Seminar Series: Abstract

Revisiting the Encounters between the Tasmanian Aborigines and the French Explorers (1772-1802)
Bertrand Daugeron - PAH Visiting Fellow

Does the landscape itself remember the event?

Could be, but history isn’t geology. Dedicated to retracing chronology, history tends to regard geography as a secondary form of knowledge. In this presentation of a work in progress, the landscape is accorded prime position in an attempt to embody the cross-cultural encounters between Tasmanian Aborigines and early French explorers.

Studies of first contacts are well established in the field of Pacific history but the point of view adopted in this book project places particular emphasis on the face to face experience of encounter. Sharing the same humankind, I’m aiming to reread the emotional feelings (hope, fear, etc.) expressed in the original narratives. Indeed, this dimension surfaces in all of the writings, as, for instance, the evident desire of both sides to meet but also their mutual fear of the unknown.

Revisiting the landscape is a particular methodological way of writing history. Breaking down the linearity of the narrative, the consideration of spatiality allows for a rebuilding of the whole event. Because events place within a precise area, it is relevant to revisit these first meeting places. This also serves to expand the historical material available: a careful reading of personal diaries, maps, drawings, and artefacts, considered together, allows us to retrace the encounters and their meetings themselves and identify the indigenous countersigns embedded in such texts, images and objects during the visits to Van Diemen's Land of Marion-Dufresne, D’Entrecasteaux and Baudin.

Perhaps we can consider landscape as a form of inscription. This presentation will introduce a work in progress that operates in both directions past and present: the actual Tasmanian landscape and archives kept in France. Before 1803, during this pre-colonial period, the meeting really took place. It's important to underline it, that’s my goal.