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The introduction of steam not only enhanced Australia's transport links within the empire. It also altered attitudes towards the feasibility and desirability of transpacific connectivities, and brought new prominence to the Pacific-orientations of Australia's eastern colonies. By envisioning steam-age connections across the Pacific, first to Panama and then to San Francisco, Australia sought to imagine and situate itself in a transpacific sphere. The routes shaped cultural sensibilities and political ideologies across the Pacific, expressed in affinities and allegiances between Australia and North America. This article examines transpacific steam from the mid-to the late nineteenth century, a fractured and indeterminate period which nevertheless laid the ground for Australia's sense of itself as an autonomous white nation, relating across the Pacific and within a wider Anglo world beyond Britain and empire.

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Steel, F. (2015). The 'Missing link': Space, race and transoceanic ties in the settler-colonial Pacific. Transfers: interdisciplinary journal of mobility studies, 5 (3), 49-67.The 'Missing link': Space, race and transoceanic ties in the settler-colonial Pacific AbstractThe inauguration of a steamship route between Canada and Australia, described as the "missing link," was envisaged to complete Britain's imperial circuit of the globe. This article examines the early proposals and projects for a service between Vancouver and Sydney, which finally commenced in 1893. The route was more than a means of physically bridging the gulf between Canada and Australia. Serving as a conduit for ideologies and expectations, it became a key element of aspirations to reconfigure the Pacific as a natural domain for the extension of settler -colonial power and influence. In centering the "white" Pacific and relations between white colonies in empire, the route's early history, although one of friction and contestation, offers new insights into settler -colonial mobilities beyond dominant themes of metropole-colony migration. Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law Abstract:The inauguration of a steamship route between Canada and Australia, described as the "missing link," was envisaged to complete Britain's imperial circuit of the globe. This

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