‘Travelling Knowledge in Western Australia’s Southwest’

Reading Transnational Lives this week I stumbled across Shellam’s ‘Travelling Knowledge in Western Australia’s Southwest’. Her article dismantled the ‘binary’ model of ‘power and passivity’ assumed to characterize 19^thcentury indigenous-European relations in Australia by charting the career of Manyat; an Aboriginal man from King George’s Sound (an ocean inlet on the south coast of Western Australia) who assisted with the European exploration process in the Southwest. I live roughly 216 miles north-west of that inlet in Bunbury, a quiet coastal city situated roughly 105 miles to the south of Perth. Being able to visualize that same Australian terrain Shellam described in her article really encouraged me to read on. 

I should admit that Shellam’s account really heightened my awareness of those pretty serious misconceptions I held about British-indigenous exchanges in the colonial south. Not all ‘transnational’ (Indigenous-European) relationships in the colonial Southwest were characterized by violence or shaped by European racism. 

In 1832 (just two years after the establishment of the Swan River colony in Perth) Manyat was asked to join Scottish doctor Alexander Collie as a guide on an expedition roughly 50 kilometers north from King George’s Sound into the Porrongorup mountain range. From that year and until his retirement, he served as a guide on several more expeditions that traversed Australia’s Southwest region, and even worked as a mediator between indigenous groups and white settlers.

I think Shellam’s description of spatial or ‘travelling knowledge’ as a commodity whose worth was mutual to European and Aboriginal societies was her most interesting point. She emphasized the similar values attributed to ‘transnational travelling’ by British and Indigenous peoples. In both Aboriginal and European cultures, travel served to support local ‘knowledge economies’ and functioned to provide social prestige for the explorer. Collie’s expeditions took him from Scotland to those same Aboriginal ‘nations’ that were foreign to Manyat. Both were ‘transnational’ voyagers. Collie acquired the same type of ‘fame’ that Manyat received for his moving beyond the borders of his indigenous society.   

‘Travelling knowledge gained high currency in the Aboriginal knowledge economy where such information was a valuable commodity, as it was among nineteenth century naturalists and metropolitan savants who traded in natural history objects and anthropological information’.

There are a couple of things I took away from Shellam’s piece which I think might help me as I move forward. First, (and building on our discussion about the importance of the ‘national’ in the ‘trans’) her work speaks to the possibility of applying the transnational lens to spaces and times where the ‘nation’ cannot be understood to have existed in any ‘modern’ / Westphalian sense (pre-federation or indigenous Australia for example). The relationship between Collie and Manyat could certainly be described ‘transnational’, though not fashioned ‘above’, ‘below’ or ‘across’ any particular sovereign territory. I think there is some value then in prioritizing the ‘trans’ over the ‘national’.  

I also think her work highlights the value in using anthropological perspectives to explore transnational relationships. Collie’s exploration was made possible as much by the ‘culturally defined process’ of colonial record as Manyat’s ‘cartographic mind’ in which maps had been ‘danced in story and ceremony’. Reconstructing culturally informed ‘ways of thinking’ is surely crucial to the understanding any ‘transnational’ relationship.That’s something I hope to keep at the forefront of my mind as I continue to practice transnational history in the future.