On Thursday, October 11, at 4:00pm – 6:00pm (Australian Hearing Hub, Level 5, Room 212, Macquarie University) the Markers of Authenticity Seminar Series will continue with two speakers, Dr Alicia Marchant (ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100–1800, University of Western Australia) and Dr Emily O’Gorman (Department of Geography & Planning, Macquarie University).

Our theme for this seminar is the Authenticity of Landscape. Our speakers will be discussing the way that landscape is understood and idealised, as well as how particular configurations of and stages in the development of a landscape are held up as authentic, original, and desirable. The speakers will address these issues in the following papers.

Alicia Marchant, ‘John Hardyng’s Scotland: Landscape, Heritage and Authenticity in the Fifteenth Century’

In 1457, Northumbrian knight John Hardyng (d. c.1465) employed a cartographer to create a map of Scotland for inclusion in his recently completed chronicle history of Britain. This bright, ornate map depicts Scotland as an appealing, prosperous and productive landscape of lochs and mountains, thick-walled castles, towers and churches. Far from straightforward, this map displays a landscape with a complex cultural and natural heritage, imbued with English colonialism, focalised through the eyes of its creator. What Hardyng desired most through the creation of this cartographic image was to convince successive English kings to gather an army and invade the land that it charted. Alongside the map and chronicle, Hardyng submitted legal documents that he claimed to have collected in Scotland but which turn out to be forged. The case of Hardyng and his failed interventions in English politics raise intriguing questions regarding authenticity, heritage and landscape.

Emily O’Gorman, ‘Towards a genealogy of wetlands: Categories of conservation, bird migration and global environmental crisis’

This paper offers a genealogy of wetlands, in particular focusing on how it became a category of conservation, shaped by understandings of bird migration and an emerging sense of a global environmental crises in the 1960s and 1970s. It situates this discussion within experiences in Australia, where changing understandings of transcontinental bird migrations, Pacific diplomacy, and ideas of habitats and habitat loss, converged to shape government scientists’ involvement in the Ramsar Convention of Wetlands of International Importance 1971. This paper examines wetlands as a category defined by and laden with specific sets of values, shaped by particular expertise and relationships with certain animals and plants, and deeply connected with Australasian and Pacific circulations, both human and more-than-human.