Again with Typewriter Monkeys‘ thanks to Anna Johnston, Professor of English Literature University of Queensland 2023

Knowledge produced from the Endeavour voyage was explosive and exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences: in John Gascoigne’s terms, this was ‘science in the service of empire³¹.’ As Saunders suggests, ‘we might see botanical illustrations as “mapping” our knowledge of plants³².’ Cartography and botany share visual practices, she argues, beginning with with fanciful images based on ancient sources, myth and rumour, and gradually developing analytical images based in experience and observation. In this, imperial mapping and botanical knowledge proceeded together in the Australian and Pacific [worlds] charted by the Endeavour. While Cook is a historical figure with a complex and continuing inheritance of imperial expansion and colonial exploration³⁴ – and who continues to be a lightning rod for public debates about the morality of colonisation globally – Banks has been less prominent in popular historical memory. Scholarly appraisals of Banks have produced [rich representations of science, knowledge production and the British Empire]. Banks’s [forty-year] role as President of the Royal Society consolidated what Bruno Latour terms ‘centres of calculation³⁵.’ David Miller’s influential concept of a Banksian (learned) empire has become commonplace³⁶. Recent work in the history of science has sought to explore further the constituency of Banks’s global correspondents, the precise techniques it brought to bear on the [production] of [natural knowledge], the [structures of kinship, succession and patronage that it entailed], and the tensions and antagonisms that disrupted it³⁷.

31 Gascoigne, ‘Science and the British,’ 47-67; Gascoigne, Science in the Service
32 Saunders, Picturing Plants, 7
34 See the National Library of Australia’s 2018-19 exhibition, ‘Cook and the Pacific.’ For recent overviews of the extensive Cook scholarship se Nugent, Captain Cook, and Thomas, Discoveries
35 Latour, Science [in Action]
36 Miller and Reill, Visions of Empire
37 Werrett, ‘Introduction,’ 2

John Blundell

6PM Wed 18 Feb 2026

South Australia

Neurocognitive-health 2-5 set series Quantum-relations thematics logic, Quantum ideational or commonly Right-brained nextness, Moses Maimonides PUT METAPHYSICS last & Baruch Spinoza enthusiast and that’s about it for human antiquity, apart from our own old people yahrduh, Economy, regenerative agriculture, cradle to grave Education-reform essentially & urgently in 25k ‘universities’ worldwide, ex Community Economist Publications Worldwide newsletter 1997 – 2003, electoral candidate against JW Olsen and the tide British colonial history, Morons Central reckoned, vote-count managed by the Liberal Party of Australia with its string of Great-man SA directors and their pals ‘down’ the years, me to S Cockburn 1994 are they crooks or idiots, he, they’re all crooks John, you do learn, young people