Navigating Encounters and Exchanges: Intercolonial trade, industry and labour mobility in Asia Pacific, 1800s – 1950s

The two-day symposium will feature international and local keynote speakers as well as panel discussions which explore flows and connections of commodity, craft, labour and expertise between sites and communities across Asia Pacific from 1800s – 1950s and beyond.

Buildings for industry, agriculture and trade in Australia, the Pacific and South-East Asia share an important but forgotten history of encounter, exchange, and influence. Industrial heritage is also under- represented in World Heritage lists, with the Asia Pacific region poorly represented and global connections between industrial sites insufficiently understood (Falser & Yang, 2001). This symposium addresses these research gaps by providing a forum for academics, archivists, and heritage practitioners to share their examinations of unprecedented buildings for trade and industrial-scale resource extraction across Asia-Pacific’s multiple colonial entities and their successor nation-states.

Click here to view the programme.

| PUBLIC KEYNOTE | ADRIAN VICKERS AND JULIA MARTINEZ

CORRUGATED IRON AND INDUSTRY IN TROPICAL AUSTRALIAN SPACES

Industrial heritage mainly consists of now-absent buildings, the kinds of temporary structures built for a season or perhaps the length of a period of indenture. Made from the cheapest available materials for transient labour forces, the structures created by Australian enterprises in the Asia-Pacific between the early- to mid-twentieth century have left few records. These were structures for living, work and entertainment. In Aru, Broome, Cairns, Darwin and Nauru, Australian industries such as pearling, plantations and mining found various ways to cater for the mobile work-forces they hired.

In some cases, these workforces had to innovate with materials at hand, while in others, employers provided the materials. Workers often lived on boats or on the beach, so their needs varied. In these industrial sites, corrugated iron was the major preferred material. The post-war reconstruction of facilities for Chinese indentured labourers on Australian- administered Nauru transferred the make-shift pre-War structures into a planned environment. The buildings were made from easy to assemble corrugated iron sheeting, transported from Australia. Consideration for the tropical climate resulted in ample shading and ventilation. Under scrutiny from the United Nations and the Hong Kong authorities, worker living conditions were defined in terms of living quarters, food and entertainment and hospital facilities.

But, as had been the case since the first Chinese labourers arrived in 1906, there remained a policy of racial segregation between indigenous Nauruans, Chinese and Europeans, with distinct buildings required for each group.
.

| KEYNOTE | ALEX BREMNER

SEEING IS BELIEVING: VISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE AND NOTIONS OF SECURITIZATION IN COLONIAL TRADE

This talk will begin by taking a glance at the built infrastructure of early global capitalism as manifest through the China Trade in the Asia-Pacific region, before considering if this infrastructure served a greater purpose than the mere perfunctory facilitation of trade.

Although buildings such as docks, warehouses, counting houses, offices etc. were understood in primarily ‘functional’ terms, it is worth considering what additional semiotic indicators they intentionally or unintentionally conveyed. How, for instance, did the physical presence/appearance of such buildings and infrastructure signal ideas of securitization, thus engendering myths of safe, ‘smooth’, and/or frictionless capital flows. How were these buildings themselves a function of the heavily networked capitalist environment in which they operated and made possible? Or, indeed, why did the image of architecture come to stand in for this idea of safe, smooth capital flows in critically associated industries such as insurance and banking?

The second part of the talk will address the latter of these questions by taking a wider view of the networked spaces of imperial capitalism through architectural notions devised within the insurance and banking industries which lay at the foundations of colonial and inter-colonial trade. Trade and capital were of course connected, and it is useful to see them as strategically aligned in a rhetorical sense as much as economically. In exploring these themes, the talk will draw on concepts from related fields of enquiry concerning the history of global capitalism, including ‘lubricity’, ‘extrastatecraft’, ‘deadly logistics’, and the social function of architecture.