Georgine W Clarsen

Pedaling Power: Bicycles, Subjectivities and Landscapes in a Settler Colonial Society

Abstract Mobilities across contested terrains are key to the formation of settler societies. This paper explores how safety bicycles were drawn into the Australian settler project at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the six independent colonies were federating into the Commonwealth of Australia. As recently imported objects, bicycles afforded settler men unprecedented mobility across remote landscapes that had not been smoothed by the infrastructures of the ‘old world’. In those years of national formation, bicycles were received as objects that could fill ‘empty’ land with people, things, activities and stories, at the same time as they generated masculine, settler subjectivities. A practice approach to settler mobilities helps to tease out the entanglements between bicycle ‘overlanding’ and two fundamental imperatives of settlerism: transforming indigenous places into settler places and creating ‘nativised’ settler subjectivities.

Automobiles and Australian Modernisation: The Redex Around-Australia Trials of the 1950s

Abstract In the first half of the 1950s, automobiles came to the forefront of national attention in three Redex Around-Australia Reliability trials, which sent hundreds of cars from Sydney to race around the continent in expressions of barely-controlled automotive fervour. As multi-dimensional events that incapsulated individual and national aspirations, the Redex trials provide an evocative framework for exploring some competing versions of Australian modernisation in those post-war years. For all their affirmations of national maturity, however, the trials perpetuated colonial orientations to ‘hostile’ landscapes and continued to envisage Aboriginal people as inherently outside of the modern present.

Mobile encounters: Bicycles, cars and Australian settler colonialism

At the turn of the twentieth century bicycles and motorcars constituted a significant break from organic modes of mobility, such as walking, horses and camels. In Australia, such mechanical modes of personal transport were settler imports that generated local meanings and practices as they were integrated into the material, cultural and political conditions of the settler nation-in-the-making. For settlers, new technologies confirmed their racial superiority and reinforced a collective sense of their own modernity. Aboriginal people frequently expressed fear and epistemological confusion when they first encountered the strange vehicles. Contrary to settler investments in Aboriginal people as outside of the contemporary world, however, they soon incorporated bicycles and automobiles into their lives. Aboriginal people complicated that imagined divide between primitivism and modernity as they devised new pleasures, accommodations, resistances and collaborations through those new technologies. This article has been peer reviewed.

'Australia - Drive It Like You Stole It': automobility as a medium of communication in settler colonial Australia

Abstract More than a means of transportation, the global system of automobility is simultaneously a meaning-making assemblage. In Australia automobility was central to the formation of a settler colonial polity, and its pervasive mediatization trumpeted settlers’ legitimate possession of the continent. The rich archives of settler automobilism are not matched, however, when it comes to Indigenous automobilities. Aboriginal people created tenacious and lively automobile cultures whenever and however they were able. While Aboriginal agency was far from erased, they were relegated to, and sometimes chose, historical silence. Automobility has been integral to imagining and materializing settler claims over the Australian continent, but also to evading, mitigating, contesting and re-visioning it.

Vistas of Future New Mobility Studies

With our eighth volume of this journal, the Transfers editorial team celebrates our achievements under our outgoing editor, Gijs Mom. Th is article outlines our priorities under our new editor, Dagmar Schäfer, and reaffi rms our commitment to the burgeoning fi eld of new mobility studies. Th e presentations by Mimi Sheller and Peter Merriman, fellow members of the editorial team, at our journal’s panel at the recent TM conference, “Vistas of Future Mobility Studies: Transfers and Transformations” is summed up for the convenience of those who were not able to attend. Th is journal will continue to encourage and publish work that places mobilities at the center of our scholarship, with special emphasis on the humanities. Our commitment is to good, innovative, activist scholarship that can help us move toward alternative mobility futures.

'The woman who does': a Melbourne motor garage proprietor

In the years immediately following World War I, Alice Anderson ran a motor garage in the middle-class Melbourne suburb of Kew.1 Over the next seven years—until her death in 1926—the women of the Alice Anderson Motor Service became the favored “machinists” and “chauffeuses” of wealthy eastern suburbs households and taught countless Melbourne women to drive. “Most people have seen her neatly uniformed chauffeurs leap briskly from the driver’s seat, open the door and salute smartly,” wrote one Melbourne newspaper.2 The Alice Anderson Motor Service continued after her death, surviving into the early 1940s, when the staff left for military service in the next war.