Category Archives: Settler colonialism

‘In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia Through God, Charity and Empire 1825-1855’ by Jessie Mitchell

Posted on January 12, 2015 | 2 comments

mitchell_ingoodfaith

2011, 197 p & notes

Available for download (free) at http://epress.anu.edu.au/good_faith_citation.html

1825 to 1855- just thirty years. Thirty years to start off with a timorous hope that perhaps it might be possible to spread Civilization among the Aborigines and lead them to the Christian Religion, only to end with an acknowledgement that it hadn’t worked, and that the whole situation had to be turned over to God’s mercy and his wondrous ways.  In 1825 L. E. Threlkeld established a mission at Lake Macquarie in NSW; in 1855 John Smithies closed his Methodist mission in Western Australia.  These two events form the bookends for this analysis of Australia’s first missions and protectorate stations.

In this book, based on her PhD. thesis, Jessie Mitchell writes:

My work has been guided by key themes of governance, subjecthood and rights, and the need to understand these ideas as developing through complex exchanges between imperial centres and mission outposts…and to consider how they were shaped by charity, religious beliefs, personal relationships and commitments to empire  (p.5)

Her work concentrates on Protestant missionaries working both on Church-based missions and government-sponsored Protectorate Stations.  Although there was a  high degree of cross-over, the distinction is important (and perhaps could have been emphasized even more strongly). The interconnection between the church-directed missions and government-directed model was there from the start, when the idea of government-funded Protectorates was first recommended by a Select Committee with a strong representation of Evangelical Christians, several of whom had been involved in anti-slavery campaigns in the past.

But the Port Phillip Protectorate was established and funded by government – not the churches. Protectors were expected to attach themselves to the tribes in the district and attend them until they could be induced to assume more settled habits; watch over the rights and interests of the natives and protect them from encroachment on their property and acts of injustice;  instruct them in cultivation should they settle in one place; educate and instruct the children; learn their language; be accountable for provisions and clothing and obtain accurate numerical information about them.  They were also were expected to instruct  in ‘elements’ of the Christian religion, with the expectation that other specialized teachers would take over instruction in the knowledge and practice of Christianity. (Note 1)   It was this emphasis on religion that distinguished church-based and government-based models, because in many other regards they were very similar.   But of the Protector and his four assistants who were appointed, all but one were Evangelical Christians, and their own religious fundamentalist beliefs very much influenced their perception of their task and the Indigenous people under their charge.   When the Protectorate all went pear-shaped, several of these Protectors sheeted home the blame partially to the secular nature of the government scheme.

Mitchell has consciously decided not to use the term ‘humanitarian’, which was not coined until 1844 and has since been overlaid with many latter-day connotations, especially in the last half-century.  Instead, she conceptualizes the impetus as ‘philanthropy’, with all its nineteenth-century connotations of benevolence, gratitude, control and religion.  Nonetheless, I was surprised to note that the Aborigines Protection Society itself in its 1840 Annual Report spoke of ‘rights’:

the rights of a common humanity, the rights of citizens, the right to possess and retain their own, the rights of protection and security to life and property, and the rights of unfettered liberty of mind, of free action and self disposal. (Third Annual Report 23 June 1840 cited on p 41)

The book explores the many tensions that are implicit in this declaration of ‘rights’, so to speak, and the aspirations for a God-centric, settled, institutionalized mission.  Philanthropists were aware of the cruel dispossession of indigenous peoples, but they were not necessarily opposed to colonialization itself.   In their attempts to foster agricultural labour on their own reserves amongst the people in their charge, missionaries themselves encouraged them to move away from traditional land use- something that became of crucial importance in late 20th century court cases (Mabo and Wik).  Those missionaries and protectors who expressed the strongest support for Indigenous land rights were those who were most opposed to an Indigenous presence in the cities.

In her introduction,  Jessie Mitchell mentions that she herself has worked in the community sector where

tensions between rights and charity and questions about the supposed (in)gratitude of vulnerable people towards state and benevolent agencies continue to have a strong relevance. (p.1)

Her analysis of ‘charity’ is insightful. Missionaries and protectors saw the distribution of food, blankets and clothing as a form of recompense for the loss of land and livelihood, but it was conditional on the Aborigines remaining on the mission.  The ‘settling’ of Indigenous peoples on a mission was seen by the government as a sign of success, but if it was done through the distribution of food, then the missionaries and protectors were accused of profligate generosity.  The missionaries’ dilemma goes on today: there were many echoes of the current government’s attempts to break the concept of ‘sit-down’ money and achieve school attendance through punishing the parents.

Perhaps the ultimate tension was in the religious missionary task itself.  We are now more attuned to the deep significance of the afterlife for Indigenous people, and are aware of the sensitivity about the names and images of people who have died.  For the missionaries, however, the afterlife and death was the major ‘hook’ to evangelize to their charges.  Mitchell emphasizes what we would now call the ‘born-again’ aspect of these missionaries’ religion: the whole  penitence, conversion, personal-relationship-with-God thing still being preached in evangelical super-churches today.  They wanted Indigenous people to have the individualistic, personal conversion experience, but they also wanted their church pews to be full with people streaming into church each Sunday, even if they didn’t yet believe.  They wanted individualism, but institutionalization as well.

And so, Mitchell suggests, we need to read the missionaries’ declarations of failure and disappointment carefully.  As born-again Evangelicals themselves, they were much given to self-examination and confession of weakness, and this was a trope that played out well in the metropolitan churches and missionary societies as well.   The Colonial Office, ever keen to reduce expenditure, took up these expressions of failure with alacrity, arguing that the whole project was futile and best ended.

While it is wonderful that this book is available as an e-book, I found myself wishing that it had a few more book-like features.   I read it in hard copy, and I missed an index in particular, and for some reason that I can’t quite fathom, I found the absence of chapter numbers frustrating.  It is not difficult to read, but you’re still aware that the thesis is not far distant.  I liked the way that the chapters started off with an anecdote or episode, and the logic of the argument was clearly laid out in the chapter structure.  Conceptually, it’s a complete, well-managed project. As a narrative, the thirty-year time span gives a coherence and almost elegiac quality to this humanitarian experiment that was tried and found wanting.

Note 1: Glenelg to Gipps 31 January 1838

aww-badge-2015-200x300My first posting to the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2015

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Posted in Aborigines in Port Phillip, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2015, Book reviews, Settler colonialism

‘Connecting’ at the masterclass

Posted on September 11, 2014 | 4 comments

Well, now I can tell you what happens at a masterclass!  There were about eighteen or so participants, drawn from universities across Australia, but the majority were from the University of Tasmania. The masterclass was hosted by Penny Edmonds from the University of Tasmania,  and several Uni of Tasmania academics attended including Anna Johnston (who wrote The Paper Wars which I reviewed here), Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Kristyn Harman, whose book Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Maori Exiles recently won the Kay Daniels award.

But the major drawcard, for me at least, was the presence of  Dr. Zoe Laidlaw, Reader in British Imperial and Colonial History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Continue reading →

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Posted in Colonial biography, Historians, History writing, Settler colonialism

‘A Swindler’s Progress’ by Kirsten McKenzie

Posted on December 21, 2013 | 10 comments

Image

2009, 303 p. & notes

A couple of weeks ago I thought that I had finished the best book that I would be reading during 2013.  I was premature in my declaration.  This is the best book that I have read this year, and in this case, I have no qualms at all about the  behaviour of its author as a professional historian.  Kirsten McKenzie’s earlier book Scandal in the Colonies is one of the books that has shaped my approach to my own research.  Her portrayal of colonial life in the early nineteenth century as a criss-crossing of networks and connections between different colonies across the globe rings true for ‘my’ judge and the other officials that he encountered during his career, as a quick glance through the Australian Dictionary of Biography will attest.  She writes clearly, with humour, and interweaves human stories into a robust and insightful theoretical framework.  She’s the sort of historian I wish I could be.

In fact, as she explains in the epilogue,  it was her concern as a professional historian with the accuracy of her footnotes just as Scandal in the Colonies was about to roll off the press that brought her to writing this book.  As part of the History Wars of the Howard era, Keith Windschuttle challenged the historiography of aboriginal/settler conflict, largely on the basis of the accuracy of footnotes.  Like many historians, I should imagine, McKenzie became increasingly “twitchy” (as she puts it) over her own footnotes, and so, suffering “footnote paranoia”,  she returned to the story with which she opened Scandal in the Colonies and found it even more fascinating than when she encountered it the first time.  It was the case of  the putative Viscount Lascelles – in reality, the implausibly but actually named John Dow- a convict who served out his time in Van Diemen’s land after being transported for swindling using yet another false identity. On the expiry of his sentence, he traversed the NSW interior, claiming that he had been commissioned by the Secretary of State to inquire into the proper treatment of assigned convicts.  He claimed that he was the eldest son of the second Earl of Harewood- a claim haughtily denied by the Earl back in England whose eldest son, in fact had been disinherited after making a series of disastrous liaisons. As part of his ruse as Commissioner of Inquiry, ‘Viscount Lascelles’/John Dow eloped with a young woman and ended up in the Sydney Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue her from her parents who had reclaimed her, only to see her married some time later to the nephew of the future Chief Justice Dowling who heard the case. He was subsequently returned to the Supreme Court after his deception was discovered- where, yes! he encountered ‘my’ Judge Willis!  In Scandal in the Colonies, the anecdote takes less than two pages. In A Swindler’s Progress it effortlessly fills 300 pages.

The distance and dislocation of the colonies gave scope to false identities and reinventions.  There are many famous ones both in literature and in real life: Robyn Annear’s book The Man Who Lost Himself about the Tichborne Claimant springs to mind. But this book is much more than the story of an antipodean imposter. McKenzie shuttles between the real Earl of Harewood and his son, bringing in parliamentary politics in 1807, West Indian plantation ownership, elopements and disinheritances, and the imposter son Viscount Lascelles and his deceptions in England, Scotland and New South Wales.  The real skill of her book is integrating the two stories, on opposite sides of the globe to explore the way in which the British world was convulsed in this period by debates about identity, wealth, demeanour and masculinity.  Note that it is “the British world”- an arena which interweaves both metropole and peripheries as a conceptual transnational whole:

As I began my hunt for Dow and the Lascelles, scholars of empire were calling for histories that recognised that developments in British and colonial societies were part and parcel of the same process.  The problem was: how to write it? How could this miracle of synthesis be achieved in anything like a readable manner?  How could you show it was happening? And how could you show what it was like to be caught up in these interconnected events?  Here I had the story of two men: of one who had come to vanish, and another who had stolen that identity to pursue his own ends.  But their fates were part of far bigger events. (Epilogue, p. 296)

Her earlier book Scandal in the Colonies is a tapestry of such stories, woven between Sydney and Cape Town between 1820 and 1850.  It has many theoretical insights that make you stop, reread, and realize that things are falling into place.  In this second book, she makes this theory come alive as she meanders along a story that crosses years and oceans, looping back on itself, with deceptions and evasions and disappointments and anxieties in multiple settings.  It is not necessarily a straightforward chronology, first in one country, then the other, although the structure of the book does support this rather simplistic approach.  The book is far more discursive than this, stopping to explore phenomena and events only tangentially connected with the main narrative thread. It is far more a ‘life and times’ of a phenomena than a biography of Lascelles in both his authentic and false identities.

Her epilogue betrays a slight defensiveness about her use of narrative to explore these all-too-human responses in the face of sweeping social change:

Is narrative simply a way for historians to smooth over the mess that is the past; to re-arrange it into comfortingly familiar patterns that have beginnings, middles and ends?  and yet, for all our scholarly suspicion of the neatening effects of stories, they still possess a powerful explanatory energy.  What was it like to be buffeted by those forces that were transforming so profoundly the British imperial world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Those caught up in them would not live their lives according to the synthesising arguments of scholars.  Rather, they would act according to the dictates of narrative and plot: finding opportunities, being thwarted, experiencing greed, hope despair.  To follow these twists and turns is to highlight the way their world was changing.  It is luck and chance and swindles and lies and unexpected opportunities that direct lives and fates. (p.298)

She need not be defensive.  She is a master storyteller who uses the human to enliven the theoretical, and the insights of the scholar enrich her narrative of lives lived with contingency, imperfection and incomplete endings.  This is the best book I’ve read all year.

My rating: A big fat, unequivocal 10

Read because: I enjoyed Scandal in the Colonies so much and I can reassure myself that at least I’m reading about the 19th century British empire this time

Sourced from: my shelves- a Christmas present from my husband in 2009.  Hmmm…… it took me a little while to get round to reading it.

awwbadge_2013This will be, I think, one of my last postings to the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2013.

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Posted in Australian history, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013, Book reviews, Colonial biography, Nineteenth Century British History, Settler colonialism

‘Babes in the Bush: The Making of an Australian Image’ by Kim Torney

Posted on February 19, 2013 | 5 comments

torney

2005,  241p.

I feel as if the McCubbin image that graces the front cover of this book has been hanging in the corridor of every school I have ever attended.  Just looking at it evokes for me the smell of squashed sandwiches and pencil cases.  Likewise, the mere mention of the “Lost in the Bush” story in the primary school reader brings back memories of brave little Jane Duff, struggling with her brother to carry their baby brother through the ravines of the endless bush, tenderly covering him with her cotton dress at night.  Of course, that’s the whole power of an image:  just a glimpse or uttered word evokes a cascade of remembrances and associations. And as the title of this book suggests, the lost child in the bush is a particularly durable and potent Australian image. Continue reading →

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Posted in Australian history, Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013, Book reviews, Settler colonialism

“A Search for Sovereignty” by Lauren Benton

Posted on November 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

2010, 300 p & notes

Lauren Benton A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires 1400-1900

As a 1960’s schoolgirl, there was something rather comforting about all that red (or was it pink? or just faded?) territory on the map of the world that graced every classroom.  So much red; so neat and decisive.  In the same vein,  I think that John Howard was also drawing on the soothing idea of defined borders- so easy in an island continent- when he thundered that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

But as Lauren Benton argues in this book, borders (even for islands) are porous and contested. Although laws might be passed to regulate who comes, they often cannot be enforced-  or I’d suggest can only be enforced at significant financial and moral cost.  Nor did all that red on the map unfurl in an orderly, deliberate fashion.  Instead,  European control in new colonies was often “lumpy”. It was thick along river-banks, but sparse to non-existent inland; harsh on islands; cocooned in enclaves; and subsumed by the larger ‘law of the sea’ in open waters.

Benton divides her book into four geographical sites: rivers regions, oceans, islands and hill enclaves, and she ranges across a number of European empires to illustrate the contingent, fragile and contested nature of legal authority in these settings.

Rivers were “corridors of elusive but essential imperial control” and counterintuitively, it was the law of treason that colonists wielded against both whites and indigenous peoples perceived to be hindering exploration.  Quite a deft legal move there: using the crime of treason against people to whom legal protection was not offered!

She depicts the oceans as an even legal space, divided into long, thin zones of imperfect control that connected port towns, coasts, garrisons and islands.  Pirates and privateers drew on several competing legal regimes in drawing up commissions and in transacting privateering schemes, and they operated in the margins of the distinctions between the right to navigate and the right to exclude others from navigating.

Islands were used by empires as sites of exile with their own anomalous legal regimes (Van Diemens Land, Norfolk,…Guantanamo, Nauru,  Manus….) underpinned by military discipline of civilians and justified by evocations of vaguely defined emergency.  In such places,

…nature would corral criminals, military rule would ensure order, and systemic violence would respond to vaguely defined necessity (p.220)

Hills, too, were defined either as sites of lawlessness (think bushrangers in VDL, the maroons in Jamaica) or purity (Indian states- even Shangri-la??) and often became little enclaves, carved out and separate from surrounding legal, social and political regimes.

The structure of this book works well in explicating  the argument by jolting the reader loose from a focus on a particular territory or  empire. Instead, it ranges across the globe in exploring a geographical rather than territorial topic, and it includes Spanish, Dutch, English, Portuguese empires.  The structure also works chronologically as well, and the book ends with a  reminder of current fault lines between geography and law: the contentious status of Guantanamo Bay, the bare sovereignty offered to Iraq and Afghanistan, jurisdiction within US Indian reservations, and part-sovereign enclaves like Gaza.

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Posted in Book reviews, Settler colonialism

‘Bogle Corbet’ by John Galt

Posted on July 6, 2012 | 3 comments

1833, 334 p.

You may not have heard of Bogle Corbet, or of its author the Scottish writer John Galt but he was an incredibly prolific author, celebrated in both Scotland and Canada as an important Romantic-era author who based his narratives on “theoretical history” drawn from his observations and empirical facts . Indeed, there is a whole field of “Galt Studies” with books and conferences- none of which had entered my Antipodean awareness, I must admit.   I have a particular interest in John Galt because he socialized with my research interest, Judge Willis, when they were both in Canada in 1828.  But although John Galt may have a higher profile in Canada, and especially in Guelph which he helped establish in the 1820s, he’s not exactly a household name in Australia.

Bogle Corbet  is fiction, but it is very much the sort of book that you might expect a land and emigration entrepreneur, as Galt was, to write.  It is not autobiography, but instead a distillation of the ‘typical’ immigrant experience that he observed as part of his own role, especially as it related to the Canada Company.   However, the span of his narrative works, and particularly Bogle Corbet has prompted a reappraisal of him as a transnational author, and hence important in historical and cultural studies today.

Bogle Corbet is,  I gather, amongst his many books the one  that deals most with the immigrant experience. It is a product of its time and taste, and rather forgettable.  It comes as a three-volume edition, available through the Internet Archive and, dear me, if ever a format encouraged verbosity it must have been the three-volume novel. It is a thinly-disguised immigrant tract, aimed at the gentleman settler market, and although the fictional young Bogle travelled far from his Scottish origins- London, West Indies, back to Scotland, then Canada- not much seems to happen in this book.

The historian in me enjoyed seeing the historical reality of British emigration fictionalized, but it’s not exactly riveting stuff.  Originally of Jamaican birth of Scottish planter parents, Bogle Corbet was sent back to Scotland for his education, as was the usual practice. He seemed to fall into a career as a Glasgow merchant, a very Scottish profession, and when business faltered after the Napoleonic Wars, he travelled to the West Indies to see how their contacts were faring over there.  His observations of slavery were of the time, but the language used in characterizing the negroes sits very uncomfortably today.  I don’t even want to quote from it:  it is better left submerged in this rather obscure book.  He returned to Scotland, married rather diffidently, and when his financial prospects failed to improve, he decided to emigrate to Upper Canada instead.  His status and contacts ensured that he became the leader of an emigration scheme, shifting poor Scottish labourers over to a dedicated settlement in Upper Canada, and although some were tempted to go south into America, several soon returned chastened by their experience to take up labouring jobs to raise the money to purchase their own farms eventually (in good rather Wakefieldian fashion).

There’s a rather neat little switch where his reminiscences all of a sudden burst into the present tense, and some clever meta-narrative with a couple of self-referential passages where he comments on the act of writing. But to be honest, such gems are few and far between.  I have a particular reason for reading this book, but you probably don’t and frankly, there are better ways to spend 300-odd pages.

If I haven’t discouraged you completely, you can download all three volumes at the Internet Archive or as an e-book at Google Books.

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Posted in Book reviews, Settler colonialism, Upper Canada, Upper Canadian history

‘Bunyip Aristocracy’ by Ged Martin

Posted on May 11, 2012 | 2 comments

Ged Martin Bunyip Aristocracy: the New South Wales constitution debate of 1853 and hereditary institutions in the British Colonies, Sydney, Croom Helm, 1986, 198 pages & notes.

To understand the past in its full roundness, the historian must acknowledge that the ideas and plans which did not come to fruition are sometimes as significant as those which did.  Any other approach is tantamount to accepting that what has happened had to happen, it which case there is really no point in writing history at all. (p. 197)

“Bunyip aristocracy”- what a delicious phrase! It was coined by Daniel Deniehy to describe the squatters and pastoralists who, if they got their way in the constitutional debates of the early 1850s,  would style themselves as earls and lord it over the rest of the people. He was speaking  at a protest meeting held at the Victoria Theatre (in Sydney) on 15 August 1853, on the eve of the Select Committee of NSW’s debate about a hereditary aristocracy.

People may have laughed at the idea of a jumped-up bunyip aristocracy  but, as Ged Martin points out

From the standpoint of modern Australia the scheme is exotically bizarre. To men who saw themselves as a resident outpost of a British world, it was eminently appropriate… In many ways, New South Wales and 1853 were the logical place and year for the idea to surface.  As a colony of large pastoralists it had a superficial similarity to landed society in Britain. Its convict past had accustomed its landowning and conservative classes to equate the defence of political control with social exclusivism.” (p. 195, 196)

The idea of a hereditary colonial aristocracy that could sit in an upper house was not new, however, and nor was it confined to New South Wales alone.  In the early chapters of this book, Martin examines the idea of hereditary institutions across the empire.  Hereditary honours for Canadian colonists were mooted in the British parliament during the debate over the 1791 Canadian constitution, but the suggestion was not acted upon.  The governor of British Guiana, Sir James Carmichael Smyth, urged the establishment of a colonial order of knighthood in 1831 and again in 1837.  It was an idea that bubbled up from time to time, only to subside again when derided or frowned upon at either the London or colonial end.

In its favour was the argument that as British subjects, colonists should be able to be considered for imperial honours.  It was felt that by instituting a framework of honours, not-quite-aristocratic-but-close-enough families would be encouraged to migrate to the colonies, where they would improve the temper of society.  An upper house composed of hereditary peerages, with perhaps the odd lifetime peer thrown in to give people something to aspire to, would act as a brake on democratic excess. After all, the colonial lords would have the long-term interests of their families and their dignity at heart, and so could be trusted to do the right thing.

But should they be ‘proper’ titles, that had good standing back home? What if England was flooded with newly minted lords, flaunting their new titles when there was such demand for titles in Britain itself?  Was it possible to invent an instant aristocracy, or was it the outcome of centuries of slow growth?

These problems were never really resolved, and by the time the British government considered the new constitution for New South Wales, the proposal for a hereditary upper house had been withdrawn at the colonial end.  Not that it was envisaged that it would be an instant House of Lords in New South Wales: instead, it was envisaged that an order of baronets, uniting wealth and merit, would be established by nomination, which over time would become an electoral college for the upper house.

As Martin points out, it turned out that Australian politics ended up with a number of legislators styled ‘Sir’ and a number of families that developed a tradition of political service anyway : Sir Robert Menzies, Sir Richard Casey and political dynasties like the Anthonys, the Downers, the Jenkins, the Cains and the Newmans.   It was sobering to remember the occasional re-emergence of quaint ideas of Australia as a cadet monarchy with suggestions that Prince Charles might become governor-general, or a rather weird suggestion that Princess Alexandra might become Queen of Australia.  Sir Robert Menzies was her first son’s godfather, and his middle name was Bruce (after Sir Stanley Bruce, I assume, and not because the name ‘Bruce’ summons up a broad-shouldered farmer with big hands?)

Queen Sandy of Australia?

Apparently this idea was treated with derision, with critics suggesting that Sir Robert Menzies or Sir Richard Casey could be appointed governor-general of Great Britain instead.

In many ways this book is a good counterpart to Peter Cochrane’s Colonial Ambition, although it lacks the rollicking characterizations of Cochrane’s book. The typesetting is of its time and awful: dense, single-spaced, typed pages with footnotes jammed up against the lines of text.   It’s not a what-if history, but it does finish by noting the things that could have brought a hereditary honours system or a cadet monarchy into existence, had they fallen differently.  And had a more systematic association with the royal princes developed,

Historians would still have gently derided the whole thing, because historians are usually good-humoured progressives.  But historians are also very good at being wise after the event.  If the persistent rhetoric of transferring British institutions to the colonies had actually led to an attempt to imitate the distinctively hereditary features of Britain’s constitution, no historian today would express much surprise. (p. 198)

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Posted in Australian history, Book reviews, Settler colonialism

‘I Succeeded Once: The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula 1839-40’ by Marie Hansen Fels

Posted on April 25, 2012 | 5 comments

There is a somewhat elegaic, wistful tone to this book, hinted at by its title. It is a quote from the journal of Assistant Protector William Thomas as he was about to re-locate his Protectorate for the second time in three years under official instructions.  He had been forced to shift from the Mornington Peninsula in 1840 to Nerre Nerre Warren, then forced again to shift to Merri Creek in 1843.  There were many reasons that he had failed, he said, but there was one time when he could have been said to have succeeded- and that was at Arthurs Seat between 1839 and 1840.

In the Afterword to the book, the author admits that there is “no conclusion, no grand summing-up” in her work.  She evokes the late Greg Dening, who taught that “the historical effort was to understand and to explain: not to judge, not to label, not to take sides.” (p. 397).  In many ways, it would have been helpful to have her afterword as a preface, because I found myself somewhat puzzled about what this book actually is. It is part of ANU’s Aboriginal History Monograph series, which presents “studies on particular themes or regions, or a series of articles on single subjects of contemporary interest.”  In this case, it focuses minutely on a relatively small area of land, over mainly a one-year period, although it does spill out of this chronological limit at times.

The book won the ‘Best Community Research, Register, Records’ category of the Victorian Community History Awards in 2011. The typographic layout of the book is more suited to a records-based document than a narrative history: it has the appearance of a work-book or training manual, and the headings and boxed biographies of individual aboriginal people feel as if they are the product of a word-processor rather than a commercial print layout.   It is thoroughly commendable that the book is available free as a download through ANU e-press here.  I suspect that I might have felt short-changed had I paid $29.95 for a print-on-demand copy (although, admittedly that is not a high price).   The rather thin covers of my book are already curling.

But the value of this book lies in its contents, not the layout.   As a Melburnian, and one who holidays on the Mornington peninsula side of the bay (rather than the “other”, western side), it was as if my January canvas of caravans and holiday houses had been stripped back to another, earlier frontier time.  Names were familiar, but distorted (like Moody Yallock for what I assume is now Mordialloc, and Kullurk for Coolart).  Although I was of course aware of McCrae Homestead, it had never occurred to me that there were other pastoralists down on the peninsula as well. I hadn’t thought of my caravan site down at Capel Sound as part of a squatter’s run, but I think that I sensed, just a little, an older history of the peninsula when I was down at Balcombe Creek a month or two back.

Her book is, as she admits, a contrarian view to the prevailing orthodoxies of confrontation, massacres and victimhood.  Instead, hers is a story of an “amiable, intimate, non-violent coexistence”, but this is not explained by the facile “our lot were a peaceful lot” with “mild and inoffensive” men. Instead, she argues:

That there was no conflict at all on the Mornington Peninsula is to be explained in the same terms as conflict is explained in other regions of Victoria, that is, in terms of individual leaders, of social and political agendas of groups, of the tone of relationships between both Indigenous and European. (p.177)

And this is what her book is- an exploration of the tone of relationships between Assistant Protector William Thomas and the squatter farmers of the Mornington Peninsula, and the men and women of the Bunurong people who ranged over it as their traditional lands.  Just as she did in her earlier book Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District, Fels delineates, names and gives a life trajectory and agency to aboriginal people who otherwise remain as the shadowy ‘other’. In text boxes headed with the variations of their names- both aboriginal and conferred-  (e.g. Nunupton/Nunuptune/Nalnuptune/Naluptune/Nunnapaton/Nunupthen/Namapton/Billy Langhorne/Mr Langhorne p. 266), you sense the white informants grappling with unfamiliar sounds, trying to render them into writing and to somehow capture individuals within a bureaucratic report and a census system.  She traces the appearance of individuals at different locations throughout the district as recorded in musters, reports and official letters, their family connections, and their all-too-often premature deaths.

She brings Assistant Protector William Thomas to life for us as well.  The Protectorate scheme was devised in Britain in response to humanitarian concern over the decimation (a term that under-estimates) of indigenous people across the empire.  The Protectors were greeted by many settlers with disdain and derision, and by humanitarians with frustration and annoyance at their various shortcomings.  Rather than being mobile, single men able to follow tribes ranging across country, they were family men operating on a model of establishing a mission in a central location.  I’ve mentioned Robinson before here and here, and Sievewright here.   Assistant Protect William Thomas was a family man as well, and shared with his fellow protectors the curse of execrable handwriting, although the depth and range of his private and public writings has been invaluable for historians (especially now that someone else has grappled with the handwriting!)

And so we see Thomas trying (not always successfully) to enforce Sunday observance; we see his powerlessness to stop a raiding party; the pettiness of Protector Robinson and the futility of railing against bureaucracy, and his sense of bewilderment and sinking disappointment as he returns to the Peninsula after the enforced and much-resented shift to Narre Narre Warren, only to find the peninsula deserted.

Although the focus of the book is on 1839-40, this one year did not happen in isolation.  Actions which took place in this focal year had antecedents, and when the Bunurong men took off on a raiding party towards Gippsland, it was yet another episode in a long-running distrust between the two nations that long predated white settlement.  She works hard to uncover the context and rationale for this feud, exploring a number of hypotheses that take her beyond tribal and cultural factors into a consideration of geological and archaeological evidence of sedimentation, inundation and earthquakes in millenia past.

Moreover, there had been contact between the Bunurong people and white sealers and timber gatherers along the coast and the Bass Strait islands in the decades before Fawkner/Batman claimed possession of the district.  Fels devotes a considerable amount of time tracing the kidnapping of particular individuals, both men and women, who ended up in the Bass Strait Islands, South Australia and even Western Australia,  far from Bunurong country.  This is important: as we speak, there are competing custodial claims from the Boonwurrung Foundation and the Bunurong Land Council based on the status and identity of Louisa Briggs, one of several women abducted.  The contentiousness of such issues is highlighted by the heavily censored and blacked-out reports generated by archaeologists and ethnographers as part of this twenty-first century dispute.

There is a sense, too, of the clock ticking over several of the sites that she describes here.   A footnote questions the expertise of the author of the archaeological report for the Martha Cove development, and a planning permit has been granted on a mission site, extended to 2013, for a Holiday Resort incorporating a winery, function centre, restaurant, hotel, camping park and golf driving range. Another mission site has been identified on private property, but she does not disclose the location.

This is not a ‘straight’ narrative history.  She rebuts a number of local history myths, and she challenges other written histories, for example Bruce Pascoe’s The Convincing Ground.   There is not a smooth narrative flow and it is certainly no coffee table book (and I’m sure was never intended to be).  It is history with its sleeves rolled up.

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Posted in Aborigines in Port Phillip, Australian history, Book reviews, Port Phillip history, Settler colonialism

‘Imperial Communication: Australia, Britain and the British Empire c1839-1850’

Posted on April 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

Simon J. Potter (ed) Imperial Communication: Australian, Britain and the British Empire c1830-1850 ,London, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 2005

Growing up in the early 1960s, I am old enough to remember thinking of myself living in an empire, even if by then the proper terminology was ‘commonwealth’.  Although I am a fourth (?) generation Australian, there was still a sense that if you were going to travel anywhere overseas (by ship, naturally), then you’d go to England and ‘the continent’. Cars were made in England; your crockery was made in England; Enid Blyton WAS England; coats came from England; the Beatles and Carnaby Street came from England, and I was inordinately proud of my Mark Shaw three-piece pillar-box red pants suit made in England.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I very much thought of England as ‘the centre’ and Australia, New Zealand and Canada as ‘the periphery’.  I don’t know that I really thought about the other red bits on the map at all, except to acknowledge them perhaps as a family of cultural political step-siblings who also received visits from our hatted and gloved Queen.

Academically, this centre/periphery model of the British Empire has been challenged by a number of views.  One of these is that, instead of  being pre-eminent at the centre of the empire, Britain was itself changed by the two way flow of wealth, information and political innovation from the colonies.  The second is that the British Empire is best seen as an intersecting, overlapping network or web, of personnel and information that flowed in circuits between and across the metropole and peripheries.  People are an important component of this- the waves of emigrants who circulated between locations, and the corps of officials and bureaucrats whose career took them from one placement to another.  My own work fits very much into this view of empire, and so, too, do the papers in this book.  It’s an approach that appeals to me because it combines the personal and fine-grained element of biography within a broader overarching structural model.

The first paper by Damen Ward from New Zealand is entitled ‘Colonial communication: forums for creating public opinion in Crown Colony South Australia and New Zealand’.  He has chosen these two colonies because they were both associated with Wakefieldianism and prided themselves that they were ‘free’ colonies rather than penal, and that their colonists were fully entitled to their legal and constitutional rights as free-born, active, independent British subjects.  He examines  this language of constitutionalism as it played out through settler-initiated public discourse, most particularly in public meetings, petitions and memorials, the press, and Grand Jury presentments where jurors themselves raised issues of concern to the population at large.

Zoe Laidlaw, in ‘Closing the Gap: colonial governors and unofficial communications in the 1830s’ examines the more personalized communication channels that governors and lobby groups carved out for themselves to ensure that their viewpoints were heard back ‘home’.  Although governors seemed to be in a privileged position in terms of official communication and access to the movers and shakers, they were much more vulnerable than they appeared.  Political parties moved in and out of office, particularly during the 1830s and 1840s, and the career-enhancing coup of naming a city or a river after a particular politician didn’t look quite so wise when that politician was bundled into the opposition.  Governors were under financial pressure and they were reliant on gossip or slow and often outdated information, and so they were reliant on ‘friends’ of like political persuasion who could represent their interests in person to the Colonial Office.  Unfortunately for them, though, their opponents and lobby groups could play this game too, and sometimes, as in the case of Sir John Franklin, the ‘friend’ turned out to be anything but.  Laidlaw illustrates this scenario through the example of Governor Bourke, who enlisted his son Dick as his envoy.

Finally, Alan Lester’s paper furthers the concept of the British Empire as a network by examining the rival humanitarian and settler circuits of communication that operated between and within sites in the Empire. The humanitarian networks reached a peak of influence with the anti-slavery and then aboriginal lobby-groups that held sway over the Colonial Office.  They, and their local branches, were challenged by settler groups, in differing degrees of formal organization, which strongly resented the imposition of a morality from afar.  This transcended national borders. Governors like Bourke were execrated as “liberals” by settler groups in South Africa,who later greeted news of his downfall in NSW  with glee.

These essays work well as a collection.  They spring from a similar historical approach, and their length is sufficient for their authors to develop and support an argument in some detail.  The layout of the pages is generous, leading to an easily-read and rewarding exploration of people operating as best they can and with differing degrees of awareness within the larger structure of empire within a tightly-focussed timeframe..

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Posted in Book reviews, Nineteenth Century British History, Settler colonialism

Edward Gibbon Wakefield and all the other Wakefields.

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 10 comments

One of the joys of research- and yes, it IS still a joy- is that sometimes you are led into a direction that you didn’t anticipate.  I’m not talking about the siren-songs of distraction that keep your head turning from side to side, but a genuine surprise that makes you stop to re-evaluate what you’ve already found from a different perspective. The other day  I was speaking with a friend who is a librarian, who enjoys the act of finding and building order into material, and he said that he could not tolerate the anxiety that the next resource he turned over might upend the whole thing. I don’t see it that way (yet?): I am still open to surprise and fluidity.

As a result, regular readers might have detected that I am wandering recently into the swamps of colonial constitutional history- not a destination I would have expected or relished-  and it is here that I have stopped for a little while with Edward Gibbon Wakefield (EGW from hereon) with two books that I’ve just read.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield (to the extent that he is known at all)  is most often associated in Australia for his connection with the settlement of  South Australia in 1836 under his theory of ‘systematic colonization’.  Put very briefly, this involved encouraging immigration to the colonies across all strata of British society, but ensuring that labourers remain available as a mobile labour force by selling land at a “sufficient price” that too high for them to purchase until they had been in the colony for a number of years. I was aware that there were Wakefieldian settlements in New Zealand, in Christchurch in particular, and so I was rather bemused by all the Wakefieldian graves in Wellington.

Wakefield family graves, Bolton St cemetery Wellington

Memorial plaque to Col. William Wakefield, Bolton St cemetery.

The works that I have read on New Zealand, namely Paul Moon’s Hobson  and Peter Adams’ Fatal Necessity portray the Wakefieldians as insistent self-interested lobbyists, who needed to be watched carefully. I was also aware that Wakefield had been imprisoned for kidnapping an heiress- indeed, it was during this period of incarceration that he wrote his Letter from Sydney (penned from his cell in Newgate!) which spelled out his systematic colonization theories.

Paul Bloomfield: Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth, London, Longmans, 1961, 378 p.

The first of the two books I have read recently is Paul Bloomfield’s Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth. This book, written in 1961, has been described in a paper by Ged Martin as “the high-water mark of uncritical admiration of Wakefield and his work ” as the title might suggest. He starts his book with the abduction, told in racy and engaging prose- and why not, because it’s a good story.  It was, however, an episode that cruelled Wakefield’s career from that point on, as the scandal attached to it ensured that he could never put his name to any official policy that drew on his principles, and  he had to content himself with background lobbying and influence instead.  There are relatively few footnotes, although there is a bibliography and useful index, and there are frequent references to novels and literary characters, as if Wakefield himself sprang from fictional origins.  This is something that I find myself having to resist in my own work.  The 19th century novel is so pervasive and its representation in film and television provides such a ready visual backdrop that it’s easy to switch to a fictional shorthand.  As such, Bloomfield depicts the abduction as a youthful aberration that denied Wakefield the acclaim he deserved.  The emphasis is mainly on Wakefield’s lobbying in England amongst Parliamentarians, although it does follow him to Canada and New Zealand as well.

He made an interesting observation (especially in light of my recent posting and resultant comments about Christmas with the cousins)

One day someone will publish a study of the difference made in English sentiment by the change from a fifteen million population composed of large families to a fifty million population in which most parents have no more than two children.  We have only to look into the lives of the prolific Quaker cousinhoods, including the Wakefields, to see what an advantage their special community-sense was to them, what a source of strength it was to them to live in a clime of mutual aid. (p. 205)

The second book that I’ve read recently on Wakefield does just this.

Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields, Auckland, Auckland University Press, 2002 (paperback edition 2003), 541 p.

A Sort of Conscience is more nuanced than the Bloomfield account, and it spreads its analysis further into the Wakefield family as a whole- the brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, many (but not all) of whom ended up embroiled in one way or another with Wakefieldian enterprises.  Although fundamentally positive towards Wakefield, Temple acknowledges the flaws of personality amongst many of the Wakefield siblings and while not dismissing the abduction completely, argues that even more disquiet amongst influential people was prompted by  Wakefield’s involvement in a dubious legal case about his first wife’s lucrative will, some ten years prior to the abduction escapade.  Like Bloomfield, Temple shows that Wakefield was forced to operate in the background when his policies were implemented, but this seems fortuitous as he was overbearing, interfering and careless of details.

Temple draws heavily on family correspondence, which seems to be voluminous, especially once the family spread across the globe.  Many of the letters were addressed to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s sister, Catherine, who married a minister and stayed behind in England- in fact, Temple quips at one stage that his book could easily have been called “Dear Catherine”.   You can detect in the family a bifurcation between the family members who moved from the Quaker to Evangelical affiliations, and those who became caught up in the entrepreneurialism and politicking of EGW as he sought to have his theory of systematic colonization embedded into colonial policy.  However, you’d have to say that the politicking won out, as more and more siblings and nephews travelled overseas to New Zealand in particular, where Wakefieldianism was implemented in its purest form.  EGW himself ended his days there, although in Wellington rather than Christchurch (the settlement which most closely approximated his theory. )

Wakefieldianism is often presented as a monolithic and inflexible policy, although frustratingly vague in important details like the price that should be charged for land to make sure that settlers remained labourers for a few years instead of moving straight on to being self-employed farmers.  I was interested, then, to see that Wakefield himself was more pragmatic and open to change than I expected once he actually moved to the colonies settled under variations of his theories.

This book is, like Bloomfield’s, ultimately sympathetic to Wakefield, although with more serious qualifications, as the ambivalence of the title suggests.  By following him more closely to the colonies, and by broadening the scope to the Wakefield family as a whole,  Temple captures well its mobility and the emotional tenor of lobbying and patronage in early 19th Britain and its colonies.  The book has been very well received, winning the Ernest Scott Prize in 2003, the Ian Wards prize for historical writing, and the Biography category of the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

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Posted in Book reviews, Colonial biography, Nineteenth Century British History, Settler colonialism