Sodom Island : Pandæmonium and The Botany Bay of Botany Bay
Abstract
This paper applies close readings to two documents central to both the historiography of Norfolk Island during its second British settlement as a penal colony and to the historiography of homosexuality in Australia during the convict period, T.B. Naylor’s letter “The Botany Bay of Botany Bay” and R.P. Stuart’s official report on the settlement. Both of these texts were subject to public censor due to their descriptions of sodomitical outbreak on the island as a crucial indicator of the state of penal indiscipline. Hereto historical interpretations of these two texts have usually understood sodomy to be roughly equivalent to modern homosexual categorisation, either as evidencing the rhetorical hyperbole of the anti-transportation movement (Kirsten McKenzie, Katie Gilchrist and Tim Causer) or as evidencing early homosexual subcultures (Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon). I here offer another reading, drawing on Kirsty Reid’s Gender, Crime and Empire (primarily concerned with Van Diemen’s Land) and queer historiography (most influentially that of David Halperin, Michael Warner and Valerie Traub), to argue that ‘sodomy’, as understood in these documents, describes a situation of disciplinary inversion – a sodomitical social order – as much as it describes the apparent situation of ubiquity of sodomitical acts occurring between the interned men. Through the literary method of close reading I offer a sustained and deep analysis of the sodomitical social order represented in these two texts, most readily represented by Naylor and Stuart through the invocation of other localities of social disorder, alike the city of Sodom: that is, ‘Pandæmonium’ and ‘The Botany Bay of Botany Bay’.
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