Join us in person or online for a seminar with John Soniega.
Monastic-Mission Domain: Spatio-Cultural History of the New Norcia Mission in the Nineteenth-Century
New Norcia, a curious town nestled in a wide valley deep within the heart of Yued-Noongar country in Western Australia. Founded by Spanish Benedictine monks in the nineteenth century, the township functioned as both a hybridised monastic mission and lived village for Aboriginal people and the Spanish monks from 1867-1900. From 1901 until the late 1990s it radically shifted towards a cloistered monastery with new schools for Catholic Anglo-settler children built over the previous mission villages. These schools were run by the Marist brothers and Irish sisters of mercy respectively. Evidently, multiple cultural communities resided and conglomerated within New Norcia from around the 1870s and until the first decade of the 1900s.
This paper, drawn from my broader Doctorate thesis, focuses on New Norcia in 1877 and utilises network analysis methods in a spatial history focus to thresh out the ‘spatio-cultural’ historical networks of both Spanish monks, Noongar people and fringe settler colonial inhabitants of New Norcia in the late nineteenth century. Alongside traditional archival work with maps, lithographs and primary source records, I have used software programs such as Gephi and the web-based Palladio visualisation tool to digitally thresh out these spatial networks and construct a spatial network graph of different communities living within a historical place in a distinct time period (1877). The seminar’s goal is to highlight how spatial arrangements of a particular place in a particular time reveals notions of negotiated space and inter-communal relations between its residents, a term I call a place’s ‘Relational Domain.’
18 March 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
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