Introduction

Summary

The introduction showcases colonial officials, missionaries and natural history collectors who, alongside Indigenous interlocutors and metropolitan advocates, sought to collect and use Antipodean information. Three key fields of knowledge emerged from the Australian colonies, and they reveal the relationship between knowledge formation and print culture. Part 1, Imagining Settler Humanitarianism, examines key debates about convictism, race and morality. Part 2, Regulating Settler Society, focuses on convictism and the forms of knowledge about reforming the self and regulating society that emerged from penal experiments. Part 3, Inventing Settler Science, shows how the scientific novelty of the Australian colonies attracted attention from the Endeavour voyage onwards, and inaugurated networks of correspondence, collection and publication that struggled to account for the Indigenous knowledge and participation that characterised the colonies.