Martin Thomas is Associate Professor in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is the author of The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (2003) and The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (2011), winner of the National Biography Award of Australia.

Expeditions combined the traversing of space with the production of discourse. The "discoveries" of expeditions, disseminated in the form of maps and reports, books and pictures, would provide the stimulus for invasion, migration, investment and more. While there is an incalculably large literature dealing with exploration and its effects, the expedition itself, a culturally and historically specific way of organising, conducting and inscribing a journey, is surprisingly under-examined. This book proposes that the expedition is as much a cultural form, specific to its epoch, as the novel or the photograph.

1. What Is an Expedition?: An Introduction Martin Thomas 2. What Is an Explorer? Adriana Craciun 3. Settler Colonial Expeditions Lorenzo Veracini 4. The Expedition as a Cultural Form: On the Structure of Exploratory Journeys as Revealed by the Australian Explorations of Ludwig Leichhardt Martin Thomas 5. The Theatre of Contact: Aborigines and Exploring Expeditions Philip Jones 6. Expeditions, Encounters, and the Praxis of Seaborne Ethnography: The French Voyages of La Pérouse and Freycinet Bronwen Douglas 7. Armchair Expeditionaries: Voyages into the French Musée de la Marine, 1828-78 Ralph Kingston 8. On Slippery Ice: Discovery, Imperium, and the Austro-Hungarian North Polar Expedition (1872-4) Stephen A. Walsh 9. A Polar Drama: The Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14 Tom Griffiths 10. The 1928 MacRobertson Round Australia Expedition: Colonial Adventuring in the Twentieth Century Georgine Clarsen 11. The Expedition's Afterlives: Echoes of Empire in Travel to Asia Agnieszka Sobocinska