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History Now 2024, Ep. 1: New Earth Histories

• The History Council of NSW and various guests • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Professor Alison Bashford and Dr Jarrod Hore, 
Chair: Dr Frances Flanagan

Alison Bashford and Jarrod Hore reflect on New Earth Histories and how the history of geosciences and different world cosmologies can be brought together.


History Now seminars explore current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. It is a long-running series of public talks and discussions, bringing new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice.

In 2024, the series, curated and directed by Dr Jesse Adams Stein, is a partnership event between the History Council of NSW, the Australian Centre for Public History (UTS) and the State Library of NSW.

The History Council of NSW is supported by the NSW Government via a grant from Create NSW.

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Dr Jesse Adams Stein:

My name is Jessie Adams Stein and I'm here in my capacity as the Program Director for History Now 2024, and I represent both the History Council of New South Wales and the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS. Thank you so much for coming along to the first session of History Now 2024, new Earth Histories. Before we begin, I'd like to start by acknowledging the land upon which we meet here. At the top of the hill on Gadigal Country, looking out to Warren Sydney Cove and Wogan-Migulia Farm Cove, we are, of course, not far from one of the key sites of colonial invasion. I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal as the traditional custodians of the land upon which we are standing and pay my respects to elders past and present, and acknowledge that we are on stolen land. Today we will be hearing a lot about time and about how we come to know the earth, and I think it's important that we start by acknowledging the incredible value of indigenous knowledge about the past and about country, and I'm sure we'll hear more about that soon.

Dr Jesse Adams Stein:

I just wanted to say a little bit about what History Now is as a program. So it's actually a long running talk series. It's been going for quite a while in many different iterations and it's gone through many different hands as well, so it gets passed long. Often it's in person, of course, during the COVID years it's been online, and so 2024 History Now is being coordinated by me in my multiple hats capacity, both at the History Council of New South Wales and as a member of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS, and we also have venue support, of course, from the State Library of New South Wales, who have been very accommodating. I'd like to introduce you to the chair of tonight's event, the fantastic Dr Francis Flanagan. Francis is one of those public intellectuals whose expertise sort of overflows beyond conventional boundaries, so it makes it hard to describe, but she's a lecturer at UTS Law, she's an environmental labour expert, industrial relations expert and an historian as well. So thank you, francis, for agreeing to chair today's event, and Francis will introduce the speakers. Thanks.

Dr Frances Flanagan:

Thank you so much, jessie. Well, it is my immense pleasure to chair tonight's discussion of New Earth, histories, geocosmologies and the making of the modern world. Now there's a physical manifestation of this book that I think you can look at on the table there. This is a book that offers a profound rethinking of the question of how we come to know the earth. The questions that it asks are of a scope and a scale that are simply dazzling. It asks how different ideas about the sacred, the animate and the earthly changed the modern environmental sciences, how different world traditions understood human and geological origins, how the inclusion of multiple cosmologies changed the meaning of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis. And the context for answering these questions are also enormous, encompassing Chinese, pacific, islamic, south and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth's origin and its make up. It uses diverse methods, too, from cultural history to ethnography, geography and indigenous studies. This is a deeply imaginative, extremely complex and also unsettling book. Nothing and no one is comfortably either local or cosmopolitan, or secular or sacred. In this text, we're constantly reminded that earth knowledge is always and has always emerged from very historically specific situations, so it will be a book of interest to all of you, especially if you are like me and you've become convinced of the urgency of keeping it in the ground, as the saying goes, when it comes to fossil fuels, this book reminds us that our conception of what the ground is and what it is, and what our agency is in relation to it, is deeply historically contingent.

Dr Frances Flanagan:

Okay, so let me now introduce our speakers. To begin with, professor Alison Bashford, science Professor in History and Director of the Laureate Centre for Earth and Population at UNSW. She is the editor, along with Emily Kern and Adam Bobet, of New Earth Histories, and her work connects the history of science, global history and environmental history into new assessments of the modern world from the 18th to the 20th century. She is the author of many, many publications, which I will not list, but most recently the prize-winning and intimate history of evolution the story of the Huxley family.

Dr Frances Flanagan:

Now second speaker is Dr Jared Hall, an environmental historian of settler colonial landscapes, nature writing and geology. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the New Earth Histories Research Program at UNSW and his work on earthquake geology, wilderness photography, early environmentalism and logistics of the natural history trade has been widely published. He's also the author of the award-winning book Visions of Nature how Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism, a physical copy of which is also available on the table to have a look at too. So our speakers will speak for 20 minutes and then we will have some questions. 20 minutes each, I should say. Thank you very much.

Prof Alison Bashford:

Thank you, jesse. I wish you had written the introduction to the book. Actually there is a really nice and generous summary. This microphone is okay, yep, great. So thank you. Thank you History Council and UTS and the State Library, and thank you for the invitation to talk about New Earth Histories, which is has this manifestation as a book which came out late last year, which was a pleasure to edit with Emily Kern and Adam Abett, who were then postdocs, who now have scattered to other parts of the, to other continents and it, but it continues. New Earth Histories continues as a research program that Jared Hoare and I run together at University of New South Wales and really, as you were talking, jesse, I was trying to think back through how I became a historian of Geosciences, because my own background as a historian of science generally for many, many years and for many projects, including the Huxley book and Interest and Interment History of Evolution, was much more about the bio world, biological history of biological sciences, histories of eugenics.

Prof Alison Bashford:

I've done history of reproduction, history of history of biological sciences, history of evolutionary sciences, which is what the Huxley book really is about, and so really for two decades now that that world of biological sciences and its past has been my focus and at some point I don't really I'm scratching my head trying to think what made me cross over to that other scientific side to start thinking about geological sciences and start to think about the people in the past for whom inorganic rocks were core business. And I think I got there probably as a world historian. So you know many of you here will understand that in the last 10 years or more, the scale that modern historians have worked on has become larger and larger and there's been a what's a while ago, people to call the planet return in lots of humanities scholarship, but also in in for historians, where we started to have to think about the whole globe, how we think about that historically, how we think about the planet historically. And it still stuns me that I I can still remember historians starting to talk about the planet as something, as a whole thing that we can historicize as historians, not as scientists for the first time, and it seemed revolutionary, but now it's an ordinary, if not essential thing to discuss. So it's maybe via that route that I started to think about earth sciences.

Prof Alison Bashford:

But then the thing that caught me and what is really still at the core of this project for me, conceptually and historically, is how, for all of our colleagues and maybe some of you here who work with apparently inorganic rocks, strata, minerals in the earth, when we look back historically not very long ago, not very many generations ago, geologists were the precisely the scholars who were most likely to be theologians, who were most likely to think about the age of the earth and how that is to be aligned with biblical scholarship. They were the people. Geologists were more likely than the life scientists or even the evolutionary theorists, or possibly them, to be thinking about how rocks told the time of the earth and how that didn't, didn't align with Genesis, how the Christian story needed to be rethought by evidence that rocks themselves, so to say, and stratigraphies of the earth were revealing. And so I became really fascinated with how this whole linking as we've got in our subtitle here of geology on the one hand and cosmology on the other, the beginning of the earth, the many people still now, but obviously for much of human existence, a kind of a divine birth, so to say, of the earth, sat right up close to and with geology, in the sense that I think it's clarified most in the number of leading geologists in the 18th and 19th century, who were themselves theologists as well, and these two things just sat really closely. And so I think that's for me.

Prof Alison Bashford:

There's something even in the very limited and very particular history of European science geology and cosmology. You don't have to scratch very far back in time or below the surface to find these two things twinned. And it was always interesting to me that you know it was historically the scientists who were most interested in the apparently inanimate, for whom big scriptural, biblical cosmological stories were also core business. And so for me I think that made me wonder, as all historians of science do now, how particular that story is, how European or North American or even perhaps Northern Hemispheric that story is, and how stratigraphies of the earth or the lithosphere of the earth, or rocks of the earth, particular minerals, particular gemstones, even to bring the scale right down, also had cosmologies attached to them. And so the purpose of the ongoing program in this particular book was really to start looking in other directions, in other kinds of traditions for geological and cosmological stories. And I learned things, like you know, on the larger scale.

Prof Alison Bashford:

I learned through this project that, although as someone who comes out of a tradition of the history of classic European geological sciences in this instance, where we know that Western science has the capacity to imagine itself as the universal story, and that's, you know, a very familiar claim to make and a very familiar claim to criticize, now that it imagines itself as universal and the only truth. What I learned in this project was the number of other locations and places and ways of knowing the earth that also claimed a kind of universal status, and so there's a really fantastic. The first chapter in the book is by Sumathi Ramaswamy, who's a really great historian of how the earth came to be imagined as a globe shape and what other traditions of universalizing understanding of the earth were displaced in order for that to become normal. I learned from the chapter that Catherine Dit, who's a historian of Neu-en, really 18th century Vietnam. I learned from her these completely different ways in which the earth, let's say the globe, was understood to belong to a universe. In that 18th century Vietnamese tradition it was the analogy of an egg shell, and so there's a soft earth at the center and nine layers, if I remember correctly. Some of you here may know nine layers of increasingly hard matter until you get to the egg shell outside of the universe. That's a universalizing idea, and so really the book was partly about what other traditions, what other ways in which, what other ways has the globe, earth and a kind of a universe been imagined? So that's the large book project.

Prof Alison Bashford:

But let me talk to you for a little bit about a spin-off project that may give you another sense. It's an example really of how we might think about classic geological histories, but how they have cosmological or spiritual, one might say, or certainly cultural histories behind and around them that are exciting to lay on top of the scientific histories. So one other project, and this is an example of how, once I've started to think, what are the new ways in which we can think of, let's say, the history of geology, all kinds of things open up. And one of the things that's opened up for me and a team and Jared is also involved in this project is a history of Gondwana, and you will all know Gondwana land as the once linked, continentally linked Southern Hemisphere that broke up, started to break up about 200 million years ago to form, as you see there, broadly South America, africa, india or South Asia, antarctica and Australia, and parts of which of course geologists here will know, are still on the sea floor and I started to think about what are the other?

Prof Alison Bashford:

What is the geological history, what are the history of ideas that gave rise to this thesis about Gondwana land, which prefaced the idea of wandering continents, and then, very, quite late in the, quite recently, the idea of plate tectonics, and I think Jared may talk more about this. Behind all that was quite recent I mean 1870s, 1880s speculation initially about these continents in Southern Hemisphere of the Earth being connected, and that speculation had a tiny start. This is little glossopterous fossil leaf, quite common actually, so my colleagues here in the Israeli Museum tell me still being unearthed quite constantly. And Scottish geologists in India that will become important started to pick up this fossil leaf. They knew from its pattern that it was already called a glossopterous fossil and they would say to one another to condense this story oh, I've seen this somewhere else and they're together in central India. I've seen this somewhere else, I've seen this in New South Wales, I've seen this in Southern Africa. And it's from this evidence, this fossil evidence that was scattered across they knew quite quickly was scattered across various continents that the thesis of a linked Gondwana land emerged. And then, as geological scientists went to other, to other continents. The glossopterous fossil leaf continued to reveal linked continents. So in a way there is a really fascinating, just plain history of geology about Gondwana land how the idea emerged, who thought of it, where they thought of it and how it led eventually I'm very late actually to plate tectonics, that we now understand the whole earth to be formed around.

Prof Alison Bashford:

One of the reasons why to kind of put the new on that old Earth history, one of the reasons why this took my fancy as a historian, was that, as everybody in this room I'm sure understands, gondwana land and Gondwana has a very particular Australian resonance. It is the case, I think you'd agree, that most people on the street would have some sense that Gondwana land was an ancient continent, that Australian was part of it. They may not layer beyond that Many people would, but it's a very familiar Australian idea and when I started speaking to my colleague historians in other continents, they were puzzled that it has a particular Australian purchase and that made me think why is that the case? But just to demonstrate, it's an Australian purchase. So why would this huge super mega-continent that once was the entire southern part of the Earth become so especially resonant to us here in this continent, but just to demonstrate its resonance there is at the moment when you look up. Why would you?

Prof Alison Bashford:

Let me just tell you ABN, which I do probably once a week, because I'm obsessed with the use of Gondwana as a term. There are hundreds and hundreds of companies in Australia that use the word Gondwana in their title, and so it's got a. If it could have been copyrighted and patented, it would have been, and they range from everything to this kind of indigenous connection. Gondwana Dreaming Tours the choirs, of course, is probably one of the most well-known use of the term. There is not one, but quite a lot of indigenous art galleries that are called Gondwana Art Galleries. There are also, at the other end of the ABN list, a resource extraction, mineral extraction companies called Gondwana Resources. That's just one example. Or the Gondwana Coal Company. It goes on and on and on. There's Gondwana Botanical Gardens, there's Gondwana Day Spars, there's Gondwana the folk group from the 80s. Some of you may remember. Maybe they still exist, I don't know, I probably should.

Prof Alison Bashford:

So I became really interested in what's the cultural history that made Gondwana so particular to Australia, and in research that we've done, it is clear that in fact, most Australians will understand Gondwana as having some special purchase to hear. But not only that. They will say it's. They will say something like oh, it's an indigenous word, I'm not quite sure where, from across the continent, but it's an indigenous word. And if you all think that too, right now you are in the majority. Most people have that understanding of Gondwana.

Prof Alison Bashford:

However, the term Gondwana land doesn't come from here at all. It comes from Gondwana, which is a central province, was a central province formerly known in Mughal India and in early British India, and Gondwana is in the across the centre of India. It's where the Scottish geologists were. They found this fossil leaf. They were in a place called Gondwana. They called it Gondwana land. So this thing that Australians have so embraced and are ironically nationalised in fact has an Indian origin. But not only that, of course. There is no state in India any longer called Gondwana, but there are Gond people registered in Indian terms as a tribal group, and Gond people understand their homeland as Gondwana. They've been generally forced off their homeland. There's a big resource. This is where these earth histories start to fold into one another. There's a big resource history here first clearing for trees. Then guess what? That fossil leaf turned into Coal, fossil fuses, a lot of mining, so there's a lot of displaced Gond people and essentially, in our terms, a land reclaiming politics. And here's an amazing humans of Gondwana, facebook.

Prof Alison Bashford:

Not only that, and this is where the project, this is where I think Gondwana is a nice second project for me anyway, because the standard old earth history, the history of geology, doesn't catch any of this and it doesn't catch what Gondwana land now means or came to mean for the Gond people. So for me, the kind of most exciting thing about thinking about something like an ancient mega-continent in its modern iterations and as a cosmology, we can see in these posters. These are posters from the 1970s, jared, would that be? That's what I think, the 1970s gond political posters arguing for the restatement of a state called Gondwana, which is their home territory. So it's a land reclaiming politics and there are several gond politicians in the Indian parliament. But for me and for us today, what I hope is interesting is the mobilization by gond people themselves of this phenomenon.

Prof Alison Bashford:

Gondwana land, the southern hemisphere of the earth, and you can see it depicted here, obviously, but also, really interestingly, here, where LaRaysia, the northern hemisphere, is distinct from Gondwana land and this project, mark II project in New Earth histories. We have anthropologists and historians and geophysicists as well, all involved. And one of our colleagues, who's the anthropologist, does a lot of work with gond people and she told us at a meeting all up to a year ago now. She presented work where she said that gond people themselves understand themselves as the original people of Gondwana land. And so one of our colleagues said oh, so gond people are like the first nations of Gondwana land. And so for me there was such a fascinating folding of this 200 million year ago history with not just 1880s Scottish geologists, which is interesting enough in itself, but classic geological sciences, but actually this cosmology for gond people in India, after whom Gondwana land is named, who have, let's say, appropriated, taken on the idea of a southern hemisphere continent and imagined themselves as the original people of that. And I did say to my Uriya anthropologist colleague hang on, are you saying to me that that means gond people understand themselves as original people vis-a-vis other indigenous people across the southern hemisphere? And she said yes, that is the case. So there's all these really interesting origin stories that are often deep or not even that deep, in fact not even deep at all inside histories of geology, and that's the kind of way in which I hope New Earth histories can take a well-known story, actually of something like Gondwana land, a phenomenon that's obviously well-known, deeply researched, and think through its other meanings. It has a completely different politics, but also cosmology, to the gond people.

Prof Alison Bashford:

And last story, one of my favorite. Oh, before I get to my favorite story, should I stop? Ok, two minutes is easy. So before we think, oh, it's the gond people who have a particular cosmological relationship to this thing called gondwana land, let's think again.

Prof Alison Bashford:

Here we have Ernst Heckel, the key German Darwinist in the late 19th century. So you don't get anybody more card-carrying as a scientist in the 19th century and he's starting to think, as they all did what is the dispersal of humankind and where did Ernst Heckel put the origin of humanity? Right here in the bottom, underneath South Asia, in the Indian Ocean, and in fact he calls it Lemuria. And Lemuria is actually a mythic, sunken continent, mythic, it's like Atlantis. But I became really it's not just so to say the gond people who are imagining these things.

Prof Alison Bashford:

I don't know this, but I suspect that those political posters are partly derived from these ideas absolutely at the core of Western science, at the core of Darwinism in the 19th century that also understand this as a kind of a human origin point. And so, on the one hand, this is where I get once. This is the kind of opening I suppose is one way of putting it as someone who's trained in classic history of sciences, which is what did scientists think in the past? But once I've started to think about what are new Earth histories, what are new ways of thinking, that in fact the folding and refolding of all these much larger and bigger stories, especially in Earth sciences, come together, and it's the Gondwana land project at the moment. That is case number one, I suppose, for a large project folding out of the New Earth histories project.

Prof Alison Bashford:

30 seconds, for my favorite part of this story, which we're still researching, is that not only did there's another Lemuria story to tell, not only did Ernst Heckel, darwinist in Germany, imagine an origin for humans which in fact on the sea calls paradise interestingly, that's the point as well in the Indian Ocean but our colleague also tells us that in the mountains of former Gondwana there are re-workings of pilgrimagees that completely take the Gondwana land story to heart and have now manifested since the 1970s, 80s and 90s as pilgrimages of thousands and thousands of people and she showed us wonderful slides of this up through the mountains in Gondwana, including to the place where the Glasopteris fossil leaf was first discovered by the Scottish geologists.

Prof Alison Bashford:

And so there's a sacralizing of that geological story of Scottish geologists picking up the fossil leaf and starting to piece Gondwana land together has been folded into this curious, wonderful sacralizing of that particular history. So I think I should leave it there, but I hope that gives you something of a taste of what our ambitions are to rethink really wonderful old-earth histories into new-earth histories. Thank you, thank you.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

Hello everyone and thank you for coming along tonight to hear more about New Earth Histories. The next 20 minutes I'm planning to give you a brief insight at building off Allyson's presentation, a brief insight into the book I'm currently working on, tentatively titled Earth Science from the Geological South surveying a revolution in planetary history. So thank you for being the test audience for this. So in this book I'm developing an account of one of the major shifts that defined 20th century Earth science by focusing on a series of specific materials and sites outside of the highly storied geologies of the United Kingdom and North America. Placing things like coal from West Bengal, which we just heard a little bit about, or from the Hunter Valley, or diamonds from the Kimberley or from Brazil, or oil from the Somali Peninsula, at the centre of this history, I think can help us explain how geologists went from understanding the Earth as relatively stable, unchanging unit in the 1830s to accepting it in the 1960s that the Earth was so dynamic that the very continental shapes that define our world are contingent and temporary, albeit in deep planetary history. So more on this soon, but first I wanted to reflect a little on the fact that this work has been totally conceived of and partially written at this stage anyway, within the frames of reference provided by New Earth Histories, and it forms a part of, and has developed with the support of, an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant called Empty Podenean Geology, of which Allison and Alessandro Antonello from Flinders University are the chief investigators. So these two things together New Earth Histories and what we call the Gondwan Land Project, have defined the outlines of this project, and at the core of it all is a provocation to approach the history of geoscience, as we've heard, as a product of a whole range of different ways of thinking about the Earth. In the New Earth Histories book, allison, emily and Adam make the important argument that the geological and environmental sciences emerge from cosmopolitan exchanges and colonial encounters, and this created new ways of knowing the Earth and its history which carry the signatures, importantly, of diverse origins. What a powerful conceptual apparatus, I figure.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

So applied to the history of what is perhaps one of the master sciences of the 20th century plate tectonics. Simply put, plate tectonics is the label for a theory that describes the geography of the Earth, how the geography of the Earth is defined by the long run consequences of large slabs of crust being pushed over the mantle by Mino-Ocean ridges when new crust is generated. After its acceptance in the 1960s, it elegantly solved a whole range of geological mysteries that have persisted within older models of the Earth, which emphasise the fixity of continents and oceans. Now, within the history and philosophy of science, plate tectonics is one of the most frequently cited instances of Thomas Kuhn's model of a scientific revolution. Trained geologist and historian of science Naomi Uresci described it in nature as an idea that simply clicked, the product of a long process of convergence between evidence and theory. Perhaps we can get into the details of all this later in discussion, but for now I think it's enough to say that scholars interested in the history of this moment have overwhelmingly focused on one part of this convergence, and that is the theory. Of course, this work is fundamental, and it does contextualise the key geophysical triggers of revision. Marie Tharp's discovery and mapping of Mino-Ocean ridges in the 1950s has rightfully been a pride of place, and Frederick Weyne and Drummond Matthews' diagnosis of alternating magnetic polarity in ocean bedrock is also very prominent. However, this literature tends to marginalise the problem of older or more established evidence of a dynamic Earth, which I've become much more interested in as a result.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

So I want to begin to open up this problem by showing you this photograph. So on your screen here is an image of two people meeting in Hungary in 1907. On the left is Bailey Willis, who at this stage was working for the United States Geological Survey as a consulting surveyor and as an earthquake geologist. Willis went on to conduct field work in an incredible array of different sites across the globe and developed very important theories of energy transfer within the crust and within the interior of the Earth. Although he remained an opponent of ideas like continental drift, passing away in 1949, he was nevertheless one of the first scientists to substantiate the idea of an energetic, a gentile planet.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

On the right, seated across, is Edward Seuss, an Austrian geologist who may as well have been from a different age entirely. Seuss was born in 1831 and spent his career assembling correspondence from a worldwide network of geologists and savants to compose his monumental account of universal geology, das Anlitzter Erder, or the face of the Earth. It was in the course of this work that he coined the geological term Godwana land, using the name for a stratigraphic sequence in West Bengal to describe a connected southern hemisphere supercontinent. Now, seuss' vision of the face of the Earth might seem quite similar to the kind of thinking the defined Willis' era and its inheritors in the world of plate tectonics, and Seuss' often referred to as an early visionary. However, there are some major differences. Probably the most important one is that Seuss' work was in the mode of old geology. He had radical ideas about mountain chains, land bridges and raised plateau, but they were made sense of using the trick of old geology unlimited time In this geology in many ways respected uniformitarianism.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

Like Charles Lyle and other leading 19th century geologists, he argued that the face of the Earth had changed many times over. He accepted that geophysical constraints, such as very slow rates of change and the relative position of the five continents, were stable. Now I want to suggest that people like Willis and his understanding of a dynamic Earth then must have come from a different tradition, and the key purpose of the book is to show that one important thread of this tradition that sustained different views of a dynamic planet around the turn of, around the middle of the 20th century. It runs firmly through a series of colonial sites that I'm referring to as a geological south. So between the 1830s and 1960s I'm aiming to show how colonial surveyors in India, australia, southern and Eastern Africa and South America found evidence of dramatic geological changes in coal seams, diamond mines, river sediments, stone quarries and oil fields. These finds challenged the conventional understandings of old geology, gradually forcing reassessments of important junctures in planetary history.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

Over a more than a hemisphere, from the Himalaya to the High Belt and from the Andes to the Australian Outback, surveys were made to account the geophysical facts that contradicted orthodoxy. What did it mean, for instance, that coal seams in West Bengal and in New South Wales were more recent than the great carboniferous seams of Yorkshire and Pennsylvania? What exactly were the giant cone-shaped structures that punctured the crust of the diamond fields around Kimberley in the Northern Cape? What could the millions of micro fossils retrieved from oil wells around the Red Sea tell geologists about the paleogeography of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia? And by engaging with questions like these, by formulating them and by thinking about and with the resources that inspired them, colonial surveyors and geologists became some of the most forceful advocates of a dynamic earth, well before the 1950s.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

Now, to try and contextualise sorry the emergence of this thinking, the book adopts the perspective of figures working within a range of colonial sites. These include the coal frontiers of India and Australia from the 1840s, the diamond-bearing locales of South Africa and Brazil, the huge river basins of the Rio de la Plata and Amazon, and the fault systems of the Great Rift Valley. Now these are the sites I'm trying to capture when I use the phrase geological south, defined by a unique set of geopolitical investments and information economies. Some of these sites were or became colonies between the 1830s or 1960s, and others were independent nations, in part defined by their colonial legacies. I'm interested in making a case here that the historical conditions of this geological south are an essential part of assessing the development of modern earth science.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

This story, I argue, is ultimately about the study of resources and a series of separate but comparable struggles over their location, description, extraction and value, and I want to go through a few of these now. So, as we've heard, this process of engagement with resources and thinking about the dynamic earth began during the 1830s, during the colonial mapping of coal seams in India, australia and Southern Africa. Here surveyors closely engaged with Permian deposits and the materials surrounding them. Those Scottish geologists, thomas Oldham, henry Medleycott and William Blandford, mapped the whole sequence of shales, coal, sandstones and glacial debris in West Bengal, in Gondwana, in the 1860s. Oldham predicted that this formation had equivalence in Southern Africa and in the 1870s. Medleycott's naming of this series triggered reappraisals of similar Permian coal basins in New South Wales, those in the Hunter that were linked to those in India by the distinctive glossopterous fossil leaf.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

As I also mentioned, this study of the Gondwana Coals can fit within a fairly conventional history of old geology, a fairly conventional history of economic geology too. But I'm more interested in how this study of the Gondwana Coals was part of a drastic, repeated and extensive thinking about environmental change. Geologists in the United Kingdom had confronted one part of this problem already, but the existence of coal from the Permian period in these colonial sites, not from the Carboniferous, meant that the planet had experienced multiple and separate coal ages. Metropolitan geologists had also never had to reckon with the geographical extent that she distanced between West Bengal, the Hunter Valley and Vereniging in South Africa, of the stratigraphic continuities that marked a mass extinction in the strata. Here, I think, is where my environmental history background comes in and why I've become interested in these geologists.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

The shift of perspective is to recognise these colonial geologists as environmental thinkers working on a planetary scale, well before figures like Willis and Modern Earth Science more generally adopted this position. Each successive subject, then, that I fold into this history of modern earth. Science advances and reinforces this argument about colonial geologists and their interlocutors. How am I going for time, francis Great? So from the 1870s, for instance, in the middle part of the map, the pattern established by these colonial geologists studying coal and shale was replicated in other fields of economic geology. In this case, it was among, amidst a diamond rush in the Kimberley in South Africa's Northern Cape, which focused worldwide attention on the origin and distribution of these precious minerals, an Australian geologist trained in Victoria, edward Dunne, was one of the first to assess the area, focusing on both coal reserves and on the intrusive geology that generated diamonds. These formations were named then Kimberlite pipes, and these two soon became relevant to the understanding of continental comparison and connection.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

By the 1920s, after nearly three decades working on the diamond fields and for debirs, the great geologist of continental drift, alexander Dottoy sought to compare and link the diamond geology of Southern Africa with much older sources of diamonds in Brazil and in India. Diamond geology, however, differed from coal geology in important ways. The rocks where diamonds are found are igneous and intrusive rather than sedimentary, and therefore the theories generated through the close engagement with these sites triggered new thinking about the interior of the planet, its massive energy flows and the consequences of this. On the surface Again, these studies stitched sites within the book's geological south together, both through the way they focused and textured thinking about the planet and via the increased circulation of scientists and knowledge about the earth. I'm sorry, there's a coal seam. We'll come back to that.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

New places within the geological south were drawn into this established pattern of resource geology in the 1920s, when the search for another hydrocarbon oil focused scientific attention on ocean basins and other marginal zones. One of the figures swept up in this search was the Cambridge hydrogeologists and for a minifera expert, william McFadden. So it was around this time that geologists realized that these fossil for a minifera, which are tiny, ancient single-celled marine organisms fossilized in sedimentary rocks, could be used to indicate the likely presence or absence of oil. The skills of McFadden in this moment, who was a specialist in water, rock and life, were in high demand then, in a set of British possessions and interests in the Middle East, he worked for British Petroleum, the Anglo-Egyptian oil fields one of a map of which is on the screen, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Somaliland Petroleum Company. In Somaliland, in particular, he drilled wells for water, for oil and conducted agricultural surveys. And throughout all of this he sent thousands of rock samples back to Cambridge, which are now held in the Sedrick Museum of Earth Sciences. And although the oil never really flowed in Somalia, mcfadden's research there led instead into debates about the shape and the distribution of the continents and seafloors. Hundreds of millions of years ago, because his micro-fossils provided an index of ocean floor ecology, geologists began to use them to argue that India and East Africa were once much closer together. Part of the northern edge of Gondwana land Now.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

Histories such as these, I think, can illuminate exactly how the colonial search for resources contributed to the development of modern ideas about the Earth's deep history. Coal surveyors challenged established timelines of coal formation and planetary climate. Geologists and engineers in diamond fuels traced out a new kind of vertical force. Consultants and scientists working on oil prospecting created an index of the ancient Earth. Now my expectation here is that this research can establish that it was no accident that many of these significant studies were situated in colonial worlds.

Dr Jarrod Hore:

Not only were geologists such as Blanford, datoi and McFadden highly mobile and occasionally transient, but they were always working in marginal sites where physical conditions were in flux due to the operation of extractive projects. By starting with these sites and the minerals and materials that formed the basis of colonial economies, I think we can effectively draw new connections between, for instance, the particular colonial histories of West Bengal, bahanta Valley, the Kimberley and Somalia and the new environmental orders past, present and future that modern Earth science enabled and articulated. And I think that this work can demonstrate how a sequence of geological engagements with commodities, resources and materials between the 1830s and the 1960s created, in fact, the only scene on which the grand drama of modern Earth science could be played out, and this will place a connected colonial world right at the centre of this history, providing new ground for thinking about the geopolitics of a dynamic planet and the deep histories that have become animate in the Anthropocene.

Dr Jesse Adams Stein:

Thank you, thank you so much again, alison and Jared and Francis. I really appreciate all of you coming and joining in and presenting so beautifully. I just wonder we'll so close off this event and I'll just pull up some slides because they have logos and important things like that Very quickly. But there's some fun stuff coming up because I'm going to tell you about what's happening with the next History Now event. So first of all I do want to acknowledge the History Council of New South Wales team, catherine Shirley, amanda Wells and Laura Sale, as well as our Executive Committee. I also want to acknowledge the State Library of New South Wales for providing the venue and the event support and the Australian Centre for Public History. Thank you to Anna Clark, tamsin Peach and Freya Newman. Also the History Council. I've always acknowledged our cultural partners, which you can see acknowledged here. But I will mention the New South Wales Government via Create New South Wales. And finally, I want to give you a sneak peek to the next three History Now sessions coming up On the 3rd of April Histories of Capitalism Now with Hanna Forsythe, sophie Loy Wilson and Mike Beggs as Chair.

Dr Jesse Adams Stein:

Same place here, 5pm on the 3rd of April, and the registration for that will be up pretty soon on the State Library website. Oh, it could just come. But yeah, the first of May, may Day, special Aboriginal Political Histories with Heidi Norman, john Maynard and Linda June Coe, and on the 5th of June, histories of Mental Health with Catherine Colvone and Jamie Dunck. So that's the next three. There's more beyond that, but that's probably enough for now. I hope to see you again at those events and, yeah, thank you for being such a wonderful audience. I'll say that's enough. Bye, bye.