Cultural Geography

22 HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY

to an apparently loftier destiny still, of propelling the human race in teleological terms from

potentiality to actuality. Failure to fulfil this destiny was to risk a degenerative lapse – as if,

in the words of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the anthropocentrism of origins, ‘beneath

civilization we would rediscover, in terms of resemblance, the persistence of a bestial and

primitive humanity’ (cited in Pearson, 1999: 180).

According to this humanist model of ‘origins’, inscribed in Darwinian anxieties about the

natural history of man, certain humans on the Australian continent embodied the primitive

potential within humanity’s (interiorized) animality. As figurations of the bestial condition

that it was humanity’s distinction to transcend, the Aboriginal savage stood in for ‘early

man’. Thus, a Society publication noted in 1898 that those indigenous people who had

become involved in pastoral pursuits on cattle and sheep stations in New South Wales would

spare themselves their race’s destiny of extinction. In point of fact, non-farmers had trans-

formed the continent according to their own knowledges and technologies for centuries prior

to British colonization, throwing into relief not only the politics of colonial land use imposi-

tion, but also the humanist ideal attached to nature’s cultivation – in Britain as well as its

colonies.

Display and judging were the primary purposes of the Sydney show. Regarding livestock,

the cattle show attracted immense interest. Cattle and horses travelled to Central Station

where they were escorted through the city to the showground. Shorthorn, Hereford, Devon,

Jersey and Holstein were some of the major categories of awards for dairy and beef cattle. In

the annual spectacle called the Grand Parade, commencing in 1907, champions from each

‘class’ of horse, cattle and goat circled the main arena in an intricate choreography.

Controlled by the ringmaster, the procession of winners dramatized the perceived triumph of

humanity’s experimental elaboration of the non-human world.

There were other sculptured forms. Stallions were brought to the showground, put to the

test of the obstacle course, and judged according to speed, size and symmetry. Regarding dis-

plays of produce, an initiative was proposed in 1899 to hold regional exhibits of farm, dairy

and floral products at the show. A ‘district exhibition court’ was opened to enable compara-

tive examination of the products of the soil. These were judged for their visual appeal, as well

as the taste, smell and texture of sample pieces made available to show-goers and judges.

These assemblages, which constitute the very ground ‘in between’ culture and nature, evoke

less purified conceptions of humans and ‘things’ than those which obtain in the triumphal dis-

courses of civilization. Highlighting the material ‘impurity’ of such artefacts in this colonial

setting is to derange the object/subject relation of nature and culture which has long been the

humanist geographer’s referential axis.

Displays of farm machinery were principal features of the show. If one of the defining mea-

sures of Australian nation-building after federation of the colonies in 1901 was ‘settlement’ of

the land, then the reapers, binders and threshing machines that had pride of place on the

show’s stages were some of its key instruments. In the case of the showground’s ‘machinery

avenue’, farmers were introduced to machines ‘to conquer the worst wilderness in Australia,

and reduce the most unyielding soil to a state of tractable fruitfulness’ (The Daily Telegraph,

12 April 1900).

Modernity’s technologies were obviously intimate partners in Britain’s colonization of the

Australian landscape. But there was more at stake here than a geopolitics of racialized power

and possession, about which anti-colonial scholarship has already told us so much. For if we

foreground the normative divide that had been inscribed under European modernity between,

on the one hand,certaintechnologies (for example tractors and notboomerangs) and, on the

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