Abstract
Twenty-seven years ago, in 1961, the art historian Bernard Smith presented a lecture at the University of Queensland which he entitled ‘The Myth of Isolation’.1 In that address he argued that the idea of cultural isolation has become an obsession for many Australian commentators, whose ‘wailing and beating of the breast’ betrays a deep sense of inferiority, an early reference to what Australians have come to call the ‘cultural cringe’. Can there be any doubt that Smith’s critique, although primarily concerned with the world of art, has broader application? Without perhaps beating their breasts about it, Australians have, I think, for too long accepted the myth of distance-imposed isolation as a general explanation for supposed weaknesses in their own scientific tradition.
Much of what I say in this paper stems from discussions with my colleagues Barry Butcher, David Turnbull, George Bindon and, at a greater distance, Mark Adams and Sally Kohlstedt.
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Notes
First published in Australian Painting Today, The John Murtagh Macrossan Lectures. 1961 (Brisbane, 1962). The lecture was given in the year following the publication fo his European Vision and the South Pacific, which remaions Australia’s most seminal contribution to the history of science and of art.
The lecture was recently reprinted in a new anthology of Smith’s essays: B. Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero (Melbourne, 1988).
G. Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne, 1966).
R. Home, ‘The Problem of Intellectual Isolation in Scientific Life’, Historical Records of Australian Science,6(1) 1984, 19–30. This thoughtful paper says much of what needs to be said on the issue of isolation in Australian science but seems too ready to attribute the cause of intellectual isolation to geographical distance.
J.G. Jenkin, ‘Frederick Soddy’s 1904 Visit to Australia and the Subsequent Soddy-Bragg Correspondence: Isolation from Without and Within’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 6(2) (1985), 153–69
Jenkin, op. cit. (n. 5), p. 165. This paper ably recounts a very interesting episode in Australian science. My quarrel is only with the conclusions the author draws about isolation
Smith, op. cit. (n. 2), pp. 223, 219
G. Seddon, ‘Eurocentrism and Australian Science: Some Examples’, Search, 12 (1981–82), 446–50.
Blainey, op. cit., (n. 3), p. ix.
The vast literature on Turner is usefully summarised and excerpted in the anthologies The Frontier Thesis, ed. R.A. Billington (New York) and R. De Renzi, C. Bucci, P. Carretta, G. Guidi, R. Tedeschi, C. Calestani and S. F. J. Cox, Physica C 162–164, 155 (1989).The Turner Thesis, ed. G.R. Taylor(New York, 1956)
Blainey, op. cit., (n. 3), p. ix.
Ibid., p. viii.
Home, op. cit. (n. 4); Ann Moyal, ‘A Bright and Savage Land’: Scientists in Colonial Australia (Sydney, 1986).
Reingold and Rothenberg comment on how difficult it is to decide ‘who is at the center and who at the periphery’, op. cit. (n. 11), p. xii.
S.F. Cannon, Science in Culture: the Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978), p. 101. Numbers and Warner quote a similar remark from the Edinburgh Review seventeen years later: ‘What does the world yet owe to American physicians and surgeons?’ (Reingold and Rothenberg, op. cit. [n. 11], p. 191).
Chambers, ‘Two Stages of the Development of Science in Mexico’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1969).
Interestingly, Black’s comments were added only in the third edition after many of Humboldt’s European critics had accused him of seeing Mexico through ‘rose-coloured glasses’. A. Humboldt, Political Essay on New Spain (London, 1822), p. v-viii.
G.F.FitzGerald to W.F. Barrett, quoted in Jarrell, op. cit. (n. 11), p. 348.
Jarrell, op. cit. (n. 11), pp. 331–6. Jarrell’s discussion of the `asymmetrical’ relations of centre and periphery raises some doubts about the traditional assumption of a strictly dominant-subordinate relationship.
Needham was calling Charles Gillespie to account for an absurdly Eurocentric remark. J. Needham, The Grand Titration (University of Toronto Press, 1969) p. 54.
Charles Richter, I understand, was an American seismologist.
James D. Watson, The Double Helix (Harmondsworth, 1970).
Shapin, ‘“Nibbling at the Teats of Science”: Edinburgh and the Diffusion of Science in the 1830’s’, in I. Inkster and J. Morrell, eds., Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London, 1983), pp. 151–78. This is a fine-grained account of scientific diffusion, reflecting the sort of analysis that I find most useful.
Roberto Moreno, ‘Mexico’, in Glick, op. cit. (n. 36; 1972), p. 348.
Gary S. Dunbar, ‘“The Compass Follows the Flag”: The French Scientific Mission to Mexico, 1864–1867’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 78 (1988), 229–40.
Enrique Beltran, ‘La Science Française au Mexique’, Culture Française, 9(4) (1960), pp. 9–22.
Frederick Burkhardt in Glick, op. cit. (n. 36; 1972), p. 33.
Home, op. cit. (n. 4), p. 20.
G. Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne, 1979), p. 131. Stephen Alomes has written on questions of colonial dependency with regard to Australia in ‘The Satellite Society’, Journal of Australian Studies, 9 (1981), 2–20.
Smith, op. cit. (n. 2), p. 225.
Thomas A. Glick, ‘Relativity in Spain’, Glick op. cit. (n. 36, 1987), p. 255.
Chambers, op. cit. (n. 33), p.314.
Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes, 1987). See especially Chapter 6, ‘Centres of Calculation’, which is another work that helps set the new agenda for historians of colonial science.
John Law, ed., Power, Action and Belief (London, 1986). This anthology also has much of interest to the historian colonial science. For present purposes, see Law’s paper, ‘On the Methods of Long-distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India’, pp. 234–63.
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Chambers, D.W. (1991). Does Distance Tyrannize Science?. In: Home, R.W., Hohlstedt, S.G. (eds) International Science and National Scientific Identity. Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3786-7_2
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