From the coloniser’s point of view: Cultural seascapes, power relations, and colonial subjectivities in the Southwest Pacific, 1880–1912

This article examines how colonial seascapes operated as cultural geographies of authority in the Queensland-Southwest Pacific labour circuit between the 1880s and the early 20th century. Its empirical focus is the diary and memoir corpus of Douglas Rannie, a Scottish-born sailor, Queensland Government Agent on Pacific Islander labour-recruiting vessels, and later Inspector of Pacific Island labourers in Queensland. Rather than treating Rannie’s writings as transparent records of the labour trade, the article reads them as representational artefacts through which a colonial agent organised mobility, danger, labour, protection, and racial difference. The article argues that Rannie’s narratives linked three spaces often treated separately: island encounters in Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, shipboard authority on recruiting vessels, and mainland institutions in Queensland towns such as Mackay, Bundaberg, and Maryborough. Through this connection, the seascape became a ‘second nature’: a historically produced but naturalised spatial order in which Pacific Islanders appeared as mobile labouring bodies requiring supervision, while colonial agents claimed the authority to interpret, transport, protect, and discipline them. By foregrounding the maritime circuit connecting islands, ships, ports, stores, wages, police, and the Polynesian Department, the article contributes to cultural geography debates on seascapes, mobility, empire, and colonial afterlives.