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Arrivals and arrivals: Royal travel at Botany Bay.
Justine Lloyd, Humanities & Social Sciences, UTS, Sydney
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
jlloyd@scu.edu.au; Justine.Lloyd@uts.edu.au
In May 1970, newsreels issued by Fox-Movietone and Cinesound covered Queen Elizabeth II’s departure from Sydney airport. The films issued by both companies created a uneasy dialogue between two spatially adjacent but temporally discontinuous events: the arrival of Captain Cook in late April 1770 and the inaugural flight of the Royal Jet from the airport’s new international terminal.
This paper examines the ways in which ‘Transportation’, once a disciplinary procedure expelling criminal elements from the ‘mother’ country, was discursively constructed as freedom and liberation at the site of Botany Bay. I argue that the liminal and marginal status of the Bay allowed the spatial history of the airport to fuse and confuse two chronotopes of arrivalism: colonial exploration and the moment of contact and the international economy of tourism. I trace these re-enacted moments of arrival on both the beach and the runway and discuss the ways in which these sites were figured in official histories, as well as in other non-official texts that used the site of the beach for subversive political rituals.
