Recovered Lives as Windows on the Anglo Colonial World, 1750-1850

Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship

Professor Pybus has a 5 year fellowship research the lives of three obscure individuals of the African Diaspora, whose stories will be recovered from the vast colonial archives of North America, West Africa and Australia. By providing a unique insight into the complexity of the colonial world during the long eighteenth century, these life narratives will unsettle orthodox interpretations of colonial experience and speak to the legacy of slavery throughout the British Empire.

PICTURE: “The Old Commodore”, Billy Blue was the first ferryman on Sydney Harbour.

Race and the Construction of Racial Identity at the Antipodes of Empire

In this groundbreaking project, Professor Pybus heads up an international team of historians and literary scholars to interrogate discourses about and empirical evidence of racial interaction in the early antipodean colonies. The main focus of the research is the early penal colonies, but the project will also engage with the Cape Colony, which was brought into the British imperial fold soon after New South Wales was founded and a decade before Van Diemen’s Land. The formative experiences of these British colonies in the antipodes have major implications for research on race and empire because they were established at the very time the malleable and contingent concept of race was being transformed into a fixed notion of innate difference. The intention is to provide a more nuanced understanding of Australia’s colonial beginnings that will inject scholarly complexity into the current dispute about race relations as well as providing a corrective to the Atlantic bias in the scholarship on race and empire.

Research collaborators

PICTURE: Constance Trudgett, a slave from Mauritius transported to Australia as a slave at the age of nine.