At the turn of the nineteenth century, and for thousands of years previously, the well-populated Mithaka lands of the south-west Queensland river-channel country were the greatest crossroads of the Australian continent. It was an area rich with resources and trade and culture and knowledge exchange, and villages where people still lived their traditional ways of life. Some also worked at the new cattle stations. A highly sophisticated long-distance communication technology had developed and was in daily use, based on engineering the production and the fluid dynamics of smoke flows. The practical mathematics involved was both numerical and non-numerical, and made use of three-dimensional geometries and the symmetry properties of smoke vortices, as well as Morse-like codes. Smoke signals conveying complex messages were sent, received, decoded, and relayed onwards over vast distances. At around that time in Western mathematics, knowledge of the importance of symmetries and of the vortical nature of flows at high Reynolds number was in its infancy, and the vector calculus that allows us to define and notate vorticity as the curl of the velocity field was still developing (and highly controversial). But Aboriginal women and men specialists had been coding and transmitting information in vortical smoke flows for centuries. Before electrical telegraphy and telephony became available, Aboriginal smoke signalling was the most advanced communication system in the world. In this talk I shall elaborate on the story of smoke signalling in Australia, and reflect on the consequences of colonial disruption of this flow of knowledge.

This paper problematizes our understanding of the little-known indigenous Mā’ohi or Tahitian named Aotourou, who ostensibly served as an “indigenous informant” to Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's French-led global expedition of 1766–1769. Aotourou presented the crew’s naturalist, Philibert Commerson, with local botanical specimens and taxonomies offering his navigational knowledge to the French upon joining the expedition en route to Paris, where he was further scrutinized within savant circles in the Enlightenment “sciences of man” tradition.

Reading available sources both with and against the grain, Aotourou emerges as a dynamic “go between” who fails to clearly fulfill any passive or active paradigm vis-à-vis his French interlocutors. Instead, he presents as a situated “networker" occupying a node in global knowledge networks with a robust vantage point. Drawing on the example of Aotourou, this paper aims to examine the forms of natural knowledge that were obtained and overlooked in the Franco-Mā’ohi exchanges. In doing so, I resist the temptation to assign Aotourou the more singualr role of “indigenous informant” while remaining critical of the uneven power dynamic at play between colonizers and colonized.

This paper explores interactions and interchanges between Western Christian missionaries and indigenous go-betweens in the making and spreading of science, technology, and medicine during the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Although missionaries hoped that spreading of science, technology, and medicine would benefit Christianity and Western colonial powers, they could rarely determine the course and consequences of these exchanges as decisively as they hoped. Indigenous people shaped the timing, process and outcomes of these interactions in ways that often discomfited and sometimes alarmed the missionaries. Illustrating these claims with examples from India, China, Africa and the Pacific, this paper questions historical narratives that attribute more power to missionaries and their sending cultures than the evidence warrants.