To the Ends of the Earth: Visions of a Changing World, 175 Years of Exploration and Photography.

• Author: McKinnon, Malcolm
• Position: Book review

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: Visions of a changing world: 175 years of exploration and photography

Author: Royal Geographical Society Published by: Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, 240pp, $69.99.

The lavish appearance of this large format book, with superb images from around the world, belies its status as an institutional history. The Royal Geographical Society was founded as the Geographical Society of London in 1830 (taking its present name in 1859) and the book commemorates its story. It also includes some account of the Institute of British Geographers, a breakaway organisation established by a more academically inclined cohort in 1933 (one of its exciting first publications--The pastoral industries of New Zealand) which reunited with the Royal Geographical Society in 1995.

Though founded in 1830, the society had its origins in the earlier era of European scientific exploration associated with Cook and Banks. In London, an African Association, a Palestine Association, a Syrian society and a Linnaean society had all been established. Why 1830 and not before for the Royal Geographical Society is not explained but the drive and gift for publicity of two of its founders, John Barrow and Roderick Murchison, may be a part of it. Among the 460 members in 1830 were 36 peers, 24 baronets and knights, 32 naval and 55 army officers and 124 fellows of the Royal Society. So it was an elite organisation, but the shared passion of its members was for finding out--'for more than forty years 1 Savile Row [the society's headquarters from 1871] was the Mecca of all true geographers, the home port of every traveller.'

The first hundred years of the Society produced all the exploration excitement that such devotees could want--journeys into the interior of Africa, the great Tibetan plateau, the polar regions, the Arabian desert. And the heroic and dramatic episodes that came in their wake--Young-husband in Tibet, Scott in Antarctica and, of course, Livingstone in Africa, greeted by American journalist Henry Morton Stanley with the famous phrase and handshake, which marked, it has been said, the moment 'getting there first' became the purpose of exploration.

Royal Geographical Society geography was one of power as well as of exploration. The writers of this volume cannot ignore Edward Said's Orientalism and similar works, with their scrutiny of the symbiosis of knowledge and empire. The chapter 'For king and country' recounts the Arabian journeys and politicking...