Armed thus, the papers in this session consider the architecture of the Tasman world from the 1780s to the 1840s in its historical circumstances, exploring architecture across three different registers: intentioned works definitively cast as Architecture the ‘grey’ architecture (after Bremner) of industries, transhipping and colonial infrastructure and as an analogy for the relationships, systems and structures of the colonial project and its economic underpinnings. These papers thus return to the colonial era of the South Pacific informed by the gains of post-colonial history, four-nations British historiography, studies of global colonial networks and systems, and an appreciation for ‘minor’ forms of historical evidence and architectural practice. The call for this session invited scholars to work against the grain of that problematic nationalism by addressing the architecture and infrastructure of those colonial industries operating across the early colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand, and connecting that ‘world’ to the economies of the British Empire, the ‘Anglosphere’, and architectural geographies defined by trade. Developments in the region’s colonial architecture from the 1780s onwards have thus fed later narratives of national foundations. The nineteenth-century architectural history of what Philippa Mein Smith (among others) has called the ‘Tasman world’ has long been shaped by the nationalist historiographies of twentieth-century Australia and New Zealand. As well as providing more in-depth discussion of these themes, the three examples of London psychogeography that I explore complicate them by illustrating further specific and diverse uses of magic – namely, magic as environmentalist critique, magic as humour/humour as magic and magic as activism. Across the varied terrain of psychogeographical walking, magic is used to conjure an openness and vulnerability to voices 'hidden' in the landscape. Drawing on a survey of British psychogeographical forms and a more detailed study of three London literary examples, it examines how psychogeographical walkers have expanded and developed 'magical modernism'. The paper shows that magic has a significant role in the work of many psychogeographical writers, artists and activists, and argues that this phenomenon needs to be understood in the context of the wider use of magic as a site and symbol of creativity and subversion in modernist cultural expression. Geographers have a developing interest in the place of enchantment and the 'extra-ordinary' in the modern city.
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