Atmospheric Archives: Gender and Climate Knowledge in Colonial Tasmania

Abstract

There is a rich cache of letters detailing the production of climate knowledge at Tasmania's Hobart Observatory in the early nineteenth century. By contrast, a mere handful of sentences survive in the written record to describe the production of climate knowledge outside the Hobart Observatory, in Tasmania's north-east. In this paper, I confront the question of what to do with these unbalanced archival remains. I draw on the work of social and cultural historians as well as historians of colonialism and science to advocate a three-pronged methodology for approaching the problem of the unbalanced atmospheric archives. The application of this methodology, I show, reveals the way gender relations shaped the way atmospheric knowledge was both produced and used by historical actors in colonial Tasmania.