Entangled Tropical Knowledges: Towards a Poetics of Knowledge and Place-Making in Nineteenth Century Voyaging Narratives

Abstract

Footsteps mark the land as people walk through the north eastern Queensland tropics. Here, in the mid-1800s, botanical explorers from the survey ship HMS Rattlesnake scour their newly encountered environment for species that will be sent as specimens to the growing collections in London. Local Aboriginal people walk with them, perhaps as guides, possibly interpreters. The narratives for this voyage refer to some individual Aboriginal people who accompanied the Europeans as cotaiga, companion – a word from one of the Cape York Peninsula languages. Meetings and encounters between these voyagers and the local people take place around conversations and communications concerning local environmental knowledge. In this paper I look more closely at these ‘knowledge encounters’, to consider the complex poetics of entanglements between local Indigenous knowledges and Western modes of knowledge and representations of the local environment. Interrogating the voyaging narratives for their depictions of these encounters-in-place, my paper will meditate upon philosophies of movement, of walking and being in place, and of place making in the tropics. The paper will also ask questions about the role of historical representations of entangled tropical knowledge formations in present day concerns about climate and environmental change.