The Process of textualising the accounts of imperial explorations in Australia problematizes the author-figure as the site of critical investigations. Far from being a dispassionate observer of ‘truth’, the author, as a conceptual figuration is subjected to the play of external forces—empire affiliated institutions (the RGS), class structures, practices of social, political and economic organizations etc. The author, as Foucault argues, performs certain ‘functional principles’. A genealogical investigation uncovers how knowledge production is riddled with imperial intervention and implicated with the expansionist agenda of empire. Knowledge is produced through ‘the author’s complicity with imperial desire’. Post-exploration censorship of the
