic survey, it examines fictional exercises in cartography used to illustrate and enrich novels in southern African and Australian contexts. Etherington and Lindy Stiebel contrast the gendered image of African spaces of promise awaiting penetration and exploitation by the European male, such as that used in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), with the more grounded and limited maps of spaces of desolation and disappointment used in Australian fiction. They attribute the difference to the metropolitan provenance of much fictional writing about Africa, and the settler provenance of Australian fiction. Aside from the ways in which different kinds of colonial spaces were cast in different ways by differently located authors, the chapter is also instructive on the racial imageries characterizing the fictional texts that accompanied these maps.

Chapter 3 is the first to focus on a single region rather than undertake an interconnected or comparative analysis, and also the first to take a landscape painting as its main source. Janda Gooding highlights the significance of the surveyor and explorer Robert Dale’s Panoramic View of King George’s Sound (1834), which provided a metropolitan audience with a kind of sales brochure for the new Swan River Colony in western Australia. Noting the influence of a training in military field sketching on much early nineteenth-century colonial art, Gooding analyzes the ambivalent relationship between Dale’s portrayal of peaceful and productive Aboriginal-British settler interaction in the painting, and the violent events accompanying colonization "on the ground." While the portrayal was intended to attract immigrants and investment to a fledgling colony, the violence was dealt with in the text that Dale produced to accompany his panorama by rendering Yagan, the most prominent leader of indigenous resistance, as an aberrant figure deserving the beheading that was his fate.

Etherington’s first substantive chapter is one of the best examples in the collection of the fruits of comparative analysis. He attempts to explain why “for nearly three centuries tribal names proliferated on maps of South Africa while the Aboriginal people of Australia were ignored by cartographers who continued to render the interior of the continent as empty of indigenous people” (p. 79). Etherington begins by explaining that European attempts to plot the movements of the barbarian tribes thought to be responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire provided a lasting template for the mapping of ethnic identities in the colonial world. The template was unfortunate both for the barbarians and for African polities, since it posited tribes as discrete, coherent, and enduring ethnic units when, in fact, each such unit was a relatively small, temporary grouping of people willing to follow a particularly strong leader. As Etherington has explained elsewhere, this misunderstanding of the nature of precolonial African ethnicity has detrimentally and profoundly shaped the historiography of the nineteenth century. In terms of mapping alone, it meant that the names of long-vanished groups could appear alongside contemporary groups, that the same group could appear in two different places under two different names, and that groups could be plotted in locations far from their own simply because European travelers encountered people from that group while they were themselves traveling. As Etherington puts it, maps of tribal affiliation in southern Africa “record a series of cross-cultural misunderstandings” (p. 88).

The part of the chapter focusing on the absence of tribal names on Australian maps is necessarily much shorter, but Etherington postulates that the contrast is due largely to the absence of sustained military resistance to conquest, rendering it less of an imperative for settlers to "know their enemies," and the fact that Australian Aboriginal people, much like the San of southern Africa, were thought to be subtribal on the scale of humanity. He also notes a lesser degree of settler interaction with, and greater ignorance of, Aboriginal culture in Australia. I wonder whether more could be made here of the role that traders played as mediators between settler communities and indigenous societies in southern Africa. Certainly traders crossing the Cape frontier in search of ivory, skins, and agricultural produce were important conduits of information about tribal loyalties and locations for the settler communities on the other side of that frontier. The great irony of the more extensive mapping of tribal identities in southern Africa than Australia is that there were probably much clearer boundaries demarcating tribal locations in Australia than there ever were in southern Africa. Etherington concludes by contrasting the exercise of putting tribes on maps in the twentieth century. In South Africa, the plotting of tribal locations was used as part of the segregationist and then apartheid project of carving up space by race and by "tribe." In Australia, more recent attempts to map tribal locations for the first time have been bound up with a more progressive postcolonial politics of recognition, reconciliation, and recompense. While Etherington could, perhaps, have picked up on a similar attempt by Khoisan and Griqua descendents in South Africa to stake claims to identity and land, accompanied by new mapping exercises, the contrast is nevertheless a thought-provoking one.

With Jane Curruthers’s ensuing chapter we are taken back to the in-depth examination of a particular moment, individual, and place. Carruthers shows how Friedrich Jeppe, an early Transvaal bureaucrat, assisted in the construction of a Transvaal state, an incipient national identity, and a discrete territory through his cartographic endeavors. In effect, he turned the local recording of appropriated property within the new republic into an outward projection of the Transvaal as a cartographic entity. In telling his story, however, Carruthers also insists on greater recognition of the significance of German intellectual engagement in the Transvaal. This degree of engagement by a British imperial rival played a much stronger role than is often recognized in the events leading up to the South African War, a war that ultimately saw the end of the republic. This chapter is a well-crafted tale of Anglo-German scientific rivalry as much as it is of Jeppe’s own cartography.

Etherington’s second substantive chapter follows Carruthers and is also focused on southern Africa alone. It examines an extraordinary, and extraordinarily influential, map produced by George Stow, a self-taught geologist, designed to illustrate graphically the successive peopling of the region. The map, with its swathes of migration of San, Khoikhoi, and Bantu peoples cutting into the southern part of the continent from the north, and its menacing upward surge of Ndebele projecting out of the epicenter of the "mfecane" in the southeast, could have remained a curiosity piece if it were not for its popularization and inscription in the national historiography by the historian George M. Theal. It shaped twentieth-century white South African understandings of an innocent and peaceful Bushman people conquered and displaced by undeserving Bantu hordes, who themselves had no right to protest when they, in turn, were displaced by European settler arrivals.

The following chapter by Christopher Vernon returns to a comparative study of the two regions, but one focused on their capital cities in particular. Vernon takes Herbert Baker’s planning of the Union Buildings and his vision of the rest of Pretoria, as well as Walter Burley and Marion Mahoney Griffin’s planning of the whole of Canberra in turn, showing how each of these planners sought to give “three-dimensional, spatial expression to notions of national identity” (p. 147). Whereas Baker envisioned the Union Buildings as an imperial command post overlooking a recently conquered territory (Jeppe’s Transvaal) being assimilated into the empire, Griffin’s American background shaped his vision of Canberra as a space for celebrating an Australian proto-republican independence, styled by its distinctive bush landscape.

Vernon’s chapter, like Etherington’s, is an excellent exercise in comparative history. What I find most tantalizing about it (and other chapters) is the way that it signals the promise of developing more of an interconnected history of southern Africa and Australia. For instance, Vernon notes that South African planners inspired by Baker were among the entrants to the competition to plan Canberra. Furthermore, William Holford, who later redesigned Pretoria to fit the apartheid model of a more thoroughly "racially" segregated city, also redesigned Canberra shortly afterward. Baker, of course, famously went on to redesign the capital of imperial India. Not all links across colonial sites were contained within the British Empire. Vernon also shows how experiments with a new capital in Brazil influenced apartheid era urban design. Such traces of the co-constituted colonial histories of southern Africa and Australia remain largely unexplored in this generally more comparative volume, but it is at least a step in what is, for me, the right direction.

The difficulty of overturning the specifically colonial cartographies examined in this volume is highlighted by the concluding chapter. Stiebel charts the course of the South African government’s attempt to foster new ways of seeing Africa’s history through maps. The Parliamentary Millennium Project, initiated in 2002 by the then speaker of parliament, Frene Ginwala, is reviewed by Stiebel as a genuinely provocative attempt to encourage people in post-apartheid South Africa “to reassess where and who they are by using contrasting perspectives on the landmass of Africa” (p. 181). But, as Stiebel notes, Ginwala recently left parliament in a reshuffle and the project has lost its driving force. “It remains to be seen whether the road mapped out for this ambitious postcolonial project will be followed” (p. 188).

Etherington and the University of Western Australia Press are to be congratulated on having produced a book that is both rich in scholarly insight and beautifully packaged and illustrated.

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Citation: Alan Lester. Review of Etherington, Norman, Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa.. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. September, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15617

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