Cast Against Type

William Dawes was a marine lieutenant in the First Fleet at Sydney Cove. A self-taught engineer and natural philosopher, he became involved with the local people, particularly with an investigation of the language. His notebooks show people and cultures on both sides of the colonial cut slipping their organizational categories and commonsense typologies. At Sydney Cove, Dawes swirled into a relational world that undid the nominalist world that he had been trained to manage.