As a Pacific historian and historian of science, my major research interest has been the history of the global concept of race and its particular manifestations in Oceania (conceived broadly as the Pacific Islands, Island Southeast Asia, and Australia). My monograph Science, Voyages, and Encounters in Oceania 1511-1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) examines the interplay of metropolitan ideas, regional experience, and Indigenous agency in European descriptions, representations, and classifications of people encountered in Oceania. More recently, focussing on the intersections of raciology with geography and local knowledge, I have correlated the conception, naming and partition of spaces with the naming, division and (eventual) racial classification of people within them. By tracing knowledge about places and their inhabitants to actual encounters, I investigate the co-dependence of local and metropolitan modes of knowing, naming, and acting. This approach throws new light on the complicity of racial geography and anthropology in 19th- and early 20th-century imperial competition and colonisation. I am fascinated by European maps of Oceania and the traces of Indigenous agency and local places inscribed in them. I was co-editor and am now secretary-treasurer of the Journal of Pacific History and am co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Pacific History.

Career highlights

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer, La Trobe University (1971-96); Fellow/Senior Fellow, The Australian National University (1997-2012); Visiting Fellow, Comparative Austronesian Project, ANU (1991); Visiting Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1995 and 2007); Humanities Research Centre Fellow, ANU (1996); Caird Fellow, National Maritime Museum, UK (2001); Harold White Fellow, National Library of Australia (2010); winner, Journal of Historical Geography Prize for best article published in 2014; elected fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities (2020).

BA (Hons) (Adelaide), 1966; PhD (ANU), 1972

The history of the idea of race, globally and in the context of encounters in Oceania, and in modern genomic studies; the history of archaeology, anthropology, and collecting in Oceania; the history of Melanesian Christianities; the colonial histories of New Caledonia and Vanuatu. My major theoretical and methodical concerns are the identification of traces of local agency and the power of place in colonial or élite representations of actual encounters, including visual or digital images, maps, vocabularies, and object collections.