Landscape, Association, Empire / Progress in Mathematics (PDF)

Long-standing imaginings of Van Diemen's Land-as island, as ends of worlds, as pristine wilderness, as emptied of Aborigines-continue to shape contemporary lutruwita/Tasmania. In this superbly contextualised engagement with the work of seven colonial artists, Hutch and Stratford show how associationist thinking was integral to settler landscapes of dispossession and possession. Landscape, Association, Empire provides a surprisingly hopeful wrestling with the fraught legacies of settler colonialism; the future can be imagined otherwise. -Professor Lesley Head, University of Melbourne, Australia

Landscape, Association, Empire explores how representation echoes, shapes, and haunts understanding. It carefully documents the interplay of art, image, policy, and action that tried to create Van Diemen's Land as a place of white innocence and Indigenous absence in the presence of genocide. Its impressive scholarship traces the contexts of colonising through place-making and place-imagining as distilled in landscape paintings. It insists that representation is never neutral or context free; always it has consequences. Hutch and Stratford's brilliant rethinking of colonial imagery undermines narratives of settlement, inviting new conceptualisations of how Tasmania's pasts, presents, and futures connect. -Professor Richie Howitt, Macquarie University, Australia

This fascinating and important book critically examines the diverse works of seven nineteenth century topographical artists, surveyors and writers in Van Diemen's Land. It is illustrated with over 60 carefully selected drawings, paintings, and maps. The authors provide many original and thought-provoking insights into the ways settlers' aesthetic associations were used to construct different ideas of place and home.
-Professor Charles Watkins, University of Nottingham, UK

Elaine Stratford is a professor in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania, with interests in the geohumanities and cultural and political geography and in how people flourish in place, in their movements, in daily life, and over the life-course.