Western Expansion in the 18th Century

Western Expansion in the 18th Century

Colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries was structured and perpetrated by an obsession with scientific empiricism and its mandate to identify, categorize and measure. These processes valorized the qualities of objectivity and precision and underpinned the annexation of new lands. Such discourses influenced navigation procedures, hydrographic charting, mapping, surveying and sketching, and were the currents of thought which drove the discoveries of this era. The trajectories of these currents are crucial to the flow of European history into the spaces of colonial Australasia, because they determined which forms of graphic documentation were officially acceptable and which were not. The precision and concision of surveys and maps were favoured over fulsome artistic renderings such as sketches, watercolours and paintings. Empirical formats were much more easily translated into legal diagrams that accurately determined individual property ownership.

Scientific empiricism drove the acquisition of data about new territories in the Southern Hemisphere and allowed a volume and accuracy of data to be accrued for the agencies of state in Europe. The form the data took, however, had serious limitations in conveying urban design information. The mechanisms for recording information soon became limiting factors in creating cities in new localities (such as Adelaide and Wellington, where the same technical template was applied to totally different topographies with ensuing complications). Explorers such as George Anson and James Cook had been aware of the attrition of non-empirical data in this precise reductive methodology, and had admitted new forms of information collection to their repertoire. These practices of sketching and painting stemmed the loss of some visual information from the empirical framework. It is largely due to these images that we have a record today of the appreciation of landscape and urban culture that such works portrayed.

Post-colonial discourse deconstructs the various forms that this documentation took. A common criticism is the reductive character of the products. Charts, maps, surveys and models were graphic or textual 'diagrams' of legal and, by implication, power relations and are deserving of the criticisms levelled at them: they are territorial codes of a Western culture obsessed with possessions. Jacobs clarifies the social derivation of these procedures by observing that “social constructs and the meanings and practices they generate are at the very heart of the uneven material and political terrains of imperial worlds”.

Charts, maps, surveys and models are all minimal representations of real geography. Their skeletal nature is proprietorial and descriptive of legal outlines rather than full outlines of an actual multi-dimensional site, with its dense mantle of plant, bird, animal and human life. Charts were required to navigate the coasts where imperial desires had focused their attention, but they told little of the profusion of flora and fauna at the land's edge, or of the commotion of inlets teeming with fish.

For the British, the reusable diagram or model, in combination with pragmatic precedent, informed the ongoing production of the city. The reusable diagram and its salient attributes are articulated by Home, who ...