This study explores the changing relationship of communities in Colonial and Post-colonial Urdu Literature. It attempts to map out the communal space in the symbolic world of literature given to the Christians over a century by Urdu fiction writers. In colonial India, the missionary activities especially for female education evoked different…[Read more]

Colonial predicament made the life and its understanding complex in the Subcontinent. To represent this complexity, Urdu writers found the polyphonic genre, i.e. the novel helpful. They used different techniques of characterization to narrate the social hierarchy of characters. The novel also provided the space for them to attract the people with…[Read more]

This article explores the connection between the development of new literary genres in Urdu and colonial authority. British Colonial authorities tried to develop a system of scrutiny for local literatures. To limit the ‘vernacular’ literatures within the ‘suggested’ traits, colonial administration used its local subordinates in disseminating the…[Read more]

All around the community in the Macarthur region are cultural artefacts that are representations of the settler-colonial narrative of the Cowpastures, which was variously a colonial frontier, a government reserve, and a formal region.
Today, the material culture of the Cowpastures is hidden in plain sight and appears to have been ‘forgotten’ by…[Read more]

The Narellan Heritage Walking Tour is an interesting and informative way to observe and learn about the history and heritage of this Cowpastures village.
First published in 2010 by photographers Kylie and Peter Lyons.

This paper contributes to a project called Camdens Worldwide to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of the Elizabethan historian/antiquarian William Camden. It is a worldwide project to mark places called Camden conducted by the Camden History Society in the UK.
The establishment of Camden, New South Wales, the town in 1840, was a private…[Read more]

The article takes account of the colonial archives and analyses the strategies of colonizers, which brought about not only the new forms of knowledge in India but also restructured the society and statecraft here. I argue that the colonial administration developed the public instruction department to impart a new character to the natives and used…[Read more]

The Burragorang Valley is one of those lost places that people fondly remember from the past. A place of imagination and dreaming where former residents fondly re-tell stories from their youth. These places create potent memories and nostalgia for many people and continue to be places of interest. They are localities of myths and legends and…[Read more]

The story of European settlement in the Cowpastures is intimately connected to the story of the convicts and their masters. This story has not been told, and there is little understanding of the role of the convicts in the Cowpastures district before 1840. Who were they? What did they do? Did they stay in the district?

The Camden township is located 65 kilometres southwest of the Sydney CBD and, in recent years, has been absorbed by Sydney’s urban growth. The main streets are a mix of Victorian, Edwardian and interwar architecture comprising commercial, government and domestic buildings. The town site was originally the entry point into what became Governor…[Read more]

The Plough and Harrow Inn at 75-79 Argyle Street is the second oldest hotel in Camden and is still on the original site. The Camden Inn (1841) was the first hotel in Camden. Located on the Great South Road, the Plough and Harrow was part of the fabric of Macarthur’s private village of Camden within the Cowpastures. By the early 20th century,…[Read more]

This is a thoroughly researched and readable book that provides a glimpse of life in western New South Wales during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the eyes of a woman, Rachel Kennedy (1845-1930). The book is a wonderful contribution to female biography and regional community history, and illustrates the precarity of life for women…[Read more]

Any memorials, monuments, historic sites, and other public facilities commemorate, celebrate and generally remind us about the landscape of the Cowpastures. In recent decades there has been a nostalgia turn in recovering the memory of the Cowpastures landscape. This is cast in terms of the pioneers and the legacy of the European settlement.
Some…[Read more]

The establishment of Camden in 1840 was a private venture of James and William Macarthur, sons of colonial patriarch John Macarthur, at the Nepean River crossing on the northern edge of the family’s pastoral property of Camden Park. The town’s site was enclosed on three sides by a sweeping bend in the Nepean River and has regularly flooded the…[Read more]

The Cowpastures was a vague area south of the Nepean River floodplain on the southern edge of Sydney’s Cumberland Plain. The Dharawal Indigenous people who managed the area were sidelined in 1796 by Europeans when Governor Hunter named the ‘Cow Pasture Plains’ in his sketch map. He had visited the area the previous year to witness the escaped…[Read more]

The Cowpastures emerged as a regional concept in the late 18th century, starting with the story of the cattle of the First Fleet that escaped their captivity at the Sydney settlement. The region was a culturally constructed landscape that ebbed and flowed with European activity. It grew around the government reserve established by Governors…[Read more]

This presentation was an overview of an ongoing project on how material culture across the Macarthur region of NSW is a store of collective memories of early colonial New South Wales and the Cowpastures region from 1795 to 1840. There are monuments, memorials, murals, and other items of material culture that prompt collective memories and tell…[Read more]

Early European settlers were the key actors in a place-making exercise that constructed an English-style landscape aesthetic on the colonial stage in the Cowpastures district of New South Wales. The aesthetic became part of the settler colonial project and the settlers’ aim of taking possession of territory involved the construction of a c…[Read more]

Urdu literature saw a “Reform boom” in the second half of nineteenth century. Most of the literati were engaged in understanding, and presenting their views on, the rapidly changing world around them. This article analyses a text produced in 1893 by Shad Azeemabadi, enhancing the need for reform in the Zenana. By underscoring the relationship of…[Read more]

Nazir Ahmad, often considered to be the first Urdu novelist, used narratives for understanding the quickly changing world around him, and in his work, shaped expanding possibilities and new roles for Muslim ashrāf women. Although he is usually thought of as a cleric who had a traditional approach towards society and new forms of knowledge, in…[Read more]