Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890 9781107084858; 1107084857

At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian de

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Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890
 9781107084858; 1107084857

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 3
Series Page......Page 4
Title Page......Page 5
Imprints Page......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
List of Abbreviations......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 11
Maps......Page 15
Introduction: How Settlers Gained Self-Government and Indigenous People (Almost) Lost It......Page 17
Settler Societies......Page 33
The Structure of the Book......Page 35
Part I A Four-Cornered Contest: British Government, Settlers, Missionaries, and Indigenous Peoples......Page 43
1 Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830......Page 45
Evolution of Britain’s Aboriginal Policy in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1788–1830......Page 47
Frontier Conflict Escalates, 1825–1830......Page 54
War in Van Diemen’s Land......Page 56
Colonisation and Aboriginal Policy – Where to Next?......Page 59
Introduction: British Enthusiasm for Colonisation Grows......Page 64
Pastoral Expansion and Aboriginal Policy, 1831–4......Page 69
Evangelicals and Aboriginal Policy, 1835......Page 74
Political Representation for Settlers? 1833–1836......Page 77
Aboriginal Protest and Negotiation, 1835–1838......Page 80
Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements, 1836–1837......Page 83
Glenelg Installs New Protection Policy......Page 88
New South Wales......Page 90
Port Phillip......Page 100
South Australia......Page 107
Western Australia......Page 114
Introduction......Page 119
Anti-transportation in Britain......Page 120
Trouble in the Canadian Colonies......Page 124
Response to the Durham Report......Page 128
British Discussion of Self-Government and Aboriginal Policy, 1839–1841......Page 130
Indigenous People in Settlers’ Political Rights Discourse......Page 135
The New Constitution......Page 140
Land Policy and Aboriginal Rights......Page 143
The First Elections......Page 147
Aboriginal Policy: The Imperial and the Local......Page 151
Separation Movements in Moreton Bay and Port Phillip......Page 157
Port Phillip......Page 161
Indigenous Activism in Van Diemen’s Land......Page 164
Part II Towards Self-Government......Page 169
British Views Regarding Self-Government......Page 171
Colonial Demands for Self-Government, 1846–1849......Page 176
Anti-Transportationists on Aboriginal–Settler Relations......Page 180
Settler Discourse on the Place of Aboriginal People in the Colonies’ Future......Page 187
The Australian Colonies Government Act, 1850......Page 189
7 ‘No Place for the Sole of Their Feet’: Imperial-Colonial Dialogue on Aboriginal Land Rights, 1846–1851......Page 196
The Reality of Population Decline and the Idea of Extinction......Page 197
Missions – Endings and Beginnings......Page 198
A Resurgence of Humanitarianism: Earl Grey, the Colonial Office, and Aboriginal Policy......Page 202
Colonial Responses to Grey’s Despatch......Page 206
Schools, Hospitals, and Blankets......Page 213
Policing......Page 216
Reflections on Impending Extinction in Van Diemen’s Land......Page 219
8 Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? Britain Transfers Control of Aboriginal Policy to the Colonies, 1852–1854......Page 224
The Gold Rushes and Aboriginal People......Page 225
Britain’s Colonial Policy, 1852–1855......Page 229
The Imperial Government Washes Its Hands: Land Policy and Aboriginal Governance......Page 232
Humanitarians in the Colonies......Page 238
Colonists Devise New Constitutions, 1853–1854......Page 242
The British Debates over the New Constitutions, 1854–1855......Page 251
British Attitudes During the First Few Years of Responsible Government......Page 254
Aboriginal People and the British Public......Page 261
Queen Victoria and Australian Aboriginal People......Page 266
Part III Self-Governing Colonies and Indigenous People, 1856–c.1870......Page 269
10 Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania......Page 271
Aboriginal Policy under Responsible Government......Page 272
The Continuing Role of the Governor......Page 274
Last Days at Oyster Cove......Page 275
The Indigenous Peoples of the Bass Strait Islands......Page 277
11 ‘A Refugee in Our Own Land’: Governing Aboriginal People in Victoria......Page 285
Indigenous Agency and the Reserves Policy......Page 290
Intervention, Micro-Management, and Control......Page 300
12 Aboriginal Survival in New South Wales......Page 304
The Northern Districts, 1856–1859......Page 305
Liberal Governments and Aboriginal Policy......Page 314
A Policy of Minimal Care......Page 317
Land and Labour......Page 321
Extinction and Indifference......Page 323
Conclusion......Page 327
13 Their Worst Fears Realised: The Disaster of Queensland......Page 329
The First Two Years of Self-Government, 1859–1861......Page 330
The Native Mounted Police under Responsible Government......Page 333
The Violent 1860s......Page 342
Missions, Schooling, and Aboriginal Labour......Page 344
Prince Alfred’s Visit......Page 347
Aboriginal Policy in the First Four Years of Responsible Government......Page 351
The Uncertainty as to Aboriginal People’s Political and Legal Status......Page 355
The Select Committee, 1860......Page 357
Colonial Governance of Aboriginal People 1861–1867......Page 360
The Far North......Page 365
‘John Baker been steal our Prince’: Aboriginal Political Strategies......Page 369
Conclusion......Page 373
Part IV Self-Government for Western Australia......Page 375
15 ‘Little Short of Slavery’: Forced Aboriginal Labour in Western Australia, 1856–1884......Page 377
Aboriginal Policy 1856–1870......Page 378
Aboriginal Policy under Representative Government......Page 382
Governor Robinson and Aboriginal Policy, 1880–1883......Page 387
The Interregnum, February–June 1883......Page 390
Broome and Aboriginal Policy, 1883......Page 392
Conclusion......Page 400
16 ‘A Slur upon the Colony’: Making Western Australia’s Unusual Constitution, 1885–1890......Page 401
The Effect of Aboriginal Policy Questions on the Campaign for Responsible Government......Page 409
Aboriginal Policy Under Self-Government, 1890–1901......Page 417
Conclusion......Page 421
Index......Page 429

Citation preview

Taking Liberty

At last, here is a history that explains how Indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens. It also shows how shifting wider imperial and colonial politics influenced the treatment of Indigenous Australians, and how Indigenous people began to engage in their own ways with these new political institutions. Essentially, this book unites two histories that have hitherto been told separately: one concerns the arrival of early democracy in the Australian colonies, as white settlers moved from the shame and restrictions of the penal era to a new and freer society with their own institutions of government; the other is the tragedy of Indigenous dispossession and displacement, with its frontier violence, poverty, disease, and enforced regimes of mission life. Ann Curthoys is an Australian historian who has written on numerous aspects of Australian history. She is Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia, and Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University. Her many books include Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers, which won the Stanner Prize from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, was ‘Highly Commended’ for non-fiction in the Australian Human Rights Awards, and was shortlisted for the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies’ Award for Non-Fiction. Jessie Mitchell holds a PhD in history from the Australian National University, where she won the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award for the best PhD thesis. She also won the John Barrett Award for Australian Studies for her article ‘“The galling yoke of slavery”: Race and separation in colonial Port Philip’, which appeared in the Journal of Australian Studies. Her book, In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia Through God, Charity and Empire, 1825–1855, was published by ANU EPress in 2011.

Critical Perspectives on Empire Editors Professor Catherine Hall University College London Professor Mrinalini Sinha University of Michigan Professor Kathleen Wilson State University of New York, Stony Brook Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series explore the connections, exchanges and mediations at the heart of national and global histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge, and the flows of people, ideas and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To that end, the series not only offers a space for outstanding scholars working at the intersection of several disciplines to bring to wider attention the impact of their work; it also takes a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical and critical knowledge, of the past and of ourselves. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/cpempire

Taking Liberty Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890 Ann Curthoys University of Sydney

Jessie Mitchell Independent Scholar

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107084858 DOI: 10.1017/9781316027035 © Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Curthoys, Ann, author. | Mitchell, Jessie, author. Title: Taking liberty : indigenous rights and settler self-government in colonial Australia, 1830–1890 / Ann Curthoys, Jessie Mitchell. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Critical perspectives on empire | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018011572 | ISBN 9781107084858 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Aboriginal Australians—Government relations—History— 19th century. | Aboriginal Australians—Civil rights—History—19th century. | Australia—Politics and government—19th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Australia & New Zealand. Classification: LCC DU124.G68 C87 2018 | DDC 323.1199/15009034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011572 ISBN 978-1-107-08485-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

 List of Abbreviations  Acknowledgements Maps Introduction: How Settlers Gained Self-Government and Indigenous People (Almost) Lost It

vii ix xiii 1

Part I  A Four-Cornered Contest: British Government, Settlers, Missionaries, and Indigenous Peoples 1 Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830

29

2 ‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’: Colonisation and the Beginnings of Humanitarian Intervention, 1831–1837

48

3 Settlers Oppose Indigenous Protection, 1837–1842

72

4 A Colonial Conundrum: Settler Rights versus Indigenous Rights, 1837–1842

103

5 Who Will Control the Land? Colonial and Imperial Debates, 1842–1846

127

Part II  Towards Self-Government 6 Who Will Govern the Settlers? Imperial and Settler Desires, Visions, and Utopias, 1846–1850

155

7 ‘No Place for the Sole of Their Feet’: Imperial-Colonial Dialogue on Aboriginal Land Rights, 1846–1851

180

8 Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? Britain Transfers Control of Aboriginal Policy to the Colonies, 1852–1854

208

9 The Dark Side of Responsible Government? Britain and Indigenous People in the Self-Governing Colonies, 1854–1870

235 v

vi

Contents

Part III  Self-Governing Colonies and Indigenous People, 1856–c.1870 10 Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania

255

11 ‘A Refugee in Our Own Land’: Governing Aboriginal People in Victoria

269

12 Aboriginal Survival in New South Wales

288

13 Their Worst Fears Realised: The Disaster of Queensland

313

14 A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different: Aboriginal Policy in South Australia

335

Part IV  Self-Government for Western Australia 15 ‘Little Short of Slavery’: Forced Aboriginal Labour in Western Australia, 1856–1884

361

16 ‘A Slur upon the Colony’: Making Western Australia’s Unusual Constitution, 1885–1890

385

Conclusion

405

Index

413

Abbreviations

ADB AFA APS CBPA CCCL CCL CO HL Deb HRA JP JRAHS LA LC ML MLC NSW NSWSA PD PP QLA QLC QSA SA SLV SMH SRSA UKNA VP WA

Australian Dictionary of Biography Aborigines’ Friends’ Association Aborigines’ Protection Society Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands Commissioner of Crown Lands Colonial Office House of Lords Debates Historical Records of Australia Justice of the Peace Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society Legislative Assembly Legislative Council Mitchell Library, New South Wales Member of the Legislative Council New South Wales New South Wales State Archives Parliamentary Debates Parliamentary Papers Queensland Legislative Assembly Queensland Legislative Council Queensland State Archives South Australia State Library of Victoria Sydney Morning Herald State Records of South Australia The National Archives of the United Kingdom Votes and Proceedings Western Australia

vii

Acknowledgements

. . . everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too – something after all which perhaps every human being has inherited, this too has to be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work. Franz Kafka

This book tells a tragic story of dispossession, destruction of many of the foundations of life, rapid population decline, and subjection of the Indigenous peoples of Australia to an imperial and then a settler-dominated regime. The challenge in writing it has been to tell that story in all its complexity and variety, and at the same time see how it intersects with other stories – imperial expansion, humanitarian and evangelical desires for ‘native’ protection and civilisation, Indigenous resistance, adaptation and survival, and settler aspirations for self-government. Yet, if many aspects of the story make for some sad reading and serious reflection on the mixed foundations on which modern Australian society is built, working on it has been a pleasure. It is a product of, and hopefully contributes to, a lively world of historical scholarship focussing on indigenous histories in settler colonies, British imperial history, and comparative settler colonial studies. This is a historical world interested in the complex results of human mobility in an imperial and colonial framework, tracing networks of communication and influence, movements of people from one part of the world to another, and clashing ideas concerning the rights, nature, and future of the indigenous peoples the colonisers meet. It has been challenging and stimulating, and the source of collegial and friendly relationships across the world. Our first acknowledgements go to those historians whose work has inspired us, and who have assisted us in our researches in various ways. Though we cannot mention everyone, we particularly mention Adele Perry, Alan Lester, Ann McGrath, Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, Dane Kennedy, Desley Deacon, Elizabeth Elbourne, Esther Breitenbach, Frances Peters-Little, Gail Lewis, Jane Lydon, John Maynard, Jeremy Martens, Joy Damousi, Julie Evans, Larissa Behrendt, Lyndall Ryan, Marilyn Lake, Mark McKenna, Patricia Grimshaw, Penelope Edmonds, Tony Ballantyne, and Zoë Laidlaw. ix

x

Acknowledgements

In particular, Ann wishes to thank Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward, the editors of Australia’s Empire, for inviting her to contribute a chapter entitled ‘Indigenous Subjects’; preparing it revealed just how rarely did histories of Aboriginal-European relations notice the transfer from British to settler self-government, let alone attempt to assess what difference it might have made. She also wishes to thank Neville Green, whom she has never met, for his essay, ‘From princes to paupers: the struggle for control of Aborigines in Western Australia, 1887–1898’, which alerted her to the fact that the British government had included a clause, Section 70, in the Western Australian Constitution of 1889 that attempted to protect Aboriginal welfare. Why, Ann immediately wondered, had there been no such attempt for the other Australian colonies? Or perhaps there had been, and it had failed and was then forgotten? From such questions was the project born. Modern academic life is intensely sociable and communicative, and we wish to thank the conference organisers and seminar hosts where we tried out our ideas, including Kirsten McKenzie, Jane Carey, Jane Lydon, Lynette Russell, Leigh Boucher, Ben Mountford, Cath Kevin, Tim Rowse, and Narrelle Morris. We thank, too, the editors of journals and essay collections who have helped us develop our work, notably Saliha Belmessous, Kate Fullagar, David Roberts, Clare Anderson, Mohamed Adhikari, Alison Bashford, and Stuart Macintyre. We also thank Jane Lydon, who co-edited with Ann a special issue of Studies in Western Australian History on Section 70 of the Western Australian Constitution. As part of our project, we held several symposia on questions of indigenous rights and settler self-government, and we thank the contributors to those symposia, whose work was important in helping us develop our ideas. For their contributions we thank Marilyn Lake, Mark McKenna, Rachel Standfield, Zoë Laidlaw, Angela Woollacott, Sam Furphy, Ann Genovese, Julie Evans, Tess Fluence, Leigh Boucher, Robert Foster, Amanda Nettelbeck, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Anne Scrimgeour, Steven Churches, Chris Owen, Jane Lydon, Katherine Roscoe, Jeremy Martens, Sarah Murray, and the late Peter Johnston. Then there are the institutions without which research such as this could not have been undertaken. We thank the Australian Research Council for funding Ann Curthoys’s Professorial Fellowship project, ‘Indigenous People, the British Empire, and Self-Government for the Australian Colonies’. We are truly honoured and grateful. Next, we also thank colleagues and staff at the universities at which we worked while on this project, principally the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, and the University of Western Australia. At the University of Sydney, Ann particularly thanks Warwick Anderson as head of the Centre for Race and Ethnicity in the Global South for supporting her work in the later stages, and the members of the writing

Acknowledgements xi

group in the History Department known as the Alchemists (since we try to turn our base metal into gold), especially Kirsten McKenzie, Penny Russell, Richard White, Blanca Tovias, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Cindy McCreery, who workshopped sections of this book. In addition, Jessie was hosted for a year at Monash University’s Indigenous Centre, and thanks Lynette Russell and Jane Lydon for their hospitality there, while Ann thanks the Menzies Centre at King’s College London, for hosting several research visits in London. Especially important were the public libraries and archives at which we worked, especially the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, the National Library of Scotland, the Rhodes House Library in Oxford, the New York Public Library, and the library of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. In Australia, we thank the staff at the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the La Trobe Library in Victoria, the State Library of Queensland, the J. S. Battye Library in Western Australia, and the State Records Office of Western Australia. The State Library of Victoria hosted Jessie for a year through its Creative Fellowship programme, enabling her to make extensive use of their archives, and she thanks them for this especially. Ann wishes to thank Jessie especially for being such a wonderful co-researcher and co-author, and for being so patient when Ann took longer than intended to write her sections of the book. She also thanks Ned Curthoys and Shino Konishi for their support and intellectual engagement with and belief in her work. Above all, Ann thanks John Docker for his enormous contribution through discussing ideas and reading every draft of every chapter, and his ongoing love and support over the years it took to bring this work to fruition. Jessie wishes to acknowledge what an absolute privilege and pleasure it was to work with Ann Curthoys. Jessie also wishes to thank her family, her partner, Sam, and her friends, especially Verity Archer for her many insights and encouragement.

Maps

Cape York

W.A

Ql d

S. A

N.S.W. Vic. Tas.

QU EENS LA ND Tr o p i c o f C a p r i c o r n Cullin-la-ringo

Hornet Bank Zion Hill/Nundah

Moreton Bay

BRISBANE Callandoon Fassifern

Myall Creek

NEW S OU TH

Waterloo Creek Lake Macquarie

WALES

SYDNEY

VI C TOR I A Franklinford Jackson’s Creek Ballarat Geelong MELBOURNE Framlingham station

Ramahyuck Strait Flinders Island

TAS MA NI A HOBART Oyster Cove

x Is. neau Fur

Bass

0

500 km

Map 1.  Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania (known as Van Diemen’s Land until 1856), showing the colonial boundaries as they were in 1863. Significant places mentioned in the text are indicated. Cartographer: Peter Johnson.

xiv

Maps

Qld

S.A

W.A

Escape Cliffs

N.S.W. Vic. Tas. Kim ber ley Broome Flying Foam Murujuga Burrup Passage Peninsula Pilbar a

S OU T H

WE S T E R N

Ca p ri c o rn Tr o p i c o f

ne River Gascoy Murchison region

AU S TR ALI A

AU S TR ALI A

New Norcia PERTH Fremantle Guildford Rottnest Island

York Poonindie Albany

Kapunda ADELAIDE

Point McLeay

500 km

Map 2.  Western Australia and South Australia, showing the colonial boundaries as they were in 1863. Significant places mentioned in the text are indicated. Cartographer: Peter Johnson.

Introduction How Settlers Gained Self-­Government and Indigenous People (Almost) Lost It

This book explores what settler self-­government meant for indigenous people in the Australian colonies.1 How, in other words, did the rights and liberties of settlers impinge upon the rights and liberties of Indigenous people? We ask what role Indigenous–settler relations played in the establishment of self-­government  – how, for example, did the experience of being colonisers shape settlers’ conceptions of independent citizenship and of their own political rights? We also ask how Indigenous peoples in Australia understood and interpreted the difference between imperial and settler governance. Most importantly, we ask what difference did the shift from British control to settler self-­government make to the ways in which Indigenous people were treated and governed. One reason we need to ask these questions is that there has been a division within Australian colonial historiography which has resulted in these questions having rarely been asked or answered. There are, indeed, two separately narrated histories that we wish to bring together. One history concerns the Australian colonies’ gaining self-­government and, soon afterwards, a type of colonial democracy, while remaining within the framework of the British Empire. Historians often tell it, to Australian audiences at least, as part of the positive story of colonists emerging from the shame and restrictions of penal settlements to build a free society with liberal institutions such as freedom of the press, trial by jury, freedom of assembly, and, with self-­government, the development of democratic institutions such as universal male suffrage and the secret ballot. Part of the attraction of this narrative of progress is the rapidity of change with little in the way of violent struggle, and the making of democratic institutions from such an unlikely start. Unlike the history of the rise of American democracy and independence, however, this is not a story to which the majority of Australians are passionately wedded. It plays surprisingly little  The terms Aboriginal and Indigenous are both used in this book, as they are in modern Australian discourse. As far as possible, we have used the term Indigenous, as the broader and more general term used in international comparative scholarship. However, given the frequent use of the term Aboriginal in our sources, we have ourselves used the term Aboriginal in the context of discussion of those sources.

1

1

2

Introduction

part in patriotic national narratives, which tend to focus more around suffering and endurance in times of war, or, less commonly, the creation of a diverse and tolerant society with opportunities for all. Yet the supposed mundanity of the tale of the rise of Australian democracy and independence is arguably the key to its subtle appeal; this is a reassuring history of progress without fuss, of a people who established governance over a continent without bloodshed or serious division. Alongside the story of the peaceful establishment of self-­government and democracy, however, is another story that historians also tell  – the tragedy of Aboriginal dispossession and displacement. This is a history of extensive frontier violence, high levels of Aboriginal population decline, and a severe reduction in Aboriginal people’s autonomy, opportunities for self-­government, freedom of movement, and control over the future of their children and their societies. While in popular political debate the history of Aboriginal dispossession and subsequent treatment at the hands of settler society is still contested, there is nevertheless substantial recognition that what happened was a tragedy for Aboriginal people. The dispute is mainly one concerning the responsibilities of modern Australians in light of this history. These narratives represent two entirely different genres, one an optimistic, even triumphant narrative of political progress and the other a chapter in the centuries-­long history of destruction and deprivation imposed on Indigenous societies by the British Empire and colonisation. Yet both happened in the same place at the same time and involved many of the same people. Both the establishment of political institutions and the dispossession of Aboriginal people centred on vital questions such as who owned the country, what it meant to be a British subject, who had the right to govern themselves, and who had the power to govern others. Australia’s violent colonising past has affected the nature and development of Australia’s political institutions up to the present day. This book sets out to combine these two histories, so generically different, and to bring them, in the words of the influential Australian anthropologist, W. E. H. Stanner, within a ‘single field of life’.2 There have been occasional exceptions to this separation of the two histories. From time to time, an imperial historian has offered valuable insights into the relationship between what he or she terms ‘native policy’ and the turn towards colonial self-­government, though the coverage of the six Australian colonies on the vast island continent was typically very brief. Arthur Berriedale Keith, an imperial historian writing in the 1920s and 1930s, for example,  W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming, Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2001 [1969], p.  25; see Ann Curthoys, ‘Stanner and the Historians’, in Melinda Hinkson, ed., An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008, pp. 233–50.

2

Introduction 3

suggested that Britain had found the question of governance of ‘native races’ a difficult one in the context of granting self-­government. In The Sovereignty of the British Dominions (1929), he pointed out that in both Canada and New Zealand, the British government had sought, unsuccessfully, to retain power over ‘native policy’ even while granting responsible government, and drew a contrast with the Australian colonial constitutions of the mid-­1850s where there was no such attempt.3 He also noted that only in Western Australia was there any attempt to retain British control over Aboriginal policy even after the granting of responsible government. The colony’s constitution of 1889, he pointed out, provided that the ‘department charged with their interests’ should remain directly responsible to the governor, and mandated that it be funded annually by at least £5000 of colonial revenue.4 This controversial provision, and the circumstances leading to it, are important to the story we unfold in this book.5 In a similar vein, John M. Ward’s Colonial Self-­Government: The British Experience 1759–1856 (1976), now a classic text in the field of imperial history, makes a few references to the question of ‘native policy’ in the context of the transition to self-­government. Ward contends that change in methods of government arose from changes in British policy and ideas rather than from local colonial pressures, and his treatment of questions of Aboriginal policy is no exception.6 When discussing the Colonial Office response in 1854 to the proposed constitution for New South Wales, for example, he notes that one of its law officers, Sir Frederick Rogers, expressed concern that Britain was transferring too much power to the colonies. One of Rogers’ examples of an unwise transfer of authority was Aboriginal policy; what would Britain do, Rogers asked, if colonial legislators authorised killing Aborigines?7 Yet despite Rogers’ concern, the British government went ahead, in part, Ward argues, because by this time there was little remaining concern for Aboriginal peoples.8 However, Ward does not flesh out these tantalising comments. Three years later, in 1979, John Cell’s essay, ‘The Imperial Conscience’ (1979) examined the ways British imperial authorities pondered the possible effects  Arthur Berriedale Keith, The Sovereignty of the British Dominions, London: Macmillan, 1929, pp. 66–9. 4  Keith, The Sovereignty of the British Dominions, p. 67. This clause, however, was rescinded in 1897. See Neville Green, ‘From Princes to Paupers: The Struggle for Control of Aborigines in Western Australia, 1887–1898’, Early Days, vol. 11, part 4, 1998, pp. 447–62. 5  See Ann Curthoys and Jane Lydon, eds., Governing Western Australian Aboriginal People: Section 70 of WA’s 1889 Constitution, special issue of Studies in Western Australian History, no. 30, 2016. 6  John M. Ward, Colonial Self-­Government: The British Experience 1759–1856, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976, p. vii. 7  Ibid., p. 326. 8  Ibid., p. 328. 3

4

Introduction

and morality of relinquishing control over Aboriginal policy when granting self-­government to the settler colonies, including those in Australia.9 Even these fleeting references are, however, missing from histories focussed squarely on Australia. As a national Australian (as distinct from British imperial) historiography emerged, historians of the coming of self-­government generally saw Aboriginal matters as outside their framework. The foundational account by A. C. V. Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia (1934; revised by R. B. Joyce, 1963), does not discuss Aboriginal policy or Aboriginal-­settler relations as a dimension of the development of self-government.10 Geoffrey Serle’s discussion in The Golden Age (1963) of the coming of self–­government to Victoria, mentions Aboriginal people only briefly, observing at the beginning of the book that the ‘onward march of European civilization and “progress” was made at the price of the virtual destruction of the aborigine’.11 Despite the rise in the study of Aboriginal history in the 1970s and 1980s, Australian political and constitutional histories continued to ignore Aboriginal people and issues. W. G. McMinn’s A Constitutional History of Australia (1979) had little coverage,12 and the same is true of John Hirst’s influential The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy (1988). Hirst focusses on the class conflicts and alliances of the 1850s, and draws attention to the historical irony that the British government granted New South Wales self-­government only to pave the way for a much more radical democracy than either Britain or the colonial elite had envisaged. In Hirst’s account, the British government was generally ill informed about colonial conditions and, thus, unwittingly passed measures that were more democratic than it realised. Aboriginal policy and dimensions are missing, as they are in Hirst’s later chapter on Australian modes of government in Australia’s Empire (2008).13 By the turn of the twenty-­first century, with Aboriginal historiography flourishing yet political historiography seemingly unaffected, historians were beginning to notice a problem. David Goodman insightfully commented in his  John Cell, ‘The Imperial Conscience’, in Peter Marsh, ed., The Conscience of the Victorian State, Syracuse (New York): Syracuse University Press, 1979, pp. 195–9; see Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Imperial Complicity: Indigenous Dispossession in British History and History Writing’, in Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, and Keith McClelland, eds., Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, especially pp. 141–2. 10  A. C. V. Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, London: Oxford University Press, 1934. 11  Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963, p. 3. 12  W. G. McMinn, A Constitutional History of Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979. 13  John Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848–1884, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988; John Hirst, ‘Empire, State, Nation’ in Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward, eds., Australia’s Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 141–62. For some brief mentions, see John Hirst, Australia’s Democracy: A Short History, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002, pp. 6, 24–5, 72–3. 9

Introduction 5

examination of the rise of democratic politics during the gold rush era of the 1850s that it was time to see that politics as part of the same story as the taking of Aboriginal land and the attempted destruction of Aboriginal societies.14 The difficulty of bringing such an understanding to bear on political history, however, remained. Peter Cochrane’s prize-­winning book, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (2006), for example, rarely mentions Aboriginal issues and people. Written to commemorate the sesquicentenary of responsible government in New South Wales, it tells of ‘how the eminent landowners of NSW plotted to transfer power from Downing Street to themselves, only to see it usurped by their political enemies – the artisans, shopkeepers, merchants and renegade gentry whose power base was in Sydney’. Discussion of Aboriginal–­settler government relations is, however, virtually absent.15 The same void is also evident in Terry Irving’s The Southern Tree of Liberty: The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before 1856 (2006). A lively and original account of working-­class politics in Sydney in the 1840s and early 1850s, it argues that the struggle for democracy came not from the elites or the liberal middle class, the focus of Cochrane’s analysis, but rather from the emerging working class.16 Here, too, Aboriginal people and policies do not appear.17 Similarly, Richard Waterhouse’s essay in 2010 on the coming of self-­ government to New South Wales, despite being part of a collection edited by Jack Greene devoted to exploring the exclusion of indigenous peoples from the liberal freedoms granted to settlers within the British Empire since the seventeenth century, has only the briefest comments on Indigenous–settler relations. It does, however, make the important point that settlers’ belief in the inferiority and imminent disappearance of Aboriginal peoples meant they did not consider Aboriginal people as potential members of the new polity.18 Benjamin T. Jones, Republicanism and Responsible Government: The shaping of democracy in Australia and Canada (2014), a valuable comparative study of political ideas and movements, also pays little attention to Indigenous–settler relations. Jones does point to the importance of settlers’ belief in the necessity for a homogenous community as a basis for successful self-­government, but  David Goodman, ‘Making an Edgier History of Gold’, in Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves, eds., Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 33–4. 15  Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006, p. xiii. See exceptions on pp. 3 and 410. 16  Terry Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty: The Democratic Movement in New South Wales before 1856, Sydney: Federation Press, 2006, especially pp. 4 and 254. 17  See review by Paul A. Pickering, ‘Contested Histories Forum: Was the ‘Southern Tree of Liberty’ an Oak?’ Labour History, no. 92, 2007, p. 142. 18  Richard Waterhouse, ‘“ . . . a bastard offspring of tyranny under the guise of liberty”: Liberty and Representative Government in Australia, 1788–1901’, in Jack Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 240–1. 14

6

Introduction

misses one of its most significant consequences – a close association between democratic ideas and racial exclusivism. If histories of Australian politics and constitutions have had little to say about Aboriginal policy, most histories of Aboriginal–settler relations in turn have, until very recently, had little to say about colonial politics and systems of government, despite the fact that the field has been criticised (or praised) as a highly politicised form of history. So little have most Aboriginal histories considered the nature of colonial government and colonial politics that many, indeed most, scarcely notice the mid-­century (later in Western Australia) transition to responsible government or ponder its significance for Aboriginal people.19 The main exception has been the work of Henry Reynolds, a founding and leading historian in the field of Aboriginal history, although even he has treated the issue only briefly. Reynolds points out that with ‘the decision in 1850 to grant the colonies of eastern Australia self-­government, the Colonial Office prepared to surrender responsibility for the Aborigines to the very colonists whom they had frequently accused of trying to exterminate the tribes they encountered’.20 When Britain granted responsible government to the new colony of Queensland nine years later, he says, disaster for Aboriginal people ensued. ‘Each step,’ he writes, ‘took responsibility closer to the frontier and placed it more securely in the hands of men with both public and private interests in the pastoral industry and in the rapid sale of land throughout the vast tropical hinterland.’21 In Reynolds’ histories, Britain generally appears as wishing to protect Aboriginal people while pursuing colonisation and settlers appear as the unruly perpetrators, seeking protection not for Aboriginal people but only for themselves.22 Change, however, is on the way. At the beginning of the twenty-­first century, a rejuvenated British imperial history (once called the ‘new imperial history’ but perhaps now a little too old and well-­established for such a title) prepared the ground for a convergence of the narratives of the coming of settler self-­ government and Aboriginal–settler relations. Influenced by late twentieth century developments in histories of race and gender and more broadly in ‘histories  See, for example, Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance 1788–2001, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1982, revised editions in 1994 and 2001; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History since 1800, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005; Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996; Bain Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2009. 20  Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Ringwood: Viking, 2001, p. 99. 21  Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p. 100. 22  This is especially true of An Indelible Stain, but see also Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, Ringwood: Penguin, 1987, and Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. 19

Introduction 7

from below’, British imperial history was turning away from its earlier focus on British initiative and control and instead exploring the dynamic relationship between Britain and her colonies. Not only did Britain influence what happened in its colonies, but also, the new scholarship emphasised that colonial pressures and developments changed Britain itself. Two books that appeared within a year of each other – Alan Lester’s Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001), and Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination (2002) – signified the change, as their titles clearly indicate.23 Through a series of essays by Alan Lester (2002), Elizabeth Elbourne (2003), and Zoë Laidlaw (2004), the new imperial history became increasingly concerned with Indigenous–settler relations across the empire.24 Historians increasingly recognised, as Alan Lester put it, that ‘the history of any one locality within an empire can be understood only through its connections with other sites, both within and even beyond that empire’.25 One result of a reconfigured British imperial history has been that with historians of the British Empire increasingly addressing Indigenous–settler relations in Britain’s settler colonies, historians of Australia turned with greater attention than hitherto to Australia’s imperial context, a context that had characterised earlier scholarship but had since faded from view. A major contribution was the ground-­breaking work by Patricia Grimshaw, Julie Evans, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s to 1910 (2003). In their study of the history of the voting and other political rights of Indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, they consider the development of representative and responsible government, and finally full independence, as Britain gradually distanced itself from its colonies’ politics and practices. They observe that,  Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain, London: Routledge, 2001; Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. 24  Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, 2002, pp. 27–50; Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates Over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-­ Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003; Zoë Laidlaw, ‘“Aunt Anna’s Report”: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–1837’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 1–28. An earlier example was Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, which combined a focus on Native American history with contributions concerning Canada, Cape Colony, the Caribbean, and an essay, by Heather Goodall, on Australia. See Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Breaking Britannia’s Bounds? Law, Settlers, and Space in Britain’s Imperial Historiography’, The Historical Journal, vol. 55, no 3, 2012, p. 811. 25  Alan Lester, ‘Relational Space and Life Geographies in Imperial History: George Arthur and Humanitarian Governance’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2009, vol. 21, no. 2, p. 29. 23

8

Introduction

in the eastern Australian colonies, the place of Indigenous peoples in the political process was barely addressed ‘in the swift passage of these colonies from Crown colonies to near self-­governing democratic societies’ and they briefly trace the attempts by British humanitarians to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples in the proposed constitutions.26 The turn towards considering Aboriginal policy in an imperial context has been joined more recently by increased attention to the impact on indigenous people of the history of slavery and anti-­slavery within the British Empire. This work has two principal dimensions – one, an investigation of the ways in which the experience of slave-­ownership in the Caribbean and elsewhere impacted on the Australian colonies politically, economically, and culturally, and the other the connected task of tracing the impact of anti-­slavery ideas and movements on policies towards Indigenous people. As Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland argue in the introduction to Legacies of British Slaveownership, their project has been to ‘reinscribe slave-­ownership onto modern British History’, from which it had largely disappeared in public consciousness. They investigate what happened to slave-­owners and their descendants after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the economic consequences of the subsequent massive slave-­owner compensation, the turn to other forms of unfree labour, and the shift in the balance of empire from the Caribbean to India and the white settler colonies.27 Catherine Hall has explored some of the cultural legacies in the work of beneficiaries of slave-­owner compensation who became significant writers in and about the Australian colonies.28 The task of tracing the economic, cultural, and political legacies of slave ownership in Australia is still in its early stages; further advanced is the study of the influences of anti-­slavery on both British Aboriginal policy and on colonial discourse. In her survey of recent scholarship, Lisa Ford emphasises that anti-­slavery advocates were concerned not only to reform and end slavery in the British Empire but also to ‘refine the constitutional relationship between the imperial centre and colonial peripheries’.29 To achieve their aims, anti-­slavery evangelicals sought to maximise the reach and effectiveness of British law, and became themselves  Patricia Grimshaw, Julie Evans, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830s to 1910, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 64–8. 27  Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-­Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 2–8. 28  Catherine Hall, ‘The Slave-­Owner and the Settler’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 29–49; Catherine Hall, ‘Reconfiguring Race: The Stories the Slave-­Owners Told’, in Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, pp. 163–202. 29  Lisa Ford, ‘Anti-Slavery and the Reconstitution of Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 45, 2014, p. 72. 26

Introduction 9

involved in the administration of the empire. Self-­governing colonies could be extremely difficult to manage on humanitarian issues, as they well knew from the extraordinarily generous slave-­owner compensation that had been necessary to achieve the abolition of slavery in 1833.30 As we explore in Chapters 6 and 7, this keen support for imperial authority and wariness about self-­government would influence both some imperial executives and the Aborigines Protection Society through the two decades leading up to the granting of self-­government in the mid-1850s. Particularly influential in the study of the connections between evangelical humanitarians and colonial imperial Aboriginal policy has been Alan Lester and Fae Dussart’s Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014). They use imperial biography – the study of certain key figures such as George Arthur and George Grey – to explore attempts to govern British colonies in a way that protected and controlled Indigenous peoples. They emphasise the importance of humanitarian ideals and individuals in shaping British Aboriginal policy in a range of colonies, especially New South Wales and New Zealand, in the context of colonisation and the violent seizure of Indigenous peoples’ lands. ‘Violent colonial conquest’, they argue, ‘was foundational and intrinsic to the shared history of British humanitarianism and governmentality.’31 Humanitarians, they argue, did not so much wish to protect Indigenous people from British governments, as to shape the nature of colonial governments in their dealings with indigenous peoples, and more directly to govern indigenous peoples themselves. Several historians have taken up Lester and Dussart’s emphasis on the role of humanitarian ideas in imperial and colonial governance of indigenous peoples, exploring in some depth the role of protectors in colonial state-­building, and indigenous peoples’ responses to protection policies.32 In a series of essays and a joint-­authored book, Amanda Nettelbeck in particular has explored the vexed relationship between policies of protection and systems of discipline and punishment in the Australian colonies.33 Investigations of protection policies have  Ford, ‘Anti-­Slavery and the Reconstitution of Empire’, p. 80.  Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth Century British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 1. 32  Penelope Edmonds and Anna Johnston, ‘Introduction: Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 2016; Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, New York: Routledge, 2014; Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, London: Routledge, 2013. 33  See especially Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Colonial Protection and the Intimacies of Indigenous Governance’, History Australia, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017, pp. 32–47; Amanda Nettelbeck, Russell Smandych, Louis A. Knafla, and Robert Foster, Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, 30 31

10

Introduction

most recently been augmented by approaches drawn from cultural history and the burgeoning field of the history of emotions, as in Jane Lydon’s exploration of the role of photography in humanitarian discourse and campaigns and Tony Ballantyne’s emphasis on the importance of print and text in the articulation and circulation of humanitarian sentiment.34 In Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture (2015), Angela Woollacott places her analysis of the coming of self-­ government firmly within an imperial framework. Although her focus is not on Aboriginal policy and governance or on the political struggles over its control, she shows in detail how settlers, with their high mobility and networked connections as individuals and families, moved from one British colony to another and participated in the flow of ideas around the empire about British settlers’ rights and about self-­government. She also emphasises the importance of both frontier violence and the employment of non-­white labour in forming a particular kind of masculine settler identity, shaping elite and middle class demands for self-government.35 Despite this burgeoning scholarship on governance and empire there is still no detailed or comprehensive study of how Indigenous–settler relations affected the transition to self-­government or what self-­government, when it came, meant for Indigenous people in the Australian colonies. This is what we set out to provide. Let us begin by exploring the key terms in our book’s title, Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government. As our main title, Taking Liberty, suggests, this is above all a history of a struggle over liberty  – who had rights to it, who could exercise it, and who should lose it. Notions of liberty were central to British settler identity, but while settlers wanted their own rights to liberty acknowledged and translated into a new system of government, they were also engaged in taking away existing liberties from others. As Blackstone explained in 1771, in English thought liberty entailed the observance of four principal rights – to personal security, freedom of movement, freedom from imprisonment without cause, and the use and Resistance in South-­West Australia and Prairie Canada, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016; Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, ‘From Protectorate to Protection, 1836–1911’, in Peggy Brock and Tom Gara, eds., Colonialism and Its Aftermath: A History of Aboriginal South Australia, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2017, pp. 27–40. 34  Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2016; Tony Ballantyne, ‘“Moving Texts” and “Humane Sentiment”: Materiality, Nobility and the Emotions of Imperial Humanitarianism’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 2016. See also Rebecca Swartz, ‘Educating Emotions in Natal and Western Australia, 1854–65’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2017. 35  Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-­government and Imperial Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015; Angela Woollacott, ‘A Radical’s Career: Responsible Government, Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Dispossession’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 16, no. 2, 2015.

Introduction 11

and disposal of property.36 English people believed that they were peculiarly blessed with the spirit of liberty and with the key institutions  – juries and parliament – required to guarantee it. When they went to British colonies overseas, they took this belief with them. In many cases, notably in North America, they were able to establish colonies with political institutions that were, for the settlers, much more representative and democratic than in England itself. At home, commentators from Edmund Burke to Adam Smith agreed that Britain granted greater freedoms and opportunities for self-­government to its settlers overseas than did any other nation.37 As Hannah Arendt observes in relation to Burke, the English right to liberty was an inheritance by virtue of being English; against those such as Tom Paine who claimed their rights as men, Burke claimed a more specific right, their rights as English men.38 There is a constant slide in this rhetoric between English and British rights; the rights of Scots in this narrative, enthusiastic participants in imperial and colonising projects though they were, is unclear at best. The idea that Englishmen had a special talent for liberty, and that wherever they went they took their rights to liberty with them, was as strong in Australian settler politics as anywhere else. Claims of their right to liberal freedoms gained particular importance in the early years of penal settlement in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, when Britain installed an autocratic military-­style system of government rather than the usual colonial institutions of juries and representative government that had characterized British colonies in North America. Against the authority of governors answerable only to the imperial centre, free settlers would increasingly insist on their rights as freeborn Englishmen.39 In addition, they argued for their rights on the basis that they had successfully brought ‘civilisation’ to a land where there had been no civilisation before. They had, they argued, successfully superseded Indigenous peoples and should have the right to govern themselves accordingly. As Richard Waswo points out in The Founding Legend of Western Civilisation (1997), European colonisers generally were supersessionists, believing wholeheartedly in the right of Europeans, those who come from afar, to settle unknown lands around the globe, to displace and replace other peoples.40 In the  This summary is drawn from Jack Greene, ‘Introduction’, in Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire, p. 3.  Ibid., p. 11. 38  Hannah Arendt, ‘Race-thinking before Racism’, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1985 [1948], p. 176. 39  See Mark McKenna, ‘Transplanted to Savage Shores: Indigenous Australians and British Birthright in the Mid Nineteenth-­Century Australian Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 13, no. 1, 2012. 40  See Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997, pp. xi–xvi, 36–7; Waswo is discussed in John Docker, The Origins of Violence, London: Pluto Books, 2008, pp. 6–7, 116, 139, 141, 169–71, 182–3. 36

37

12

Introduction

Australian colonies, settlers’ rhetorical emphasis on liberty both defined them as colonisers and provided a basis for demands for greater autonomy from the imperial centre. The second term in our title is Indigenous rights, a notion that has a clear present-­day meaning. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 lists forty distinct rights, beginning with ‘the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law’. Some of the other rights listed include freedom from discrimination, the right of self-­ determination and self-­government, and the right to maintain and strengthen distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining rights to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State. Article 7, Part 2 (drawing in part on the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) states: ‘Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct peoples and shall not be subjected to any act of genocide or any other act of violence, including forcibly removing children of the group to another group.’ In the nineteenth century, British authorities and settlers had varying notions of Indigenous rights, and over time, the question became a troubling one. In the 1830s and 1840s, British humanitarians frequently stressed the rights of Aboriginal people as the original possessors of the land. In a pamphlet written for the British Aborigines Protection Society in 1840, Standish Motte argued that parliament should pass legislation for Aboriginal peoples throughout the British Empire that recognised Aboriginal peoples’ rights to be an independent nation, and the rights of individuals in that nation to personal liberty and protection of property and life.41 Most settlers, however, thought Aboriginal people had no rights at all. Radical journalist, E. J. (Edward John) Hawksley, spoke for many when he declared in Sydney in 1842 that civil rights were ‘rights which man in a state of nature, never had and never can have’.42 In the settler imagination, Indigenous people were outside society and politics. Yet the question of Indigenous rights, or the lack of them, was not so easily settled, and the idea that settlers owed Indigenous people something, by virtue of their being the original possessors of the soil and settlers having taken

 Standish Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation for Securing Protection to the Aboriginal Inhabitants of all Countries Colonized by Great Britain, London: Aborigines Protection Society, 1840, p. 13. 42  E. J. Hawksley, letter in the Australasian Chronicle, 3 March 1842, p. 2. See D. W. A. Baker, Preacher, Politician, Patriot: A Life of John Dunmore Lang, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998, pp. 114–18. 41

Introduction 13

their land, persisted into the second half of the century.43 A Select Committee report in South Australia in 1860, for example, recognised land rights when it commented that Aboriginal people had ‘an equitable title to the lands they occupied, and of which they are virtually all dispossessed.’44 Writing in 1870, historian James Bonwick commented on the irony that British authorities had repeatedly instructed governors to live in ‘amity and kindness’ with the ‘natives’ while failing to recognise ‘their rights to the land’.45 The conflict between these different forms of understanding Indigenous rights, and what that conflict meant for forms of government and the conduct of politics, is a major theme in this book. Indigenous people, meanwhile, responded to the settler seizure of their lands, the undermining of their traditional economies, the trampling on sacred sites, and the destruction of political and family life with an assertion of their rights in a multitude of ways. Indigenous groups varied in size and strength, and made different decisions in reacting to the invaders, some confrontational, others collaborative and adaptive.46 Time and again, Indigenous men responded to the settler presence and its concomitant destruction of the foundations of Indigenous life, economy, and society, by killing or stealing stock and stealing other sources of food. Very often, Indigenous men attacked settlers in response to settler men’s abuse of, or unlawful relationships with, Indigenous women. As frontier violence receded, the options facing Indigenous people changed, and some began to use the language of the incoming population to assert their rights. Walter George Arthur, on Flinders Island in 1846, for example, wrote, ‘All I now request of his Excellency is that he will have full Justice done to me the same as he would have done to a white man and a free man.’47 Moving on to the next key term in our book’s title, ‘settler self-­government’, we need first to consider the meaning of ‘settler’, and with it, settler colonialism. The category ‘settler colonialism’ has become a key term in modern historiography; we use it here to describe colonies in which an imperial power colonises a land, introduces its own population and frequently others as either free or  See Anne O’Brien, ‘Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2001. 44  South Australia, Parliament, Legislative Council, Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council upon ‘The Aborigines’; Together with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, Adelaide: W. C. Cox, 1860, pp.1–6, 99–100. 45  James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land, London: Samson Low, 1870, p. 271. 46  See, for example, Rachel Standfield, ‘Protection, Settler Politics and Indigenous Politics in the Work of William Thomas’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 13, no. 1, 2012; Libby Connors, Warrior: A Legendary Leader’s Dramatic Life and Violent Death on the Colonial Frontier, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2015. 47  Walter George Arthur to Colonial Secretary, Van Diemen’s Land, 15 July 1846, reproduced in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 41. 43

14

Introduction

unfree labour, and in the process dispossesses and largely displaces that land’s Indigenous peoples. Usually, but not always, there is a massive demographic invasion, as the incoming peoples vastly outnumber the Indigenous peoples they seek to displace, while the Indigenous peoples thus colonised usually suffer high levels of population decline before, at some point (although not in all cases), achieving population stabilisation and recovery. There are many examples of settler colonies in world history, and settler colonialism continues today, but of most importance to our study are those in the British Empire, such as the colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa, and to a lesser extent those that had once been British possessions, as in the United States. In the exploding field of settler colonial studies, one of the key theorists has been the late Patrick Wolfe, who used comparisons of settler colonialism in different places, especially Australia and the United States, to outline its distinctness from other forms of colonialism. In his view, settler colonialism is distinguished by the settlers’ desire for Indigenous people’s land rather than their labour; for extractive, franchise, and other kinds of colonialism, the opposite is true  – what matters is the exploitation of labour. Typically, in settler colonies, he writes, ‘the colonizers come to stay, expropriating the native owners of the soil, which they typically develop by means of a subordinated labor force (slaves, indentures, convicts) whom they import from elsewhere’. When settlers want the land and only the land, they seek to destroy, both physically and culturally, those who resist the seizure of their lands. The primary logic of settler colonialism, he writes, ‘can be characterized as one of elimination’.48 This elimination takes various forms – outright killing, removal and incarceration, chronic neglect, and policies of assimilation or absorption.49 In our view, these formulations, in positing an ideal type of settler colonialism, are excessively prescriptive.50 It is not true, for example, to say that settlers have little interest in Indigenous labour; this varies very considerably depending on the other available sources of labour. While Wolfe recognises that sometimes settlers do rely on Indigenous labour, for instance, in the northern Australian cattle industry, he insists that these instances ‘do not alter the primacy of the dominant pattern’, exemplified in the south east of Australia, where settler colonialism exists in ‘its pure or theoretical form’.51 We query an approach which speaks of ‘pure’ as opposed to actual settler colonialism,  Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, The American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, 2005, p. 5. 49  Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor and Difference’, p. 12. See also Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006 pp. 387–409. 50  Tim Rowse and others have described Wolfe’s argument as circular and predetermined; in Rowse’s words, ‘we know what’s going to happen because it always does’. See Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2014, p. 301. 51  Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference’, p. 4. 48

Introduction 15

and much of our book focuses on the importance of Indigenous labour at various times and places and on the range of government and private attempts to preserve, manage, and control it.52 British commentators and government officials saw employment as both useful for settlers and a means of survival for Indigenous people, Herman Merivale notably warning in his Lectures on Colonization in 1839–41 that settlers would exterminate Aboriginal people if they did not find them useful.53 We also query the metaphor of ‘the logic of elimination’. Many historians have preferred this formulation to the concept of genocide, since it locates the destruction of Indigenous people and societies within settler colonialism itself and avoids any awkward comparison with the Holocaust. Some Australian historians, such as Reynolds, reject the argument that what happened in Tasmania and the other colonies was genocide.54 This is a complex issue, but overall, we prefer the concept of genocide to the metaphor of a logic of elimination, which tends to render Indigenous survival, adaptation, and cultural renewal as ultimately impossible; every Indigenous achievement becomes a sign of Indigenous assimilation and thus elimination. In contrast, the notion of genocide enables one to recognise both the enormity of the human destruction that occurred in the wake of colonisation as well as give full recognition to the histories of survival and transformation that followed. It is worth remembering that the original definition of genocide, outlined in 1944 by the eminent Polish Jewish jurist, Raphaël Lemkin, reads as follows: Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.55  See also Ann Curthoys, ‘Indigenous Dispossession and Pastoral Employment in Western Australia during the Nineteenth Century: Implications for Understanding Colonial Forms of Genocide’, in Mohamed Adhikari, ed., Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-­Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2014, pp. 210–31. 53  Herman Merivale, Lectures in Colonization and Colonies Delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841, London: Longman, Green and Roberts, 1861, pp. 535–8. 54  Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, and Henry Reynolds, The Forgotten War, Sydney: New South Publishing, 2013, pp. 138–42; Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005, pp. 87–108. For a critique, see John Docker, ‘Are Settler-­ Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-­ reading Lemkin’, in Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, New York: Berghahn Books, 2008 pp. 88–90; and John Docker, ‘A Plethora of Intentions: Genocide, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Consciousness in Australia and Britain’, The International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 74–89. 55  Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008 [1944], p. 79. For an extended evocation of Lemkin’s argument in chapter nine of Axis Rule in 52

16

Introduction

This sounds remarkably like a description of settler colonialism itself. The survivors and descendants of the Indigenous peoples who experienced genocidal processes are testament to human resilience and adaptability, rather than proof that genocide did not occur. Genocide is, moreover, the concept preferred by many Indigenous scholars, Larissa Behrendt, for instance, commenting on ‘the conviction that Indigenous communities feel about “genocide” being the word and the concept that describes the colonial legacy inherited and still pervasive’. These convictions, she astutely continues, ‘form part of the legitimate contest over the writing of Australia’s colonisation’.56 We are especially concerned here with one of the manifestations of genocide to which Lemkin drew attention, and that is its disruption of the ability of a people to govern themselves. Lemkin identifies the various techniques of genocide  – political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral. For Lemkin, the political dimension of genocide involved the destruction of previous systems of self-­government and the imposition of a new administration by the occupying force. In this book, we explore the impact of the imposition of British systems of government and law upon Indigenous people’s ability to govern themselves.57 These effects were severe, but never complete; as Ford comments, ‘long after settler courts and parliaments defined and diminished Indigenous jurisdictions, unexpected spaces remained open for some old and some very new modes of Indigenous collective assertions’.58 We come now to the final term in our book’s title, self-government. Our study is an attempt to ‘get inside’ the colonial state in both its imperial and local manifestations, to explore the ways Britain governed her settler colonies, the nature and actions of colonial governments under British rule, and the system of self-­government that followed. During the sixty years from 1830 to 1890, Britain used three main systems of government to manage her settler colonies. The first was the Crown Colony, where the governor had largely autocratic powers, though he might have an advisory Legislative Council, appointed by himself or by the Colonial Office, to assist him. His role was to govern within the framework established by the British government, and more specifically, the Colonial Office. Although governors had considerable Occupied Europe, see Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Introduction – Genocide: Definitions, Questions, Settler-Colonies’, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, pp. 5–11.  Larissa Behrendt, ‘Genocide: The Distance between Law and Life’, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, p. 146; see also Noel Pearson, A Rightful Place: Race, recognition, and a more complete Commonwealth, Quarterly Essay No. 55, Melbourne, 2014, especially pp. 16–23. See also the discussion of Indigenous legal claims of genocide in Ann Curthoys, Ann Genovese, and Alexander Reilly, Rights and Redemption: History, Law, and Indigenous People, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008, Chapter 5. 57  Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 82. 58  Lisa Ford, ‘Introduction’, Ford and Rowse, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, p. 2. 56

Introduction 17

formal authority in the colonial setting, the practicalities of rule over long distances, both from Britain and within each colony, meant local pressure groups, sometimes with strong links of their own to the imperial centre, could severely limit the effective exercise of that authority in practical terms. The second system of British colonial government was representative government, the system explained and praised by John Stuart Mill in his seminal text, Considerations of Representative Government (1861). Under this system, as it operated in the British Empire in the nineteenth century particularly, the augmentation of the powers (over legislation and colonial expenditure) of the Legislative Council increased the constraints on the governor. Councils were now part appointed and part elected, usually by men of property, and at times could pose a serious challenge to gubernatorial authority, especially through their financial powers. So powerful could they become that colonial government at times, as during the last few years of Governor George Gipps’ rule in New South Wales in the mid-­1840s, became a form of oligarchy. The third system of British colonial governance was self-­ government, whereby colonies could govern themselves on internal matters but remain within the British Empire; the imperial government generally retained control over matters of foreign policy and defence, and retained a (rarely exercised) right of veto over colonial legislation where British interests were seen to be involved. The particular form self-­government took in the second half of the nineteenth century was responsible government, a term introduced in the late 1840s to express the idea that governments were responsible to parliament, rather than to British officialdom through the person of the governor. Under this system, colonial parliaments had two houses, based on the British model, the lower house being an elected Legislative Assembly and the upper house being a Legislative Council, which was sometimes nominated and sometimes elected, often on a restricted franchise. The governor remained as a significant link between Britain and the colony; he could withhold royal assent on legislation and forward it to Britain for consideration, and he retained important ceremonial and advisory functions. Significantly, the governor now had little influence on and no control over Aboriginal policy. Some governors continued to invite Aboriginal people to Government house, or meet with Indigenous delegations when they visited rural areas, but their doing so was more a matter of personal commitment and inherited tradition than government policy. Settler Societies It is especially important for a study of imperial and settler governance to recognise that while settler colonial societies are, by definition, fundamentally divided between settlers and Indigenous people, there are other groups and sources of conflict involved. One important group for the history of colonial

18

Introduction

governance consists of those ambiguous figures, the British, German, and Spanish missionaries who sought to protect, civilise, and convert Indigenous communities.59 These twin policies of protection and cultural control constituted a powerful form of colonisation that would have lasting impacts on Indigenous Australia. The relationship between missionary colonialism (often linked strongly to religious societies overseas) and the local settler state (often dominated by pastoralists) ranged from cooperative to openly hostile; sometimes missionaries worked closely with government, and at other times they came into direct conflict with it. The closer one looks at settler colonial situations, the more one becomes aware of their multiple fault lines. Through sexual and social interaction, initially distinct groups become genetically and socially mixed; a range of intermediate and mediating groups emerge.60 Social classes form, along lines initially drawn from the metropole but developed in the colony in distinctive ways. In the penal colonies, for example, divisions between convict, ex-­convict, and free were intense, and were replaced when the convict system ended by sharp divisions between pastoralists, merchants, artisans, and labourers. These class divisions underlay the emergence of distinct political movements  – conservative, liberal, and radical, which would shape both the campaigns for self-­government and then the nature of the new settler governments themselves. They would also influence Aboriginal policy, though not always in expected ways. While the Australian colonies, being the result of the colonising ambitions of only one empire, the British, showed less diversity along racial and ethnic lines than many other colonies, they were nevertheless never purely British. There were significant populations from Germany, China, and the Pacific Islands, and a scattering of others, from India, Scandinavia, the United States, and elsewhere. Many were from Ireland, a colonised part of Britain at this time. The presence of Chinese, in particular, was a source of anxiety in the eastern colonies, as opposition emerged first to indentured Chinese labour and then to the arrival of free Chinese gold seekers. Colonists claimed repeatedly that Chinese people were inherently unable to assimilate and thus to share in the political rights and responsibilities of European colonists; through such debates emerged the idea, that soon became entrenched, that colonial society, living standards, and democracy required racial uniformity.

59

60

 See Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith: Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity, and Empire, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2011.  On intermediaries, see Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam, eds., Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015; Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi, and Allison Cadzow, eds., Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2016.

Introduction 19

To these divisions by class and race we must add those of gender. As the growing literature on gender and empire and on colonial forms of masculinity and femininity reminds us, gender and sexuality shaped the relationships between all the actors in these histories, and the nature of both colonial and imperial politics. Sexuality played a major role both in frontier conflict and in less violent and less conflicted relationships between Indigenous people and settlers.61 Policy-­makers in the 1830s and 1840s sometimes encouraged inter-­racial unions as a means of assimilating Indigenous populations; later, such unions came to be considered troubling and to be strictly managed and controlled.62 Female reproduction and its control were immensely significant for the development of settler colonies; while Indigenous women, suffering from loss of nutrition and new diseases, often experienced a serious decline in fertility, colonial white women usually had high levels of fertility that ensured the continuing demographic predominance of incoming over Indigenous populations. The ongoing subordination of white women within their own society and their invisibility in much public and political culture obscured the fact that Australian colonial men, living in colonies founded by disproportionately high numbers of single white men, regarded the arrival of white women as essential to the civilisation and domestication of their community. Our study of politics and government, exploring the ideas and actions of officials, politicians, writers, missionaries, Indigenous resistance leaders, pastoralists, and convicts, is a study of a largely masculine world. Though not entirely: despite their vulnerability to a range of abuses, Indigenous women demonstrated innovation and resilience in keeping themselves and their communities alive, and some like Lucy Beedon became outspoken community leaders. White women, too, could at times intervene in public debates and express their views, as did missionary wives like Mary Ann Elizabeth Gribble. The Structure of the Book We begin with the period of British imperial rule. Part I traces Aboriginal policy, Aboriginal–settler relations, and debates surrounding the question of representative government, in all the Australian colonies up to 1846. In the most general terms, we show how Aboriginal policy and practices in the Australian colonies from 1830 until the implementation of self-­government were a product of imperial dynamics, neither solely British nor entirely colonial in origin  See Mitchell, In Good Faith; Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014; Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia, Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 2015. 62  Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Interracial Intimacy, Indigenous Mobility and the Limits of Legal Regulation in Two Late Settler Colonial Societies’, Law and History, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, pp. 103–24. 61

20

Introduction

or operation. Like Elizabeth Elbourne in her classic essay, ‘The Sin of the Settler’, and Tom Lawson, in his book, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, we draw attention to British responsibility.63 The British decision to establish settlements without negotiating or developing treaties with the Indigenous peoples was to have far-­reaching consequences that still reverberate in Australian society today. Although British governments hoped from the start to establish penal colonies in a barely known southern continent with minimal disturbance to its existing occupants, within a very short time they responded to Indigenous resistance with whatever force they felt to be necessary. As many historians have shown, there was in the 1830s a rise in humanitarian concern at the devastating impact colonisation was having on Indigenous peoples in British settlements; for a short period in the late 1830s and early 1840s British governments did attempt to enact a policy of Aboriginal protection and ‘civilisation’. They hoped, as did the advocates of the establishment of a free colony in South Australia in 1835, that colonisation and Aboriginal protection could proceed together. Such hopes for a form of moral imperialism, however, did not last long, as colonial expansion and Indigenous resistance to it continued, and by the mid-­1840s, British policy had largely returned, more or less, to its usual emphasis on colonial security, self-­sufficiency, and economic productivity. In other words, it is a mistake to portray British governments as deeply concerned with Indigenous welfare; rather, it makes more sense to regard British colonisation projects, especially in Australia, as involving an inherent contradiction concerning Indigenous people that was never resolved. Even when officials, pastoral companies, colonisation societies, and settlers alike knew that the spread of settlement would seriously harm, and be contested by, Indigenous peoples, Britain continued to colonise.64 The incoherent and inconsistent Aboriginal policy that emerged from the beginnings of British settlement until the establishment of self-­government produced a series of military actions, punitive expeditions, police forces, systems of punishment, ‘civilising’ and missionary projects, and exploitative employment practices. Britain itself together with British settlers produced the widespread destruction of Indigenous societies. Part II looks closely at the period from 1846 to 1856, when both Britain and the colonies debated the question of self-­government. Extreme distance and Britain’s desire to maintain New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land for convict transportation exacerbated the usual problems facing imperial  Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler’; Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. 64  See, in relation to Tasmania specifically, Ann Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea’, in Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide, pp. 229–52, especially p. 246. 63

Introduction 21

governments seeking to combine the three contradictory tasks of retaining settler loyalty, maintaining control, and devolving costs to the colonies, making British authorities hesitant to apply the principles of self-­government to the Australian colonies. The growing free settler population became increasingly restive on the matter; for them, self-­government meant control above all over the disposal of land, but also over the many other matters, economic, social, cultural, and political, that affected them. From the mid-­1830s onwards, as the colonies gradually changed from penal to free settlements, and as the products of the land – especially wool and minerals – underwrote the colonies’ wealth and population growth, they increasingly sought control over their own affairs. Settler desires for self-­government were heightened by fears of the continuation of convict transportation, the influence of Chartist and other radical and liberal ideas developing in Britain, and the example of some of the Canadian colonies, where, in response to colonial demands and political unrest, Britain had granted self-­government. Settler claims, furthermore, centred not only on achieving greater independence from Britain, but also on gaining independence from other Australian colonial centres. In Port Phillip, in the far south of New South Wales, settlers’ sense of themselves as independent citizens developed in the 1840s in opposition to the convict and pastoralist-­dominated New South Wales, while in the northern districts, settlers were vehement in the 1840s and 1850s in their opposition to the distant urban centre of Sydney. By 1850, Britain had turned to self-­government as the preferred way of managing its settler empire. The expense and impracticality of governing such vast thinly settled territories, a turn to policies of free trade, and growing colonial agitation all combined to lead British governments to look to self-­government as a solution. In the eyes of British governments, self-­government was a means of maximising the benefit and minimising the cost of its settler colonies, while guaranteeing the triumph of expansionist policies of emigration, overseas investment, and settlement as part of the continuing extension of the empire’s global reach. Britain was also prepared to accede to the demands of certain regions for greater independence through separation. Through a series of steps, starting with the separation of Port Phillip to form the new colony of Victoria in 1850, continuing in the mid-­1850s with the passing of new constitutions for New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania, and concluding in 1859 with the separation of the northern districts to form the new colony of Queensland, Britain established five self-­governing Australian colonies. The exception was Western Australia, which the British government deemed not yet ready, owing to its tiny settler population and acceptance of convict transportation just when the eastern colonies were rejecting it. It would be another thirty-­one years before it, too, became self-governing. Given the violence and destruction accompanying colonisation thus far, there was some humanitarian concern and some official unease at the possibility that

22

Introduction

settler self-­government could mean disaster for Aboriginal people. As former Colonial Office Permanent Under-­Secretary, Frederick Rogers, recalled in 1871, Britain had faced some ‘moral difficulty’ in granting self-­government, considering that ‘coloured races’ were ‘always exterminated by Anglo-­Saxons in temperate climates’.65 During his period as Secretary of State from 1846 to 1852, Earl Grey did attempt to protect Indigenous people’s access to pastoral land, and to encourage colonial governments to establish small land reserves and provide education and medical assistance for Aboriginal people. By the time his term ended, however, indeed somewhat before, British officials generally agreed that their attempts at Aboriginal protection and ‘civilisation’ had been a failure, and that there was little more they could, or needed, to do. They could now withdraw from a problem they had been unable to resolve. In the end, the desire for colonial expansion took precedence over any sense of responsibility for the lives, livelihood, and future of Indigenous people. Nonetheless, Part II ends with an examination of the ways in which the ongoing destruction of Aboriginal lives continued on occasion to trouble British officials and observers. Was self-­government, we ask, a radically new disaster for Aboriginal people in the Australian colonies, or did it not make much difference? In Part III, we consider the five self-­governing colonies in turn for the first decade and a half of the new system. Settler governments initially took over the methods of control and management of Aboriginal people developed during the period of British rule; this is one reason historians have so often not noticed the shift from one system of government to another. The policies of ‘dispersal’, summary punishment, child removal, and assimilation that are so often associated with the self-­governing colonies were all already in place, having evolved over several decades of establishing British colonial settlements on someone else’s land. Yet while there are significant continuities, the establishment of colonial self-­government did make a difference. The removal of British government control and with it the impact of non-­government bodies such as the Aborigines Protection Society meant that the colonies were freer than before to diverge from one another. Now, with the colonies developing in different directions – demographically, politically, and economically – diverge they did. We can summarise these differences briefly. In Tasmania, self-­government saw both the last years of the Aboriginal survivors at Oyster Cove and the refusal of colonial governments to consider as Aboriginal the growing community in the Bass Strait Islands descended from Aboriginal women and white Straitsmen (originally sealers), with the result that Tasmanian governments after 1856 had little Aboriginal policy at all. The humanitarian side of British 65

 George Eden Marindin, ed., Letters of Frederic Lord Blachford (Frederick Rogers), Under Secretary of State for the Colonies 1860–1871, London: John Murray, 1896, p. 297.

Introduction 23

Aboriginal policy survived better in Victoria than in the other colonies, partly an inheritance of the protectorate of the 1840s and partly the result of the presence of both an assertive Aboriginal population and a substantial middle class white population in the wake of the gold rushes. It soon became clear, however, that protectionist and ‘civilising’ impulses would lead to detailed systems of state micro-­management and control. Self-­government in South Australia had mixed effects. While its tradition of missionary and protectorate work amongst Aboriginal people survived to some extent, pastoral expansion and a desire for Aboriginal labour underpinned a disciplinary regime of policing, punishment, and imprisonment. In contrast, believing that Aboriginal people would soon disappear entirely, governments in New South Wales adopted a laissez faire approach; paradoxically, perhaps, the combination of a healthy colonial economy and indifferent liberal governments created certain spaces in which Aboriginal people could maintain family and cultural life. Queensland was different again. Since it became self-­governing when the destructive genocidal process of dispossession, displacement, and replacement still had a long way to go, and given its rich natural resources and a relatively large Aboriginal population, it saw the bloodiest settlement process of them all. Colonial governments adopted policies of violent ‘dispersal’, often using the Native Mounted Police, consisting of white officers and Indigenous troops from far away to destroy Aboriginal resistance. While the debate over the numbers of Aboriginal people killed on Australia’s frontiers continues, what is clear is that in Queensland it was particularly high.66 In all the self-­ governing colonies, colonial self-­ government provided Indigenous people with new challenges. Under the British regime, they had become aware of the Crown and had at times been able to develop a relationship with the governor. Under self-­government, they continued to interact with the governor when they could, despite his loss of control over Aboriginal policy. As Lisa Ford and Paul McHugh point out, settler self-­government meant that while the Crown, whom the governor represented, ‘ceased rather suddenly to act as a check on settler ambition’, it nevertheless ‘remained an interlocutor with Indigenous polities’.67 At the same time, Indigenous people learnt to deal with the more dispersed forms of governmental power exhibited by settler governments, and continued to seek some restoration of their lands, and a safe  Ray Evans and Robert Orsted-­Jensen argue that in Queensland it may have been as high as over 60,000. See Ray Evans and Robert Orsted-Jensen, ‘“I Cannot Say the Numbers that were Killed”: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier’, Social Science Research Network, 2014, 2467836: 1–11.doi:10.2139/ssrn.2467836 67  Paul McHugh and Lisa Ford, ‘Settler sovereignty and the shapeshifting Crown’, in Ford and Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, p.  23. Ford and McHugh focus on the examples of New Zealand and Canada to illustrate their general argument; their remarks also apply, though in a diluted form in view of the lack of treaties, to the Australian colonies. 66

24

Introduction

place in which to raise their families. Over time, they began to address the new settler governments directly, through petitions, deputations, letters to newspapers, giving evidence at inquiries, and other strategies. Widespread government and settler indifference to their claims, however, along with social attitudes of distance, fear, and racial superiority, seriously limited their options and effectiveness, although they were to have greater success in Victoria than in the other colonies. It is important to note that Indigenous responses to the imposition on their land of a settler-­colonial society were not limited to resistance. Indigenous people worked for employers and/or in traditional food-­getting, cared for family, played sport, passed on some cultural knowledge to their children and generally maintained a life and society against enormous odds, or in Lester and Laidlaw’s phrase, showed the world a remarkably ‘tenacious adaptation’ to their radically changed circumstances.68 Western Australia differed from all the others. Part Four concludes the book with two chapters offering a detailed exploration of the specific and unusual case of Western Australia, where the question of self-­government arose in the 1880s in a changed imperial environment. For the thirty years during which Western Australia remained the only colony in Australia that was not self-­ governing, British officials withdrew funding and support for protection and ‘civilisation’ policies, and focussed on the operations of the law, punishment, and imprisonment to manage both frontier conflict and labour relations.69 Aboriginal policy varied somewhat from governor to governor, with a series of governors in the late 1850s and the 1860s taking little interest, and Governor Frederick A. Weld from 1869 attempting a more protectionist and ‘civilising’ approach. The realities of settlement over vast distances, however, meant that governments of all political hues instituted systems of summary (in)justice conducted by magistrates who were themselves settlers and employers, leading to a system of policing, trial, and punishment of Indigenous people that lacked any semblance of judicial independence and was particularly harsh. British governors presided over the extensive and often brutal use of Aboriginal labour in the development of the pearling and pastoral industries in the north, though they did make sporadic and largely ineffective attempts at regulation. The scandal of Western Australia’s labour system, dubbed in the 1880s a form of slavery by anti-­slavery critics, came to affect the transition to responsible government. In this case, as we noted earlier, the British government did attempt to institute protections of Aboriginal welfare in the new colonial constitution in a way  Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 11. 69  Paul Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of ‘native policy’ in Western Australia 1829–1897, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970 [1942], p. 79. 68

Introduction 25

it had not done for the other colonies. The eventual solution was a clause, Section 70, in the colony’s 1889 constitution that mandated that Aboriginal policy remain under British control through the governor, and that the colony direct one per cent of colonial revenue to Aboriginal welfare. The clause would last only seven years, and was ineffective in preventing the continuing dispossession and exploitation of Indigenous people under the new system of responsible government. Western Australia would continue to witness extensive frontier violence for several decades. The struggles between colonisers and colonised that inform this book continued long after the particular history we relate, and in some respects they are with us still. We complete this book in the context of renewed debates over the future constitutional and political relationship between Indigenous people and the Australian state. More than fifty years after the successful referendum in 1967 to amend the Australian constitution to allow the Commonwealth government for the first t­ime jurisdiction over Aboriginal affairs, the ideals of equality and inclusion that prompted a yes vote of 90.77 per cent have not been achieved. These exclusions, inequalities, and denials of Indigenous rights have their roots deep in the history we narrate in this book. Our hope is that by tracing the links between empire, settler self-­government, and Indigenous responses to the overwhelming of their world, we can illuminate a political history that has implications for modern Australia, modern Britain, and beyond.

Part I

A Four-­Cornered Contest: British Government, Settlers, Missionaries, and Indigenous Peoples

1

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830

In the middle of 1830, the British Secretary of State, Sir George Murray, sat down to read the latest reports from Van Diemen’s Land, Britain’s southernmost colony. The colony had grown rapidly in the previous decade, through the transportation of convicts and the migration of settlers with capital – always alert to moneymaking and career opportunities anywhere in the empire – intent on making their fortunes through the island’s growing pastoralist industry. Here was a new episode in the centuries-­long attack by European settler-­colonisers worldwide on thousands of years of hunter-­gatherer existence and ecology. This growth, conducted with the greatest speed, had not occurred peacefully. Tensions between settlers and their convict servants burst sporadically into violence, while both groups were involved in a struggle with the island’s Indigenous population for control of the land. Determined to secure the country for sheep and other forms of farming, colonists found themselves, their servants, and their flocks  – their introduced fauna, destroying and replacing the indigenous ecology – under attack from Indigenous groups in a campaign to halt the invasion and settlement of their lands, which was undermining their foundations of life. There were deaths on both sides, but the consequences for the Indigenous population were especially severe. Not only was the number of violent deaths much higher, but they also suffered the effects of deteriorating nutrition, including a rapidly declining birth rate. Britain was at an ethical crossroads, in terms of its historical reputation as an empire. Its colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land, which had become both a penal and a pastoral settlement, was wiping out the Indigenous people. Only a few decades earlier, as Shino Konishi movingly evokes, that same people had shown hospitality, amity, and kindness towards a late-­Enlightenment French scientific expedition, engaging with it in mutually inquisitive conversations.1 Now those same Aboriginal people were struggling to survive. In the letter Murray now read from George Arthur, the colony’s lieutenant-­governor since May 1824, we can see the Janus face of British colonialism. A man who expressed deep  Shino Konishi, The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012.

1

29

30

A Four-­Cornered Contest

concern at the possibility of Aboriginal people being destroyed, Arthur had himself resorted, in the previous two years, to martial law and vigilante tactics in an attempt to protect the settlement and crush Aboriginal resistance.2 During his twelve years in Van Diemen’s Land as lieutenant-­governor, he grappled with the humanitarian wish to protect a vulnerable people alongside the angry demands of British settlers, who saw such protection as a violation of their right to shape the conditions of their own colonising project. In his report to Murray, written in April 1830, Arthur attributed the violence in part to the actions of ‘lawless convicts’, stock-­keepers, and sealers, and in part to the inherent nature of the Aboriginal people, whom he called ‘a most treacherous race’.3 Arthur had taken advice from the local Aborigines Committee, consisting of a group of Anglican clergymen along with local police and treasury, customs, and medical officials. On the basis of that advice, he explicitly exempted the free settlers (whom the committee had consulted extensively) from the charge of violence, stating that they had always shown ‘kindness and humanity’, unfortunately to no avail. Arthur then referred to ‘the most embarrassing circumstances of this Government’, describing its contradictory tasks as follows: ‘His Majesty’s subjects must be protected, and the outrages of the black Natives must be repressed, and yet if it can be avoided these wretched people must not be destroyed.’ Arthur’s confusion of feeling was evident. On the one hand, this inherently ‘slight and very feeble race’ – not at all the view of the French explorers that Konishi records – was in danger of disappearance; on the other, it had become a danger to the settlement. He reported that he would authorise the settlers to take matters into their own hands, by financially rewarding them for each capture of an Aboriginal person.4 The only encouraging sign, he added, was the employment of George Augustus Robinson on ‘an embassy of conciliation’. Robinson had ‘fallen in with a tribe’ with whom he had strong hopes of making friends.5 Murray wrote back to Arthur. His now-­famous reply of 5 November 1830 has been much quoted by historians, in part because of its extraordinary contradictions. While agreeing with Arthur that everything must be done to enforce  Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012, pp. 105–21; Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Ringwood: Penguin, 1995, pp. 87–119; Nick Brodie, The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion, Richmond: Hardie Grant Books, 2017. 3  Arthur to Murray, 15 April 1830, in House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1831 (259), Van Diemen’s Land. Copies of all correspondence between Lieutenant-­Governor Arthur and His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the subject of the military operations lately carried on against the aboriginal inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, pp. 15–16, accessible online at http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk. 4  Ibid., p. 16. 5  Ibid., p. 17. 2

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 31

the security of the colony and overcome Indigenous resistance, Murray also expressed deep concern that the Aboriginal people of Tasmania might, ‘at no distant period, become extinct’.6 While this outcome might be pleasing to those settlers whom Indigenous people had attacked, he wrote, ‘it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of occupation of the island as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity, or even with principles of justice and sound policy’. If we had their disappearance as one of our aims, he stated, this would ‘leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government’.7 In recent times, historians have cited Murray’s letter in the course of debates over whether we can justly describe the large-­scale destruction of the Aboriginal Tasmanians as genocide.8 We would agree that the processes of destruction and replacement occurring in Van Diemen’s Land conformed to Raphaël Lemkin’s definition of genocide as outlined in our Introduction; here, we wish to draw attention to its political dimension. The letter recognised a crisis that was to help shape British debates about colonial governance for more than a decade. The 1830s were to witness a ferment of competing ideas and visions about colonial governance, the contest between them as unresolvable as the dilemma on which it turned: the connection between colonisation and the destruction of indigenous societies. At stake was nothing less than the reputation and future direction of Britain and its empire. Evolution of Britain’s Aboriginal Policy in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1788–1830 As Murray read Arthur’s dispatch, he might well have thought, not only ‘What are we to do?’ but also ‘How have we come to this?’ Accounting for British colonisation in Van Diemen’s Land, and its drastic consequences, takes us into the history of British colonialism not only in Van Diemen’s Land but also in the older colony of New South Wales, from which

 Murray to Arthur, 5 November 1830, in House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, 1831 (259), Van Diemen’s Land, p. 56, accessible online at http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk. 7  Ibid., p. 56. See Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Melbourne: Viking, 2001, p. 4. 8  Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014, pp. 56–8; Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, Sydney: New South Books, 2013, pp. 141–2; Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?; John Docker, ‘A Plethora of Intentions: Genocide, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Consciousness in Australia and Britain’, The International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 74–89. For the debates over colonial violence and Indigenous population decline, see the ‘History Wars’ debates of the early 2000s; Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, Macleay Press, 2002; Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003; Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, 2003. 6

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Van Diemen’s Land had been administratively separated only five years earlier, in June 1825.9 When we consider the establishment of New South Wales, it quickly becomes clear that Britain never had, in fact, a coherent Aboriginal policy for its penal settler colonies in the south. When planning the British penal settlement at Botany Bay in New South Wales in the 1780s, officials and politicians had not put in place any processes for acquiring the land. It was not that they did not know the relevant principles of international law. In a letter to Captain Cook in 1768, the president of the British Royal Society, James Douglas, the 14th Earl of Morton, had urged Cook to treat any Indigenous people he might meet with utmost respect and kindness, and to remember that: They are the very natural and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several regions they inhabit. No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the aggressors.10

Yet when Cook, on Possession Island in 1770, declared Britain’s possession of New Holland, and when in the 1780s the penal settlement was being planned, there was no such recognition of Aboriginal people as legal owners and occupiers of the land.11 British officials in 1786 understood from the respected naturalist Joseph Banks, who had been on Cook’s expedition to the country in 1770, that there were only a few scattered people who would offer little resistance. There appears to have been no discussion at this early stage of whether there should be some kind of negotiation, purchase, or treaty that would make good Britain’s claims to sovereignty over the continent, as was required (as the Earl of Morton had made clear) by international law. Officials believed that a friendly approach would be enough to minimise any opposition local people might have to the British settlement and establish good relations for the future. They were careful, however, to instruct Governor Phillip that he was to conciliate with and show amity and kindness towards the native population, and secure the settlement if necessary from ‘any attacks or interruptions of the natives of that country’.12 In its lack of any form of negotiation, this approach was in marked contrast to that taken in other colonies – in  Order in Council separating Van Diemen’s Land from New South Wales, 14 June 1825, Historical Records of Australia, Series I, Volume 12, accessible online at www.foundingdocs.gov.au/ item-sdid-30.html 10  http://nationaltreasures.nla.gov.au/index/Treasures/item/nla.ms-ms9-113-s003, accessed 16 April 2018. 11  Alan Atkinson, ‘Conquest’, in Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward, eds., Australia’s Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 33–53. 12  Merete Borch, Conciliation–Compulsion–Conversion: British Attitudes Towards Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, pp. 77–9. Quoting Lord Sydney to the Lords of the Admiralty, 31 August 1786, Adm 1/4152. 9

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 33

North America, New Zealand, and elsewhere – and one that would have consequences for the legitimacy of colonisation, right to the present day.13 From the establishment of New South Wales as a penal colony in 1788 until the 1820s, the problem of settler–Aboriginal conflict, though significant at certain times and places, was relatively contained. For the conservatives in power in Britain for most of this period, the focus was on establishing penal and strategic outposts. The penal settlements ranged along almost 2000 miles of coastline, from Van Diemen’s Land in the south (in 1803) to Moreton Bay to the north (in 1824) plus a range of smaller settlements in between. There were also a number of strategic outposts, such as at Albany (almost 2,000 nautical miles away from Sydney, on the southwestern tip of the continent), established by Governor Darling in 1827 to demonstrate British occupation of the entire continent and prevent French settlement.14 In addition, along the southern coast of the mainland, European whalers and sealers visited and encountered Indigenous people, leading sometimes to cooperative exchange and trade, and sometimes to violence.15 However, the scale of these early encounters had been relatively slight. Small, isolated convict stations posed relatively little threat to local Indigenous people, who, in some regions, were employed by the penal authorities to capture escaped prisoners.16 As Raymond Evans notes of the Moreton Bay settlement, it remained small throughout its sixteen-­year existence, so that the local Turrbal, Undanbi, and Ninghi Ninghi peoples always outnumbered the convicts and the soldiers guarding them. While the presence of the convicts and guards was disturbing in many ways – introducing new and destructive diseases and leading to sexual attacks on Aboriginal women and retaliatory violence – Indigenous people were able to maintain their communities and some control over their landscape.17

 See Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 14  Tiffany Shellam, Shaking Hands on the Fringe, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2009, pp. 50–1. 15  Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2002, pp. 6–43. 16  Peter Read, A Hundred Years War: The Wiradjuri People and the State, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1994 [1988], pp. 2–4, 9–12; David A. Roberts, ‘Aborigines, Commandants and Convicts: The Newcastle Penal Settlement’, in D. A. Roberts, H. M. Carey and V. Grieves, eds., Awaba: A Database of Historical Materials Relating to the Aborigines of the Newcastle-­ Lake Macquarie Region, Newcastle: University of Newcastle, 2002, accessible online at www.newcastle.edu.au/group/amrhd/awaba/; John Turner and Greg Blyton, The Aboriginals of Lake Macquarie: A Brief History, Newcastle: Lake Macquarie City Council, 1995, pp. 13–14, 28–9, 36–7; Raymond Evans, ‘The Mogwi take Mi-an-jin: Race relations and the Moreton Bay penal settlement, 1824–42’, in Rod Fisher ed., Brisbane: The Aboriginal Presence, 1824–1860, Brisbane: Brisbane History Group, 1992, pp. 10–15. 17  Evans, ‘The Mogwi take Mi-an-jin’, p. 16; Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 32–6, 46–7; Raymond Evans, ‘On the Utmost 13

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The situation changed as the initial penal settlement at Port Jackson gradually spread north, west, and south. Governors granted land to officers, former officers, government officials, and free immigrants to encourage farming and thus the self-­sufficiency of the colony. In the early years, these were mainly agricultural, and later also pastoral, as colonists discovered the suitability of the land for sheep farming. Colonial society quickly became an uncertain mix of government officials, military men, convicts, and free settlers, all of whom found that the Aboriginal people were more numerous than expected and surprisingly fierce defenders of their land. Their resistance took many forms, including stealing of grains, stock, and other sources of food, and attacks on people either individually or in groups. Sexual violence by British men, convict and free, against Aboriginal women also led to serious reprisals. Wherever British settlement went, British officials had to try to quell Aboriginal attacks and secure the land, through an ever-­shifting mix of harsh measures and conciliatory gestures involving both official military action and less official action by private settlers.18 Because of the colony’s convict character, the imperial authorities gave the governors wide powers; there were none of the advisory bodies, assemblies, councils, or rights such as trial by jury that characterised many other British colonies of the time. In most settler colonies, Britain had traditionally adopted the principle of representative government, giving propertied colonists a limited role in colonial governments. Since 1791, for example, the legislature of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada had consisted of both a Legislative Assembly, an elected lower house, and a Legislative Council, a nominated upper house. Yet there were real limits to the effectiveness of these institutions. In most cases, they had little power over the executive government, and government officials were accountable not to the elected members of parliament but to the governor and ultimately the British imperial government. New South Wales, however, did not have even this limited form of representative government, despite its growing free population. Until the early 1820s, the authority of the governor remained virtually absolute, even (or perhaps especially) after wealthy colonists and officers of the New South Wales Army Corps rebelled in 1807 against Governor Bligh.19 Verge: Race and Ethnic Relations at Moreton Bay, 1799–1842’, Queensland Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 2008, pp. 13–14. 18  Charles Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Ringwood: Penguin, 1970; Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, Sydney: Allen  & Unwin, 1987; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance 1788–2001, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001. 19  Richard Waterhouse, ‘ “. . . a bastard offspring of tyranny under the guise of liberty”: Liberty and Representative Government in Australia, 1788–1901’, in Jack P. Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 223–4.

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 35

After the end of the Napoleonic wars, with increased convict transportation and private settlement including by former officers from the Peninsular wars, the pace of expansion stepped up rapidly.20 There was by now an extensive use of the system of assignment, whereby convicts were sent to work for private employers rather than for the government, thus again blurring the lines between private enterprise and state authority in a manner that would become characteristic of the Australian colonies. Just as importantly, pastoral development and free immigration began to change the character of the colony. With the discovery that wool of export quality could be grown in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, an increasing number and variety of people began to migrate, take land, and establish sheep farms.21 Governor Macquarie, who began his term as governor in January 1810, sought to manage the expanding and diversifying colony by emphasising public order, morality, and public works, as well as promoting the growth and respectability of the free population, including the ex-­convicts. However, the more a free population expanded, and the more the role of government thus went beyond penal control, the more settlers would demand that the government deal harshly with an Aboriginal population that was pushing back against the colonial and imperial systems that were overwhelming their world and cosmos. British authorities now had to find ways to reconcile the punitive role and economic development of the colony. Governor Macquarie’s emphasis on including former convicts in the development of a freer and more prosperous society was anathema to the small colonial elite, whose members, known as ‘exclusives’, insisted on their right to be kept above and apart from those with convict backgrounds. Partly as a result of the exclusives’ private representations to the British authorities, the Colonial Office appointed John Thomas Bigge, a former chief justice in the harsh slave plantation society of Trinidad, to enquire into and report on the management of New South Wales. His task was to advise on ways to make transportation ‘an object of real terror’ and at the same time protect the interests of the free population. Bigge produced three key reports in 1822 and 1823 which, in answer to the first task, recommended making the convict system more severe, extending the use of punishments such as floggings, pillories, treadmills, and public executions – in Michel Foucault’s terms in Discipline and Punish, admonitory spectacles of punishment and deterrence.22 In answer to the second, he advocated  Christine Wright, Wellington’s Men in Australia: Peninsular War Veterans and the Making of Empire c.1820–1840, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 21  Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, vol. 1, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997. 22  John Ritchie, Punishment and Profit: The Reports of Commissioner John Bigge on the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1822–1823; Their Origins, Nature and Significance, Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, 20

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A Four-­Cornered Contest

supporting the free settlers, first through a growth in pastoralism (which meant further encroachment on Aboriginal lands) and second through the development of forms of government more appropriate for free British settlers. The wealthier settlers would have their labour needs supplied by extension of the assignment system, and their civil and political rights were met in the form of a legislative council, foreshadowing the introduction of a local oligarchy.23 Accordingly, the New South Wales Act of 1823 authorised the formation of a legislative council to assist the governor. Its powers, however, were extremely limited: it had an advisory role only, and its members were all to be nominated by the Crown in consultation with the governor. The first five-­member council met on 24 August 1824; the following year the number of members was increased to seven.24 The same Act also established some of the institutions thought essential for British civil society, such as non-­government newspapers and trial by jury for civil cases. It created the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the office of Chief Justice (the holder of which was also to be an ex-­ officio member of the legislative council). As Lisa Ford points out, the colony needed a new legal system to deal with its new situation as not only a penal colony but also one with a growing free population and expanding economy.25 The Act also authorised the separation of Van Diemen’s Land from New South Wales. Six months after news of the Act arrived, the promised separation had still not occurred, and it was only after approximately one hundred ‘landholders, merchants and other free inhabitants’ of Van Diemen’s Land petitioned the King to do so that the imperial government finally enacted it in June 1825. This meant the colony now gained its own (purely advisory) legislative council consisting of five appointed members, increased to six in 1827.26 Despite the shift the Act represented away from authoritarian and military style rule, it did little to satisfy those, such as the colonial-­born William Charles Wentworth, who wanted a more representative form of government. At public meetings in Sydney in 1825, 1826, and 1827 Wentworth voiced his demands for an elective assembly.27 In response, the ‘exclusives’ led by John Macarthur petitioned the secretary of state for the colonies to oppose representative government; instead they wanted to increase their own power through Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 55–6; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.  Macintyre, A Concise History, pp. 55–6. 24  Parliament of New South Wales, “1822–1842 – The First Legislature”, www.parliament.nsw .gov.au/about/Pages/1822-to-1842-The-First-Legislature.aspx 25  Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 159. 26  Accessible online at www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-73.html and www.parliament.tas.gov .au/History/tasparl/mlcs1825to1855.htm 27  Andrew Tink, William Charles Wentworth: Australia’s Greatest Native Son, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012, pp. 85, 117. 23

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 37

an enlarged legislative council, consisting of appointed men like themselves.28 The exclusives got what they wanted, and in 1828 the Act was replaced by an imperial statute that came to be known as the Australian Courts Act 1828; the Statute renewed the earlier Act unchanged but for the increase in the size of the advisory council to between ten and fifteen.29 The legislative council still had limited powers, with the result that politics in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s and 1830s very often took place in other available public arenas – the courts, the newspapers, and the churches.30 Politics also took place in Indigenous spaces. Indigenous people quickly recognised the governor as the key figure with whom they had to negotiate. From Arthur Phillip’s arrival in January 1788, each governor had insisted on conducting personal meetings with the Indigenous people and making small gestures of goodwill and recognition in an attempt to ensure good relations and forestall Aboriginal resistance to the establishment and expansion of each convict settlement. Phillip had inaugurated a tradition of governors establishing themselves as father figures for Indigenous peoples, who would, through good relations, be able to transform them into true British subjects.31 On 28 December 1814, Governor Macquarie went considerably further, instituting an annual Aboriginal feast and distribution of blankets and supplies, which, as R. H. W. Reece has explored, he intended as public demonstrations of goodwill and conciliation. For years, these feasts attracted hundreds of Indigenous people from different districts and huge crowds of white observers.32 Sometimes governors used these events as opportunities to offer amnesties to Aboriginal people who had been in conflict with the colonists and the military, for example, following violence during martial law near Bathurst in 1824. Governors also used these occasions to acknowledge (albeit in a patronising and ill-­informed manner) the leadership of some senior Indigenous men, who were given medals and king-­plates. Governor Darling, for instance, presented Biraban with a brass plate recognising him as a ‘chief’ and thanking him for working with the  Tink, William Charles Wentworth, p. 90.  Australian Courts Act 1828, 9 Geo IV, c 83 (Imp).  See Anna Johnston, The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2011, p. 217. 31  Shino Konishi, ‘The Father Governor: The British administration of Aboriginal people at Port Jackson, 1788–1792’, in Matthew McCormack, ed., Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 54–72. See also Ann McGrath, ‘The white man’s looking glass’, in Penny Russell and Richard White, eds., Pastiche I: Reflections on Nineteenth-­Century Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp. 28, 30; and Tom Keneally, The Commonwealth of Thieves, Sydney: Random House Australia, 2005, pp. 86–128. 32  R. H. W. Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets: The History of Some Early Attempts to Establish Relations with the Aborigines of New South Wales, 1814–1846’, in Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, vol. II, no. 3, October 1867, pp. 193–5; Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006, pp. 27–9. 28 29 30

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missionary Lancelot Edward Threlkeld in translating and transcribing his language. The feasts also served as occasions for recruiting Aboriginal children to the Native School, a gesture that might be read as conciliatory or sinister, and over time became an opportunity to demonstrate to Aboriginal parents how well the school cared for their children until its closure in 1833.33 Above all, the feasts were an annual display of the governor’s authority. When Macquarie was preparing to leave Sydney in 1821, he took the opportunity at the annual feast to introduce the Aboriginal people present to his successor, Governor Darling.34 Indigenous people had inherently complex relations with the governors: while some knew the governor on a personal level and hoped to foster a kinship relationship with him, many were also aware that he was responsible for punitive operations against them. Frontier Conflict Escalates, 1825–1830 The approach adopted by the British government after the Bigge report, of encouraging the growth of both the penal system and pastoral expansion, had significant consequences for Aboriginal policy. In the second half of the 1820s, violent struggles over land escalated in both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. In the remote districts past the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, the challenge to the Aboriginal peoples’ traditional food sources and ways of life grew ever more severe. In turn, Aboriginal attacks on settlers and servants increased, leading the secretary of state in 1825 to instruct Governor Darling to ‘oppose force by force’ and to repel any native aggression.35 Into this highly charged environment of colonial expansion and settler-­ Indigenous conflict came a new group of colonists: the missionaries. Along with a range of clergymen and British evangelicals, they formed a network of men outside government who debated questions of Aboriginal policy.36 In Anna Johnston’s words, they asked not only what the morality of colonisation was but also ‘What relationship did Aborigines have towards the colonial state?’37 One of the first and most important of the missionaries was Threlkeld, sent in 1825 by the London Missionary Society to conduct a mission amongst the Awabakal people of Lake Macquarie. Threlkeld was an early example of a missionary who sought not only to evangelise Aboriginal people but also to  Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 34.  Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, pp. 193–5.  Borch, Conciliation – Compulsion – Conversion, p. 116. Some of the most violent resistance and retaliation occurred in the north-­western country of the Gamalarai and the Ngiyamba, and in the Wiradjuri lands to the south-west. 36  Johnston, The Paper War, p. 3. 37  Ibid., p. 10. 33 34 35

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 39

assist them, and to facilitate better understanding and communication between them and the new colonial community. He spent fifteen years working with Biraban, an Awabakal man, learning his language.38 Johnston and other historians have drawn attention to Threlkeld’s long-­standing role as a court interpreter assisting Aboriginal people and later as a linguist and ethnologist who published essays on Awabakal language and culture. Threlkeld would become famous, perhaps notorious, in the colony and even to some degree in Britain for his quarrelling with other leading colonial figures, aired in the courts and the newspapers. Opposition came not only from wealthy pastoralists but also from other leading religious figures in the colony. One was John Dunmore Lang, an outspoken Presbyterian leader who supported missionary work in principle but opposed Threlkeld’s particular projects and thought him guilty of wastefulness and ‘gross mismanagement’.39 The other was Samuel Marsden, the powerful Church of England clergyman and magistrate who was a leading figure in the local wing of the London Missionary Society. Marsden’s opposition was so great that it led the LMS to withdraw funding; for several years, the New South Wales government stepped in and funded the mission. Marsden thought missions to Aboriginal Australians were a waste of time, as they were lazy, ungrateful, and impossible to ‘civilise’; he would later hold a quite different view of the Maˉ ori when he lived in New Zealand.40 Such conflicts among themselves, and views like Marsden’s, did not help the missionaries’ endeavours. While friendly encounters were in fact occurring between the missionaries and Indigenous people at a local level in the 1820s and 1830s, as Jessie Mitchell has shown, these efforts were small scale, and colonists and government generally considered them unsuccessful.41 The idea that Aboriginal people were unable to be ‘improved’, that is, unable to adopt European cultural and economic norms, represented so starkly in the views of Samuel Marsden, was becoming a foundational assumption in settler society. In terms of conceptualising the relation between Aboriginal people and themselves, colonists held the still-­popular view of the world as ‘a great chain of being’, commencing with inanimate things and ranging upwards through lowly forms of life, animals, man himself, and on up through the heavenly

 Ibid., p. 9. See also Anna Johnston, ‘Linguistics, religion, and law in colonial New South Wales: Lancelot Threlkeld and settler-­colonial humanitarian debates’, in Diane Kirkby, ed., Past Law, Present Histories: From Settler Colonies to International Justice, Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2012. 39  Johnston, The Paper War, pp. 36, 39, 48; Meredith Lake, ‘Samuel Marsden, Work and the Limits of Evangelical Humanitarianism’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 3, 2010, pp. 57.11–57.12. 40  Rachel Standfield, Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012, chapters 5 and 6. 41  Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith: Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity, and Empire, 1825–1855, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2011, esp. p. 7. 38

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A Four-­Cornered Contest

beings, finally reaching its pinnacle in God.42 Humanity was divided on a similar principle, so that in the early nineteenth century, it had become common to speak of a ‘scale of humanity’, where each human group occupied a place on the scale according to the quality of its civilisation or way of life. Britons placed themselves at the top of the scale and Australian Aboriginal people (along with the ‘Hottentots’ of southern Africa) at the very bottom. Alongside these views on racial inequality, settlers held the view that Aboriginal people had no claim to the land, since they did not (settlers thought) cultivate it for farming and mining. They also held the supersessionist belief that it was ethically appropriate and justifiable to displace a society and culture held to be inferior. These ideas, already evident in the 1820s, were consolidated in the next few decades, alongside the rapid seizure of the land. War in Van Diemen’s Land While in New South Wales governors Darling and after him, Brisbane, struggled through the 1820s to quell Aboriginal resistance as settlement spread, in Van Diemen’s Land Governor Arthur was facing an even greater challenge. His initial hopes for a peaceful paternalistic settlement were not to be realised. In her history of Aboriginal Tasmania, Lyndall Ryan notes that in 1819, the two populations had been nearly equal in size, with the colonial population having risen to 4350 and the Aboriginal population having fallen from an estimated pre-­contact 7000 to around 5000.43 She characterises the second half of the 1820s as an era of strategic, systematic warfare as Indigenous nations tried to frighten the British away, and British settlers responded with force. Finally, in November 1828, determined to put an end to the conflict, Arthur declared martial law.44 He gave the military the power to arrest Indigenous people without a warrant or shoot them on sight and authorised roving parties to search, capture, or kill. Attacks by the Oyster Bay and Big River nations continued, but the military strength of the colonists, the loss of food sources leading to very low Indigenous birth rates, together with massive internal disruption between the Indigenous nations, had led to shocking depopulation. By the time Arthur and Murray were corresponding in 1830, the situation had thus become desperate. Although the Aboriginal population was now in free fall, with perhaps only 600–700 people left, those who remained could

 Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960. 43  Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 71. 44  Julie Evans and Tess Fluence, ‘Securing the Settler Polity: Martial Law and the Aboriginal Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 15, 2013, pp. 13–14. 42

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 41

still sustain dangerous attacks on the settlement.45 In September 1830, several months before receiving Murray’s reply, Arthur authorised the formation of the Black Line: a 2,000-­strong campaign designed to drive out the Aboriginal people from the ‘settled’ districts. The line caught very few people, but this may have been because so many had died already.46 In 1823, the populations of the Big River, Oyster Bay, Northeast, North, and North Midlands nations comprised about 1000 people in total – by 1832, only nine years later, they were fewer than a quarter that number, around 233. The Oyster Bay people alone had declined by 80 per cent, falling from 300 people to less than 60.47 Murray’s fears of extermination and extinction seemed to be more than justified. Given that contemporaries saw the Black Line as having failed spectacularly (though recently historians have suggested it actually achieved its aim of putting an end to the resistance), it did not provide a model for future colonial governments.48 Another of Arthur’s policies, developed in desperation at around the same time, was to prove far more effective. This was his policy of isolating the entire Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land away from the settlers and onto an offshore island, for their own and the settlers’ protection. The Aboriginal population would be under the care of a government-­appointed protector, who would be responsible for their transformation into civilised Christians. Their seclusion, Arthur hoped, would enable settler expansion and both convict and free immigration to continue, and at the same time prevent further loss of Aboriginal life.49 Arthur may have adapted the idea of appointing a government protector from his time in the British colony of Honduras, where he had served as a superintendent and commandant (as lieutenant colonel) from 1814 to 1822. Alan Lester and Fae Dussart describe his role there as that of a humanitarian seeking a form of autocratic British colonial governance that would protect the weak from the strong.50 He had fought to protect the slaves and limit the powers of the slave owners. In doing so, he came to see the courts as a hindrance, dominated as they were by pro-slave-owning magistrates, and so he devised an alternative system of regulation in which specially appointed guardians (later protectors) of slaves, would hear enslaved people’s complaints of

 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 115. Ryan draws attention to the wildly varying estimates of population at the time. 46  Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996, pp. 114–24. 47  Ibid., pp. 122, 174. 48  Lyndall Ryan, ‘The Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1830’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2013, pp. 3–18. 49  Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 72–3. 50  Ibid., p. 39. 45

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mistreatment.51 The government, that is, should intervene between slave owners and enslaved populations to protect the latter from the former. It was an idea that could easily be transferred from slave to other vulnerable populations, including Indigenous peoples. The man Arthur chose for the task of persuading and cajoling the people into moving away from the Van Diemen’s Land mainland was George Augustus Robinson, who has been alternately praised and reviled for his work ever since.52 A former builder and ‘self-­made man’ from a working-­class background, who had come to Van Diemen’s Land as a free immigrant in 1824, Robinson answered Arthur’s advertisement in early 1829 for someone to manage a small settlement of Aboriginal people at Bruny Island, the nineteen survivors of the South East Tribe.53 Needing employment and moved by humanitarian concerns about the destruction of native societies, he was delighted to be chosen. This appointment was to be the starting point of a much more ambitious plan for Robinson to traverse Van Diemen’s Land with some of the Bruny Island people, get to know the other Indigenous peoples, and persuade them to relocate away from their own land and the settlers’ presence. Robinson called it the Friendly Mission.54 On Arthur’s instructions, Robinson began in January 1830 to traverse the island. Various Indigenous communities, especially from the central and eastern regions, formed complex relationships with him. While they refused his attempts to control and ‘civilise’ them, they took an active part in his travels, leading him around the island and conducting ceremonies and negotiations with other groups. Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan have noted that Robinson was dependent on Indigenous knowledge and diplomacy, and Reynolds in particular argues that these small nations were entering into unwritten treaties with Robinson, where he promised them peace, protection, material goods, and the right to keep visiting their homelands.55 The survivors of the Oyster Bay and Big River peoples seemed to regard themselves not as prisoners but as  Ibid., pp. 53, 59. The slave owners and settlers of Honduras were enraged and published a pamphlet defending themselves and attacking Arthur as an autocrat trampling on settler freedoms.  Robinson’s singularity – the fact that he was virtually the only man in Van Diemen’s Land trying to conciliate, observe, and govern the Indigenous people at close quarters – has exposed him to passionately different judgements. See Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, eds., Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission, Hobart: Quintus Publishing, 2008. 53  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 66; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 113. 54  See N. J. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1966. 55  Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 137–50; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 102, 129– 55. For more on the involvement of Indigenous people in Robinson’s negotiations, see James Erskine Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, Etc. of the Native Tribes of Tasmania, Hobart: Henn & Co., 1875, pp. 23, 58–62, 101. Cassandra Pybus, ‘A self-­made man’, in Johnston and Rolls, Reading Robinson, pp. 100–5. 51

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free agents when they famously walked into Hobart with Robinson’s party in January 1832, carrying their weapons and singing proudly. Here, according to the colonial historian James Bonwick, they met confidently with Lieutenant-­ Governor Arthur, performing for him and accepting his gifts and gestures of peacemaking.56 They then boarded a ship for Bass Strait, understanding, as the Colonial Times put it, ‘that they were to be sent to a place where there is plenty of kangaroo and no work’.57 Instead, Arthur sent them in 1835 to Flinders Island, where government officers gathered them under Robinson’s supervision into an institutional environment that increasingly came to resemble a prison.58 In the three years between their agreement to go to Flinders Island and their arrival there, their numbers had declined from around 300 to a mere 112.59 Tragically, most of them would never be able to go home again. We return to their story in Chapter 3. Colonisation and Aboriginal Policy – Where to Next? At the time, as Alan Lester and Fae Dussart and others point out, Arthur’s solution of removal and isolation was widely interpreted as a success by British observers, who saw it as having been chosen freely by the Aboriginal people themselves and enabling them to be trained in the ways of civilisation and converted to Christianity.60 British commentators regarded it as an outstanding act of mercy, a rescue operation for a threatened people. Many praised the men who had done the most to bring it about, Governor Arthur and George Augustus Robinson, for their humanity and foresight, and Robinson in particular came to be regarded as an authority on how to protect Aboriginal people from settler incursions and brutality. Arthur and Robinson’s approach of removal and isolation of Indigenous people came under considerable metropolitan discussion in part because knowledge of them arrived at a crucial moment in British thinking about colonisation and Aboriginal policy. Two major publications, one in 1829 and the other in 1830, were especially significant. The first was Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s  James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians: Or, the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land, London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1870, pp. 229–30.  Colonial Times, 11 January 1832, p. 2. See also Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission, p. 605. 58  Lawson in The Last Man sees Robinson as enacting cultural genocide, his supervisory practices on Flinders Island providing a laboratory for imperial and settler-­colonial practices across the continent; see pp. 91–125, esp. pp. 124–5. 59  Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 219, 251–6. 60  The population dropped to 49 by 1847, when the government closed the settlement and removed the people to the Tasmanian mainland. Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p.  251; Windschuttle, Fabrication, p.  214; and Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 74. 56

57

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Letter from Sydney in 1829, which challenged British thinking about the value of its colonies. As Jennifer Pitts explores in A Turn to Empire, Whigs and reformers had until around 1830 generally opposed colonisation, seeing it as a Conservative project.61 In an essay entitled ‘Emancipate Your Colonies’ (1793), Jeremy Bentham had addressed the new revolutionary government in France, urging it to abolish colonies since they were strongholds of aristocratic privilege and against the principles of justice and liberty. Furthermore, they were not needed for purposes of trade: ‘Must you govern a people in order to sell your goods to them?’ he had asked. ‘You sell goods to Britain, don’t you? And do you govern Britain?’62 In a series of essays over the next decade, Bentham opposed Britain’s Australian colonies and the system of convict transportation as contrary to his ideas of reform of the prisoner via the panopticon.63 After Waterloo, with Adam Smith’s promotion of laissez faire and growth through trade in the ascendant among liberal and radical thinkers, the idea of empire was at a low ebb.64 Liberals and radicals generally believed that the colonies would, like the earlier American settlements, turn into nations and leave the empire.65 They looked with favour upon the United States, where trade and emigration flourished at no cost to Britain. Yet these critiques of empire and colonisation were not to prevail. Indeed, the critics themselves changed their minds, and liberal reformers began to see colonisation as an outlet for British initiative, economic development, and civilisation.66 Wakefield, that much-­discussed theorist and promoter of colonisation, was especially important in this transformation.67 In Letter from Sydney, he developed his theory that colonisers needed to ensure a proper relation between the availability of land, the supply of labour, and the capital needed to bring the two productively together. In an ideal colony, he argued, the government would at first concentrate settlement and then expand it into contiguous areas, using the proceeds of land sales to pay for the immigration of free settlers. Wakefield was conscious of the implication of his theory of colonisation  Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, chapters 2–4.  Jeremy Bentham, Emancipate Your Colonies, 1793, accessible online at www.en.wikisource .org/wiki/Emancipate_your_colonies! 63  On Bentham’s attitudes to transportation, see R. V. Jackson, 1998, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the New South Wales convicts’, International Journal of Social Economics, vol. 25, no. 2–4, pp. 370–9. 64  Alan Mark Thornton, The Philosophic Radicals: Their Influence on Emigration and the Evolution of Responsible Government for the Colonies, California: Pomona College, 1975, p. 76. 65  Ibid., vol. 1, p. 73. 66  W. P. Morell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969 [1966], p. 4. 67  There is extensive literature on Wakefield and his influence. See Friends of the Turnbull Library, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration, Wellington, 1997; June Phillip, A Great View of Things: Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Melbourne: Nelson, 1971. 61

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for systems of colonial government. To ensure that colonies stayed within the empire, Britain would need to recognise that the settlers, being able to assert the ‘birthright of all British subjects’, would be ‘as well qualified to govern themselves as the people of Britain’.68 In practical terms, Wakefield thought, the settlers could be represented either in the British Parliament or in their own colonial assembly; if the latter, it would be ‘under the eye of a viceroy,’ who would have the right of veto ‘like the king of England’, but its officials would be ‘responsible to the people’.69 Wakefield’s supporters included British politician and reformer Charles Buller, radical baronet William Molesworth, radical philanthropist Robert Gouger, liberal philosopher and British civil servant John Stuart Mill, and, for a brief period, the emigration enthusiast Robert Wilmot Horton. A baronet who had spent the previous decade in the Colonial Office as an under-­secretary of state for war and the colonies, Horton, along with Gouger, formed a National Colonisation Society in 1830 to promote colonisation on Wakefieldian principles. Though the society was short-­lived, other organisations quickly formed to pursue the same objectives. Gradually, Wakefield’s ideas gathered liberal and radical support, and even Bentham converted to the new enthusiasm for colonisation.70 The second key text informing British ideas about colonisation and native policy was Saxe Bannister’s Humane Policy: Or Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements, which appeared in 1830, a remarkable text to which Elizabeth Elbourne, Alan Lester, and Saliha Belmessous, among others, have drawn our attention.71 In this text, Bannister drew on his experiences in both New South Wales and the Cape Colony. A lawyer, he had arrived in New South Wales in 1824 as its first attorney-­general, after the changes in colonial governance introduced by the Act of 1823. He came with a wide knowledge of the problems colonisation posed for Indigenous peoples, being well informed, for example, about the land claims of Indigenous peoples against the Upper Canadian government, writing a report on the subject in 1822.72 As attorney-­general,  E. G. Wakefield, Letter from Sydney, accessible online at www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/ 1306631h.html, pp. 196–7. 69  Ibid., p. 197. See also Derek Whitelock, Adelaide: Sense of Difference, Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2000, p. 28. 70  Thornton, The Philosophical Radicals, p. 21. 71  Saxe Bannister, Humane Policy: Or Justice to the Aborigines of New Settlements, London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830; Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-­Century South Africa and Britain, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 33–44; Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-­Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003; Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 72  Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, p. 69. 68

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A Four-­Cornered Contest

Bannister was anxious that the British settlers should conduct their relations with the Aboriginal people within and not outside the law; controversially, he thought martial law, with its brief use of maximum force, was the best means of preventing a continuing state of war between black and white.73 He was also interested in Aboriginal people, befriending Threlkeld and praising his study of Aboriginal languages.74 Bannister never forgave Governor Darling for failing to apply the death sentence to three convicts found guilty of the murder of an Aboriginal boy.75 After he left the colony in 1826, in part as a result of losing a salary claim but also because of his serious conflicts with Governor Darling, Bannister worked as a lawyer in Cape Town and wrote papers and pamphlets urging the colonisation of Natal. He returned to London in 1829, where he completed Humane Policy.76 While Humane Policy is primarily about the Cape and Natal, it has a five-­page appendix on New South Wales, drawing on Bannister’s experience there. Humane Policy’s subtitle, ‘with suggestions how to civilize the natives by an improved administration of existing means’, indicates its importance for questions of colonial governance. Writing mostly of the situation in the Cape Colony, Bannister opposed the idea that indigenous peoples generally were unable to be improved, and attributed their failure to adopt British civilisation instead to the abuse and corruption they had experienced at the hands of European colonisers. In particular, he argued that their declining numbers were the result of frontier violence and introduced diseases.77 Bannister was convinced that colonisation, protection, and civilisation of native peoples could go together. Instead of treating indigenous disappearance as inevitable, European colonisers had an opportunity to create with indigenous peoples wholly new societies governed by the principles of civilisation. He emphasised that the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’ could coexist, since all, including the ‘savage’,

 Bannister convinced Governor Brisbane to declare martial law to quell Aboriginal resistance in the area west of Mount York (near the town of Bathurst), but Brisbane’s successor, Governor Darling, disagreed, seeing martial law as an excessive and risky response. It was not used on the mainland again. See Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, p. 70, quoting Darling to Bathurst, 6 October 1826, in HRA, series I, vol. II, p. 609. 74  Johnston, ‘Linguistics, Religion and Law’, pp. 26–7. 75  Bannister, Humane Policy, p. ccxlii; Evidence of S. Bannister, 14 March 1837, Minutes of Evidence before Select Committee, Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements); with the Minutes of Evidence, appendix and index, 14 July 1837, pp.  14–21; Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire. See also Penny Russell, ‘Death on a river: Honour and violence in an Australian Penal Colony, 1826–1827’, in Caroline Strange, Robert Cribb, and Christopher Forth, eds., Honour, Violence and Emotions in History, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 107–26. Russell suggests that Darling’s decision not to impose the death sentence may have resulted as much from justice issues arising from very long delays after the initial sentencing, as from a desire not to hang white men for killing Aboriginal people. 76  Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, pp. 70–1. 77  Ibid., p. 79. 73

Colonialism and Catastrophe, 1830 47

were capable of improvement. Even the simplest people, he wrote, could be raised ‘to the true point of political well-being’.78 An important aspect of Bannister’s argument was his emphasis on the role of the government in ensuring Aboriginal protection and civilisation. Governments were responsible for maintenance of the rule of law, which was essential to the task of improvement, and for taking action to change settler colonial mentalities.79 He attributed the problems in New South Wales partly to the fact it was a convict colony, and to the government taking the side of the settlers rather than the Indigenous people they displaced: ‘the government has sympathized too much with the oppressing class and too little with the oppressed, to permit justice to have its course’.80 Governments, he argued, needed to protect and improve Indigenous people by appointing a special officer to protect their interests. Such officers, whom he called commissioners, could lead, in the Cape Colony’s case, the African tribes ‘to high civilisation in a very few years’.81 They would ‘represent the king to the tribes subject to the Governor at the Cape’, and their duties would include negotiating treaties, reporting complaints, organising common laws, acquiring indigenous languages, and printing annual reports on their situation.82 Above all, wrote Bannister, it was important that British governments involved in colonisation projects remember and ‘execute the king’s instructions of 1670’.83 The king he referred to was Charles II, who in his instructions to the Council of Foreign Plantations, had said: you are in our name to command all the Governors that they at no time give any just provocation to any of the said Indians that are at peace with us  . . . and that they do employ some persons to learn the languages of them; and that they . . . take care that none of our own subjects, nor any of their servants, do in any way harm them.

In Bannister’s view, the principles observed in the seventeenth century had been forgotten by the nineteenth, and it was time to revive them.

 Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 95, quoting Bannister, Humane Policy, 1830, p. vi.  Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire, p. 90. 80  Bannister, Humane Policy, Appendix 5, p. ccxl. 81  Ibid., p. 239. 82  Ibid., pp. 239–40. 83  Ibid., p. 240. 78

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‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’ Colonisation and the Beginnings of Humanitarian Intervention, 1831–1837

The foundation of our penal settlements in Australia, which, begun as a matter of state necessity, has created new sources of wealth in a manner entirely unforeseen by its contrivers, and revealed to us, as it were, another New World inviting our occupation. Herman Merivale, Lectures, 1839, p. 10.

Introduction: British Enthusiasm for Colonisation Grows In Britain in the early and mid-­1830s, there was a growing enthusiasm for colonisation, and especially settler colonisation, drawing on earlier European utopian visions of new colonies in new worlds. At the same time, a humanitarian critique of the effects of settler colonies on indigenous populations gathered steam. The humanitarian intervention, both metropolitan and colonial, has occupied considerable historical attention in recent years, with key contributors including Alan Lester, Zoë Laidlaw, and Elizabeth Elbourne.1 So, too, has the story of the destructive effects of pastoral expansion, convict transportation, and free migration from Britain to the colonies.2 Here we focus on the implications for imperial and colonial government of the conflict between colonisation and humanitarianism. Some of the questions that arose in the face of continuing colonisation included: How should conflict between settlers and indigenous  Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century’, in Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 64–85; Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005; Zoë Laidlaw, ‘“Aunt Anna’s Report”: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–1837’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 1–28; Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-­Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 4, no. 3, 2003. 2  Henry Reynolds, Frontier, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987; James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance 1788–2001, Sydney: Allen  & Unwin, 2001, pp. 26–72. 1

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‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’ 49

peoples be managed? Where should authority lie in colonies so far from the metropolitan government? What political rights should settlers have? At the centre of the resulting maelstrom of ideas about colonisation and its effects on indigenous peoples was the governor in each colony, a figure with extensive formal powers but many imperial and local colonial constraints on their effective exercise. As this chapter explores, the localised struggles between Indigenous peoples, settlers, governors, British officials, and missionaries in the colonies revealed with increasing clarity the nature and impossibility of the governor’s contradictory position. In their different ways, all these players sought new solutions to the political impasse wrought by colonial expansion. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s proposal that governments should fund emigration to the colonies from the revenue derived from the sale of land had a significant influence on the new Whig government elected on 22 November 1830 under the leadership of the 2nd Earl Grey. One of Wakefield’s most influential followers was the Prime Minister’s son, Henry George Grey, at this time known as Viscount Howick (later, as the 3rd Earl Grey, Howick would have a significant impact on colonial policy in Australia, as discussed in Chapters 6 and 7).3 Along with others, Howick persuaded Murray’s successor as Secretary for War and Colonies, Lord Goderich, to direct the New South Wales Governor, Ralph Darling, in February 1831 to sell rather than grant land; the government could then use the revenue to subsidise the passages of free emigrants who could supply labour.4 Although the Wakefieldian scheme sought a concentration rather than expansion of settlement, the combination of a new emphasis on colonisation, the existing practice of ‘squatting’ (occupying Crown lands without authority), and the rapid growth in the profitability of sheep farming, set the stage for a huge expansion in settlement. The 1829 boundaries of settlement around Sydney  – a semi-­circle of 120 miles diameter from Sydney known as the limits of location  – would not be enforced. Henceforth, there would be no stopping the land-­hungry settlers. Together with the development of free working-­class migration, the resultant population growth and economic expansion would alter colonial society and government very substantially. The consequences for Aboriginal people would be immense. The new enthusiasm for land sales and government-­funded migration from Britain to the colonies affected each colony differently. In Van Diemen’s Land, the British government continued to see the colony as a site for receiving convicts rather than free immigrants. Some assisted immigration schemes were tried out, but abandoned after a few years when it became clear that land sales were by now too low to fund them. Unassisted immigrants generally went to the  W. P. Morell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969 [1966], p. 8.  Morell, British Colonial Policy, p. 8.

3

4

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more attractive colonies of South Australia and New South Wales. Population growth in the 1830s came from a mix of convict transportation, unassisted free immigration, and natural increase arising from a high birthrate.5 The new migration scheme would also have little effect in Western Australia, founded as a British colony in 1829, just before Wakefieldian policies took effect. The British established the Swan River Colony, as they called it originally, primarily to thwart possible French ambitions. Given that it was not a convict colony, British officials insisted from the beginning that it should involve minimum British government expenditure. They wanted private investors, who would be enticed by the promise of free grants of land, to fund it.6 When settlers found the land to be less fertile than expected and experienced a range of difficulties including a severe labour shortage, the colony quickly acquired in Britain the reputation of being a failure, an image it took many decades to lose. The settlement remained small, with its non-­Indigenous population around 2,000 for most of the decade. It would not be until the 1840s that Wakefieldian ideas would affect the struggling colony, and even then, given the colony’s poor reputation, only to a limited degree. In Capital (1867), Karl Marx would famously use Western Australia’s early economic failure to illustrate his argument that labour was essential to capital; he agreed with Wakefield that the colony’s undoing was in providing land so cheap that even labourers could purchase it, thus quickly converting them into independent landowners and competitors and diminishing the availability of labour.7 The Australian colony most affected by the influence of Wakefieldian principles of colonisation was to be a new one colonial reformers proposed for the southern edge of the continent. A group of Wakefield followers, including John Stuart Mill, formed the South Australian Association in December 1833.8 They envisaged a new style of colony – more rational, orderly, and agricultural than New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, less dominated by pastoralism, and free of any convict presence. They thought the authoritarian system of government already in place in New South Wales (from which their new district was being carved) was inappropriate for a free colony, and wanted for the colony some form of representative government, on the model of the North American colonies of the seventeenth century.9 In particular, they sought to limit British government power over the new settlement by establishing a system of  Henry Reynolds, A Concise History of Tasmania, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 88–111. 6  Reginal Appleyard, ‘Foundation and early settlement’, Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2009, pp. 382–5. 7  Karl Marx, ‘Capital: a critique of political economy’, in trans. Ben Fowkes, The Modern Theory of Colonisation, vol. 1, ch. 33, London: Penguin, 2004 [1867]. 8  See Bain Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title’, The Journal of Legal History, vol. 34, no. 1, 2013, p. 55. 9  Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past’, p. 54. 5

‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’ 51

colonisation commissioners to control the sale of (Aboriginal) land and the appointment of officials.10 Unsurprisingly, the Colonial Office opposed the plan, wishing to retain government control. After extensive argument, the British parliament in August 1834 passed the South Australian Act, a compromise between Association and government wishes. With the full title ‘An Act to empower His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British Province or Provinces and to provide for the Colonization and Government thereof’, the Act established that the colony would receive no convicts and that migration would be funded from land sales. With ominous implications for Indigenous people in the region (who were still recovering from the impact of smallpox, which had spread from the eastern settled areas to the Adelaide Plains and Lower Murray districts in 1829–30), the Act contained no recognition of Aboriginal rights to land.11 The Crown was declared to be the sole proprietor of the land, whose territories were ‘waste and unoccupied . . . supposed to be fit for the Purposes of Colonization’.12 The Act established both a Board of Commissioners to control land sales and emigration (as the Association had proposed), but also insisted on the usual system of a governor supported by appointed officials.13 He would head a Council of Government, consisting of paid officials and a representative of the Board of Commissioners. In a brief nod to the self-­government aspirations of the Association, the Act also stipulated that when the colony’s population reached 50,000, settlers would receive some representative government.14 The oldest colony, New South Wales, was still a convict colony, but it, too, was significantly affected by the new enthusiasm for free migration funded by the sale of colonial land. When Richard Bourke, from an Anglo-­Irish family based in southern Ireland, arrived in New South Wales as the new governor in December 1831 after a period serving as lieutenant governor of the Cape Colony, he was in New South Wales to represent an imperial government that  P. A. Howell, ‘The South Australia Act, 1834’, in Dean Jaensch, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, Netley: Wakefield Press, 1986, pp. 27–9. 11  Howell, ‘The South Australia Act, 1834’, p. 42; J. M. Main, ‘Social Foundations of South Australia: Men of Capital’, in Eric Richards, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Social History, Netley: Wakefield Press, 1986, p. 97; Whitelock, Adelaide, p. 31; Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past’, pp. 55–9; R. Amery, ‘Sally and Harry: Insights into Early Kaurna Contact History’, in Jane Simpson and Luise Hercus, eds., History in Portraits: Biographies of Nineteenth Century South Australian Aboriginal People, Aboriginal History Monograph no. 6, Canberra: Aboriginal History, 1998, p. 86. 12  Peter Moore, ‘Fatal Letter: Robert Torrens and Native Title’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 40, 2012, p. 7. 13  Morell, British Colonial Policy, p. 9. Its full title was ‘An Act to empower His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British Province or Provinces, and to provide for the Colonization and Government thereof.’ 14  An Act to empower His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British Province or Provinces and to provide for the Colonization and Government thereof, 15 August 1834, www.foundingdocs .gov.au/resources/transcripts/sa1_doc_1834.pdf, accessed 16 April 2018, p. 6. 10

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was turning to free immigration, colonial expansion, and the continued use of convict labour to support that expansion. These imperial policies would be significant for his conduct of Aboriginal policy, despite his anti-­slavery credentials from his role in the Cape Colony.15 When the British government reverted to Conservative for a brief period from November 1834, it instructed Bourke to maintain the earlier policy of constraining settlement within specified bounds, but the return of the Whigs six months later meant a rapid return to the policy of colonial expansion.16 The free settlers were in any case pushing out beyond the limits set five years before, taking with them sheep and convict shepherds, and, as a proponent of colonisation and private enterprise, Governor Bourke did little to stop them.17 Indeed, as his biographer Hazel King points out, he wrote in February 1835 to Thomas Spring Rice, a friend and leading Whig politician, soon to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, that he was convinced that ‘the sheep must wander or they will not thrive, and that the Colonists must have sheep or they will not continue to be wealthy’.18 With pastoral expansion encouraged both in London and by Governor Bourke, exploration for new lands proceeded rapidly.19 The Surveyor General of New South Wales, Thomas Mitchell, himself conducted three major expeditions in New South Wales between 1832 and 1836, exploring the colony’s river system and seeking new pastoral lands. During the third expedition, he traversed country that came to be known as the Western Districts of Port Phillip, and was so impressed by the quality of the land he called it ‘Australia Felix’ and publicised it as ‘one of the finest regions on earth’.20 From 1836, the occupation of the Port Phillip district progressed rapidly, as colonists moved across from Van Diemen’s Land and then, inspired by Mitchell’s talk of wonderful pastoral land, south from New South Wales. New sheep stations appeared along the Murray and Darling rivers and their tributaries and then in

 Lisa Ford, ‘Anti-Slavery and the Reconstitution of Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 45, 2014, p. 76. 16  Hazel King, Richard Bourke, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 185–7. 17  Boyce, 1835, p. 31. See also Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Richard Bourke: Irish Liberalism’ in David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives Across the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 129. 18  Bourke to Spring Rice, 19 February 1835, quoted in King, Richard Bourke, p. 183. 19  Pastoralists in the Hunter River valley, just north of Sydney, seeking new pastures moved north-­ west into the Liverpool Plains from the early 1830s, where violence increased from early 1836; R. H. W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974, pp. 28–9; Roger Millis, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales, Melbourne: Penguin McPhee Gribble, 1992, chapter 4. 20  Thomas Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, London: T.  & W. Boone, 1838, available online at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00036.html, accessed 23 January 2014. 15

‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’ 53

Port Phillip.21 Immigrants began arriving through assisted migration schemes, and pastoralism became central to the colonial economy.22 If Bourke was sympathetic to the pastoralists and their need for land, he was also insistent that the government exert as much control over the process as possible. To this end, in 1836 he introduced into the legislature a Crown Lands Occupation Act (7 Wm. IV, no. 4), which provided squatters with a licensing system. This would, he hoped, both recognise squatters’ rights to the land they had taken, but on government terms.23 The Act also provided for the appointment of Commissioners of Crown Lands who would oversee the operation of the Act, especially beyond the boundaries of location.24 Bourke was especially keen to establish a government presence in Port Phillip and, in late 1836, he sent Captain William Lonsdale there to act as police magistrate, military commander, chief administrator, and protector of Aboriginal people, along with several other officials, some police, and some working convicts.25 Pastoral Expansion and Aboriginal Policy, 1831–4 Pastoral expansion, rapid in New South Wales and moving more slowly in Western Australia, placed great pressure on Aboriginal societies, as many historians have shown.26 A range of military and police forces were deployed in an attempt to prevent or quell Aboriginal resistance; very often, settlers were left to ‘look after themselves’ which meant taking violent action in response to, or in an attempt to forestall, Aboriginal attacks on property and persons. In Western Australia, the early and middle 1830s saw frontier violence. As in the convict colonies, the governor had considerable autocratic powers, though from February 1832 the governors were advised by a small, appointed Legislative Council. The first governor, Governor Charles Stirling, adopted a policy of suppressing Aboriginal attacks on property and settlers. He made few attempts to negotiate and authorised a number of punitive expeditions.27 The closest he came to any policy of protection or negotiation was to establish a Mounted Police force in July 1832 for the purpose of securing settlers’ lives and property in  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 24.  Don Garden, Victoria: A History, Melbourne: Nelson, 1984, pp. 37–8. 23  Boyce, 1835, p. 31. See also Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Richard Bourke: Irish Liberalism’, p. 129; Hazel King, ‘Richard Bourke’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, www.adbonline.anu.edu.au/ adbonline.htm (hereafter ADB online), accessed 26 July 2018. 24  King, Richard Bourke, p. 182. 25  Boyce, 1835, p. 142; King, Richard Bourke, p. 187. 26  Reynolds, Frontier; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists; Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996; Geoffrey Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage: Western Australia since 1826, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2008. 27  Ann Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject: Colonial Law in Aboriginal-­European Relations in Nineteenth Century Western Australia 1829–61, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011, pp. 53–87. 21 22

m t.n h eid lau n o b /ad .en u .a.n u ew iw law n o b d .

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a manner ‘least injurious’ to Aboriginal people. It soon became clear, however, that for Stirling, protecting the settlers took priority; as Paul Hasluck points out, within a year of its establishment, the force’s sole task was to protect the settlers.28 In October 1834, Stirling himself notoriously led a military action against Aboriginal people in Pinjarra, south of Perth, leading to the loss of over twenty Nyungar lives.29 In New South Wales, too, the 1830s witnessed high levels of frontier violence. Governor Bourke hoped to protect and ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people affected by the onrush of settlers on the land they occupied. The Irish-­born Bourke was a Whig of generally liberal sympathies. As governor of the Cape Colony from 1826 to 1828, he had attempted to prevent settler and military violence through policies of conciliation and had encouraged missionary endeavour.30 Yet in New South Wales, he was unable to prevent frontier violence, and Aboriginal policy was low on his list of priorities.31 When Thomas Mitchell reported to him that on his third expedition in 1836, his party had killed a ‘considerable number’ of Aboriginal people, Bourke was shocked by Mitchell’s self-­praising account of the massacre but accepted the argument that Mitchell and his party had acted in self-­defence. He did, however, give a full report on the matter to the secretary of state.32 During Bourke’s time, the Mounted Police, drawn since the 1820s from the British-­funded military and consisting of a force of 120 men by 1837, were used mainly against escaped convicts and bushrangers, but were also deployed against Indigenous people at crucial times, and especially from 1837 in the Liverpool Plains.33 In terms of containing frontier violence and managing the processes of pastoral expansion, Bourke faced his greatest challenge in the southern districts of New South Wales, known as Port Phillip. The process of settlement there was initially unusual, in that a private colonisation association, operating without government sanction, negotiated directly with Indigenous people for the purchase of land. The process began when settlers in Van Diemen’s Land, on finding that all pastoral land there had been taken up by 1834, looked across Bass Strait for new lands. Finding huge expanses of land suitable for pastoralism, they sailed across with their flocks from Van Diemen’s Land, with neither government planning nor sanction. They formed the Port Phillip Association to  Paul Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in Western Australia 1829–1897, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970 [1942], p. 69. 29  Hasluck, Black Australians, pp. 50, 183–4. 30  King, ‘Richard Bourke’, ADB online. 31  Roger Millis points out that he wrote very few despatches on Aboriginal matters, and those he did write did not deal with major policy issues; Millis, Waterloo Creek, p. 114. 32  Laidlaw, ‘Richard Bourke: Irish Liberalism’, pp. 129–30; King, Richard Bourke, p. 192; Millis, Waterloo Creek, pp. 127–36, 217–8. 33  John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002, pp. 105–7. 28

‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’ 55

establish a new colony, and, hoping to force the governor of New South Wales to grant them the land, decided to approach directly the Kulin nations who lived there.34 They would do so not through any kind of government agency, but through a privately negotiated treaty. This was an unusual step for the Australian colonies, as historians such as Diane Barwick, Robert Kenny, and Bain Attwood have explored in detail.35 In June 1835, John Batman’s party from the Association met with representatives of the Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, and Daungwurrung peoples of the Kulin nations, and signed a treaty with them to buy the land in return for gifts. As Attwood points out, the Batman treaty has often seemed an anomaly in Australian history, but in fact the Port Phillip Association was following a long tradition from North America, where individuals and private companies had used treaties with local people to stake claims over the land. The Association was probably influenced, too, by a wish to avoid the violence its members had experienced in Van Diemen’s Land  – and to sidestep interference from the Sydney government.36 As Attwood and Diane Barwick have noted, however, it is highly unlikely that the Kulin delegates meant to sell their country, a concept alien and repugnant to their way of life. Rather, they seem to have read the encounter in terms of their traditional tanderrum ceremony, which allowed visitors temporary access to land and its resources in return for presents and appropriate behaviour.37 Robert Kenny has gone further, painting a picture of a ‘knowing’ Kulin leadership, aware of the colonial devastation happening elsewhere and seeking, through gestures of friendship and accommodation, to limit its effects in their country.38 Unsurprisingly, given that the treaty ignored the role of government altogether and indirectly challenged the Crown’s control of land, Governor Bourke declared it unlawful,39 and instead officially annexed Port Phillip the following year.40 For the people of the Kulin nations, however, the treaty seems to have established a certain precedent, strengthening their belief that the newcomers were obliged to pay for their residence. Batman distributed gifts again at the first anniversary of the treaty, in 1836, and when Governor Bourke visited  Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathaniel Pepper and the Ruptured World, Melbourne: Scribe, 2010 [2007], p. 68. 35  Bain Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History, Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2009; Robert Kenny, ‘Tricks or Treats?: A Case for Kulin Knowing in Batman’s Treaty’, History Australia, vol. 5, no. 2, August 2008, pp. 38.1–38.14; Diane E. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc, 1998, pp. 20–5. 36  Attwood, Possession, pp. 4, 14, 18–32. 37  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 20–5; Attwood, Possession, pp. 36–58. 38  Kenny, ‘Tricks or treats?’, pp. 38.1–38.14. 39  See Bourke to Arthur, 17 August 1836, A2168, ML, quoted by Zoë Laidlaw in ‘Richard Bourke: Irish Liberalism’, in Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives, p. 129. 40  Boyce, 1835, p. 142. 34

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the following year, he, too, handed out presents, while the Aboriginal people brought him kangaroo meat and danced for him.41 While these early meetings were personal and cordial, and merged easily with Indigenous traditions of hospitality and reciprocity, the full impact of dispossession would begin to hit home within just a few years, and equitable and friendly dynamics became harder to sustain. As the invasion progressed, Indigenous Victorians found their access to country curtailed, their traditional diet severely reduced, and their lives endangered by new forms of violence, disease, and social disruption. It appears that smallpox had already swept through this region, perhaps twice, prior to the British arrival, wreaking massive damage in advance and weakening the survivors’ ability to resist human invasion. When the British arrived with additional illnesses, and frontier violence gathered pace, the losses in some districts were just as shocking as those in Van Diemen’s Land. In her recent work on violence in colonial Port Phillip, Lyndall Ryan has also concluded that massacres of Aboriginal people by colonists were more common than historians have previously recognised, most notably in Victoria’s western districts. She calculates sixty-­eight known massacres during 1836–51, which may have accounted for the deaths of 11 per cent of the Aboriginal population.42 Governments developed various strategies to counter not only frontier violence but also to manage Aboriginal populations once the large-­scale violence was over. They sometimes assisted Aboriginal people to survive by distributing rations or blankets. In New South Wales by the 1830s, the annual blanket distribution originally established by Macquarie had become a key element of government policy. Though Bourke in 1835 abolished the feasts Macquarie had inaugurated, on the grounds that they were becoming a public nuisance, he maintained the associated annual blanket distribution and placed it directly in the hands of local magistrates, police officers, settlers, and missionaries. The distributions, which drew Aboriginal people into towns to collect the blankets at least once a year, helped strengthen the position of the magistrates who conducted them. R. W. Reece suggests that they became not only important material items at a time of worsening Aboriginal poverty, but also a valued symbol of official recognition, and something to which Aboriginal people believed they had a right.43 Governments also relied on, and sometimes financially assisted, the establishment of missions. Bourke supported various attempts to encourage Aboriginal people to settle down and acquire ‘industrious habits’, including missionary  Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005, p. 18; King, Richard Bourke, p. 188. 42  Lyndall Ryan, ‘Settler massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, September 2010, pp. 257–73. 43  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 209. 41

‘Another New World Inviting Our Occupation’ 57

endeavour. In 1832, seven years after the London Missionary Society sent Lancelot Threlkeld to conduct a mission amongst the Awabakal people of Lake Macquarie, another large metropolitan missionary society, the Church Missionary Society, sent missionaries J. C. S. Handt and William Watson to evangelise the Wiradjuri.44 Under Colonial Office instruction, Bourke granted the missionaries Wiradjuri land at Wellington Valley, more than 300km north-­ west of Sydney, and persuaded the Legislative Council to grant the missionaries £500 a year from colonial revenue. Despite innumerable difficulties, including conflict between the missionaries, the mission would last twelve years.45 Bourke also sent George Langhorne to Port Phillip in 1836, hoping he could persuade Indigenous people to settle in villages and undertake agriculture; Langhorne also wanted to establish a school for the children.46 The Western Australian Missionary Society, formed in England in 1835, established a mission at Guildford, near Perth, the following year, appointing Anglican clergyman Louis Giustiniani as schoolmaster.47 However, when Giustiniani spoke out against settler frontier violence, describing settler behaviour as worthy of the ‘darkest ages of barbarism’, and advocated remuneration of Aboriginal people for their loss of land, he encountered a press campaign so hostile that in 1838 he left the colony forever.48 It was the government-­funded settlement at Flinders Island, however, that most caught the attention of those interested in Aboriginal policy. It was a particular site of interest for travelling Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, who between 1832 and 1841 visited every Australian colony with the specific aim of inquiring into the processes of colonial governance.49 The Aboriginal residents responded to them warmly in 1832–3, welcoming them with singing, dancing, and exchanging gifts and at the same time demonstrating their keen awareness of the difference between convict and free

 Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith: Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity, and Empire, 1825–1855, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2011, p. 22. See also Hilary Carey and David Roberts, eds., 2002, The Wellington Valley Project: Letters and Journals Relating to the Church Missionary Society Mission to Wellington Valley, New South Wales, 1830–42, A Critical Electronic Edition [hereafter WVP]: www.newcastle.edu.au. 45  Mitchell, In Good Faith, pp. 13–28. 46  King, Richard Bourke, pp. 194–5; Mitchell, In Good Faith, pp. 30–1. 47  Mitchell, In Good Faith, p.  36; Michael Gladwin, ‘The Journalist in the Rectory: Anglican Clergymen and Australian Intellectual Life’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 3, 2010, p. 56.11. 48  Michael Gladwin, ‘The Journalist in the Rectory’, p. 56.11–56.12; Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998, pp. 84–90; Hilary Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 158–9. In London, Giustiniani laid allegations of cruelty towards indigenous people in the colony before the Colonial Office and the Aborigines Protection Society; Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 124. 49  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, pp. 74–5. 44

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when they refused offers of clothing that resembled convict uniforms.50 George Augustus Robinson, after two more years’ travelling around Van Diemen’s Land, making friends with and persuading the remaining Aboriginal people to join the community at Flinders Island, became commandant in October 1835. Lyndall Ryan provides a detailed account of his regime, with its emphasis on order and imparting the arts of ‘civilisation’. Though only 14 of the 112 residents at the time were children in October 1835, Robinson placed great emphasis on the children’s schooling and subjection to a rigid daily routine in a bid to encourage their ‘civilisation’. Women were also strictly supervised and trained in domestic duties; Robinson exerted less direct supervision over the men, though he expected them to work hard to maintain the settlement, building roads and fences, clearing land, and shearing sheep. As Ryan points out, however, the adults continued many cultural practices, including performing ceremonies.51 Serious problems with the quality of the water and food resulted in illness and, from 1837, a high death rate. It took some time, however, before the high death rate became known elsewhere, so that Robinson and Flinders Island came to represent an enlightened policy of Aboriginal rescue for some years after the failure of the settlement was becoming sadly apparent on the ground. Evangelicals and Aboriginal Policy, 1835 By 1835, there was potential conflict, both at the imperial centre and in the settler colonies, between the growing enthusiasm for colonisation and the idea of Aboriginal protection. While there had always been those in Britain who expressed concerns over the treatment of Aboriginal peoples in Britain’s colonies, they represented a weak voice indeed until the mid-­1830s. Evangelicals and others who had been so important in the anti-­slavery campaign were now the cornerstone of the movement to protect Aboriginal peoples in Britain’s  James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, London, Hamilton: Adams and Co., 1843, pp. 81, 169–72; George Washington Walker, Notes on the Aborigines of Tasmania, Hobart, Royal Society of Tasmania, 1898, pp. 4, 9, 12, 16–17. Aptly described by Penelope Edmonds as ‘“institutional opponents” working within imperial political circuits’, Backhouse and Walker undertook an investigation that was unusually thorough, assisted by a very high level of government assistance and co-­operation, enabling them to interview governors, settlers, and Indigenous people alike. They corresponded extensively, wrote many reports, and were widely regarded at the time as a key source of information on what was happening to Indigenous people in Australia; Penelope Edmonds, ‘“Travelling Under Concern”: Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1832–1841’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 40:5, 2012, pp. 769–88, quote on p. 769. See also Anna Johnston, Paper War, p. 52; Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 75. 51  Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012, pp. 218–33. 50

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settler colonies, in North America, Australia, and the Cape Colony.52 In their view, British settlers’ quest for land was leading to great loss of life and livelihood for the indigenous peoples they encountered, and undermining missionary attempts to Christianise and civilise them. As a result, British colonisation was becoming what George Murray feared in 1830 in relation to Van Diemen’s Land  – dishonorable, bringing shame and discredit to Britain itself. Many humanitarian spokesmen supported the establishment of missionary enterprises far away from secular settlements, so that missionaries would be the only Englishmen indigenous people could meet. Failing that, they argued that governments would have to control the settlers much more than they had hitherto, if colonisation were ever to become an honourable pursuit.53 The evangelical view of how colonisation ought to be managed gained considerable sway within the Colonial Office and in parliament in the second half of the 1830s, and has since attracted a large and lively historiography.54 A key parliamentary figure in the growth of support for Aboriginal protection was Thomas Fowell Buxton, an evangelical with extensive connections to missionaries and others concerned at the fate of indigenous peoples, especially in the Cape Colony. Buxton successfully moved in the House of Commons in July 1834 an address to the King that asserted the importance of protecting and civilising native inhabitants of British colonies.55 The growth in support of Aboriginal protection, it indicated, was in part a result of the abolition of slavery in British colonies by the new Whig government in 1833, elected after the implementation of the Reform Act of 1832 that widened the franchise and reformed the parliament.56 Evangelicals and others now energetically applied the humanitarian ideas developed in the context of opposing slavery to the situation of indigenous peoples who were being displaced by British settlement and expansion.57

 R. Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002, p. 8. 53  Harris, Making Native Space, p. 8. 54  See especially Julie Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous People in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 27–34; Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, esp. chapter 3. 55  House of Commons Journal, 2 July 1834, vol. 97, p. 449, cited in Moore, ‘Fatal Letter: Robert Torrens and Native Title’, p. 40, fn. 19. 56  Liberated slaves would serve a six-­year apprenticeship as a transition to freedom, and the government would compensate the slave owners at the extraordinary cost of £20,000,000. Nick Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-­Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. It is becoming clear from the findings of the Legacies of Slavery project and the work of historians such as Draper and Catherine Hall, that Fund recipients invested them in various ways, including the expansion of pastoralism in the Australian colonies, transforming the economy of Britain and her colonies as a result. 57  Henry Reynolds, Law of the Land, Melbourne: Penguin, 1987, p. 82. 52

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In the Whig government under the leadership of Lord Melbourne, elected in April 1835, evangelical influence reached its height, with important effects on Aboriginal policy. These men hoped, as Bannister had five years earlier, that the two ideals of continued colonisation and Aboriginal protection, which seemed so utterly opposed, could in fact be made to work together in harmony. One of their key bodies, the Church Missionary Society, had particular influence, notably through the civil servant James Stephen, Undersecretary for Colonies from 1836 to 1847, and the Member of Parliament, Charles Grant, who in 1835, now Lord Glenelg, became Secretary of State for the Colonies.58 With Glenelg, Stephen, and Viscount Howick all firm evangelicals, the stage was set for a direct confrontation between the competing principles of colonisation and protection. Glenelg’s instructions to governors stressed Aboriginal protection much more strongly than his predecessors had done. Given the vast distance from London to the Australian colonies, the change in policy caught some governors unawares. Glenelg was deeply concerned, for example, to learn that Governor Stirling had himself led a military action against Aboriginal people in Pinjarra and, to Stirling’s surprise, censured him in a despatch in July 1835, reminding him of his duty to protect the Aboriginal people and to treat them equally with white settlers before the law.59 At the same time, as Henry Reynolds and others have noted, in July 1835, Howick drew the attention of the South Australian colonisation commissioners, who by this time were preparing in earnest for the new colony, to the importance of avoiding the destruction that had accompanied British settlement in Van Diemen’s Land. They needed to adopt from the beginning a more conciliatory approach. To this end, he passed on some advice from Lieutenant Governor Arthur, such as the suggestion that they negotiate arrangements for taking land with Aboriginal peoples before settlement.60 The settlers should also avoid committing offences that might lead to lasting ill will and continued warfare. The commissioners, in turn, approached the Colonial Office for further direction on a number of issues, including the limits of the province and the establishment of a legislative council.61 Bain Attwood draws attention to their strategy: knowing that the Colonial Office would insist on some plan to protect Aboriginal people from the slaughter and destruction evident in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, they proposed their own ‘protection plan’. It included the establishment of officials known as protectors and an assurance  Alan Mark Thornton, The Philosophical Radicals: Their Influence on Emigration and the Evolution of Responsible Government for the Colonies, California: Pomona College, 1975, p. 75.  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 54, 86; Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 50. 60  Reynolds, Law of the Land, p. 99, quoting CO 280/55Q. See also Robert Foster and Mandy Paul, ‘Married to the Land: Land Grants to Aboriginal Women in South Australia 1848–1911’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 34, no. 121, April 2003, p. 51–2. 61  Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past’, p. 63. 58

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that they would sell no land that Indigenous people possessed ‘in occupation or enjoyment’ without their consent.62 Those favouring the plans for a new kind of colony in South Australia realised they had to convince the government that they took Aboriginal rights seriously; they expressed hopes that colonisation and Aboriginal protection could proceed together. At a dinner given in London a few months later, in September 1835, by supporters of the new colony to mark Captain John Hindmarsh’s appointment as the colony’s first governor, some speakers expressed their desire for kindly Aboriginal policies to distinguish this new colony, in contrast to the destruction that had occurred in Van Diemen’s Land and other regions. The absence of convicts, they thought, gave grounds for hoping that racial harmony would prevail.63 To Colonial Office and government ears, this all sounded promising, and they agreed to the appointment of protectors, but insisted that the government, not the commissioners, must appoint them and that the colony would pay their salaries.64 The 1836 Letters Patent, which created South Australia as a colony under the British Crown, reiterated that colonisation should not infringe upon Aborigines’ rights to occupy and enjoy the land ‘now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives’. This was a much stronger recognition of Aboriginal rights in land than had been evident in Governor Phillip’s original instructions in 1787, or in the South Australia Act of 1834 in which the lands were described as ‘waste’ and ‘uninhabited’.65 The government, it seemed, was finally putting in place an honourable colonising project. When Governor Hindmarsh proclaimed the official start of colonisation in Adelaide in 1836, he declared that he would treat the Aborigines equally under British law – a remark presumably aimed at an imperial, white audience as much as a local, black one.66 Political Representation for Settlers? 1833–1836 Just as protectionist policies were gaining ground in British government circles, a countervailing development emerged that would threaten their implementation. This was the demand by both colonial reformers and colonial elites that the government introduce into its Australian colonies some form of representative government. In the colonies, demographic and economic expansion led settlers to question the limited powers of the advisory legislative council  Paul and Foster, ‘Married to the land’, pp. 51–2.  C. Mann, Report of the Speeches Delivered at a Dinner given to Capt. John Hindmarsh, R. N., on his Appointment as Governor of South Australia, London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1835, pp. 7, 13–18. 64  Attwood, ‘Returning to the Past’, p. 74. 65  Reynolds, Law of the Land, p. 136. 66  Alex C. Castles and Michael C. Harris, Lawmakers and Wayward Whigs: Government and Law in South Australia, 1836–1986, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1987, pp. 8–9. 62 63

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established in 1823.67 The split in colonial politics between two main factions, however, complicated the demand for representation. On one side, the exclusives, led first by John and then his son, James, Macarthur, still wanted Britain to postpone the introduction of representative government until there was no danger that ex-­convicts would be elected. On the other were those like William Wentworth and Sir John Jamison, who thought Britain should grant greater political rights immediately. Born in the colony to a convict mother and a free immigrant father, Wentworth was a key figure in colonial politics who will appear frequently in this narrative, first as an early advocate of free institutions and self-­government, and later as a defender of squatter supremacy and upper-­ class privilege. Jamison, born in Ireland and a medical practitioner educated in Scotland, was a wealthy landowner regarded as ‘the chief representative of the immigrant settler class’.68 Wentworth and Jamison’s group held public meetings in Sydney in February 1830 and again in January 1833, both of which sent petitions to Parliament seeking the same civil and political rights as Britons had in Britain.69 The 1833 petitioners hoped that after the extension of the franchise in Britain itself in 1832, the reformed Parliament would be sympathetic to their claims. The liberal-­minded Governor Bourke in 1833 had recommended the Legislative Council be half nominated and half elected.70 Yet the imperial government remained cautious. Viscount Howick strongly opposed representation in a convict colony; in a memorandum to his father, the Prime Minister, he argued that convictism had demoralised New South Wales just as slavery had the sugar colonies, making representative government there impossible.71 This was just one of the many instances in which debates in and around New South Wales were inflected with ideas and concerns arising from the fierce debates over the abolition of slavery raging in the early 1830s, culminating in the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Pressure for some kind of representation, however, continued to grow. In 1835, with the Australian Courts Act of 1828 due to expire in 1836, the question of what form of government should operate in New South Wales became more urgent. Would the British government change the provisions concerning the arrangements for governing New South Wales, or would it simply renew the Act and thus preserve the status quo? Those in the colony wanting representative government formed the Australian Patriotic Association in May 1835  T. H. Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 17; Andrew Tink, William Charles Wentworth, pp. 117, 125; A. C. V. Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia: New South Wales, 1788–1856, London: Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 205–6. 68  G. P. Walsh, ‘Sir John Jamison’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018. 69  Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, p. 203. 70  King, ‘Richard Bourke’, ADB online. 71  Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006, p. 16. 67

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to conduct a campaign on the issue.72 At first, it seemed that the exclusives, a proto-­oligarchy that by this time had come to support the idea of representative government so long as it excluded ex-­convicts, would join in, but the political differences between exclusives and reformers were too wide for a concerted campaign. The exclusives composed a petition to Parliament on the matter early in 1836, suggesting that the Legislative Council did indeed need greater powers, but that the government should delay making any change until free immigration had overwhelmed the convict and ex-­convict population.73 The Australian Patriotic Association held its own public meetings and drew up an alternative petition, calling for a Council in which three-­quarters of its members would be elected. It was a sign of the change in colonial politics and society arising especially from the growth in free immigration that the exclusives’ petition attracted only 398 signatures, while the Association’s had 5,000, more than twelve times as many.74 Governor Bourke transmitted both petitions in April 1836, supporting the larger petition and this time suggesting that the new Constitution Act should provide for a Council that was two-­thirds elected, a proposal that was more radical than the one he’d made three years earlier, though less so than that of the Australian Patriotic Association petition.75 In the end, the Whig government, led by Lord Melbourne, decided the following year to make no changes to the existing system as long as the parliamentary Select Committee on Transportation was conducting inquiries. It saw the two questions, convict transportation and the election of members of the Legislative Council, as closely related. The government accordingly renewed the 1828 Act rather than develop a revised constitution, and made no concessions to the Australian Patriotic Association’s demands.76 It would be another five years before Britain would make any changes to the colony’s system of government; five years which would see major conflict between settlers and governors over Aboriginal policy. While British officials typically presented convictism as the reason for denying the extension of settler representation in government, it would seem that an  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, pp. 18–19; Tink, William Charles Wentworth, p. 139.  Tink, William Charles Wentworth, p.  141; John M. Ward, James Macarthur, Colonial Conservative, 1798–1867, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1981, pp. 60–1; Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, pp. 210–1. 74  Tink, William Charles Wentworth, p. 142. 75  HRA series I, vol. 18, pp. 391, 456. King, ‘Richard Bourke’, ADB online; Laidlaw, ‘Richard Bourke: Irish Liberalism’, pp.  131ff. In Colonial Connections, Zoë Laidlaw points out that Bourke also wanted to replace military tribunals with civilian juries, have a majority of elected members in the legislature, limit the political power of the Church of England in New South Wales, and expand the franchise to all men who met the financial criteria, regardless of whether they had free or convict backgrounds. Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution, and Colonial Government, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, pp. 72–3. 76  John M. Ward, Colonial Self-Government, p. 154. 72 73

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even more important motivation was their desire to retain control of land in a rapidly expanding colonial economy. This was, after all, for them the cornerstone of colonisation itself. In 1836, the House of Commons appointed a Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies to consider the best ways of disposing of colonial lands, focussing on the Australian colonies, the Cape of Good Hope, and the West Indies. Wakefield, one of the witnesses, insisted on the importance of the control of land remaining with the imperial government; it should not be devolved to local colonial governments. Only the imperial government, he said, was in a position to tie the disposal of land clearly to the funding of migration. In its deliberations, the committee considered the question of the ways in which Aboriginal people could be persuaded to yield their land, looking both at the arrangements recently made for South Australia, and the circumstances and subsequent rejection of the Batman treaty, but the Committee’s final report made no mention of this issue.77 Instead, the report recommended in true Wakefieldian spirit that the disposal of colonial lands should be under the control of a Land Board based in London, responsible to the British government. This Board would also direct emigration from Britain to the colonies, to the benefit of both. As the British government’s reluctance to grant representative government to South Australia had suggested, matters other than the presence of convicts were at stake. Those seeking some form of representative government, let alone self-­ government, would encounter over the next fifteen years an unwillingness in Britain to accede to their demands that owed at least as much to the land as to the transportation question. Aboriginal Protest and Negotiation, 1835–1838 Through the 1830s, governors ruled unchallenged by elected representative bodies, though powerful local elites could take advantage of less formal means of shaping policy or undermining their authority. Indigenous people recognised the formal authority and power of the governor, and developed various negotiation strategies in response. In New South Wales, they sometimes appealed to Governor Bourke, or asked others to do so for them, when other avenues failed. When police arrested a man called Baggama, for example, at the Bogan River in 1835 for the murder of colonial botanist Richard Cunningham, Baggama begged the Wellington Valley missionaries for help. The missionary, William Watson, recalled, ‘He asked me many times over, “if they would hang him?” and said, “I believe you send book (or Letter) to Governor and tell him not

77

 Report from the Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies, 1836, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, xi (512), pp. 499–765.

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to hang me.”’78 They also understood that the governor authorised the annual blanket distribution, even when the missionaries actually handed them out. At Wellington Valley in 1836, Watson, notoriously irritable, complained that when local Wiradjuri people heard of blankets arriving from the governor, they demanded he hand them over immediately. In his journal, Watson recorded that Wiradjuri had told him the blankets ‘did not belong to me, they had been sent up for them [the Wiradjuri] and they must have them’. When Watson disagreed – he was planning to distribute the blankets to the neediest and the people who had worked hardest on the mission farm – a furious argument broke out. Two months later, Watson recorded another argument with a man he called Narrang Jackey, who wanted a new blanket. When Watson scolded him for giving the last one away, Narrang Jackey retorted, ‘O never you mind that, all about blankets Governor sent for Black fellow don’t belong at all to Parson, white fellow all about say so.’79 It was on Flinders Island, though, that Indigenous people would most thoroughly develop new forms of community protest, adapted to the post-­frontier environment. From their relocation to the island in 1832, the Aboriginal residents, descendants, for the most part, of the Ben Lomond, Big River, and western communities, and survivors of the so-­called Black War, had to make radical changes in order to survive. On Flinders, they forged new alliances with one another, amalgamating ceremonies, language, and kinship networks from different regions.80 Within a few years, this new community began to express its discontent and anger at the poor living standards of the people and their lack of control over their own lives, as well as their distance from home. They expressed their objections to local authorities, initially through disobedience and passive resistance.81 According to Henry Reynolds, residents refused to take on regular labour, stating that they were not prisoners and that the government was obliged to look after them because the colonists had taken all their land.82 Before long, residents began to make their complaints more formally, in scenes that would reappear in other colonial settings over the following century. A culture of written protest began to develop on the island. During George Augustus Robinson’s time as commandant from 1835 to 1838, he and the young men together published a local newspaper, the Flinders Island Chronicle. Lyndall Ryan notes that Robinson envisaged this as a public relations exercise, to show other colonists how well the mission was (allegedly) succeeding, but  Watson, Journal, 1 December 1835, WVP.  Watson, Journal, 24 August 1833 and 7 October 1833, WVP. 80  Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996, pp. 185–9. 81   Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 156–62; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 179, 185. 82   Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 160–2. 78 79

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the contribution of two of the young men made this a more complex document than he perhaps intended.83 One was Walter George Arthur, son of the Ben Lomond elder Drule.er.par, who would later become a leader in his own right; and the other was a more socially isolated orphan called Thomas Brune. Both sought to improve their status through acquiring literacy and forming connections to Robinson.84 Given the commandant’s supervision, it would have been almost impossible to express rebellion directly, and most of their writings were submissive and repetitive, urging the residents to show obedience and gratitude to Robinson and God.85 Sometimes, however, the discourse of Christian paternalism allowed for veiled expressions of discontent and anguish. During 1837, there were outbreaks of illness on the island and many deaths,86 and these tragic developments may have spurred Brune to write more frankly. In an unusually eloquent article, he combined the conventional language of paternalism with some painful reflections on his community’s past, present, and future. He began conventionally enough: Now my friends you see that the Commandant is so kind to you he gives you every thing that you want when you were in the bush the commandant had to leave his friends and go into the bush and he brought you out of the bush because he felt for you . . .

A different note then appears: . . . and because he knowed the white man was shooting you and now he has brought you to Flinders Island where you get every thing . . . the Bible says some of all shall be saved but I am much afraid none of us will be alive by and by as there is nothing but sickness among us [our emphasis].87

Later that year, Brune finished another article on a pitiful note, wishing that someone would help the people on the island who were sick and dying. He then asked, ‘Why dont the black fellows pray to the king to get us away from this place [?]’88 Observing that this last remark was missing from other

 Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 187.  Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006, pp. 105, 111. See also Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 16–23. 85  Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 107. 86  Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 184. 87  The Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, 17 November 1837, in The Aboriginal or Flinders Island Chronicle 1836–38, in the papers of George Augustus Robinson, vol. 52, photocopy, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. (Spelling and grammar in the original.) 88  The Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, 17 November 1837; Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, pp. 111–12, 119. 83 84

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editions, Van Toorn suggests that Brune may have inserted it after Robinson’s proofreading.89 A few months later, in January 1838, the residents, whose number by this time had fallen to ninety-­three, welcomed Governor and Lady Franklin to the island. According to the colonial writer James Erskine Calder, the residents of Flinders were eager to meet the Franklins, and danced for them, staged a sham fight, and received their gifts happily.90 Although Robinson allowed the residents little chance to express their views, and succeeded in presenting to the Franklins a sanitised version of Flinders Island life, the residents nevertheless were deploying some Indigenous traditions to shape their relations with the colonial government. They were creating a public and discursive space into which later activists could move to greater effect.91 Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements, 1836–1837 At the same time, British politicians were pondering the treatment of indigenous peoples more generally in Britain’s settler colonies. The missionary societies in the Cape Colony had protested against the governor, who, when war broke between settlers and Xhosas late in 1834, had supported the settlers by extending the boundary of settlement to legitimise their expansion into new lands.92 In response, and buoyed by the success of his motion of July 1834 to address the King on the whole issue of protecting and civilising the Aboriginal peoples in British colonies, Thomas Fowell Buxton successfully moved in March 1835 for a Select Committee on the Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements) to investigate the matter further.93 As Zoë Laidlaw has noted, the committee of sixteen, chaired by Buxton, included a number of his friends and supporters. Over two parliamentary sessions the committee took evidence from forty-­six witnesses, predominantly those based in the Cape Colony. While the Committee was meeting, in December 1835, Glenelg declared the British military advance into Xhosa territory illegal and ordered the troops and settlers to abandon the new areas. Consideration of the conflicting evidence concerning these tumultuous events extended the committee’s work through 1836 and into 1837.94 It finally tabled in parliament in July 1837, just one month after Queen Victoria’s  Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 119.  Calder, Some Account of the Wars, p. 38; N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement, Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987, pp. 525–7. 91  Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 114. 92  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 85. 93  Reynolds, Law of the Land, p. 84; Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Aunt Anna’s Report’, p. 4. 94  Laidlaw, “‘Aunt Anna’s Report’”, pp. 4–5. 89 90

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ascension to the throne, its lengthy report, known as the Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements).95 The inquiry and its subsequent report have been the subject of intense interest by historians in recent years for the light they throw both on the state of indigenous-­settler relations in the British Empire at this time and on the concerns and influence of the evangelical humanitarians who originated and contributed to them. Our focus here is specifically on their importance for questions of colonial governance – that is, the future political relationship between the imperial centre, the settler population, and indigenous peoples.96 Given what had prompted the inquiry, the evidence concerning the Australian colonies was much more limited than for the Cape Colony, and at times, it was contradictory. As Anna Johnston points out, the personal animosities between some of the key figures who gave evidence, either in person or in writing, especially Threlkeld, Marsden, and John Dunmore Lang, resulted in the committee receiving mixed messages.97 The committee consulted both Lang and the Anglican archdeacon William Grant Broughton, though neither had extensive experience with Aboriginal people or institutions.98 In his evidence, Broughton emphasised the disaster of Van Diemen’s Land, and saw the removal to Flinders Island as having saved the lives of Aboriginal people and made it possible for the survivors to acquire Christianity.99 The committee did not invite Threlkeld to testify; although his involvement had been significantly greater than either Broughton’s or Lang’s, by this time he had lost the support of the London Missionary Society.100 Saxe Bannister was one of the few witnesses to have held office in, and to have extensive knowledge of, the situation in New South Wales.101 His policy suggestions were extensive and precise, and followed on from those in Humane Policy, published seven years earlier. In a paper presented to the committee, which was included in full in the minutes of evidence, he began by insisting that no expense be spared in establishing a just and humane approach  House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) with the Minutes of Evidence, appendix and index, 14 July 1837, British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, vol. 7, pp. 3–87 (hereinafter referred to as the Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines). 96  See, for example, Laidlaw, “‘Aunt Anna’s Report’”, pp.  1–28; Elbourne,  ‘The Sin  of  the Settler’. 97  Anna Johnston, ‘Linguistics, Religion, and Law in Colonial New South Wales: Lancelot Threlkeld and Settler-­Colonial Humanitarian Debates’, in Diane Kirkby, ed., Past Law, Present Histories: From Settler Colonies to International Justice, Canberra: Australian National University E Press, p. 37. 98  Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler’, para. 23; Lester, ‘Humanitarians and White’, p. 75. 99  House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, p.  24; Alan Lester, ‘Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars’, Geographical Research, vol. 44, no. 3, p. 234. 100  Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, p. 154. 101  Johnston, ‘Linguistics, Religion, and Law’, p. 33. 95

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to Aboriginal peoples, on the grounds that the land acquired from them was immense, better relationships would lead to increased markets, and, above all, the existing system led to high military and human costs.102 In general terms, his emphasis was on equality before the law, and the treatment of tribal leaders with respect. He recommended the establishment of a new body to oversee Aboriginal policy; it would be composed of protectors of Aborigines based in the colonies on the model of ‘those appointed in the South Australian charter’, an agent in London representing ‘all coloured people in and near the colonies’, political agents from the tribes, and commissioners of inquiry. Such a body should answer to the Foreign Office, not the Colonial Office, since it was in fact a check on the latter, and on governors and other officials appointed by the secretary of state for the Colonies. His key point was that the ‘interests of the natives are totally distinct from the interests of the colonists and colonial officers’.103 To place the natives, he went on, under the Colonial Office, was to sacrifice them to the colonists. Bannister also emphasised the importance of medical assistance, supporting missionary endeavours, the study of native languages and the provision of interpreters, and the provision of schooling of white and coloured children together.104 He insisted that the British public should know and understand what was happening in the colonies, and to this end there should be frequent publication of government and law reports. Although, as Zoë Laidlaw has shown, the Committee watered down the report from its original draft, it was still a powerful indictment of past and current government policy and settler practice. It suggested that indigenous peoples everywhere were being morally degraded and physically destroyed through settler violence, alcohol, and introduced diseases, and specifically quoted the section of Murray’s despatch of 1830 that referred to the possible extinction of the race. Although it praised Arthur’s removal of the remaining Aboriginal Tasmanians to Flinders Island, describing it as ‘an act of real mercy, though of apparent severity’,105 the report did sound a sombre note when commenting on the rapid population decline that ensued. ‘Thus, nearly,’ it wrote, ‘has the event been accomplished which was thus predicted and deprecated by Sir G. Murray.’106 Nonetheless, even while recognising the effects of colonisation on Aboriginal peoples, the committee’s solution was not to halt colonisation itself; rather it sought to make it more honourable, just as the speakers for the dinner in honour of Captain Hindmarsh had done. The report therefore concluded in  Evidence of S. Bannister, 14 March 1837, Minutes of Evidence before Select Committee, Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, pp. 14–21. 103  Bannister, Evidence, p. 15. 104  Ibid., p. 17. 105  Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, p. 83. 106  Ibid., p. 14. 102

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relation to the Australian colonies, ‘Whatever may have been the injustice of this encroachment, there is no reason to suppose that either justice or humanity would now be consulted by receding from it.’107 The committee supported continued emigration to the settler colonies, which it saw as providing an outlet for ‘the superabundant populations of Great Britain and Ireland’. The solution was to continue colonisation in a more controlled manner, providing to British settlers new economic opportunities and to indigenous people both Christianisation and government protection. How, then, could colonisation and protection be reconciled? The report saw the answer in constraining the settlers. As Alan Lester and Fae Dussart note, one key theme of the report was that the task of protecting indigenous people during colonisation was necessarily that of the government.108 The report’s first recommendation was that indigenous policy remain with the imperial government through the person of the governor in each colony, and not with local legislatures.109 Such legislatures, it pointed out, represented the views of the settlers, the very people who were in dispute with the native people. Even when colonial legislatures were not representative but consisted of members chosen by the governor, their members would still minister to popular prejudices. ‘Whatever may be the legislative system of any Colony, we therefore advise that, as far as possible, the Aborigines be withdrawn from its control.’110 This view, accepted and promulgated in Colonial Office circles, was to be highly significant for subsequent debate over questions of settler self-government. The report went on to indicate just how centralised power over Aboriginal policy should be. While the governor should initiate immediate action, any law concerning Aboriginal people (other than in an extreme emergency) should be ‘expressly sanctioned by the Queen’ and copies of such laws should be communicated to both Houses of Parliament. The governor should be invested with ‘authority for the decision of all questions affecting the interests of the native tribes’.111 Authority for the management and control of Aboriginal people, that is to say, would rest with the British government rather than with settlers or with Aboriginal people themselves. Only the Crown should have the power to purchase or acquire Aboriginal people’s land,112 and governments should use the revenue raised to provide protection and religious instruction (provided by missionaries) to the survivors of the tribes.113 Thus, the imperial government

 Ibid., pp. 13–14. See also Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler’.  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, pp. 105–6.  Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, p. 31. 110  Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, p. 77. 111  Ibid. 112  Harris, Making Native Space, p. 10. 113  Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines, p. 79. 107 108 109

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would direct Aboriginal policy using funds raised from the forcible acquisition of their land. For the Australian colonies specifically, the Report recommended the appointment of officials, to be known as Protectors of Natives, directly under the authority of the governor. The Report’s views on what the protectors ought to do were clearly influenced by those of George Augustus Robinson, Lieutenant Governor Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, and Saxe Bannister, though it did not take up Bannister’s more radical suggestion of establishing a system of oversight separate from the Colonial Office. The duties of the protectors, said the report, ‘should consist, first, in cultivating a personal knowledge of the natives, and a personal intercourse with them, and with that view these officers should be expected to acquire an adequate familiarity with the native language’. Then, the protectors should be able to offer gifts, to secure confidence, and then find out what kind of employment would most suit the native tribes. Native peoples should have secured for them ‘such lands as may be necessary for their support’, and ‘the means of pursuing the chase without molestation’.114 Protectors should act as coroners (this being particularly important in establishing whether a settler was responsible for killing an Aboriginal person, and thus whether legal action was necessary). In addition, protectors should advise the local government on the need, if any, for special laws, given the absurdity and injustice of requiring recently colonised people to observe English law.115 Drawing explicitly on the Van Diemen’s Land example, the report said Aborigines should not be used by police to ‘detect and counteract thefts practised by the convicts’; in Van Diemen’s Land this practice had led to such dreadful antipathy between Aborigines and bushrangers that the race would have been exterminated had the remnant not been removed to Flinders Island. The protectors should have the powers of a magistrate and should promote the prosecution of all crimes against the Aborigines’ persons or property.116 Finally, protectors should make detailed reports to the governor, especially giving statistical information about the native population; the governor should then send these reports to Britain. This would ensure that British politicians and officials could recognise the magnitude of any problem in time and take appropriate action. This was a project of tight governmental control of a colony thousands of miles and many months away, which was undergoing a process of government-­ sanctioned pastoral expansion. Given the distance from the metropole, and the rapid spread of pastoralism and increasing British migration to the colonies, the plan advocated in the Report seemed unlikely to succeed.  Ibid., p. 83.  Ibid., p. 84.  Ibid.

114 115 116

3

Settlers Oppose Indigenous Protection, 1837–1842

Introduction The late 1830s witnessed a range of attempts to institute a more systematic and humane way of governing Aboriginal people in the Australian colonies through the establishment of protectorates, the support of missions, provision of rationing, and prosecution of both white and black men accused of frontier violence. But settler populations were determined to resist such measures, and to continue the process of securing the land for pastoral expansion and profit. The former policies were those of the British government, officially and formally in control, while the latter resistance was from settler populations without political representation or representative government. This chapter explores how and why it seemed impossible, despite the efforts of governors in each colony, to prevent the continuing destruction of Aboriginal lives and communities. The pastoralists were, like the settlers evoked by Patrick Wolfe in his account of the events leading up to the Trail of Tears, an unstoppable white horde, and they had their ways of asserting themselves against policies developed by distant metropolitan authorities.1 Just as important, however, to the defeat of the protection policy were its own internal contradictions. While the imperial government tried to regulate the process of land theft, in the end its own settler-­colonising desires and ambitions meant it was always complicit. Glenelg Installs New Protection Policy Soon after the tabling of the Report of the Aborigines Committee in the House of Commons in July 1837, the British government began taking steps to implement the report’s key recommendations. Lord Glenelg, as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, reminded Governor Richard Bourke that Aboriginal people were to be regarded as British subjects, and to be treated equally before 1

 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, p. 392.

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Settlers Oppose Indigenous Protection, 1837–1842 73

the law.2 The Colonial Office began the task of appointing protectors to each of the colonies – one to South Australia, two to Western Australia and five (one chief protector and four assistant protectors) to the Port Phillip district of New South Wales. On the recommendation of George Arthur, recently returned to England after his period as lieutenant-­governor of Van Diemen’s Land, the government chose George Augustus Robinson as chief protector for the Port Phillip district and William Thomas, James Dredge, Edward Stone Parker and Charles Sievwright as his assistants.3 In January 1838, Glenelg sent the report to the new governor of New South Wales, Governor Gipps, and informed him of the government’s ‘plan for the better protection and civilisation of the Native Tribes within the limits of your Government’.4 As recommended in the 1837 report, Glenelg included in the protectors’ tasks inducing the tribes in the newly settled districts to lead a sedentary life, protecting them from physical violence and injustice, learning their local languages, acting as a mediator between the tribes and the colonial government, preparing them for ‘civilised’ life, and promoting ‘moral and religious improvement’.5 Humanitarian ideals would thus be enacted through a more intensive system of Aboriginal governance than the Australian colonies had ever seen. The protectors were also an important part of the assertion of the authority of the imperial centre, rather than the settlers, to determine and manage Aboriginal policy. Aboriginal people, the new policy suggested, were not there to be conquered, exploited, or ignored, but rather to be managed and improved. Glenelg made it clear that the protectors would, as the Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines had recommended, be funded from colonial revenues. Having to pay for the protectors themselves would greatly exacerbate settler hostility to the whole policy. In Western Australia, the appointed Legislative Council was so adamant that the colony could not pay that, in the  Roger Millis, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales, Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 217–8. 3  Dredge and Parker, both Methodists, applied for the positions partly on the urging of clergyman Joseph Orton, who had visited Port Phillip in 1836 and found the local Kulin people to be friendly and hospitable. Joseph Orton, The Aborigines of Australia, London: Thomas, 1836, pp. 7–9; Joseph Orton, 21 April 1836, Joseph Orton, Journal 1832–1839 and 1840–1841 (JOJ), ML ref. A1714–1715: CY reel 1119, State Library of New South Wales. See also 23, 24, and 28 April 1836. See also Millis, Waterloo Creek, pp. 375–80; Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, pp. 106–7. 4  Glenelg to Gipps, 31 January 1838, HRA, XIX, p. 252. See Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 136–7. See also the Sydney Monitor, 24 September 1838. 5  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p.  107. Sir George Arthur to Lord Glenelg, 15 December 1837, in Michael Cannon, ed., Historical Records of Victoria (HRV): The Aborigines of Port Phillip, 1835–1839, vol. 2A, Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982, p. 33; Lord Glenelg to Sir George Gipps, 31 January 1838, Michael Cannon, ed., HRV: Aborigines and Protectors, vol. 2B, Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Press, 1983, p. 375. Also p. 365. 2

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end, Glenelg reluctantly arranged for Britain to do so.6 In New South Wales, news that they would have to pay for protectors they did not want was a source of instant resentment, leading to hostility to the protectors even before they arrived.7 The Sydney Gazette wrote with concern about the colony’s revenue and the fact that the local legislature had no control over official salaries. In this context, the newspaper sarcastically noted that ‘seven or eight other drones called Protectors of Aborigines, are reported to be on the way, doubtless, all of them with tolerably comfortable salaries’.8 The protectors began arriving in the colonies – first, New South Wales in late 1838, then South Australia six months later, and last, Western Australia in February 1840. They would encounter very different forms of reception from Indigenous people, settlers, and local officials. Some would last only a very short time, some fell out with the authorities or each other, and some stayed and became significant figures in Aboriginal–settler relations for some decades. New South Wales It was clear from the beginning that in New South Wales, Britain’s new policy would be firmly resisted, and the protectors made to feel unwelcome. Wealthy pastoralists and their supporters in the press opposed both the policy itself, and the fact that they, the colonial elite, had had no say in its formulation or implementation. As a new governor, arriving in February 1838, George Gipps had, therefore, a massive task ahead of him. Though the Colonial Office would reduce the magnitude of his task to some degree by appointing Charles La Trobe as superintendent of the Port Phillip district from March 1839, he retained overall responsibility for the whole colony, which at that point covered the eastern third of the mainland. Frontier violence, it seemed, was occurring in every direction – in Port Phillip to the south, along the Murrumbidgee River in the west and south west, and the Liverpool Plains district to the north-west.9 Most concerning of all for Gipps, perhaps, was the situation in the north-­west, where, in the grasslands along the Gwydir River, the Kamilaraay people and their neighbours were resisting the rapid influx of settlers, prompting violent settler reprisals. Two major massacres would occur in this district that still reverberate in colonial history  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 87.  The Sydney Herald, 17 August 1838, p. 2; Glenelg to Gipps, 1 February 1838, HRA, vol. 19, pp. 253–5. 8  Sydney Gazette, 10 July 1838, p. 2. See also Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 40; M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–1886, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979, pp. 93–4, 103–4, 118; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 156–9, 200. 9  In the west, in Narragundera country along the Murrumbidgee River, there was an explosion of conflict that historians have since named the Wiradjuri wars; Bill Gammage, Narrandera Shire, Narrandera: Narrandera Shire Council, 1986, pp. 3–17. 6 7

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and consciousness. In December 1837, after Bourke left the colony and before Gipps arrived, Acting Governor Kenneth Snodgrass, himself a pastoralist, had sent the Mounted Police under the leadership of Major James Nunn to put a stop to the resistance.10 Nunn’s operation became a punitive expedition; on or around 26 January 1838, at a place the party named Waterloo Creek, his troops massacred between 40 and 50 Aboriginal people.11 This was to prove the last major British army action on the frontier. From then on, the government would leave the task of quelling Aboriginal resistance to various civilian police forces (though sometimes paramilitary in approach) and private settlers.12 Gipps received news of the massacre soon after his arrival. He had to respond in the context of his responsibility to institute the new humanitarian-­ inspired protection policy, of which colonists knew little. Colonial newspapers were only just beginning to take notice of the 1837 Report on Aborigines in British Settlements; an early mention was on 21 February 1838, when the Sydney Monitor reprinted from the London-­based Spectator a comprehensive summary of the report’s findings.13 Gipps tabled the report at a meeting with his Executive Council on 27 March, along with Nunn’s report, which concerned him greatly.14 Council agreed to conduct an enquiry into the Nunn matter, to be conducted by the police magistrate and justices of the peace at the site where the incidents occurred, that is, at Invermein, more than 200 kilometres from Sydney.15 The inquiry was delayed, however, when Gipps received news of another massacre in the north-­west. It would become known as the Myall Creek massacre and is the best-­known today of all the massacres that occurred on Australia’s violent frontiers.16 This time, it was not the military but a private group of twelve men, including one station manager and eleven convict and  Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, p. 105.  Ibid., p.  111. For the most detailed account, see Millis, Waterloo Creek, pp.  166–203; See also Lyndall Ryan, ‘Waterloo Creek, Northern New South Wales, 1838’, in Bain Attwood and S. G. Foster, eds., Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003, pp. 33–43. 12  Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, p. 120. The Native Police, although managed through the civilian bureaucracy and clearly not soldiers, operated in a paramilitary fashion. 13  Sydney Monitor, 21 February 1838, p. 3. The Spectator article saw kind and constructive treatment of indigenous peoples as essential for successful colonisation, and the existing pattern of conflict and destruction as short-­sighted and disastrous. However, it thought the report was too much against colonisation; it had ‘almost denounced colonization however well contrived’. 14  Minute no. 38/23, 27 March 1838, Executive Council Minutes 1837–41, AO 4/1520, cited in Millis, Waterloo Creek, pp. 224, 816. 15  Millis, Waterloo Creek, p. 225. 16  This massacre continues to preoccupy both popular and academic historians. See Brian Harrison, ‘The Myall Creek Massacre’ in Isabel McBryde, ed., Records of Times Past: Ethnohistorical Essays on the Culture and Ecology of the New England Tribes, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1978, pp. 17–51; Alan Atkinson and Marian Aveling, eds., Australians 1838, Sydney: Fairfax, Syme, and Weldon, 1987, pp. 55–61, 393–4; Millis, Waterloo Creek, pp. 274–321, 504–68; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 140–74; Terry Smyth, Denny Day: The Life and Times of Australia’s Greatest Lawman. The Forgotten Hero of the 10 11

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ex-­convict stockmen, who were involved. On 10 June 1838, this group gathered at Henry Dangar’s Myall Creek station to avenge Aboriginal attacks in the area and found a group of about fifty unarmed Weraerai people camped by Myall Creek. They killed approximately thirty people with pistols and swords, then decapitated and burnt their bodies and removed the remains.17 Given past practice, those responsible must have expected little if any punishment. However, this time it was different. For one thing, and this was unusual, there were white witnesses prepared to give evidence, which led the local police magistrate to charge the men involved and notify the colonial secretary.18 For another, the new governor was determined to pursue the matter. On hearing reports of the massacre at the end of June, Gipps consulted Attorney-­General John Plunkett and ordered Magistrate Edward Day to investigate. Through July and August, Day located eleven of the twelve men (the manager, John Fleming, escaped), and took written and signed evidence from witnesses.19 By mid-­September, the eleven men had been brought to Sydney to be tried for the murder of an Aboriginal man known to the colonial record only as ‘Daddy’. Prompted perhaps by the Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek massacres, Gipps now took steps to make colonists fully aware that British policy was now to take a stronger stand against such punitive expeditions than it had done hitherto, and that it placed a new emphasis on protection and civilisation. On 10 August 1838, more than four months since he had tabled the 1837 report in the Executive Council, he tabled it in the Legislative Council together with Glenelg’s January 1838 despatch announcing the appointment of the Protectors for Port Phillip, reports of the missions at Lake Macquarie and Wellington Valley, and correspondence concerning George Augustus Robinson’s proposal to take with him the remaining Flinders Island residents to Port Phillip.20 In response, the Council on 14 August appointed a committee of five – Bishop Broughton, John Blaxland, Collector of Customs John Gibbes, Hannibal Macarthur (cousin of John Macarthur), and Auditor General William Lithgow – to enquire into the situation in New South Wales, especially the results of efforts by missionaries and others to educate and Christianise Aboriginal Myall Creek Massacre, Sydney: Ebury Press, 2016; Mark Tedeschi, Murder at Myall Creek: The Trial That Defined a Nation, Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2016. 17  Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, p. 102. See 1838 volume, pp. 54–60. Weraerai is sometimes spelled Wirrayaraay. 18  Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, p. 102. 19  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 146; Smyth, Denny Day, pp. 125–33. 20  The Sydney Herald, 17 August 1838, p. 2. The plan had received tentative support from British authorities but also generated furious opposition from Port Phillip colonists, many of whom had been present in Van Diemen’s Land during the era of frontier violence. See also Glenelg to Gipps, 31 January 1838, HRA, series 1, vol. XIX, Sydney, Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1923, p. 253; G. A. Robinson to John Montagu, 11 February 1835, in Cannon, Historical Records of Victoria (HRV), pp. 10–11.

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people. Only Bishop Broughton, who had been supportive in his evidence to the 1837 committee of the removal of Aboriginal people to Flinders Island, had any demonstrated commitment to their protection and ‘improvement’. Over the next two months, the committee interviewed a variety of people, including Hunter Valley pastoralist Robert Scott, missionary L. E. Threlkeld, and George Augustus Robinson. Scott, who as a magistrate in 1826 had co-­ordinated a punitive expedition against the Wonnarua, leading to the murder of eighteen people, unsurprisingly advocated the necessity of using force in dealing with Aboriginal people, while Threlkeld thought the proposed duties of the protectors too extensive for one person alone.21 Robinson spoke of what he had achieved at Flinders Island, and argued that he should be allowed to take the residents with him when he took up his new position at Port Phillip, arguing they would set a good example to the Indigenous tribes there. Yet if Robinson was proud of his success in ‘improving’ the residents of Flinders Island, he had also to acknowledge that their health was now so bad that their lives were in danger: ‘Their utter extinction,’ he said, ‘may consequently be looked forward to, at no very distant period.’22 Taking them from Flinders Island to Port Phillip was important, he implied, not only for the residents’ civilising influence in Port Phillip but also for their own survival. While the Legislative Council’s committee was conducting its investigations, there was a lively press discussion of the new protection policy. It was evident that personal differences would continue to undermine missionary action when J. D. Lang’s The Colonist reproduced Threlkeld’s annual report (1837) for his mission at Lake Macquarie, along with a hostile editorial.23 A week later, the liberal newspaper, The Australian, expressed its hostility to the use of public funds on missions, since the missionaries ‘have no influence in restraining the natives from outrage on the life and property of the whites’.24 While some missionaries may be worthy, it went on, others (in a veiled reference to Threlkeld) ‘eat the bread of idleness’ and their mode of instruction to the blacks ought to be investigated. Even more hostile was the Sydney Herald, the proprietor of which, Ward Stephens, was a pastoralist in the process of acquiring land in the tumultuous north-­west. In a letter published on 19 September, ‘Anti-­Hypocrite’ described the missions as a glaring misuse of public funds, since Aboriginal people were impossible to civilise. There was a desperate  Harrison, ‘The Myall Creek Massacre’, p. 30; Millis, Waterloo Creek, pp. 384–9, 406–17. On Scott, see Nancy Gray, ‘Helenus Scott’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018, and Georgina Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright, Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016, pp. 33–7. 22  NSWLC, Aborigines Question: Report from the Committee on the Aborigines Question, with the Minutes of Evidence, Sydney: J. Spilsbury, 1838; imperfect copy available online at www .kathystavrou.net/caught-in-the-act/1838-(2)aborigines-question-SCR.html, accessed 17 April 2018. 23  The Colonist, 1 September 1838, pp. 2, 4. 24  The Australian, 7 September 1838, p. 2. 21

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need for more police to suppress them (the letter described Aboriginal people variously as ‘cannibals’, ‘reptiles’, ‘degenerate’, ‘despicable’, and ‘brutal’), but instead the colonists were now faced with paying the salaries and expenses of a ‘Protectorship’. This was the atmosphere when the first protectors – assistant protectors Parker, Dredge, and Thomas – began to arrive in the colony in September. While they were still in Sydney, before undertaking the journey south to Port Phillip, they attended with Robinson a meeting held on 1 October to form the Aborigines Protection Society, an affiliate of the British Society. With J. D. Lang in the chair, those present included the reverends Threlkeld, Saunders, and Crook, along with Lieutenant Sadlier, Richard Windeyer, and several others.25 It agreed to meet again three weeks hence. During that time, public debate over Aboriginal policy matters continued. The Herald printed several responses to ‘Anti-­Hypocrite’ on 5 October, two of which strongly disagreed with it and defended the policy of protection and civilisation; in its editorial, however, the Herald supported ‘Anti-­Hypocrite’ and suggested the government’s priority must be the defence of the settlers.26 The debate was helped little by the Legislative Council’s committee presenting a weak and indecisive report on 12 October. Unsurprisingly, given its mixed membership, the committee had been unable to agree on almost anything. Its report referred to the ‘atrocities perpetrated on the Aborigines at Liverpool Plains’ but then somewhat excused them given the ‘outrages committed on the properties of the settlers there; during which several whites fell victims to the ferocity of the savages’.27 The only thing the committee could agree on was to oppose Robinson’s proposal that people from Flinders Island accompany him to Port Phillip. Despite the committee’s unanimous opposition, however, Gipps decided to approve the transfer, though only of those judged to be docile ‘mission’ people, rather than the entire community at Flinders Island.28 Gipps may have been influenced in part by a petition from the people on Flinders Island. On 12 August 1838, Robinson gathered them together and told them of his plans, promising them that a change of scene would improve their health and alleviate the depression and ‘mental irritation’ that had seized them. Furthermore, they could set an example of civilisation to other Aboriginal

 The Colonist, 3 October 1838, p. 3. For a discussion of this meeting and the role of the Reverend Saunders, see Ken Manley, ‘The Work of the Second Baptist Minister in the Colony, Rev John Saunders (1834–1848) Among the Aborigines’, The Recorder: Journal of the Baptist Historical Society of New South Wales Inc., no. 126, 2014, pp. 5–13, www.baptisthistory.org.au/journals/ tbr/tbr126_aug2014?sessid=a743e4df86e7fa4ba8e9633704a8afaa, accessed 17 April 2018. 26  Sydney Herald, 5 October 1838, p. 3. 27  NSWLC, Aborigines Question. 28  Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803, St Leonards: Allen  & Unwin, 2012, p. 237. 25

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peoples. Afterwards, almost all the men of the island apparently signed the following statement: We the undersigned aboriginal natives of Van Diemen’s Land and now residing on Flinders testify on behalf of ourselves and families that we are not only willing but perfectly desirous to accompany the Commandant G. A. Robinson to Port Phillip from whom we do not wish to be separated.

This document may have been the first petition signed by Indigenous people in the Australian colonies. Men of different age groups and tribal backgrounds placed crosses beside their names, a process witnessed by the white officers of the settlement. Robinson insisted, and the officers agreed, that the people had understood him and had ‘cheerfully consented’ to go. Indeed, he told the colonial secretary that his plan ‘met with their free and unequivocal consent, there being not a dissentient voice among them ... it was hailed with rapture and delight’.29 Given the obscurity of Robinson’s own agenda and the scant nature of the evidence surrounding the document, we must treat it with caution. We do not know exactly how Robinson explained the situation to these men, many of whom may not have been able to read well. The level of literacy is unclear but seems low.30 Perhaps because of its uncertain authorship, the 1838 petition has not received much attention from contemporary historians. Reynolds and Ryan do not appear to discuss it, and Plomley mentions it only briefly, without considering the motives of the signatories at any length.31 Yet, in our view, we should not dismiss it out of hand. The colonial historians John West and James Bonwick treated it seriously, stating that the men of the island sanctioned the petition because they were ill and desperate for change.32 While it seems unlikely the residents wished to transfer permanently (later activists never made any such request, and indeed alienation from their home lands was continually a source of resentment and grief), desire for a temporary move is plausible. As Lynette Russell and Kate Auty note, this group ‘had been raised on a battlefield’, and had thus far survived by adopting ‘strategic and tactical resistances and  G. A. Robinson to John Montagu, 12 August 1838, in NSW: Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council During the Session 1838, Sydney, E. H. Statham, in New South Wales Parliamentary Papers: Legislative Council, 1824–1838, LTM105, SLV; G. A. Robinson Journal, 12 August 1838, in N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement, Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987, pp. 576, 751. To deduce the men’s ages and backgrounds, we have matched the names against Ryan’s table, see Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996, pp. 265–76. 30  See Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p.  13; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p.  185; Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, pp. 113, 115. 31  See Plomley, Weep in Silence, p. 751. 32  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 266; John West, The History of Tasmania, edited by A. G. L. Shaw, Sydney, Angus and Robinson, 1971 [1852], p. 313. 29

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accommodations’.33 It is also possible, as Boyce suggests, that Robinson had encouraged them to hope that they could still go home.34 In any case, the petition seems to have helped Robinson’s case, since Gipps did approve the transfer, against Council opposition.35 By this time, public discussion of the new protection policy was closely interwoven with debate over the Myall Creek trial: hostility to the fact that white men were being tried at all helped fan the flames of opposition to protection.36 Public debate on matters of Aboriginal policy became unusually heated and intense. On 15 October, the pro-­pastoralist Sydney Herald published a strong editorial opposing the protection policy, especially the fact that the colony would have to pay for protectors it did not want. There was no need for them, said the Herald – indeed the law favoured the Aborigines, not the settlers. The former could escape unpunished for their attacks on stockmen and shepherds, while the white man who retaliated (with a clear reference to the Myall Creek case) ‘stands a chance of being hanged’. A far better approach, the newspaper thought, would be to spend the money on an efficient police force for the outer districts with the power to declare martial law as needed. Again, linking the two issues, protection and the impending trial, the Herald recommended a response of ‘passive resistance through the jury box’ (meaning acquittal of white men accused of killing Aboriginal people), since colonists had no direct means of rejecting the imposition of the protectors.37 The supporters of the protection policy were horrified by such arguments. When the New South Wales branch of the Aborigines Protection Society met for the second (and apparently last) time on 18 October, speakers at the well-­attended meeting expressed strong objection to the Herald editorial published three days

 Lynette Russell and Kate Auty, Hunt Them, Hang Them: ‘The Tasmanians’ in Port Phillip 1841–42, Melbourne: Justice Press, 2016, p. 20. 34  Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, pp. 309–13. 35  Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 122. As it turned out, fifteen selected Flinders Island residents did go with Robinson to Port Phillip, but their removal was not in any terms a success: two were hanged for murder, several died in Port Phillip, and six returned to Flinders Island in 1842. See Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 192–3; Russell and Auty, Hunt Them, Hang Them, 2016. 36  Harrison, ‘The Myall Creek Massacre’, p. 23; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 140–74; Haydn Marsh, ‘Native Tears: Conflict on the Colonial Frontier and R v. Kilmeister (No 2)’, The ANU Undergraduate Research Journal, vol. 3, 2011, pp. 97–109. 37  Sydney Herald, 15 October 1838, p. 2. Rebecca Wood argues that in these debates in the second half of 1838, the Sydney Herald was helping define a new identity of ‘settlers’, which transcended the old division between exclusives and emancipists, and saw the main division as being between the settlers on the one hand and, on the other, the Aboriginal people who obstructed their access to the land along with their deluded protectors. Rebecca Wood, ‘Frontier Violence and the Bush Legend: The Sydney Herald’s Response to the Myall Creek Massacre Trials and the Creation of Colonial Identity’, History Australia, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, p. 67.7. 33

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earlier.38 The Reverend Saunders was especially eloquent in his condemnation, urging the meeting to repudiate the Herald for its ‘canting trash’, and arguing that the solution was rather to ‘join in the proposed work of humanising the blacks, and the land would become guiltless of blood, and free from its stain forever’. Those present, reported The Colonist, received Saunders’ speech with tremendous applause, and passed Robinson’s motion that only through raising the ‘Moral and Civil Condition’ of the Aborigines could they prevent mutual aggression and atrocious crimes.39 Hostility to the protectorate continued in subsequent weeks. Several letter writers to the Herald were unimpressed by the Aborigines Protection Society meeting, challenging the missionaries to prove their case that the conversion and civilisation of Aboriginal people was possible.40 The Herald returned to the question in an editorial on 14 November, again arguing that the protectors were robbing public funds to pay for a hopeless endeavour – ‘Let the British government pay them, or, by a bold-­faced robbery, charge the land fund with them. The Council ought not vote them a fraction’.41 The Herald was apoplectic about the trials, its proprietor, Ward Stephens, having personal links with fellow pastoralists such as Robert Scott, who organised a defence fund, the Hunter River Black Association, for the accused men.42 There were, in fact, two trials. At the first, R v. Kilmeister, on 15 November, the charges for the murder of ‘Daddy’ were compromised by the difficulty in identifying the bodies of the victims and disputes over whether an Aboriginal witness could testify; the colonial jury acquitted the eleven accused.43 Attorney-­General Plunkett, who acted as the leading counsel for the prosecution, immediately detained seven of the acquitted men on further charges, this time for the murder of an Aboriginal boy known to the colonial records only as ‘Charley’.44 Tellingly, Gipps supported Plunkett. So did Justice William Burton, who had presided over a significant previous case in 1836, R v. Jack Congo Murrell, which found that Aboriginal people were indeed subject to, and protected by, British law. On 28 November, Justice Burton presided over the second trial. In his summing up, he spoke emotionally  The Colonist, 31 October 1838, p. 2; see also the Sydney Herald, 24 October 1838, p. 2. For reasons which are unclear but noted by the newspapers, many more women attended than at the earlier meeting. Both George Suttor, a pastoralist of long standing, and E. S. Hall, editor of the Monitor, defended the majority of colonists in their treatment of the Aborigines. 39  The Colonist, 31 October 1838, p. 4. 40  Letter signed ‘Reason’, Sydney Herald, 29 October 1838, p. 2; letter signed ‘A friend to conversion and a colonist’, in Sydney Herald, 31 October 1838, p. 2. 41  Sydney Herald, 14 November 1838. 42  Wood, ‘Frontier Violence and the Bush Legend’, p. 67.5. 43  Marsh, ‘Native Tears’, p. 100. 44  Tony Earls, Plunkett’s Legacy: An Irishman’s Contribution to the Rule of Law in New South Wales, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, pp. 98–9. 38

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of the horrors of the massacre and made it clear he believed that the defendants were guilty. This time, despite the presence of three leading barristers, including Richard Windeyer, funded by the pastoralists of the Hunter River Black Association,45 the jury found those charged with murdering ‘Charley’ guilty. Following the trial, the Herald newspaper put pressure on Gipps to exercise his power of clemency to spare the guilty men from the death penalty, threatening that frontier violence would grow much worse if he did not.46 Gipps refused, and the seven men were hanged on 18 December 1838. The conviction, sentence, and hangings all provoked popular outrage. The principal objection was that the Governor and the Supreme Court were defending Aboriginal people rather than the settlers and their servants. That such a thing could happen provoked criticism of the colony’s legal system. Colonists especially resented the governor’s authority over the courts, since, in the absence of parliamentary representation, the courts were a principal means for men of property to assert their status and challenge the governor’s dominance.47 Considerable anger was directed against Plunkett as Attorney-­General, especially in a virulently anti-­Aboriginal editorial in the Sydney Herald on 26 November, two days before the trial. The Myall Creek trials, it argued, should prompt colonists to campaign for a Grand Jury system, as colonial society was too respectable and civilised to submit to ‘that “great body corporate of one”, the Attorney General’.48 After the trial, the Commercial Journal and Advertiser charged ‘this Attorney-­General of ours, or rather, the Attorney-­General of the Government’, with dictatorial behaviour and disgraceful persecution of white men. The writer also accused the ‘would-­be Aboriginal protectors’ of having rejected the findings of the first jury (which acquitted the defendants) because those jurors were not intimidated by ‘fear of Governors, Judges, Attorney-­ Generals, and Government Spies’.49 The angry debate over the protectorate and the Myall Creek trials stimulated public discussion of the morality of colonisation itself. One of the most striking commentaries appeared in the Sydney Herald on 5 December, putting forward an unusually articulate version of the settler philosophy of colonisation. It began by opposing the idea that land had been taken from Indigenous people, ‘to which they possessed an exclusive right’. The right to land, it argued, citing Blackstone, arose first from being ‘the individual who had first bestowed his labour on its cultivation’. Indigenous people, being few in number and making no use of the land, did not have such a right in land. To recognise their right to  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 147. The Australian, 17 November 1838, p. 3. For more on the role of Scott, see Arnott, The Unknown Judith Wright, p. 41. 46  Marsh, ‘Native Tears’, p. 102. 47  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 17. 48  Sydney Herald, 26 November 1838, p. 2. 49  Commercial Journal and Advertiser, 28 November 1838, no. 323, vol. 4, p. 2. 45

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possession of the soil would mean to agree one should not forcibly take it from them. Settlers did not in fact have to take such a burden upon themselves, for they had taken up land under the authority of the British crown. The individual settler who holds land, then, ‘is not to be told that he is an intruder – that he has no just title to his possessions. He claims under the strongest of all titles – the law of the country, which is recognised by all civilized nations.’ It is the state, the Sydney Herald continued, which takes responsibility, and which, therefore, and here was a crucial part of the argument, ought to pay for any protectors it thought necessary. It had nothing to do with the settlers.50 Both the protectorate and the Myall Creek trials also implicitly raised the question of the adequacy of the colony’s political system, with its powerful governor and weak, appointed, advisory Legislative Council. The humanitarians and their supporters in the press, such as The Colonist, were relatively unconcerned, freely accepting the argument of the 1837 Aborigines report that local legislatures should have no control over Aboriginal policy.51 They were not democrats, but rather supporters of paternal forms of government grounded in wise and just principles. For the wealthy landowners, by contrast, their inability to control Aboriginal policy heightened their desire to control the way the colony was governed in general. As the Commercial Journal and Advertiser, for example, put it, for them the Myall Creek case highlighted the folly of investing so much power in Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg and the Home government, all of whom were contemptuous of ‘our flourishing, influential, and powerful Colony’.52 In a letter to the Australian on 27 December 1838, ‘Junius’ (possibly the lawyer, politician, and supporter of representative government, Sir James Martin) said the protectorate was a prime example of the misappropriation and mismanagement of revenue suffered by ‘a community which has no share in the management of its internal affairs’. If the Legislative Council were not so powerless, Junius continued, Britain could not have initiated the protectorate. The protectorate was proof that the colony needed a local representative assembly.53 Settlers need not have been so worried. There was to be no repeat of the Myall Creek trials, even though massacres would continue for decades afterwards. While Gipps had initially sought to investigate the (probably much greater) massacre at Waterloo Creek, led by Major Nunn in January 1838, he did not pursue it further after the Myall Creek trials, nor were further charges made against the four other men accused of murder at Myall Creek.54 With  Sydney Herald, 5 December 1838, p. 2.  The Colonist, 12 December 1838, p. 2.  Commercial Journal and Advertiser, 28 November 1838, vol. 4, no. 323, p. 2. 53  Australian, 27 December 1838. Re: Martin as ‘Junius’, see www.adbonline.anu.edu.au/adbonline.htm with Bede Nairn, “Sir James Martin”, ADB online, accessed 26 July 2018. 54  See Marsh, ‘Native Tears’, p. 103; Ryan, ‘Waterloo Creek’, pp. 37–8; Earls, Plunkett’s Legacy, pp. 102–6. 50 51 52

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no further hangings in subsequent years of white men for killing Aboriginal people, dispossession and frontier violence went on much as before once the colony recovered from the shock of the Myall Creek trials. The main difference was a greater secrecy surrounding punitive expeditions and other violent means used to drive Aboriginal people from their lands. All this, and the protectors had not yet even begun their work in the colony’s southern region, the Port Phillip district. As the site of a chief protector and four assistant protectors, Port Phillip would be the most important test of Britain’s Aboriginal protection policy. Port Phillip When the four protectors arrived in Melbourne in late 1838 and began travelling out to their new stations in early 1839, they found settler resentment and suspicion. In a series of articles in February, March, and June 1839, the Port Phillip Gazette, edited by George Arden, strongly protested against the new system. If commentators in Sydney had viewed the protectorate as a British imposition, Port Phillip residents tended to blame another distant, unrepresentative authority. An appointed government in Sydney, it exploded, was trying to wrest the district ‘from its only lawful masters, the first cultivators of the soil’, the civilised, prosperous settlers whose exertions had ‘reclaimed this territory from the hand of the savage’.55 Settlers in Port Phillip indeed prided themselves on their free, liberal enterprise, some boasting of how they had overcome the supposedly savage Indigenous past through their own private initiative. The portrayal of Indigenous people as savage, made in order to promote independence for the local colonists, provided both a starting point from which colonists had progressed and an obstacle that they were overcoming. Such rhetorical violence both hinted at and obscured the cruelties of the genocidal dispossession that was then proceeding so rapidly, just as it had in Van Diemen’s Land, from which many of the Port Phillip settlers had come. Though settlers received the protectors with hostility, Indigenous people welcomed them warmly with dancing and gift exchange at a public banquet, and with cordial greetings at the new protectorate stations in Mitchellstown, Jackson’s Creek, Franklinford, and Mt Rouse. Some Aboriginal people quickly tried to form familial relationships with the protectors and agreed to work for them and leave their children with them sometimes. The protectors could be incorporated relatively easily into Indigenous traditions of kinship, and the Indigenous people into British dynamics of charity towards the needy.56 55 56

 Port Phillip Gazette, 23 February 1839, 9 March 1839, 12 June 1839.  Cannon, notes, in Cannon, ed., HRV, vol. 2A, 1982, p. 434; Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–1886, p. 94; Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas

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Before long, Aboriginal people were demanding that the protectors do something about the loss of access to their traditional lands, the depletion of food sources, and the tensions and aggressions they were experiencing with settlers and the police. The protectors’ presence helped to foster a political culture in Port Phillip in which Indigenous people asserted their sovereignty to colonial powers rather more confidently than people in other regions were able to do. As A. G. L. Shaw outlines, one problem from the beginning was the uncertainty over whether protection involved a policy of establishing settlements for Aboriginal protection and education or was best conducted by itinerant protectors meeting Aboriginal people, learning their languages, and acting as conciliators, a model established by Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land. Robinson had possibly developed his approach through his admiration of Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish Bishop and critic of colonialism, from whom he may have learnt of the Jesuit tradition of itinerant meeting with Indigenous peoples.57 Glenelg’s and the assistant protectors’ instructions were committed to the former approach, while Gipps preferred the latter, seeing it as more likely to prevent further frontier violence. Another problem was that there were only four assistant protectors, with large areas to cover, too much to do, and too little support. As the protectors settled in to their new tasks, Gipps had some related matters to address. One was the problem of admissibility of Aboriginal evidence, which the Myall Creek trials had revealed to be important. In September 1839, he introduced to the Council a Bill to allow Aboriginal people to give evidence without a Bible oath, which would be accepted if corroborated by other sources. Though the pastoralists opposed the Bill, the Council passed it, and Gipps forwarded it to London. It was, however, disallowed as contrary to British law, which required witnesses to be aware of ‘the existence of a God or a future state’.58 of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900, Melbourne: Monash Publications in Geography, 1990, p. 94; James Dredge, 28 March 1839, 21–6 August 1839, James Dredge, Diaries, Notebook and Letterbooks 1817?–1845 (JDD), MS11625, MSM534, SLV; Edgar Morrison, ‘The Loddon Aborigines: Tales of Old Jim Crow’, in Geoff Morrison, ed., A Successful Failure: The Aborigines and Early Settlers, Maryborough: Graffiti Publications, 2002, p. 204; E. S. Parker, Quarterly Journal, December 1840–February 1841, Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV), VRPS4410, unit 2, 1841/55 (reel 2). 57  We are indebted to Jane Lydon for this point. On Robinson’s admiration for Las Casas, see Henry Reynolds, ‘George Augustus Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land: Race, Status and Religion’, in Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, eds., Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to George Robinson’s Friendly Mission, Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2012, p. 166. 58  See a copy of Minute by His Excellency Governor Sir George Gipps on Captain Grey’s Report to the Secretary of State, on the means of improving and civilising the Aborigines of New Holland, printed in Southern Australian (Adelaide), 12 October 1841, p.  3. See also Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p.  180, and for a detailed account, see Russell Smandych, ‘Contemplating the Testimony of “Others”: James Stephen, the Colonial Office, and the Fate of

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Gipps also attempted to establish an impartial police force that would keep order and prevent the killing occurring in frontier districts, placing the new Border Police under the control of the network of Commissioners of Crown Lands that Bourke had established in 1836 to represent the government outside the settled districts.59 In establishing the force and extending the powers of the commissioners by making them magistrates, they would be more able, said Gipps in his proclamation, to ‘put a stop to the atrocities which have of late been so extensively committed beyond the boundaries, both by aborigines and on them’. The commissioners would be required to assist and support Aboriginal people, but also to make them aware of the penalties for aggression against the ‘persons or properties of the colonists’. While they would to some extent function as intermediaries and sources of information for government on Aboriginal people’s wishes and circumstances, the commissioners’ dual function as protectors of both Aboriginal people and settlers would ensure that they would be ineffective in preventing frontier violence.60 Meanwhile, the protectors took up their roles as intermediaries. They each established a station with reserved land, as a permanent base for supporting Aboriginal people in their district.61 Aboriginal people in the four regions acquiring a protector complained to them of being gaoled, intimidated, or shot for offences that white men committed against them with impunity.62 They complained that the settlers ‘shoot too much blackfellow’; otherwise Aboriginal people would not need to attack in return: ‘no sulky blackfellow no spear white fellow’. Finally, they asked, if the problem was stealing, ‘What for

Australian Aboriginal Evidence Acts, circa 1839–1849’, Australian Journal of Legal History, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, pp. 249–54. 59  The relevant legislation was An Act further to restrain the unauthorized Occupation of Crown Lands and to provide the means of defraying the Expense of a Border Police, 2 Vic. No. 27 1839. Proclamation in Government Gazette, No. 418, 22 May 1839, p.  605. The earlier Act, from Bourke’s time, was Act 7 Will. IV no. 4 (1836). See also the even earlier An Act for protecting the Crown Lands of this Colony from Encroachment, Intrusion and Trespass, 4 Wm. IV No. 10, assented 28 August 1833. 60  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 180, 173–6, 185–6; Barry Bridges, ‘The Mounted Police 1826–1850’, RAHS Newsletter, no. 83, August 1969, p. 6. 61  A. G. L. Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria Before Separation, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1996, pp. 119–22. 62  For instance, E. S. Parker, Quarterly Journal, 1 March–31 May 1841, PROV VA512 Chief Protector of Aborigines, VPRS4410, unit 2, 1841/61 (reel 2); William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 19 October 1839, f.29–31, reel 7, William Thomas, Papers, 1834–1868 (WTP), ML MSS 214, State Library of New South Wales; Thomas, 14 November 1839, WTP, reel 1; William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 29 February 1840, PROV VPRS4410, unit 3, 1840/66 (reel 2); Thomas, 27 September 1840, WTP, reel 1; William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 1 March 1841, PROV VPRS4410, unit 3, 1841/68 (reel 2); William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 5 June 1843, PROV VPRS4410, unit 3, 1843/76 (reel 2); William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 31 November 1844, PROV VPRS4410, unit 3, 1844/82 (reel 2); Thomas, 17 September 1845, WTP, reel 3.

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no put white fellow gaol?’63 While the protectors and missionaries were often sympathetic to these complaints, tensions arose when they tried to exert greater control over Aboriginal people’s lives, or when it became clear that dispossession was continuing and that the interests of colonists were still paramount. Just as concerning was the loss of traditional sources of food. When Chief Protector Robinson urged Aboriginal people not to steal sheep, they pointed out that when their native foods were available they had not needed to take sheep, but now they did: Long time ago, they had plenty of kangaroo, Parm-­pun, Tuerer-­corn (roots eaten by the Natives); and then they were not hungry and did not take sheep. Kangaroo all gone, jumbuc (sheep) eat the roots.64

Indigenous people continued to complain passionately to the protectors of their treatment, their loss of land, and the destructive results that followed. In 1841, when Robinson asked a family he met on the Glenelg River where they came from, ‘they beat the ground and vociferated, Deen! Deen! (here! here!), and then, in a dejected tone, bewailed the loss of their country’.65 Protector Edward Parker also found it difficult to respond to repeated Indigenous complaints about the loss of their land; they were, he said, being ‘beaten back by the “white man’s foot” . . . excluded, perforce, from lands which they unquestionably regard as their own . . . classified with and treated as wild dogs’.66 His colleague William Thomas noted in his diary in 1841: ‘The Blacks this morning very dissatisfied & talk much about no good white man, take away country, no good bush, all white man sit down.’67 Alongside these complaints were demands that colonial authorities recognise Indigenous systems of land ownership. In 1841, Woiwurrung men explained in detail to their protector, William Thomas, the boundaries of their country in Port Phillip.68 Chief Protector Robinson recalled one man’s statement of land ownership: ‘When Tung.bor.roong spoke of Borembeep and the other localities of his own nativity, he always added “that’s my country belonging to

 George Augustus Robinson, ‘A Report of an Expedition to the Aboriginal Tribes of the Interior During the Months of March, April, May, June, July and August 1841’, in Ian D. Clark, ed., The Papers of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, vol. 4, Clarendon: Heritage Matters, 2001, p. 27. 64  Robinson, ‘A Report of an Expedition to the Aboriginal Tribes’, p. 23. 65  Ibid. 66  E. S. Parker to G. A. Robinson, 1 April 1840, in Cannon, ed., HRV, vol. 2B, p. 413. Also, E. S. Parker to G. A. Robinson, 1 December 1843, PROV VPRS12 unit 4, 1843/16 (reel 3). 67  Thomas, 17 September 1841, WTP, reel 2. 68  William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, Journal of the Proceedings during the months of June, July and August 1841, PROV VPRS4410, unit 3, 1841/70, reel 2. 63

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me!! That’s my country belonging to me!!”’69 Meanwhile, the Daungwurrung people of northern Victoria impressed upon the local protector, James Dredge, their deep material, personal, and historical attachment to country. Dredge recalled: ‘Each Tribe has its own district the extent and boundaries of which are well known to themselves, and they speak of their country to a stranger with emotions of pride.’70 To avoid complete destruction, some people tried to negotiate a settlement. In 1840–1, the Daungwurrung of the Goulburn River expressed dismay at the resignation of their protector, the relatively sympathetic Dredge. Dredge was a devout Methodist with aspirations to become a missionary. He had quit his position following disputes with the government over his pay and conditions, but also over the continued dispossession and mistreatment of Indigenous people, which he realised he was powerless to prevent. A party of Daungwurrung men followed Dredge to Melbourne to urge him to return to their country – if he could secure some land, they said, they would build him a house and work on his farm.71 Meanwhile, the clergyman Francis Tuckfield, another intermediary, told the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society in 1840 that Indigenous people around Geelong often asked him when they would get their own mission, lamenting: ‘Our country all gone.’72 However, securing land for protectionist purposes was a fraught business. The Port Phillip Herald was outraged in December 1840 when Edward Parker, now stationed among the Djadjawurrung and Djabwurrung peoples in the Loddon region, took over an area of land for his Aboriginal station that a neighbouring pastoralist, Mr Darlot, claimed was part of his lease. In a classic example of frontier logic, where the settler who has come from far away has land rights greater than those of the indigenous peoples he displaces, the newspaper referred to this as a ‘black intrusion’. When La Trobe supported Parker, the paper seized upon it as proof that the government felt free to bully colonists and disregard their property rights.73 The Herald also complained that Parker had prosecuted, aggressively and unlawfully, white men for frontier violence, while ignoring Aboriginal attacks against them. Such actions were a ‘subversion of the principles of the British constitution’, ‘calculated to arouse the indignation of a free, and, besides, a British people’.74 The paper claimed  G. A. Robinson, Journals: Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, 1 October 1840–31 August 1841, Ian D. Clark, ed., Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998, p. 318. 70  James Dredge to Reverend D. Harding, 12 September 1840, JDD; James Dredge, 6 June 1842, JDD. 71  Dredge, 11 June 1840, 10 October 1840, 18 March 1841, 27 November 1841, 4 December 1841, JDD; James Dredge to J. Harding, 31 October 1840, JDD. 72  Francis Tuckfield to General Secretaries, 30 September 1840, WMMS, reel 2. Also, Francis Tuckfield to the General Secretaries, WMMS, 31 June 1840, Francis Tuckfield Journal. 73  Port Phillip Herald, 4 December 1840. 74  Port Phillip Herald, 8 December 1840, and 21 May 1841. 69

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that these officials were treating colonists like slaves, disregarding their labour that had built this prosperous settlement, and urged readers to protest to the Crown. Appeals sent to Governor Gipps would be useless; indeed, they would only ‘furnish another golden opportunity for His Excellency to mock us to our face, by recording as another answer the omnipotence of the Protectorate’.75 During the early 1840s, the protectors had little good news to report. Press hostility was unremitting. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser was especially vociferous on the subject. It complained in September 1840 about the money being wasted on the protectorate and urged the Legislative Council to protest against its continuance. If the British philanthropists (scornfully dubbed ‘the friends of “Am I not a brother?”’, a derogatory reference to the anti-­slavery sympathies and backgrounds of supporters of Indigenous people) were dissatisfied with the current situation, they could fund such initiatives themselves.76 Returning to the issue in March 1841, the Gazette railed against the protectorate as: a piece of downright-­jobbery – one of those disgraceful channels through which the public money is drained into the pockets of a parcel of greedy sinecurists; it is high time the voice of the public should be heard on this subject.77

By April 1841, the paper declared there was now plenty of evidence that the protectorate had brought no benefit whatsoever. It was, said the Gazette, ‘a huge job, a mass of corruption’ whose ‘whole fabric should be completely remodelled, or levelled in the dust as an incurable incubus on the public purse’.78 Caught between escalating dispossession, frontier violence, and attacks on their integrity by settlers and the press, the protectors also suffered from internal conflicts. James Dredge, for instance, left his job partly because he could no longer tolerate working with George Augustus Robinson, and Charles Sievwright was dismissed after Edward Parker made accusations of incest against him. Moreover, always haunting these men was their lack of success in achieving Aboriginal conversions to Christianity, and above all the sickness, despair, and premature deaths of the people they had come to protect.79 As early as 1840, both Gipps and La Trobe had lost confidence in the protectors, and between 1841 and 1843, each station was closed down, seen as a failure. From 1843, the budget allocation to the protectorate declined and the government appears to have lost faith in their chief protector. Robinson, nevertheless, continued throughout the 1840s to travel among Aboriginal people, as he had done in Van Diemen’s Land.  Port Phillip Herald, 8 December 1840, also 11 December 1840.  Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 3 September 1840, p. 2. 77  Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 9 March 1841, p. 2. 78  Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 20 April 1841, p. 2. 79  Mitchell, In Good Faith?, p. 181. 75 76

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His frequent reports on the number, condition, and customs of people in each district, though thought by La Trobe to be of little value, are now one of the most detailed records we have of Aboriginal life at this crucial time.80 It was not only government stations that were closing down. Private missions were also in trouble. The task of education and conversion to Christianity seemed a hopeless one. When Gipps arrived in early 1838, there were three missions in New South Wales – at Lake Macquarie, Wellington Valley, and a new mission begun on J. D. Lang’s initiative the year before at Zion Hill, in Moreton Bay. The two older missions were already in deep trouble. In 1841, Lancelot Threlkeld wrote to Colonial Secretary E. Deas Thomson to announce the imminent closure of his mission. By the time the mission closed officially on 31 December that year, the Awabakal population there had fallen dramatically.81 For several years, the mission at Wellington Valley had also been in crisis, as a severe drought damaged the mission farm and furious internal disputes between the missionaries themselves damaged its reputation. By the late 1830s, the missionaries were warning that more Wiradjuri people were dying than being born, and support from the Church Missionary Society and Governor Gipps was waning.82 Accordingly, in 1842, Gipps recommended and the Colonial Office agreed that government support for both missions should cease.83 The only mission to continue in the middle districts of New South Wales was at Apsley, near the Wellington Valley site, now run privately by Reverend William Watson, formerly of Wellington Valley.84 The situation looked a little brighter in the northern districts around Moreton Bay. An attempt to establish a mission at the penal station in Moreton Bay had failed in 1837. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) had sent J. C. S. Handt (also formerly of Wellington Valley) to the area, where he met the Toorbul, Undanbi, and Ninghi Ninghi peoples; he quickly became pessimistic about the possibility of establishing a successful mission there. They seemed ‘savage and cruel’, he told the CMS, and rejected his authority, treating him only as a source of food.85 With the CMS venture abandoned, J. D. Lang stepped in.86  Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District, p. 127.  L. E. Threlkeld to E. Deas Thomson, ‘The final report of the mission to the Aborigines, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, 1841’, PMS1847, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. 82  Mitchell, In Good Faith? pp. 177–8. 83  Stanley to Gipps, 20 December 1842, HRA, I, xx, pp. 437–8; Charles Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Ringwood: Penguin, 1970, p. 100. 84  Mitchell, In Good Faith?, p. 177. 85  J. C. S. Handt to William Cowper, 13 September 1837, Church Missionary Society, Records (CMS) AJCP M212, reel 40, SLV. Also Church Missionary Society, Missionary Register, London: Seeley & Sons, August 1839, pp. 389–90. 86  Jillian Beard, ‘Lang, John Dunmore, 1799–1878’, in Griffith University, German Missionaries in Queensland, www.missionaries.griffith.edu.au/biography/lang-john-dunmore-1799-1878, accessed 23 January 2014. 80 81

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Lang had been interested in establishing a mission in the area for some years and, unable to find Presbyterian missionaries, had made contact with the independent Lutheran Gossner Mission Institute in Berlin. With the assistance of a British government grant plus funds supplied by his brother and himself, he arranged for the German missionaries and their families to come to Moreton Bay.87 With Reverend Karl Wilhelm Schmidt as leader, along with artisan missionaries and their wives and families, the group arrived in June 1838 at Zion Hill, now known as Nundah, eleven kilometres from the main penal settlement.88 Although they believed conversion would depend ultimately on establishing an Aboriginal settlement, they soon realised that, if they were to make lasting contact, it was important also to accompany Aboriginal people on their travels. They made sixteen expeditions between November 1839 and April 1843.89 On one of these expeditions, Schmidt and Peter Nique, one of the artisan missionaries, travelled along the coastal regions of Moreton Bay.90 As with George Augustus Robinson’s Friendly Mission travelling around Van Diemen’s Land, these missionaries were led through dangerous regions by Indigenous guides, who were carefully diplomatic, negotiating with local communities and distributing gifts. In doing so, they came closer to observing Indigenous protocols than many of their counterparts elsewhere. However, despite the successes of these journeys in terms of internal Indigenous politics, their inability to produce Aboriginal Christian converts and farmers led to the missions being described by colonial commentators as a failure. South Australia South Australia seemed to be a more promising site for the new protection policy to work. Some of its elements were already in place, and the idea that South Australia was an exceptionally civilised and enlightened community played a notable part in the colony’s early public image, both in Britain and in the colony itself. One work published in 1838, the year before the protectors  Jillian Beard, ‘Zion Hill Mission’, in Griffith University, German Missionaries in Queensland, accessed 1 May 2015. 88  Libby Connors, Warrior: A Legendary Leader’s Dramatic Life and Violent Death on the Colonial Frontier, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2015. 89  Ibid., p. 36. 90  Schmidt mentioned that they had met with four ‘tribes’ over a distance of 50–60 miles, including a nearby island, but he was vague about the identities of the Indigenous nations concerned. From Norman Tindale’s work on Aboriginal Australia, we would suggest that they may have been people of the Jagara, Koenpel, Jukambe, or Dugi regions, but it is difficult to say. See New South Wales Legislative Council, ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines’, in New South Wales Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Sydney: Government Printing Office, 1845, pp. 958–9; Norman B. Tindale, Map Showing the Distribution of the Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, Adelaide: T. F. E. Moore, 1940 (National Library of Australia online). 87

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arrived, by Governor Gawler’s Attorney-­General William Smillie, The Great South Land, listed cruelty towards Indigenous people amongst the regrettable features of the older colonies, which also included unwise land policies, gender imbalance, and the penal system. Smillie repeated the colonisation commissioners’ instructions that they were not to sell Aboriginal lands in South Australia without the consent of the Aboriginal occupants, who should then receive compensation in the form of rationing and ‘civilising’ programmes.91 That year, the emigration agent, Henry Watson, had expressed similar hopes in his lecture on South Australia, calling for politicians to respect Aboriginal people’s rights, shield them from violence and teach them to become farmers. He drew a pointed contrast between the new colony and New South Wales, with its disreputable convict heritage.92 The missionary societies, the Aborigines Protection Society, and the Colonial Office all expected that since South Australia was to be settled by a pious population of free British Christians, uncontaminated by convicts with their ‘fearful profligacy and ungodliness’, Aboriginal people would be treated well and drawn into civilised society.93 In the year before Protector Matthew Moorhouse arrived on 29 June 1839, these hopes seemed to be borne out. Soon after Governor Gawler arrived in October 1838, he and Commissioner Charles Sturt began making provision for small Aboriginal reserves to be set aside in all the districts offering land for sale, and allowed Indigenous people to use the Adelaide Parklands.94 German Protestant missionaries began work in Adelaide in 1838 and would do so in Port Lincoln and Encounter Bay in 1840.95 Gawler appointed three men to act in the office of protector while waiting for Moorhouse to arrive – in turn, George Stevenson, Captain Walter Bromley, and William Wyatt. From the beginning, some of these protectors’ most striking interactions with Indigenous people concerned the distribution of rations, which had already been established as a standard means of conciliation (and to some degree compensation), and were now also an attempt to entice Aboriginal people into Christian schooling and manual labour.96  William Smillie, ‘The Great South Land’: Four Papers on Emigration, Designed to Exhibit the Principles and Progress of the New Colony of South Australia, 2nd edition, London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1838, pp. 5, 12, 20, 26–7. 92  Henry Watson, A Lecture on South Australia, London: J. Gliddon, 1838, pp. 4, 8. 93  Colonial Church Society, Colonial Church Record, London, vol. 1, no. 3, October 1838, p. 45. Also, Aborigines Protection Society (APS), First Annual Report, 16 May 1838, London, W. Ball, p.  24 (records the property of Anti-­Slavery International); Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, London, vol. XIII, December 1834, p. 504; Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, London, Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, vol. XIII, December 1835, p. 503; Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, vol. XIV, February 1836, pp. 51–2. 94  Reynolds, Law of the Land, pp. 162–5. 95  John Harris, One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity. A Story of Hope, Sutherland: Albatross Books, 1990, pp. 316–21. 96  Robert Foster, ‘Feasts of the Full-­Moon: The Distribution of Rations to Aborigines in South Australia, 1836–1861’, Aboriginal History, vol. 13, 1989, pp. 63–5; Harris, One Blood, p. 325; 91

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At first, the Kaurna, the people of the Adelaide plains which stretched both north and south of Adelaide, had other sources of food and were openly disdainful of the settler authorities; a little later, as their own sources of food dwindled, they welcomed the food but did not see it as creating obligations on their part to reciprocate. Very possibly they considered material gifts their due, given the uninvited presence of the British in their country, and saw no reason to be grateful or obedient. They soon came to expect rations, and were angry when they were denied these, as Captain Walter Bromley reported. Bromley, who acted in an intermediary role, paints a picture in his papers from 1837 of Kaurna life continuing confidently around Adelaide, as the people held ceremonies nearby and seized colonists’ property for themselves, not regarding this as stealing. While some tried to enter into kinship relationships with Bromley, many others demanded food supplies from him and scolded him when the meals were not to their liking. Bromley lamented that ‘gratitude is out of the question with them’.97 From November 1838, when Governor Gawler staged a public feast attended by around 200 Indigenous people and a large European audience, rationing also took on performative and ceremonial functions. The feast was somewhat in the tradition inaugurated by Governor Lachlan Macquarie a quarter of a century earlier, which Governor Bourke in New South Wales had abandoned in 1835. The celebrations were also an opportunity to demonstrate royal engagement with Indigenous welfare, as became evident the following year, when the gifts distributed included pewter plates with pictures of Queen Victoria. Certainly, they were an opportunity for the governor to develop relationships with Aboriginal leaders. At the 1838 feast, Governor Gawler gave two influential men, known to colonists as Okaparinga Jack (Mullawirraburka) and Captain Jack (Kadlitpinna), special clothing with tassels and ribbons, which they wore while leading the parade. The British wished to single out ‘chiefs’ but it was also a sign of the men’s real local status. Gawler gave a speech, translated (probably imperfectly) by the missionaries, assuring the Indigenous listeners that the colonists wanted them to be happy, but that this would only happen if they became Christians, lived in houses, wore clothes, spoke English, and became ‘useful’. He urged them to love white men and other black men

Anne Scrimgeour, ‘Notions of Civilisation and the Project to “Civilise” Aborigines in South Australia in the 1840s’, History of Education Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2006, p. 35. 97  Protector Bromley to Colonial Secretary, 26 June 1837, SRSA GRG24/1, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters and other communications received, no.  206 of 1837; Protector Bromley to Governor Stirling, 29 June 1837, SRSA GRG24/1/1837/210; Protector Bromley to Provisional Secretary, 1 June 1837, SRSA GRG24/1/1837/152; Protector Bromley to Colonial Secretary, 26 June 1837, SRSA GRG24/1/1837/206; Protector Bromley to Governor Stirling, 29 June 1837, SRSA GRG24/1/1837/210; Protector Bromley to Colonial Secretary, 6 July 1837, SRSA GRG24/1/1837/224.

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and to consult the protector if any white man harmed them.98 What the assembled people made of this, it is now difficult to say, but it inaugurated a tradition of public expressions of good will between Indigenous people and the governor, which would continue in Adelaide into the 1850s. As in New South Wales, these levees were understood to be at times a display of peace after conflict. This was certainly true of the levee in 1839. Kaurna had shortly before objected angrily when authorities stopped their rations in reprisal for attacks on shepherds in other districts. This seemed especially unfair since some Kaurna men had accompanied the investigating police party. On this occasion, Kaurna complained that it was unjust to kill and starve them when they were not the ‘bad black men’. They were quoted in the South Australian Gazette as saying, ‘You white men have taken our land and you have driven away our kangaroos and emus. We have no food now but what you please to give us.’99 Colonists hoped the 1839 levee would cement peaceable relations once more, following the recent ‘unpleasant excitement’.100 All too soon, however, it became clear that South Australia would not be as conciliatory and harmonious as so many people had hoped. As Peggy Brock has pointed out, despite South Australia’s early humanitarian rhetoric and alternative administrative models, the results for Indigenous people generally mirrored what was occurring elsewhere.101 The colonisation commissioners and private settlers largely ignored the instructions to seek Indigenous people’s consent before acquiring land they occupied or enjoyed, comforting themselves with the thought – the longstanding thought, the mythos, in European settler-­colonising worldwide – that since the Indigenous peoples were neither farmers nor shepherds, they did not really ‘occupy or enjoy’ the land at all.102  South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 3 November 1838, p. 4.  While the writer paraphrased these remarks, he insisted that ‘The substance – almost the very words  – of what we have written has been spoken to several inhabitants.’ South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 4 May 1839, pp. 1–2. Around this time, two Aboriginal men, Yerricha and Wang Nucha, were condemned to death for the murders of white shepherds, Duffield and Thompson, at the River Torrens and the Para River; see Tom Gara, ‘The Life and Times of Mullawirraburka (“King John”) of the Adelaide Tribe’, in Jane Simpson and Luise Hercus, eds., History in Portraits, Biographies of Nineteenth Century South Australian Aboriginal People, Canberra: Aboriginal History Monograph, 1998, p. 105. See also Alan Pope, One Law for All? Aboriginal People and Criminal Law in Early South Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011, p. 17. 100  South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 25 May 1839, p. 3. 101  Peggy Brock, Outback Ghettoes: Aborigines, Institutionalisation, and Survival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 14; Peggy Brock, ‘South Australia’, in Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines Under the British Crown, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 208, 214, 218–22; Matthew Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 13 September 1841, in Protector of Aborigines, Letterbook 1840–1857, GRG52/7, vol. 1, unit 1, SRSA; Scrimgeour, ‘Notions of Civilisation’; Cameron Raynes, ‘A Little Flour and a Few Blankets’: An Administrative History of Aboriginal Affairs in South Australia, 1834–2000, Gepps Cross: State Records of South Australia (SRSA), 2002, p. 13. 102  Paul and Foster, ‘Married to the Land’, p. 52; Reynolds, The Law of the Land, pp. 139–41. 98 99

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It quickly became clear that since the pastoral sector would be vital to the colony’s growth,103 and since Indigenous peoples, here as elsewhere, defended their lands and livelihood and resisted becoming willing or submissive subjects of British rule, conflict would surely follow. As colonists spread south-­east and north-­west with the pastoralist and copper mining industries, violent confrontations resulted. A notorious and revealing incident occurred in July 1840, following the wreck of the Maria on the Coorong coast east of the Murray Mouth, around a hundred kilometres south-­ east of Adelaide. The 26 survivors set off overland on foot towards Adelaide, possibly with the initial consent and assistance of the local Milmenrura people. Shortly afterwards, however, all the survivors were found dead and many dismembered, apparently killed by the Milmenrura for breaking local laws. The incident would later be mythologised as exemplifying the dangers of pioneer life.104 Governor Gawler, a devout Christian and also a decorated lieutenant-­colonel, responded by sending an armed party led by Major Thomas O’Halloran to the Coorong. There, they hanged two Milmenrura men, publicly and summarily, while two other men were shot trying to escape.105 This was the second instance of public hanging of Aboriginal offenders found guilty of a capital crime; the first had occurred the year before in Adelaide.106 It presaged a practice of public hanging at the scene of the crime that would continue in the colony for two decades. Gawler’s armed party prompted heated debates over whether Indigenous people were foreign enemies or British subjects breaking British laws. In defence of his actions, Gawler told the Colonial Office in London that the colonial government could regard the Milmenrura as foreign enemies and thus outside of British law.107 He had, he wrote, acted partly on the advice of Justice Charles Cooper, who had suggested that while the land in question was within South Australia’s borders, settlers had not yet occupied it. As a result, the people were not familiar with colonial law or society, and had not surrendered to British rule.108 For his actions, Gawler came in for criticism both from within the colony and from the Colonial Office. In the colony, two  Main, ‘Social Foundations of South Australia: Men of Capital’, p. 98.  Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Mythologising Frontier: Narrative Versions of the Rufus River Conflict, 1841–1899’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 23, no. 61, 1999, p. 75. Different sources suggest the Maria survivors either refused to deliver food and gifts they had promised, or were involved in sexual violence against Aboriginal women. 105  Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia’s Frontier Wars, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2012, pp. 27–8. 106  Steven Anderson, ‘Punishment as Pacification: The Role of Indigenous Executions on the South Australian Frontier, 1836–1862’, Aboriginal History, vol. 39, 2015, pp. 6–7. 107  Castles and Harris, Lawmakers and Wayward Whigs, pp. 16, 31–3. 108  Julie Evans, ‘Colonialism and the Rule of Law: The Case of South Australia’, in Barry S. Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall, eds., Crime and Empire 1840–1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, Devon: Willan, 2005, p. 64. 103 104

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newspapers, the South Australian Register and the Adelaide Chronicle, were highly critical of Gawler on humanitarian grounds, though another newspaper, the Southern Australian, supported him.109 The Colonial Office, acting on the advice of the law officers of the Crown, rejected Gawler’s argument, on the grounds that the murders the Milmenrura people were accused of committing had occurred within the limits of a province defined under the authority of an Act of Parliament. That is, they could not regard the Milmenrura as foreign enemies, but only as British subjects who had broken the law. In consequence, they should have brought them to trial rather than sending a military party and summarily executing the accused. Summary executions, the Colonial Office declared, were acts of murder, and it warned that Gawler himself could be charged as an accessory before the fact (as it turned out, he never was).110 Despite the firmness of the Colonial Office on the matter, within the colony, as indeed in the other Australian colonies, uncertainty over whether Aboriginal people were subjects or enemies would continue. Matters did not improve when Gawler’s replacement, George Grey, arrived as governor in May 1841. Grey had previously held the position of resident magistrate at King George’s Sound in Western Australia, where he had developed ideas about Aboriginal policy that would prove to be extremely influential, not only in the Australian colonies but also beyond, in New Zealand and the Cape Colony, as several historians have shown.111 From a military background and with some experience in Ireland, Grey had originally arrived in Western Australia in late 1837 as an explorer, hoping to help find new lands suitable for colonisation. As an administrator from August 1839 at King George’s Sound, Grey became a keen ethnographer with a strong interest in Aboriginal policy. Grey was an unusually thorough assimilationist, arguing that amalgamation of settlers and indigenous people was the only long-­term solution to colonisation’s inevitable conflict between indigenous and settlers’ rights. He published Vocabulary of the Dialects spoken by the Aboriginal Races of South-­Western Australia in 1839, and, significantly, a ‘Report on the Best Means of Promoting the Civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia’ in 1840, which advocated the supersession of Aboriginal laws with British ones, and placed great stress on the value of labour as a force for civilisation.112 Aboriginal people, he emphasised in his 1840 report, should be employed in ways that would  Pope, One Law for All?, pp. 19–20.  S. D. Lendrum, ‘The Coorong Massacre: Martial Law and the Aborigines at First Settlement’, Adelaide Law Review, vol. 6, September 1977, p. 43: Pope, One Law for All?, p. 22. 111  Alan Lester, ‘Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34, no. 3, 2016, pp. 492–507. Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 142–4; Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Victorian British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, esp. pp. 107–30. 112  George Grey, Vocabulary of the Dialects spoken by the Aboriginal Races of South-­Western Australia, London, T. & W. Boone, 1839; George Grey, ‘Report on the Best Means of Promoting 109 110

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be of value to the settlers and Aboriginal people themselves. The government should support native institutions and schools in the towns, and recompense individual employers in remote areas who taught their workers skills. The work should be interesting to Aboriginal people, and he thought they would like work involving mobility and variety, such as building or repairing roads.113 Grey had sent the report to the Colonial Office, where it was highly regarded; it was distributed to colonial governors for comment, printed in the British parliamentary papers and then in periodicals, and made Grey’s name.114 As Governor of South Australia, Grey began by announcing that he would respect the status of Indigenous people as equal British subjects.115 He immediately faced a major challenge, however, when frontier violence in the Rufus River region (near the border with New South Wales) escalated. In response to numerous settler petitions for armed support, Grey reluctantly relented and in August 1841 sent a combined police and civilian party to the area under the command of Protector Moorhouse, the protector of Aborigines, hoping that this would ensure a conciliatory approach. He made it clear that the Maria reprisals of the previous year would not recur: the party was to remember that ‘the Aborigines are subject to the Queen, and that belligerent rights cannot be exercised against them’.116 Yet sending Moorhouse did not have the desired effect. When Maraura men threatened to attack the expedition, as the Indigenous people at Lake Bonney had warned him they probably would, Moorhouse immediately surrendered his command to the police, who opened fire.117 A massacre of perhaps thirty people ensued. When the party returned to Adelaide, Grey called for an inquiry into the killings. The Bench of Magistrates resolved, however, on a motion put forward by Major O’Halloran himself, in his role as a justice of the peace, that the party’s conduct had been justified and unavoidable. As Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster have remarked, this incident served to formalise and legitimise colonial aggression.118 It was now clear, despite some early indications to the contrary, that the South Australian government would prioritise pastoralist interests over humanitarian considerations. the Civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia’, reproduced in Russell to Gipps, 25 August 1840, NSWLCVP, 1839–42. 113  Grey, ‘Report on the Best Means of Promoting the Civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia’. 114  Lester, ‘Settler Colonialism, George Grey’, p. 496. 115  Pope, One Law for All?, p. 23. 116  Quoted in Pope, One Law for All?, p. 24. 117  Matthew Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 13 September 1841, in Protector of Aborigines, Letterbook, SRSA GRG52/7, vol. 1, unit 1, SRSA. 118  Foster, ‘Feasts of the Full Moon’, p. 67; Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, ‘Reading the Elusive Letter of the Law: Policing the South Australian Frontier’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 38, no. 130, October 2007, p. 308; Nettelbeck, ‘Mythologising Frontier’, pp. 75–8.

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Not only that, but this government would develop a range of punishments for Aboriginal people who attacked settlers or their property, including summary punishments such as public whippings or withholding rations. Grey and other colonial officials considered such punishments more effective and sometimes more humane than sending Indigenous prisoners and witnesses to trial in the city, which not only involved a brutal process of dragging people in chains but also allowed prisoners more chances to escape.119 The government came to see punishment as essential to preventing further settler violence. As Pope argues, when settlers in South Australia lost confidence in the ability of the police to apprehend and the courts to convict Aboriginal people for attacks on persons and property, the result was a ‘slide into illegal retaliation . . . via the sword, musket and arsenic’.120 Thus, while many colonists, along with Governor Grey, had arrived with humanitarian sympathies, these quickly eroded when the cycle of frontier violence – land-­taking, Aboriginal resistance, police or settler retaliation – continued. Western Australia In Western Australia, too, a recently appointed humanitarian governor faced the problem of dealing with frontier violence.121 John Hutt, who arrived in early 1839, was connected with the colonial reformers and had been briefed and influenced by the Aboriginal Protection Society.122 His brother, William, was closely associated with Wakefield and those who advocated and planned the colonisation of South Australia; John Hutt himself had been superintendent of emigration for the South Australian Colonization Commission before taking up the governorship in Western Australia.123 As Ann Hunter has shown, Hutt was especially concerned to understand Aboriginal peoples’ political structures and ideas of land proprietorship. Soon after his arrival, he asked the existing officials a range of questions about Aboriginal people to help him understand them better. He was interested in whether there were chiefs with whom he could negotiate, and what they thought their claims to the land actually were: ‘Is it as mere hunting grounds or do they pretend to a priority right in the soil and if so in whom is this right vested, in the tribe – the family or the individuals?’ In particular, he wanted to know whether they understood ‘the transfer of the right in landed property from a party to another’.124

 Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Reading the Elusive Letter of the Law’, pp. 299–301.  Pope, One Law for All?, pp. 159–60. 121  A. C. Staples, ‘John Hutt’, with ADB online, accessed 26 July 2018. 122  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 85. 123  Staples, ‘John Hutt’, ADB online. 124  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 173. 119 120

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Hutt saw Aboriginal people as members of distinct communities, possibly with notions of their right to the land. When the two promised protectors, Peter Barrow and Charles Symmons, finally arrived in February 1840, they did act to some extent as the intermediaries between government and Noongar that Hutt needed.125 On Hutt’s instructions, they recorded local Noongar names for particular places, in justice to the ‘first inhabitants or discoverers of any spot’, which, as Ann Hunter notes, meant that many Noongar place names were registered and used, many right up to the present day.126 More generally, however, the protectors proved to be of mixed value. Though Charles Symmons was to stay for many years, Peter Barrow, the youngest son of a senior Colonial Office official, did not last long. Less than a year after his arrival, he was writing letters to the colonial secretary saying that he felt out of his depth and that his hopes for the Noongar were low. He called them unpredictable and treacherous and thought they had no ‘inclination for civilization and a strong dislike to be interfered with’.127 When he left the following year, Governor Hutt replaced him with a local settler and Justice of the Peace, Rivett Henry Bland. Despite Hutt’s view that he had a ‘thorough knowledge of the native character, [and] acquaintance with their languages’, Bland was in fact even less sympathetic to Aboriginal people than Barrow had been.128 A distinctive feature of Western Australia was that the settlers were unusually interested in employing Aboriginal labour. With immigration rates low, no convict labour, and the colony struggling to survive, there was a severe labour shortage, especially after the contracts of the indentured labourers who had arrived at the beginning of settlement expired in 1835.129 As a result, Noongar people worked in the towns as domestic servants, messengers, and labourers and in rural areas as shepherds and servants; in both town and country, their labour was often essential for the survival of the settlement. They were, wrote lawyer and explorer, George Fletcher Moore, in The Inquirer, ‘a valuable help in our present dearth of labour’.130 This unusual interest in employing Aboriginal labour would be important in shaping Grey’s assimilationist ideas, and influenced Hutt’s policies as well. Seeing education, civilisation, and employment as intimately related, Hutt encouraged settlers to employ Aboriginal people in a way that developed their skills and attachment to settled life, offering a bounty to those who taught their workers a trade or farming skill. As Ann Hunter points out, the emphasis on farming skills was consistent with Hutt’s  Ibid., p. 87.  Ibid., pp. 175–6.  Peter Barrow to Ernest Hawkins, 15 November 1840; see Mitchell, In Good Faith?, p. 38. 128  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 100–3; Staples, ‘John Hutt’. 129  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 179. 130  G. F. Moore, ‘On the Aboriginal Race of Western Australia’, The Inquirer, 31 March 1841, p. 4; Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 179. 125 126 127

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holding of the widespread and popular view that agriculture, rather than pastoralism, promoted civilisation and amalgamation into colonial society.131 Hutt also secured in 1840 assistance for a school run by Methodist, John Smithies, that emphasised training Aboriginal children for work as labourers and servants for settlers; children worked for most of the day and then took lessons with Smithies or his interpreter.132 This close association between schooling and useful work led Smithies’ institution to be much admired in missionary circles during the 1840s; it was warmly noticed by the secretary of state for the colonies in 1843.133 Though he shared much with George Grey, Hutt differed from him on the crucial question of imposing British laws. While Lord John Russell was attracted to Grey’s proposals for imposing British law as a way of managing and subduing Aboriginal resistance, Hutt thought that it was impossible to ‘make them at all times and under all circumstances in their habits and customs amenable to our laws’. To attempt to do so, he went on, would be a form of persecution, making them hostile and reinforcing their attachment to ‘their own rude and barbarous observances’.134 Hutt thought that in reality Aboriginal people were not British subjects in all respects; he thought them, as Ann Hunter points out, ‘a different kind of subject’.135 In unsettled areas, as far as he was concerned, they could practise their own laws and customs; in his opinion, they should be brought within the purview of British law only gradually.136 It was a different matter, though, where attacks on settlers were concerned. He quickly established a locally funded civil police force, which from June 1840 included Aboriginal police aides, to deal with spiralling levels of frontier violence at the edges of settlement.137 As Amanda Nettelbeck explains, Hutt’s aim was to ensure that the law, rather than settler violence, was used to prevent Aboriginal attacks on settlers and their property. In his view, to achieve this, the law ought to be modified to allow for summary punishment,  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 180.  Charles Symmons to Colonial Secretary, report on the Wesleyan Missionary School in Perth, September 1840, and Charles Symmons to Colonial Secretary, 31 December 1840, in BPP: Papers Relating to Australia, 1844, Colonies: Australia, vol. 8: 387–9. See also Pen Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in the Nineteenth Century in Western Australia, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2002, p. 118; Mitchell, In Good Faith?, p. 103. 133  Neville Green, ‘Survival Against All Odds: The Indigenous Population of Metropolitan Perth, 1829–2001’, in Christine Hansen and Kathleen Butler, eds., Exploring Urban Identities and Histories, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2013, p. 37. Mitchell, In Good Faith?, p. 181; Harris, One Blood, pp. 269–77. 134  Bruce Buchan, The Empire of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008, p. 97. 135  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 175. 136  Ibid., p. 177. 137  Ibid., p. 107. 131 132

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or the imposition of punishment on the spot, in all cases except those potentially leading to capital punishment. This would both impress on Aboriginal people the inescapability of the law and would also avoid the necessity for long terms in gaol while awaiting trial.138 On Hutt’s initiative, the Legislative Council passed an Act enabling magistrates to award summary punishment; it was in operation for a year before news came that Royal Assent had been refused.139 Despite this setback, the idea that summary punishment best suited their circumstances remained strong in Western Australia for the rest of the decade and would finally be instituted in law, with British consent, in 1849.140 Hutt’s emphasis on the importance of bringing the law to bear on Aboriginal people when they attacked settlers meant the protectors lost the independence from the police that the Colonial Office originally intended. Protectors Symmons and Bland were both closely associated with policing and ensuring that sentences of punishment, including imprisonment, were actually carried out.141 Sometimes the police were assisted by ‘native constables’, Aboriginal men who assisted police parties and helped bring in Aboriginal people wanted for minor offences.142 The two protectors became embroiled in the development of an Aboriginal prison and reformatory on Rottnest Island, known as Wadjemup to Noongar people and located less than twenty kilometres from the Swan River settlement. Just before Hutt’s arrival, Governor Stirling had sent the first Aboriginal prisoners to Rottnest.143 Stirling had considered suggestions that the island be not only a prison but also a place of training and moral education, and when he arrived early in 1839, Hutt embraced the idea. In November 1841, he used his casting vote to ensure the Legislative Council passed the Act formally establishing the prison and stating that Aboriginal prisoners would be ‘instructed in useful knowledge and gradually trained in the habits of civilised

 Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘“A Halo of Protection”: Colonial Protectors and the Principle of Aboriginal Protection Through Punishment’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 2012, p. 402. 139  Ann Hunter, ‘The Boundaries of Colonial Criminal Law in Relation to Inter-­Aboriginal Conflict (“Inter Se Offences”) in Western Australia in the 1830s–1840s’, Australian Journal of Legal History, vol. 8, no. 10, 2004, www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AJLH/2004/10.html. 140  The British government would approve a summary justice bill in 1849, as discussed in Chapter 7. See also John McCorquodale, Aborigines and the Law: A Digest, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1987, pp. 90–2 and Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 197–220. 141  Nettelbeck, ‘A Halo of Protection’, pp. 406–7. 142  Gara, ‘The Life and Times of Mullawirraburka’, pp. 100–1. While colonial authorities hoped this would be a civilising technique, the men concerned may have seen it as a way of reinforcing their own local status. 143  The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 25 August 1838, p.  134; Neville Green, ‘Aborigines and White Settlement’, in Tom Stannage, ed., A New History of Western Australia, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1981, p. 87; Neville Green and Susan Moon, Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island, 1838–1938, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1997, p. 14. 138

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life’.144 Hutt hoped that the prison would train Aboriginal people for farm employment; those who acquired farming skills could receive an early parole and return to their districts, where some could obtain seasonal work.145 It was a hope and an ideal that would not last long in the disciplinary framework of the Rottnest prison. Under Henry Vincent, its autocratic and harsh superintendent, Rottnest quickly became predominantly a place of punishment. Protector Symmons commented in his report for 1843 that Rottnest, which as a magistrate he frequently visited, was so feared by Aboriginal people that it was a serious deterrent to crime.146 In the course of a newspaper debate over the capacities and treatment of Aboriginal people, one contributor (who called himself ‘Migo’, an apparent reference to a well-­known Noongar man in the Perth area), commented that, ‘The establishment of a native prison at Rottnest has done much good’, having ‘restrained their excesses, and done service to the state.’ ‘Migo’ also noted, though, that the confinement there ‘is terrible to the imagination of a native’.147 It was not only the horror of confinement that affected Noongar and other Indigenous people sent to Rottnest; there was the larger problem that, as Neville Green eloquently put it, ‘it removed the best of its men, left women vulnerable, wrongs unavenged, sacred areas unattended and the traditional life disorientated’.148 This was one civilising project that would prove especially destructive for Indigenous people, and that is how it is still remembered.

 George Seddon, A Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1972, p. 216; James A. Henderson and Tom Perrigo, Rottnest Island: Links in History, Perth: Rottnest Island Authority, 1989, pp. 10–15. 145  Green, ‘Aborigines and White Settlement’, p. 92; Green and Moon, Far from Home, p. 16. 146  Nettelbeck, ‘A Halo of Protection’, p. 408. 147  ‘Migo’, Letter to the editor, The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 7 May 1842, p. 3. 148  Green, ‘Aborigines and White Settlement’, p. 93. 144

4

A Colonial Conundrum Settler Rights versus Indigenous Rights, 1837–1842

Introduction It seemed in the late 1830s that Britain’s Australian convict colonies were a long way from gaining representative government, let alone self-­government, and that, as a consequence, Aboriginal policy would remain formally under direct British imperial control. Successive British governments did not accept the arguments of some powerful (and wealthy) supporters of representative government in the colonies, such as William Wentworth’s Australian Patriotic Association, that convict transportation and representative government could go together. Two developments at the end of the 1830s, however, greatly strengthened the case for greater representative government for New South Wales. One was a heightened attack in Britain on the transportation system, leading to close parliamentary scrutiny of its operation and effects. The other was a series of events in Britain’s Canadian possessions that was to have a profound effect on the nature of colonial governance in all of Britain’s settler colonies, including those in Australia. While managing Britain’s Canadian colonies seemed on the surface to have little to do with Australian Aboriginal policy, in fact, by putting the issue of colonial self-­government firmly on the imperial agenda, it changed the framework for the entire debate. From this point onwards, questions of Aboriginal policy would entwine with questions of settler political rights and self-­government in a new way. Pro-­Aboriginal groups in Britain, recognising the ability of settlers to defeat protection policies even when they had no formal political representation, began to fear that if representative government were granted, the settlers’ anti-­Aboriginal views would reign supreme. While observers and officials in Britain debated how to reconcile settler and Aboriginal rights, colonial debate was both literally and figuratively a world away. The rights preoccupying the colonists were largely their own, and from the early 1840s those campaigning for greater political representation gained increasing support. The arguments were many and various, but a core claim was based on nationhood and race – that British colonists had the rights of Britons everywhere and should be governed accordingly. In making their case, 103

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colonists argued that they had proven their ability to govern themselves by building a thriving, civilised, British society in a land where there had been only barbarism before; they had, they claimed, successfully displaced a ‘savage’ with a ‘civilised’ people. Anti-transportation in Britain The first development favouring a change in the way Britain governed New South Wales came from British colonial reformers enthusiastic about colonisation through free immigration and against the continuation of convict transportation. The most determined opponent of transportation in the House of Commons was the young Philosophical Radical, William Molesworth, part of the circle of colonial reformers influenced by Wakefield and a member of the committee of the South Australian Association established in 1833.1 As such, he envisioned colonies founded on free rather than convict labour, and was determined that the transportation of convicts to Australia should end. He successfully moved in April 1837 in the House of Commons for a select committee to enquire into the transportation system. The membership of the committee, which began its work in July just as the Aborigines report was being tabled in parliament, ensured a hostile report; it included Charles Buller, Lord John Russell, and Viscount Howick, all well-­known critics of transportation who wanted substantial changes to the system, though not its total abolition. The committee, in what Kirsten McKenzie describes as a ‘show trial’, collected a great deal of evidence to condemn the system on moral grounds. Its report, tabled in parliament in August 1838 after a year’s work, recommended that transportation to New South Wales should cease as soon as possible, and assignment of existing convicts to work for settlers be brought to an end.2 Van Diemen’s Land would continue as a site for transportation, but the system would be transformed to emphasise reformation of the convict as well as remaining a deterrence to crime. While the focus of Molesworth’s committee was on the conduct of the convict system and its effects on the morality of colonial society, as many historians have explored, it also had implications for Aboriginal policy.3 It shared with the select committee on Aborigines, whose final report had been

 Peter Burroughs, ‘Molesworth, Sir William, Eighth Baronet (1810–1855)’, first published 2004; online edition, January 2008, www.dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18902, accessed 17 April 2018.  Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004, p. 147. 3  See, for example, McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, pp. 124, 146–51; Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. 1

2

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submitted just two months earlier, an overall project of colonial reform.4 Both had their origins in the anti-­slavery movement; as Kirsten McKenzie writes, ‘The Molesworth report was the direct descendant of the forms of moral outrage first expressed in Britain over slavery, and it explicitly linked transportation to the earlier cause.’5 In McKenzie’s words, ‘The corruption of the settler was deemed the inevitable result of the forced labour of the convict.’6 A common theme was that, not only did the system treat Britons as slaves, but also, like slavery everywhere, the system corrupted the slave-­owner. The report argued further that the penal colonies in Australia had acquired the character of depraved societies, marked by homosexuality (‘unnatural crimes’), venereal disease, sexual scandal, and child rape. The entire society had become immoral.7 The final report described New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land as societies that had been as corrupted by transportation as slave societies had been by slavery. The Molesworth report’s emphasis on moral corruption influenced the way it considered the effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people. Whereas the 1837 Aborigines committee had focussed on the role of convicts in frontier violence, the Molesworth committee was more preoccupied with moral issues such as sexual contact and cohabitation between convicts and Aboriginal women, and the resulting venereal disease.8 Several witnesses indicated that disease, and the deleterious effects of alcohol, were leading to an alarming decline in the Aboriginal population, but only one witness, John Dunmore Lang, spoke of convict stock-­keepers exhibiting violent aggression towards Aboriginal people, including the seizing of women.9 The Molesworth committee, in any case, did not pursue this line of inquiry, and the question of convict violence towards Aboriginal people did not figure in its final report.10 While the Molesworth committee focussed on moral questions, convict transportation was always very much a system for supplying labour for colonising  As Isobelle Barrett Meyering points out, the committees had two common members, Sir George Grey and Mr Benjamin Hawes; Isobelle Barrett Meyering, ‘Abolitionism, Settler Violence and the Case Against Flogging: A Reassessment of Sir William Molesworth’s Contribution to the Transportation Debate’, History Australia, vol. 7, no. 1, 2010, pp. 6.01–6.18, 6.11. 5  McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, p. 124. 6  Ibid., p. 147. 7  Ibid., p. 146. Reid, Gender Crime and Empire, pp. 161–203. 8  See Reid, Gender Crime and Empire, p. 195. Reid cites Select Committee on Transportation, BPP XIX (518), 1837, pp. 23–4, 27, 48, 66, 151. 9  Select Committee on Transportation Report and Minutes of Evidence, p. 261. 10  It did not go entirely unnoticed though. Soon after the tabling of the report, Saxe Bannister described colonial convictism as ‘a system of white colonial slavery’ and as having ‘sealed the destruction of vast numbers of coloured people’. If the government had extended the transportation system, he suggested, it ‘would have been fatal to the natives of all Australia and of the whole of the South Seas, and, perhaps of the Eastern Archipelago’; Saxe Bannister, British Colonization and Coloured Tribes, London: William Ball, 1838, pp. 160, 251. 4

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projects. As such, it was directly related to Aboriginal policy, especially as it concerned Aboriginal labour, which had been important from the beginnings of European contact – in sealing, whaling, agriculture, and domestic service. From the mid-­1830s, however, government and pastoral employers began to diverge in their views on the place of Aboriginal labour in the colonial society and economy. For policy-­makers such as George Grey, it was the best method of assimilation, and for missionaries and their supporters in government, it was an excellent means of imparting morality and civilisation to Indigenous people. Pastoral employers in New South Wales seeking cheap labour, however, looked less to Aboriginal than to convict labour, and, when that was insufficient, to overseas ‘coloured’ labour. The idea that they could import Indian ‘coolie’ labour was first mooted in 1836, when John Mackay, a pastoralist who had for twenty-­eight years been a merchant and indigo planter in India, proposed to Governor Bourke that the colony introduce Indian (specifically ‘hill coolie’ or Dhangur) indentured labour to work in the labour-­starved pastoral industry. Bourke disagreed, a refusal British authorities supported. In December 1837, Glenelg, as Secretary for the Colonies, instructed the new Governor of New South Wales, George Gipps, to oppose the scheme on the grounds that the colony should import only British labourers.11 Gipps needed no persuading; as he wrote to Glenelg the following May, he thought the introduction of labour from India or China to be ‘fraught in my opinion with evils of the greatest magnitude’.12 By this time, the Indian indentured-­labour trade was under more general attack in Britain, with reformers Lord Brougham and William Molesworth denouncing it in parliament, and the government calling a temporary halt to the trade to Mauritius and the West Indies.13 News of these concerns reached the colony in July 1838, and for the rest of the year the question of coolie labour occasioned considerable public debate. Newspapers were divided on the question, the Herald supporting the importation of Asian indentured labour and the Australian denouncing it as an ‘Eastern Slave Trade’.14 In any case, pastoralists’ plans for Indian indentured labour were largely dashed when the government in Bengal, in May 1839, imposed a ban on Indians

 Glenelg to Gipps, 14 December 1837, HRA, I, xix, pp. 202–3. Indeed, from 1837 to 1847 the British government prohibited the use of colonial funds to import labourers from anywhere other than Britain, see Janet Doust, ‘Setting Up Boundaries in Colonial Australia: Race and Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 35, no. 123, April 2004, p. 159. 12  Gipps to Glenelg, 1 May 1838, HRA, I, XIX, 401. Also quoted by Doust, ‘Setting up Boundaries’, p. 162, among others. 13  Rose Cullen, ‘Empire, Indian Indentured Labour and the Colony: The Debate Over “Coolie” Labour in New South Wales, 1836–1838’, History Australia, vol. 9, no. 1, April 2012, p. 104. 14  Cullen, ‘Empire, Indian Indentured Labour and the Colony’, p. 106. The Australian, 30 October 1838, p. 2, 1 November 1838, p. 2, 3 November 1838, p. 2, 6 November, p. 2. 11

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being indentured to work overseas.15 When the matter was debated in the Legislative Council two years later, in July 1841, Gipps spoke strongly against the proposal, arguing as Lord Glenelg had done before him that the indentured labourers were likely, once introduced, to remain in the colony as a ‘slave caste’.16 This was not purely a matter of their contracts, he explained; even when these had concluded, they would remain as a degraded class of free citizens. A Committee on Immigration the following month took a similar view – any Indians who remained in the colony would be alien and servile.17 Given the strength of government opposition to the introduction of indentured labour from India, pastoralists at this stage seemed to have been defeated on the issue. They would, however, renew their efforts four years later, and the association between indentured coloured labour and ‘servility’ would resonate in colonial debate for a long time to come. The transportation question also brought into focus the question of the appropriate system of government for New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. As Molesworth outlined in a parliamentary speech in June 1839, the colonial reformers linked the granting of representative government to the end of transportation, a position unpopular with elite colonists, who wanted both representative government for themselves and a continuing supply of cheap convict labour.18 In 1838, knowing that the report’s description of colonial society as immoral would seriously undermine their claims for representation, the Australian Patriotic Association, formed three years earlier, strongly opposed the Molesworth Report’s excessively negative portrait of the colony’s moral and social character.19 There was nothing, it declared, in the social state of the colonies to justify Britain’s refusal to grant representative government.20 It was, however, a view few in Britain supported. A year after the tabling of the Report, in September 1839, Lord John Russell, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, remained firm that if New South Wales were to gain free institutions, it must cease to be a convict colony.21 The following year, in May 1840, the government decided to withdraw New South Wales from its list of places where convicts might be sent. Its decision was partly in response to the Molesworth  I. M. Cumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834–1854, London: Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 33. 16  SMH, 21 July 1841. 17  Myra Willard, History of the White Australia Policy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978 [1923], p.  4. See New South Wales Legislative Council, Committee on Immigration, Immigration, 1841: report from the Committee on Immigration, with the appendix, minutes of evidence, and replies to circular letter on the aborigines. Ordered by the Council to be printed, 13th August 1841. Sydney, Government Printer, 1841. 18  Meyering, “Abolitionism, Settler Violence and the Case Against Flogging”, p. 6.1. 19  McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, p. 151. 20  John Manning Ward, Colonial Self-­Goverment: The British Experience, 1759–1856, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976, p. 162. 21  Ibid., p. 162. 15

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Report and more broadly in recognition of the fact that free immigration and economic development had taken the colony well beyond its initial status as a penal settlement. With this decision, Britain could now more freely consider a new governing Act for New South Wales to replace the now long out-of-date Act of 1828. The way was open for free and representative institutions to be more seriously considered. Trouble in the Canadian Colonies Alongside the impending changes to convict transportation was a development in Britain’s Canadian colonies that would impact on the question of self-­ government even more profoundly.22 In contrast to the authoritarian system of government that prevailed in the Australian colonies, both Upper Canada and Lower Canada had long had an elected Legislative Assembly (as well as a nominated upper house). While these Assemblies could vote on legislation, they had no control over the executive government, the appointment of government officials, and thus over the implementation of policy. Both English and French political leaders were increasingly concerned and wanted a new system, that of responsible government, where parliament controlled the executive. Rebellion against the British authorities broke out in Lower Canada in November 1837 and in Upper Canada in early 1838. J. M. Bumsted suggests that the rebellions entailed the coming together of two different forms of resistance, one led by middle-­class liberals clamouring for greater political control, and the other a popular rural movement focussing on economic grievances and seeking land reform.23 The British government acted swiftly to quell the rebellions, recalling the governor of Upper Canada and replacing him with none other than Sir George Arthur, who had ended his term in Van Diemen’s Land the year before. In March 1838, not long after he had been advising the British government on the appointment of Aboriginal protectors to the Australian colonies, Arthur arrived in Upper Canada and later that year responded to further outbreaks by transporting the Canadian rebels to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.24 The imperial government also commissioned John Lambton, the first Earl of Durham, to take control as the new governor-­general with  For a more detailed discussion, see Ann Curthoys, ‘The Dog that Didn’t Bark: The Durham Report, Indigenous Dispossession, and Self-­Government for Britain’s Settler Colonies’, in Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, and Henry Yu, eds., Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, pp. 25–48. 23  J. M. Bumsted, ‘The Consolidation of British North America, 1783–1860’, in Phillip Buckner, ed., Canada in the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 55–6. 24  Beverley Boissery, ‘The Punishment of Transportation as Suffered by the Patriotes Sent to New South Wales,’ and Cassandra Pybus, ‘Patriot Exiles in Van Diemen’s Land,’ in F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, eds., Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, vol. 2 of Canadian State Trials, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 22

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oversight of both Upper and Lower Canada, and to investigate the reasons for the political crises there. The appointment of Durham for the task was significant, for it indicated the Whig government’s emphasis on British colonial expansion and settlement. Durham was part of the circle of liberal and radical thinkers that included Wakefield; indeed, Wakefield now travelled in a private capacity with Durham to the Canadian colonies. Also in the party was Charles Buller, agent in London for the Australian Patriotic Association and fresh from his role as an anti-transportation member of the Molesworth committee, and serving now as Durham’s private secretary and advisor.25 Durham’s rule as governor-­general turned out to be brief indeed. He arrived on 28 May and resigned only four months later over the British government’s repudiation of his decision to banish eight of the rebels to Bermuda, where he had no jurisdiction, and to forbid sixteen others from returning to Canada.26 On his return to Britain, he wrote his ‘Report on the Affairs of British North America’, completing it in late January 1839. The report attracted considerable attention then and has continued to do so ever since, in part at least owing to the brilliant clarity of its prose, and in part for its eventual impact on how Britain governed its settler colonies. Its major concern was ensuring British dominance in any future political arrangements for its remaining North American colonies, and especially in relations between the French and English colonial communities. It understood the racial dimension of the restiveness of the English settlers in the Canadian colonies very clearly, noting their view that ‘if the mother country forgets what is due to the loyal and enterprising men of her own race, they must protect themselves.’27 As Patricia Grimshaw et  al. in Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights point out, Durham’s report did not mention Indigenous people at all.28 Given the intense concern within the Colonial Office over Aboriginal peoples and policy at this time, this is puzzling, indeed startling. Durham was well aware of the concerns of the Aborigines Protection Society (APS), which Buxton, Thomas Hodgkin, and others had formed in 1836 and whose existence they first publicised in 1837.29 Before he left England on 24 April 1838, the Society had presented  Jarett Henderson, ‘Banishment to Bermuda: Gender, Race, Empire, Independence and the Struggle to Abolish Irresponsible Government in Lower Canada’, Histoire sociale/Social History, vol. 46, no. 92, Novembre/November 2013, pp. 321–48; on Buller’s role, see pp. 325, 330–6. 26  Bumsted, ‘The Consolidation of British North America’, pp. 56-7. 27  House of Commons, ‘Report on the Affairs of British North America from the Earl of Durham with Appendices’, British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 2, 1839, p. 23, Irish University Press Series, Colonies, Canada, 1968 (hereafter referred to as the Durham Report). 28  Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, p. 34. 29  James Heartfield, The Aborigines Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836–1909, London: C.J. Hurst and Co., 2011, pp. xii, 24–5. 25

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him with a memorial, entitled Report of the Indians of Upper Canada, which he ‘graciously acknowledged’.30 The society urged Durham to pay attention not only to his difficult task of ‘healing the wounds inflicted by war and insurrection’, but also to ‘the claims and sufferings of the Canadian Indians’, reminding him that they were under his management.31 The APS decided to implore Durham to take action, said the memorial, because the ‘very existence’ of the Canadian Indians was at stake. With their ‘threatened annihilation rapidly advancing, and almost consummated’, the matter was now urgent.32 They reminded Durham that the lands of North America once belonged to the Indians, and that settlers had either taken much land from them outright or purchased it in a questionable manner. The APS authors put forward several suggestions for the Indians’ protection and civilisation. They pointed out that land that had not been ceded to or purchased by the Crown was in principle outside the government’s authority and was, in fact, still Indian land. In other words, it was the government’s duty to prevent settlement beyond the authorised boundaries, and to grant no legitimacy whatsoever to any settlement that did occur. Furthermore, the APS report sought the preservation of Indian reserves within the colony of Upper Canada, the recognition of their rights as British subjects, and government support for missionary endeavour.33 In article 32, furthermore, the APS report had turned to the question of the responsibilities of local and imperial governments, past and present. Like the 1837 report, the ideas of which it was applying to the Canadian colonies, it urged a check on local governments in matters of Aboriginal policy and suggested that the interests of Aboriginal people were better represented in London than in the colonies. The APS recommended that the British government should appoint an agent in London specifically to represent the interests of the Aborigines, who would report to an under-­secretary of state for Aborigines.34 Funds for Indian protection and improvement would come from the sale of land within the boundaries, as outlined in detail in a

 Aborigines Protection Society, Report of the Indians of Upper Canada, London: William Ball, Arnold, and Company, 1838, p. 30. 31  APS, Report of the Indians of Upper Canada, p. 23. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid., pp. 27–43. See also Michael D. Blackstock, ‘Trust Us: A Case Study in Colonial Social Relations Based on Documents Prepared by the Aborigines Protection Society, 1836–1912’, in Celia Haig-Brown and David A. Nock, eds., With Good Intentions: Euro-­Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006, p. 58. 34  APS, Report of the Indians of Upper Canada, p. 50. 30

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separate report to the House of Commons by Charles Buller.35 There were other recommendations too, including changing inappropriate laws, such as requiring an oath to give evidence in court, and ensuring the British public was fully informed about what was happening to Aboriginal people in Britain’s colonies.36 None of this discussion appears in the Durham Report. We must read between the lines to see its stance on Aboriginal rights. A great deal of the report is implicitly about the demise of Aboriginal people in the Canadian colonies, through the extension of British settlement and the taking up of new lands. Throughout the report, the land was assumed to be empty, awaiting settlement; indeed the report began by describing all Britain’s colonies in North America as ‘ample and fertile,’ much of them ‘still unsettled’, and later refers to ‘unoccupied land’.37 The resources of the colonies were, according to the report, ‘the rightful patrimony of the British people, the ample appanage [grant or benefit] which God and Nature have set aside in the New World for those whose lot has assigned them but insufficient portions in the Old’.38 The report looked forward to the filling of the ‘ample territories’ of the colonies with a ‘large and flourishing population’. It shared the views of the English settlers as to the possibilities for future expansion and settlement. One of the many differences it saw between the English and the French is that while the former saw the North American provinces as ‘a vast field for settlement and speculation’, the latter regarded them ‘not as a country to be settled, but as one already settled’.39 In Durham’s eyes, the French were content simply to maintain what they already had; it was only the English who were by nature expansionist colonisers, and whose dominance, therefore, the government needed to guarantee. In order to secure the colonies for further British settlement, Durham recommended the unification of Upper and Lower Canada. This would ensure that the population of British origin numerically and politically dominated the French population. With a view to keeping the new colony within the British Empire and forestalling any further loss of Britain’s North American colonies, he also advocated a transfer of powers from Britain to the colonists, except in matters of foreign policy and defence. He did not mention Aboriginal policy, but the omission may suggest that he had rejected the APS view that it must remain an imperial responsibility. The aim in transferring considerable powers to the colonists was to keep settlers loyal to Britain and avoid another American-­ style revolution against British rule. More specifically, he recommended a system of responsible government whereby the government ministers and their  Ibid., p. 30.  Ibid., pp. 51–2. 37  Durham Report, p. 7. 38  Ibid., p. 7. 39  Ibid., pp. 18, 19. 35 36

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departments would be answerable to locally elected legislatures. This model was no invention of Durham’s, but something the colonists in the two provinces had been demanding for some time. Significantly, the Durham Report also argued the Wakefieldian point that in colonial situations the sale of Crown land could make the colonies self-­supporting and self-­sufficient. This was so important to British colonial policy, that even when granting self-­government, Britain must retain control over the disposal of colonial land.40 In this view, Durham appears to have been influenced both by Charles Buller, who wrote the report’s Appendix on the disposal of colonial lands, and by Wakefield, who had urged the importance of imperial control to the 1836 Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies.41 Durham’s insistence on imperial control of land was, perhaps, somewhat at odds with the overall recommendation for the development of a form of responsible government, since land was a fundamental source of revenue for colonial administration. The question of whether land was under imperial or local control was to be significant in the Australian colonies, too, during the 1840s. In the most general terms, then, the Durham Report was a manifesto for effective settler colonialism, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and their replacement with British settlers. Within the settler society thus created, the British were to be dominant – economically, demographically, and politically – while the French would be a marginal and politically insignificant population. The report simply assumed the dispossession and displacement of the never-­ mentioned Indigenous people, a process crucial to colonisation itself. The report’s silence on the fact that ‘unsettled’ and ‘unoccupied’ lands were in fact inhabited is thus telling indeed. Response to the Durham Report While the report is in retrospect significant, since the ideas it articulated were eventually largely adopted, the British government did not immediately accept its key recommendation – the institution of responsible government. Lord John Russell, as Home Secretary, dominated the cabinet debate on the matter in March 1839, and though he welcomed Durham’s suggestion to unite Upper and Lower Canada, he rejected his argument for granting the newly united colony responsible government.42 After some consultation with the legislature of Upper Canada and the special council of Lower Canada, parliament passed  Ibid., p. 101.  E. M. Wrong, Charles Buller and Responsible Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926, p. 24; ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies together with the Minutes of Evidence’, ordered to be printed 1 August 1836, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, Wakefield interview on pp. 44–121. 42  Ward, Responsible Government, pp. 74–5. 40 41

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the British North America Act, 1840 (Act, 3 and 4 Vict., c.35), known as the Union Act, which was finally proclaimed in February 1841. In the Australian colonies, too, it took some time for the full implications of the Durham Report for future colonial governance to become clear. Because it had directed its findings specifically at Upper and Lower Canada, newspapers in Sydney saw few, if any, implications for their own colony. They were interested in it, but as an overseas, not a local, matter. When news of the report arrived in Sydney in mid-­June 1839, newspapers such as the Sydney Monitor reprinted sections of it in whole or in summary.43 The conservative Sydney Herald in its editorial on 17 July focussed only on what the report meant for the Canadian colonies, including strengthening the influence of the people on the government, the establishment of sound municipal institutions, the independence of the judiciary, and the promotion of emigration.44 The Australian did comment, though, that the report’s portrayal of the conflict between English and French, involving ‘two classes of the inhabitants of the same country, owing allegiance to the same sovereign’, reminded it of the equally destructive insistence in New South Wales on the distinction between emigrant and emancipist.45 The Australian’s observation was timely for, as several historians point out, the old division between exclusives and emancipists was fading, giving way to new divisions, between conservatives, liberals, and radicals.46 The fledgling South Australian press also covered the Durham Report in some detail, but largely without comment. The Southern Australian did note, with some satisfaction, the extended discussion of the report in London at the new South Australian Rooms, where several speakers had contrasted the state of affairs in Canada unfavourably with ‘the practical working of the self-­ supporting system of Colonization in South Australia’.47 South Australian settlers were particularly anxious that their colony would soon achieve some form of self-­government. Although the 1834 South Australia Act establishing the colony had envisaged some system of local government only when the colony reached 50,000, hopes remained high that a more open system of government would soon be established. To the disappointment of settlers, there were no arrangements for elected members of the Executive Council, for which they petitioned as early as 1839; the South Australian Register called their right to

 The Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 19 June 1839, p. 2; 21 June 1839, p. 2, synopsis in Sydney Gazette, 20 June 1839, p. 2; Sydney Herald, 28 June 1839, p. 2. 44  Sydney Herald, 17 July 1839, p. 4. 45  The Australian, 11 July 1839, p. 2. 46  McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, p.  156. Ward, Responsible Government, pp.  163–4. D. Beer, ‘A Note on Lord Durham’s Report and the NSW Press, 1839’, JRAHS, vol. 54, no. 54, 1968, p. 205. 47  Southern Australian, 30 October 1839, p. 3. 43

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representation ‘a right to which every Briton has an indefensible and an indisputable claim’.48 There was more commentary on the implications of the report for the Australian colonies in Van Diemen’s Land, in the liberal Colonial Times. Based in Hobart, by now a thriving port town with lively newspapers, theatres, and churches enhanced from the beginning of 1837 by the influence of Governor John Franklin and especially his wife, Jane Franklin, the Colonial Times was a supporter of representative government. A recent editor was Henry Melville, author of the anonymous Two Letters Written in Van Diemen’s Land Shewing the Oppression and Tyranny of the Government (1835) and History of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to 1835 (1836). Now, the Colonial Times pointed admiringly to the Durham Report’s emphasis on ‘the necessity of granting to the Colonies, a substantial British Government, – not the paltry and miserable skeleton or apology for such, which they now generally possess’. The Colonial Times was particularly enthusiastic about the report’s recommendation for the encouragement and promotion of emigration, which it saw as ‘to a certain extent applicable to these Colonies’.49 In Western Australia, too, the sections on emigration and the disposal of waste lands attracted the most interest. The Western Australian Journal commented on 24 August 1839 that the Durham Report ‘embraces many points of material importance to our community’.50 Although it was, like South Australia, a free and not a penal colony, colonists were not yet clamouring for greater representation, and showed little interest in the report’s comments on self-government. It was only a few years later, when the system of government for the Canadian colonies finally began to embody some of the principles Durham had outlined, that most Australian colonial commentators saw any implications for themselves. Wentworth, in particular, knew it well and made frequent reference to it in political debate.51 British Discussion of Self-­Government and Aboriginal Policy, 1839–1841 In Britain, the Durham Report occasioned a flurry of writing on the question of how best to govern Britain’s settler colonies more generally.52 Charles  South Australian Register, 21 September 1839, p. 4; 21 December 1839, p. 5; 26 August 1843, p. 2. 49  Colonial Times, Hobart, 9 July 1839, p. 5. 50  WA Journal, p. 134. 51  Chester New, Lord Durham: A Biography of John George Lambton, First Earl of Durham, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929, p. 528. 52  See Charles Buller, Responsible Government for Colonies, London: J. Ridgway, 1840; George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Government of Dependencies, London: John Murray, 1841. Neither considered the question of Aboriginal policy. 48

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Buller’s Responsible Government for Colonies (1840) would be influential on Howick, soon to become Earl Grey and within six years Secretary of State for the Colonies. The following year, George Cornewall Lewis’s An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841) would also be widely discussed. These and other works placed significant pressure on British policy-­makers to consider the idea of self-­government more carefully. One enticement for granting increased representation was that it would be grounds for handing over more of the colony’s costs to the colony itself, such as the cost of police and gaols.53 For New South Wales, which still did not have representative government, let alone responsible government, the issue was representation. In Britain, the idea of a single chamber with a blend of nominated and elected members, suggested by Bourke, among others, in 1833 as appropriate for New South Wales, now gained ground. It would allow some representation, but without a fully elected Assembly to challenge British authority (as had happened in the Canadian colonies) it would enable the governor to remain firmly in control. Russell introduced a Bill to this effect, but the Whig government fell in August 1841 before it could be debated and passed.54 The matter awaited a fresh approach from the new Tory government, and that was to take some time. Like Durham before them, neither Buller nor Lewis considered the question of Aboriginal policy. Yet there were several bodies and key individual thinkers who did, and who were seriously troubled by the potential effects of self-­ government on Aboriginal people. For the APS, the Colonial Office, and others concerned with the welfare of indigenous populations in the wake of British colonial expansion, colonial self-­government had the potential to undermine the imperial control over Aboriginal policy they thought so essential for protecting and civilising Aboriginal populations. Self-­governing colonies, they felt, would ignore the British government policy of protection and civilisation, and the destruction would go on unabated. A fear that representative government might spell disaster for Aboriginal people was to preoccupy many in the decade to come. What might represent good and fair governance for settlers, recognising their rights and liberties, might prove the opposite for Aboriginal people. At the request of the Aborigines Protection Society, Standish Motte, a member of its committee, published in 1840 a pamphlet entitled Outline of a system of legislation for securing protection to the Aboriginal inhabitants of all countries colonized by Great Britain and addressed to the ‘Colonial Minister, and the Legislature of Great Britain’.55 According to the Fourth Annual Report of the APS, the pamphlet was widely disseminated, with copies sent to the Colonial Office, members of parliament, and the Committee of the House of  Ward, Responsible Government, p. 167.  Ibid.  Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation, p. 2.

53 54 55

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Commons on the Colony of South Australia, among others.56 Motte, and the society, wanted legislation enshrining the government’s Aboriginal policy. The pamphlet sought a Commission of Inquiry empowered to ‘draw up a general system of legislation, together with a subdivision of particular laws applicable to each people or country requiring special laws’.57 The principles guiding the necessary legislation included recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights as an independent nation, that Britain could justly obtain sovereignty only by fair treaty and with their consent, and that every individual of a nation had a right to personal liberty and protection of property and life. The pamphlet then went into some detail on the elements of the necessary legislation, including rights of property, constabulary force, apprenticeship and service, protection of life, and administration of justice (evidence, jury, arbitration, legal protection board, appeal). It repeated the 1837 report’s emphasis on imparting civilisation in sections on instruction and amelioration, outlining plans for moral, religious, intellectual, and physical training. Outline of a system of legislation clearly envisaged the retention of control by the imperial government, especially during the phase when Aboriginal people were learning the ways of civilisation. In addition to local colonial boards of protection, Motte recommended the appointment of a Board of Protection for Aborigines in Britain. The APS demand for legislation enshrining the new policy was to prove unsuccessful.58 A couple of years earlier, Saxe Bannister had also emphasised the importance of imperial control, and particularly the role that the British parliament and beyond it the British people could and should play in ensuring a more humane system of governing indigenous people than had been evident hitherto. In British Colonization and Coloured Tribes (1838), he commented acerbically on the 1837 report’s recommendation that the executive government should control native policy. For Bannister, executive control was insufficient; strong parliamentary oversight of colonial affairs was also essential. Executive control in the form of the Colonial Office had always been the case, he pointed out, to appalling effect – ‘things have been precisely the worst where that very  APS, Fourth Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Society, London: P. White, 1841, p. 10. See also Mark Murphy, The Peaceable Kingdom of Nineteenth Century Humanitarianism: The Aborigines Protection Society and New Zealand, MA thesis, The University of Canterbury, 2002, pp. 153–4. 57  Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation, p. 13. 58  Motte’s pamphlet put forward both legal pluralist and assimilationist arguments. Historians have varied in their interpretations, with Henry Reynolds emphasising its legal pluralism, Damen Ward its assimilationism, Mark Murphy its slide from one to the other, and Robert Kenny both its assimilationism and its legal pluralism. Reynolds, Law of the Land, p.  86; Damen Ward, ‘ “Savage Customs” and “Civilised Laws”: British attitudes to legal pluralism in Australasia, c. 1830–48”, London Papers in Australian Studies, no.  10, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings College London, 2004, p. 21; Murphy, The Peaceable Kingdom, p. 157; Robert Kenny, ‘Tricks or Treats? A Case for Kulin Knowing in Batman’s Treaty’, History Australia, vol. 5, no. 2, 2008, pp. 38.8–9. 56

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office has been the most influential’. What was needed was open public debate on native policy – ‘publicity, instead of secrecy’, ‘knowledge, instead of ignorance’, ‘courtesy, instead of insolence’, and, above all, ‘justice . . . instead of injustice in its multitudinous forms and fatal effects’. Proper parliamentary oversight was essential: ‘Above all, the British public must be made acquainted with a subject so intimately connected with its honour and interests’.59 Another influential figure who articulated and pondered the problem of Aboriginal policy in the wake of the Durham Report was Herman Merivale. A professor of political economy at Oxford, he was later to become permanent under-­secretary at the Colonial Office from 1847 to 1860.60 Merivale was influenced by the liberal humanitarianism and Protestant evangelical Christianity of the 1830s and had considerable knowledge of colonial governance issues and problems. In a series of lectures delivered in 1839, 1840, and 1841, he directly tackled the question of settler government and indigenous policy throughout the Empire. As David McNab has noted, he wrote in his lectures in 1839 that the native question was ‘the greatest moral difficulty of colonization’.61 It was inevitable that when men ‘superior in intelligence and in power’ are ‘turned loose’ among indigenous people, they will ‘grossly abuse their power’ unless there is ‘disinterested control’.62 In lecture 18, he wrote angrily of the devastation wrought by the current situation. ‘Of what use are laws and regulations,’ he asked, ‘however Christian and reasonable the spirit in which they are framed, when the trader, the backwoodsman, the pirate, the bushranger, have been beforehand with our legislators, poisoning the savage with spirits, inoculating him with loathsome diseases, brutalizing his mind, and exciting his passions for the sake of gain?’ The result was appalling: ‘Desolation goes before us, and civilization lags slowly and lamely behind.’63 Colonial government, he continued, had two duties – protection and civilisation. For the purposes of protection, Merivale suggested, each colony ought to have a civil department devoted solely to that purpose. Its officers would detect and prosecute offences against native people and regulate master and servant contracts. Like the authors of the 1837 Report of the Parliamentary Select  Bannister, British Colonization and Coloured Tribes, p. 270.  For an excellent discussion of Merivale, see David McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century’, in Ian A. L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier, eds., As Long as the Sun Shines and the Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983, pp. 85–103. 61  David McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and the Native Question, 1837–1861’, Albion, vol. 9, no. 4, Winter 1977, pp. 350–84, this reference p. 361. Herman Merivale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures on Colonization and the Colonies, Begun in March 1839, London: Longman, 1839, p. 29. 62  Merivale, Introduction to a Course of Lectures, p. 26. 63  Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies Delivered Before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841, Longman: Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861, p. 489. 59 60

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Committee on the Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements) before him, Merivale thought it imperative that Britain not transfer control over indigenous policy to colonial legislatures. It was essential that ‘the protection of natives should in all cases be withdrawn altogether from the colonial legislature, and intrusted to the central executive’.64 In each colony, a local network of appointed civil servants, or protectors, would assist this department in its task of shielding and governing native peoples. In addition, reserves should be set aside specifically for indigenous peoples to insulate them from the worst of settler ferocity, from ‘insult and outrage’.65 Merivale’s long-­term solution, however, went beyond protection to a policy of amalgamation, or in more modern language, assimilation.66 In presenting this argument, Merivale outlined the three possible outcomes for indigenous peoples of colonisation – extermination, insulation (confinement to reserves), or amalgamation (assimilation). He opposed the idea that extinction was inevitable, saw isolation as valuable in the short term (especially for imparting religion, in which the role of missionaries was crucial), but suggested that only amalgamation was practicable in the long term. While British laws were unenforceable in frontier contexts, he suggested, they could be used to protect indigenous peoples in settled regions. Merivale’s programme for amalgamation emphasised religious instruction, practical training, employment, and intermarriage. Employment was important for both protection and civilisation, he suggested – settlers would exterminate Aboriginal people unless they found them useful. Intermarriage, which would produce ‘half castes’, was desirable since it could act as a counter to settler racism, and the half castes themselves had energy and organisation.67 In favouring amalgamation, Merivale drew on both Bannister and George Grey. In British Colonization and Coloured Tribes, Bannister had criticised the 1837 report for supporting Arthur’s policy of sequestering on Flinders Island the Aboriginal Tasmanians, who, he wrote, ‘after being horribly persecuted by the convicts, soldiers and settlers’, had been ‘sacrificed to the removal theory and stifled in an island unsuited to their habits’.68 He had strongly argued for amalgamation, and saw Aboriginal employment as an important means to that end. ‘Natives,’ he wrote, ‘should be employed in all proper cases; their equality of rights should be admitted; and their ultimate amalgamation with us aimed

 Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, p. 495. See also McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and the Native Question’, p. 365; Harris, Making Native Space, pp. 6–10.  Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, p. 507. 66  Ibid., pp.  509–10. See Salesa, Racial Crossings, pp.  93–6, for an extended discussion of Merivale’s theory of amalgamation. 67  Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, pp. 535–38. 68  Bannister, British Colonization and Coloured Tribes, p. 247. 64

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at’.69 Bannister’s emphasis on respect for land rights and for chiefly authority made it clear that the kind of amalgamation he was envisaging respected tribal authority and Aboriginal communal identity. By 1840, Grey, as we saw in Chapter  3, had in 1840 outlined a thorough amalgamation programme in his Report on the Best Means of Promoting the Civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia. Merivale’s role was to shape and present Bannister and Grey’s views to a wider audience. As Alan Lester suggests, ‘Merivale became the key means by which Grey’s writings circulated not just among other governors and the Colonial Office but within a broader British public’.70 Through Merivale, the amalgamation or assimilation theory would come to dominate British native policy from the mid-­1840s. There would prove, however, to be serious impediments indeed to its application to the Australian colonies. David McNab’s perceptive comment on Britain’s Aboriginal policy in the Canadian colonies in this period applies in Australia too. As McNab suggests, Britain’s Aboriginal policy was the product not only of particular theories, such as isolation or amalgamation, but also of a range of pressures – ‘the demands of the settlers for colonial self-­government, the desires of British politicians and the Treasury to rationalize the British Empire in economic terms, the failures of missionaries to “civilise” the natives, and of great significance, the active resistance of the native people against those persons who wanted to change their way of life’.71 Indigenous People in Settlers’ Political Rights Discourse As colonial reformers and evangelicals debated the vexed question of settler self-­government and Aboriginal policy, British immigration was transforming colonial life in New South Wales in ways that would have profound implications for Aboriginal people and questions of policy. The immigrants of the late 1830s came from a politicised generation, and were used to asserting their citizenship rights.72 By 1841, the non-­Aboriginal colonial population numbered almost 131,000, almost 75 per cent larger than it had been five years earlier, a demographic invasion.73 It was also increasingly diverse, ranging from the wealthier men engaged in pastoral expansion, through a middle class of bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, and tradesmen, to a growing working class taking advantage of subsidised immigration policies in order to make a new life. As the class structure shifted, so did the politics, as distinct conservative, liberal, and radical constellations and groupings emerged.  Ibid., p. 274.  Lester, ‘Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography’, p. 503. 71  McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy’, p. 87. 72  Hirst, Australia’s Democracy, p. 26; Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, pp. 17–53, 200–204. 73  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 20. 69 70

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Throughout 1841 and 1842, colonists waited impatiently for their long-­ promised new constitution. The end of transportation to New South Wales meant that advocates of representative government could now hope for a change in British policy, though there were still some, such as James Macarthur, who thought transportation and greater representation could have co-­existed. Indeed, radical newspaper editors such as W. A. Duncan and James McEachern feared that the moves towards greater representation could still be hijacked by those who wanted a resumption of transportation, not only as a source of cheap labour but also as a basis for limiting political rights to those with property.74 For them, it was not merely a question of representative government, but of who would represent and be represented. As conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike waited for their new constitution, they spent considerable energy in arguing the case that the colony was now free, productive, and civilised, well able to govern itself. In seeking greater self-­government, they were not rejecting Britain but rather asserting their own British male subjecthood. In his discussion of the English national character, Peter Mandler has argued that the qualities becoming characterised as ‘English’ during this era were those linked to self-­government: order, liberalism, and respect for property and industry.75 In the colonies, men seeking self-­government claimed to be descended from a people with long traditions of liberty and independence – a heritage which was described variously (sometimes by the same authors) as English, British, or Anglo-­Saxon: terms which were overlapping but not identical. In 1840, the Commercial Journal and Advertiser, for example, called for changes to the New South Wales executive: ‘we want some of our young born-and-bred-in-the-Colony men, to ­battle with the Colonial Ministers, so that the Home Government may not have the rule entirely in their own hands’. The journal sought a more liberal and extended legislature, perhaps with a New South Wales representative in the British House of Commons, its writer affirming that ‘we have an equal right, with our fathers and brothers in England, to have the same liberal institutions established in this Colony’. Representative government was their entitlement, as ‘the descendants of free-­born Britons’.76 The Commercial Journal and Advertiser was articulating the key argument in settler demands across the colonies for greater political representation. Britons everywhere had the same political and legal rights, wherever they were – their exceptional mobility did not lessen their status as Britons. As New South Wales politician, Robert Lowe, put it, ‘A British subject ... does not sell his  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, pp. 71–2.  Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, London and New York: Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 53–7. 76  Commercial Journal and Advertiser, 4 January 1840, vol. 6, no. 437, p. 2; 22 January 1840, vol. 6, no. 442, p. 2. 74 75

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British birthright for a piece of Colonial bread’.77 They talked about innate ‘Anglo-­Saxon’ freedoms, and claimed that Anglo-­Saxon peoples of all political colours shared an ancient and instinctive urge towards liberty and good government. One could be an immigrant and a settler, and, if British, still retain the rights one had at home.78 Paul Pickering has termed this view ‘popular constitutionalism’, and points out that, however stridently expressed, it was not the same as republicanism. Rather, it was characterised by expressions of loyalty – sometimes cautious, sometimes passionate – towards ‘home’, and especially towards the unifying figure of Queen Victoria.79 The argument for representative government on the basis of Britishness had another dimension. As Terry Irving points out, it was used on all political sides, but especially by liberals and radicals who wanted to insist on the rights of all, not just men of property. At a public meeting on 16 February 1842 in Sydney on the question of representative government, attended by over 2,000 people, Henry Macdermott, a merchant with a Protestant Irish military background, sought a change to the wording of the petition under discussion, arguing they ought to claim representation ‘as their British birthright’ rather than on the basis of wealth or station.80 In doing so, L. J. Hume points out, he revealed the conservative nature of the Wentworth-­Macarthur alliance which was seeking representative government.81 Also prominent in colonial debates at this time was a redemptive image of colonialism, a belief that settlers could build a better Britain overseas.82 The Colonial Observer, J. D. Lang’s new journal replacing the now defunct Colonist, called in 1841 for colonists to be granted political representation. After asserting that ‘the rights and privileges of the British Constitution, and in particular the right and privilege of taxation by representation, are the birthright – the inalienable birthright – of every Briton’, it added that colonists were, if anything, better subjects than their relatives back home:

 Colonial Observer, 28 October 1841, vol. 1, no. 4, p. 1.  For more on the history of this idea, see Kirsten McKenzie, ‘ “The Laws of his Own Country”: Defamation, Banishment and the Problem of Legal Pluralism in the 1820s Cape Colony”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 43, no. 5, 2015, pp. 787–806; Daniel J. Hulsebosch, ‘The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence’, Law and History Review, vol. 21, no. 3, 2003, pp. 439–82. 79  Paul Pickering, ‘Loyalty and Rebellion in Colonial Politics: The Campaign Against Convict Transportation in Australia’, in Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Rediscovering the British World, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005, pp. 98–103. 80  Irving, Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 74. 81  L. J. Hume, ‘Henry Macdermott’, ADB online, accessed 17 April 2018. 82  Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart McIntyre, eds., Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2007, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6, 9. 77 78

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The pressure of poverty and the sense of injustice experienced from whole classes of the community may, indeed, extinguish this feeling of patriotism in the breast of the miserable Chartist, in the dark and unhealthy alleys of Birmingham and Manchester; but wherever a moderate degree of comfort is enjoyed in men’s outward circumstances, it will assuredly prevail.83

Their experiences of settlement, then, had made them more admirably British than ever. If a sense of Britishness helped to inspire these debates, so too did a sense of colonial struggle and conquest. Their claim to self-­government was enhanced by their self-­image as successful colonisers. It was not just that as Britons they brought certain rights with them. It was not just that they wanted to ensure their future development as a free British society. It was also that they had successfully carried out the British racial project of colonisation and had thus earned the right to self-­government many times over. Their rights were grounded not only in being British, but also in being British settlers, who had displaced and replaced Indigenous peoples. In expressing such ideas, colonists in New South Wales were following in a tradition of thinking developed two centuries earlier in the colonisation of the Americas – the idea of bringing one’s rights with one had long been a feature of imperial conquest. On the surface, images of conquest referred mainly to the settlers gaining control of the Australian landscape, though we can read the frequent references to the subduing of a wild landscape as a form of allegorical displacement, referring obliquely to the conquest of Indigenous people.84 There was also a constant association of Indigenous people with a contemptible past, from which settlers had moved away and superseded, reinforcing the sense that, in the new colonies, Indigenous people could have no real future. This sense of frontier conflict as being in the past was enhanced in Sydney and other older urban centres by the fact that recent immigrants had little direct experience of racial violence and older colonists usually preferred not to acknowledge it. The Aboriginal societies that had pre-­existed the colony, and the frontier conflict accompanying their displacement, were all but forgotten. Speakers implied this version of colonial history in 1842, for example, during a meeting on 26 February, ten days after the earlier meeting, at Sydney College calling for a more representative form of government. Against radical protests, the petition under consideration still used a list of categories of well-to-do colonists, rather than the radicals’ preferred term of simply ‘colonists’, and many speakers based their claims for representation on colonists’ economic success.85 The  Colonial Observer, 28 October 1841, vol. 1, no. 4, p. 1.  Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 61, June 1999, pp. 1–22. 85  Irving, Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 76. 83 84

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former soldier and aspiring politician, Captain Maurice O’Connell, was one of the speakers. The grandson of Governor William Bligh, he had lived in various British colonies around the world. O’Connell asserted that settlers had proved their mental and physical fitness by the profits they had made in the colony. This was a landscape where ‘some fifty years ago not an echo awoke the dead stillness of the forest, but the wild shout of the savage, or the tuneful note of its feathered inhabitants’. Colonists, he said, had built civilisation in this ‘dreary worthless waste’.86 In a similar vein, the Sydney Chronicle would later claim that the British government would surely support greater independence for the colonies, if they could only see how far New South Wales had developed away from a ‘howling wilderness’, ‘trodden only by the foot of the naked savage’.87 In referring to the continent before colonisation in this way, drawing on the idea of a ‘howling wilderness’ from Deuteronomy 32:10, the Chronicle was repeating a common motif of colonial discourse: the land had been uncultivated, inhabited only by beasts and savages, with the strong suggestion that those ‘savages’ were barely human.88 In political debates of the early 1840s, colonists from a variety of different backgrounds would evoke the figure of the native savage to highlight their own progress or express their own fears. They saw the ‘Aborigine’ as the very opposite to a rational, mature, self-­governing subject.89 Their attitude became apparent in the Colonial Observer’s attacks in 1842 on the New South Wales conservatives, who had called for a colonial aristocracy to perform the functions of the British House of Lords at a local level. The Observer ridiculed the idea and mocked their public meeting as a ‘Pitt-­Street Corrobbory’ and the Legislative Council as ‘the Macquarie-­street Corroborry’. To reinforce its view that the Council’s days were numbered, the Observer described it as such a useless institution, destined to disappear, that even the Aborigines would ­survive longer.90 It was rare in these public discussions for colonists to address the possibility of Indigenous people being involved in representative government themselves. They mentioned the very idea only as a symbolic threat or joke in the course of deriding one’s white enemies and their political approach. In 1842,  Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1 March 1842, p. 2. For more on O’Connell, see H. J. Gibbney, ‘O’Connell, Sir Maurice Charles (1812–1879)’, ADB online, vol. 5, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 350–1. 87  Sydney Chronicle, 27 January 1848, p. 2. 88  For a discussion of the idea of a ‘howling wilderness’ in the Australian context, see Roland Boer, Last Stop Before Antarctica: The Bible and Postcolonialism in Australia, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, ch. 3. 89  See Bruce Buchan, Empire of Political Thought, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008, pp. 19, 25, 58, 98, 126. 90  Colonial Observer, 23 February 1842, vol. 1, no. 21 p. 1; 9 March 1842, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 1; 31 August 1842, vol. 1, no. 55, p. 1. 86

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for example, the conservative pastoralist James Macarthur gave a speech to the New South Wales Legislative Council, where he threatened that if political powers were permitted to a broader cohort of settlers, the colony would sink into anarchy and ‘vile democracy’. He insisted that the rights of Britons did not imply ‘the abstract rights of man’, but rather depended on the attainment of ‘certain qualifications’.91 Pursuing these distinctions between abstract human rights and British rights, he asked: Would they stand up for their rights as Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, aye, and Australians; or would they act upon those principles [abstract rights of man], which, if followed out, would justify the Cannibalism of the natives of New Zealand, and even admit the savages of this Colony to a share in the Government [?]92

Macarthur’s oligarchic opposition to more democratic forms of government was strongly opposed by liberals and radicals, but no one disputed his belief that Indigenous inclusion was absurd and unthinkable. When the more liberal Colonial Observer responded to his speech, it dismissed his references to a Ma¯ori or Aboriginal franchise as nothing more than deceptive scaremongering.93 An even firmer rebuttal of the idea of Aboriginal participation in colonial politics came from radical Catholic, E. J. Hawksley, who criticised Macarthur in the Australasian Chronicle and called for representation for working-­class male colonists. Macarthur, said Hawksley, had insulted ordinary colonists with his references to Aborigines and Ma¯ori. We were, he said, ’asking for civil rights – rights which man in a state of nature, never had and never can have’. Macarthur’s bombast, then, ‘about the cannibals of New Zealand, and the savage that roams these wilds’ was ‘mere froth and scum, thrown up by the disturbed waters of his double-­distilled Toryism’.94 The radicals, liberals, and democrats could no more envisage Aboriginal political participation than could the conservatives. The New Constitution News of the long-­ awaited Australian Constitutions Act finally arrived in November 1842. Lord Stanley, from September 1841 Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in the Conservative government under Prime Minister Robert Peel, had in May 1842 introduced a Constitution Bill very similar to the bill that Russell had sponsored and then withdrawn when the Whig government  Irving, Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 76.  Colonial Observer, 9 March 1842, vol. 1, no. 23. See also discussion in Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 77. 93  Colonial Observer, 9 March 1842, vol. 1, no. 2. 94  Australasian Chronicle, 3 March 1842, p. 2. 91 92

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fell. Charles Buller, who had acted as the agent in London for the Sydney-­based Australian Patriotic Association since 1835 (though he had angered its landowning and convict-­employing members after his role in strenuously advocating the cessation of transportation in the Molesworth committee in 1837), had put to the secretary of state, persuasively it would seem, the Association’s case for greater representation.95 The Act, passed in July, embodied modest changes to the status quo for New South Wales. The formerly appointed Legislative Council would now be only one-­third appointed and two-­thirds elected by male property-owners.96 Council would be a little more independent in that the governor would no longer be a member; on the other hand, it could not control the executive, which continued to be responsible to the governor. Its legislative powers were limited, too: the Council could pass laws but not on matters concerning Crown lands and land revenue, which would remain under imperial control. Furthermore, the governor could amend bills and refer them to the Colonial Office, which still had the power of veto. The franchise was limited to males who owned freehold of £200 or paid a rental of at least £20 per annum, low enough to allow some working men a vote.97 Advocates of representation were disappointed; the Act offered far less than they had hoped. Robert Lowe and John Dunmore Lang spearheaded the outcry, Lang seeing the Act as contrary to the principles of the British constitution and Robert Lowe saying the time had come for responsible government.98 Even more disappointed were those seeking representative government in South Australia, who had sought it from the earliest days of the colony. In 1840, Governor Grey had overseen the transition of the colony to a more orthodox system of government, which meant the abolition of the land commissioner and the establishment of an appointed Legislative Council. The 1842 Act to Provide for the Better Government of South Australia, though welcomed for its guarantee of freedom of religious worship and the prohibition of transportation, also confirmed that representative government would arrive only when the colonial population reached 50,000.99 At this point, the settler population was around 16,000.100 For colonists who already considered themselves  Tink, William Charles Wentworth, pp. 145–6, 166–7.  The Australian Constitutions Act (No. 1), 5 and 6 Vict., c.76. Long title: An Act for the Government of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Ward, Responsible Government, p. 168. 97  Hirst, Strange Birth, p. 17; Ward, Responsible Government, p. 169. 98  Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia 1788–1996, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 34. 99  Anna Munyard, ‘Making a Polity: 1836–1857’, in Dean Jaensch, ed., Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, Netley: Wakefield, 1986, pp. 56–8; Whitelock, Adelaide, pp. 52, 54, 85. 100  The census figure in 1841 was 15,436, and included 534 Aboriginal people. Graham Jaunay suggests that this figure was most likely an underestimation given the difficult conditions in 95 96

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capable of respectable autonomy, this fell well short of their expectations. In Van Diemen’s Land, too, there was no introduction of representative government; there would be an appointed Legislative Council as before. As for colonists in Western Australia, there was no suggestion of representative government, given its tiny settler population of less than 2,000. They would have to wait almost another thirty years. Even without any system of political representation, powerful settlers had been able to defeat the efforts of governors to prevent frontier violence and bring ‘civilisation’ to the Aboriginal people who were being displaced. Now, with the introduction of representative government into New South Wales, their hand had been strengthened. For the next decade, the colony would have a political system which provided little or no place for the views and interests of the growing number of middle- and working-­class colonists, but enabled the most powerful settlers to challenge very substantially the autocratic power of the governor. The resulting oligarchy, in which pastoralist interests in the seizure of Aboriginal land were prominent, boded ill for the future of policies of Aboriginal protection.

which the census was conducted. See Graham Janay, ‘1841 South Australian Census: What you will and won’t find’, 2004, www.jaunay.com/1841census.pdf, accessed 11 May 2015.

5

Who Will Control the Land? Colonial and Imperial Debates, 1842–1846

We were asking for civil rights – rights which man in a state of nature, never had and never can have.1

E. J. Hawksley, Sydney, 1842

All I now request of his Excellency is that he will have full Justice done to me the same as he would have done to a white man and a free man . . .2 Walter George Arthur, Flinders Island, 1846

In New South Wales, the squatters’ resistance to Britain’s Aboriginal policy of protection, application of the rule of law, and provision of education and conversion to Christianity rose to a crescendo in the years 1842–5. The main stimulus to the squatter revolt was the British attempt to insist on making squatters pay more for the vast areas of land they were wresting from Aboriginal people. An added stimulus in the frontier regions far away from Sydney, in Port Phillip and Moreton Bay, was their desire to escape the government based in Sydney, and instead to govern themselves, including devising their own methods of suppressing Aboriginal resistance to their loss of land. Land Policy and Aboriginal Rights Colonial outrage over the limited nature and extent of representative government awarded in the Australian Constitutions Act of 1842 was mild compared with that over the accompanying Australian Sale of Waste Land Act.3 This latter Act had arisen from an increasing enthusiasm for emigration as a solution to Britain’s economic problems. While the United States, outside the empire,  E. J. Hawksley, letter in the Australasian Chronicle, 3 March 1842, p. 2.  Walter George Arthur to Colonial Secretary, Van Diemen’s Land, 15 July 1846, reproduced in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 41. 3  An Act for regulating the Sale of Waste Land belonging to the Crown in the Australian Colonies, 22 June 1842, 5 and 6 Victoria, c. 36. John Manning Ward, Colonial Self-­Government: The British Experience 1759–1856, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1976, p. 170; Stephen Roberts, The Squatting Age in Australia 1835–1847, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970 [1935], p. 124. 1 2

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was as valuable to Britain as the colonies within the empire as a destination for emigrants, the advantage of the settler colonies was that Britain could retain greater control. Through governing the sale and distribution of land, it could both sustain an emigration programme and ensure the growth of prosperous settler societies adopting British social and political institutions and serving its broad economic and geopolitical purposes.4 Signifying government acceptance of Charles Buller’s ideas for systematic colonisation, in which Britain’s control of funds from the sale of land would enable it to finance emigration to the colonies, the Act made mandatory both the auction system for selling land and a minimum price of 20 shillings per acre.5 The resulting revenue would be placed under the jurisdiction of the Crown, meaning that the Governor would have control over land policy, unrestrained by the Legislative Council. Ominously for the New South Wales squatters at whom this legislation was aimed, Governor George Gipps had already indicated his view that squatters should pay more for their use of the land.6 The Sale of Waste Land Act had implications for Aboriginal policy. Both Whig and Tory governments in Britain wanted the funding for the management of Aboriginal people through policing, local courts, training, and education to come from the sale of colonial lands. In the grotesque logic of settler colonialism, land that had to be taken by force from Aboriginal people was also to fund their management and protection. Perhaps in an attempt to counteract the destructive effect of expansion for Aboriginal people, the framers of the Act included a provision that among the public uses for which land could be reserved from sale, in both Australia and New Zealand, was ‘the use or benefit of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the country’. The Act did not mandate such reserves but simply made their creation possible should colonial governments wish to do so.7 The very different approach taken in New Zealand at this time, however, highlights how little Britain recognised Australian Aboriginal rights in land. A key element in the colonisation of New Zealand that was not present in the Australian colonies was the British government policy of purchasing land from Ma¯ori. Both the British government and the Wakefieldian New Zealand Company assumed that Ma¯ori, having advanced far enough in ‘civilisation’ to recognise property in land, had entitlements to territory.8 Intent on managing and, as Mark Hickford  A. G. L. Shaw, ‘British Attitudes to the Colonies, c. 1820–1850’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 1, no. 9, 1969, pp. 89–90. 5  An Act for regulating the Sale of Waste Land belonging to the Crown in the Australian Colonies, 22 June 1842, 5 and 6 Victoria, c. 36. 6  Roberts, Squatting Age, p. 216. 7  Reynolds, Law of the Land, p. 131. 8  Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 63, 90. 4

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puts it, ‘disciplining’ the colonisation of New Zealand, the Colonial Office had appointed a lieutenant-­governor in August 1839 and arranged for the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ma¯ori leaders and British representatives in February 1840.9 The treaty recognised Ma¯ori land proprietorship and gave Ma¯ori equal rights and privileges with British subjects. Its purpose, Hickford suggests, was to insist on the role of government, rather than private interests, in the acquisition of Ma¯ori land. Not only would colonisation be more orderly, but also the government could enhance revenue collection through the management of land sales, that is by Ma¯ori to settlers.10 In 1843, the new Governor, Charles Fitzroy, an evangelical Tory who three years later would become governor of New South Wales, was determined to prevent unauthorised settlement and ensure revenue collection from authorised land sales.11 In the New Zealand context, this meant insisting on territorial native rights against the claims of colonial adventurers. By late 1844, Charles Fitzroy’s restrictions on unauthorised buying or taking of land was proving so effective in limiting settlement that systematic colonisation itself was threatened.12 There could be no similar insistence on the Crown purchasing Indigenous people’s land in the Australian colonies since the British government had from the beginning simply declared Aboriginal land to be Crown land, and then sought to secure it from Aboriginal attack. While colonists and officials gradually became aware that Aboriginal people did have a sense of land ownership that had never been legally recognised, it was thought to be too late to recognise Aboriginal land rights and claims. As Ann Hunter puts it, ‘the threat to British sovereignty and control was too great’.13 The provision in the 1842 Australian Land Sales Act for the reserve of land for ‘the use or benefit of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the country’ was, then, a minimal step indeed toward recognising Aboriginal land rights and entitlements. The new land policy enraged the squatters. Taken together, the Australian Constitutions Act and the Land Sales Act of 1842 meant that any power they might hold in the soon-to-be enlarged Legislative Council would be irrelevant on land matters, which they regarded as the most important of all. The squatters, who sought greater security of tenure and a continuation of the system of paying minimal rents, saw that not only their fortunes but also their ability to influence government policy to their liking, were at stake. Their outrage, examined in detail by historians including Michael Roe, Stephen Roberts, and Mark McKenna, also had an anti-­Aboriginal dimension.14 As Roe points out,  Hickford, Lords of the Land, p. 93.  Ibid., pp. 63, 90, 104, 129.  Ibid., p. 150. 12  Ibid., p. 155. 13  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, p. 175. 14  Michael Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1833–1851, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965, pp. 61–76; Roberts, The Squatting Age in Australia 1835–1847, pp. 186–262; 9

10 11

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squatters were not only concerned about having to pay more, sometimes much more, for the land they occupied and farmed for profit, but were also opposed to those representatives of government authority in their districts, the Commissioners of Crown Lands, if they ever erred in supporting Aboriginal people rather than the squatters themselves.15 Matters came to a head in the Lee case of August 1842 in New South Wales, when the local commissioner cancelled William Lee’s squatting licence after a violent clash between his servants and a local Indigenous group, possibly Wiradjuri. A public meeting in Bathurst strongly condemned the Commissioner’s action, while James Macarthur tabled a petition in the Legislative Council seeking greater pastoralist control over decisions concerning land licences, and illustrating the case with reference to the violent confrontation between black and white at the Lee station.16 The ensuing exchange between Macarthur and Gipps was revealing. In introducing the petition, Macarthur expressed the common pastoralist view, with its long lineage in European thought and biblical imagery, that since men had a right to ‘multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it, the roving savage tribes over desolate and extensive tracts, not fulfilling the conditions of this great charter, formed no claim of possession’. He opposed those philanthropists in England who thought settlers had lost all sense of mercy and humanity in their dealings with Aboriginal people (whom Macarthur called ‘a race of savages’) and insisted that whenever civilised men meet savages, ‘it becomes necessary to impress them with respect for the power which civilisation had matured’ There was no point in imposing British laws upon Aboriginal peoples, Macarthur insisted, for they could not understand them; what the settlers needed if they were to prevent further attacks was a display of strength.17 Gipps responded perceptively to Macarthur’s petition, describing it as ‘an attempt to try the strength of the “squatting interest” against the strength of the government, in the administration of the government domain, and the protection of the aborigines’.18 He remonstrated that the petition had complained of the murder of three white men but ‘there was not one word about the murder of the blacks, not one word indicating any feeling of humanity’. Gipps also pointedly read to the Council that section of the 1837 Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines that recommended that the British government refuse to entrust local legislatures with Aboriginal policy.19 John Dunmore Lang’s Observer commented that while it opposed Gipps on many counts, as it had done on the proposed land regulations a few weeks earlier, it agreed with his criticism of the petition’s Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic: A history of republicanism in Australia 1788–1996, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 33–9. 15  Roe, Quest for Authority, p. 62. 16  The Colonial Observer, 24 August 1842, vol. 1, no. 54, p. 421. 17  Ibid., p. 421. 18  Ibid. 19  The Colonial Observer, 24 August 1842, p. 421.

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lack of humanity towards Aboriginal people.20 There was indeed, it commented, ‘a heartlessness displayed in certain other quarters in the Council, in the absence of anything like sympathy for the Aborigines, which was exceedingly unseemly in itself, but which accords entirely with our own frequently expressed opinions of that body, viz.: that it was not so much a head that it wanted as a heart’. The attitude of the Council, the Observer thought, ‘illustrates the wise policy of the Home Government in taking the protection of the Aborigines out of their hands’.21 The First Elections The debate between Gipps and Macarthur was conducted in a fully appointed Legislative Council. The composition and power of the Council, however, was about to change as the new constitution came into force. In August 1843, the colony held its first elections. So important was the change that a new building had been erected in Macquarie Street, Sydney, to hold the new Council, a building that the New South Wales legislature still occupies today.22 Despite the criticisms of the limitations of the Constitutions Act, especially from the growing radical movement explored in detail in Irving’s The Southern Tree of Liberty, there was in fact considerable rejoicing that the colony had at last gained some representative government. In the afterglow of the elections, the passionate and prolific journalist George Arden praised the growth of a free legislature, with British privileges of elective representation and domestic self-­government. In what was by now a familiar trope in colonial politics, he reminded his readers of how much Sydney had changed since its beginnings as ‘a wilderness, barely capable of affording natural sustenance to its scattered savage tribes’. Before British settlement, Sydney had been a desert city like Palmyra, ‘literally built on a barren rock, and encircled by a sterile sand; now, vegetation has been made to smile at the threshold of every door’.23 In Richard Waswo’s terms, bringing civilisation, it seemed, had been rewarded. The elections produced a new and more powerful Legislative Council, one the governor could no longer control through appointments, indicating the arrival of a new era of oligarchic power. With a restricted franchise allowing only the wealthiest third of adult males to vote, pastoralists and their supporters won the majority of the twenty-­four new seats. As Stephen Roberts puts it, the elections meant that the Council had become ‘a veritable garrison held by  Ibid., 6 August 1842, p. 1.  Ibid., 31 August 1842, vol. 1, no. 55, p. 433.  M. M. H. Thompson, The First Election: The New South Wales Legislative Council Election of 1843, Mittagong: Max Thompson, 1996, p. ix. 23  George Arden, ‘The New Colonial Constitution’, Arden’s Sydney Magazine of Politics and General Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, September 1843, pp. 1, 4. Italics in original. 20 21 22

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them [the squatters] against the Government’.24 The remaining members could do little to challenge squatter dominance on the related questions of land and Aboriginal policy.25 While colonial radicals advocated a union of the middle and working classes to defeat the squatters, they were not yet in a position to achieve their aim. So great was their opposition to the squatters, and their fear of the squatters’ growing power under the new constitution, that some, such as the editor of the radical Weekly Register, William Duncan, went so far as to prefer a benign autocracy by the governor on behalf of the Crown to an oligarchy dominated by squatters.26 Radical outrage, however, did not militate against an enthusiastic participation in the colony’s first elections, and Lang was elected the member for Port Phillip. Though he and liberal lawyer, Robert Lowe (who accepted Gipps’s offer to become an appointed member of Council) were to be powerful voices there throughout the 1840s, they were greatly outnumbered.27 Matters came to a head when Gipps decided in April 1844 to act on the land question. Under the existing regulations, squatters paid a mere £10 tax per annum, no matter how large their tracts of land. In order to raise colonial revenue, Gipps wanted to increase the rents significantly by taking into account the amount of land held, and put forward a proposal to this effect in April and May 1844. He also provided for squatters to purchase land over an extended period.28 As the Constitutions and Sale of Land Acts of 1842 had both made clear, he did not need to get Legislative Council approval for the changes. Gipps’s proposal, which would mean a massive increase in rents for many pastoralists, met with total opposition, expressed in numerous public meetings, local and British newspapers, and the technically irrelevant but in practice quite powerful and influential Legislative Council. The Pastoral Association of New South Wales led the campaign, and undertook energetic lobbying in London. This was a rebellion led by wealthy landowners, most of whom had shown little interest in self-­government until this point. With their economic interests threatened, and their new-­found authority in the Legislative Council rendered irrelevant, they now wanted change, and talk of constitutional rights flowed freely. Land policy, they insisted, must be under the control of the Legislative Council, not the governor.29 The Sydney Morning Herald (as the Sydney Herald became in August 1842) declared in May 1844 that the colonists of New South Wales should be ruled ‘like free British subjects and not like so many felons

 Roberts, The Squatting Age, p. 220.  For exceptions, see Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 7, 225, 233.  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 138. 27  R. L. Knight, ‘Robert Lowe’, ADB online, accessed 18 April 2018. 28  Roe, Quest for Authority, p. 63; McKenna, Captive Republic, p. 35; Roberts, Squatting Age, pp. 239–40. 29  Roe, Quest for Authority, p. 63. 24 25 26

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or slaves’.30 The campaign against Gipps was unrelenting and widespread; as Mark McKenna suggests, there was even a thread of republican feeling.31 Despite his tense relationship with the squatters’ faction, Lang thought the imperial government’s control of revenue from land, without reference to the Legislative Council, was against the British constitution, and drafted a declaration of independence that proclaimed the end of the ‘galling and degrading yoke under which we have so long groaned as a British colony governed by absolute Secretaries of State and tyrannical governors’.32 Though the republican moment would soon pass, agreement on the question of land helped those former foes, James Macarthur and W. C. Wentworth, to find common cause on representative government. For the first time, the conservative James Macarthur, appointed to the Legislative Council in May 1840, emerged as a supporter of representative government. As J. M. Ward perceptively puts it, ‘changing political circumstances in the colony, as leading exclusives came together with leading emancipists, and the numbers of free immigrants, remote from convictism, increased spectacularly, shifted Macarthur’s position’.33 Wentworth had long supported self-­government, but now it was more important to him than ever; the settlers with landed property had to protect their own interests.34 As Peter Cochrane suggests, the new alliance of Macarthur and Wentworth tells us much about how the large landholders feared political change emanating from Britain, and sought a form of self-­government to ensure that the old order, as they saw it, could prevail.35 They also feared their political enemies closer to home – the liberals and radicals seeking to challenge pastoral dominance over land, and to open the land for smaller farming. Though these forces were still politically weak in the mid-­ 1840s, they were growing. Radicals and liberals expressed strong views, for example, on the question of the importation of indentured labour from India. Though the pastoralists had failed in their earlier attempts in the late 1830s to import such labour, as discussed in Chapter 4, they tried again when the British imperial authorities, under pressure from planters, agreed to lift the ban on the trade to Mauritius in 1842, and henceforth to ensure regulation of the trade.36 In September,  SMH, 2 May 1844. Quoted in McKenna, The Captive Republic, p. 31.  McKenna, Captive Republic, pp. 36–8.  The declaration, dated 7 July 1845, is reproduced in David Headon and Elizabeth Perkins, Our First Republicans, Sydney: Federation Press, 1998, p. 11. See also Paul Pickering and Benjamin Jones, ‘A New Terror to Death: Public Memory and the Disappearance of John Dunmore Lang’, History Australia, vol. 11, no. 2, August 2014, p. 128. 33  Ward, Responsible Government, p. 163. 34  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 23. 35  Ibid., p. 24. 36  See David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 63. 30 31 32

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pastoralists formed a Coolie Association led by W. C. Wentworth to press the British government to lift the ban for New South Wales as well. It was a sign of the unpopularity of the proposal that, when Gipps, in May 1843, forwarded to the secretary of state for the colonies the Association’s petition, signed by 686 pastoralists, he not only expressed his own disagreement but also forwarded a counter-petition.37 Signed by over 4,000 people, ‘principally of the working class’, the latter argued that the indenture system was akin to slavery, and that slavery, as convictism had shown, degraded not only the slave but also the slave-owner.38 Employers in New South Wales, said speakers at the meeting producing the latter petition, had been corrupted by the ‘habits formed’ when they were ‘masters of assigned convicts’.39 One of those leading the opposition to indentured labour was radical cleric, Lang, who argued in the Colonial Observer that the Indian coolies would form ‘a numerous and permanently degraded race in the land’. Not only were they a degraded people, but also the pastoralists would ensure that they were kept degraded; they would form an undesirable weapon for ‘Colonial Toryism and oppression’.40 This was one battle the liberals and radicals would win, though not so much through their own efforts as through the development in British government circles of similar forms of racial thinking. Secretary of State Edward Stanley rejected the pastoralists’ petition in September 1843, and the British government agreed to continue to restrict the movement of Indians to those areas of the empire under the control of the East India Company.41 The Colonial Office agreed with the colonial radicals – Indian labourers in New South Wales would become a lower class, corrupting the whole society. They should reserve New South Wales for British emigration and not permit it to become a racially divided society. Permanent Under-­Secretary Sir James Stephen summed up the British view in an oft-­quoted minute: To expedite augmentation of wealth in New South Wales by introducing the black race there from India, would, in my mind, be one of the most unreasonable preferences of the present to the future which it would be possible to make. There is not on the globe a social interest more momentous, if we look forward for five or six generations, than that of reserving the continent of New Holland as a place where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed with any lower caste. As we now regret the folly of

 Gipps to Stanley, 5 May 1843, NSW Governors’ Despatches, 1843, vol. 42, p. 847 (Mitchell Library, 1231). 38  Gipps to Stanley, 27 March 1843, NSW Governors’ Despatches, 1843, vol. 423, p. 531 (Mitchell Library, 1231). 39  SMH, 18 January 1843; Australasian Chronicle, 17 January 1843. 40  Colonial Observer, 28 September 1842. 41  Maxine Darnell, ‘Community Interest and Labour Power: A Tale of Squatters, Shepherds and the Law’, Proceedings of Sixth Conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 1999, www.ro.uow.edu.au/labour1999/proceedings/refereed/9/, accessed 18 April 2018, p. 66. 37

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our ancestors in colonising North America from Africa, so should our posterity have to censure us if we should colonise Australia from India.42

Aboriginal Policy: The Imperial and the Local The squatters’ fear that they would have to pay more for their access to land strengthened their antipathy to Gipps on other questions, especially Aboriginal policy. One of the first tests of the new blended Council on the issue was the long-­standing question of admitting Aboriginal evidence in court. After considerable pressure from the Aborigines Protection Society, from John Plunkett while visiting London on leave from his role as New South Wales Attorney General, and from James Stephen in the Colonial Office, the British parliament had finally passed an enabling Act for the admission of such evidence in 1843.43 When Gipps in June 1844 re-­tabled in Council his earlier Bill (1839) to allow Aboriginal evidence, however, Council rejected it.44 In this debate, speakers frequently referred to the Myall Creek trials of six years before, with Wentworth and Windeyer calling the execution of the convicted killers ‘judicial murder’.45 In the view of squatters and their supporters, the admission of Aboriginal evidence would mean more hanging of white men.46 The political situation was rather different in South Australia and Western Australia, neither of which had elected members of Council, and where squatter opinion was less powerful. In the former, Governor Grey met little opposition from the Legislative Council when he introduced an Aboriginal Evidence Ordinance Bill in August 1844.47 Despite a major press campaign led by pastoralists against the Bill, it received Royal Assent and, from 1846, South Australian courts took account of Aboriginal evidence.48 Western Australia was even earlier in admitting Aboriginal evidence, Governor Hutt having introduced an Aboriginal Evidence Act in 1840 that was similar to that of New  Minute 12 September 1843, CO 201/333. No 1563. Quoted in Paul Knaplund, ‘Sir James Stephen on a White Australia’, The Victorian Historical Magazine, vol. XII, no. 4, June 1928, p. 241; see also W. P. Morell, British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969 [1966], p. 90. 43  Russell Smandych, ‘Contemplating the Testimony of “Others”: James Stephen, the Colonial Office, and the Fate of Australian Aboriginal Evidence Acts, Circa 1839–1849’, Australian Journal of Legal History, vol. 8, no. 2, 2004, pp. 257–9. See also Mark Tedeschi, Murder at Myall Creek: The Trial that Defined a Nation, Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2016, p. 203. 44   Papers on Aboriginal Evidence, NSWLCVP, 1849, p. 990; Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, p. 128. 45   Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 180. 46   Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995, pp. 16–17; Smandych, ‘Contemplating the Testimony of “Others” ’, pp. 259–60. 47   Pope, One Law for All?, p. 44. 48   Ibid., p. 47. 42

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South Wales and applied it until the expected disallowance came through the following year – expected because admitting evidence without an oath was against English law.49 When, on Hutt’s initiative, Council passed a revised Act in November 1841, it operated for two years before news arrived that it, too, had been disallowed.50 In the end, the British Enabling Act of 1843 changed the situation, and the practice of admitting Aboriginal evidence continued in Western Australia. By this time, the desire of pastoralists in New South Wales to oppose and defeat Gipps at every turn extended even to the annual distribution of blankets, begun by Macquarie and stepped up by Bourke. This was the one policy assisting Aboriginal people that pastoralists did support, since it both improved relations with local people and relieved the pastoralists themselves of any obligation in the matter. Gipps, on the other hand, disapproved of the practice as expensive and also as encouraging Aboriginal indolence rather than their working for settlers.51 When Russell asked Gipps for his views on George Grey’s memorandum concerning amalgamation and Aboriginal employment, Gipps responded in July 1841 that he agreed wholeheartedly with Grey on the value of labour. ‘It is by the employment of the Aborigines as labourers for wages,’ he wrote, ‘and the education of their children in establishments conducted either by Missionaries or Official Protectors, that I consider the civilization of the Aborigines of this continent must be worked out, if it is ever to be accomplished.’52 It was these views that had led Gipps in 1839 to reintroduce the policy, gradually abandoned during Bourke’s period of rule, that the government should give blankets only as a form of reward. Owing partly to financial constraints, he enforced this policy more strongly from 1841, so that numbers of blankets distributed fell from 2,485 that year to 562 in 1844. By 1845, expenditure on blankets had accordingly fallen from its 1839 level of £1,330.7.6 to a mere £23.15.6.53 Gipps’s emphasis on reducing costs in this matter needs to be understood in the context of the changes in British government Aboriginal policy at the time. Now, more than ever, under the growing influence of theories of systematic colonisation and free trade, the British government’s desire to minimise expense intensified. Through the 1840s, both Tory and Whig governments increasingly thought colonies ought to be able to fund themselves, and shaped  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, ch. 6, p. 120.  Ibid., p. 125. 51  Papers on Aborigines, encl. in Gipps to Stanley, 21 March 1844, NSW Governor’s Despatches, 1844, vol. 44, p. 1457 (ML A1233). 52  ‘Sir George Gipps’ Minute on Governor Grey’s Notes on the Aborigines of Australia’, Southern Australian (Adelaide), 12 October 1841, p. 3. 53  Returns of Expenses, attached to New South Wales Legislative Council, ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines’, 30 October 1845, Votes and Proceedings of the NSW Legislative Council (NSWLC), Sydney: Government Printing Office, 1845, p. 942. 49 50

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imperial Aboriginal policy accordingly. Stanley, as the Conservative Secretary of State for War and the Colonies from September 1841 to December 1845, was especially firm on the matter. In the recently formed Province of Canada, uniting the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, he ordered Governor Charles Bagot in 1842 to conduct a major review of Aboriginal policy.54 The resulting inquiry, known as the Bagot Commission, concluded in 1844 that contact with Europeans was leading the indigenous peoples of the colony to deteriorate both physically and mentally, to become ‘indolent to excess, intemperate, suspicious, cunning, covetous and addicted to lying and fraud’.55 The commissioners argued for a new and cheaper programme of imparting civilisation to indigenous people. In place of existing policy, which they thought paternalistic and isolating indigenous people from the rest of the society, they advocated a system designed to encourage assimilation and associated habits of independence, hard work, and self-­reliance. As John Milloy points out, they thought such a system would not only be more successful in producing civilised people, but would also be considerably cheaper, since much less oversight and supervision would be necessary.56 Local agents, tasked with assisting indigenous people in their settlements, would be withdrawn, and replaced by occasional visits from departmental officials.57 The emphasis on amalgamation and teaching individual self-­reliance was evident also in two other recommendations. One was that the government should recognise indigenous land holding in individually rather than communally owned allotments,58 and the other, most importantly, that it support the maintenance of reserve and industrial schools.59 Stanley accepted the Bagot Commission’s recommendations, but made it clear that the British government expected the province, not Britain, to implement and fund them. Britain reduced its financial support for the Indian Department, and insisted that the colony itself would have to pay for the Aboriginal education programme at the heart of the new policy.60 It was clear that British policy towards indigenous peoples was now favouring an inexpensive assimilation policy much more firmly than ever before. Squatters set out to defeat Gipps on the blanket question, as they had on all other aspects of Aboriginal policy, although in this instance the squatters cast themselves as the more benign and pro-­Aboriginal party. In the winter of 1844, Port Hacking Indigenous man William Annan, well known to Europeans in  John Sheridan Milloy, The Era of Civilization: British policy for the Indians of Canada, 1830– 1860, PhD thesis, Oxford, 1978, p. 234. 55  Milloy, The Era of Civilization, p. 235. 56  Ibid., pp. 237–8. 57  Ibid., p. 239. 58  Ibid., pp. 240–2. 59  Ibid., p. 244. 60  Ibid., p. 128. 54

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Sydney, came to Sydney, probably to collect a blanket. There were no blankets, and he died from exposure in Hyde Park soon afterwards. In response, Bob Nichols, lawyer, former editor of The Australian, and member of Wentworth’s Australian Patriotic Association, formed a committee to raise funds for the ‘Sydney tribe’, and Charles Smith organised a lavish feast some months later for ‘the Aboriginal tribes of Woolloomooloo and Shoalhaven’.61 Some leading politicians saw a chance to attack Gipps on the blanket issue, and a year later, in August 1845, on the initiative of elected member Richard Windeyer, the Legislative Council established a Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines. Windeyer had a complex record on Aboriginal matters, having been a member of the short-­lived Aborigines Protection Society of 1838, and at the same time been the leading lawyer acting for the accused in the Myall Creek trials. The committee, which Windeyer chaired and whose members included Lang and Lowe, sent a circular letter to the benches of magistrates, Commissioners of Crown Lands, and pastoralists, asking for their views. The respondents agreed that the blankets were desirable, not only because Aboriginal people needed them but also because they ensured good relations.62 So did the witnesses who spoke before the committee.63 The only Aboriginal witness was a man called Mahroot who described himself as one of five survivors of the original Botany Bay clan; he had participated in some whaling voyages, earned his living through fishing for subsistence and sale, and lived on land leased to him by the governor near the Botany Heads fishing grounds. He reported to the committee that his people had stopped receiving blankets the previous year and that the blanket distribution should be resumed, as there were no longer enough possums around to make traditional cloaks.64 Meanwhile, many colonists testified that the blanket system had encouraged friendliness between Aborigines and colonists, and that Aboriginal people became confused and angry when it stopped. Zion Hill missionary Reverend  Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney, Sydney: NewSouth, 2017, pp. 62–3. 62  NSWLC, ‘Report of Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines’, 1845, pp. 964–82; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 207–10; R. H. W. Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets: The History of Some Early Attempts to Establish Relations with the Aborigines of New South Wales, 1814–1846’, Archaeology & Physical Anthropology in Oceania, vol. 2, no. 3, October 1967, pp. 190–206, this information on p. 201. 63  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 124–6, 209–12. 64  NSWLC, ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines’, Votes and Proceedings, 1845, pp.  945, 947. Mahroot’s precise background was not clarified here, but Melinda Hinkson, Aboriginal Sydney: A Guide to the Important Places of the Past and Present, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2001, indicates that the people of the southern shores of Botany Bay were the Gweagal clan, and that the clans of the region in general have been variously identified as Darug speakers, or as part of particular language groups now identified as the Eora, pp. xxi–xxiii. See also Paul Irish, ‘An Aboriginal Entrepreneur – 1850’, Historical Stories of Aboriginal People in Coastal Sydney, www.coastalsydneystories.com/single-post/2017/01/31/ An-Aboriginal-entrepreneur, accessed 18 April 2018; Irish, Hidden in Plain View, pp. 24, 38.

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Schmidt commented that the people had been pleased on one occasion when the governor sent the missionaries blankets to distribute, and were disappointed when this did not continue.65 Witnesses agreed that Aboriginal people needed these items for warmth at a time of great poverty, but when blankets did not arrive, there was also a feeling that trust had been broken. As Henry Bingham, Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Murrumbidgee, explained, ‘it contributes much to their comfort and satisfaction, and shows them that the Government have some regard for them, which is very gratifying to them’.66 A thoughtful and extensive response that was also sensitive to Indigenous feeling was given by David Dunlop of the Wollombi district, who could be described as an intermediary. Dunlop was a religious man and deeply concerned about the deprivation and suffering of the Indigenous people (possibly the Darkinjang) in his area. The blanket distribution, he explained, appeared to them as ‘a recognised tie between the ruler and the ruled.’ Their simple nature understood it thus, that the Governor sold their grounds to people who cut down the trees where the opossum dwelt, which had always furnished food for themselves, and warmth for their sleeping place, and for their women, and that in lieu thereof he gave them blankets, which they accepted from want, but always spoke of as no sufficient recompense.

The blankets may not have been much, Dunlop suggested, but they were expected and seen as a sign of trust between the people and the government. When they stopped, the people were angry. Dunlop movingly writes: The miserable dole having ceased, it is looked upon as a breach of faith ... a spirit of deeper discontent is engendered ... I cannot convey an idea of the energetic feeling of the chief, when pleading for his very few old women and sick young ones all so cold, no hut, no blanket, no light fire on white fellow’s ground, adding indignantly – ‘what we do, bail not fight, like New Zealand fellow, no! No, did no bad, we not get blanket! what for?’67

The committee made no recommendations, though the Council did pub­lish, in its Votes and Proceedings, the Minutes of Evidence and some

 NSWLC, ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines’, pp. 958–9; P. Nique, ‘Aborigines: Diary of Messrs Nique and Hartenstein of the German Mission to the Aborigines, at Moreton Bay, During a Journey to Toorbal, a District of Country to the Northward’, in Colonial Observer, vol. 1, nos. 4 (28 October) and 5 (4 November), 1841; Karl W. E. Schmidt, ‘Report of an Expedition to the Bunya Mountains in search of a suitable site for a mission station’, Accession: 3522, Box 7072, State Library of Queensland, pp. 1–2, 5–6, 9–10, 12–15. 66  NSWLC, ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines’, p. 981. Also pp. 968, 970–1, 978. 67  Ibid., p. 972. 65

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correspondents’ replies.68 On Windeyer’s initiative, the committee sent an additional circular to clergymen of all denominations in February 1846, and these replies, too, were printed in Votes and Proceedings.69 As with the earlier replies, these indicated that blankets had been valued, and the cessation of their distribution two years earlier had led to both ill health and much dissatisfaction. The Anglican minister at Newcastle, for example, wrote to the committee, ‘When the distribution of the blankets ceased, “McGill”, the late chief, told me “they all cursed the Governor”’. Little resulted from this committee, though the issue was to reappear in Council a few years later. When Windeyer’s health failed, the committee and its report became something of a dead letter, since his colleagues seem to have been less keen to push matters along.70 The documents survive now mainly as a fascinating, if painful, record of colonial and, more implicitly, Indigenous experiences of the time. There was little blanket distribution until Gipps’s successor, Governor Fitzroy, revived the practice in 1848.71 By 1846, the squatters had defeated Gipps on the land issue. As Stephen Roberts explains, the squatters had been able to muster such substantial support in England, in the ‘press, business associations, private and group influence’ by industrialists and politicians concerned to maintain their supply of colonial wool, that Gipps was in the end outmanoeuvred.72 Gipps finally wrote to Stanley in January that while he had opposed leases hitherto, now he conceded he must grant them.73 Towards the end of his tenure, he was dealing with a new secretary of state for the colonies. For the last six months of Peel’s Tory government, in 1846, Stanley’s successor as secretary of State for war and the colonies was William Gladstone, who later became four times prime minister. He was by this time an ardent supporter of free trade and systematic colonisation, and more sympathetic to colonial self-­government than his predecessor Stanley had been, especially for colonies that had not been sites for convict transportation.74 In relation to New Zealand, he wrote to Governor Grey, the settlers should gain self-­government as soon as possible, ‘being as they are of British blood and birth, and not affected . . . by the infusion of actual and

 Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 213, quoting NSWLCVP, pp. 937–1001.  Replies to a Circular Letter addressed to the clergy of all denominations by order of the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines, 31 October 1846, NSWLCVP, Government Printer, 1846. 70  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 212–3. 71  See Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, p.  201; ‘Berrima: Blankets to the Blacks’, SMH, 19 July 1848, p. 2. 72  Roberts, The Squatting Age, p. 252. 73  Gipps to Stanley, 10 January 1846, quoted by Henry Reynolds and Jamie Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases – Imperial and Colonial Policy 1826–1855’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, vol. 19, no. 2, 1996, p. 340, note 135. 74  A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Gladstone at the Colonial Office, 1846’, Working Papers in Australian Studies, no. 5, London: Australian Studies Centre, University of London, 1986, p. 2. 68 69

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emancipated convicts into their community’.75 Gladstone was, however, also conscious of Britain’s responsibilities to indigenous peoples in the empire, and recognised that this might be a reason to continue to limit colonial self-government.76 As a sign that he and the Tory government were by no means ready to withdraw from the field, Gladstone wrote that, ‘I conceive it to be an undoubted maxim that the Crown should stand in all matters between the colonists and the natives’.77 By this time, however, Gipps, the Crown’s representative in the colony, had given up not only on the land question but also on the idea that he should act as an intermediary between colonists and Aboriginal people. One of his last comments on the subject was in a despatch to the Colonial Office in April 1846, attaching the usual reports of the Commissioners of Crown Lands. He commented, as he had been doing on these reports for some years, that ‘I very much regret that it is not in my power to notice in them any favourable alteration in the general condition of the Aborigines’.78 Three months later, his commission as Governor ended and he left the colony for England, where he died six months later. In 1847, the squatters gained most of what they wanted. An Order in Council brought into operation the Sale of Waste Lands Amendment Act of 1846, which permitted the relatively inexpensive leasing of land for pastoral purposes.79 As a result, squatter antagonism to the British government substantially declined; talk of rebellion and secession quickly subsided. In New South Wales, at least, demands for self-­government would hitherto come from a much wider range of social classes. Separation Movements in Moreton Bay and Port Phillip The intense debates in Sydney on questions of land, representative government, and Aboriginal policy had their counterparts in the less ‘settled’ districts of New South Wales. The spread of British settlement to Port Phillip in the south and Moreton Bay in the north meant that the most fiercely contested frontiers were now located in regions peripheral to colonial government and  Gladstone to Grey, 31 January 1846, GPPP, 1846, pp.  159–61. Quoted in A. H. McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, Wellington: Government Printer, 1958, p. 283.  Shaw, ‘Gladstone at the Colonial Office’, p. 17. 77  Gladstone to Grey, 31 January 1846, British Parliamentary Papers, 1846, xxx (337), p. 153, quoted in Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p.  98. See also, McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, p. 285. 78  Quoted in Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, p. 214. Gipps to Stanley, 1 April 1846, HRA, XXV, p. 1. 79  The Sale of Waste Lands Act Amendment Act, 9 & 10 Vict., c. 103, 104, 28 August 1846; Order in Council, 9 March 1847; Reynolds and Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases’, p. 330. 75

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most of the colonial population. In both, settlers’ desire for greater control over their own affairs meant not so much a desire for elected representation on Council as separation from the Sydney-­based government altogether. In Moreton Bay, settlers saw the urban political sphere down south as an irrelevant, and perhaps hostile, force. Though they had a few representatives on the Legislative Council, attendance at meetings was an unpopular task because of the distance and inconvenience involved. It was difficult, therefore, to attract able candidates whom the settlers of the district could trust, and squatters began to demand the right to govern themselves instead.80 This was a desire for oligarchy, not democracy. As Maurice French has commented, ‘they wanted good government (by themselves), not self-­government (by the masses)’.81 Moreton Bay colonists vociferously complained of the problems of geographical distance, the dearth of local infrastructure and administration, and the inadequate supply of immigrant labour. An important aspect of settler discontent was frustration with the government approach to dealing with frontier conflict, which in settler eyes meant a failure to punish Aboriginal people and prevent further Aboriginal attack. From around 1840, squatters had begun moving their flocks up rapidly from the south, and entering the lands of Aboriginal people who had not encountered pastoralism before. The land along the Darling River was taken quickly, then pastoralists moved north to the Darling Downs, west along the Condamine into Maranoa, east into Moreton Bay, and up the coast to Wide Bay. Gipps and the Commissioner of Crown Lands told the first squatters moving into the north that their safety and their employees’ behaviour was their own responsibility, a declaration that did little to discourage the informal conflict. The region witnessed shocking violence that was much more widespread than anything hitherto experienced, leading some historians to call it the Black War of Southern Queensland.82 Indigenous people targeted stock and stations to drive the colonists away or punish unwelcome behaviour, including sexual abuse of Indigenous women or refusal to share resources. As Henry Reynolds has noted, violent punishments for transgressions may have had their roots in pre-­colonial practices, but the apparently chaotic and bizarre  Maurice French, ‘Squatters and Separation: A Synoptic Overview’, Queensland History Journal, vol. 20, no. 13, February 2010, pp. 806, 809; Keith Moore, ‘English liberty and People’s Rights: The Influence of Heritage in Achieving Self-­Government in Queensland’, Queensland History Journal, vol. 20, no. 12, November 2009, pp. 742–3; Val Donovan, ‘Arthur Hodgson and His Role in Separation’, Queensland History Journal, vol. 20, no. 12, November 2009, p. 730; Jennifer Harrison, ‘Separation Celebration: Speculation, Anticipation and Observations from 1859 Reports’, Queensland History Journal, vol. 20, no. 12, November 2009, p. 676. 81  French, ‘Squatters and Separation’, p. 809. 82  Ray Kerkhove, ‘A different mode of war? Aboriginal “guerilla tactics” in defining the “Black War” of Southern Queensland 1843–1855’, paper presented in July 2014 to the Australian Historical Association Conference, University of Queensland, available online at http:// nationalunitygovernment.org/pdf/2016/Indigenous-Resistance-Wars-KerkhoveFINALa-2.pdf, accessed 18 April 2018. 80

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behaviour of the newcomers led to conflict on a much larger scale than would have occurred in traditional Indigenous life.83 Colonists reacted, in turn, with vicious retaliations and pre-­emptive attacks. Libby Connors’ ground-­breaking study, Warrior, evokes the violence in the region at this time, tracing the internal conflicts within both Indigenous and settler communities.84 Missionary activity was occurring within a context of extensive frontier violence. At Zion Hill, the local Ninghi Ninghi people gradually embraced the mission; as a result, the Toorbul and Dalla further north became interested in acquiring their own mission, partly for the benefits of food, and partly to strengthen them in their ongoing conflicts with tribal rivals.85 Though they did not succeed in attracting a new mission to their area, the Toorbul and Dalla soon found their life disrupted by a quite different influx of newcomers – this time, squatters seeking new pastoral lands. As in Port Phillip at this time, an unusually large number of them were Scots.86 Sir Evan Mackenzie and three Archer brothers arrived in the early 1840s with sheep and cattle, Mackenzie to establish a station called Kilcoy and the Archers to establish Durundur. Between them, Mackenzie and the Archers represented two very different approaches to managing Aboriginal people. Where the Archers employed the Dalla alongside convicts and Scottish labourers who arrived early in 1842, enticing the Dalla with a generous supply of goods, Mackenzie relied more heavily on the Scottish labourers and was concerned to keep the Dalla away from the station.87 The two strategies were known in the region as ‘bringing in’ versus ‘keeping out’. While violence occurred in both cases, the policy of exclusion tended to bring more extreme violence with it. One event on Kilcoy was to become notorious, and well-­remembered in both Indigenous and non-­Indigenous communities for years to come. When Mackenzie was absent in January and February 1842, and large numbers of Aboriginal people were visiting the area for a major Indigenous traditional gathering, Mackenzie’s frightened shepherds responded by poisoning the food given to the visitors. Between thirty and sixty men, women, and children died, making this one of the most extensive and deadly frontier uses of poison, which, since it was thought to be less detectable, had increased in the wake of  Henry Reynolds, ‘The Other Side of the Frontier: Early Aboriginal Reactions to Pastoral Settlement in Queensland and Northern New South Wales’, in Henry Reynolds, ed., Race Relations in North Queensland, Townsville: James Cook University, 1978, pp. 9–11. 84  Libby Connors, Warrior, A Legendary Leader’s Dramatic Life and Violent Death on the Colonial Frontier, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2015. 85  Connors, Warrior, pp. 37, 40. 86  For a more detailed discussion, see Ann Curthoys, ‘Conflicts of Interest, Crises of Conscience: Scots and Aboriginal People in Eastern Australia, 1830s–1861’, in Angela McCarthy and John M. Mackenzie, eds., Global Migrations: The Scottish Diaspora since 1600, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 98–116. 87  Connors, Warrior, p. 49. 83

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the Myall Creek hangings.88 The event soured relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the area immediately, and the effects lasted for many years. Though the fighting Aboriginal men of the area retaliated, killing two shepherds, the grief over so many deaths continued. The few local authorities in this lightly administered region took a hands-­off approach, and barely bothered to investigate.89 One effect of the poisonings was the intensification of conflict between the coastal peoples who sought accommodation with the Europeans and those further inland who wanted to evict them, with the latter, more confrontational, tactics gradually winning the day.90 By 1846, it had become clear that those who favoured driving the settlers away and avenging settler wrongdoing with attacks on persons and property had prevailed over those who preferred some form of accommodation. As attacks on stations increased, settlers became enraged at the lack of government support in their struggles with Aboriginal people for the land.91 The Moreton Bay Courier in January 1847 accused the authorities of abandoning pastoralists in the north to Aboriginal attacks. It was appalled that the principle of equality before the law actually meant that Aboriginal people escaped punishment for their crimes. The paper dismissed those who thought Aboriginal people needed protection as ‘humbuggers and traffickers in humanity’, and saw the London-­based Aborigines Protection Society (APS) as especially ignorant and hypocritical. Later that year, when it learnt that speakers at a meeting of the APS in London had deplored the disappearance of Aboriginal people and described this as the result of their being ‘mercilessly slaughtered’, the newspaper responded angrily. ‘How gratifying it would be to them [Aborigines],’ it wrote, ‘if they could know that the white men of England form themselves into societies for the purpose of co-­operating with them.’ Instead, it continued, the reality was that white people were being murdered by Aborigines, and the government was doing nothing to stop it.92 Reports of Aborigines being slaughtered were ‘concocted by carpet philanthropists regaling themselves with their domestic tea and muffins’.93 In the frontier context of the region, the popular notion that the British (or the English) were a law-­making, rights-­bearing people took a distinctive and aggressive form. Some commentators made it plain that if they were to establish civilisation in the area, frequent violations of the law would be necessary.  R. J. Flanagan, The Aborigines of Australia, Sydney: Edward F. Flanagan and George Robertson and Co., 1888, p. 141; Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, pp. 112, 157. 89  Raymond Evans, ‘ “Plenty Shoot “Em”: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier’, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, pp. 163–4; Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 52–6. 90  Connors, Warrior, p. 68. 91  Ibid., p. 95. 92  Moreton Bay Courier, 30 January 1847, p. 3. 93  Moreton Bay Courier, 23 October 1847, p. 3. 88

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In one article in the Moreton Bay Courier in November 1846, for example, the writer expressed outrage that colonists were not permitted to deal directly with Aboriginal threats but were hindered instead by ‘the cumbrous panoply of constitutional law’. The defence of life and property was, this writer claimed, ‘one of our most sacred ordinances’, but to treat Aboriginal people as if they could understand this was an insult to the law itself. The authorities ought either to ‘shut their eyes while we take the law into our own hands, or ... afford us that protection which was erewhile the glory and safeguard of every Englishman throughout the world’.94 Colonists in the north and elsewhere repeatedly voiced this seeming contradiction – the law was fundamental to British civilisation and at the same time a dangerous hindrance to its spread. As Julie Evans argues, discrimination and cruelty towards colonised peoples as part of the ‘settlement’ process both went against the rule of law, but also produced the conditions where the rule of law could flourish once Indigenous resistance had been quelled. British imperial dominance must be secured, colonists argued, before so-­called ‘normal’ life could prevail.95 Port Phillip Port Phillip’s settlers were equally resentful at being governed from a distance, but in their case, the resentment was that government intervention – in the form of the protectorate – was not too little, but too much. Advocates of separation often pointed to Port Phillip’s large revenue and thriving businesses as proof of colonists’ readiness for localised government. They complained about the paucity of government works, and saw the Aboriginal protectorate as an unwelcome drain on public finances, a complaint expressed in several separation petitions, as well as some published works like the pastoralist Charles Griffiths’ Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District (1845).96 The Port Phillip Herald in November 1845 accused the New South Wales government based in faraway Sydney of greedy and arbitrary use of public revenue, citing Aboriginal funding (‘the Protectorate Humbug’) as a notorious example of ‘the gross injustice with which Port Phillip is treated’.97  Moreton Bay Courier, 21 November 1846, p. 2.  Julie Evans, ‘Colonialism and the Rule of Law: The Case of South Australia’, in Barry Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall, eds., Crime and Empire, 1840–1940, Devon: William Publishing, 2005, pp. 59, 68. 96  Charles Griffith, The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales, Dublin: William Curry, 1845, p. 93; Petition on Port Phillip separation, 21 August 1844, in New South Wales (NSW) Legislative Council, 1843, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Government Printing Office, Sydney; Committee of the Separation Society, The Petitions of the District of Port Phillip (Australia Felix) for Separation from the Territory of New South Wales, Melbourne: W. Clarke, 1844, pp. iv, 13, 32. 97  Port Phillip Herald, 20 November 1845. 94 95

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Settlers looked, however, much more kindly on another of Gipps’s initiatives, the formation of the Native Police. The white Border Police force Gipps had formed in 1839 had not proved to be the impartial force he sought, partly because it was more aligned with the white population than the Aboriginal people it was meant to protect, partly because Aboriginal protection was only one of its duties, and partly because it was too small for the task.98 Instead, Gipps now relied in the Port Phillip district on a new force called the Native Police, established by Captain Alexander Maconochie in February 1842.99 It had first been proposed by Maconochie in March 1837, and there had been a couple of previous attempts to establish it.100 Protector William Thomas had recruited a small group of Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung men in November 1839, supposedly to police their own tribes, but their scope and actions seem to have been very limited. Maconochie’s new force was more serious, quasi-­military; it was designed partly to strengthen the government’s ability to police the frontier through a range of tracking and guarding functions and partly to incorporate Aboriginal people into colonial society. Maconochie, also a penal reformer, believed that not only would Aboriginal police be useful in asserting British control over the ‘frontier’, but also pride in their military discipline would tie them to the colonial government.101 As Marie Fels and Richard Broome have noted, the police had access to guns, horses, smart uniforms, and rations for their families. Many Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung men considered a police posting quite prestigious, and took part. They may well have considered their involvement in policing to be a way of strengthening their status within their own societies, as well as engaging with the British. However, the government ordered Native Police also to crush Aboriginal resistance in other parts of the Port Phillip district, notably in Gippsland and the Western District, among people whom they considered foreigners or traditional enemies.102 In this way, attempts by Indigenous people to deal with the new order became entangled with old hostilities with destructive results. By 1842, settlers were realising the benefits of the Native Police to themselves. The Port Phillip Patriot reported that in the Portland district, the force had ‘succeeded in driving the Blacks towards the Aboriginal reserve where they are provisioned and otherwise cared  Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 185–6.  Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005, p. 44; Marie Hansen Fels, ‘I Succeeded Once’: The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula, Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2011, p. 46. 100  See Lyndall Ryan, ‘Billibellary, the Formation of the Native Police Force in the Port Phillip District in 1837 and its Connection to the Batman Treaty of 1835’, Law and History, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, pp. 14–17. 101  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 36. 102  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 44–6; Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District, 1837–1853, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988, pp. 1–4, 74–7, 83. 98 99

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for’.103 As frontier violence continued in the district through the mid-­1840s, La Trobe disbanded the Border Police in 1846 and increasingly relied on the Native Police to suppress Aboriginal resistance.104 Despite their satisfaction with Gipps’s use of the Native Police to protect settlers against Aboriginal attack, colonists in Port Phillip increasingly asserted that they had outgrown being governed from Sydney. Their campaign for regional separation featured the now familiar discourse of British, English, and Anglo-­Saxon fitness for government, but with a local twist. Aggrieved settlers attacked those who tolerated Sydney’s authority as ‘unpatriotic’, ‘a traitor to [their] country’.105 Radical politician and writer William Westgarth complained that the seizure of Port Phillip’s revenue by Sydney was ‘a wound of a tender character in the estimation of every Englishman’.106 The physician James Bennett Clutterbuck wrote of Port Phillip’s ‘galling yoke of slavery’, and looked forward to a brighter and separate future when ‘the length and breadth of the land will be gradually peopled by the Anglo-­Saxon race’.107 The writer and artist George Henry Haydon’s Five Years’ Experience in Australia Felix (1846) stressed the damage done to the region by dependence on New South Wales. Although concerned for Indigenous people’s wellbeing, Haydon also lamented the high land prices set by the government, and remarked that it was a wonder that settlers had not deserted the district, letting it return to ‘that barbarism from which it had so recently emerged’.108 Especially unsympathetic to Aboriginal people, and offering some pertinent insights into settler perceptions of the connections between Aboriginal policy and self-­government, was Alexander Harris. A novelist, farmer, and writer for working-­class magazines, he was the author of the well-­known work, Settlers and Convicts (1847), which devoted a whole chapter to the mismanagement of Aboriginal affairs. He claimed that the protectorate in Port Phillip had encouraged Indigenous people to attack colonists, and called the protectors ‘the authorised emissaries of “King George”’, meaning Gipps.109 He concluded that Gipps ‘had now become their [Aboriginal people’s] protector and partisan,  The Colonial Observer, 30 November 1842, p. 646.  Shaw, Port Phillip, pp. 132–3 and 199. 105  Argus, 26 November 1849, p. 2; James Bennett Clutterbuck, Port Phillip in 1849, London: John W. Parker, 1850, pp. 14–6; William Westgarth, Australia Felix; or, A Historical and Descriptive Account of the Settlement of Port Phillip, New South Wales, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1848, p. 342. 106  Westgarth, Australia Felix, pp. 285, 342. 107  Clutterbuck, Port Phillip in 1849, pp. 14–16. 108  G. H. Haydon, Five Years’ Experience in Australia Felix, vol. 1, London: Hamilton, Adam, 1846, p. 22, also pp. 8–9, 12, 17, 22–3, 46–7. See also Niel Gunson, ‘Haydon, George Henry (1822–1891)’, ADB online, vol. 4, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972, pp. 362–3. 109  Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts: Or, Recollections of Sixteen Years’ Labour in the Australian Backwoods, Sydney: University of Sydney (Australian Literature Gateway), 2003 (first published 1847), p. 189. 103 104

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as he had hitherto been the white man’s’.110 The protectorate, Harris concluded, had been an utter disaster. Yet the squatter perspective was not the only one, and there were signs of the emergence of more pro-­Aboriginal views. One of the most thoughtful comments on Aboriginal policy in Port Phillip came from Thomas McCombie, a Scotsman who had arrived from Aberdeenshire in April 1841 and begun editing the Port Phillip Gazette in 1844. His novel, Adventures of a Colonist; or Godfrey Arabin the Settler, appeared in 1845 and appended to it was an essay in which he discussed questions of Aboriginal character and policy in some detail. The essay raised the question, an important one in international law as we saw in Lord Morton’s comments in Chapter 1, of whether the British government had any right to ‘take possession of the country, and, without any consent from the original proprietors, sell the land, and make them amenable to the laws of Britain, of which they know nothing’. It also drew attention to the inability of the protectorate to protect Aboriginal people from loss of land and livelihood. McCombie noted that the question of Aboriginal policy was under considerable dispute. One school of thought advocated their confinement on reserves and the separation of children from their parents that they might be trained and later ‘placed out as apprentices to tradesmen in the town’, while another believed that since ‘the aborigines have peculiar claims upon the Government’ they ought ‘to be studied, and their lives and liberties protected’. The question now, he wrote, was ‘what the ultimate fate of the blacks is to be’.111 He was to return to this question over a decade later and to become, as Leigh Boucher and others have shown, a major figure in debates over Aboriginal policy in the new colony of Victoria.112 Voices like McCombie’s were clues that while in the mid- to late 1840s the squatters prevailed, there were new political voices emerging in colonial society that would have a bearing on Aboriginal policy. Indigenous Activism in Van Diemen’s Land While settlers made claims for greater political representation, the Indigenous people they were displacing were making parallel claims for liberty and independence, in their case against settler incursions and government systems of management and control. They began to adopt forms of protest new to them, such as petitions, addresses, and letters, in which they demanded a change in approach from their new and unwelcome masters. In doing so, they  Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 188.  McCombie, Adventures of a Colonist, pp. 165–7. 112  Leigh Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular Ethnography and the Governance of Aboriginal Subjects’, in Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, eds., Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-­Century Victoria, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015, pp. 63–94. 110 111

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foreshadowed and led the way in the development of Indigenous political tactics and strategies in the post-­frontier colonial situation.113 In 1842, two developments produced an outburst of Aboriginal petitioning and activism. The first was the return of seven Islanders from Port Phillip, where Robinson had taken fifteen of them in 1839. Their time in Port Phillip had been a mixed experience. Some of the Islanders had travelled with Robinson and worked for settlers, while others escaped and became outlaws. Timmy and Pevay were hanged in January 1842 for bushranging and murder, and five other Islanders had died. Now, the remaining seven returned: from the original group, Walter George Arthur, Mary Ann Arthur, Trukanini, Fanny Cochrane, Matilda (Puterrunner) and Davy Bruny, and in addition, Jack Allen, formerly with John Batman. As Ryan has noted, these survivors used their wider colonial experience to encourage new forms of activism.114 The second development was the arrival in the middle of the year of an unpopular new superintendent at Flinders Island, Henry Jeanneret, a doctor who had practised in Sydney and Hobart. Jeanneret quickly proved to be domineering and the Islanders campaigned hard for his departure. In view of their extreme discontent, the new governor, John Eardley-­Wilmot, who replaced Sir John Franklin in August 1843, suspended Jeanneret in 1844. When Jeanneret appealed against his suspension to the Colonial Office, the Islanders campaigned to have the suspension upheld. Jeanneret’s temporary replacement as superintendent, Joseph Milligan, a surgeon, suggested to their leader, Walter George Arthur, that he seek support from the prominent Quaker, George Washington Walker, who had visited the Island ten years earlier.115 Arthur accordingly wrote to Walker, imploring him to ‘advise us what is proper and lend me good books to read the Blacks would all petition the governor to get land and to earn for themselves but they are afraid’.116 To the Islanders’ dismay, the Colonial Office upheld Jeanneret’s appeal against his suspension on the grounds that due process had not been followed, and Jeanneret returned as superintendent. Arthur then wrote to George

 Their campaign has attracted considerable interest from historians in recent years, since it provides one of the few sources of written evidence of Indigenous people’s political thinking. Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 7–26; Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000, pp. 119–22; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp.  243–51; van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, pp.  119–22, 177–9; and Lawson, The Last Man, pp. 116–9. 114  Michael Cannon, ed., HRV: Aborigines and Protectors, vol. 2B, Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Press, 1983, p. 393; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 192–9; Mitchell, In Good Faith, p. 40; Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, p. 123. 115  Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 200. 116  Walter George Arthur to George Washington Walker, 30 December 1845, in Attwood and Markus, eds., Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 37–38. 113

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Augustus Robinson in Port Phillip, complaining that government officers were treating his community with arrogance and neglect. The natives are having been treated shamefully just like savages ... the people (white people) I mean, use the natives as they please and they dare not speak one word in their own defence and why, because Doctor Jeanneret carrys his pistols in his pockets and puts the blacks in jail.117

The residents collectively appealed to Lieutenant-­ Governor Denison, addressing him as ‘Father’. They asserted that they were a free people who had withdrawn peacefully from the mainland, and were therefore entitled to be protected from tyranny and enjoy the rights of white men.118 As Henry Reynolds has noted, this emphasis on liberty was crucial within a convict colony.119 Racial divisions could be superseded or at least complicated by the language of bond versus free. This conversation was also shaped by the language of fatherhood and children, which gestured towards imperial paternalism, but also harked back to the residents’ own traditions of kinship.120 The residents’ campaign reached its peak in February 1846, when Walter George Arthur and seven other men asked Robert Clark, their catechist, to draw up a document to keep Jeanneret away. On 17 February, they signed the first petition from an Australian Indigenous group to a reigning monarch.121 Addressed to Queen Victoria, this document had both a specific objective – to exclude Jeanneret from the island – and a wider view. It reminded the Crown that their people had negotiated with the authorities and lived peaceably ever since, and that Jeanneret had abused his position, using violence and threats, mismanaging their supplies, and putting them in gaol ‘for talking to him because we would not be his slaves’. They did not challenge Britain’s right to rule Van Diemen’s Land, but rather appealed to more philanthropic visions of imperialism. Using language that evoked both equality and paternalism, they assured the Queen ‘we are your free children ... we were not taken prisoners but freely gave up our country to Colonel Arthur then the Governor after defending  Walter George Arthur to George Augustus Robinson, 1 February 1847, also Arthur to Robinson, 5 July 1843, in Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence, pp.  1014–5. Spelling and grammar from the original. 118  Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 25. 119  Ibid., p. 22. 120  Walter George Arthur to G. W. Walker, 30 December 1845, Mary Ann Arthur to Colonial Secretary of Van Diemen’s Land, 30 December 1845, Walter George Arthur to Colonial Secretary of Van Diemen’s Land, 15 June 1846, in Attwood and Markus, eds., Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 38–41; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 12, 25. 121  Of the eight men who signed this document, four of them – King Tippo, Neptune, King Alexander, and Washington – had also put their names to the earlier statement of 1838, discussed in Chapter 3. Two others – Walter George Arthur and Jack Allen – were the sons of men who had signed it. We have deduced this from Ryan’s table; some of the names vary slightly but appear to be the same men. See Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 265–76. See also Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 12. 117

Who Will Control the Land?

151

ourselves’.122 The Colonial Office received the petition sympathetically and the secretary of state presented it to the Queen, who responded that she was pleased to receive the Aborigines’ address. Like the petition of 1838 before it, the 1846 campaign proved effective in some ways, but also led to outcomes that were unforeseen and damaging. A furious Jeanneret gaoled Walter George Arthur and tried without success to make him renounce the petition. Arthur responded by calling for Jeanneret to be charged with false imprisonment, complaining to the colonial secretary and demanding the same justice as ‘a white man and a free man’.123 He added that the people of Flinders had wanted to write to the governor but Jeanneret had prevented them from doing so, telling them that the governor had no power on Flinders Island. Arthur asked the colonial secretary to send magistrates to investigate, ‘to whom we will tell our Pitiful Story of what we poor Creatures are suffering different from what Col. Arthur and Mr. Robinson told us when we gave them our Countrys of Van Diemen’s Land’.124 On Colonial Office advice, Lieutenant-­ Governor William Denison dismissed Jeanneret in 1847, closed the institution, and ordered the removal of the survivors to Oyster Cove on the Tasmanian mainland. Already, their community had shrunk to a shocking low of 47 people.125 Walter George Arthur’s statements remain testimony to an overwhelmed yet still assertive and proud population. They contained a powerful mix of ideas about Indigenous people: as equal to Europeans, as subordinate to the Crown, and as independent nations who had agreed to a political settlement. Unsurprisingly, governed as Van Diemen’s Land was by a governor with an advisory and appointed Legislative Council, his ideas about governance had little to do with participation in a parliamentary system. Rather, when the Indigenous people of Flinders spoke of how they wished to be governed, they did so through the language of freedom versus imprisonment, conquest versus negotiation, paternalism versus separate autonomy. The activists of Flinders Island, like so many colonised peoples before and since, were appealing to an idealised sense of British government. Yet while Aboriginal activists spoke of what that government owed to the people it had colonised and dispossessed, they struggled to find a truly sympathetic audience. Their voices were increasingly drowned out by settler demands that the British government recognise the right of free white men in the colonies to determine their own future and the freedom to continue the dispossession of Aboriginal people, by whatever means necessary, on which this future would depend.

 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 7–8.  Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 14–15; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 201–2. 124  Walter George Arthur to Colonial Secretary of Van Diemen’s Land, 15 July 1846, in Attwood and Markus, eds., The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 40–1. 125  Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 7–15; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 203–5. 122 123

Part II

Towards Self-Government

6

Who Will Govern the Settlers? Imperial and Settler Desires, Visions, and Utopias, 1846–1850

By mid-­century, the long-­standing tension between the British policies of settler-­colonisation and Aboriginal protection was being resolved decisively in favour of the former. Colonial policy turned increasingly towards self-­ government as the best way to maintain and extend Britain’s settler empire in an era of free trade and extensive emigration, and away from imperial management of the humanitarian project of protection and civilisation. Although the move towards colonial self-­government was, in Benjamin Jones’s words, ‘a seismic shift in the nature of colonial governance’,1 there was no single moment where the policy was announced or embodied in legislation. Rather, it emerged in the late 1840s and early 1850s through a series of decisions expressed in acts and despatches, the most important of which was the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850. One factor in the turn to self-­government was a growing colonial desire for it, strengthened in the eastern colonies by a massive campaign against British plans to revive or continue convict transportation. The anti-­transportation campaign and changes in the economic character of the colonies together ensured a more politically and socially diverse push for self-­government than elite colonists would ever have wanted. While liberals and radicals increasingly challenged pastoralists’ land and labour policies, they lacked a coherent Aboriginal policy of their own, or much heartfelt commitment to the issue at all, suggesting that under self-­government, pastoralist-­supported policies were likely to prevail. British Views Regarding Self-Government From the mid-­1840s, there was growing enthusiasm in Britain for the idea of self-­supporting colonies, with which Britain could trade freely, and where local lands would provide the resources to fund emigration and economic development. In the context of severe crop failure in England, Scotland, and especially  Benjamin Jones, Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada, Montreal: McGill-Queens’s University Press, 2014, p. 144.

1

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Ireland in 1845, British Prime Minister Robert Peel, though a Tory, adopted a policy of free trade in 1846. When the issue proved so controversial that it split the Conservative Party, Lord John Russell’s Whig government replaced Peel’s Tory government in mid-­1846 and extended the free trade policy. As Miles Taylor has argued, widespread political unrest in Europe, exemplified in the revolutions of 1848, also strengthened government resolve to ensure that colonies were self-­supporting. Only in this way could the government keep British taxes sufficiently low to stave off the unrest that was engulfing mainland Europe from spreading to Britain.2 The conflict in British political circles over how to balance the interests of settlers in self-­government with apprehension as to its effects on indigenous peoples can be seen more clearly in the case of New Zealand than in Australia. In June 1845, the House of Commons witnessed an unusually long debate on colonial matters, when Charles Buller moved on 17 June that they consider the situation in New Zealand and especially the question of self-­government. ‘New Zealand,’ said Buller, ‘never can be secure of good government until its English settlers are put in possession of their birth right of representative self-­ government.’ Furthermore, Buller said the government ought not to restrict the purchase of Ma¯ ori land, since such purchase was so important to the task of amalgamating the two races. With land purchase, he said, the chiefs could become landed proprietors, and ordinary Ma¯ ori could function like British labourers.3 Government ministers replied that the problem with establishing self-­government in New Zealand was that it would be impossible to include Ma¯ ori as equals in a representative system, and yet if peace were to be maintained it was equally impossible to exclude them. In the debate, many speakers urged that they pay more attention to settler rights, some favouring the strengthening of municipal government as a pathway to self-government.4 Viscount Howick’s contribution to the debate was notable not only for its argument concerning New Zealand, but also because he was soon, under his new title of Earl Grey, and as secretary of state from July 1846 to February 1852, to become a crucial figure in the question of self-­government and Aboriginal rights in the Australian colonies.5 As secretary of state, he would be somewhat ambivalent in his attitude to self-­government. In this debate on New Zealand, Howick advocated strong powers for the governor in the short term and colonial self-­government in the long term. ‘No doubt they [the settlers] would  Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past and Present, vol. 166, no. 1, 2000, pp. 146–80, www.past.oxfordjournals.org/content/166/1/146.citation.  Charles Buller, House of Commons, 17 June 1845, Hansard, pp. 680–1. 4  A. H. McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, Wellington: Government Printer, 1958, pp. 276–8. 5  John M. Ward, Colonial Self-­Government: The British Experience 1759–1856, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976, pp. 269, 291. 2

3

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commit some mistakes, perhaps serious ones,’ he said, ‘but all experience was in favour of self-­government.’ From his experience of the Colonial Office, he was, he said, ‘persuaded that it was utterly impossible for any man, be his talents and industry what they might, adequately to administer such complicated affairs as those of the British Colonies, scattered all over the world.’ In response to the comments by the under-­secretary for the colonies that self-­government would undermine indigenous people’s security, he replied that the answer to that lay in amalgamation.6 This was a significant comment, indicating the role that assimilation policy would play in authorising and justifying British withdrawal from Aboriginal policy in general. The two policies – assimilation and withdrawal – would henceforth be closely entwined, not only for New Zealand but also for the Australian colonies. Britain’s first attempt to grant self-­government to New Zealand proved to be a false start. In August 1846, the British parliament passed the New Zealand Constitution Act, but suspended it in December 1847. Governor George Grey suggested that, with only 13,000 settlers, New Zealand was not ready; there were, in addition, widespread concerns about the Act’s proposed complex system of local councils as well as a Legislative Assembly and a Legislative Council.7 In Governor Grey’s view, a major obstacle to the Act was that placing political power in colonists’ hands would exacerbate Ma¯ ori unrest. Through their chiefs, Ma¯ ori currently had direct access to the governor, but under the new constitution, which reduced the powers of the governor significantly, they would have little or no voice. In Grey’s view, it was the governor’s power and authority which most helped to maintain peace between the Ma¯ ori and settlers.8 Once again, the principles of settler self-­government and indigenous autonomy and political power were at odds. As the colony’s Attorney General William Swainson, who had assisted Grey in drawing up a proposal for the 1846 Act, later revealingly remarked, constitution-­making for self-­government would have been easy had the colony been uninhabited when the settlers arrived. As it was, it was extremely difficult to recognise the rights of Ma¯ ori and at the

 Viscount Howick, House of Commons, 18 June 1845, Hansard, pp. 844–5.  The full title was ‘An Act to make further Provision for the Government of the New Zealand Island’. See Brian Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand 1855–1870, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967, p.  1. More recent work in this field includes Damen Ward, ‘Civil Jurisdiction, Settler Politics, and the Colonial Constitution, circa 1840–58’, Victoria University of Wellington Law Review, vol. 39, 2008, pp. 497–532; Tony Ballantyne, ‘The State, Politics and Power, 1769–1893’, in Giselle Byrnes, ed., The New Oxford History of New Zealand, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 110–1; and Andre Brett, Acknowledge No Frontier: The Creation and Demise of New Zealand’s Provinces, 1853–76, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016, pp. 33–41. 8  Governor George Grey to Earl Grey, 3 May 1847, CO 209/52, quoted in David W. McIntyre and W. J. Gardener, eds., Speeches and Documents in New Zealand History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 65. See also Ballantyne, ‘The State, Politics and Power’, pp. 110–1. 6 7

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same time establish a government ‘by one Law, on equal terms, and without distinction of race’.9 Earl Grey also considered the question of responsible government in relation to Britain’s Canadian colonies, where the campaign for it had originated in the 1830s or earlier, advocated by local political leaders including Robert Baldwin in Upper Canada, Louis-­Hippolyte La Fontaine in Lower Canada, and Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia. In the Province of Canada, the Union Act of 1840 uniting Upper and Lower Canada had done nothing to lessen the growing demand from both English and French reformers for responsible government. By 1846, it had become clear that failure to grant it could jeopardise Britain’s hold on these colonies altogether.10 Grey told the governor of Nova Scotia in November that year that Britain did not wish to interfere in the internal affairs of its colonies, other than to prevent any one colony from injuring another or the empire as a whole. Accordingly, when the parliament of Nova Scotia passed a resolution of no confidence in the Executive Council in January 1848, the Council resigned and the governor swore in a responsible ministry on 2 February 1848.11 Grey also appointed as governor of the Province of Canada his nephew-in-law, James Bruce, the Eighth Earl of Elgin (son of the earl who, in controversial circumstances, took from Greece the classical marble sculptures now known as the Elgin Marbles); Elgin was to oversee the transition to the new system in that colony.12 With Elgin’s acceptance early in 1848 of a new government, headed jointly by La Fontaine and Baldwin, and his acceptance in April 1849 of the Rebellion Losses Act, a form of responsible government was finally in place in that colony as well. The Rebellion Losses Act was significant in that it provided for compensation to those who had suffered damage in the rebellions of 1837. Colonial conservatives expected Elgin to refuse assent; when he did not, it was clear that Britain would no longer interfere with the colonial legislature on internal matters. It had accepted the principle of responsible government. Most of the other Canadian colonies followed soon after, though Britain retained control over the western territories.13 While considering and making these changes in Canada and New Zealand, British officials did not forget the Australian colonies. Before the New Zealand constitution was suspended, Grey told Governor Charles Fitzroy in July 1847 that it might serve as a model for self-­government for the Australian colonies

 William Swainson, New Zealand and Colonization, 1859, pp. 282–4, as quoted in McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, p. 262.  Milloy, The Era of Civilization, p. 295. 11  Jones, Republicanism and Responsible Government, pp. 121–2; Ward, Colonial Self-Government, pp. 271–7. 12  Jones, Republicanism and Responsible Government, p. 119. 13  Bumsted, ‘The Consolidation of British North America, 1783–1860’, p. 58.     9

10

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and instructed Fitzroy to gauge colonial reactions to the idea.14 When the Act was suspended, Grey decided on a different and more flexible approach.15 In a memo to the Colonial Office headed ‘Australian Constitution’ on 17 March 1848, written just a week before the faraway New South Wales Legislative Council met to consider his earlier suggestions, he outlined a much more modest proposal. The best plan, he wrote, would be simply to extend the current New South Wales system of a partially elected Legislative Assembly to South Australia, Port Philip, and Van Diemen’s Land, and to Western Australia when it was prepared to pay for its own government and to cease relying on an annual grant from parliament. This meant that rather than setting up a bicameral system in each colony, as the New Zealand model had done, they would leave it to the colonies themselves to decide on which system they wanted. Britain would thus give them ‘the most ample power of remodelling their own Constitutions’, to be approved by the Queen after being laid for one month before both Houses of Parliament. In effect, the system of limited representation would continue for the time being, and a framework established whereby colonists could devise new constitutions embodying self-­government of some kind that could then be debated, amended, and approved both in the colonies and in Britain. The Colonial Office discussed Grey’s suggestion in a series of minutes. The time had arrived, it seemed, for responsible government, and expressions of opinion in its favour were fulsome. James Stephen commented that responsible government had proved successful in Canada. When the British authorities had shown confidence in the Canadian legislatures, they had been rewarded with an end to agitation, good government there, and a much more contented people. They could expect the same results in the Australian colonies. ‘Responsible government,’ he wrote, ‘(could be) applied with safety wherever the colonists constitute an intelligent, English, homogenous population.’16 Benjamin Hawes, the Under-­Secretary of State for the Colonies, commented that ‘[i]f the colonists see that the powers of self-­government are fully conceded, including the power of dealing with their own form of government, the chances of acting in harmony with them will be increased’. Indeed, he went on, perhaps somewhat surprisingly in view of the negative views the Colonial Office had held of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, ‘[i]n no part of the world can the fullest measure of self-­government be conceded so safely as in the Australian colonies’.17

 Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, pp. 344–6.  Internal Memo, Grey, 17 March 1848, The National Archives of the UK (UKNA), CO 88/1/I, p. 21. 16  James Stephen to Grey, attached to Grey, 17 March 1848, UKNA, CO 88/1/I, p. 21. 17  B. H. (Benjamin Hawes) to Grey, attached to Grey, 17 March 1848, UKNA, CO 88/1/I, p. 21. 14 15

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In light of these positive views, Grey wrote to Governor Fitzroy on 31 July 1848, suggesting the colonies be free to propose changes to their own constitutions.18 A report of the Privy Council on the matter the following year endorsed the overall approach and added that they exclude Western Australia from the plan, since the settlers there were totally unwilling to sustain the expenses of their own civil government and, in any case, were too few in number.19 Colonial Demands for Self-­Government, 1846–1849 In these last years of the 1840s, colonial politicians waited anxiously to learn of developments in Britain concerning their future form of government. South Australia seemed especially suitable for a progressive constitutional change. The governor was constrained only by a fully appointed Legislative Council, the membership of which consisted of wealthy men and mostly landowners.20 From the beginning of settlement in 1836, colonists had hoped for some form of representative government, and had been promised, both in the 1834 Act establishing the colony and in the 1842 Act to Provide for the Better Government of South Australia, that it would be granted when the settler population reached 50,000. They were fast reaching that number, and becoming impatient: in December 1848, the population was estimated at 38,666, but a year later, mainly as a result of immigration, it had jumped to 52,904.21 The continued denial of self-­government led to popular resentment in South Australia towards governors, typically seen as dictatorial and disrespectful of colonists’ autonomy. Governor George Grey earned the dislike of many settlers when he cut expenditure on public works, while his successor, Governor Frederick Robe, offended Nonconformists by backing state aid to the Anglican Church and took the unpopular decision to charge royalties for minerals discovered on former Crown land. Colonists continually responded to unpopular decisions with angry public meetings, petitions for the governors’ recall, and passionate arguments in the press. J. M. Main has described a vibrant political culture in Adelaide during this era, with at least a hundred public meetings advertised on a variety of topics between 1837 and 1856.22 Speakers repeatedly  Grey to Fitzroy, 31 July 1848, HRA, xxvi, 529 ff. (CO 201/394). See John M. Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies, 1846–1857, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1958, pp. 84–5. 19  Draft report prepared by James Stephen, UKNA, CO 88/1/I, p. 5. See also Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, p. 366. 20  Main, ‘Social Foundations of South Australia: Men of Capital’, pp. 100–1. 21  ABS, Australian Historical Population Statistics, Table  1.1, www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/ [email protected]/DetailsPage/3105.0.65.0012014?OpenDocument, accessed 18 April 2018. 22  Keith Seaman, ‘The South Australian Constitution Act of 1856’, in Dean Jaensch, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, Netley: Wakefield Press, 1986, pp. 78–81; Main, ‘Social Foundations of South Australia: Men of Capital’, p. 101. 18

Who Will Govern the Settlers? 161

insisted they deserved better treatment and greater independence because, unlike many other settlements, South Australia had been founded on independence, respectability, and liberty.23 Those urging self-­government were still proudly British. In South Australia and its Mines (1846), Francis Dutton, a successful pastoralist who discovered the Kapunda copper mine and went on to help plan the colony’s representative constitution, wrote of South Australia as ‘this thoroughly British colony’. While settlers might resent some unwelcome policies emanating from the Home government, he said, this did nothing to diminish their love of their homeland or their Queen.24 In his 1849 Guide to South Australia, the engineer William Snell Chauncy emphasised the importance of their right as Britons to representative government; it was outrageous, he wrote, ‘that any class of British subjects, whether far or near from the seat of the supreme Government, should be left without representation’.25 In the same year, the grazier and agriculturalist Samuel Davenport, JP, spoke at a public meeting about proposals for a new constitution, objecting to the possibility of an unrepresentative legislature. Davenport declared, ‘They were Britons; and they felt the spirit of Britons as much in South Australia as they had done when they were in Old England itself.’26 Colonists in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were also fervently British, but in their case, the question of self-­government continued to be seriously affected by the issue of convict transportation. Although transportation to New South Wales had ended in 1840, British governments and administrators still saw it as a solution to Britain’s overcrowded gaols and as the best (and harshest) form of punishment and there was always a danger of its resumption to New South Wales.27 The situation was even worse in Van Diemen’s Land, which now became the main site for receiving Britain’s growing convict population. Concerned at the moral state of the colony (principally a concern over the reported prevalence of homosexual acts between convicts), the British government suspended transportation to Van Diemen’s Land for two years  John Hirst, Australia’s Democracy: A Short History, Canberra: Allen & Unwin, 2002, p. 28; Main, ‘Social Foundations of South Australia: Men of Capital’, pp. 96–102; Munyard, ‘Making a Polity: 1836–1857’, pp. 55–62; John M. Ward, ‘The Responsible Government Question in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, 1851–1856’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 63, no. 4, March 1978, p. 231; Whitelock, Adelaide: Sense of Difference, pp. 85–6, 92–3. 24  Francis Dutton, South Australia and Its Mines: With an Historical Sketch of the Colony, Under Its Several Administrations, to the Period of Captain Grey’s Departure, Hampstead Gardens: Austaprint, 1978, pp.  147, 149. See also Geoffrey Dutton, ‘Dutton, Francis Stacker (1818– 1877)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp. 341–2. 25  William Snell Chauncy, A Guide to South Australia, London: E. Rich, 1849, p. x. 26  South Australian, 25 December 1849, p. 3. 27  A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 312. 23

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from May 1846.28 After an anxious search for additional sites, it selected the Cape Colony for the first time and announced the resumption of transportation to New South Wales.29 Influenced by penal reformers, the government also changed the form transportation would take: it would now be limited to ‘exiles’, that is, convicts who had already served a period of reformation in prison in Britain.30 The reformers argued that not only would this relieve pressure on gaols in Britain, but also the offer of a ticket-of-leave in reward for good conduct would be a powerful incentive for good behaviour and reform.31 The Secretary of State, Gladstone, wrote confidentially to incoming Governor, Charles Fitzroy, in April 1846 informing him of the plan for New South Wales, and seeking Legislative Council opinion.32 When Earl Grey replaced Gladstone three months later, he too sought New South Wales Legislative Council opinion. Furthermore, he proposed the resumption of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land when the two-­year suspension had ended.33 Widespread outrage met Grey’s proposals in both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. When the new Governor, Sir William Denison, arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in January 1847, a passionate campaign greeted him. Huge public meetings in Hobart and Launceston petitioned against renewed transportation, with campaigners arguing that convict labour was undermining free settlement, keeping wages low, forcing settlers to pay exorbitant rates for police and gaols, and encouraging sinful sexual behaviour among the prisoners.34 There was a similar response in New South Wales, which was now facing the resumption of transportation. At public meetings and in newspapers, there were angry denunciations of the idea, and even the conservative pastoralist-­dominated Legislative Council indicated it would support such a resumption only if there were equal numbers of male and female convicts and a matching number of free emigrants. Nonetheless, Grey proceeded to send several ships of exiles to New South Wales without the equivalent number of  As convicts made up an increasing percentage of the colony’s population, there was rising concern over homosexual acts between convicts. James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land: A History, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008, pp. 237–8; Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire; Babette Smith, Australia’s Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2008. 29  Discussions of a new constitution for the Cape Colony began in 1848, prompted both by Earl Grey and colonial agitation, but were suspended during the furore in the colony through 1849 following British government plans to introduce convict transportation there for the first time. See Stanley Trapido, ‘The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853’, The Journal of African History, vol. 5, no. 1, 1964, pp. 37–54, esp. pp. 43, 47–9. 30  Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, p. 313. 31  Ibid., pp. 313–4. 32  Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development of Australia, p. 358. 33  From figures provided by A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, it is clear that transportation in 1846–8 reduced rather than ended entirely: 1845 – 2,870, 1846 – 1,126, 1847 – 1,269, 1848 – 1,434, 1849 – 1,847. 34  Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, vol. 1, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 484–6. 28

Who Will Govern the Settlers? 163

free emigrants.35 When the Hashemy arrived in Sydney in June 1849 and the Randolph in Melbourne two months later, huge protest gatherings met them.36 The protest against the Hashemy on 11 June 1849 drew 5,000–6,000 people; the protest against the Randolph was smaller, the ship having been quickly diverted to Sydney to avoid further trouble, but nevertheless an overflow crowd of possibly 1,500 people attended a protest meeting on 20 August convened by the mayor of Melbourne at the Queen’s Theatre.37 In both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, opposition to actual and proposed convict transportation became a major catalyst in the political campaign for more representative and finally responsible government. Anti-­transportationists argued that the colonies deserved better, and it was intolerable that authorities in Britain should return them to the past. The anti-­ transportationist Sydney Chronicle articulated the feelings of many when it declared on 5 December 1846: The colonists of New South Wales have nobly done their duty; they have proved themselves worthy descendants of their sires; they have stood forward boldly and fearlessly in the cause of humanity and justice. The brand of immorality and vice, which was stamped upon the brow of Australia, is wiped away for ever, and she now stands forth to the world, in her true character as the advocate of the oppressed, the enemy of the cruel taskmaster, and the friend of religion, of peace, of order, and of social happiness.38

The campaign against transportation has attracted a huge historiography, which shows no sign of diminishing.39 Its impact on the campaign for self-­ government has also attracted attention, in the works of John M. Ward, Colonial Self-­Government: The British Experience (1976); John Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy (1988); and Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition (2006). Feminist and cultural historians have emphasised the importance in the anti-­transportation movement of desires for respectability and ordered family life, as well as hostility to homosexuality, believed to be a product

 Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, pp. 322–5; Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development, pp. 360–1. 36  Don Garden, Victoria: A History, Melbourne: Nelson, 1984, pp. 52, 61–6; Davis McCaughey, Naomi Perkins, and Angus Trumble, Victoria’s Colonial Governors, 1839–1900, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1993, pp.  16, 31; ‘New South Wales Statistical Returns from 1823 to 1842’, printed 15 August 1843, NSWLCVP, 1843. Petition on Port Phillip separation, 21 August 1844, and Petition by H. Condell, Mayor, 18 September 1884, NSWLC, 1844, Sydney: Government Printer. Petition on Port Phillip separation, 21 August 1844, and Petition by H. Condell, Mayor, 18 September 1844); Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District (this edition, 2003), pp. 153, 177–8. 37  The Argus, 22 August 1849, p. 2. 38  Sydney Chronicle, 5 December 1846, p. 2. 39  David Roberts, ‘Remembering “Australia’s Glorious League”: The Historiography of AntiTransportation’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 14, 2012, pp. 205–15. 35

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of the transportation system.40 Most recently, there have been transnational approaches, as in the work of Chris Holdridge comparing anti-­transportation movements in the Cape Colony and the Australian colonies, and Benjamin Jones comparing self-­government politics in the Canadian and Australian colonies.41 In the context, then, of this large and lively historiographical field, we focus here on what the anti-­transportation movement meant for the relationship between Aboriginal policy and the question of self-government. Anti-Transportationists on Aboriginal–Settler Relations One important similarity between the Aboriginal and transportation debates was the fact that clergymen were prominent both in supporting Aboriginal protection and in the anti-­ transportation campaign.42 Two of the leading anti-­ transportationists, John Dunmore Lang and Congregationalist clergyman John West, were both supporters of Aboriginal protection and critics of frontier violence. Lang commented in his book, Cooksland in North-­Eastern Australia (1847), that the squatter approach to colonisation was ‘tantamount to a sentence of confiscation, banishment, and death to the unfortunate aborigines’,43 while West in his The History of Tasmania (1852) provided extended and detailed accounts of the Indigenous people and the frontier conflict they endured, depicting the cruelty and brutality of the whites. Yet both were also keen advocates of further colonisation, and both saw the future of their respective colonies as lying with free immigration.44 While West regretted settlers’  Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire; Smith, Australia’s Birthstain; Catie Gilchrist, ‘Space, Sexuality and Convict Resistance in Van Diemen’s Land: The Limits of Repression?’ Eras, no. 6, November 2004, http://artsonline .monash.edu.au/eras/space-sexuality-and-convict-resistance-in-van-diemens-land-the-limitsof-repression/, accessed 18 April 2018; McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies. 41  Jones, Republicanism and Responsible Government; Chris Holdridge, ‘Putting the Global Back into the Colonial Politics of Transportation’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 14, 2012, pp. 272–9. 42  See Gladwin, ‘The Journalist in the Rectory’, pp. 56.1–6. 43  John Dunmore Lang, Cooksland in North-­Eastern Australia, London: Longman and Co., 1847, p. 469. See discussion of this text in Paul Pickering, ‘The Highway to Comfort and Independence: A Case Study of Radicalism in the British World’, History Australia, vol. 5, no. 1, 2008, pp. 6.1–6.14; Anne O’Brien, ‘Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2011, pp. 6.9–6.10, accessed 4 March 2015, www.muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colo nial_history/v012/12.2.o-brien.html#f62-text; Meredith Lake, ‘Such Spiritual Acres’: Protestantism, the Land and the Colonisation of Australia 1788–1850, PhD thesis, The University of Sydney, 2008, p.  293; O’Brien, ‘Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia’, pp. 6.9–6.10. 44  In Cooksland, Lang advocated the development of a cotton industry using free immigrant labour in the Moreton Bay area as an alternative to slave-­grown cotton in the United States. Pickering, ‘The Highway to Comfort and Independence’, p. 56.11. 40

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failure to conciliate Indigenous people, he saw Indigenous deaths in the face of colonisation as largely inevitable, and looked forward to a better future: of independent government within an imperial network, including the United States. In the colonial process of one people displacing and replacing another, the act of replacement, even when accompanied by concerns for indigenous peoples, could readily inspire extravagant utopian visions. West, in this spirit, imagined a transformation of the known world: ‘The lands conquered by Caesar, those discovered by Columbus, and those explored by Cook, are now joined together in one destiny.’45 Yet neither Lang nor West discussed Aboriginal policy in the context of transportation debates. Usually, that debate proceeded as if Aboriginal people did not exist – most recently arrived colonists had limited direct connection with Aboriginal people, while those who had been in the colony longer, either as immigrants or locally born, had by this time developed a discourse of impending extinction that effectively excluded Aboriginal people from consideration. Usually, the rights being defended were the settlers’ own; despite being English, they said, they were being kept in a state of bondage. One anti-­ transportation work, by Jacob Lackland, stressed how anomalous and disgraceful it was for ‘Englishmen, cradled and reared in liberty’, to have their opinions discounted simply because they lived in Van Diemen’s Land: ‘We have been often conveyed from hand to hand as the property of Others; but consulted? never!’46 Anti-­transportationist leader, John Crookes, a Wesleyan preacher and businessman, said at a meeting in Launceston in 1847 that he could not believe Queen Victoria wished her subjects be ‘kept in a state of bondage’.47 It was too distressing to think of Britain’s ‘almost total oblivion to our rights and privileges as Britons; we more resembled “dogs upon chains” than sentient and responsible beings who knew their rights and were determined to maintain them’.48 Thus the discourse against slavery, which had originally hinged on assertions in racialised contexts of the equal humanity of all peoples, was now adopted to further an anti-­transportation agenda resting on assertions of the unique value of Britishness and an assumption of whiteness. Occasionally, though, questions of Aboriginal rights did intrude, as campaigners considered the impact of transportation on Aboriginal people. Fears for their safety if transportation were to be revived arose from the perception, which lasts until the present day, that frontier violence was mainly the fault of convicts. A petition unanimously adopted at an anti-­transportation meeting in Singleton, north-­west of Sydney, on 21 November 1846, for example,  John West, The History of Tasmania, vol. 2, Launceston: Henry Dowling, 1852, p. 347.  Jacob Lackland, Common Sense: An Enquiry into the Influence of Transportation on the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land, Launceston: Henry Dowling, 1847, pp. 3–4. 47  Cornwall Chronicle, 24 April 1847, p. 3. 48  Ibid., p. 3. 45 46

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predicted that renewed transportation would be ‘speedily followed by the total extermination of the aboriginal race’. Possibly revealing clerical influence, the petitioners suggested that experience had taught them that, so far as prisoners in bondage have been permitted to penetrate the wilds of the interior, the original owners of the soil have perished from the face of the earth; a result naturally to be expected from the fearful contact with men of violent passions and dissolute manners, for the most part confined to celibacy, and incapable, from dispersion, of being held under proper discipline and restraint.49

In Geelong, John Moore Airey (formerly a naval officer, now a settler, and later that year to replace Lang as the Member of the Legislative Council for Port Phillip) expressed a similar view at a protest meeting on 9 March 1847. In addition to the immigrants and the families who would suffer from the introduction of convictism, he said, he was protesting on behalf of ‘the aborigines of the colony who would thereby be exposed to deeds of cruelty and bestiality, from contact with men always reckless of consequences as well as eager for crime’.50 In London, the Aborigines Protection Society expressed similar concerns. Its journal, the Colonial Intelligencer, in November 1849 discussed in some detail the problem of sending convicts to countries inhabited by Aboriginal people. Although it paid far more attention to the Cape Colony than to the Australian colonies, it did note the mass protest against the arrival of the Hashemy in Sydney.51 More generally, the Intelligencer observed that convictism in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land had had ‘pernicious consequences’ for Aboriginal people, in that the actions of convicts had prompted them to ‘wage deadly war against the Settlers in general’; they were continually ‘led astray by the wicked example of designing men’.52 Here the Intelligencer was endorsing a wider discourse that attributed frontier conflict to convict wickedness alone, displacing recognition of the responsibility of the squatters themselves, and failing to recognise the violence of frontiers, as in Western Australia and South Australia, where no convicts were present. Significantly for Aboriginal policy, the transportation controversy revealed how much colonial politics was changing. Pastoralists were beginning to lose their grip on colonial power. While most middle- and working-­class colonists opposed transportation as deleterious to the development of a free, virtuous, and self-­governing society, pastoralists were divided.53 In remote areas such as  SMH, 27 November 1846, p. 2.  SMH, 24 March 1847, p. 2. 51  Colonial Intelligencer, XVIII and XIX, October and November 1849, pp. 275–83, esp. p. 183. 52  Colonial Intelligencer, XVIII and XIX, October and November 1849, pp. 276–7. 53  See Jones, Republicanism and Responsible Government, p. 180. 49 50

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Moreton Bay, where free labour was scarce, pastoralists still wanted convict labour, while in the longer-­established areas, pastoralists were aware of the political benefits of ending transportation, that is, of gaining self-government.54 Not only were they divided, but also they were politically under pressure from the growth in size and influence of middle-­class liberals and radicals, who sought a diversified economy in which small-­scale agriculture and production were valued and large-­scale pastoralism contained and controlled.55 Demands grew in both colonies to ‘unlock the lands’ dominated by pastoralists. Even in the northern districts of New South Wales, where the squatters remained powerful, there were some new political alliances between middle- and working-­ class townspeople, in opposition to the squatters. One of the implications of this shift in colonial politics and the rise of liberalism was that it entailed a critique of squatter land and labour policies. These rising political forces accused the squatters of tying up the land and thus hindering free migration, and of seeking cheap unfree labour that damaged the social fabric of the colony. The anti-­slavery rhetoric that had been important to the Molesworth inquiry ten years earlier now reappeared; the difference was that whereas, in the late 1830s, it had been deployed mainly in Britain, now it was heard most frequently in the colonies themselves. Those of liberal and radical persuasions were especially critical of pastoralists for their pursuit, whatever the social cost, of sources of cheap, unfree labour. The convict system, they argued, was like slavery; the alternative the liberals favoured was a free society composed of a balance of interests, a political system of self-­ government, and, in Chartist-­influenced circles, manhood suffrage. Liberal and radical opposition to coloured indentured labour had a similar foundation, though in this case it also incorporated notions of racial difference and inequality. The indentured labour question had seemed to be at an end when Britain refused in 1842 to allow the importation of Indian ‘coolie’ indentured labour, but in fact it was far from over. First, pastoralists found a loophole in the law that allowed them to introduce ‘coolies’ under the guise of domestic servants; through it, they brought, between 1844 and 1847, more than one hundred labourers from India to work on their stations in the northern districts  During the mid-­1840s, British authorities had sent hundreds of bonded and expiree workers to Moreton Bay, so that by 1846 over half the white men at Moreton Bay and the Darling Downs were transportees, free or bonded, and by 1852 convicts and ticket-of-leave men still comprised about a third of the white male population. Ray Evans, A Concise History of Queensland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p.  61. In 1849, a petition from ‘magistrates and stock-­holders’ of Moreton Bay, Darling Downs, and the Burnett districts sought ticket-of-leave men, though it wanted free emigrants as well; Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development, p. 363. 55  See Ann Curthoys, ‘Liberalism and Exclusionism: A Prehistory of the White Australia Policy’, in Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard, eds., Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2003. 54

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of New South Wales.56 Next, in 1847, entrepreneur Benjamin Boyd brought to New South Wales more than one hundred men under indenture from several Pacific islands, including Tanna and Aneityum in the New Hebrides and Lifu in the Loyalty Islands, hoping to use them as shepherds and labourers on his extensive pastoral runs.57 To his surprise, his actions met with near-­universal opposition. Anti-­pastoralist political opinion, which was on the rise, sought to condemn pastoralists for putting short-­term economic gain over long-­term social considerations, just as it did in the debates over convict transportation. In the Legislative Council, Robert Lowe and Charles Cowper sought an investigation of the legality of Boyd’s operations.58 In his speech in the debate, Lowe drew a parallel between Boyd’s recruitment of islanders and the African slave trade, and went on to oppose all coloured labour such as that from India or China.59 In the judgment of Marion Diamond, Boyd’s biographer, the importation of Pacific Islanders had made Boyd ‘a pariah amongst urban liberals, and embarrassed even his erstwhile associates’.60 Certainly, the case lived long in colonial memory, and colonists would refer to it frequently in debates over questions of race and immigration for years to come.61 Increasingly, in colonial discourse, the presence of a multi-­racial population was associated with a threat to liberty. The Immigration Committee appointed by Council to investigate the importation of Indian and Pacific labour expressed in its report in September 1847 the ‘deepest  See the Report of the Select Committee on Asiatic Labour, 1854, p. 1 in NSWLCVP, 1854, vol. 2. One of those importing Indian labourers was Phillip Friell, who had spent many years in India and now had a property in the Moreton Bay district. In a pamphlet in 1846, he extolled the advantages of Indian labour though he also pointed out the difficulty in enforcing contracts signed overseas under the Master and Servants Act of 1845; P. Friell, The Advantages of Indian Labour in the Australian Colonies, Sydney: Richard Thompson, 1846, discussed in the Moreton Bay Courier, 19 December 1846, p. 2. The relevant Act was ‘An Act to amend and consolidate the Laws between Masters and Servants in New South Wales’, 9 Vic., no. 27, 1845. See also Janet Doust, ‘Setting Up Boundaries in Colonial Australia: Race and Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 35, no. 123, April 2004, p. 159. 57  An Act to amend an Act intitled ‘An Act to amend and consolidate the Laws between Masters and Servants in New South Wales’, 11 Vic., no. 9, 16 August 1847. See Maxine Darnell, ‘Community Interest and Labour Power: A Tale of Squatters, Shepherds and the Law’, in R. Hood and R. Markey, eds., Labour & Community. Proceedings of the 6th National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Wollongong: Department of Economics, University of Wollongong, 1999, pp. 65–70. 58  Marion Diamond, Ben Boyd of Boydtown, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 132. 59  SMH, 2 October 1847, p. 3. 60  Diamond, Ben Boyd of Boydtown, p. 137. 61  The opposition to the introduction of these Pacific Islanders was so strong that when the Masters and Servants Act was amended in August 1847 to make agreements signed elsewhere enforceable in the colony, it explicitly excluded ‘any native of any savage or uncivilized tribe inhabiting any Island or Country in the Pacific Ocean or elsewhere’. Boyd’s plan proved a complete failure, as many of the first arriving group absconded while the contracts of the second group, which arrived after the amendment became law, were unenforceable; Diamond, Ben Boyd of Boydtown, pp. 130–1. 56

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regret and alarm’, since this particular labour trade would ‘expose the colony to all the evils of a mixed and coloured population’. The colony, it said, would be occupied by ‘a semi-­barbarous or savage race, to the prejudice of immigrants from the United Kingdom, and to the injury of the purely British character, which it is so desirable the colony should continue to maintain’.62 The controversy heightened the growing anti-­pastoralist opinion. One letter, signed ‘An Englishman’, in the Courier in 1847 was typical of the opposition, attacking the squatters as feckless, impermanent residents who did not care about the colony’s long-­term prospects as other colonists did. Whereas those regarding the colony as home for themselves and their descendants saw it as a matter of great importance that they ‘preserve the national character in this land of their adoption’, those who did not intend to stay, like the squatters, and were there simply to make a profit, were indifferent ‘whether our future village population is composed of the pure Anglo-­Saxon race, or a mixture of New Caledonians [a reference in colonial debate at this time to Boyd’s Pacific Islanders] and the Coolies of the hills’.63 In fact, squatters shared with their critics a view of Indians and Chinese as inferior to themselves; the difference was that they saw no problem in the inclusion of inferior peoples as labourers in a hierarchical society, or, as they were wont to say, the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Their opponents, however, saw a huge problem. The importation of Indians and Chinese, liberals and radicals argued, would create a permanent ‘lower caste’ in colonial society, and thus undermine its social fabric and opportunities for democracy. While these debates did not refer directly to the question of Aboriginal rights or role in colonial society, they indicate the turn to the belief in the necessity for racial and cultural homogeneity that would underlie Australian political discourse for several generations to come, including in the twentieth century. Pastoralists sought cheap, unfree labour even more persistently in Western Australia, where there was a low rate of free immigration and the non-­ Aboriginal population in 1847 was still less than 5,000.64 While greater use was made there of Aboriginal labour than in the other colonies, pastoralists did not think it sufficient for their needs. As Pamela Statham shows in her detailed study, some pastoralists began campaigning in 1845 for the introduction of convict labour, seeing it as both cheap and plentiful. The acting governors, Clarke and Irwin, and the Legislative Council, however, totally opposed such an idea and looked for alternatives.65 In an unusual step, as this was a government not a private scheme, Irwin arranged for the introduction of twenty

 The Maitland Mercury, 22 September 1847, p. 2.  Moreton Bay Courier, 23 October 1847, p. 3. 64  ABS, Australian Historical Statistics, Table 1.1, www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Details Page/3105.0.65.0012014?OpenDocument, accessed 18 April 2018. 65  Pamela Statham, ‘Why Convicts II: The Decision to Introduce Convicts to Swan River’, in Tom Stannage, ed., Studies in Western Australian History IV: Convictism in Western Australia, Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia, 1981, p. 11. 62 63

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Chinese labourers from Singapore for public works.66 Singapore was a logical source of Chinese labour for Western Australia at this time, with its institutional framework for recruiting and dispatching indentured labourers, its population of unemployed Chinese, and its relative geographical proximity and therefore lower transportation costs to the colony.67 The numbers to be introduced, however, would not solve the labour shortage, and accordingly, in April 1847, pastoralists again asked the Legislative Council to support the introduction of convict labour. Now more pro-­pastoralist in its composition than it had been two years earlier, the Council agreed to explore a range of labour sources, including more Chinese labour from Singapore, indentured juvenile apprentices from Britain’s Parkhurst Prison, support for more free British emigration, as well as a small number of convicts for public works.68 Twenty-­eight more Chinese labourers arrived before the colony learnt that the Colonial Office had reprimanded Council for seeking labour from Singapore, reminding it that the colony should meet its labour needs from Britain. The same Colonial Office dispatch made it clear that it would not support any non-­British labour importation scheme involving the use of British government funds.69 Although the British government opposed the Singapore scheme, it was very interested in the suggestion that Council might approve the addition of Western Australia to the list of convict destinations. Given the situation in Van Diemen’s Land, the government was becoming desperate. It appointed a new pro-­transportation governor, Captain Fitzgerald, who, on his arrival in August 1848, brought with him a despatch from Earl Grey indicating the British government would send ‘exiles’ accompanied by their families if the Council agreed. After a large public meeting on the question in February 1849, Fitzgerald reported to the Colonial Office the general view that the colony would accept the exiles, but only if Britain established the colony as a regular penal settlement involving major expenditure from Britain.70 There was clearly concern about the effects of importing an all-­male convict population; while the colonists opposed the transportation of female convicts, they did want an influx of British and Irish female immigrants to help them achieve a socially

 They arrived in October 1847. See Anne Atkinson, Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia, 1847–1947, PhD thesis, Murdoch, 1991, available at www.researchrepository.murdoch .edu.au/5068/2/Atkinson_phd_1991.pdf, accessed 18 April 2018, p. 22. 67  Atkinson, Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia, p. 53. 68  Statham, ‘Why Convicts II: The Decision to Introduce Convicts to Swan River’, p. 12. Concerning the Parkurst apprentices, see Andrew Gill, Convict Assignment in Western Australia 1842–1851. Maylands, Western Australia: Blatellae Books, 2004. 69  Atkinson, Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia, p. 41; Statham, ‘Why Convicts II: The Decision to Introduce Convicts to Swan River’, p. 13. 70  Statham, ‘Why Convicts II: The Decision to Introduce Convicts to Swan River’, pp. 14–15. 66

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desirable gender balance. The point was, though, that the colony would accept convicts; the first shipload of male convicts arrived in June 1850.71 Settler Discourse on the Place of Aboriginal People in the Colonies’ Future While Western Australia was negotiating a system of convict transportation, the campaign for self-­government in the other colonies intensified. A week after the protest meeting against the arrival of the Hashemy, a public meeting on 18 June 1849 was devoted to the question. Speakers condemned Earl Grey and the Colonial Office; the meeting unanimously passed a resolution that the government of the colony ‘should no longer be administered by the remote, ill-­informed, and irresponsible Colonial Office, but by Ministers chosen from and responsible to the colonists themselves, in accordance with the principles of the British constitution’.72 In moving the resolution, lawyer and rising political figure Archibald Michie said that in seeking responsible government, they were following the views of Lord Durham and Mr Merivale, and the proven example of Canada. Robert Lowe said of the forty-­five dependencies of the British Crown, only Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia had responsible government, and it was clear the British government would never contemplate sending convicts to them. ‘How many hours – how many minutes’, he asked, ‘would this question have been discussed, had responsible government prevailed [?]’ It came down, he said, to a question of whether colonists would any longer bear this domination by the Colonial Office, or whether they would instead govern themselves. Yet for all the anger at British policy, this was not a rebellion against Britain. Even the minority strand of republicanism in the noisy debates leading up to self-­government appealed to the rights of Britons to liberty and freedom.73 Charles Price, a Congregational minister, outlined a very common view of the matter at an anti-­transportation meeting: ‘We still value the British constitution – we still cling to the throne of Britain. (Hear, hear). We still rejoice in Britain’s history and Britain’s glory. We still attach to that constitution which has been pronounced by the ancients as the wisest and the best.’ It was important, however, he continued, to impress upon the British government their strong views on the question of transportation: ‘Let us establish our indisputable claim to an equal participation in civil rights.’74

 Ibid., pp. 16–17.  SMH, 19 June 1849, p. 2. 73  McKenna, The Captive Republic, chaps. 3–5; Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 235; McKenna, ‘Transplanted to Savage Shores’, www.muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_ colonial_history/v013/13.1.mckenna.html, accessed 18 April 2018. 74  Cornwall Chronicle, 30 October 1847, p. 2. 71 72

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In these debates over political rights, Aboriginal people were rarely mentioned, and, when they were, they were generally seen as outside civilised society, undeserving of rights or recognition – the objects of government, not its makers. The idea that they might be political actors within colonial society continued to be treated with scorn. In commenting on British parliamentary debates over New Zealand’s constitution in 1848, for example, in particular the suggestion of including property-­owning Ma¯ori men in the municipal franchise, the Port Phillip Herald asked rhetorically whether such an idea would be imposed upon Port Phillip as well. Naming Aboriginal men who lived around Melbourne, it remarked with incredulity, ‘we shall have King Benbo, Koort Kirrup, Lively, and Billy Lonsdale, recording their votes, at the first election under our new constitution’.75 Rather than potential participants in the colony’s political life, colonists saw Aboriginal people in the longer-­established areas as a weak, defeated people who would soon be extinct, and who posed no military threat. The absence of any sense of threat was important in debates over self-­government, since it meant the colonies did not need to rely on Britain for military support, and thus were free to choose self-­ government or even an independent republic. Robert Lowe, for example, at a large public meeting had mocked the idea that colonists could not attain self-­government lest they lose British military protection. ‘What,’ he asked, ‘did they want a military force for? Was it to be supposed that any insurrection of the blacks could not be put down, any invasion from New Caledonia could not be repelled by their own arms? (Cheers).’76 J. D. Lang also used this argument when, after a period abroad, he re-­entered colonial politics as an elected member for the City of Sydney in June 1850.77 His election campaign, Terry Irving suggests, inaugurated an eighteen-­month period of high levels of political activity, in which radicals feared that transportation could still be revived, and that the new constitution they knew was being prepared in London would serve the interests of a pastoralist oligarchy rather than the people more generally.78 In a series of lectures delivered in 1850, published as The Coming Event, Lang advocated independent republican government for the Australian colonies.79 His was not to be a violent revolution, however, and he  Port Phillip Herald, 20 April 1848. Also Edmund Bohan, To Be A Hero: Sir George Grey, 1812–1898, Auckland: HarperCollins, 1998, p.  102; Raewyn Dalziel, ‘The Politics of Settlement’, in Geoffrey W. Rice, ed., The Oxford History of New Zealand, 2nd ed., Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 91–2; Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland: Penguin, 2003, pp. 197–8; A. C. V. Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development in Australia, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1963, pp. 342, 345. 76  SMH, 19 June 1849, p. 2. 77  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 184. 78  Ibid., p. 187. 79  John Dunmore Lang, The Coming Event; or, the United Provinces of Australia: Two Lectures Delivered in the City Theatre and School of Arts, Sydney, Sydney: D. L. Welch, 1850. Discussed by Jessie Mitchell, ‘Are we in danger of a hostile visit from the Aborigines? Dispossession and 75

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opposed the suggestion of one of his supporters, Dr Aaron, that perhaps ‘every freeman had the right to keep arms in his house for his own defence’.80 These colonies, Lang argued, faced no military threats from Asia, South America, Europe, or the United States, and they faced no internal threat particularly from the Aboriginal peoples they were displacing. If British military and naval forces were removed, they would still be safe. Lang played for a laugh the very idea of an Aboriginal invasion.81 ‘Now, who,’ he asked, ‘are the enemies we should have to apprehend in such a case? Are we in danger of a hostile visit from the Aborigines? (immense laughter).’82 In Van Diemen’s Land, too, where the discourse of inevitable disappearance was strongest, advocates of self-­government sometimes argued that Aboriginal people’s imminent disappearance strengthened their case. With the demise of Aboriginal people, they suggested, the colonies would have no lasting divisions of race to make self-­government impracticable or unwise. The (Hobart) Courier, for example, in 1850 held up the Australian colonies as an example of civilised communities ready to govern themselves. The writer agreed that responsible government with popular suffrage would not be possible for all British colonies; in some, the social and racial divisions were so great that it would be impossible. It would be unworkable and dangerous for ‘the Irish peasant, or the emancipated negro’; it would cause racial chaos in India and the Cape, and induce former slaves and slave-­owners to turn on each other in Guiana (in South America). The Australian colonies, then, provided to the world a utopian example of admirable homogeneity. In Australia and its group ... self-­government really does mean something. Here, it is feasible, expedient, inevitable. There is no native race in its way; no slaves, no planters, no Orange or ascendency men! no family compact, no Dutch, no French – nothing but a multitude of industrious and enterprising Englishmen ...83

In a passage that also ignored non-­British migrants, here was a chilling ­erasure indeed of Indigenous people. The Australian Colonies Government Act, 1850 Both the anti-­transportation and self-­ government campaigns were eventually to prove successful. In view of the intensity and breadth of colonial and the rise of self-­government in New South Wales’ Australian Historical Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2010, p. 304. 80  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, p. 187. 81  Mitchell, ‘Are We in Danger of a Hostile Visit’, p. 304. 82  Lang, The Coming Event, p. 31. 83  Courier (Hobart), 11 May 1850, p. 4.

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metropolitan opposition, in November 1849 Grey agreed to abandon plans to resume transportation to New South Wales, though it would be another threeand-a-half years before it ended to Van Diemen’s Land.84 There was progress in relation to self-­government, too, though too little and too slowly for its more enthusiastic advocates. On 8 February 1850, Prime Minister Lord John Russell gave a speech in parliament on the principles governing colonial policy in general. He supported the idea of self-­government in general terms, announced that the government would develop new constitutions for a range of colonies, and intimated that the government would soon introduce an Australian Colonies Government Bill. ‘As a general rule,’ he remarked, we cannot do better than refer to those maxims of policy by which our ancestors were guided upon this subject. It appears to me, that in providing that wherever Englishmen went, they should enjoy English freedom, and have English institutions, they acted justly and wisely. They adopted a course which was calculated to promote a harmonious feeling between the mother country and the colonies, and which enabled those who went out to these distant possessions to sow the seeds of communities of which England may always be proud.85

In the ensuing debate on colonial policy, Colonel Thomas Perronet Thompson, an advocate of parliamentary reform and previously one of the Philosophical Radicals associated with Molesworth, asked whether, in the proposed new colonial constitutions, there would be any provision ‘for admitting the aborigines and their descendants to the full enjoyment of political privileges, on their complying with reasonable conditions?’ If, for example, the New Zealander conformed to ‘the rules and habits of English society . . . was the way open to him to the privileges of a “true-­born Englishman”?’ (Thompson would later become an articulate critic of Whig government treatment of the aboriginal inhabitants of both Jamaica and New Zealand.)86 Benjamin Hawes, as Under-­ Secretary of State for the Colonies, replied that he ‘had satisfaction in stating, that under British rule aborigines were entitled to every privilege of British-­born subjects’, adding that they were in fact British subjects ‘whenever they complied with provisions made and provided’.87 This was a brief and unsatisfactory exchange indeed, which to the modern observer raises more questions than it answers, since British subjecthood was not usually thought to be dependent on behaviour, but was rather something granted unconditionally by the Crown.88  Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development, p. 364.  Hansard, 8 February 1850, vol. 108, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1850/ feb/08/colonial-policy, accessed 18 April 2018. 86  Hull University Archives introductory notes to Thompson papers, referring to item DTH/3/29. Accessed 29 October 2015 at www.hull.ac.uk/arc/downloads/DTHcatalogue.pdf. 87  Hansard, 8 February 1850, vol. 108, pp. 567–611. 88  See Michael J. Turner, ‘“Raising Up Dark Englishmen”: Thomas Perronet Thompson, Colonies, Race, and the Indian Mutiny’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005, https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/article/181828, accessed 18 April 2018. 84 85

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Three days later, on 11 February 1850, the government introduced the promised Bill concerning the government of the Australian colonies.89 It replaced an earlier Bill that Earl Grey had introduced in the previous parliamentary session.90 The Bill proposed separating Port Phillip from New South Wales to form the new colony of Victoria, extending partial representative government to South Australia and Van Diemen’s Land (and to Western Australia when it was prepared to pay for its own government) and leaving it to the colonies themselves to propose new constitutions. It also included a provision to create a federal assembly to which colonies could choose to belong, and, most significantly, to transfer to this assembly powers over Crown lands and Crown land revenues. There was no mention of Aboriginal policy in the Bill, and there would be none in the parliamentary debates concerning it, save a passing reference by Earl Grey to the 1846 Waste Lands Act (discussed in Chapter 7) which had made provision for the creation of Aboriginal reserves.91 Nor had there been any discussion of Aboriginal issues in the Colonial Office papers concerning preparations for the Bill, though there was considerable discussion of other matters, including religion, land, and emigration. Yet if there was little parliamentary discussion of the question of Aboriginal policy under the proposed extension of representative government, outside parliament the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) was deeply concerned. It had long considered that Aboriginal policy ought to remain an imperial matter; now, it seemed, the government was extending the system of representative government and making moves towards a more thorough form of self-­ government without guaranteeing to retain imperial control over Aboriginal policy. The society kept a close eye on all the legislation and arrangements for self-­government, and had a few years earlier expressed concern over the limited recognition of indigenous rights in the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1846.92 The Colonial Intelligencer had commented then that the Act would place power in the hands of those who posed most danger to Ma¯ ori, that is, the settlers. Ma¯ ori leaders, it insisted, should sit in parliament, be co-­magistrates with Europeans, police superintendents, customs officers, and other government positions.93 Although pleased to note in its annual report for 1847 that  Hansard, 11 February 1850, vol. 108. The second reading was on 18 February 1850, HC Deb, 18 February 1850, vol. 108, pp. 976–1020. 90  Grey had introduced the Bill on the very same day, 11 June 1849, as colonists in Sydney were vociferously demanding an end to transportation and the need for self-­government at the Hashemy protest meeting. The parliamentary session had ended before the Bill could be debated, and now Russell was reintroducing it. 91  Earl Grey, speech in House of Lords, Hansard, 31 May 1850, p. 504. HL Deb, 31 May 1850, vol. 111, pp. 497–528. 92  Raymond M. Cooke, ‘British Evangelicals and the Issue of Colonial Self-Government’ Pacific Historical Review, vol. 34, 1965, p. 128. 93  Cooke, ‘British Evangelicals’, p. 133. 89

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the New Zealand Constitution Act had subsequently been suspended (in part, because it undermined the direct connection between Ma¯ ori and the governor), the APS remained concerned that with a less sympathetic governor, further injustices might occur.94 Similarly, in the Province of Canada, where the establishment of a form of responsible government in 1847 had not involved legislation, the British government had retained direct control of the Indian departments in the hands of the governor-general.95 Governor Elgin continued energetically to develop and implement the new British policy of encouraging indigenous amalgamation and individual self-­reliance, thus minimising government expenditure.96 Thus, in both Canada and New Zealand, indigenous policy remained, for the time being at least, an imperial matter. The Australian Government Bill, however, did not address the question of who would control Aboriginal policy and made no reference to Aboriginal rights, protection, or welfare. Deeply concerned, the APS sent a delegation on 20 March 1850 to meet the prime minister in Downing Street.97 Samuel Gurney, as president, led the delegation, and its membership of nine included its secretary, Thomas Hodgkin. In the address it now presented to the prime minister, the society expressed concern that the government’s plans to increase representative government and provide for further moves towards self-­government did not sufficiently recognise Aboriginal rights or provide for Aboriginal protection. The principle of ‘the recognition of perfect equality and full participation in all civil rights, with reference to race, country, or religion’ was such an important one that it needed to be guaranteed in the new constitutions before the British Government transferred any more power to the colonists as it could do nothing afterwards.98 As the address put it, the Bill needed additional clauses in order to secure ‘just and equal rights to the Aborigines before the power to do so has been surrendered’.99 There had been no provision in the draft Bill, the address pointed out, ‘for imparting to the Natives the privileges enjoyed by British subjects’.100 The  The Colonial Intelligencer, vol. II, no.  1, May 1848, p.  11. The APS had also thought the proposed constitution for the Cape Colony was inadequate in failing to provide for native participation in colonial government. See Cooke, ‘British Evangelicals’, p. 136.     95  David T. McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy in the Mid-­Nineteenth Century’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1981, pp. 277–302, see especially pp. 278, 285; Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986, p. 1.     96  Milloy, The Era of Civilization, p. 256. Bumsted, ‘The Consolidation of British North America’, p. 57. Evans et al., Equal Subjects and Unequal Rights, 51.     97  ‘Australian Government Bill. Address to Lord John Russell’, Colonial Intelligencer, series 2, no. 24, pp. 403–9.     98  Ibid., p. 408.     99  Ibid. 100  Ibid., p. 403.This address has also been discussed in Cooke, ‘British Evangelicals’; Evans et al.,Equal Subjects and Unequal Rights, pp. 66–8; and Ann Curthoys, ‘“The Lying Name of Government”:     94

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g­ overnment’s task should be to ensure that ‘the distinctions of colour and race may no longer operate against them’, and in some instances that they possessed ‘an adequate portion of the land of which they once had the undisputed possession’.101 The address mentioned important related matters, such as ensuring the admission in all colonies of Aboriginal evidence in court, the provision of defence counsel for Aboriginal defendants, reserves of land for Aboriginal use and for missionary enterprise, schools, and farms, and a threefold increase in expenditure to make these measures possible. Most radically, it suggested that colonists’ ‘local privileges’ (perhaps meaning self-­government), should be dependent on ‘the amount [i.e., the survival] of the native population’.102 The APS’s key point was that any government feeling of goodwill towards Aboriginal people, if it were to mean anything, ought not to be implicit, but ought to be translated into law. It was not enough, furthermore, to say, as the under-­secretary of state for the colonies had done, that as British subjects, Aboriginal subjects would ‘qualify for the franchise equally with others’, for they were everywhere subject to special conditions which incapacitated them from using these theoretical rights.103 One only had to look, it said, at the ongoing denial of political participation in a number of colonies to see what could happen. Not only were political rights limited in the Province of Canada, but in the Cape Colony, too, there was a danger that self-­governing settlers would exclude the native tribes from political influence. Even in New Zealand, where there were greater guarantees in place for Ma¯ ori, the requirement that they be able to read and write in English in order to vote in practice excluded them. Despite its concern for Indigenous protection, this APS address was not a ringing endorsement of its faith in or respect for Australian Indigenous people. The proposed constitutions, it said, should contain safeguards for Indigenous peoples, whatever their character or quality. It did not necessarily disagree with the general view that Australian Aboriginal people were a ‘degraded and hopeless  . . . portion of the human family’; rather, it saw their ‘feebleness’ as the basis of their claim to paternal care.104 None of the APS suggestions were incorporated into the Bill. On the issue of political representation, Under-­Secretary Hawes assured the APS, as he had the House of Commons, that Aboriginal people were British subjects and therefore qualified for the franchise on an equal basis with others.105 In the following months, the Bill was further debated and amended, removing the provision, Empire, Mobility and Political Rights’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, New York: Routledge, 2014, pp. 79–82.  ‘Australian Government Bill. Address to Lord John Russell’, pp. 403, 405. 102  Ibid., p. 409. 103  Ibid., p. 405. 104  Ibid., p. 408. 105  Colonial Intelligencer, series 2, no. 24, 1850, p. 405. 101

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unpopular in the colonies, for an intercolonial assembly, but, most importantly, retaining imperial government control over land policy. Its main effect was to separate the Port Phillip District from New South Wales to form the new colony of Victoria, and to extend the system of limited representative government to South Australia, Van Diemen’s Land, and Victoria.106 In addition, the franchise for the elected members of the Legislative Councils was generous enough to weaken the hold of conservatives and provide a pathway for the growing liberal and democratic spirit in the colonies to find expression and influence. The Act embodied the idea, first suggested by Secretary of State Earl Grey two years earlier, that the best and simplest way to proceed would be for each colony, excepting Western Australia, to propose its own new constitution. As far as Western Australia was concerned, it provided that when colonists in that colony themselves sought representative government and agreed to pay its costs, it would be granted. In its amended form, the Act received Royal assent on 5 August 1850.107 Outside Victoria, where the news of separation was joyously received, colonists met the 1850 Act with mixed feelings. In New South Wales, it seemed the Act had changed little; in particular, the control of land policy and land revenue remained under imperial control. Outraged, the Legislative Council in May 1851 passed a ‘Declaration and Remonstrance’, proposed by Wentworth, against the 1850 Act, seeking greater powers for the Council, including control over colonial revenue and the civil list, and especially over Crown lands.108 Yet in one important respect, as both John Hirst and Peter Cochrane have pointed out, the Act was revolutionary: it significantly expanded male suffrage by lowering property requirements and including those who rented dwellings at £10 per annum or more.109 Radicals and liberals were accordingly delighted, as their electoral base was now considerably expanded; importantly, the change led them to be more interested in responsible government than ever before. With an extended franchise, the Council had the potential to become truly representative of the people, and, if so, an extension of its powers would be most welcome.110 What pleased the liberals and radicals, however, alarmed the conservatives. Though they could do nothing about the extension of the suffrage,

 On Herman Merivale’s suggestion, it also allowed that the Crown could in future detach from New South Wales any territory to the north of the thirtieth parallel; Avril Harvey, ‘Herman Merivale, the Colonial Office, and the Australian Colonies, 1848–1860’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 60, pt. 2, June 1974, p. 100. 107  Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies, pp. 109–15. 108  Andrew Tink, William Charles Wentworth; Australia’s Greatest Native Son, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009, pp. 219–21. 109  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p.  256; Hirst, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy, pp. 25–6. 110  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 257; Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, pp. 189–90.

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they set about limiting the damage by passing new Electoral Acts that distributed seats to their advantage.111 In the new colony of Victoria, the Act represented local independence. Interestingly, Aboriginal people were included in the joyous celebrations. In the town of Geelong, the Wadawurrung received their blankets and marched in the celebratory parade looking, in the words of the Argus, ‘as dignified and important as if they de facto possessed that soil which they proudly walked over’.112 In Melbourne, the Native Mounted Police led the parade, accompanying the chief constable and grand marshall. Settlers seemed to value the police presence as a symbol of the defence of colonists’ property, and as a counterpoint to the usual image of Indigenous people as ‘savage’, deserving paternalistic pity. As the Argus commented, A native policeman celebrating the freedom of Victoria in the character of a protector of the life and property of its white inhabitants! A volume might be written on this text. Even the few aborigines who loitered round the city seemed deeply impressed with the importance of the occasion ...113

Indigenous people were also represented in a display for the occasion in which the new colony of Victoria was represented by a throned female figure supported by her protector, Britannia, and surrounded by rejoicing settlers. On the right hand side of the display, the Argus reported, an Aboriginal figure ‘is on the ground, and some missionaries are endeavouring to raise him, and instructing him in the way to rise from his uncivilised position. Behind them are some of the black police in their uniforms’.114 The two ways settlers ‘knew’ Indigenous people, through civilising and policing projects, thus sat uneasily together in settler consciousness of the future of their new colony. This ambivalence would soon have a major impact on Indigenous people’s lives, since the 1850 Act, though few noted it at the time, had set the stage for a complete handover of Aboriginal policy from imperial centre to colonial legislatures.

 In New South Wales, Victoria, and Van Diemen’s Land, electoral acts over-­represented pastoral and agricultural areas in the distribution of seats. See Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, pp. 258–9; Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age, pp. 13–14; Townsley, Tasmania: From Colony to Statehood, pp. 45–6. 112  Argus, 22 November 1850, p. 2. 113  Argus, 19 November 1850, p. 1. 114  Ibid. 111

7

‘No Place for the Sole of Their Feet’ Imperial-Colonial Dialogue on Aboriginal Land Rights, 1846–1851

In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the British authorities – government ministers and the Colonial Office – made a strenuous last attempt to implement the Evangelical-­inspired protection and civilisation policy they had instituted in 1838. Although cautiously supporting the moves towards self-­government, Earl Grey as Secretary of State for the Colonies, along with the Colonial Office, was apprehensive as to its likely effects on Indigenous people. While the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) had gained no government support for its view that the Australian Colonies Government Act should include measures to ensure Aboriginal protection and welfare, Earl Grey and the Colonial Office now sought to institute Aboriginal policies that would survive the transfer of power from Britain to the colonies. Some of their attempts failed in the face of stern colonial opposition, some were successful, and one succeeded but with consequences very different from those the British authorities had intended. Surprisingly, perhaps, the changes made in the last days of direct British rule on Aboriginal matters did impose some constraints on the freedom of the newly empowered colonial authorities to manage Aboriginal policy just as they chose. Britain’s Aboriginal policy in these crucial transitional years has been of particular interest to historians and legal scholars since Henry Reynolds drew attention to it in his influential book, The Law of the Land (1987), and in subsequent essays.1 The nature of the policy, and the intentions of its framers, were important in the Mabo case ending in 1992, and the Wik case, ending in 1996.2 The historical issues were addressed in the High Court judgments in both cases, and there has been extensive legal commentary since.3 Several  Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 1987; Henry Reynolds, ‘The Mabo Judgment in the Light of Imperial Land Policy’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, vol. 16, 1993, pp. 27–44; Reynolds and Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases’, pp. 315–77. 2  Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1; Wik Peoples v. Queensland (1996) 141 ALR 129. 3  J. Fulcher, ‘Sui Generis History: The Use of History in Wik’, in G. Hiley, ed., The Wik Case: Issues and Implications, Sydney: Butterworths, 1997, pp. 51–6; Frank Brennan, The Wik Debate: Its Impact on Aborigines, Pastoralists and Miners, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1998. See Curthoys et al., Rights and Redemption, pp. 48–54. 1

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other historians, including Heather Goodall and Anne O’Brien, have also noted the importance of British Aboriginal policy in this period.4 In this chapter, we explore the effects of imperial-­colonial interactions on Aboriginal policy during this time of transition. We will consider Henry Reynolds’ argument that ‘prior to the granting of responsible government to the Australian colonies in 1856, the Colonial Office attempted to provide compensation and protection for the Aborigines’ and that ‘these policies continued to have relevance throughout the colonial period and beyond’, especially in relation to Aboriginal access to lands under pastoral lease.5 British policy in this transitional period is further illuminated by a contrast with policy in Western Australia, a Crown colony which was not moving towards self-­government, and whose Aboriginal policy had certain distinctive features. The Reality of Population Decline and the Idea of Extinction In the late 1840s and early 1850s, as the pastoral rush continued, the Australian colonies continued to be the scene of frontier violence. On the east coast, frontier conflict was moving north and west. It was long over in Van Diemen’s Land, and had passed its peak in Port Phillip around 1845, though outbreaks continued until 1851.6 In South Australia, frontier violence was occurring on the west coast, especially around Port Lincoln, as pastoralism spread.7 In the northern districts of New South Wales, conflict centred on Maranoa (500 km west of Brisbane), and the Burnett and Dawson districts north of Brisbane.8 The conflict at Maranoa was especially bloody. As R. H. W. Reece points out, the area was full of settlers from the Liverpool Plains, that scene of so much bloodshed in the late 1830s; settlers who had learned how to repel Aboriginal resistance without attracting attention. ‘Among the white settlers,’ he writes, ‘there was a conspiracy of silence. The lessons of the Myall Creek murderers’ trials in late 1838 had been well learned: no white man would swing again for killing blacks.’9 The Myall Creek trials were still well remembered, and frequently referred to in debates over Aboriginal policy. On 10 May 1852, the  Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 44–56; Anne O’Brien, Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 58–9. 5  Reynolds, ‘The Mabo Judgment’, p. 28. 6  Frances Thiele, ‘Superintendent La Trobe and the Amenability of Aboriginal People to British Law 1839–1846’, Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria, no. 8, September 2009, www.prov.vic.gov.au/publications/provenance/provenance2009/superintendent-la-trobe, accessed 14 April 2018. 7  Foster and Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 84–5. 8  Patrick Collins, Goodbye Bussamarai: The Mandandanji Land War, Southern Queensland, 1842–1852, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002. 9  R. H. W. Reece, ‘Our Killing Fields’, Eureka Street, 24 June 2006, accessed 13 November 2015, www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=1151#.VkVZgjHotPY. 4

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Empire leader, titled ‘The Murdered Blacks’ and commenting on events in the northern districts, drew attention to how the Myall Creek convictions had made subsequent killings more secret. ‘A species of refined Thuggism has sprung up,’ it read, ‘secret, implex [complex], and impenetrable.’10 In areas where frontier violence continued or was still in recent memory, settlers regarded Indigenous people as savage foes. The fear and hatred characteristic of the frontier counteracted to some extent the complacency embedded in the notion that Indigenous people were doomed to extinction. In the cities and towns, however, and in those rural areas where the violent frontier phase had passed, Aboriginal depopulation was clearly evident and generally seen as inevitable. The idea of extinction had appeared as early as the 1820s, and by the late 1840s had become a commonplace belief, expressed in numerous travel books, emigrant guides, and public speeches reported in newspapers.11 Even former missionary, Lancelot Threlkeld, recalled Awabakal life at Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, in 1850 in an elegiac manner that was becoming a key part of colonial popular culture. ‘[T]he once numerous actors,’ he wrote, ‘who used to cause the woods to echo with their din, now lie mingled with the dust, save some few solitary beings who here and there still stalk abroad, soon, like their ancestors, to become “a tale that is told”.’12 Missions – Endings and Beginnings The belief that Aboriginal people were ‘unable to be improved’ was also profoundly embedded in settler colonial thinking by mid-­century. Missionary endeavour was widely regarded as having been a failure, leading to the generally agreed view that it was unwise to attempt again to educate, ‘civilise’, or convert Aboriginal people. There was simply nothing further that could be done. This idea was a product partly of the circulation of ideas concerning race emanating from imperial projects more generally, and partly of settlers’ own experiences of taking the land and wishing to justify that process. These were not universal ideas, and could be countered by those who admired Indigenous people in certain ways, but they were increasingly powerful in public discourse in this period, while the evangelical humanitarian views were losing ground.  Empire, 10 May 1852, p. 2.  For a discussion of its expression in George French Angas, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1847, see Catherine Hall, ‘The Slave-­Owner and the Settler’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, New York: Routledge, 2014, p.  43. See also Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 123–35. 12  L. E. Threlkeld, ‘A Key to the Structure of the Aboriginal Language [1850]’, in L. E. Threlkeld, An Australian Language as Spoken by the Awabakal, the People of Awaba or Lake Macquarie, John Fraser, ed., Sydney: Government Printer, 1892, p. 89. 10 11

‘No Place for the Sole of Their Feet’ 183

For Britain, Catherine Hall identifies a ‘shift from the ascendancy of abolitionist humanitarian discourse to a harsher version of stadial theory (envisioning the civilizational process as glacially slow)’.13 In the colonies, the abolitionist humanitarian discourse had never been ascendant, but the general direction of the shift was similar. There, too, the evangelical humanitarian voice was weakening, and the view that humanity was composed of racially superior and inferior peoples was gaining ground. This was not yet the fully articulated racial science that came to the fore several decades later; instead, there was a range of ways to express the idea of superior and inferior peoples. A common formulation was the idea of the great chain of being, placing Australian Indigenous people at the very bottom of the scale of humanity. Imperial and colonial discourse constructed Indigenous people as living in a state of nature, as without restraint, governed by passions rather than reason. Sir Thomas Mitchell, for example, in a major speech on ‘the Arts and Sciences’ in Sydney on 21 May 1851 asserted that Aboriginal people had no art or civilisation, and it was only through art that a people could assert its permanence in any country. Through art, the ‘Anglo-­Saxon race’ could ‘make the country of its adoption more emphatically its own, than any country could be to even aboriginal inhabitants’.14 This sense of failure to civilise and Christianise Aboriginal people reached its height at a critical juncture in Australian colonial political history. As Henry Reynolds demonstrates, in both metropole and colony through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it was not the liberals, radicals, and democrats but rather the missionaries and their supporters who most supported Aboriginal rights.15 With the protectorate in danger of closure and missions at a low point, support for Aboriginal rights was especially weak at the very time that colonists and British authorities were entering into serious debate on the future forms of colonial governance. Everywhere, it seemed, missions had closed or would soon do so. In New South Wales, there was little missionary activity of any kind, with the older missions in Wellington Valley and Lake Macquarie having already ended. In the northern districts, the Catholic mission at Stradbroke Island, begun in 1843, had already closed by 1847, while the German mission at Zion Hill near Brisbane ended in 1848.16 In Port Phillip, the missionaries at the Methodist mission at Buntingdale thought of quitting as early as 1842, owing to low numbers at the station, but the residents objected, seeing it as a form of protection  Catherine Hall, ‘Gendering Property, Racing Capital’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 78, no. 1, 2014, p. 26. 14  Empire, 27 May 1851, p. 2. 15  Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts. 16  Regina Ganter, German Missionaries in Australia Website, Griffith University, www.missionaries .griffith.edu.au/, accessed 14 April 2018. 13

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against both the settlers and their traditional enemies. They called a large meeting to discuss the matter, and missionary Francis Tuckfield wrote: On this very interesting occasion the Natives particularly complained of the want of protection. Intimating that as the white men had killed some of their fighting men, the great Governor ought to send them the Police to protect them from the violence and revengeful attacks of those [neighbouring] tribes.17

The missionaries decided to continue, and struggled on until near the end of the decade; Buntingdale finally closed in 1848. The Merri Creek School, established in 1841 near Melbourne, lasted until 1851.18 A Moravian mission established in 1851 at Lake Boga, near Swan Hill on the Murray River, lasted only five years; with the gold rushes cutting a swathe through the Lake Boga region, and after making no Aboriginal converts, the missionaries went home in despair in 1856.19 By the late 1840s, the Lutheran missions established in 1838 in Adelaide and in 1840 in Encounter Bay and Port Lincoln had also ceased.20 Similarly, in Western Australia, few schools and missions for Aboriginal people were viable in the late 1840s. John Smithies’ Methodist institution moved 25 km north from Perth to Wanneroo in 1845 to avoid the consequences of intensive settlement, but after being almost wiped out by severe floods in 1847, moved again in 1851, this time inland, to a site 100 km east of Perth.21 George King’s Fremantle School, founded in 1842, was also still operating in the late 1840s, but only just; it, too, ended in 1851.22 In addition, the Aboriginal Prison on Rottnest Island, 22 km off the coast near Perth, which had begun in 1838 with some missionary and ‘improvement’ ideas alongside those of punishment and isolation, had by the mid-­1840s been transformed into something else entirely. It was now purely a prison, and a particularly harsh one at that. In 1842 and again in 1846, Protector Charles Symmons conducted inquiries into Superintendent Henry Vincent’s alleged  Francis Tuckfield, Report on the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society’s Mission to the Aborigines of the Sub District of Geelong, Port Phillip, August 1843, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Archive: Australasia 1812–1889 (WMMS), Mp2107 (Record ID: 133095), reel 2, National Library of Australia (NLA). 18  Ian D. Clark and Toby Heydon, A Bend in the Yarra: A History of the Merri Creek Protectorate Station and Merri Creek Aboriginal School 1841–1851, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004. 19  Jane Lydon, Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission, Lanham: Altamira Press, 2009, p. 89. 20  Ganter, German Missionaries in Australia. 21  Hasluck, Black Australians, pp.  60, 89–92, 134–43. Neville Green, ‘Aborigines and White Settlers’, in Tom Stannage, A New History of Western Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1981, p. 90. 22  Mitchell, In Good Faith, p. 181. 17

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mistreatment of prisoners, but he was a friend and ally of Vincent’s and in both cases dismissed the charges.23 With Aboriginal labourers desperately wanted for government works in 1847, Acting Governor Major F. C. Irwin recalled most of the prisoners from the island and put them to work on road gangs in Perth and Fremantle.24 The following year, Governor Fitzgerald decided to turn Rottnest Island into an exclusive summer retreat for his own use, and in July 1849 he closed Rottnest prison and transferred the remaining prisoners to Perth to assist with public works.25 It would remain closed as a prison for another six years. The original missionary and ‘improvement’ aspects of the project were entirely forgotten. Yet it was not all a question of failure and endings. There were two initiatives at this time that were to have long-­term effects. In South Australia in 1850, Anglican Archdeacon Matthew Hale established a Native Training Institution at Poonindie near Port Lincoln, several hundred kilometres to the west of Adelaide. The mission, which endured in various forms until 1894, began as an experiment, taking only young people raised in mission schools, such as the relatively successful Adelaide School for Aborigines. It was established with government support in the form of a land grant but Hale also used his own private funds.26 The people Hale brought with him to the new mission had already left their ancestral country in the southern districts  – Eyre Peninsula, Port Augusta, Yorke Peninsula, Adelaide, and the River Murray; being young, they may have felt less attached to the old ways, and, at a time of dispossession and poverty, they had few other options.27 In Western Australia, the most successful mission of all was just beginning. Unlike the other missions thus far, it was a Catholic mission. In a letter in 1847 to Cardinal Franzoni, in the Vatican, Sydney’s Archbishop John Bede Polding offered an astute analysis of why the missions had so far been unable to achieve conversions. These poor people, who have lost their native land to the invaders who destroy and scatter their crops and animals, sometimes especially in winter, driven by hunger, attempt to retaliate against the Europeans. This results in bloody conflicts which the negroes

 Neville Green and Susan Moon, Far from Home, Aboriginal prisoners at Rottnest Island 1838– 1931, Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1997, p. 21. 24  Green, ‘Aborigines and White Settlers’, p. 93. 25  Ibid. 26  Peggy Brock, ‘Writing Aboriginal Collective Biography: Poonindie, South Australia, 1850/1894. History of an Aboriginal Mission’, Aboriginal History, vol. 11, nos. 1–2, 1987, pp. 117–20. 27  Peggy Brock, Outback Ghettos: Aborigines, Institutionalisation and Survival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 37, 39, 43. 23

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always lose and this is the source of their hatred towards the whites and consequent reticence in embracing religion.28

In the same letter, Polding announced that the Catholic Church would adopt a different approach: ‘to build monasteries in different places which will become centres of civilisation’. The key issue seems to have been the scale of the enterprise: where Protestant missionary societies established missions with few missionaries and limited supporting staff, Catholic missions would be on a large scale, and would ‘establish other subordinate stations as is deemed necessary’.29 Accordingly, at New Norcia, 132 km to the north of Perth, a Benedictine Catholic mission began operations in April 1847 with support from the Propaganda College in Rome. This was to prove one of the most successful ventures of all in terms of missionary and welfare activity for Aboriginal people and for inculcating workforce skills. It would take a few more years, however, to make the project viable and secure. By January 1849, the mission had already suspended operations while its leader, Father Salvado, went overseas seeking financial support and recruiting missionaries. Salvado returned four years later, in 1853, with a further three priests and thirty-­seven lay brothers, who together provided the foundation for longer-­term success.30 The mission would last under various guises until the 1970s. A Resurgence of Humanitarianism: Earl Grey, the Colonial Office, and Aboriginal Policy Earl Grey, as Secretary of State for the Colonies from July 1846, faced a challenging task if he wanted to make a difference to colonial policy affecting Aboriginal people in Australia. There were major policy issues to confront wherever he looked  – the long-­standing question of Aboriginal evidence, Aboriginal access to land, provision of education, medical assistance, rations, and blankets, and above all approaches to policing, punishment, and the law. While aspects of his policy have undergone intense scrutiny  – from historians such as Henry Reynolds, from the courts, and from legal scholars – the imperial historians such as John M. Ward who have studied his career in depth  Archbishop John Bede Polding to Cardinal Franzoni, ‘Report on the Mission in Australia to 1846’, Oceania, vol.  3, leaves 16–17, Propaganda Fide Archives, Vatican City, Rome. Our thanks to Mark McKenna for alerting us to this source and providing a copy of the translation in Rolando Pizzini, ‘Angelo Confalonieri in Australia’, in Stefano Girola and Rolando Pizzini, eds., Nagoyo: The Life of don Angelo Confalonieri Among the Aborigines of Australia, Trento, Italy: Fondazione Museostorico del Trentino, 2013, pp. 39–68, esp. pp. 48–51. 29  Polding to Franzoni, ‘Report on the Mission in Australia to 1846’, leaf 13. 30  See John T. McMahon, Bishop Salvado: Founder of New Norcia, Perth: Patersons Printing Press, 1943; George Russo, Lord Abbott of the Wilderness: The Life and Times of Bishop Salvado, Melbourne: Polding Press, 1980. 28

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rarely considered his approach to Aboriginal protection and policy.31 Grey’s own history of colonial policy during his period as Secretary of State is not especially helpful here, ignoring as it does his Aboriginal land policy altogether.32 Grey is an interesting and complex figure; although he was not close to the Aborigines Protection Society, he was influenced by humanitarian thinking and policy ideas.33 As noted in Chapter  2, he had, in July 1835, as Under Secretary for the Colonies, insisted to the South Australian colonisation commissioners that they adopt measures to avoid the kind of destruction that had happened in Van Diemen’s Land.34 Now, a decade later, he was in charge of colonial policy. Canadian historian Robin Fisher is right to describe Grey’s period as Secretary of State for the Colonies as one in which the humanitarians experienced a ‘resurgence of official influence’ after a loss of direction and impact in the early and mid-1840s.35 Perhaps the most important aspect of Aboriginal policy at this time was the question of Aboriginal access to pastoral and other land once violent conflict was over. While practice varied across the country, in general Aboriginal people in settled but not fenced-­in or built-­up areas could still access their traditional lands for food and ceremony. In such areas, they were not slow to make their desire for land known to settlers. In 1843, the Woiworrung leader Billibellary, who had greeted explorer and pastoralist, John Batman in 1835 and made repeated attempts to negotiate with the new order, told Protector William Thomas that his people were too miserable to survive as they were, but ‘if Yarra black fellows had a country on the Yarra that they would stop on it and cultivate the ground.’ Even the people who survived by begging around Melbourne told Thomas ‘give us all land in our own country and we live like Whites’.36 The access they did have, however, was potentially threatened by the Sale of Waste Lands Amendment Act of August 1846 (endorsed by the Order in Council in March 1847), which in response to squatter demand created a system of pastoral leases. Unlike its predecessor, the Waste Lands Act of 1842, the 1846 Act did not expressly provide for the creation of Aboriginal reserves. Without any provision for Aboriginal access to land, it had the potential to

 John M. Ward, Earl Grey and the Australian Colonies, 1846–1857, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1951.  H. G. Grey, The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, vols. 1–2, London: R. Bentley, 1853. 33  James Heartfield, The Aborigines Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1837–1909, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 107–13, 132–6. 34  Reynolds, Law of the Land, p. 99. See also Foster and Paul, ‘Married to the Land’ p. 52. 35  Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian European Relations in British Columbia, 1774– 1890, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992 [1977], p. 86. 36  William Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 1 December 1843, PROV VPRS4410 unit 3, 1843/78 (reel 2). 31

32

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cast Aboriginal people as trespassers on leased pastoral land, destroying their opportunities to gain food and shelter by traditional means. As Henry Reynolds notes, Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson warned of this danger in his annual report for 1846.37 In Robinson’s words, there was a high probability that ‘unless suitable reserves are immediately formed for their benefit, every acre of their native soil will shortly be so leased out and occupied as to leave them, in a legal view, no place for the sole of their feet’. (This was a reference to Genesis 8:9. Noah after the flood sends a dove to find land, but ‘the dove found no resting place for the sole of her foot’.) When Fitzroy in May 1847 forwarded Robinson’s report to Earl Grey, along with the annual reports for 1846 from the Commissioners of Crown Lands, both Merivale and Grey became alarmed.38 Something needed to be done if Aboriginal people were to continue to access their traditional lands. Grey then wrote a major despatch on the subject to Governor Fitzroy on 11 February 1848, a despatch which has since been of great interest to historians and the courts.39 Both Aboriginal people and pastoralists, Grey insisted, had rights over land. Pastoral leases, he wrote, ‘are not intended to deprive the natives of their former right to hunt over these Districts, or to wander over them in search of subsistence, in the manner to which they have been heretofore accustomed, from the spontaneous produce of the soil’.40 He urged Fitzroy to ensure, through declaration or enactment, that the colonists recognise that Indigenous people continued to have rights to their land in Crown leases, so that they could hunt except on fenced or cultivated land. He also urged the establishment of small reserves for Aboriginal use.41 Large reserves, he agreed, though successful in other colonies, would not be appropriate in the Australian case, given the barren nature of much of the land and the ‘migratory habits of the scanty Tribes, in search of sustenance which the earth very sparingly affords them’, and the need of pastoralists for large amounts of land to succeed.42 Small reserves, being insufficient to sustain a traditional hunting way of life, would encourage Aboriginal people to cultivate land or to work for  Chief Protector’s Report for 1846, enclosure in Fitzroy to Earl Grey, despatch no.  107, 17 May 1847, CO 201/382; HRA, vol.  1, 26, p.  224; Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986, p. 208; Reynolds and Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases’, pp. 333 and 355. 38  Fitzroy to Grey, despatch no. 107, 17 May 1847, HRA, 1925, series 1, vol. xxv, April 1846– September 1847, p. 558. 39  Grey to Fitzroy, 11 February 1848, no.  24, printed in Appendix to the Report from the Select Committee on the Aborigines and Protectorate, 4 September 1849, NSWLCVP, 1849, pp. 426–8. 40  HRA, series 1, vol. 26, p. 226, quoted in Reynolds, ‘The Mabo Judgement’, p. 35. 41  Earl Grey to Governor Fitzroy, 11 February 1848, HRA, series 1, vol.  26, October 1847– December 1848, pp. 223–8. 42  On this point, see A. G. L. Shaw, ‘British Policy Towards the Australian Aborigines, 1830– 1850’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 99, October 1992, p. 284. 37

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others.43 He noted that, in South Australia, small reserves were also used as central depots for the distribution of rations when needed, and he thought this system could be adopted in New South Wales. In his view, there had been much more success in South Australia in ‘the management of the Natives’ than in any other colony.44 Indeed, as Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster show, South Australia had made particular use of ration distribution as a strategy for reducing frontier violence, or, as the protector wrote in 1852 of Aboriginal people in frontier districts, ‘keeping them quiet’.45 Rationing had also grown as pastoralists increasingly sought Aboriginal labour, and from the early 1850s was distributed by the pastoralists themselves, rather than police or magistrates.46 Rations supplemented traditional food-­getting, enhancing the chances Aboriginal people would remain on the stations where their labour was wanted. Grey was probably not aware of it, but at the same time as he wrote his despatch, the South Australian government was implementing a policy consistent with his wishes. This was the policy, unique in the Australian colonies, of reserving land for Aboriginal women who married white men; such women were thought more likely to use the land in a European way. As Mandy Paul and Robert Foster suggest, the colonial authorities saw these grants as a means of encouraging self-­sufficiency and civilised marriage. While the principle of recognising Aboriginal rights in land, and setting aside land for Aboriginal use, had been established at the time of the foundation of the colony, it was not until early in 1848 that it was implemented in this way. The first formally recorded grant of land arising from such marriage was to an Aboriginal woman, Mary Ann Kudnarto, who married a British man, Thomas Adams; there were some other similar grants in subsequent years. Although the number of grants was low, there was a certain public awareness and acceptance of the policy.47 It was indicative, perhaps, of a colony where settlers had always considered respectable marriage and small-­scale agriculture important to their own image, and who perhaps envisaged some future for Indigenous people, however marginal. The land was treated as a dowry of sorts, an incentive for women to marry, but it was also held in trust in the women’s names; it did not belong to their white husbands, nor was it necessarily promised to their descendants.48 The inclusion of the recipients into colonial society was thus limited. In the case of Kudnarto and Thomas Adams, for example, their sons ended up being sent to Poonindie  Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 49–50.  Report of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society for the year ending April 1848, pp. 34–39 (in Report of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 1840–51), cited in Mitchell, In Good Faith, p. 181. 45  Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, ‘Food and Governance on the Frontiers of Colonial Australia and Canada’s North West Territories’, Aboriginal History, vol. 36, 2012, p. 26. 46  Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Food and Governance’, p. 30. 47  Paul and Foster, ‘Married to the Land’, pp. 49–50, 57. 48  Ibid., p. 48. 43 44

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mission, after their mother died and their father lost the land and could no longer support them.49 At a time of frequent dispossession and poverty, the policy must have had a significant impact on the lives of some women and their families, but it is hard now to discover its effects. The written records revolve mostly around debates between white men, and the agency and opinions of Indigenous women remain hidden from view. The question of Aboriginal rights of access to land was not the only issue raised in Grey’s important despatch. Other issues included the protectorate, schooling, and the admission of Aboriginal evidence in court. Grey sought a full report on whether Fitzroy’s doubts about the protectorate, expressed in his despatch of May 1847, were about the value of the protectorate as a whole or rather a criticism in particular of the services of its Chief Protector, George Augustus Robinson. He also suggested that the small reserves he was now proposing could be the sites of schools and other establishments. Echoing the views of, among others, George Grey, he proposed a form of schooling which combined industrial and vocational training with ordinary and religious education. Finally, there was the long-­standing and vexed question of the admissibility of Aboriginal evidence. When the imperial government five years earlier had passed an Act enabling the colonies to pass legislation admitting Aboriginal evidence, only Western Australia and South Australia had done so, though two years later, in July 1846, the Legislative Council in South Australia had amended the Act to limit its use to cases involving punishment by transportation or death.50 As outlined in Chapter 5, the New South Wales Legislative Council had refused to pass a similar Act, and Grey was now pressing the matter again, urging Fitzroy to take action.51 Colonial Responses to Grey’s Despatch Fitzroy consulted the Executive Council as to how to respond to Grey’s troubling despatch, troubling because its recommendations were so much at odds with a great deal of settler-­received wisdom. At its meeting on 22 August 1848, the Executive Council agreed to call for further information from Charles La Trobe as Superintendent at Port Phillip, Sir Thomas Mitchell as Surveyor General, the Commissioners of Crown Lands, and, in relation to the question of Aboriginal rights to hunt and gather on leased land, the Crown law officers.52 Over the next few months, the reports came in. La Trobe’s report, of 18 November 1848, was a long and passionate consideration of Aboriginal policy.  Brock, ‘Writing Aboriginal Collective Biography’, p. 124.  Pope, One Law for All?, p. 47. 51  Gipps to Stanley, 9 July 1844, no. 137, printed in NSWLCVP, 1849, p. 994. 52  Extract from Minutes of NSW Executive Council 22 August 1848, enclosure with Fitzroy to Grey, 13 October 1849, no. 231, CO 201/416. 49 50

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It was a thorough indictment of the protectorate and full of praise for the Native Police. The protectorate, he wrote, had cost the government £42,200, almost four times as much as the Native Police, which La Trobe and many Port Phillip settlers saw as a far more effective way of aligning Aboriginal people with colonial society.53 There had been no conversions to Christianity, no genuine adoption of civilized forms of life, and no interest in agricultural pursuits. Their mode of life would have led to their gradual extinction in any case, but this had been much accelerated by the presence of Europeans: It is difficult to conceive that any other result than a gradual extinction of race could be the ultimate consequence of their peculiar habits and mode of life . . . [but there could be no doubt that the presence of] the European has connected what may have been a gradual decline, into a rapid fall.

Violent conflict had become rare, and Aboriginal people could sometimes be usefully employed. La Trobe’s preferred solution was to introduce compulsory military enrolment for all young Aboriginal men, and to enact ‘actual and total separation’ of children from their parents, though he recognised that in practice these measures were unlikely to receive support. He did agree, however, with Earl Grey that they had a ‘right to wander over the pastoral districts in search of food, or for recreation as formerly’, and that ‘especial stipulations, to assure them this privilege, should be made in the forms of leases’.54 He also agreed with the proposal to create reserves for Aboriginal use as places of asylum, and thought they could be placed under the charge of a medical officer. There was also some support in the reports from the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the proposals to reserve land. They noted that Indigenous people continued to live in their ancestral country, despite the pastoralist advance, and supported Grey’s proposed access to provisions. While they expressed reservations concerning the practicality of granting small reserves, they did not oppose the idea entirely.55 William Mayne, Commissioner for Crown Lands for Murrumbidgee, for example, requested not only a reserve of land for Aboriginal use but also that a clause be inserted into pastoral leases enabling free access by Aboriginal people to land, trees, animals, and water in their own country.56  La Trobe to Fitzroy, 18 November 1848 and 27 February 1849, NSWLC, Report from Select Committee on Aborigines, VP, 1849, vol. 2, 417ff; summarised in Russell Doust, New South Wales Legislative Council 1824–1856: The Select Committees, Sydney: New South Wales Parliamentary Library, 2011, p.  203. See also Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District, pp. 142–3. 54   La Trobe to Fitzroy, 18 November 1848, p. 9. 55   Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, p. 51. 56   William Mayne, Wellington, to Fitzroy, 1 June 1848, enclosed in Fitzroy to Earl Grey, 11 October 1848, CO 201/400. Cited in Reynolds and Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases’, p. 332, n. 83. 53

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When told of Grey’s suggestions concerning land reserves and access, Indigenous people were pleased. In Port Phillip, Protector William Thomas in early 1849 explained to the Kulin and Gunnai people about Earl Grey’s plan to set aside reserves of land for their use. They lobbied him for assistance in gaining land for agricultural purposes.57 According to Diane Barwick, when Thomas told the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung people about ‘Earl Grey’s humane despatch’, they responded quickly. Benbow, a senior Boonwurrung man, announced that his people needed a secure country, and made plans to speak with Superintendent La Trobe. Governor Fitzroy was visiting Melbourne at this time, receiving various delegations and claimants, and it is possible Benbow hoped for an audience with him, too. He waited for hours, however, before being turned away. This rebuff was prophetic of the decade to follow, when land rights would remain both desired and elusive.58 Aboriginal policy was becoming an explosive issue. In response to Grey’s urging that all the colonies clearly admit Aboriginal evidence, governors in Western Australia, South Australia, and New South Wales had all ensured that Native Evidence Bills were introduced into the local legislatures. Both South Australia (in July 1848) and Western Australia (in May 1849) passed new acts securing the admission of Aboriginal evidence without requiring its corroboration by a non-­Aboriginal person, but it would not be so easy in New South Wales.59 The Bill was introduced in May 1849 by Attorney General, John Plunkett, the very same Attorney General who had prosecuted the Myall Creek trials, and those trials now haunted the second reading debate on 27 June.60 Though the vote would turn out to be close, most of the speeches were violently against the Bill, both those by liberals such as Robert Lowe and George Nichols and those by conservative pastoralists including John L. Foster, James Macarthur, William Wentworth, Robert Fitzgerald, and Charles Cowper. In New South Wales, there was little room on either side of politics for humanitarian sympathies. Lowe – lawyer, leading advocate of self-­government, and anti-­transportationist – opened the attack. Fresh from his major speech at the mass meeting protesting against the arrival of convicts on the Hashemy two weeks earlier, he now opposed the Native Evidence Bill on the grounds that Aboriginal people could not be treated as equals. The problems were both specific and general. Specifically, Aboriginal people, having no idea of an after-­life, would not be capable of making an oath binding on their conscience. They had no conception, he said, of the difference between right and wrong, truth and falsehood.  Mitchell, In Good Faith, 93.  Argus, 20 March 1849, p. 2, and 23 March 1849, p. 2; Diane E. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, Canberra, Aboriginal History Inc., 1998, p. 34; Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith?, p. 91. See also Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 107. 59  Pope, One Law for All?, p. 49; Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 186–7, 206. 60  SMH, 29 June 1849, pp. 2–3. 57 58

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His objections, though, were much broader  – he thought Aboriginal people should not be protected by government or the law at all. The government, he suggested, ought to keep out of conflict between settlers and Aborigines entirely; ‘the wisest policy they could adopt was to leave the blacks and the settlers to fight it out between themselves’. Any attempt to intervene, as had been done in the Myall Creek case, had led to a ‘system of poisoning and secret murder of the blacks’. Putting Aboriginal people, as Governor Gipps had done, ‘on the same footing, on the same rules as if they were in the streets of London’, had led to a situation in which the whites, in self-­defence, ‘betook themselves to the miserable arts of the assassin, the blacks were shot wherever they were met with, where there were no witnesses present’. Many of his points were taken up by conservative pastoralists, such as Foster, who agreed that Aboriginal people ‘were so utterly debased a race that they had no knowledge of truth or falsehood’, and liberals such as Nichols, who thought ‘there was no doubt that such a race as this must give way before the march of civilization; they . . . must eventually perish from the earth’. Most vitriolic of all was William Wentworth, who also argued that the government should keep out of frontier conflict. The ‘civilized people’, he said, ‘had come in, and the savage must go back (Cheers). They [the whites] must go on progressing until their dominancy was established.’ He described the Myall Creek trials as ‘judicial murder’, and the current Bill as ‘most dangerous’ and ‘cruel to the white inhabitants’. Speakers were scornful of the humanitarians of Exeter Hall, labelled variously as exhibiting ‘morbid philanthropy’, ‘morbid and ill-­directed sympathy with the aboriginal races’, having ‘sickly sympathies’, and inspiring the government to ‘false philanthropy’. Several referred to the ‘ladies’ of Exeter Hall, or to the ‘gossips – male and female’, who knew nothing of the situation they attempted to influence from afar. There were a few voices in support of the Bill. One was that of the Colonial Secretary, Deas Thompson, who reminded the Council of the inhuman slaughter committed at Myall Creek, and the importance in many cases of Aboriginal evidence for securing a conviction. Thompson defended Aboriginal people’s competence to give evidence, as did Alexander Berry, one of the few pastoralists to have developed cordial relations with local Indigenous people, who said Aboriginal people did indeed have some idea of a future state, and he had always found them trustworthy. George Allen, a lawyer, defended both the convictions in the case of the Myall Creek trials, and the humanitarians, whose motives, he thought, ‘were more pure and disinterested than those of the parties who now condemned them’. When replying to those who opposed the Bill, Plunkett particularly condemned Nichols for being untroubled by Aboriginal people being ‘swept from the face of the earth’, Wentworth for the charge of ‘judicial murder’, and Lowe for implying that they should let massacres go on ‘till all were murdered’.

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After a tense debate, the Bill was defeated ten votes to nine. With this successful refusal to implement an aspect of British imperial Aboriginal policy, the majority in the Legislative Council sought further victory on the question. They wished to extinguish as much as they could of the humanitarian protection policy installed in 1838. Most of all, they had in their sights the beleaguered Port Phillip Protectorate. Two days after the defeat of the Native Evidence Bill, Council appointed a select committee to enquire into the state of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the colony, especially in relation to the protectorate. Chaired by conservative pastoralist John Foster, its members included William Macarthur, John Dickson, Edward Hamilton, William Suttor, and Charles Cowper; Henry Moor was later added. Foster, Hamilton, Dickson, and Cowper had already expressed their anti-­Aboriginal feelings in the Native Evidence Bill debate, while Suttor, Macarthur, and Moor were all wealthy landowners. Their report, tabled on 4 September 1849, was decisive in rejecting most of Grey’s recommendations.61 They had considered Grey’s dispatch and La Trobe’s report of November 1848, interviewed two clergymen, and received forty-­five replies from magistrates in the Port Phillip district to a circular letter enquiring their opinion of the protectorate and its influence on Aboriginal people of their district. The report’s conclusion, unsurprisingly, was that ‘the present system of protection of the Aborigines has totally failed in its object’. It had been useless, or worse. The report also rejected Grey’s suggestion of creating small reserves, as they would ‘prove prejudicial to those settlers who would be ousted of portions of their runs, and thus, perhaps, interfere with the good feeling which your Committee are happy to notice has sprung up between the white and black population of the Colony’.62 The report added that, while it recommended abolition of the protectorate, it had no substitute policy to suggest. There was little hope for the adults, and the only successful plan was the ‘total separation of the parents from the children’, which would require ‘compulsory measures’. Instead of spending huge sums on attempts to improve Aboriginal people, which were doomed to fail, it would be better, the report concluded, to spend the money on British colonists: ‘much more real good would be effected by similar exertions to promote the interests of religion and education among the white population in the interior of this Colony, the improvement of whose condition would, doubtless, tend to the benefit of the Aborigines’.63 Fitzroy was caught between a reforming Earl Grey and a recalcitrant pro-­ pastoralist Legislative Council. Wearily, perhaps, he took the question of  NSWLCVP, 1849, volume II, pp. 419–20.  NSWLCVP, 1849, volume II, p. 419. Also quoted in Reynolds, Law of the Land, p. 143. 63  Report from the Select Committee on the Aborigines and Protectorate, NSWLCVP, 1849, Part II, pp. 419–20. 61 62

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Aboriginal policy to the Executive Council on 15 October 1849. In what was to be one of its last major statements on Aboriginal policy before the advent of responsible government six years later, the Executive Council adopted many of the ideas La Trobe had expressed a year earlier. It reiterated its view that Fitzroy ought to abolish the protectorate immediately, and referred to ‘the extreme difficulties which stand in the way of any material amelioration of the character and habits of the Aboriginal Natives of this Colony, and the almost total failure which has attended all the efforts which have hitherto been made in this behalf’. The missions, like the protectorate, had accomplished nothing. Reserving land for Aboriginal use was unlikely to have any positive effect, either in terms of providing the basis for ‘moral and intellectual improvement’ or the means of subsistence, except in the case of fisheries. Nevertheless, and importantly, it did support proposals to reserve ‘small tracts in suitable situations with a view to their being applied to hereafter to the purposes specified in Earl Grey’s Despatch of the 11th February 1848’. These would be allocated beyond the settled districts, in areas recommended by the surveyor general and the Commissioners of Crown Lands, at sites ‘known to be still frequented by them’. Interestingly, the Executive Council agreed with Earl Grey that the reserves ‘should remain under direct control of the Executive Government’. Commissioners of Crown lands could act as official visitors of the reserves, presenting periodical reports on them; they should also act as protectors, and in that role provide annual returns on the numbers of Aboriginal individuals and tribes in their districts.64 They did not agree, however, that these reserves should be the site for issuing food and clothing; nothing should be given that was not ‘earned by some moral or physical exertion’.65 On two questions, the Executive Council came close to supporting Grey’s recommendations. In relation to the immediate question of protecting Aboriginal’s access to pastoral lands, it recognised the ‘justice and expediency’ of ‘securing for the Aboriginal Inhabitants the right of wandering as heretofore in quest of food over all lands which the Crown Tenants may leave in an unimproved state’. The Council also supported the Native Police and wanted it to be increased in size as much as possible. The Native Police force, it agreed, was of ‘great use in the detection and prevention of crime, and in the protection of their own race’. In addition, the force produced in the native policemen themselves ‘general habits of self restraint, and a fixed preference for the food, clothing and usages of civilized man’.66

 Extract from Minutes of NSW Executive Council, 15 October 1849, prepared for printing for parliament headed ‘New South Wales’, CO 201/416. 65  Exec Council minutes, 15 October 1849, p. 242. 66  Ibid., p. 236. 64

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Fitzroy abolished the protectorate in December 1849, confirming in imperial and colonial discourse for long afterwards that it had been a complete failure. Jessie Mitchell has challenged this view, drawing attention to the continuation of friendly relationships between former missionaries and Indigenous people. Watson and Gunther, Tuckfield, and Threlkeld, all continued their connections with the people they knew. Edward Parker, though no longer a protector, retained his old protectorate station at Franklinford and ran an Aboriginal school there among the Djadjawurung and Djabwurung people, many of whom had become small farmers.67 Furthermore, the protectorate survived in some senses through the figure of William Thomas, the last remaining Protector, who was made Guardian of Aborigines when the protectorate ended. In that role, he managed ration stations at Mordialloc and Warrandyte, continued to make notes on the Woiwurrung language, and listened (often impotently) to Indigenous people’s concerns.68 He would act as an intermediary between Indigenous people and settler society for some time to come. Charles Symmons in Western Australia was also given a new title in 1849, but in his case the change simply confirmed his existing role. He now became Guardian of Natives and Protector of Settlers.69 This was fitting; Symmons had in his annual report in 1848 insisted, as he had always done, that protectors could best advance Aboriginal interests by identifying themselves with the settlers, and protecting them, the settlers. In preventing Aboriginal attacks on settlers, protectors, he suggested, could forestall the deadly settler practice of retaliation.70 Though colonial authorities succeeded in rejecting aspects of Grey’s Aboriginal policy, they finally had to accept his proposal to ensure Aboriginal access to land under pastoral lease. It was, however, a three-­year struggle. When Fitzroy first instructed the Crown law officers in New South Wales to insert provision for Aboriginal access and hunting rights into all pastoral leases, they rebelled, seeing the instruction as outside the 1846 Waste Lands Act. Fitzroy then sought a new Order in Council; the British government complied, providing a new Order in Council on 18 July 1849 which overcame the legal officers’ objections and enabled the provision to be included in pastoral leases.71 In May 1850, Grey sent instructions to governors in New South Wales,  See E. Morison, A Successful Failure, A Trilogy: The Aborigines and Early Settlers, Castlemaine: Graffiti, 1965, pp. 230–1, discussed by Lester and Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Sites and Mobilities’, pp. 1–2. 68  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, p. 35; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 120. 69  Hasluck, Black Australians, pp. 79–80. 70  Ibid., pp. 79–80. Symmons was proud to report in 1851 that no year since he took up office in 1839 had been so unmarked by ‘native aggression on the property of the white inhabitants’ as the one just ended, the year 1850; The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News, 7 February 1851, p. 1S. 71  The Order in Council is discussed in more detail in Reynolds and Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases’, p. 364. 67

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South Australia, and Western Australia, stipulating that Aboriginal people could enter and seek food on land under pastoral lease.72 Fitzroy proclaimed the new regulations for New South Wales in March 1851, and from then on pastoral leases in New South Wales routinely included clauses specifically allowing Aboriginal access. South Australia and Western Australia followed soon after.73 In New South Wales, the new regulations also implemented Grey’s policy of allocating small reserves for Aboriginal use; thirty-­five reserves were gazetted in New South Wales, and, while none of the lands set aside were in the more densely colonised regions around Sydney, some were on sites of significance to local Indigenous nations.74 After a struggle, then, Grey had succeeded in making changes that increased Aboriginal access to land to some extent. The question was, would they survive the transition to self-government? Schools, Hospitals, and Blankets Two aspects of Grey’s Aboriginal policy  – schools and hospitals  – involved further discussion between the imperial and colonial governments. When Grey suggested the small reserves could be sites for schools, the Executive Council on 15 October 1849 had strongly objected, commenting that all attempts at schooling had failed. Where they had succeeded, such as at the Native School which had operated for nine years in South Australia, they nevertheless produced no practical benefit, ‘as the children instructed there returned to the haunts of their respective tribes, as soon as they reached the age of puberty, and have reverted to the habits of uncivilized life’.75 Fitzroy accordingly wrote to Grey on 12 November 1849 that experience had shown there was no point in planning for schools and other institutions.76 He wrote again on the matter on 23 March 1850, enclosing the many reports he had commissioned in response to Grey’s 1848 despatch, on the proposed small reserves and other  Grey to Fitzgerald, 22 May 1850, no.  104, CO 397/9, also quoted in Reynolds, ‘The Mabo Judgment’, p. 37. Grey to Young, 19 June 1850, in Governor’s Despatches, State Records of South Australia, Government Record Group 5/1/10/48, cited by Robert Foster, ‘Co-existence and Colonization on Pastoral Leases in South Australia, 1851–1899’, in John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, eds., Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005, p. 250. See also Robert Foster, ‘The Origin of the Protection of Aboriginal Rights in South Australian Pastoral Leases’, Land, Rights, Laws: Issues in Native Title, no. 24, 1998. 73  Reynolds and Dalziel, ‘Aborigines and Pastoral Leases’, pp.  369–71; concerning South Australia see also Roberts, ‘Co-­existence and Colonization’, p. 250. 74  Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 53–5. 75  Earl Grey to Governor Fitzroy, 11 February 1849, pp.  223–8; Executive Council minute, 15 October 1849, p. 235. 76  Governor C. A. Fitzroy to Earl Grey, 12 November 1849, BPP: Papers Relating to Australia, 1850, Colonies: Australia, vol.12, Shannon, Irish University Press, 1969, p. 59. CO 201/416. 72

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matters.77 In an internal memo on Fitzroy’s despatch, Merivale commented that he could see no use for the proposed reserves, since the Aboriginal people did not cultivate, but did support taking action on pastoral leases. However, he wrote, it seemed clear that ‘they cannot long continue to exist. They are too few and too low in intelligence to remain without amalgamation with the settlers. And this seems impossible.’78 In response to a further despatch from Fitzroy, Grey commented, ‘It does not appear that anything more can be done than expressing my regret at receiving these accounts of the continued and rapid diminution of the natives and of the general failure of the measures taken for their improvement.’79 Grey had not, in fact, quite given up. On 5 November 1850, he wrote again to Fitzroy, suggesting, on Merivale’s advice, the establishment in the interior of the colony of boarding schools for ‘the gratuitous tuition of the children of the Aborigines in common with those of the European population’.80 He also repeated his earlier suggestion of providing medical aid in frontier districts, in the form of hospitals and dispensaries.81 At its meetings the previous year, the Executive Council had agreed to allocate government funds to provide medical assistance, and had commissioned a report from Dr O’Brien as to how best to do so.82 This appears to have been Bartholomew O’Brien, whom Fitzroy trusted and admired after O’Brien had attended to him when he fell ill, later appointing him to the Medical Board of New South Wales and in 1852 as medical advisor to the government.83 O’Brien recommended that for Aboriginal patients, the government fund public hospitals in the settled districts and individual medical practitioners elsewhere. When it considered the matter on 16 July 1851, the Executive Council rejected Grey’s proposal for hospitals and dispensaries as expensive and impractical, but did adopt O’Brien’s suggestions.84 The government appointed six medical attendants with responsibility for Aboriginal health care in the New England, Lachlan, Liverpool Plains, Maneroo, Burnett, and Wide Bay districts.85 These were  Fitzroy to Grey, 23 March 1850, no. 63, CO 201/427.  Merivale minute on Fitzroy to Grey, 23 March 1850, p. 344.  Grey, minute on Fitzroy to Grey, 18 July 1850, CO 201/429, f. 206. See also Shaw, ‘British Policy towards the Australian Aborigines’, p. 284. 80  Grey to Fitzroy, 5 November 1850, no. 163, NSWSA 4/1334. See also Fitzroy to Newcastle, 22 December 1853, CO 201/467 NSW 1853, no. 162. 81  See also Barry Bridges, Aboriginal and White Relations in New South Wales, 1788–1855, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1966, p. 687. 82  Extracts from minutes of NSW Executive Council, 16 July 1849 and 15 October 1849, CO 201/416. 83  Appointments, SMH, 24 March 1852, p. 2; Obituary: Bartholomew O’Brien, SMH, 28 January 1870, p. 7. 84  Extracts from minutes of NSW Executive Council, 30 July 1851, CO 201/416. 85  Fitzroy to Grey, 6 August 1851, no. 146, CP 2–1/442; Fitzroy to Newcastle, 22 December 1853, no. 162, CO 201/442; NSW Col Sec, Returns of the Colony, 1852, pp. 428–9 (ML 4/285). 77 78 79

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ordinary medical practitioners who were paid £20 annually for their services to Aboriginal people. While Grey’s proposals for schools were opposed and medical assistance half-­heartedly acceded to, government authorities did support the annual distribution of blankets in winter. Governor Fitzroy revived the blanket distribution in 1848, and even before its official revival he had acceded to a request in April 1847 from the Sydney Aborigines Committee formed a few years earlier for a ‘bale of blankets’ for distribution in Sydney, and the government continued to use the committee for its annual Sydney distribution thereafter.86 On 24 May 1850, the committee distributed more than sixty blankets to Aboriginal people from Sydney, Botany, Georges River, Port Hacking, and places north and south of Sydney along its coastal zone. The recipients gave three cheers for the Queen, the governor, and the mayor of Sydney, and left.87 By 1851, the expenditure on blankets had risen to £1,000, and by 1853 to £1,500.88 For clergymen and others supportive of Aboriginal people, such services were seen as the least they could do. John Gibson, a clergyman in Grafton, a town on the Clarence River, one of the northern rivers still witnessing frontier violence, wrote angrily to the Empire on 3 May 1852, defending humanitarian Aboriginal policies against those who saw them as ‘the cant of humanity’. ‘I blush for many of my countrymen’, he wrote, ‘who being wholly absorbed with self-­interest and the cursed lust of gain, forget every duty which they owe to fallen, bleeding, suffering humanity.’ After pointing out that squatters had gained immense pastoral districts from Aboriginal people and given nothing in return, and that it was no wonder that there had been few conversions when Aboriginal people ‘witnessed so much vice and injustice’, he concluded that the government could at the very least provide blankets, schools, and medical attendance.89 The blanket distribution would last, though somewhat erratically, for the rest of the century.90 Interestingly, the bureaucratic records it generated have since proved valuable sources of information for Indigenous people, useful for claiming native title and constructing genealogies.91 For many Aboriginal people in New South Wales in the nineteenth century, these records are the only ones we have that name them individually.  See Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, p.  201; ‘Berrima: Blankets to the Blacks’, SMH, 19 July 1848, p. 2; Irish, Hidden in Plain View, p. 65.  Irish, Hidden in Plain View, p. 86. 88  Receipt and Appropriation of the Crown Revenue, p. 17 in NSWLCVP, 1852, vol. 1; Fitzroy to Newcastle, 6 August 1853, no. 106, CO 201/465. 89  Empire, 3 May 1852, p. 3. 90  In January 1854, Colonial Secretary Deas Thomson announced that the blanket issue would be extended, and in 1855 the Legislative Council voted £2,300 for this purpose. Estimates, 1856– Territorial Revenue, p. 5, in NSWLCVP, 1855, vol. 2. 91  Steve Meacham, ‘How a 150-Year-Old Blanket can Help Settle a Native Title Claim’, SMH, 9 December 2005. 86

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Policing The one policy on which imperial and colonial governments agreed was that the Native Police ought to be extended, though their understanding of what the Native Police stood for differed significantly. Both regarded the force as the one success in Aboriginal policy, though the Colonial Office saw it as a civilising agency while the New South Wales government was interested in its efficacy in putting down Aboriginal resistance. There was some basis for both understandings; the Native Police Corps at this time was, as Richard Broome and others have pointed out, a curious phenomenon, serving as it did both as an agent of dispossession and an opportunity for advancement for some Aboriginal men. In Port Phillip, and then Victoria, between forty and fifty men were enlisted each year; their involvement gave them new skills, a sense of power, and participation in the formal life of the colony. In Broome’s estimation, ‘these men were not joining the colonial power structure, but enlarging their power by extending it into a new sphere’.92 The force was, nevertheless, for the government and settlers, a cheap and relatively effective means of securing land for settlers against Indigenous resistance in areas remote from the policeman’s own, which is, of course, why so many settlers approved of them. For a few years from 1848, there were two Native Police forces, one operating in the Port Phillip district and the other in the northern districts.93 After the death of Commander Dana and with frontier violence in the area more or less over, the Port Phillip detachment was disbanded at the end of 1852. The northern force, on the other hand, would – notoriously – continue for another five decades. The idea to develop a northern branch of the force first arose when the region around the Macintyre River (which would later lie on the border between New South Wales and Queensland) experienced continued violent frontier conflict in the 1840s. The area, occupied by the Bigambul people, was without effective policing, and there were calls for government intervention.94 After receiving reports of a massacre there of Aboriginal people by whites, Fitzroy decided as an experiment to send a small branch of the Native Police.95 The man chosen to be the first commandant was Frederick Walker, formerly superintendent on William Wentworth’s Tala station on the Murrumbidgee in 1845–6, and experienced in quelling Aboriginal resistance

 Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 43–5. Quote on p. 45.  Barry Bridges, ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837–53’, JRAHS, vol. 57, pt. 2, June 1972, pp. 113–44, esp. pp. 124, 131. 94  See Mark Copland, ‘The Native Police at Callandoon – A Blueprint for Forced Assimilation’, in Mike Enders and Benoit Dupont, eds., Policing the Lucky Country, Sydney: Hawkins Press, 2001, pp. 84–5. 95  Fitzroy, notice titled ‘Native Police Beyond the Settled Districts’, 8 June 1848, NSWLCVP, 1848. 92 93

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from his role in the earlier Mounted Police Force.96 After spending some months recruiting Aboriginal men from the Murrumbidgee and Murray River regions that he knew well, Walker began operating the first Native Police detachment in the northern districts.97 Operations began in May 1849 in the Macintyre River district, first at Boggabri and then at Callandoon,98 and quickly took on the quality of outright warfare, to the extent that the colonial secretary felt moved to caution Walker ‘not to commit acts of aggressive warfare against the Aboriginal Natives’.99 Within a year, the efficacy of the Native Police in suppressing Aboriginal rebellion was being widely acclaimed, and in response to petitions and other requests from the Burnett and Wide Bay pastoral districts further north, the force – ominously for the Indigenous nations still resisting settler colonialism’s deadly project of displacement and replacement  – was expanded in 1850.100 Walker became an important and complex figure in the colonisation of the north, for, while the Native Police under his direction was effective in putting down Aboriginal resistance, he also advocated policies of inclusion and employment that ran counter to settler desires at the time. Many pastoralists were adamant that Aboriginal people should be kept away from the stations, adopting a policy of separation known as ‘not allowing the blacks in’ or ‘keeping them at a distance’.101 Walker was equally adamant that settlers should be allowing Aboriginal people onto leased pastoral land, where they could be supported and more easily controlled; to this end he would refuse assistance to squatters who insisted on keeping Aboriginal people off their stations.102 From 1851, his emphasis on incorporation was supported by the inclusion in all pastoral leases of clauses specifically stating Aboriginal people’s right of access, and he remained critical of those who wanted him simply to wage war against Aboriginal people.103 Northern settlers, he complained to the colonial secretary on 1 March 1852, saw the Native Police purely as a government body sent to ‘shoot Blacks’ and to whom they could, in addition, attribute their own violent  Jonathon Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008, pp. 179–80.  Connors, Warrior, p. 177, and Richards, The Secret War, p. 179. 98  David Denholm, “Frederick Walker”, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018. 99  Notes written by Col Sec on Walker’s Report of the 9th July Battle, NSWSA, 4/2920: 49/7305, as quoted by Copland, ‘The Native Police at Callandoon’, p. 89. 100  Bridges, ‘The Native Police Corps’, pp.  124, 131; Select Committee Report on Aborigines, NSWLCVP, 1849, p. 419 ff, esp. p. 423; Report on State of Native Police, NSWLCVP, 1850, vol. 1. 101  Connors, Warrior, p. 181; Robert Orsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited: Queensland and the ‘History War’, Brisbane: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011, p. 114; Copland, ‘The Native Police at Callandoon’, pp. 87–8. 102  Walker to Colonial Secretary, 26 May 1849, NSWSA, 4/2920, 49/5554. Quoted in Copland, “The Native Police at Callandoon”, p. 88. 103  Connors, Warrior, p. 177. 96

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acts.104 Despite these conflicts, Walker did in fact establish the Native Police as a force that served the squatters well, acting not only to crush resistance but also to encourage ‘amalgamation’ in the form of employment as free or very cheap labour.105 As frontier conflict declined, or sometimes even while it continued, labour-­starved squatters increasingly came to appreciate the value of employing Aboriginal people. Unlike the other colonies, Western Australia was not under consideration for some form of self-­government, and Colonial Office policy would prevail. There, policing was directed mainly at protecting settlers from stock theft and securing Aboriginal labour. Revett Henry Bland, a protector based in the township of York since 1841 who shared the emphasis of his fellow protector, Charles Symmons, on policing Aboriginal people, sought an extension of the prevailing system of summary justice.106 The Legislative Council agreed, passing in December 1847 a Summary Punishment Act that allowed a whipping punishment of thirty-­six strokes or imprisonment for up to one year. The question was, would the Colonial Office, which had in 1841 rejected a somewhat similar Act, agree? As it turned out, they did. As Ann Hunter shows, by this time Colonial Office thinking was shifting away from an insistence on equal treatment before the law to one of adapting legal practice to frontier situations. The appointment of Herman Merivale as Permanent Under-­Secretary in 1848 was significant, as Merivale had already in his earlier lectures argued the case for legal adaptation.107 In Merivale’s view, in frontier situations, martial law administered by police was preferable to a jury system, since settlers could largely control the latter.108 Merivale by this time had also concluded that, in Australia, in contrast to New Zealand, amalgamation was unlikely to be achieved, and the most important role of the law was to develop and maintain Aboriginal people as useful labour.109 Because of sparse settlement and very long distances, Western Australia was a special case.110 Earl Grey agreed to the legislation, though his preference seems to have been for gaol sentences rather than whipping. He would write approvingly to Governor Fitzgerald in June 1850 of the Guardian of Natives Report for 1849 that  Frederick Walker to Colonial Secretary 1 March 1852, NSWLCVP, 1852, pp. 801–2; SMH, 16 June 1852, p. 1S.  In the many controversies surrounding Walker, ending ultimately in his dismissal for drunkenness in 1854, conflict over separation versus inclusion played an important role; Orsted-­Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p. 115. 106  Bland became more powerful in October 1848 when he was appointed private secretary to the governor and clerk of the advisory Legislative Council. 107  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 202 –3. 108  Ibid., p. 211. 109  Ibid., p. 212. 110  Ibid., p. 214. 104

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there had been a ‘decided improvement’ in Aboriginal behaviour in the colony resulting from ‘subjecting them to punishment for Acts of Violence, and from the course of discipline and of training which they are made to undergo while under such punishment’.111 Under pressure from Acting Governor Irwin and his Legislative Council, however, he acquiesced to the Summary Punishment Bill. He did warn, though (presciently, as it turned out), that the legislation would have to ensure that local magistrates, who were in fact pastoralists themselves and not fully independent government officials, could not abuse their power.112 Ann Hunter suggests that one reason Grey acquiesced was that he feared the high costs of the gaol system. This was a serious concern, since Western Australia was soon to become a convict colony, and Britain would be responsible for it, and its costs, for some time to come. ‘In the end,’ Hunter writes, ‘it was the greater weight of economic expediency over ideology that clinched the decision.’ The Trial and Summary Punishment Act was duly passed, on 6 May 1849, and approved by the Colonial Office the following year.113 It was a decision that was to have far-­reaching effects in Western Australia. As Robert Madden, Colonial Secretary at the time and the only strong voice against the legislation in the colony, commented on the draft legislation in 1848, the Act in effect delivered Aboriginal people to the pastoralists114. The abuse of power by magistrates, many themselves pastoralists, that officials had feared began to occur on a large scale, and would become a focus of debate in the 1880s, when the question of self-­government for Western Australia came at last to the fore. British agreement to the legislation, which rejected the principle of equal treatment before the law, also reminds us both of the limits of British commitment to protection and that, at the close of the 1840s, British governmental commitment to protection and equal treatment was waning fast. Reflections on Impending Extinction in Van Diemen’s Land British protection policy was also suffering a blow from the continuing story of human loss and destruction in Van Diemen’s Land. There, the population at Oyster Cove, to where the Flinders Island community had been removed in 1847, continued to decline. Local settlers had strongly opposed the return of Aboriginal people to the Tasmanian mainland, some still fearing a renewal of the violence of almost twenty years before. Member of the Legislative Council and pro-­transportationist William Race Allison wrote to Lieutenant Governor Denison on 27 September, describing the proposed move as ‘fraught with  Grey to Fitzgerald, 15 June 1850, no. 108, CO 201/429, p. 290.  Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, pp. 204–5. 113  Ibid., p. 215, 218. 114  Ibid., p. 216. 111 112

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danger to the lives of her Majesty’s subjects here, to the aborigines, and to the peace and welfare of the colony’. They should not risk, he wrote, a repetition of ‘horrible murders committed by the natives’. He knew that the Aboriginal people had been treated badly by stockmen in earlier times, and had seen for himself the ‘heart-­sickening massacres of innocent persons by the blacks’. After recounting the history of the conflict during Arthur’s period as governor, he predicted that if the Aboriginal people were brought back to the mainland, ‘the sight of their old haunts would recall old recollections’, and they would escape, possibly joined by runaway convicts.115 The local newspapers agreed. When reporting that deputations to Denison against the plan had been unsuccessful, the Hobart Courier predicted that ‘the scenes enacted in the colony in former years may form a dreadful feature in our future history’.116 The Cornwall Chronicle agreed: ‘to bring back the same people who some years ago deluged the colony in blood, to the scenes of their former atrocities is madness’.117 In a reverse narrative, familiar in settler colonialism everywhere, colonial newspapers  – seeing settlers as the victims or potential victims – now warned that settler violence would result if the survivors of the mainland genocide of the 1820s and 1830s were returned.118 The result of removing the survivors back to Oyster Cove could well be, said the Chronicle, a settler-­led exterminatory war against the Aboriginal returnees that would obliterate them altogether: ‘in less than twelve months after the landing of the Aborigines in this colony, not a memento, save their bleached bones, will be left of them.’119 If this happened, the Chronicle warned, the government would be to blame. The Oyster Cove plan was yet further evidence, if they needed any, of the corruption, incompetence, and despotism of the government, which ignored settlers’ views and denied them representation. Initially, the islanders, however, were pleased to move, and marked their arrival with dancing and rejoicing. Some colonists with humanitarian sympathies were optimistic about their future there. The Nonconformist writer James Bonwick, who had become interested in the Aboriginal people through his links to the local Quaker movements, explained: ‘We knew that this was the desire of the Blacks themselves, who said if they could only live in their own country again, they would all be healthy and happy.’120 The hopes of the Indigenous  W. Race Allison to Denison, 27 September 1847, printed in the Cornwall Chronicle, 30 October 1847, p. 4. 116  Hobart Town Courier, 11 September 1847, p. 2. 117  Cornwall Chronicle, 2 October 1847 p.  2; Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996 (first published 1981), p. 203. 118  See Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile’, pp. 1–19. 119  Cornwall Chronicle, 2 October 1847 p. 2. 120  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 272. For more on Bonwick, see Guy Featherstone, ‘Bonwick, James (1817–1906)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969, pp. 190–2. 115

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people and their supporters, however, were not to be realised. At first they lived amicably at their new station and attended several social functions with Lieutenant-­Governor Denison and his family. Denison hoped that these public occasions would show colonists the Aboriginal people were harmless now and reconcile them to the removal to Oyster Cove. He also wanted to use the occasion to show to the Indigenous parents the Orphan School in Hobart, where their children would soon be going. For the Indigenous visitors, going to Government House may have felt like a way of continuing their tradition of friendly and fairly equitable relations with the governor.121 Denison’s wife, Caroline, described the Aboriginal visit to Government House in Hobart on Christmas Day, 1847, in some detail. ‘We had a most amusing afternoon,’ she wrote, ‘with our black guests. In they came, fourteen of them, packed in two carriages.’122 At the event, the tent in which they gathered turned out to be the main attraction: ‘thither went all the white visitors, when their own meal was concluded, to watch the goings on . . . [they] seemed never tired of watching them.’ The Aboriginal visitors found it hard to believe that Denison was the governor as ‘he had not got a cocked hat on’.123 Years later, in 1859, when James Bonwick visited the settlement, the residents told him that they had been happier when Governor Denison was there, as ‘that gentleman often paid them a visit, bringing some of his family with him and having a packet of toys, marbles and balls.’ He would join in their games, ‘play even at leapfrog with them’ and join them in food and laughter.124 However, their optimistic mood did not last long. Conditions at Oyster Cove were poor and unsanitary, and the few children were quickly removed to a harsh upbringing at the Orphan School. Within a couple of years, the residents were seriously influenced by alcohol, flouting the governor’s authority and refusing to work. Already their numbers were dwindling.125 By 1850, when the remaining people gathered to mourn the death of their catechist, Robert Clark, their numbers – forty-­nine when they first moved to Oyster Cove in 1847 – had fallen again. They now numbered only thirty-­five.126 When George Augustus Robinson, now 60, visited briefly in April 1851, the women gave him traditional necklaces and the people complained about their unhealthy living conditions, begging to return to Flinders or to Bruny Island.127 Robinson did not record his response and appears not to have done anything. After the collapse of his Tasmanian mission, the failure of his protectorate in Port Phillip, and the criticism he had received for his own role there, he may have lost interest  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 276; William Denison, Varieties of Vice-­Regal Life, vol. 1, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1870, pp. 68–71, 80, 83.  Included in Denison, Varieties of Vice-­Regal Life, p. 69. 123  Denison, Varieties of Vice-Regal Life, pp. 70–1. 124  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 276. 125  Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 205–14. 126  Ibid., p. 259. 127  Ibid. 121

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in campaigning for justice for Indigenous people. He moved back to England shortly afterwards.128 There was, however, in addition to the settlement at Oyster Cove, a community of sealers and Indigenous women, amounting to about fifty people in thirteen families, now living on one or another of eight Bass Strait Islands.129 The Strait community began to approach the colonial authorities, campaigning for schoolteachers, catechists and secure leases of land, but had difficulty in having their claims accepted. Their application for a lease on Badger Island was rejected for administrative reasons, although Lyndall Ryan detects a certain racial undercurrent, too.130 In 1851, they petitioned Lieutenant-­Governor Denison for a catechist and schoolteacher; the residents suggested the government pay for it out of the Land Fund, in recognition of their Aboriginal origins. Denison replied that he was sorry to hear of the ‘destitute religious state’ of the islanders, but he ‘did not feel himself justified in advancing from the Crown revenue aid to people who could not fairly be termed aborigines’.131 The existence of the Bass Strait community thus did little or nothing to dispel the growing general view that the Indigenous people of Van Diemen’s Land would soon be extinct. With the imminent end of transportation and the rapid decline in the population at Oyster Cove, there was a growing feeling that Van Diemen’s Land was reaching a turning point in its history. It was a moment for some reflection on what had happened to the Indigenous people of the colony. Two major books appeared in 1852 – John West’s influential and still-­remembered The History of Tasmania, and travel writer G. C. Mundy’s A Record of Observations in Van Diemen’s Land. Both suggested that while their colony did have a violent racial past, it had also distinguished itself by providing charitable care for the Aboriginal survivors. Both saw Aboriginal extinction on Van Diemen’s Land as inevitable. Colonists had proven their civilisation and decency, West wrote, by supporting institutions like Oyster Cove, ‘to smooth the last hours of this unfortunate race.’132 Mundy praised the government’s policy of removal: ‘Those who fell into the hands of government were humanely treated, fed, clothed, provided with medical aid, and located in a sequestered spot where they might sit down and await . . . their certain destiny – extinction’.133 West’s  G. A. Robinson, 26–7 April 1851, Ian D. Clark, ed., The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, vol. 6, Clarendon: Heritage Matters, 2000, pp. 41–2. 129  Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2015, pp. 302–5. 130  Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 223–5. 131  Tasmanian Church Chronicle: A Monthly Periodical, vol. 1, no. 3, 6 March 1852, p. 2. 132  Mundy, A Record of Observations in Van Diemen’s Land, Adelaide, Sullivan’s Cove, 1986 [1852], pp. 30–1; John West, The History of Tasmania, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971 [1852], p. 317. 133  Mundy, A Record of Observations, p. 31. 128

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account was by far the longer of the two, and the most troubled. He asks whether, given what happened to the indigenous people, colonisation itself was just? He concludes it was, since ‘wandering hordes’ could not retain exclusive rights over vast regions that would ‘feed millions where hundreds are scattered’. The ‘laws of increase’, echoing Malthus, indicated to West that there was a ‘right of migration’. It was impossible to resist the assumption of ‘sovereignty over a savage people’, since the barbarian who cannot comprehend treaties must be governed ‘by bribes, or by force’. They had no reason, then, to feel remorse that British sovereignty had been imposed, but the government did have a duty to protect the native people, and England had in fact ‘forgot the aborigine’, securing him no refuge. The government should have offered care and protection, and seen the native as a friend rather than an enemy; instead, it ‘let loose on the shores of Tasmania its outcasts, its robbers, and its homicides’ and let them destroy the native unpunished.134 West concludes on a sad note. While everyone can be gladdened by ‘the triumph of colonisation’ when ‘cities rise in the desert, and the wilderness blossoms as the rose’, the question of the fate of the Aborigines must ‘check exultation’.135 A touch darkly, West also reminded his readers, both in Britain where his book sold well, and in the colonies, that they enjoyed the imperial power they did by the consent of Providence alone. This implied that British imperialism was God’s will, but it also suggested a vague disquiet, that God could withdraw his approval. Let colonists become greedy, lazy, or impious, West warned, and ‘the moral Governor of the world will assert his sovereignty, and will visit a worthless and ungrateful race with the yoke of bondage, the scourge of anarchy, or [and these are the final words of the book’s conclusion] the besom of destruction’.136 West’s reflections here strike a haunting apocalyptic note of fear, insecurity, and anxiety that has never left imperial and settler historical consciousness.137 Unsettlingly (and despite the new Aboriginal communities developing in the Bass Strait Islands, of which colonisers and imperial authorities took little or no notice), what had happened in Tasmania suggested there was no possible future for Indigenous people in Australia’s settler colonies.138 After Tasmania, could the imperial and settler-­colonising British ever comfortably feel that in taking the continent they were acting honourably? Had they committed, in the eyes of posterity, in the judgment of God the all-­seeing, an unforgiveable historical crime?

 West, The History of Tasmania, p. 330–1.  Ibid., p. 332. 136  Ibid., p. 533. 137  Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts. 138  S. E. Bowdler, ‘The Bass Strait Islands Revisited’, Quaternary International, vol. 385, 2015, pp. 206–18. 134 135

8

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? Britain Transfers Control of Aboriginal Policy to the Colonies, 1852–1854

One of the key questions we address in this book is why the British government handed over management of Aboriginal people to the colonial governments when it did. Given the emphasis in imperial government rhetoric from the late 1830s on the need for British, and not colonial, legislatures to manage Aboriginal policy, the complete handover in the 1850s is at first sight surprising. In this chapter, we consider this question by taking a close look at both the processes of developing constitutions for self-­government and the changing nature of imperial-colonial-Indigenous relations in this period. We suggest that the handover had in fact been occurring for some time, with Earl Grey’s attempts to impose a policy of amalgamation and protection providing something of an interruption and in any case succeeding only to the extent that colonial legislatures accepted them. We also consider developments in the colonies during this crucial handover period that affected the outcome. As the colonies (excepting Western Australia) edged closer to self-­government, they entered a period of massive economic, social, and political change. The oligarchic political elites who had wanted self-­government in order to secure their own control, free from British interference, increasingly found a strong political challenge from another quarter – the growing middle- and working-­ class population opposed to pastoralist power and in favour of a more democratic system that would enhance their own claims. The outcome of this class conflict within the colonies would have implications for future Aboriginal policy. For Indigenous people, rapid economic growth and high immigration rates in this period meant alternately further displacement and new employment opportunities. While colonists could celebrate the arrival of a system in which government officials would be more answerable to parliament, for Aboriginal people the new system would mean the loss of Britain’s intervening role via a powerful governor. Their direct contact with governors was already diminishing, as governors, who had once been so careful to nurture some diplomatic relations with them, gradually yielded in Aboriginal matters to a more decentralised system of government. The special relationship between the sovereign 208

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 209

and her Indigenous subjects, on which governors and other British officials had always insisted, was under threat. The Gold Rushes and Aboriginal People Especially transformative of colonial life and politics were the gold rushes, which attracted tens of thousands of immigrants to New South Wales and especially to the new colony of Victoria. The gold rushes began on the Turon River in New South Wales in mid-­1851, and quickly moved south, reaching Ballarat in September and Bendigo in November. Within a year, the southern colony’s population had doubled, and within four, it had quadrupled.1 The labour shortage the district had experienced in the late 1840s ended as the economy expanded. There was a dramatic rise in the number of towns, many of which had not existed, or been scarcely present, just a few years before. The giddy optimism of some new settlers was balanced by conservative fears of social anarchy and foreign invasion.2 While Victoria was at the centre of this transformation, the other colonies were also affected. On the one hand, Victoria’s increased demand for timber and pastoral and agricultural produce stimulated the economies of the other colonies.3 On the other, labourers seeking their fortune began to leave New South Wales, South Australia, and Van Diemen’s Land in great numbers for the Victorian goldfields. While New South Wales more than compensated for its loss of population by a rise in immigration, especially after the revival of its own goldfields from 1854, the emigration from Van Diemen’s Land was at first so great that the male population of Van Diemen’s Land dropped by 33 per cent between March 1851 and October 1852.4 As people moved back and forth between Van Diemen’s Land and Victoria, however, the rate of departure slowed and the Van Diemen’s Land population stabilised.5 At the time, many observers assumed that Aboriginal people had long disappeared from the land that was now attracting thousands of gold seekers. In London, the Times remarked on 4 September 1851 that one of the many attractions of the Australian goldfields, compared with those of California, was that miners would have little problem with Aboriginal people: ‘instead of the  Stephen Henry Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement, Oxford: Frank Cass and Co., 1969 [1924], p. 228. 2  David Goodman, Gold-Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp. ix–xxix. 3  Wendy Rimon, ‘The Gold Rush in Victoria’, The Companion to Tasmanian History, www.utas .edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/G/Gold%20rush.htm, accessed 14 April 2018. 4  Rimon, ‘The Gold Rush in Victoria’; Caitlin Mahar, ‘Vandemonians’, eGold: A Nation’s Heritage, www.egold.net.au/biogs/EG00191b.htm, accessed 8 December 2015. 5  Wray Vamplew, ed., Australians: Historical Statistics, Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987, p. 28. 1

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warlike and ferocious natives of the Sierra Nevada, the Australian miner will have to deal with a race of aborigines entirely subjugated, and by virtue of some inscrutable law of Providence verging to extinction’. The paper repeated this point two months later, saying the Aboriginal people near the goldfields offered ‘the spectacle of savage man cowed and overawed by the influences of a civilization which he can neither comprehend nor resist’. He was simply waiting with a ‘harmless and listless inaction’ his own demise, an ‘extinction to which some untraceable cause has doomed him’.6 Yet Aboriginal people were far from listless or extinct, and as historians are increasingly demonstrating, gold was to provide some of them with new opportunities.7 While the accelerated influx of settlers into Aboriginal lands ultimately meant further population decline, the goldfields also paradoxically provided new sources of income and support.8 Some Aboriginal people were involved in finding gold in particular areas, especially in the early stages of the gold rushes. Fred Cahir draws attention to the ways in which Aboriginal people in Victoria sought various kinds of employment on the goldfields – sometimes demonstrating for payment their boomerang and tree-­climbing skills, at other times acting as guides to miners unfamiliar with the country, and working with prospecting parties.9 In the final two years of the Native Police force in Victoria, before the government abolished it at the end of 1852, Aboriginal people acted both as gold escorts and as collectors of the hated goldfield licences.10 Their newly acquired ability to earn wages from settlers, however, gradually undermined the attraction of belonging to the Native Police, and instances of desertion from the force became more common.11 By October 1852, the Victorian branch of the Native Police had finished duty on the goldfields and by the end of that year it had been abolished altogether.12 In South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, pastoralists now sought Aboriginal labour to replace the departing white labourers.13 Aboriginal people, who had often been excluded as enemies from pastoral stations a decade before, now found that their skills were valued and relatively well paid, and that they could continue at the same time to maintain elements of traditional life.14  The Times, 4 September 1851, as reprinted in the Empire, 27 December 1851, p. 4; The Times, 19 November 1851, as reprinted in the Empire, 5 March 1852, p. 3.     7  Fred Cahir, Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850–1870, Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2012.     8  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 7, 9, 20, 29, 114.     9  Cahir, Black Gold, esp. pp. 18, 35, 47. 10  Ibid., pp. 50–1. 11  Ibid., p. 53. 12  Ibid. 13  Fitzroy to Earl Grey, 17 June 1852, printed in British Parliamentary Papers, reprinted in Colonial Intelligencer, nos. XIV and XV, June and July 1853, p. 264. 14  Fitzroy to Newcastle, 22 December 1853, no. 162, CO 201/467, New South Wales 1853, vol. 5, November–December.

    6

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 211

Robert Foster suggests that one reason squatters in South Australia accepted the new co-­existence clause in pastoral leases in 1851 without much public debate was that they now wanted access to Aboriginal labour; access to pastoral lands would encourage people to stay on the stations and act as a much-­ needed labour supply.15 By June, Aboriginal shepherds in South Australia were already in charge of around 200,000 sheep.16 Noting the success of pastoralists in employing Aboriginal people in the Macintyre River region in the northern districts of New South Wales, transforming the area from one of frontier violence to one of prosperity and security, the Empire, a liberal newspaper established eighteen months earlier, commented: From the perfect security which now is felt at every station, property has risen greatly in value, while the services of the people whose depredations formerly rendered every thing unsafe, have, during the present dearth of labour, actually saved many proprietors from absolute and total ruin.17

A few days later, the same paper considered the question of Aboriginal labour more generally. It noted that in some areas it had become indispensable and praised Aboriginal people’s aptitude for ‘settled pursuits’. On the sheep stations, they made the best shepherds, and were valuable in washing operations during the shearing season. The Empire speculated that had settlers employed Aboriginal people more consistently from the beginning, they might have had good reason to question the apparently natural law of their inevitable extinction.18 In South Australia, where there was a greater emphasis in government circles than elsewhere on Grey and Merivale’s idea of amalgamation, protectors were instructed to keep Indigenous people in their home districts as much as possible, through supplying rations at small rural depots. The government saw a threefold benefit from this form of ration supply – Aboriginal people would survive by becoming part of colonial society, they would be a useful labour supply and, on the stations, rationing would cost less than in town.19 Rationing was also sometimes seen as a form of philanthropy, either as a measure of compensation for Aboriginal losses, or as a way of providing for the sick and helpless – a mixed and equivocal discourse of charity and entitlement.20 Pastoralists

 Robert Foster, ‘Coexistence and Colonization on Pastoral Leaseholds in South Australia’, in John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, eds., Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005, pp. 248–51. 16  South Australian Register, 26 June 1852, p. 3. 17  Empire, 10 May 1852, p. 2. 18  Empire, 14 May 1852, p. 3. 19  South Australian Register, 26 June 1852, p. 3; Foster, ‘Coexistence and Colonization’, pp. 254–5. 20  Foster, ‘Coexistence and Colonization’, pp. 251–3. 15

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who undertook to supply rations for whole communities in order to maintain access to their labour also sometimes saw it as a form of personal benevolence. This decentralisation of rationing was successful, and had an impact on government–­Indigenous relations. Without anything drawing them into the centre of Adelaide, Aboriginal numbers at the governor’s levees dropped during the early 1850s, and the governor himself stopped attending.21 The direct, central, and personal diplomacy of the early years was now outsourced to pastoralists and police. There was also a reliance on the successful mission at Poonindie, the government insisting in 1853, for example, that it take in people from Port Lincoln and any ‘half-castes’.22 Not all the labourers who left the stations for the goldfields were European. Some were Chinese, who had arrived under indenture since 1848. Though the Indian indentured labour trade had been stopped effectively by 1847, the British government did not have the power to prevent another indentured labour trade, that from China. With the amendment of the Masters and Servants Act in 1847 to ensure indentures signed elsewhere could be enforced in the colony, pastoralists in the Australian colonies had been able to join other employers worldwide in importing Chinese indentured labourers. Employers brought approximately 3,500 Chinese indentured labourers to New South Wales, working principally in the less ‘settled’ regions of Port Phillip and Moreton Bay.23 Colonial opposition to Indian indentured labour, evident from the 1830s onwards, was now directed at Chinese indentured labour. Colonial liberalism, now gaining strength in colonial politics, strongly opposed the trade. Liberals wanted labour to be based on freedom of contract, and the ‘squatter monopoly’ of the 1840s to be replaced by a diversified economy in which different economic interests would be held in balance. A key figure in colonial liberalism and in opposition to coloured indentured labour was Henry Parkes, who had arrived in New South Wales as a young man in 1839. The Empire, which he had established and edited from 28 December 1850, ventured on 20 November 1851 that, ‘We have ever regarded the reckless importation of coloured races as an act of treason to society.’ The Chinese were inferior, and indentured labour was ‘a species of slave trade’. So concerned was liberal member of parliament, Henry Douglass, that he moved on 21 November for leave to introduce a Bill to limit Chinese immigration, though doubts about  South Australian Register, 25 May 1850, p. 3; 26 May 1851, p. 2; 25 May 1852, p. 3; 25 May 1853, p. 2; 25 May 1854, p. 2; 25 May 1855, p. 3. 22  Brock, ‘Writing Aboriginal Collective Biography’, p. 119. 23  Maxine Darnell, ‘Master and Servant, Squatter and Shepherd: The Regulation of Indentured Chinese Labourers, New South Wales, 1847–1853’, in Henry Chan, Nora Chiang, and Ann Curthoys, eds., The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, Taipei, Canberra: National Taiwan University, Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, p. 54. 21

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 213

the Council’s authority to pass such legislation, plus squatter opposition, led him to withdraw it.24 While pastoralists seemed to have won the struggle for Chinese indentured labour as surely as they had lost that for similar labour from India, in the longer term, the introduction of Chinese labourers presented them with a major political difficulty. As in earlier debates about Indian labour, they were now attacked as promoting a form of slavery and introducing an unwanted race. Furthermore, they came to be somewhat disappointed with their indentured Chinese labourers, finding them far less ‘docile’ than they had hoped and expected. It proved difficult to keep the labourers to their contracts, and many pastoralists found they had, in fact, to draw up new agreements guaranteeing payment of a higher wage.25 Even Robert Towns, the main importer of Chinese indentured labour, described the reports of their value as ‘not satisfactory’.26 The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the whole situation. In 1852, after riots and demonstrations in the port of Amoy against the ‘coolie’ trade, the British government ordered its officers in Amoy not to assist the emigration of Chinese contract labourers.27 The trade ended, replaced by the much larger migration of free Chinese from Hong Kong to the goldfields under a ‘credit ticket’ system.28 Once present on the Victorian goldfields, the large Chinese population met with considerable hostility, leading to government measures to limit the number of arrivals and to tax and control Chinese residents through a ‘protectorate’ system, requiring Chinese people to be registered, live in designated areas on the goldfields, and pay a residence tax.29 Colonial opposition to these free Chinese immigrants rested on many of the same ideas as had applied to indentured labourers – they were inherently slave-­like, and would form a permanent lower caste in the community. In these increasingly democratic times, they were also criticised for not understanding British political institutions, and undermining hopes for a democracy based on a homogeneous population.30 Britain’s Colonial Policy, 1852–1855 At the same time as the gold rushes were transforming most of the colonies, and a new emphasis on managing Aboriginal labour was emerging, British  Empire, 22 November 1851.  Willard, A History of the White Australia Policy, p. 11.  Report from the Select Committee on Asiatic Labour, 1854, NSWLCVP, 1854, vol. 2, p. 12. 27  Persia Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire, London: F. Cass, 1971 [1923], p. 103. 28  Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration, p. 58. 29  Garden, Victoria, pp. 72, 79–81, 100–1; Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Society, London: Quiller Press, 1992, p. 100. 30  See Ann Curthoys, ‘Men of All Nations, Except Chinamen: Chinese on the New South Wales Goldfields’, in Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves, eds., Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 108–9. 24 25 26

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politics were in upheaval. There were two changes of government in less than a year, with colonial questions playing a role in the political instability. As Alan Lester points out, criticisms of the Colonial Office for its mismanagement of both the convict and frontier war questions in the Cape helped bring about the Russell government’s demise.31 In February 1852, after five-and-a-half years in office, the Whig government fell to the Tories, and Sir John Pakington replaced Earl Grey as Secretary of State. The new government faced a fast-­changing political landscape in settler-­ colonial governance. While there had been since 1848 a powerful drive in Britain to transfer to the colonies one or other form of greater self-­government, the task of converting that idea into practice was proving difficult in every case. As a minority government, and weakened by the split within the conservatives over free trade, it was not especially well placed to make the many decisions on colonial governance that now confronted it. Like many other government ministers, Secretary of State John Pakington was inexperienced in colonial affairs and open to Colonial Office advice.32 Herman Merivale, the Permanent Under-­Secretary at the Colonial Office since May 1848, had favoured granting responsible government for some time, but given Earl Grey’s concerns and caution, had so far been unable to see it enacted.33 Pakington, however, had fewer strong views on the matter, and Merivale’s influence was growing.34 One colony needing immediate attention was New Zealand. After the failure of the 1846 Act, consideration of responsible government in New Zealand stalled for five years, but had resumed in 1851 when Governor Grey drafted an alternative Act, which established provincial councils and a central bicameral parliament, or General Assembly, and created Ma¯ ori districts.35 The governor would retain his existing powers over military matters and native affairs, with funds for the latter – for educational and social services and advancing Ma¯ ori prosperity and happiness generally  – coming from funds reserved annually from provincial revenues.36 Earl Grey received Governor Grey’s draft favourably, embodying many of its suggestions in his own draft, written on February 1852, just before the Russell government lost office.37 Pakington, as the new Secretary of State, introduced a bill differing little from Earl Grey’s version. Significantly, the Bill allowed the General Assembly to ‘make laws for regulating  Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship: Colonial Inclusions and Exclusions’, in Martin Hewitt, ed., The Victorian World, London: Routledge, 2012, p. 388. 32  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 326. 33  Ibid., p. 328. 34  Avril Harvey, ‘Herman Merivale, the Colonial Office, and the Australian Colonies, 1848–1860’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 60, Pt 2, June 1974, pp. 98–9. 35  Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, pp. 74–5. 36  Governor Grey to Earl Grey, 30 August 1851, British Parliamentary Papers, 1852, pp. 18–33, cited in McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, p. 319, n. 1. 37  McLintock, Crown Colony Government, p. 327. 31

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 215

the sale, letting, disposal, and occupation of the waste lands of the Crown in New Zealand’, except that only the Crown could purchase or otherwise acquire Ma¯ ori land. Section 71 provided that the governor could proclaim designated ‘native districts’ where Ma¯ ori laws could continue to operate, provided they were not ‘repugnant to the general principles of humanity’.38 The ensuing parliamentary debates on the New Zealand Constitution Act in May and June 1852 were notable for how few speakers mentioned Ma¯ ori affairs.39 Sir Edward Buxton, as an Aborigines Protection Society (APS) member of parliament, made it clear that the society had now accepted the principle of self-­government, seeing it as assisting the desirable process of amalgamation by making the two groups – Ma¯ ori and Pakeha – into one political society.40 Rather than criticise self-­government itself, as the society would earlier have done, Buxton now simply sought an assurance that the franchise would not discriminate against Ma¯ ori. In the House of Lords, Earl Grey pointed out that the Bill marked a major shift in imperial governance in transferring such significant control to a colonial legislature, and thought it important that the Crown maintain its right of veto over colonial legislation.41 The New Zealand Constitution Act (15 & 16 Vict. c. 72), finally passed in June 1852, did not clearly specify that the governor retained power over Ma¯ ori affairs, though that had been assumed from Governor Grey’s 1851 draft onwards. Within two years, the question of governor versus Assembly control of Ma¯ ori policy was to become a matter of contention.42 Granting somewhat less than the New Zealand constitution was the proposed new constitution for the Cape Colony, also under discussion in 1851 and 1852. In the Cape, the mass movement against transportation had had a similar effect to its counterpart in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land – it had given new energy to demands for greater local political representation and control. In the Cape context, this was a demand for the establishment of representative government, hitherto withheld by Britain partly on the grounds that the people known as ‘Cape Coloureds’ would suffer at the hands of a white settler-­dominated Legislative Council, a position supported by humanitarian opinion.43 Debate over the question of a new constitution establishing representative government had begun in 1848 but the transportation question and the Eighth Frontier War of 1850–2 had delayed it. The existing system  The New Zealand Constitution Act [1852], www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GovCons -t1-body-d1-d1.html, accessed 14 April 2018. 39  McLintock, Crown Colony Government, p. 335. 40  Ibid., p. 336. 41  Ibid., p. 342. 42  See Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand 1855–1870, p. 31. 43  Cape Coloureds were of mixed origin  – Indigenous, European, and slaves from around the Indian Ocean. Trapido, ‘The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853’, pp. 37–54, this material pp. 37–8. 38

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of a nominated Council, already unpopular, completely lost support during the crisis over convict transportation.44 When debate resumed in 1851, settler pressure for some form of representative government was overwhelming; nevertheless, both Governor Sir Harry Smith and coloured petitioners opposed representative government on the grounds of its dangers to the rights of coloured people.45 When colonists debated the proposed new constitution, there was considerable disagreement over whether or not property qualifications for the franchise should be high, thus effectively excluding most coloured voters, or low, ensuring poorer whites could be included.46 The issue remained unresolved when the Tories lost power in December 1852. The Australian press watched developments in both New Zealand and the Cape closely. Henry Parkes’s Empire, now a little over a year old, commented at length on the proposed new constitution for the Cape soon after copies arrived in New South Wales early in 1852. It thought Britain was offering the Cape a much better deal than it had given the Australian colonies in their 1850 Act. The Cape had been promised two elected houses of parliament, thus repudiating the ‘vicious’ system of nomineeism that still held for the Australian colonies. Officers of the Crown could attend parliamentary sessions in the Cape’s Lower House and contribute to debate, but would not be allowed to vote. Furthermore, the legislature had control of the civil list, that is, of the appointment and payment of government employees.47 The difference was galling indeed to advocates of self-­government in New South Wales. They were, in fact, soon to gain a better deal than they had expected. The Imperial Government Washes Its Hands: Land Policy and Aboriginal Governance Pakington had before him clear evidence of strong and diverse settler pressure for self-­government in most of the Australian colonies. In a despatch to the secretary of state on 15 January 1852, Governor Fitzroy expressed his support for a petition from the New South Wales Legislative Council seeking full powers over legislation, land policy and revenues, and the civil list, as had recently been granted in Canada, something colonists had learnt about during their recent election campaign.48 Significantly, as Fitzroy stressed, the petition was supported by elected conservatives and liberals alike, with only eight official (unelected) members voting against, and was popular both within and outside

 Trapido, ‘The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853’, p. 44.  Ibid., p. 39. 46  Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, p. 92. 47  Empire, 4 March 1852, p. 2. 48  Fitzroy to Grey, 15 January 1852, CO 201/450; Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 288. 44 45

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 217

the Legislative Council.49 Pakington also had before him Merivale’s memorandum strongly in favour of granting responsible government.50 A key issue in considering the pleas for self-­government was who would control land policy  – the British government or the newly empowered local legislatures. In Merivale’s harsh but largely accurate view, it was land, rather than anything else, that mattered to the New South Wales Legislative Council. ‘The rest,’ he wrote, ‘is thrown in by way of makeweight.’51 Imperial control over colonial land had been a core British government view for decades. Earl Grey had reasserted it at the very end of his period as secretary of state when, on 23 January 1852, he wrote to Fitzroy: The Waste Lands of the vast Colonial Possessions of the British Empire are held by the Crown as Trustee for the Inhabitants of that Empire at large and not for the Inhabitants of the particular Provinces, divided by arbitrary geographical limits, in which any such Waste Lands happen to be situated.52

The land question had not been fully resolved by the Waste Lands Act of 1846 and the Order in Council of 1847, though they did reduce the intensity of conflict between the government and the squatters, and laid the basis for the development of a distinctive form of land tenure (the pastoral lease) that seemed appropriate for Australian conditions. Squatters wanted even more security of tenure than the Act had offered; in Stephen Roberts’ view, the squatters had achieved greater security, and were now ‘attempting to convert it into a monopoly’.53 Despite insistence that control of land was an imperial matter, the imperial government no longer could make its assertion of control of land policy a reality. In practice, it allowed the colonial Legislative Councils to draft the necessary regulations under the 1846 Act. Its position appeared to be that, while it alone had the right to control land policy and revenue, it was prepared to hand over much of that control to the local pastoralist-­dominated legislatures. In this context, and strongly influenced by Merivale,54 Pakington decided to grant the colonial legislatures and the pastoralists their dearest wish and give them control over all land matters, though he would be careful, as Roberts  Fitzroy to Grey, 15 January 1852, CO 201/450; Ward, Colonial Self-Government, pp. 298–9.  Harvey, ‘Herman Merivale’, p. 99. 51  Minute by Merivale written on Fitzroy to Grey, 15 January 1852, CO 201/450. Quoted by Ward, Colonial Self-Government, p. 305. 52  Grey, The Colonial Policy, Cambridge University Press digital version 2010, p. 324. Quoted in Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement, p. 227. 53  Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement, pp. 218–9. 54  See Melbourne, Early Constitutional Development, p. 398; Harvey, ‘Herman Merivale’, p. 99; Dorothy P. Clarke, The Colonial Office Attitude to Responsible Government 1854–1868, PhD thesis, London: King’s College, 1953, p. 21. 49 50

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notes, to point out that the transfer of powers in this case was ‘a question of expediency and not of right’.55 This was a crucial decision that would have serious consequences for Aboriginal policy for a long time to come. There was also the continuing question of transportation. Not only was anti-­ transportationist sentiment strong in the eastern colonies but also opinion in Britain was turning against the system as the prison reformers’ preferred policy of building more prisons and keeping convicts at home in Britain gathered momentum.56 Above all, there was a sense that the gold rushes had undermined the system. As The Times commented on 4 September 1851, transportation had already lost much of its dread, with the wages and opportunities for the working man significantly superior in the colonies than in Britain; now, with the gold rushes, ‘punishment will be turned into reward, and that which is meant to deter will be the inducement to crime’. The gold discoveries, it predicted, would put an end to transportation ‘far more certainly’ than the eloquence of its British opponents, such as Sir William Molesworth, or the campaigns of bodies such as the Colonial League.57 The Times returned to this point two months later, commenting that most of the convicts they were still transporting to Van Diemen’s Land would, under the ticket-of-leave system, quickly find their way to the goldfields.58 Many others made a similar point; one example was, inevitably, John Dunmore Lang, who summarised for Empire readers in November 1852 the contents of his letters to Pakington on questions of colonial government. Like many others, he submitted that ‘the discovery of gold in Eastern Australia has rendered the whole group of colonies in that region no longer a fit and proper place for the transportation of criminals’.59 Yet as 1852 drew to a close, transportation had still not ended, with the last convict ship leaving Britain for Hobart on 28 December 1852.60 It was clear, though, that it could not last much longer. Two weeks earlier, on 15 December 1852, Pakington had written to Fitzroy announcing the government’s new policy on all three questions  – land, transportation, and the powers of colonial legislatures in the new constitutions. Control and disposal of Crown lands was to be transferred to the colonies. Convict transportation to Van Diemen’s Land would end, given especially the ‘strong repugnance’ of colonists towards the system. The British government would allow the four eastern Australian colonies to devise constitutions similar to that of the United Canadas, with an

 Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement, p.  227. The decision was communicated in Pakington to Fitzroy, 15 December 1852, CO 201/450.  Shaw, Convicts, p. 348. 57  The Times, 4 September 1851, as reprinted in the Empire, 27 December 1851, p. 4. 58  The Times, 19 November 1851, as printed in the Empire, 5 March 1852, p. 3. 59  Empire, 23 November 1852, p. 3. 60  Shaw, Convicts, p. 351. 55

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elected Assembly and a nominated Council.61 Among other things, Pakington’s despatch cited ‘those extraordinary discoveries of Gold which have lately taken place in some of the Australian Colonies’ as a reason for the British government’s change in thinking: these discoveries had ‘imparted new and unforeseen features to their political and social condition’ such that self-­government was now entirely feasible.62 Pakington included South Australia and Victoria in his decisions, sending copies of his despatch to those colonies, and promised Van Diemen’s Land separately that transportation would cease.63 Two weeks later, after less than a year in office, the Tory government ended, replaced by a coalition of Whigs and Peelites (conservatives who had come to support free trade) led by the Earl of Aberdeen. The new government, with the Duke of Newcastle as the new secretary of state for the colonies, immediately disposed of the transportation question, announcing on 17 February 1853 that Van Diemen’s Land would cease to be a site for transported convicts. The departure of the convict ship, St Vincent, the previous December proved to be the last.64 When news of Newcastle’s announcement arrived in the colonies in mid-­1853, colonists, especially in Van Diemen’s Land, were generally delighted. The new government had before it the question of a number of colonial constitutions – not only the four eligible Australian colonies submitting constitutions for responsible government but also the Cape Colony with its proposed constitution establishing representative government. In the Cape’s case, Britain’s new government promptly passed the new constitution that had been under discussion for some time, providing for a colour-­blind franchise. In his despatch to the governor at the Cape on 14 February 1853, Newcastle observed that it was the ‘earnest desire’ of Her Majesty’s government that ‘all her subjects at the Cape, without distinction of class or colour, should be united by one bond of loyalty and a common interest; and we believe that the exercise of political rights, enjoyed by all alike, will prove one of the best methods of attaining this object’. The despatch concluded with the pointed remark that the government’s aim was to promote the interests not only of British settlers, ‘but of all the Queen’s subjects’.65 The Act came into effect on 1 July that year, and the first elections for the Legislative Council in the Cape took place soon after.66 As this was representative but not responsible government, the governor retained considerable powers. A governor with a strong agenda of his own in native affairs, in the form of Sir George Grey, arrived in the Cape in December 1854.  Ward, Colonial Self-Government, p. 296.  Pakington to Fitzroy, 15 December 1852, CO 201/450. 63  Ward, Colonial Self-Government, p. 306. 64  Ibid., p. 297. 65  Newcastle to Cathcart, 14 March 1853, published in the Courier (Tasmania), 19 July 1853, p. 2. 66  Trapido, The Origins of the Cape Franchise Qualifications of 1853, pp. 37–54. 61 62

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True to form, Grey set out to ‘amalgamate’ white and black populations, as he had recommended ever since his time in Western Australia fourteen years earlier, by making Xhosa useful servants, who would obey British laws, and share the religious values of the white settlers.67 He was soon to find, however, that the newly elected legislature would have its own ideas, passing legislation that, while ostensibly colour-­blind, in fact especially restricted the rights of black labourers.68 In the Australian colonies other than Western Australia, by contrast, the days of gubernatorial power over Aboriginal policy were ending. Britain was fast withdrawing from Aboriginal policy altogether. The exchange of despatches between New South Wales and London on Aboriginal policy matters, so frequent during Grey’s period as secretary of state, now became rare and desultory. Governor Fitzroy wrote one of the few on 22 December 1853, belatedly responding to Grey’s suggestion of mixed-­race schools in remote districts, originally made three years earlier.69 Fitzroy had at last received and was now forwarding the responses to his queries from both the Denominational School Board and the National Education Office, and advice from the Executive Council. The Denominational Schools Board had written promptly on 19 November 1851, observing that the establishment of schools in pastoral districts was outside its powers. It commented that, in view of the ‘unhappy failure of all endeavours to promote the civilization by education or by any other means of the Aboriginal race’, such an experiment, of educating European and Aboriginal children together, would inevitably fail.70 It went further: ‘Their wandering and unsettled habits seem to be governed by a power as influential as the instinct of animals, their passions are easily stimulated while their reason is dormant hence they imbibe readily the destructive vices of civilization and sink beneath their influences.’ The Denominational Schools Board would nevertheless instruct the heads of denominational schools to offer education to Aboriginal children free of charge. The National Education Board took much longer to reply, and considered the issues in some detail. The result, though, was much the same; in view of previous failures ‘to civilize and educate the Aboriginal race’, the National Education Board agreed that this plan, too, would surely fail.  T. R. H. Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p. 141. 68  Christopher Strobel, The Testing Grounds of Modern Empire: The Making of Colonial Racial Order in the American Ohio Country and the South African Eastern Cape, 1770s–1850s, New York: Peter Lang, 2008, p. 149. 69  Fitzroy to Newcastle, 22 December 1853, CO 201/467 NSW 1853 no. 162. See Barry Bridges, ‘Aboriginal Education in Eastern Australia (NSW) 1788–1850’, The Australian Journal of Education, vol. 12, no. 3, October 1968, p. 238. 70  C. D. Riddell, Chairman of the Denominational School Board, to Fitzroy, 19 November 1851, encl. with Fitzroy to Newcastle, 22 December 1853. 67

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At its meeting on 16 May 1853, the Executive Council concurred with the two boards’ rejection of Grey’s boarding school proposal.71 In his despatch to Newcastle, Fitzroy was regretful that he and his Executive Council had been unable to carry out any of Earl Grey’s wishes other than the expansion of the Native Police. In a second despatch sent the following day, on 23 December 1853, Fitzroy forwarded the annual reports of the Commissioners of Crown Lands for the year 1852, apologising for their lateness and promising the 1853 reports shortly. Aboriginal policy had clearly become a matter of low priority and no urgency. In Merivale’s memo written on 29 July 1854 on Fitzroy’s despatch of 22 December, we can see the imperial government giving up and washing its hands of the whole affair. In response to Fitzroy’s reporting so belatedly that the colony had rejected Grey’s boarding school proposal, Merivale noted on 29 July 1854 that the suggestion had originally come from him, and then made this comment: It seems useless to press the suggestion [for mixed race schooling] further in the face of such discouraging reports and when the Land Fund is at the disposal of the local Legislature, the Executive Government would be wholly without the means of carrying out such a project without the concurrence of the Legislative Assembly.72

In other words, in granting both self-­government and control of land revenues, Britain was effectively also handing over Aboriginal policy. On Fitzroy’s other despatch, forwarding the 1852 reports of the Commission­ ers of Crown Lands, Merivale remarked that they were relatively encouraging, compared to earlier reports, since they reported a growing practice of employing Aboriginal labour in the wake of the gold discoveries, with Aboriginal people providing useful services which settlers appreciated. In a comment made on 5 August 1854, Merivale summed up Colonial Office opinion even more clearly: The Executive here has, I think, now done what it can: the duty and responsibility will rest with the legislatures of Australia.73

It was abundantly clear that Fitzroy’s reports were of academic interest only to the Colonial Office, since British involvement in Aboriginal policy in the Australian colonies, except in Western Australia, was coming to an end.

 Minutes of Executive Council, 16 May 1853, confirmed on 23 May, enclosed with Fitzroy to Newcastle, 22 December 1853. 72  Merivale comment dated 29 July 1854, written on Fitzroy to Newcastle 22 December 1853, no. 162, CO 201/467, New South Wales 1853, vol. 5, November–December. 73  Merivale comment dated 5 August 1854, written on Fitzroy to Newcastle, 23 December 1853, no. 163, CO 201/467, New South Wales 1853, vol. 5, November–December. 71

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Humanitarians in the Colonies Although the humanitarian voice on Aboriginal matters in both the metropole and the colonies had become a minority voice indeed, it was by no means completely silenced. In these last years before the operations of responsible government, both Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales witnessed new interactions between missionaries and Indigenous people. In Van Diemen’s Land, Church of England Bishop Nixon, who had arrived in the colony and toured the Bass Strait Islands in 1843, returned to the islands in 1854 and began writing and speaking about the need for missionaries there. The resident islanders had already had some contact with the clergy on the Tasmanian mainland; in 1852 a party of them had met with the Rev. Mr Kane in George Town and told him of their wish for missionaries and teachers, a report which was then circulated through church meetings and the Tasmanian Church Chronicle, and which presumably influenced Nixon’s decision to visit the area.74 When the bishop arrived, the residents welcomed him into their homes, prayed with him, and impressed upon him the need for better schooling for their children. The women presented him with gifts of shells, seaweed and traditional necklaces, emblems of this distinctive region and of their ancestral cultures.75 Although Nixon described the Bass Strait Islands as a wild and marginal place, where British migrants were at risk of degeneration,76 he saw the Furneaux islanders as governing themselves, domestically and spiritually, rather well. He praised what he called ‘the grave, sober and gentle demeanour’ of the men and the ‘quiet retiring modesty of the females’; they had ‘an air of quiet domestic union’ – ‘these simple-­hearted people are correct in their habits and docile in disposition’.77 The islanders’ humility could be associated with their class and racial status, but also with ideals of Christian worship. Nixon was conscious of the community’s mixed racial origins and their ‘wild’ surroundings, but he was equivocal in his portrayal of their ethnicity, at a time when most settlers associated Aboriginality with helplessness and doom. He showed little interest in reviving Tasmania’s history of institutionalising Indigenous people, nor did he compare their settlements on the islands to Aboriginal missions elsewhere. Instead, he portrayed the people as vigorous, intelligent ‘half-­castes’, in a part of the colony that was isolated and strange enough to need missionary and state intervention, but also familiar and civilised enough to be sure to benefit from it.  Tasmanian Church Chronicle: A Monthly Periodical, vol. 1, no. 3, 6 March 1852, p. 2.  Francis Russell Nixon, The Cruise of the Beacon: A Narrative of a Visit to the Islands in Bass’s Straits, London: Bell & Daldy, 1857, pp. 43–5, 49. Also Courier, 23 May 1855, pp. 2–3; 20 January 1858, p. 2; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 222. 76  Nixon, The Cruise of the Beacon, pp. 17–25, 54–5. 77  Nixon, The Cruise of the Beacon, pp. 45–7. See also Church News for the Diocese of Tasmania, 21 November 1864, vol.  1, no.  31, p.  389; Courier, 9 December 1854, p.  2; 23 May 1855, pp. 2–3; 20 January 1858, p. 2. 74 75

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James Boyce has described Nixon’s visit to the island in terms of the arrival of church and state power, especially as he was travelling with the surveyorgeneral.78 Indeed, Boyce portrays the visit as a key symbolic moment of transition, as Van Diemen’s Land gave way to the new Tasmania. Certainly, the bishop was trying to formalise the family arrangements in the islands: baptising a number of ‘half-­caste’ children and marrying an old sealer, Edward Mansell, to an Indigenous woman named Judy Thomas, also known as Pollerelberner or Julia, from St Patrick’s Head.79 If this was a gesture of British authority, however, it was an equivocal one, for Nixon was formalising unions of British men and Indigenous women, and recognising their children, something that would not have been socially acceptable in most colonial settings. Nor did he imply that conventional British government was securely in place now. He reflected with pleasure on Mansell’s decision to marry, believing this signaled a wish to repent his past ‘sin and folly’, but also noted with irritation that Judy struggled with the English words of the ceremony and that her husband laughed about it. He added that the captain of the government schooner stood in for Judy’s father – a gesture that was imperialist and patriarchal, but also had an unintended piquancy, given that some Indigenous women in this community did indeed have fathers who had been white sailors.80 Thus, the messages about governance in Nixon’s work were mixed; he portrayed the arrival of British patriarchal order while also hinting at its limitations, and depicting a community more orderly and self-­disciplined than many of his readers would have expected, and more keen to be drawn into an equal system of government. Humanitarians, especially clergymen, continued to argue publicly that the ‘original possessors of the soil’ deserved care and protection. In Victoria, the former protector of Aborigines of the Loddon area, Edward Stone Parker, delivered a public lecture in May 1854 in which he called for greater missionary work, insisting that Aboriginal disappearance was not natural and could be checked by Christian civilisation.81 The following year, a mission committee of the Church of England reminded colonists that, in dispossessing Indigenous people, they had incurred obligations towards them. In passionate rhetoric that contemporary readers might see as foreshadowing Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating’s famous Redfern speech of 10 December 1992, the committee’s report said: We all benefit by the occupation of the country which was once solely theirs; we have taken their hunting grounds; we have destroyed the animals upon which they fed; we have been the means of whole tribes of them having been extirpated, or nearly so; we  Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, pp. 315–7.  Courier, 9 December 1854, p.  2; 23 May 1855, pp.  2–3; Nixon, The Cruise of the Beacon, pp. 41–2; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 225, 275. 80  Nixon, The Cruise of the Beacon, pp. 41–2. 81  Edward Stone Parker, ‘The Aborigines of Australia’, in Edgar Morrison, ed., Frontier Life in the Loddon Protectorate, Daylesford: Advocate, 1967, pp. 14–7, 29–30. 78 79

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have taught them all our vices, while we can hardly be said to have been the means of conferring upon them a blessing as yet.

If such duties were ignored, the committee warned, ‘extermination’ might well follow. Nor can it [charity] be safely deferred until local wants are less pressing, for in a very few years, in all probability, the opportunity of attending to it will, with the natives themselves, be passed away for ever.82

Anglican missionaries accordingly began a mission at Yelta on the Murray-­ Darling junction west of Mildura in 1855. However, like the mission established four years earlier at Lake Boga, approximately 260 km along the Murray River south east of Yelta, it had little success, though it was still in existence in the mid-­1860s and was finally closed in 1869. While the Lower Murray people initially visited and helped establish a small settlement there, the attraction of pastoral wages and the bush inns around the nearby town of Wentworth proved too much for the development of a strong mission-­based community.83 While there was little interest in New South Wales in missionary activity at this time, one major exception was William Ridley. A Presbyterian missionary and a keen linguist, he was also a passionate spokesman for philanthropy towards Aboriginal people. He had initially been recruited in 1849 by John Dunmore Lang as an itinerant clergyman, and during the mid-­1850s, he travelled through what would become the north-­west of New South Wales and the south-­west of Queensland, preaching mainly to Kamilaraay- and Pikampul-­ speaking people and distributing tracts. Ridley’s reports were sent to supporters in the church and the Moreton Bay Aborigines’ Friends Society (established in 1855), and reproduced in the Sydney and Brisbane press.84 Ridley emphasised the continuing existence of Aboriginal people in New South Wales, noting in one report in the Colonial Intelligencer in July 1854 that the Episcopal Board of Missions had estimated 11,000 Aboriginal people remained in New South Wales. In the Liverpool Plains and along the Namoi and Barwon rivers, which, he said, were suitable for pastoral but not agricultural pursuits, there were still enough native plants and animals to support the Aboriginal population. In regions that were less attractive to settlers, he commented, in an acute perception, on the potentially genocidal consequences of colonisation: ‘there is not so much reason to fear the speedy disappearance of the black race from these plains as from districts which are more inviting to colonial enterprise’.85  First Annual Report of the Melbourne Church of England Mission to the Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne: Goodhugh & Trembath, 1855, p. 10. 83  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 121. 84  See Colonial Intelligencer, New Series, vol. 1, no. III, April–September 1856, pp. 161–6. 85  Colonial Intelligencer, series IV, nos. XX and XXI, July–December 1854, p. 361. 82

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When Ridley travelled around Brisbane, along the Condamine and into Warwick and the Canning Downs, many Indigenous people approached him on friendly terms. They appreciated his efforts to speak their languages and followed his preaching with interest. Ridley’s style was possibly more appealing than that of his missionary predecessors, or perhaps, as the invasion of their lands worsened, people had begun to see potential benefits in such an alliance. On some stations, he found peaceful co-­existence, with Indigenous people working for pastoralists and maintaining much of their traditional lives. On others, he found starvation and violence. As he travelled south down the Balun and Barwon rivers, people protested to him about being kept away from their sources of food and water and subjected to cruelty, abduction, and rape. He wrote: One poor fellow on the Mooni addressed me in a long and pathetic harangue on the wrongs which his people have suffered at the hands of the white man; and urged upon me, as I had been telling the blackfellows not to do evil, to go round and tell the white man not to wrong the blacks, especially not to take away their gins [women].86

Another man from the Barwon complained to Ridley that his wife had been taken by a white man and urged Ridley to send the constables after him.87 Other communities, however, were not at all keen on a police presence. The people around Bulgora, in particular, were terrified by the sight of Ridley’s Native Mounted Police guard, a point not lost on the missionary.88 Ridley’s travels suggested that peaceful alliances between Indigenous people and British philanthropists might have been possible in the north, had the opportunity been made available. At first it seemed such opportunities might still remain; when Ridley called repeatedly for more support, petitioning the New South Wales Legislative Council to fund missionary work with revenues from land designated for Aboriginal reserves, he received quite a positive response. The council now had some liberal and radical members, who supported his request. Although, true to form, they insisted that the British seizure of Australia had been justified since colonists alone could make the land ‘useful’, they also maintained that it had left colonists with responsibilities.89  William Ridley, Report laid before the Moreton Bay Aborigines Friends’ Society, Sydney: Empire General Steam, 1855, p. 5. 87  Ibid., p. 6. See also Maitland Mercury, 6 December 1854, p. 2; Moreton Bay Courier, 20 October 1855, p. 2. 88  Moreton Bay Courier, 13 October 1855, p. 2; SMH, 14 December 1855, p. 3. 89  Legislative Council of New South Wales, ‘Aborigines: The petition of William Ridley, A. B., Minister of the Gospel in connection with the Synod of New South Wales’, ordered by the Council to be printed, 12 September 1854, Votes and Proceedings, Sydney, 1854, p. 4; Maitland Mercury, 12 April 1854, p. 4; 16 September 1854, p. 4; 6 December 1854, p. 2; Moreton Bay Courier, 24 March 1855, p. 2; 13 October 1855, p. 2, 19 January 1856, p. 3; 9 February 1856, p. 3; SMH, 7 April 1854, p. 2; 13 September 1854, p. 5; 14 December 1855, p. 3; 30 April 1856, p. 3. 86

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These early signs of support, however, were not followed up and without either private or government funding, Ridley was forced to give up. The people he had spoken to would find few white advocates of Ridley’s kind in the years to come. Colonists Devise New Constitutions, 1853–1854 While responsibility for Aboriginal policy was shifting to the colonies, a parallel debate was taking place over the shape of the new constitutions – although the two discussions rarely made reference to one another. British decisions had ensured that each of the proposed colonial constitutions would consist of both a lower house – a Legislative Assembly, and an upper house of review – a Legislative Council. This was a system of ‘strong bicameralism’, whereby the two parliamentary houses had roughly equal powers, though money bills had to originate in the Assembly, and Council could reject, but not alter, them. When the British government in August 1853 withdrew the earlier requirement that the new constitutions must provide for a nominated upper house, the colonies could decide for themselves how their upper house would be formed.90 The system of ‘nomineeism’, so hated and scorned by democrats, was now up for full and free consideration. Ominously for liberals and democrats, the decision would be made by the existing Legislative Councils in which they were outnumbered; in public forums debating the new constitutions, on the other hand, the liberal voice was strong and getting stronger. Through these separate processes, colonies came to different arrangements for the franchise for the Assembly, for whether the Council was to be nominated or elected and, if the latter, by whom. In New South Wales, the shape of the new legislature and franchise was debated thoroughly. Terry Irving has counted nine large public meetings on constitutional reform in 1853–5, in which merchants were increasingly vocal.91 Parkes’s Empire had now for three years been articulating a distinct form of colonial liberalism  – consistently critical of pastoralists for their policies, their wealthy lifestyle, their liking of cheap labour from wherever it might come, their economic and social values, and offering a contrasting vision of a diversified economy and a democratic system giving voice to different interests.92 The Legislative Council, in May 1853, established a Select Committee to recommend the details of a new constitution, and two months later Parkes and other leading liberals formed an unofficial New South Wales Constitution

 Newcastle to Fitzroy, 14 August 1853, GBPP, 1854, vol. XLIV, 62f; Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967, p. 468. 91  Irving, The Southern Tree of Liberty, pp. 201–2. 92  Ibid., p. 202. 90

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Committee.93 There were acrimonious disputes over whether the new government should be broadly representative – an idea supported by liberals and the professional classes  – or whether it should have an appointed upper house. W. C. Wentworth, who had been a liberalising figure in the penal era but was now keen to cement the power of what he conceived of as the landed gentry, pushed for a conservative upper house stacked with pastoralists to act as a buffer against excessive democracy. What was more, he wanted its membership to be hereditary, on the model of the House of Lords, once the colony had formed a new aristocracy.94 When the Select Committee agreed to Wentworth’s proposals, liberals and radicals were outraged. They bitterly opposed the proposed electoral maldistribution for the lower house and nominated system for the upper house, the difficulty in changing the constitution, and the suggestion for a colonial aristocracy.95 Meetings around the colony opposed their proposals, especially the idea of a colonial aristocracy, which they had great fun lampooning, with much mention of Botany Bay barons, and the like. The vigour of these anti-­pastoralist protests reminds us how much political discussion proceeds by metaphor, utopian and dystopian visions, jokes, quips, and stories. The most effective and best-­remembered epithet came from Daniel Deniehy on 15 August at a packed protest meeting called by the liberal Constitution Committee. A solicitor and the Australian-­born son of Irish convicts, Deniehy poured scorn on the proposal, calling it a ‘bunyip aristocracy’. The epithet ‘bunyip’ has since lost its sting and for many its meaning, but in colonial Sydney in 1853 it meant a lot, and contained within it a widely accepted colonial understanding of Indigenous people and their beliefs. The bunyip was somewhat like the Loch Ness monster of the twentieth century, a large creature of the deep, with attendant uncertainties over whether it was a real or fantastical creature. Ideas about the bunyip came originally from settler contact with Indigenous people in the Port Phillip district, a report in the Geelong Advertiser on 2 July 1843 describing it as apparently ‘uniting the characteristics of a bird and of an alligator’.96 In his book, Our Antipodes, published in 1852, Godfrey Mundy described it as ‘a sort of “half-­horse, half-­ alligator”, haunting the wide rushy swamps and lagoons of the interior  . . .. Rolling his voluminous length above the surface of the silent waters, or rearing his monstrous head over the tall rushes on their banks’.97 Mundy reported that  Ward, Colonial Self-Government, p. 308.  See Tink, William Charles Wentworth, pp. 229–43.  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 352. 96  Geelong Advertiser, 2 July 1845, p. 2. 97  Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes, or Residence and Rambles in the Australian Colonies, with a Glimpse of the Goldfields, digital text by Australian Literature Gateway, 2003, first published 1852, chapter 1. 93 94 95

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in the mid-­1840s there had been much excitement among naturalists in Sydney about the possibility that there may be yet another curious animal in this antipodean, upside-­down land. After examining a supposed bunyip skeleton for the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1847, however, the naturalists had concluded that it was not a new animal, and the skull was in fact that of a horse. When ­colonists learnt that the bunyip was a figure in Aboriginal mythology rather than a real animal, the term ‘bunyip’ entered the colonial vocabulary as (in Mundy’s words) ‘a Sydney synonyme [sic] for impostor, pretender, humbug, and the like’. Aboriginal people, Mundy thought, remained unaware of the scientific proof there was no such animal, and ‘continue to cherish the fabulous bunyip in their shuddering imaginations’.98 Deniehy’s quip, then, repeated in every historical account of the quickly discredited proposal for a colonial aristocracy, had embedded in it a view of Indigenous superstition and trickery that has since been forgotten but at the time gave it suasive power. Indeed, Deniehy had not been the first to use the idea of the bunyip to discredit the colonial aristocracy proposal. John Dunmore Lang, in a letter to the Empire on 13 January 1852, responding to an earlier suggestion for a colonial nobility put forward by Justice Dickinson of the New South Wales Supreme Court, had already sarcastically referred to these ‘Nominee Baronets of Botany Bay’ as ‘these Australian bunyips’. Others, such as the radical editor, Edward Hawksley, had at an earlier meeting dubbed the proposal a ‘bunyip abortion’.99 The rhetorical power of the epithet was so great that when Deniehy coined the term ‘bunyip aristocracy’ it not only drew great laughter at the meeting, but also immediately entered the colonial lexicon and encouraged the Legislative Council, in the face of widespread derision, to abandon the whole idea. As the ‘bunyip aristocracy’ example suggests, questions of race and civilisation were never far away in these debates. At the very same meeting, several speakers referred to the fact that the Cape Colony had recently gained an elective upper house in their new constitution; Hottentots and Dutchmen, they said, had gained more in another British colony than had Anglo Saxons in New South Wales.100 In his long speech in the Second Reading debate in the Legislative Council the next day, 16 August, Wentworth echoed these references to the Cape constitution having given too much power to the Hottentots, and took them a good deal further. In an open attack on the idea of democracy, he urged the Council to prevent the Cape Colony constitution from influencing theirs.101 Its representative upper house, he argued, would prove to be  Mundy, Our Antipodes.  Empire, 13 January 1852, p. 3; see also Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 363. 100  Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 358. 101  Ibid., p. 373.     98     99

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disastrous by allowing the worst elements of society, including ‘the coloured tribes’, to interfere in government and threaten the safety and respectability of the ‘white races’.102 Indeed, in Wentworth’s theatrically dystopian vision of a world turned upside down, the ‘consequence would be that the lowest classes in the community, the inferior races, and even the Hottentots, would become the dominant classes’.103 Both liberals and conservatives justified their arguments by drawing on an ever-­ready fund of self-­admiring terms – British, English, Anglo-­Saxon, and sometimes white. When John Bayley Darvall, for example, a judge, philanthropist, and opponent of nominee government, called for an elected upper house, he harked back to ancient ‘Anglo-­Saxon’ freedoms. Anglo-­Saxons, he said, had a deep capacity for wisdom and good government and had built successful colonies under both monarchical and republican systems.104 Such language and concepts were open to both sides of colonial politics, however. On the other side of the upper house debate, the northern pastoralist Matthew Marsh thought nomination of the upper house by the governor would follow in the tradition of the House of Lords in guarding ‘English’ and ‘Anglo-­ Saxon’ freedoms. Marsh made clear that these freedoms were connected strongly to settlers’ capacity for imperial expansion and conquest, adding: I have boundless faith in the power of our own race to rule themselves ... To us it has been given to subdue and replenish the earth, to rescue from the hands of the oppressors, and to civilize the dusky nations of the earth, and to fill the wilds of the West and South with the fair and manly race of the Northern Isles.105

Marsh’s excited utopian visions associated the superiority of the British race on a hierarchical scale of humanity with an aesthetic ideal, the Nordic value of being ‘fair’, and a gendered ideal of being ‘manly’. In these heated exchanges, the question of British identity was complicated to some extent by the debate over democracy, frequently associated with the United States. Wentworth had urged the Council to adopt a constitution that was lasting and conservative, ‘a British, not a Yankee constitution’, and cited Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to warn that they should never bring democracy to New South Wales.106 Yet Parkes and the other liberals and radicals thought they could be both British and democratic; Parkes said he was not a republican and assured his followers that ‘he did not want a “Yankee  Edward Kennedy Silvester, New South Wales Constitution: The Speeches in the Legislative Council of New South Wales on the Second Reading of the Bill for Framing a New Constitution for the Colonies, Sydney: Thomas Daniel, 1853, pp. 33–4. 103  Empire, 17 August 1853, p. 3. 104  Silvester, New South Wales Constitution, pp. 55–9. 105  Ibid., pp. 70–5. 106  Ibid., pp. 33–4; Cochrane, Colonial Ambition, p. 373. 102

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Constitution” any more than Mr Wentworth’.107 Popular constitutionalists like Parkes based their claims for colonial democracy not on the United States, as is sometimes suggested, but on a liberal reading of the idea of the British constitution. Britain in their view had learnt its lesson from the loss of the American colonies almost eighty years earlier; what they wanted was not American republicanism, but adherence to the liberal spirit of British constitutionalism.108 By December, the Council had settled on a compromise: an upper house (not hereditary) the membership of which the governor would nominate on the advice of the Executive Council, a lower house with broad but not universal franchise, and a distribution of seats skewed to favour pastoralist interests. The draft constitution included also a list of ‘imperial subjects’, that is, areas of government that would remain under British control – allegiance to the Crown, naturalisation of aliens, treaties and other relations with foreign powers, military forces at land and sea, and the crime of high treason. In other words, imperial matters were primarily those to do with foreign relations and defence. Unsurprisingly, Aboriginal policy was not included in the list of ‘imperial subjects’. The compromise did not mollify the liberals and radicals, who gained almost 8,000 signatures to their petition in protest. In November 1853, Governor Fitzroy forwarded both the Bill and the opposing petition to London.109 There was one significant group of colonists in New South Wales that stood largely outside these debates. As citizens in Sydney and other districts in New South Wales looked forward to the approach of self-­government, settlers in the colony’s faraway northern districts felt they would have little to celebrate. They wanted their own separate colony with its own responsible government, and had good reason to believe separation was imminent, the New South Wales Constitution Act of 1850 having provided specifically for its possibility in the future. Local support for the idea had been evident since the 1840s, and had quickened from 1850 with the formation of the Moreton Bay and Northern Districts Separation Association that year. As Keith Moore has noted, northern settlers, like their southern counterparts, through the 1850s demanded political independence through the language of British freedom and subjecthood.110 In 1853, the Moreton Bay Courier declared, ‘What we want is no more than the

 Empire, 7 September 1853, p. 3. In doing so, he distinguished himself from J. D. Lang’s version of republicanism expressed in Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia, published in 1852 but only recently available in the colony, which did envisage a political separation from Britain. See McKenna, The Captive Republic, pp. 77, 81–3. 108  Paul Pickering, ‘“The Oak of English Liberty”: Popular Constitutionalism in New South Wales, 1848–1856’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 3, no. 1, April 2001, pp. 20–24. See also Waterhouse, ‘Liberty and Representative Government in Australia’, pp. 235–8. 109  Fitzroy to Newcastle 10 November 1853, no. 140, CO 201/467. 110  Moore, ‘English Liberty and People’s Rights’, p. 738. 107

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 231

birthright of every Englishman – a voice in the making of our own laws, and a power to dispose of the public revenues to which we contribute.’111 While longing for greater control over their region, northern settlers were somewhat unnerved by the increasingly liberal and democratic spirit evident to their south. The Moreton Bay Courier contrasted the British loyalty of northern settlers with the dangerous views taking hold in Sydney, under the influence of ‘red hot Chartists, with freshly imported London eloquence’. Interestingly, the Courier blamed this supposed disloyalty on Sydneysiders being too close to Home politics – implying that the ideal of Britishness would survive and flourish better at the periphery than at the centre of empire.112 On a more practical level, settlers continued to complain, as they had done by now for at least a decade, that the Sydney legislature was too distant, that it ignored their interests and left them with a poor supply of migrant labour and inadequate infrastructure. In Victoria, where attention was focussed on the gold rushes, the greatest political upheavals were not about the new constitution but about what was happening on the diggings. Miners were protesting in increasingly radical terms over the price of licences and police corruption. While a select committee appointed by the Legislative Council in September 1852 was deliberating in a leisurely manner on what might be Victoria’s new constitution, there was a surge in democratic politics, especially after the miners’ protests that culminated in the famous Eureka rebellion of December 1854. Subsequently, there was public anger at the government’s harsh use of military force. The enquiries that followed led to the dropping of the old licence system and the introduction of annual licences instead, which effectively gave more miners the vote. A democratic spirit was fostered also by the rapid increase in towns, small and large, prompting the arrival of local government in many areas of Victoria through the 1854 Municipal Institutions Bill.113 The constitution finally sent to Britain attempted to balance conservative and democratic interests more than the New South Wales constitution had done: the Assembly was to be elected on a wide franchise, while the Council would also be elected, though only by those owning property worth at least £1,000. Both houses, however, were to have an electoral distribution favouring conservative rural seats and imposing a high property qualification for members of parliament.114 South Australia was even more democratic, after an initial tussle. Under pressure and promises from Governor Young (who, among other things, withheld knowledge that the Council now had a free choice as to the nature of the  Moreton Bay Courier, 15 September 1855, p. 2; 27 October 1855, p. 2.  Moreton Bay Courier, 11 May 1850, p. 2. 113  Garden, Victoria, p. 92. 114  Serle, The Golden Age, p. 148. 111 112

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upper house), the Legislative Council in 1853 passed a conservative constitution, with an upper house nominated for life. After news reached Britain of widespread popular protests at the contents of this constitution, including a monster petition with nearly 5,000 signatures seeking two elected houses, Newcastle insisted that a new Legislative Council be elected to reconsider the constitution. Settlers were deeply offended when they learnt of Young’s deception, and political engagement rose considerably; between 1851 and 1855, the percentage of men enrolled to vote rose from 35 to 74.115 The election of 1855 was unusual for the Australian colonies, for it focused mainly on what sort of constitution the colony should have. Colonists rejected the nominee system and supported an elected upper house with a widened franchise, a lower house to be elected by full male suffrage, a ban on multiple voting, and a secret ballot.116 It was the most democratic constitution of all. It was a rather different story in Van Diemen’s Land. At first it seemed there might be certain similarities; the conservative Lieutenant-­Governor William Denison was just as opposed as Young to responsible government, and radical and anti-­transportationist members reacted angrily to what they considered to be Denison’s arrogant and overbearing behaviour on electoral matters and the transportation question. In September 1852, the majority of the Legislative Council expressed a lack of confidence in their governor. Tensions eased, however, when the colonists learnt of Pakington’s despatch promising an end to transportation, and in subsequent debates, Denison managed to minimise the influence of the Legislative Council’s elected members. The constitution the Council proposed in 1854 was the least liberal of them all.117 The franchise for the Assembly was to be property-­based, aimed at educated and successful men; for the powerful Council, the property qualifications for voting were even higher.118 Each constitution defined the limitations on the right to vote for parliament in terms of property and (implicitly) gender; there was no limitation according to race. Thus Aboriginal males who met the property or rental requirements could (at least in theory) vote. At this point, very few, if any, did, but it meant that if the franchise were widened to include all adult males, Aboriginal males  Hirst, Australia’s Democracy, p. 53.  P. A. Howell, ‘Constitutional and Political Development, 1857–1890’, in Dean Jaensch, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986, pp. 116–7; Hirst, Australia’s Democracy, pp. 53–4; Munyard, ‘Making a Polity: 1836–1857’, pp. 56, 64–73; Seaman, ‘The South Australian Constitution Act of 1856’, p. 78; Ward, ‘The Responsible Government Question’, pp. 231–2; Whitelock, Adelaide, pp. 85, 89, 93–4. 117  Robson, A History of Tasmania, p. 520; W. A. Townsley, Tasmania from Colony to Statehood, 1803–1945, Hobart: St David’s Park, 1991, pp. 45–6. 118  The Legislative Council was to be chosen, not through a general election, but in a series of elections at which only one-­third of the seats were up for election. See Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, p. 165.

115 116

Who Will Govern Aboriginal People? 233

would automatically be included. It is doubtful that anyone in the colonies recognised this at the time. In all these debates over the new constitutions, including those in New South Wales concerned with defining imperial and local subjects, no-­one considered how Aboriginal people might be affected by responsible government. Neither those who pondered the future of Aboriginal people, such as William Thomas, Edward Parker, John Dunmore Lang, and Bishop Hale, nor the democrats and conservatives fighting over the constitution, addressed the question of what self-­government would mean for control of Aboriginal policy. Furthermore, the idea that Aboriginal people might actually become involved in political processes remained an opportunity for rhetorical scorn, not for serious consideration. There was one observer present in the colonies at this time, however, who did ponder the question of Aboriginal rights more generally as responsible government approached. In his book, Principles of Government, or Meditations in Exile, Irish political prisoner William Smith O’Brien wrote one of the most thoughtful commentaries on colonial governance in this period. O’Brien was among those transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1849 for his role in the Young Ireland armed insurrection of May 1848. This had been a rebellion of the urban intelligentsia. O’Brien, its leader, was of aristocratic Protestant background, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and a member of parliament. In Van Diemen’s Land, after a period at the harsh Maria Island, he lived in his own cottage at Port Arthur and then at other locations in Van Diemen’s Land. O’Brien left the colony in 1854, after receiving a conditional pardon.119 While in the colony, and then when living in Brussels, he worked on Principles of Government, and published it in 1856, the year he was finally allowed to return to Ireland. In part, it reflected on his experiences during his five years in Van Diemen’s Land. O’Brien had, he wrote in the introduction, through circumstances, been forced to ‘generalize my ideas and to write as a citizen of the world, rather than as an Irish Patriot’.120 He pondered the question of colonial self-­government then under discussion in Van Diemen’s Land, and in particular which areas of government should be devolved to the colonies and which kept within the sphere of the imperial government. Colonial governments should levy their own taxes and control the appointment of government officials (the civil lists), while the imperial government ought to control foreign relations and commercial treaties, and have the power to prevent settlers from establishing systems of religious persecution. In this context, O’Brien considered the question of who should control Aboriginal policy in some detail. His answer was the  George Rudé, ‘William Smith O’Brien’, ADB online, accessed 17 April 2018.  William Smith O’Brien, Principles of Government, or Meditations in Exile, Dublin: James Duffy, 1856, pp. v–vi.

119 120

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imperial government. In North America, South Africa, and Australia alike, he wrote, the native peoples were being ‘exterminated from the soil which gave them birth’; in view of the proven rapacity and violence of the settlers, imperial governments had a responsibility to control Aboriginal policy. In the Australian colonies, ‘they are treated as noxious vermin, and when they resent injuries, by retaliation, they are hunted down and exterminated’.121 Like John West, he asked, as did many others at this time, considering the moral implications of the destruction of indigenous peoples, ‘Are we to arrest the march of colonization lest it may trample upon the aboriginal children of the soil which we desire to colonize?’ His answer was also that of John West – colonisation was in principle justified, since wandering tribes who live by hunting or traditional forms of pastoralism had so much land they could cede some for agricultural purposes without loss; it was unreasonable for so few to have to themselves a territory ‘capable of supporting millions of human beings’. On the other hand, Aboriginal peoples had ‘vested rights’ which had to be recognised. Imperial governments were thus justified in arranging for the purchase of native lands, and in using their power to prevent settler violence and plunder.122 Where Smith O’Brien differed from John West was in reflecting on the implications of the history of ill treatment of Aboriginal people for colonial self-­government. He even went so far as to suggest that the Aboriginal question was so important that self-­government ought not to be granted. Highly as we may value the principle of self-­government, we ought to desire the abrogation or suspension of every constitutional principle rather than consent to a systematic violation of the rights of an aboriginal population, which may justly claim the protection of the metropolitan government against the aggression of its colonists.123

Aboriginal people had human rights: ‘However ardently we may advocate the principle of self-­government, we cannot object to the exercise of an overruling authority, when that authority is applied to protect the fundamental rights of mankind.’124 Smith O’Brien’s voice, the voice of an exile, was a rare reminder of Enlightenment ideas of universal humanity, and of intellectuals as, in his own phrase, citizens of the world.

 O’Brien, Principles of Government, pp. 283, 290.  Ibid., pp. 290, 291. 123  Ibid., pp. 294. 124  Ibid., pp. 295. 121 122

9

The Dark Side of Responsible Government?* Britain and Indigenous People in the Self-­Governing Colonies, 1854–1870

. . . the Home Government can but hold up its hands

Frederick Rogers, January 18661

Having received draft constitutions from four Australian colonies, Britain entered the final phase of granting responsible government and, with it, transferring control of Aboriginal policy. Where the 1837 Aborigines Committee had blamed British governments for allowing the destruction of Aboriginal people in the wake of British settlement, and for a short period thereafter British governments had adopted protection policies, now, as self-­government approached, they withdrew from all responsibility. Soon after, as Britain became preoccupied with a series of major upheavals elsewhere in the empire  – in New Zealand, British North America, southern Africa, and Jamaica – British government and public attention to Australian Aboriginal people dramatically declined. This chapter traces the steps by which British governments withdrew from Aboriginal policy in Australia, and contrasts the rapidity of the process with the far messier withdrawal of similar responsibility in New Zealand and Canada. Yet despite British disengagement from Australian Aboriginal people and their welfare in this period, there were two arenas in which British interest in Australian Aboriginal people continued – in the emerging field of racial science, and to some degree in the monarchy and its representatives. This chapter explores this curious mix of British political disengagement, scientific interest, and royal connection. The British Debates over the New Constitutions, 1854–1855 British authorities carried out the transfer of control of Aboriginal policy with some qualms. In a long and detailed report on 6 September 1854, Sir Frederick  For the phrase ‘dark side’ in this context, see McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy’ p. 99. 1  J. Rogers, Colonial Office Minute, 29 January 1866, CO 234/16. 57333, as quoted in Raymond Evans, ‘Across the Queensland Frontier’, in Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster, eds., Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003, p. 66.

*

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Rogers, Assistant Under-­Secretary in the Colonial Office, asked whether the imperial government ought to amend the Constitution Acts so that Britain retained the power to disallow purely local legislation. Should they, he asked, allow royal assent to be given to legislation ‘which is palpably immoral, especially in relation to the unrepresented aborigines or immigrants of colour’?2 Could the British government really disclaim all responsibility and arrange for royal assent in all cases? His ‘extreme examples’ included cases in which ‘the Local Legislature were to pass an Act evidently calculated to enable settlers to destroy aborigines with impunity, or to allow polygamy, or to encourage kidnapping from the coast of China or the southern islands, or repudiating a public debt due to English and foreign capatalists (sic)’.3 Various cabinet members commented on the question Rogers raised, along with the problem of who should decide, and how, which were imperial and which were local Acts. Lord John Russell thought the attempt in the draft constitutions to prevent imperial veto of colonial laws was so outrageous that the ‘independence of the Australian Colonies, with no obligation to defend and protect them, would be a preferable alternative’. In the case of criminal law, he asked, could they justify sanctioning barbarous punishments generally, including ‘punishments of the natives without trial’? He also thought the attempt to distinguish between imperial and local matters was fraught with difficulty; the only solution was to maintain the imperial prerogative of disallowance for all colonial legislation. William Molesworth and William Gladstone both suggested an alternative solution: rather than accept the attempts embodied in these colonial Acts to distinguish between imperial and local matters, Britain should pass its own separate Act to do so.4 The solution eventually adopted was the one suggested by Russell – to remove lists of imperial subjects from the constitutions, and to retain control over all matters through the power of veto. There was one area, however, where despite the decision not to specify in these constitutions which were imperial and which were local matters, two constitutions did articulate a transfer of power in a specific domain  – the all-­important control over colonial lands. Sir John Pakington’s dispatch in December 1852 had promised this transfer and now the government embodied it in the New South Wales and Victorian constitutions.5 Furthermore, a separate Act, the Repeal of Waste Lands (Australia) Act (18 and 19 Vict. c. 61),  Report from Sir Frederick Rogers to the Secretary of State for the Colonies on the Australian Constitutional Acts, 6 September 1854, CO 881/1, VII, clause 20. 3  Report from Sir Frederick Rogers, 1854, clause 21. 4  Molesworth minute on Report from Sir Frederick Rogers, 1854, CO 881/1/XIV; Gladstone minute on Report from Sir Frederick Rogers, 1854, CO/881/1, XVI. 5  The New South Wales constitution provided that ‘the entire management and control of the waste lands belonging to the Crown in the said colony, and also the appropriation of the gross proceeds of the sales of any such lands . . . shall be vested in the Legislature of the said colony’. Preamble, The New South Wales Constitution Act, 1855, 18 and 19 Vic. c. 54, 16 July 1855. 2

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also receiving royal assent on 16 July 1855, made it clear that all four self-­ governing colonies now gained control of land, while Western Australia was specifically excluded.6 At first glance, it seemed that with this unambiguous transfer of power over land policy and revenue, Earl Grey’s attempts to protect Indigenous people’s access to pastoral lands had failed. In the case of New South Wales and Victoria, however, the transfer as outlined in the Repeal of Waste Lands Act of 1855 came with an important condition – that it did not prevent ‘the fulfilment of contracts, promises and engagements’ already made. Henry Reynolds argues that this clause meant that the new colonial governments did not have the power to repeal the existing provisions concerning the guarantee of Aboriginal access to land under pastoral lease, since these constituted a promise that had to be fulfilled.7 It remained to be seen what the colonial governments would actually do. Under these arrangements, the first constitution the British parliament approved was that for Van Diemen’s Land on 1 November 1854. Next came the troublesome constitutions from New South Wales and Victoria on 16 July 1855, and finally South Australia on 4 January 1856. (In addition, on 16 July 1855 an Order in Council changed the name of Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania, to much colonial delight.) Despite the last-­minute insertion of the right of imperial veto over any legislation, it was nevertheless clear, as it had been since the end of Earl Grey’s period as Secretary of State, that control over Aboriginal policy was passing to the colonial legislatures. Only three weeks after the New South Wales and Victorian constitutions gained royal assent, Merivale made the comment, discussed in the previous chapter, that henceforth ‘the duty and responsibility will rest with the legislatures of Australia’.8 In the crucial years of 1854–5, when the colonial constitutions were under consideration in Britain, the Aboriginal Protection Society (APS) played little role. In contrast with the situation just a few years earlier, when the Australian Colonies Government Bill was under discussion, this time around there would be no repeat of the delegation that met with Lord John Russell in 1850. The society did not raise the question of Aboriginal rights in relation to the new constitutions  – indeed, the society did not have much to say about the Australian colonies at all in these years. Its journal, the Colonial Intelligencer, had little Australian news, being much more preoccupied with New Zealand  Section 7 of the Repeal of Waste Lands Act of 1855 clearly stated that in Western Australia ‘the sale, letting, disposal, and occupation of Waste Lands’ would remain under British control. See Jeremy Martens, ‘Crown land, Territorial Integrity and Responsible Government in Western Australia’, Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 30, 2016, p. 32. 7  Reynolds, ‘The Mabo Judgment’, pp. 27–44. On p. 40, Reynolds points out that this was the view taken by the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1861 in the case Rusden v Weekes, which made it clear that control of waste lands had been transferred with conditions attached. 8  Merivale comment dated 5 August 1854, written on Fitzroy to Newcastle, 23 December 1853, no. 163, CO 201/467, New South Wales 1853, vol. 5, November–December. 6

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and southern Africa. There was still the occasional mention, as in an address by the society’s Secretary, Thomas Hodgkin, in early 1853, when he expressed frustration at English indifference to a range of imperial catastrophes: . . . It is high time that the revolting spectacle of our Kaffir wars, Tasmanian extermination, Borneo massacres, and New Zealand frauds, should arouse the sympathy and patriotism of Englishmen to seek to avert a similar fate, by timely repentance and amendment.9

But the references to Australia were rare, and the annual report for 1854, presented in May 1855, stated that the society had received very little information from Australia that year. The report said the society was aware that a Bill would be introduced into Parliament soon for a new constitution for one of the Australian colonies, but it had not ‘learnt whether the natives are noticed in the provisions of the Bill’.10 The journal and the annual reports made no mention of the new constitutions. The society was increasingly viewing amalgamation and employment as the way forward not only for New Zealand but now also for Australia. It noted with interest the growth in Aboriginal employment in the wake of the gold rushes. One of the few letters the Colonial Intelligencer printed from Australia at this time was from Governor Young, who was at this point angling for as conservative a constitution for South Australia as possible. Written on 11 September 1852, the letter reported the high levels of Aboriginal employment with so many Europeans having gone east to the goldfields.11 In July 1853, the Intelligencer printed copies of despatches and other correspondence in Parliamentary Papers relating to the discovery of gold in Australia which, it said approvingly, were ‘illustrative of the capacity of the natives for becoming useful members of civilized society’.12 One result of this growing emphasis on amalgamation rather than separation was a shift away from the society’s concerns with constitutional recognition of special rights and responsibilities and towards accepting colonial self-­government. In the case of New Zealand, this meant ensuring that Ma¯ ori had voting rights in the new constitutions; there appears to have been no similar attempt for Aboriginal people in Australia.13

British Attitudes During the First Few Years of Responsible Government The new colonial constitutions had been barely enacted when the British government began making plans for yet another. This was for a new colony, to  Colonial Intelligencer, series IV, no. X, January and February 1853, p. 186.  Eighteenth Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Society, London, APS, May 1855, p. 6. 11  Colonial Intelligencer, series IV, no. X, January and February 1853, p. 183. 12  Ibid., nos. XIV and XV, June and July 1853, pp. 264–8. 13  See McLintock, Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, pp. 333–4.     9 10

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be formed by separating the northern districts from New South Wales; like its New South Wales parent the new colony would be self-­governing. The Colonial Office had been considering creating a separate colony in the north since 1840, initially because it wished to exert greater direct control over land policy, and later because it hoped to send convicts to the region after transportation had ended to New South Wales. Moves in this direction stalled in the early 1850s, however, as both of these reasons for separation were rendered redundant by changing land and transportation policies, and the two New South Wales governors, first Fitzroy then Denison, and the Legislative Council were opposed. The strongest support for the northern separatists came from the Colonial Office, especially from Herman Merivale, who wanted to avoid the bad feeling that the delayed separation of Port Phillip had shown could develop when popular separatist movements were denied. By July 1856, the British government had accepted the settlers’ argument that being governed from faraway Sydney was proving impractical.14 Debates over where the border between New South Wales and the new colony would lie delayed the latter’s formation, however, until December 1859.15 During these three-and-a-half years, there was little discussion in Britain of Aboriginal policy, since Britain had already ceded control on Aboriginal matters. The violence of dispossession then occurring in the northern districts did lead, though, to one of the few letters from the APS to the secretary of state for the colonies on Australian matters at this time. Aboriginal people in the region, the APS cautioned, were being ‘exterminated’ and it urged intervention to stop ‘the lawless and sanguinary spirit which appears to be rife among the white population’.16 It was, however, far too late for Britain to intervene, and from the British perspective it would have seemed a small step to transfer control from Sydney to Brisbane. Yet the change was highly significant; it meant that Aboriginal policy in the region would now be fully controlled by a local government under pastoralist control. As Henry Reynolds comments, ‘Each step took responsibility closer to the frontier and placed it more securely in the hands of men with both public and private interests in the pastoral industry and in the rapid sale of land throughout the vast tropical hinterland.’17 Except in Western Australia, Britain now had little to do with Aboriginal policy. As the Colonial Office pointed out to Governor Denison in New South Wales in March 1857, in response to Denison’s forwarding as usual the annual reports for the previous year of the Commissioners of Crown Lands summarising  Labouchere to Denison, 21 July 1856, printed in ‘Papers Relative to the Separation of the Moreton Bay District from New South Wales and the establishment of a Separate Government’, 30 July 1858, Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 90, London, 1857–8, p. 55; Harvey, ‘Herman Merivale’, p. 101. 15  Evans, A History of Queensland, p. 77. 16  Aborigines Protection Society, Twenty-Second Annual Report, May 1859, in Aborigines Protection Society, Transactions, c. 1837–1909, reel 1, records property of Anti-­Slavery International. 17  Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p. 100. 14

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the condition of Aboriginal people in their districts, there was no longer any need to send these reports. Chichester Fortescue, Under-­Secretary of State for the Colonies, noted on Denison’s despatch that ‘these melancholy returns have now only a general interest for this department, as, under the system of self government, it has no longer any control over the executive in this or other respects’.18 Perhaps from force of habit, Denison nevertheless a year later again forwarded the Commissioners of Crown Lands’ reports for the previous year, commenting that the ‘physical peculiarities of the race, their want of stamina, to resist the slightest access of disease seems to render their gradual extinction a matter almost of necessity, when coupled with the unproductiveness of the females’.19 Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Secretary of State for the Colonies, was concerned by the tenor of Denison’s comments, and responded that we ought ‘not to relax our efforts in despair’, and that they needed to do their duty ‘on Christian no less than political grounds’.20 This was, however, merely expressing a sentiment, as neither Bulwer Lytton nor Denison had by this time any control over Aboriginal policy in the colony. The speed with which the Colonial Office handed over control to the Australian colonial governments is highlighted when we contrast it with the slower and messier transfer of control in New Zealand and British North America. In neither case did the granting of responsible government initially entail the handing over of responsibility for Aboriginal policy. When the New Zealand Legislative Assembly, established under the constitution of 1852, first met at the beginning of 1854, it immediately demanded full responsible government. Acting Governor Colonel R. H. Wynyard agreed, and the Secretary of State concurred on 8 December 1854.21 The question of who controlled Ma¯ ori policy, however, remained unclear. Fearing that the now-­powerful Assembly would adopt measures likely to antagonise Ma¯ ori, and thus the possibility of a Ma¯ ori-­settler war for which Britain would have to pay, Governor Thomas Gore Browne declared in March 1856 that Ma¯ ori affairs rested with the governor, and not the government ministers.22 As Andre Brett notes, this assertion that the governor controlled Ma¯ ori affairs appears to have come from Browne himself, not the Colonial Office, though the latter with some hesitation supported it once it was known.23 The new government leaders in the Assembly accepted  Memo by Fortescue attached to Denison to Labouchere, 14 March 1857, no. 55, CO 201/498. Merivale had also commented that their end was approaching; see memos by Carnarvon and Merivale attached to Denison to Bulwer Lytton, 13 September 1858, no. 133, CO 201/503. 19  Denison to Bulwer Lytton, 13 September 1858, no.  133, CO 201/503. Governors had been forwarding these reports annually since 1841. 20  Draft of despatch from Bulwer Lytton to Denison, 19 February 1859, no. 13, attached to Denison to Bulwer Lytton, 13 September 1858, no. 133, CO 201/503. 21  Ward, Colonial Self-­Government, pp. 325–6. 22  Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand, p. 30. See also Ward, ‘Civil Jurisdiction’, pp. 497–532. 23  Brett, Acknowledge No Frontier, p. 132. 18

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Browne’s view, apparently in the belief that governor responsibility for Ma¯ ori affairs would mean Britain would pay for military expenditure if violent conflict ensued.24 There was a strong view in Britain, however, that if settler behaviour provoked a war with Ma¯ ori, then the colony, not Britain, should pay.25 Retaining the governor’s control over Ma¯ ori policy proved to be an expensive decision for Britain, for Browne was in fact unable in practice to exert full control or to prevent war with Ma¯ ori erupting in March 1860. After a lull in late 1861 and 1862 and the appointment as Governor of George Grey (formerly governor of South Australia and most recently the Cape Colony), war resumed in 1863 and lasted until 1872. Partly under Grey’s influence, the war came to be regarded as a test for British imperial authority, and to the disgust of most British politicians, Britain had to pay most of its huge costs until 1866, when colonial forces took over.26 One of the many factors in these complex wars was the divided authority between the governor and the colonial legislature. It was a situation which led John Stuart Mill late in life to reflect on what he saw as the harmful dark side of responsible government. In Considerations on Representative Government in 1861, he had expressed pride in the system of self-­government and did not mention the question of its implications for native policy.27 By 1866, in light of the New Zealand wars, he was more troubled.28 Still firmly believing the British were a superior race, he began to worry about the genocidal aspects of high migration and expansionist policies. In a letter in 1866 to Henry Chapman, a friend who had migrated to New Zealand, he confides a sense of intellectual impasse, anguish, and tragedy.29 After noting the seeming inevitability of conflict between settlers and Ma¯ ori, such that the country would remain divided between two hostile races ‘unless or until the progressive decline of the Ma¯ ori population ends in their extinction’, he wrote: ‘Here, then, is the burthen on the conscience of legislators at home. Can they give up the Ma¯ ori to the mercy of the more powerful and constantly increasing section of the population? Knowing what the English are, when they are left

 See Dalton, War and Politics in New Zealand, pp. 31–2.  Ibid., pp. 17–8. 26  James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, Auckland: Penguin, 1996, pp. 229–41. 27  John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1861, p. 378. 28   See Katherine Smits, ‘John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes: Settler Violence Against Indigenous Peoples and the Legitimacy of Colonial Rule,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 51, 2008, pp. 1–15; Duncan Bell, ‘John Stuart Mill on Colonies’, Political Theory, vol. 38, no. 1, 2010, pp. 34–64. 29   For a discussion of Henry Chapman, see Angela Woollacott, ‘Political Manhood, Non-­white Labour and White-­settler Colonialism on the 1830s–1840s Australian Frontier,’ in Alison Holland and Barbara Brookes, eds., Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, pp. 75–95. 24 25

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alone with what they think an inferior race, I cannot reconcile myself to this.’ Yet Mill acutely realised that it was unrealistic for Britain to retain control: But again, – is it possible for England to maintain an authority there for the purpose of preventing unjust treatment of the Ma¯ oris, and at the same time allow self government to the British colonists in every other respect? How is that one subject to be kept separate, and how is the Governor to be in other things a mere ornamental frontispiece to a government of the colony by a colonial Cabinet and Legislature and to assume will and responsibility of his own, overruling his cabinet and legislature wherever the Ma¯ oris are concerned?

Mill concluded, sadly, ‘I do not see my way through these difficulties.’30 As Duncan Bell writes, the main problem for Mill was that ‘those best placed to control the colonists – the Crown government in London – no longer had the political power to do so. Rather than leading to progress, colonial autonomy facilitated injustice.’31 In the Canadian colonies, too, the imperial government attempted to maintain formal control over Indigenous policy even after the granting of responsible government. In 1856, the legislative assembly of the Province of Canada sought to transfer control of Indian affairs from Britain to itself. The matter was still under debate when Governor Edmund Walker Head, in light of Britain’s desire to reduce the cost of Indian administration, for which it was still bearing a large cost, introduced the Gradual Civilization Bill of 1857 that outlined a new assimilationist approach.32 Indians were henceforth to be accorded inferior legal status and denied the franchise; they would be gradually trained, and when deemed to have attained the arts of civilisation, granted full citizenship, the right to vote, and forty acres of land.33 Despite Indian nations’ opposition, British authorities’ belief that assimilation policy was the path of the future, together with their increasing desire to reduce costs, led them three years later to pass full control to the colonial government under the Indian Lands and Properties Act of 1860.34 David McNab describes this abandonment of responsibility for Aboriginal welfare the ‘dark side’ of responsible government.35 Granting self-­ government to its settler colonies had many advantages for Britain, not least in divesting itself of many of the costs of policing and  John Stuart Mill to Henry Samuel Chapman, 7 January 1866, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 16, The Later Letters 1849–1873, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 1136. 31  Bell, ‘John Stuart Mill on Colonies,’ p. 53. 32  J. R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian – White Relations in Canada, 3rd edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010, p. 210. 33  Sidney L. Harring, White Man’s Law: Native People in Nineteenth-­Century Canadian Jurisprudence, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 32–3. 34  Sarah Carter, ‘Aboriginal People of Canada and the British Empire,’ in Phillip Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 209. 35  McNab, ‘Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy’, p. 99. 30

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military defence.36 Especially since the Crimean War, which ended in March 1856, just as the first four of the Australian colonial constitutions were coming into force, most British politicians were focussed on the need to maintain British military strength in Europe and concomitantly to reduce expenditures on colonial defence.37 Self-­government now provided the perfect argument for insisting that the colonies, not Britain, pay their own defence costs including those arising from internal conflicts with indigenous people. In March 1862, the House of Commons resolved that self-­governing colonies ought to defend themselves; and by July 1864 British ministers were encouraging the confederation of Britain’s North American provinces as a way of fending off their annexation by the United States without committing Britain militarily.38 In August and September 1864, Australian newspapers somewhat anxiously reprinted items from British newspapers reporting the British view, notably a London Times editorial arguing that Britain had no responsibility to come to the defence of her colonial dependencies, and a Saturday Review article explaining that Britain wanted the colonies to defend themselves.39 The consequences of transferring control over Aboriginal policy and insisting that colonies pay for their own defence were clearly illustrated in some heated correspondence between the secretary of state for the colonies and the Queensland government a few years later. As J. C. H. Gill shows, the correspondence arose in the context of the joint establishment by both governments of a settlement at Cape York, on the northern tip of the colony, in order to protect and provide supplies for British commerce in the Torres Strait, the scene in the 1850s and 1860s of many shipwrecks and attendant loss of life, including through Indigenous attacks on the crew of the Sapphire after it was wrecked on the Barrier Reef.40 The two governments agreed in 1861 that Queensland would manage and fund the settlement, while Britain would supply a ship and a contingent of Royal Marines.41 The settlement was established in 1864, with John Jardine in charge. Conflict with local Indigenous people soon escalated, as Jardine and Lieutenant Pascoe, in charge of the Royal Marines, both reported to Governor George Bowen. Pascoe, however, also reported on the  Peter Burroughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 327. 37  Dorothy Clarke, The Attitude of the Colonial Office to the Working of Responsible Government, 1854–1868, London: University of London, 1953, p. 33. 38  Burroughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, pp. 327–31. 39  The South Australian Register, 23 August 1864, p. 2; Mount Alexander Mail, 25 August 1864, p. 2; SMH, 15 September 1864, p. 2; Empire on 13 October 1864, p. 3. 40  Moreton Bay Courier, 27 March 1860, p. 2. 41  J. C. H. Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines: A Documentary Review’, Queensland Heritage, vol. 2, no. 7, November 1972, pp. 3–29. See also Margaret Lawrie, ‘John Jardine and Somerset’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol. 14, no. 8, 1991, p. 323; Anon., ‘Thursday Island’, Queensland Government website, www.qld.gov.au/atsi/culturalawareness-heritage-arts/community-histories-thursday-island/, accessed 3 November 2016. 36

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matter directly to his superiors in the Royal Marines, blaming Jardine for the conflict. When this report was referred to Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Cardwell was furious and relations between the British and Queensland governments became strained. ‘I trust,’ Cardwell wrote to Bowen, ‘that great care will be taken to prevent the recurrence of such proceedings ...’42 It was far too late for Cardwell to intervene. As Frederick Rogers, who was one of the few to have shown concern when self-­government was being considered in 1854 and who had in 1860 replaced Merivale as Permanent Under-­ Secretary at the Colonial Office, pointed out in a minute on the Cape York events, Britain had handed full control of Aboriginal affairs to the colony. After describing it as impossible ‘to exaggerate the recklessness with which blacks have been destroyed (in some cases by strychnine like foxes) in Queensland’, he wrote, ‘But the Home Government can but hold up its hands. There is no effectual power to interfere in their cause’.43 A month later, in response to a despatch from Bowen sent on 16 December 1865 forwarding accounts of another conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people at Cape York, Rogers wrote in a spirit of resignation that ‘I do not see that anything requires to be done or said about the natives. Matters now going on well enough.’44 Cardwell, however, was not content to let the matter rest there, and wrote a strong ‘please explain’ letter to Bowen on 26 March 1866.45 In response, Bowen sent a stern reply supported by comments from the Executive Council, the former colonial secretary, the commissioner of police, and other Queensland government officials, all insisting that this was no longer a matter for British concern or control.46 It is unsurprising, then, that when Frederick Chesson wrote on behalf of the Aborigines Protection Society to the secretary of state for the colonies on 15 January 1868 on the gravity of the situation in Queensland, the Colonial Office replied that there was nothing they could do ‘beyond raising their voice’ in protest.47 As Herman Merivale had already commented in the revised version of his lectures on colonisation published in 1861, for Britain the problem of how to protect native populations once self-­government had been granted was  Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 15, citing a despatch from Cardwell to Bowen, no. 20, 27 March 1865. 43  J. Rogers, Colonial Office Minute, 29 January 1866, CO 234/16. 57333, as quoted in Evans, ‘Across the Queensland Frontier’, p. 66. 44  Rogers, Colonial Office minute, 23 February 1866, written on Bowen to Cardwell, despatch 80, 16 December 1865, QSA GOV/24. As quoted in Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 19. 45  Cardwell to Bowen, 26 March 1866, despatch 18, QSA GOV/7, as cited in Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 29, fn. 63. 46  These responses are discussed more fully in Chapter 13. 47  Frederick Chesson to the Duke of Buckingham, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 15 January 1868, CO 234/21, 57510; Colonial Office Minutes, 21 January 1867, CO 2324/16, 57333. As cited by Evans, ‘Across the Queensland Frontier’, p. 66. 42

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now insoluble.48 He commented in a new footnote that the idea that Britain could control native affairs while the settlers had responsible government was impractical: ‘There cannot be two governments in the same community; certainly not unless some mode can be devised of having two public purses.’49 His successor, Frederick Rogers, on his retirement in 1871, would offer a similar reflection: ‘The moral difficulty in the abandonment of all this authority was the difficulty of securing the protection of coloured races, who are always exterminated by Anglo-­Saxons in temperate climates, and yet are incapable of receiving more than an illusory share in the government.’50 Rogers’ last comment here hints at an awareness that one alternative to a simple handover to settlers was to ensure a place for indigenous people in the new colonial governments. In that way, they had a chance to become part of those governing. While British authorities had made some slight moves in this direction in the New Zealand constitution of 1852, authorising the governor to proclaim ‘Native Districts’ where Ma¯ ori law could continue, they made none at all in the Australian colonies.51 Aboriginal People and the British Public British withdrawal from Aboriginal matters, both politically and militarily, was possible in the 1850s and 1860s in part because British public opinion endorsed it. As scholars such as Catherine Hall have pointed out, this was the era of a rise in racial thinking, dramatically highlighted in the controversy over Governor Edward John Eyre’s brutal suppression of a rebellion in Jamaica in 1865. While John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, and others strongly criticised Eyre and sought his arrest and trial for murder, others, including Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, supported him.52 Support for the idea of protecting and civilising Indigenous people had declined significantly since its humanitarian heyday in the late 1830s, and there were fewer representations of Aboriginal people in fiction and travel writing. There was one major respect, however, in which British commentators did not forget Aboriginal Australians. In the growing debates of the 1860s about human origins, evolution, and the relations between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ peoples, British scientists were interested in Aboriginal people in their efforts to understand the history of racial difference. Some of this interest was expressed  Harris, Making Native Space, p. 14.  Merivale, Lectures, 1861 edition, p. 521.  Marindin, Letters of Frederic Lord Blachford (Frederick Rogers), p. 297. 51  See Ballantyne, ‘The State, Politics and Power’, pp. 111–7; Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, p. 75. 52  Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 48 49 50

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in the new ‘science’ of anthropometric photography, but the main focus was on studying Tasmanian human remains.53 As Helen McDonald explains in Human Remains, interest in the remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people was nothing new, and British medical men had been collecting Tasmanian Aboriginal bones since 1804.54 The matter took on a new urgency in the 1860s partly because scientists believed the Tasmanians would soon be extinct, and partly because the debates over human origins and development had become more heated. In the context of the argument between those who posited a plurality of human origins and those favouring a Darwinian explanation of difference through evolution from a single human origin, the Aboriginal Tasmanians were of particular interest. As Rebe Taylor notes, archaeologists and ethnologists in the 1860s thought the Tasmanians, through their stone tools, might provide a clue to understanding the European distant past. After seeing a Tasmanian stone scraper tool in Taunton in about 1860, Edward Tylor, since regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology, was struck by its similarity to French stone tools from the last Ice Age, or Pleistocene. This Tasmanian stone tool, he thought, brought the Stone Age into the present: ‘Man of the Lower Stone Age,’ he wrote, ‘ceases to be a creature of philosophic inference, but becomes a reality.’55 Furthermore, in the unfolding debates over human origins, between the monogenists positing a common origin for humanity and the polygenists arguing for a number of separate human origins, the Tasmanians, seen as the most isolated race on earth, were thought to provide important clues. While polygenists attributed the Tasmanians’ supposedly distinct characteristics to their separate biological origins, monogenists thought these characteristics were the result of isolation and slow transformation; racial divergence, monogenists argued, could arise after a single human origin.56 In their supposed extinction, too, the Tasmanians were of special interest to men of science. Charles Darwin himself had some difficulty in explaining the disappearance of the Tasmanians in the face of English expansion, a fate they shared with other indigenous peoples. ‘Wherever the European has trod,’ he wrote in his journal in 1839, ‘death seems to pursue the aboriginal.’57 He did not see English colonialism as the problem; rather, the extermination of  On the Australian role in anthropometric photography in the 1870s, see Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, and Empire, pp. 44–45.  Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 108. 55  Rebe Taylor, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2017, p. 60. 56  Taylor, Into the Heart of Tasmania, p. 63. 57  Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edition, London: John Murray 1845 [1839], p. 435. Cited and discussed in Tony Barta, ‘Mr Darwin’s Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 32, no. 2, 2005, p. 125. 53

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the Tasmanians seemed to him the result of ‘some mysterious agency’. The destroyer is not ‘the white man alone’, he continued, but rather a product of the interactions of ‘the varieties of man’, with ‘the stronger always extirpating the weaker’.58 As Paul Turnbull notes, while Darwinians by the 1860s were able to see the Tasmanians’ supposed racial extinction as proof of the theory of natural selection, their opponents searched for other, non-­Darwinian, explanations.59 This conflict was in evidence when the Anthropological Society, which had been formed in late 1863 in opposition to the pro-­Darwinian views of the Quaker-­dominated Ethnological Society, debated the extinction of the ‘lower races’ in London on 19 January 1864.60 The opening speaker, Richard Lee, said the ‘natives of Tasmania are almost, if not quite, extinct . . . Nowhere has the disappearance of a native race been more complete in modern times than in Tasmania’.61 He mentioned the usual causes – diseases, effects of alcohol, and direct killing – but thought these inadequate explanations, since they did not address why more females than males diminished or why there was such low fertility.62 There was a suggestion of a more fundamental cause. Thomas Bendyshe, who frequently translated German and other European anthropological works into English, challenged the idea of inevitable and perhaps mysterious extinction arising from colonisation. He argued that the problem was not the ‘mere presence of the white man’ but the taking of a people’s land; considerations of superiority or inferiority of race, he suggested, were irrelevant. The president of the society, James Hunt, who saw race theory as a science, believed that races were separate species, and endorsed slavery, also attributed the Tasmanians’ disappearance, like that of other human extinctions, to being removed from their native lands and sent to Flinders Island.63 Also present, however, was Alfred Russell Wallace, who, although in the Darwinian camp, liked to participate in Anthropological Society debates. On this occasion, he combined a practical with an evolutionary explanation. Along with the effects of new diseases and alcohol on indigenous peoples, he said, was the fact that ‘the selection of numbers of young and healthy women by the intruders’ led inevitably to the decline in the native population. In such a situation,  Darwin, Journal of Researches, p. 435.  Paul Turnbull, ‘British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice, The Appropriation of Indigenous Australian Bodies 1860–1880’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, Eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, Australian National University E Press, 2005, https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/foreign-bodies, accessed 14 April 2018. 60  George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, New York: The Free Press, 1987, pp. 248–54. For a fuller discussion, see Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania’, pp. 229–52. 61  Richard Lee, ‘The Extinction of Races’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, vol. 2, 1864, pp. xcv–vi. 62  Lee, ‘The Extinction of Races’, p. xcvii. 63  On James Hunt, see Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 372. 58 59

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he commented, ‘it was a mere question of time, and sooner or later the lowest races, those we designate as savages, must disappear from the face of the earth’.64 So great was the excitement over the scientific ideas and the possibility that the human remains of the Tasmanians would help provide answers – and so strong was colonists’ sense of entitlement to the bodies of Aboriginal people – that the attempts of medical men to gain their remains for the purposes of science overshadowed and haunted the deaths of the last few members of the Oyster Cove community. We return to this story, explored by a number of historians, including Lyndall Ryan, in the next chapter. An important text for British understandings of indigenous peoples’ population decline in the wake of British colonisation was James Bonwick’s book, The Last of the Tasmanians (1870). Bonwick, an evangelical lay preacher and a schoolteacher who had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1841, had first become interested in the Aboriginal Tasmanians through his association with the prominent Quaker George Washington Walker in the 1840s.65 After spending the 1850s in South Australia and Victoria, his interest and concern was greatly stimulated by a visit in 1859 to Oyster Cove.66 He spoke with the residents, including Mary Ann Arthur, who lamented to him that her people had received no education at Oyster Cove and could not avoid the dangers of alcohol and convict company – ‘We had souls in Flinders,’ she said, ‘but we have none here.’67 Shocked by the desolation, poverty, and lack of religious instruction at the fast-­dwindling community, and by the possibility of the extinction of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Bonwick decided to write a history of what had happened. After spending most of the 1860s in Melbourne, and undertaking substantial research on the history of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, he left for England in 1869 and on the voyage wrote The Last of the Tasmanians. In the book, he wrote of seeing Flinders Island from the ship taking him from Tasmania to England, and his determination to tell the story of what happened there. As I gazed upon its storm-­torn coast, and my eyes rested upon its bleak and fantastic hills, the whole story, in all its varied and stirring phases, came before me, and I felt quickened in my resolution to tell my countrymen the sorrows of the Tasmanians.68

In his research, conducted through the 1860s, he drew on colonial archival records, his own memory from living in the colony in the 1840s, and his subsequent visits including the aforementioned visit in 1859 and another in 1867  Lee, ‘The Extinction of Races’, pp. cx–cxi.  Guy Featherstone, ‘James Bonwick’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018. 66  Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 210. 67  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, pp. 276–7. 68  Ibid., p. 271. 64 65

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or 1868, when he met William Lanney in Hobart, who had just returned from a whaling voyage.69 Bonwick emphasised the destructiveness of the British appropriation of Tasmanian land. After describing the early visits by maritime explorers, he writes of the coming of the British penal settlement: ‘The Whites came again. They came not as curious visitors, but to make a home in the land. They came not to share the soil with the dark man, but to appropriate it.’70 He thought it ironic that on the one hand the British authorities instructed Captain David Collins to live in amity and kindness with the natives of Van Diemen’s Land, and to punish offenders against them, and on the other remained ‘utterly oblivious of their rights to the land’.71 Bonwick thought the ‘wild man’ had two choices: to ‘prostrate themselves beneath the feet of the usurpers and quietly submit to slavery’ or to ‘refuse to sell their birthright of freedom, and take the consequences’. It was no surprise to Bonwick that they chose the latter course.72 In his view: ‘Certain it is that the Blacks resented the occupancy of their country when they found themselves put to some inconvenience from the supposed trespass, and made most unmistakeably (sic) to feel their sense of inferiority’.73 The events in Tasmania, he thought, provided a story like that written by Las Casas in his ‘Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies’. In both cases, the government tried impotently to protect the natives ‘against the avarice and cruelty of its subjects’.74 As Tom Lawson notes, Bonwick’s book created a considerable stir in London. It was widely reviewed, the subject of public readings, and a prompt for public reflection on empire.75 Various scholars subsequently drew on it, including Charles Darwin, whose Origin of the Species (1859) had generated so much debate, and whose theories of natural selection had prompted so much interest in human origins and development. His next book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), applied his theories to human beings, leading to a conflict between religion and science that lasted for the rest of the century, and beyond. One chapter of the book, entitled ‘On the Extinction of the Races of Man’, explored possible reasons for indigenous population decline and disappearance, comparing the cases of Tasmania, New Zealand, and the Sandwich Islands. For the Tasmanian section, he relied heavily on Bonwick. He listed many possible causes of their disappearance when  Ibid., p. 393.  Ibid., p. 28. 71  Ibid., p. 31. 72  Ibid., p. 28. 73  Ibid., p. 29. 74  Ibid., p.  57. For a more detailed discussion of Bonwick, see Ann Curthoys, ‘The History of Killing and the Killing of History’, in Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Durham: Duke University Press. 75  Lawson, The Last Man, p. 155. 69 70

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in contact with ‘civilised nations’ – loss of land, the effects of new diseases, vices, and alcohol. Drawing on Bonwick, he was particularly struck by the women’s low fertility, and speculated that it resulted from their changed conditions of life. Civilised races, Darwin considered, could adapt much better to change than savages could, for they were more used to varying conditions, mobility, and interbreeding.76 The Last of the Tasmanians would prove enormously influential in scientific and ethnographic thinking, not only in Britain but also worldwide. In part its longevity resulted from its having few competitors, there being nothing of its scale and ambition until the appearance of Clive Turnbull’s Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1948, followed by Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians in 1981. When Raphaël Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide, conducted the research for a chapter on Tasmania for a book on the history of genocide (which was never published), it was largely to Bonwick that he turned.77 British historians would take relatively little interest until Tom Lawson’s The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania was published in 2014.78 Queen Victoria and Australian Aboriginal People One arena in which the relationship between Britain and Australian Indigenous people was maintained was the monarchy, which stood above and outside both imperial and colonial governments. As was the case around the British Empire, the impetus for a sense of special connection seems to have come from Indigenous people, colonial authorities, and royalty itself. We know from a range of other imperial and colonial histories how strongly Indigenous and colonised peoples in other regions, such as South Africa and Canada, saw the Crown as a possible source of redress for the wrongs they were suffering at the hands of British settlers and their descendants, and it is clear that Australian Indigenous people had similar understandings.79 As discussed in earlier chapters, from early on Indigenous people saw the governor as the leader of the people who were overwhelming their world, and accordingly sought to develop strong familial relationships with him. One governor after  Russell McGregor, ‘The Doomed Race: A Scientific Axiom of the Late Nineteenth Century’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 39, no. 1, 1993, 16–7; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edition, London: John Murray, 1882, pp. 181–92. See also Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. 77  See Ann Curthoys, ‘Raphael Lemkin’s Tasmania: An Introduction’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 39, no. 2, June 2005, pp. 162–9. 78  Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Melbourne and London: F. W. Cheshire, 1948; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians. 79  Mark McKenna, This Country: A Reconciled Republic?, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004, p. 66.

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another spoke of the King, and after 1837 the Queen, as the source of whatever gifts and goodwill had been offered to Indigenous people. The feasts and blankets first given by Governor Lachlan Macquarie had been given in the name of the King, and blankets were typically distributed to Indigenous people in many country towns on the sovereign’s birthday, sometimes along with plates or other items that featured the Queen’s image. The sense that Queen Victoria was looking after Indigenous people was heightened when in 1850 the Land Commissioners in New South Wales explained to Indigenous people in their own district that Queen Victoria had set aside land for them.80 With this evidence before them of the Queen’s concern for their welfare, Indigenous people often saw her as an alternative source of authority, as someone who could help them in their battle with settler governments and peoples, especially in their quest for the return of their land.81 While the monarchy consistently failed to address Indigenous people’s concerns, having no political relationship to the making and implementation of policy, it did maintain a symbolic connection which remains to this day.82 This connection became especially evident during the royal tour by Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, of all the Australian colonies in 1867 and 1868. When Indigenous people in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland met the Duke, these were their first meetings with British royalty on their own soil.83 A key aspect of these meetings was an Indigenous performance, through which Indigenous people sought to strengthen their connections with the Crown and to advance claims for recognition and just treatment. They were important moments for people with few avenues of protest and little recognition of their political agency. While performance provides a common element between the different colonial meetings, the Duke’s meetings with Indigenous people in each colony proved to be very diverse. As we explore in more detail in subsequent chapters, these meetings highlighted just how different the colonies were from one another, and how fast they were diverging further in conditions of settler self-government.

 Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, p. 56.  See Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent, eds., Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. 82  See Maria Nugent, “‘The Queen Gave Us the Land”: Aboriginal People, Queen Victoria and Historical Remembrance’, History Australia, vol. 9, no. 2, August 2012, pp. 182–200. 83  Jessie Mitchell, “‘It will Enlarge the Ideas of the Natives”: Indigenous Australians and the Tour of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh’, Aboriginal History, vol. 34, 2010, pp. 197–216. 80 81

Part III

Self-Governing Colonies and Indigenous People, 1856–c.1870

10

Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania

In this book, we ask not only why the Australian colonies gained self-­ government when they did, but also what difference it made to Indigenous people when it came. Overall, we argue, settler self-­government made a considerable difference to Indigenous people, but the ways in which it did so varied significantly from colony to colony. Already different from one another as a result of their particular political, economic, and cultural histories, the colonies under self-­government now moved further away from British metropolitan discourses, desires, and constraints. This chapter and the four that follow explore the resulting divergences for the first decade-and-a-half of responsible government. Here we consider Tasmania, the colony that wanted to forget Aboriginal people altogether. With responsible government and a new name – Tasmania – for the colony, colonists welcomed the chance for a new start; they wanted to relinquish the past and create Tasmania anew. As one commentator in the Hobart Mercury exclaimed in February 1856, ‘We particularly wish to forget, as soon as possible, the name of Van Diemen’s Land.’1 Colonists wanted to put behind them both the penal system and the conflict with Aboriginal people. While colonists waited with a variety of emotions for what they believed to be the impending disappearance of an entire people, the colonial government was, in fact, responsible for governing two distinct groups of Indigenous people in this period. One was the survivors of the Flinders Island experiment, now living at Oyster Cove, and the other was the demographically thriving community on the Furneaux Islands of Bass Strait, descended from Aboriginal women and European men.2 In both cases, colonial governments did very little for the people concerned, but the different approaches to the two communities illustrate how Tasmanian ideas about race, governance, and progress were developing during that time.

 Hobart Mercury, 25 February 1856, p. 2.  Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 222–9; Taylor, ‘Savages or Saviours?’, pp. 73–4.

1 2

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Aboriginal Policy under Responsible Government Despite responsible government and a new name, true independence for Tasmania did not come easily. New social institutions were slow to develop, and an economic recession beset the colony for almost twenty years.3 Early political life under responsible government was rather unstable in all the Australian colonies, and this was especially true of Tasmania. There was not yet a clear party system and a period of rapid ministerial change made it difficult for governments to get their legislation through both houses of parliament. Meanwhile, Tasmanian politics did not demonstrate the democratic and liberal turn that would be evident in New South Wales and Victoria. Under the Tasmanian constitution, the franchise for the Assembly was property-­based, excluding more than half the adult male population from the vote. While radical members of parliament continued to complain that the franchise was unequal (and the governor overpaid), there were few moves towards universal male suffrage of the kind that was by this time emerging in Victoria, South Australia, and New South Wales. It would not be until the 1880s that parliament passed legislation to widen the vote for Tasmania’s Assembly, and not until September 1900 that it introduced universal male suffrage.4 The new Tasmanian government lacked funds. The Legislative Council, also elected on a restrictive property franchise,5 and with a membership of wealthy landowners, merchants, and some professional men, was instrumental in voting down government attempts to introduce any new taxes to alleviate the chronic shortage of government revenue, since these would harm the interests of wealthy landowners.6 Without revenue, the comparatively strong centralised state and bureaucracy that had developed in Van Diemen’s Land before 1856 now withered away. As Stefan Petrow suggests, there was in Tasmania in these early years of responsible government a certain hostility and even fear of a centralised state, possibly because it was associated with the old penal system.7 The colony’s elite (mostly wealthy landowners) preferred responsibility to devolve instead to local officials, charities, and private business. Joan Brown has noted that the delivery of social services was precarious as the new colonial authorities, strapped for funds, tried to ease such work onto the voluntary sector, which in turn was struggling to raise charitable funds during an  Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, p. 136.  Terry Newman, ‘Franchise’, in Alison Alexander, ed., The Companion to Tasmanian History, www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/F/Franchise.htm, accessed 14 April 2018. 5  Townsley, Tasmania from Colony to Statehood 1803–1945, pp. 112–3. 6  Shayne Breen, ‘Outdoor Poor Relief in Launceston, 1860–1880’, in Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Tasmanian Historical Research Association: Papers and Proceedings, vol. 38, no. 1, March 1991, p. 23; Framlingham, ‘Economy’, p. 421. 7  Stefan Petrow, ‘The State’, in Alison Alexander, ed., The Companion to Tasmanian History, Hobart: University of Tasmania, 2005, pp. 484–85. 3 4

Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania 257

era of economic depression and frequent popular suspicion about the ‘undeserving’ poor.8 This weak and under-­funded state would have implications for Aboriginal policy. Where Tasmanian Aboriginal activists of the 1830s and 1840s had experienced an excess of government and were very aware of central figures of authority, the Aboriginal people living in the Bass Strait islands would find they had to struggle to get the authorities to notice them at all. Even before the new government was in place, the main Aboriginal policy was one of reducing expenditure on the Aboriginal settlement at Oyster Cove. In the last year under the old system, the colonial government under Governor Henry Young decided to encourage able-­bodied men at Oyster Cove to find work away from the settlement as a way of reducing expenditure.9 Several of the men did so, becoming whalers, where they experienced a more egalitarian environment than they ever had on land.10 One of these men was William Lanney, who was to become known in colonial society as the last Aboriginal Tasmanian man of full descent, and whom James Bonwick records at this time as ‘[j]olly in habits as well as in appearance  . . . always a favourite with his fellow-­seamen, and [who] was received with enthusiasm by the old ladies of the settlement whenever he paid them a visit’.11 Despite the economic involvement of some able-­bodied men in whaling, the number of residents at Oyster Cove continued to fall; by 1856 there were fewer than twenty people living at the settlement. As the number of residents kept falling, as the old people died and no children were born, everybody believed the Tasmanian Aboriginal people would soon be ‘extinct’. Colonists observed this continued population decline with very mixed feelings; to some extent, the knowledge that the community was dying led to an increased interest in them in their last years. Some colonists argued that they ought to take steps to preserve knowledge of what was about to disappear. Representatives from the new electoral district of Pembroke, for example, asked Governor Young in 1856 for support in compiling an official Aboriginal vocabulary, explaining that Aboriginal people would probably be ‘extinct’ soon and their language should be recorded for the benefit of scientists and historians. They also recommended (re)introducing Aboriginal place names to the colony, expressing disapproval of the colonial tradition of ‘repeating, without any significance or beauty, the names of English counties and towns.’12  Joan Christina Brown, ‘Poverty is not a Crime’: The Development of Social Sciences in Tasmania, 1803–1900, Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1972, pp. 83, 87.     9  Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp. 178–82; Johnson and McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land, pp. 283–4. 10  Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870, New York: State University of New York Press, 2012, p. 67; Johnson and McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land, p. 288. 11  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 394. 12  Hobart Courier, 17 December 1856, p. 2.     8

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For others, including Hugh Munro Hull, clerk to the House of Assembly, senior civil servant, public speaker, and writer (and later to become a corresponding member of many British and other overseas societies), there was no cause for remembering or for lament. Hull published a Royal Kalendar and Guide to Tasmania for 1859, and after recording that there were remaining at the Oyster Cove settlement only fourteen people (five men and nine women, and no children) he commented: ‘Uncleanly, unsober, unvirtuous, unenergetic and irreligious, with a past character for treachery, and no record of one noble action, the race is fast fading away, and its utter extinction will hardly be regretted.’13 The Continuing Role of the Governor With colonial governments inactive as colonists waited for the people to disappear, the governor was potentially one of the remaining points of contact between Indigenous people and settler society. Some governors, however, maintained much stronger connections than others. Sir Henry Young, Governor between January 1855 and December 1861, had little involvement, and does not appear to have visited the settlement or invited the people to Government House, as Governor Denison had done. James Bonwick would later comment, having visited the settlement in 1859, that the lack of contact with Governor Young since his arrival in 1855 ‘had darkened their latter days’.14 The arrival of Thomas Gore Browne in December 1861, however, signalled a return of gubernatorial interest in the surviving residents at Oyster Cove, to their considerable pleasure. Gore Browne, recalled from his role as governor of New Zealand after the outbreak of war there in March 1860, took a greater interest in Aboriginal people and issues than Young had done. He met from time to time with both the Oyster Cove people and the Furneaux islanders. On his invitation, the Oyster Cove people visited Government House a number of times – in January 1862, and again in August 1864.15 On the latter occasion, four Aboriginal people – Mary Ann Arthur, Bessy Clark, Truganini, and William Lanney attended, ‘dressed in the usual ballroom fashion’, were photographed by Henry Frith, and met the governor and many of the ladies and gentlemen present.16 This appearance at Government House led to much reflection and discussion, both in the colony and in England. The Hobart Mercury on 22 October commented, ‘We had read much before of the last man, and  Hugh Munro Hull, Royal Kalendar and Guide to Tasmania for 1859, Hobart: William Fletcher, 1859, p. 13. 14  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 276. 15  Ibid., p.  392, quote from Hobart Town Mercury, October 1864; Plomley, Weep in Silence, p. 197, fn. 33. 16  Launceston Examiner, 27 August 1864, p. 5. 13

Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania 259

heard much of the last man of his race, but had never expected to have been favoured with the sight of such a person’. The writer was clearly moved by the experience, going on to say that, ‘In this, there is something very serious, if not very affecting.’ Whenever the white man attempted to civilise the Aboriginal races, he continued, he ‘found them melting away before him as snow before a summer’s sun’. Then followed a long discussion of the sad history concluding with the question: ‘With whom does the blame of this rest?’ The writer had no real answer, other than that Aboriginal people were ‘as much sinned against as sinning’. In any case, ‘they are gone, and their extinction, as a race, was probably as inevitable, as it is inscrutable’. Reflections such as these did not end in the colony, but reverberated in Britain as well.17 This was not the last visit of the people from Oyster Cove to Government House. On the Queen’s birthday in May 1866, with Thomas Gore Browne still the governor, four Aboriginal women attended in ball gowns, and had their photographs taken by Charles Woolley for the upcoming intercolonial exhibition in Melbourne.18 Woolley’s portraits, in fact, won a medal there, probably in part because, as Jane Lydon suggests, of ‘their subjects’ tremendous, tragic significance as the supposed ‘last of their race’.19 There were royal connections too. In January 1868, when Prince Alfred visited the colony as part of his worldwide tour, William Lanney, Mary Ann, and Truganini were invited.20 They stood with the official party headed by Governor Gore Browne on the pavilion steps to greet the Prince.21 The scene seems to have captured Bonwick’s imagination, for he would write of Lanney’s presence: ‘Clad in a blue suit, with a gold‑lace band round his cap, he walked proudly with the Prince on the Hobart Town regatta ground, conscious that they alone were in possession of royal blood.’22 It appears, however, that the Aboriginal people present had no chance of a meaningful royal meeting.23 Last Days at Oyster Cove While these ceremonial occasions were giving a sentimental gloss to the unfolding tragedy of what were thought to be a dying people, much more  Lawson, The Last Man, p. 122.  Plomley, Weep in Silence, p. 197, fn. 33.  Jane Lydon, ‘The Experimental 1860s: Charles Walter’s Images of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria’ Aboriginal History, vol. 26, 2002, p. 119. See also the report of the women’s visit to Government House in the Tasmanian Morning Herald, 25 May 1866, p. 3. 20  Tasmanian Times quoted in Cornwall Chronicle, 15 January 1868, p.  5, cited by Cindy McCreery, ‘“Long may He Float on the Ocean of Life”: The First Royal Visit to Tasmania, 1868”, Tasmanian Historical Studies, vol. 12, 2007, pp. 19–42. 21  Hobart Mercury, 10 January 1868, p. 2. 22  Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 395; quoted in Russell, Roving Mariners, p. 80. 23  McCreery, ‘Long may He Float on the Ocean of Life’, p. 37; Mercury, 10 January 1868, p. 2. 17 18 19

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sinister forces were also at play. The combination of scientific interest in the origins of humans and the impending disappearance of the Tasmanians led to an intense interest in the human remains of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, as each of the residents at Oyster Cove passed away. As requests came from men of science in Britain for such remains, local men of science were only too pleased to comply. When Bessy Clark died in 1867 and was buried at Oyster Cove, Hobart lawyer, naturalist, and collector, Morton Allport, sometime later disinterred her remains and sent them to the Hunterian Museum in London.24 Worse was to come. On 3 March 1869, a year after meeting the Prince, and only a few months after the departure of Gore Browne and his replacement by Charles du Cane, William Lanney died. As Stefan Petrow shows, his death was met with a wide range of emotions, including genuine sorrow.25 News of Lanney’s death reached London in mid-­1869 to much interest and consternation; on 29 July, The Times declared that, ‘the aboriginal Tasmanian has actually vanished’.26 While people knew that there were still two old Tasmanian women remaining, and that William Lanney was not literally the ‘last Tasmanian’, with the last male went the chance of any more children of full Aboriginal descent being born. Despite attempts by Lanney’s friends to prevent it, several men of science colluded to dismember his body and send the remains to Britain, where they were to be located over a century later in Edinburgh.27 One of those who expressed disgust at this treatment of Lanney’s body was James Bonwick, whose book, The Last of the Tasmanians, ended with a long newspaper account of Lanney’s death and the desecration of his remains.28 Still the deaths continued. The official Aboriginal Establishment at Oyster Cove finally closed in 1869, though Mary Ann, her white husband, and Truganini continued to live there for several more years. Mary Ann died in 1871, leaving only Truganini, the woman who had lived through the various phases of British and colonial policy towards her people. She left for Hobart in 1874. She was afraid that she too, would be ‘cut up’ one day. When she died on 8 May 1876 she was initially given a proper burial in Hobart.29 Two years later, however, as Ryan notes, the Royal Society of Tasmania exhumed her remains  Helen McDonald, Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005, p. 120; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 264. It seems that Bessy Clark’s remains were destroyed, along with two-­thirds of the Hunterian Museum’s collection, by a bomb on 10 May 1941. N. J .B. Plomley, ‘A List of Tasmanian Aboriginal Material in Collections in Europe’, Records of the Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston, New Series, no. 15, Launceston: Launceston City Council, 1962, p. 6. 25  Stefan Petrow, ‘The Last Man: The Mutilation of William Lanne in 1869 and Its Aftermath’, Aboriginal History, vol. 21, 1997, pp. 90–112, re: sorrow pp. 100–1. 26  The Times, 29 July 1869, quoted in Lawson, The Last Man, p. 156. 27  Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 267. 28  Concerning Bonwick, see Curthoys, ‘The History of Killing and the Killing of History’, pp. 363–5; and Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania’, pp. 235–6. 29  Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 270. 24

Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania 261

and stored them in a box. After several decades, the professor of anatomy at the University of Melbourne, R. J. A. Berry, articulated them into a skeleton for display in the Tasmanian Museum.30 Such a death was seen to signify extinction, since in nineteenth-­century thinking mixed-­race descendants did not signify the survival of a people. Accordingly, when Truganini died on 8 May 1876, scientists duly pronounced the Tasmanians extinct, a conviction that has lasted well into our own time.31 There were many expressions of sadness; as Brantlinger points out, ‘such expressions were common wherever indigenous peoples were drastically reduced.’32 Renato Rosaldo notes the tendency of colonisers to ‘long for the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed . . . people mourn the passing of what they themselves transformed. Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox. A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim’.33 The death of William Lanney and Truganini became part of a theatre of mourning as a constituent element of the history of settler colonialism and of its psychopathology. The Indigenous Peoples of the Bass Strait Islands There was at the same time quite a different story unfolding. The community on the Furneaux islands of Bass Strait, descended from Aboriginal women and European men known as Straitsmen, was not only surviving but also demographically prospering.34 By this time, the people of the islands had become a more confident, multi-­generational community, and they were beginning to make requests and demands of the church and state authorities. The newly responsible governments were, however, just as unresponsive as the immediately preceding governments had been. While a series of governors had attempted rigorous rule at Flinders Island, they had made very few efforts to administer the Furneaux islanders. Indeed, the islanders had long been imagined as existing outside government, civilisation, and regular society  – the very opposite to disciplined British subjects. Their ancestry was seen to exclude them from civilised society twice over. As Rebe Taylor has noted,  Ibid.  Truganini was not, in any case, in fact the last person of full Tasmanian Aboriginal descent to die. One of the women taken to Kangaroo Island in South Australia in the 1820s, known as Suke, was still alive; as Rebe Taylor explores, her date of death is unclear but it was at least four, and possibly as many as 18, years after the death of Truganini. Taylor, Unearthed, pp. 139–44. 32  Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 4. 33  Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston: Beacon, 1989, 68–87. 34  Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 222–9; Taylor, ‘Savages or Saviours?’, pp. 73–4; Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier, Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 2011. 30 31

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colonists since the 1810s had shared tales of the sealers as white savages, piratical and brutal, part-­beast, part-­bushranger, part-­Robinson Crusoe.35 And if, in colonial thinking, the islanders were not proper British subjects, nor were they seen by white colonists as Indigenous. The newly self-­governing colonial authorities ignored the presence of several ‘full-­blood’ women on the islands, and labelled the other residents ‘half-­castes’, denying both their Aboriginality and their inclusion in the British colonial public.36 Acknowledging the Furneaux islanders as Aboriginal would have disrupted the idea of a vanishing race and cast Aboriginal welfare as an ongoing responsibility. As Katherine Ellinghaus has argued, when governments declared that certain people were not Aboriginal, they were not necessarily rendering these people ‘white’, or bestowing upon them greater power or status. White identity, she suggests, ‘could be used as a tool in the hands of those who held the balance of power’. It could be withheld.37 There were, nevertheless, some individual cases where the colonial authorities did take some responsibility for people in the Straits. When the Archdeacon of Launceston, Thomas Reibey, visited the islands in 1863, he noted that Margery Munro, an elderly Aboriginal woman from Western Port in Victoria, who had once lived with the Straitsman James Munro38 and now resided on Little Dog Island, was drawing a small pension voted to her by Lieutenant-­Governor Franklin ‘for services rendered to the Crown’. Given the nature of the region, where disastrous shipwrecks were common, this may refer to some kind of aid to ships or travellers in danger.39 Another woman, a Tasmanian called Marian (or Maria) Scott, had received a pension from the Tasmanian government when she was living on King Island, but had lost it when she moved to the Furneaux group in the 1850s.40 The government may have given Marian a pension partly in recognition of her involvement in the shipping sector, and/or as a charitable  Taylor, ‘Savages or Saviours?’, pp. 77–81.  Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 224. 37  Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Regulating Koori Marriages: The 1886 Victorian Aborigines Protection Act’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 25, no. 67, 2001, pp. 380–1. 38  James Munro had been on Preservation Island since 1819, becoming a local spokesman and special constable, and he had lived with three or four Indigenous women and their children. Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 297. 39  Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 70. 40  Marian claimed to have been shipwrecked there after travelling out with the straitsman John Scott and two other Aboriginal women and a child, to help the crew of the Rebecca, which was wrecked nearby in 1843. Most of Scott’s party had drowned, and the two survivors, Marian and Georgia, lived on King’s Island for years, hunting kangaroos and selling their skins to a trader from Launceston, David Howie. Howie’s party on King Island earned some fame when they tried to aid the victims of the Cataraqui shipwreck, a disaster that occurred nearby in 1845 – local legend would later maintain that Marian had foreseen the disaster in a dream. Tasmania, Legislative Council, ‘Half-­Caste Islanders in Bass’s Straits: Report of the Ven. Archdeacon Reibey’, printed 26 August 1863, in Journals of the Legislative Council (with papers), vol. IX, Hobart, James Barnard, 1863. 35 36

Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania 263

gesture.41 Joan Brown has noted that Tasmanians in the mid-­nineteenth century accepted that the state must retain some responsibility for looking after elderly ex-­convicts and the criminally insane, as a kind of survival from the old penal system.42 It appears that the government may have felt a similar obligation towards the women of the Straits, but its approach was small-­scale and fragmented and did not point to any plans for sustainable, future governance in the region. Gaining some official attention was important, because this community was facing new problems. The portrayals of sealers as white savages, and Aboriginal people as black savages, became especially relevant as newer colonists moved into the Straits, usurping land and resources from the residents and justifying their land-­taking on the basis that the Straitsmen and their descendants were not real, land-­owning citizens but merely scavengers and hunter-gatherers.43 According to Irynej Skira, the community before the 1860s had occupied at least eight islands, and as none of these were freehold the residents could move between them freely for the mutton-­birding industry on which their livelihoods depended. However, in 1860 the discovery of deposits thought to be guano brought an influx of outsiders to the islands, soon outnumbering the locals.44 The Waste Lands Acts of 1861 and 1870 allowed colonists from the mainland access to this ‘empty’ Crown territory, placing at risk land that had previously seemed securely to belong to the Straits islanders.45 The islanders responded by petitioning the government, leasing 222 hectares for themselves under the Waste Lands Amendment Act, and seeking closer links with the church.46 Colonists sometimes acknowledged that Indigenous dispossession, though not an injustice, had incurred a debt. During the 1860s, James Grant, a merchant  Pauline Buckley’s biography of David Howie suggests his family alerted the Anglican bishop Francis Russell Nixon to the poverty of the Aboriginal women in the 1850s, on the grounds that it should not be up to local colonists to provide for them, being poor themselves. Pauline Buckley, David Howie: Devil or Saint?, Smithton: Jamala Press, 2003, pp. 116, 161, 177, 179; Andrew Lemon and Marjorie Morgan, Poor Souls, They Perished: The Cataraqui, Australia’s Worst Shipwreck, Collingwood: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1995, pp. 81–6, 103, 106. 42  Brown, ‘Poverty is not a Crime’, pp. 89–91. 43  Taylor, ‘Savages or Saviours?’, pp. 77–81. 44  Irynej Skira, ‘Always Afternoon: Aborigines on Cape Barren Island in the Nineteenth Century’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association: Papers and Proceedings, vol. 44, no. 2, June 1997, p. 121. 45  Although the Acts were supposed to widen the land ownership base, they were only partly successful, giving smaller farmers access to land that was mostly hilly, forested and hard to work. See Shayne Breen, Contested Places: Tasmania’s Northern Districts from Ancient Times to 1900, Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, 2001, pp. 34–44. 46  Boyce, God’s Own Country?, pp. 61–5; Irynej Skira, ‘“I Hope You will be My Friend”: Tasmanian Aborigines in the Furneaux Group in the Nineteenth Century – Population and Land Tenure’, Aboriginal History, vol. 21, 1997, pp. 30–45; Stephen Murray-Smith, ed., Mission to the Islands: The Missionary Voyages in Bass Strait of Canon Marcus Brownrigg, 1872–1885, Hobart: Cat & Fiddle Press, 1979, pp. xix–xx. 41

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in the colony since the 1820s, and the member of the Legislative Assembly for Fingal, the electorate covering the islands, supported the islanders using these arguments.47 Several times in parliament, notably in October 1861, he warned that government neglect was depriving the people of the islands of education and forcing them off their land. He acknowledged that many of the islanders were ‘descendants of the aborigines’, and that they had often helped ships in distress. He concluded that ‘these poor people ... had a claim on our sympathies, and were likely to be of great public service’.48 In the parliamentary debates that followed, the language of the colonial politicians revealed a mix of ideas about the deserving poor, the obligations of settlers towards conquered peoples, and the practical benefits of supporting strong maritime communities in the straits. Grant was supported (perhaps surprisingly) by William Race Allison, a conservative politician and pastoralist, whose father had been a grazier in the colony during the Black War. Allison spoke of ‘the intelligence and usefulness of the people at the islands’. ‘We owed them something; it was a very unhappy thing that wherever the white man went, the black man fell; there were very few of these people left, and we had all their land.’49 Yet throughout the 1860s these moments of recognition of a debt and an obligation did not affect government policy. The islanders had considerable difficulty in gaining government assistance, or any recognition that they were owed such assistance by virtue of everything they had lost. Most of the time, when they claimed their Indigenous heritage, the authorities were unresponsive. This became apparent when the islanders sought to invite the survivors of Oyster Cove to live with them in the Straits. The death at sea in 1861 of Walter George Arthur, who had been a leading figure on Flinders Island in the 1840s, and had been one of the Aboriginal men based at Oyster Cove involved in whaling in the 1850s, was a calamity for the Oyster Cove community. As Ryan puts it, Arthur’s death ‘deprived the community of leadership essential to its survival’.50 J. S. Dandridge, superintendent of the settlement since 1855, along with his wife took care of the few remaining residents, but some islanders thought the survivors would be better off living with them. Lucy Beedon, a powerful matriarchal figure who was descended from a woman called Emerenna from Cape Portland and the Straitsman James Beedon, was especially concerned about Truganini. Beedon wanted to offer a home to this now-­elderly woman, ‘where she might spend her remaining days among the descendants of her  Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania: Volume II, Colony and State from 1856 to the 1980s, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 26.  Mercury, 3 October 1861, p. 2, 12 October 1861, p. 3. 49  Mercury, 12 October 1861, p. 3. For more on Allison, see John Reynolds, ‘Allison, William Race (1812–1865)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 1, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp. 7–8. 50  Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines. 47

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Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania 265

own race’. Archdeacon Reibey, Reverend George Fereday, and Canon Marcus Brownrigg all supported the idea, but the colonial government ignored their request. Perhaps this was mere indifference, but white officials would also not have welcomed a reminder that Truganini and the other survivors of Flinders Island at Oyster Cove – already being memorialised as the last of their race – were in fact linked to a larger, surviving community.51 Meanwhile, the islanders were especially keen to gain assistance in providing education for their children. This was thanks in large part to Lucy Beedon, who had taught the local children herself. Now she invited Archdeacon Reibey and George Fereday, the minister at George Town, to visit the islands in 1862 and discuss the need for a teacher. The islanders promised they would contribute some funds for this purpose.52 Persuaded of their case, Reibey then supported their claims to his church colleagues and the colonial secretary. Any schooling system, he urged, could only operate with the residents’ approval and support. The teachers must be people of good characters and qualifications, whose behaviour would withstand scrutiny  – ‘The half-­castes are peculiarly observant, are easily prejudiced, and therefore much, if not everything, will depend upon the opinion they are led to form.’53 The ‘more intelligent’ parents, he said, wanted a boarding school for their children, preferably on Barren Island.54 The islanders’ requests were in keeping, more or less, with the wider education system in Tasmania at the time. Derek Phillips, Lloyd Robson, and W. A. Townsley have noted that the majority of Tasmanian children did not attend school until the late 1840s. Thanks especially to the efforts of the educational reformer Thomas Arnold, who arrived in the colony in 1850, the 1850s witnessed an expanded, more secular schooling system. In his history of state education in Tasmania, Derek Phillips points out that by this time there was a growing belief that all children should be able to receive an education managed or at least funded by the state. A new educational board was established, more teachers were hired, and spending on education increased. At the same time, educational reformers wanted a more general schooling system, in an effort to curb the disproportionate power of the Church of England and encourage a more active role for the state, with non-­sectarian religious teachings.55 Phillips notes, however, that public schools continued to charge fees and that there  James Boyce, God’s Own Country? The Anglican Church and Tasmanian Aborigines, Hobart: Anglicare Tasmania, 2001, pp. 53–7; Murray-­Smith, Mission to the Islands, p. 10; Tasmania, Legislative Council, ‘Half-­Caste Islanders in Bass’s Straits’, printed 26 August 1863. 52  Boyce, God’s Own Country?, pp. 53–7. 53  Church News for the Diocese of Tasmania, 21 May 1862, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 4–5. 54  Mercury, 4 September 1862, p.  6; Tasmania, Legislative Council, ‘Half-­Caste Islanders in Bass’s Straits’. 55  Derek Phillips, Making More Adequate Provision: State Education in Tasmania, 1839–1985, Hobart: A. B. Caudell, 1985, pp. 13–25; Robson, A History of Tasmania, p.  462; Townsley, Tasmania from Colony to Statehood, p. 78. These changes were much to the disgust of Bishop 51

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was a certain stigma against children whose parents could not or would not pay – a situation associated with the ragged schools for the very poor.56 When the Furneaux islanders offered to contribute funds towards their children’s education, then, this was no doubt a practical measure, but it may also have been a certain assertion of pride and self-­sufficiency, a reminder that they were not just recipients of charity but also members of the public. It is difficult to know exactly how the islanders portrayed their own ethnicity and social position during these political encounters. They were seeking engagement with the government, but presumably did not wish to have its more punitive forms inflicted upon them. Those people who were officially acknowledged as Tasmanian Aborigines had been subjected to controlling and degrading treatment on Flinders Island and at Oyster Cove. In contrast, the Bass Strait families, whose Indigenous character was not fully recognised, had enjoyed relative freedom. Nevertheless, it is clear that they were making some references to their origins and culture. As Archdeacon Reibey commented, they wanted a school, but not one located on Flinders Island. This was not only because of its poor water supply but also because, as Reibey explained, ‘the islanders are prejudiced against the place, – partly from the fact of it having been the prison of their forbears’.57 Calls for schooling and policing in the islands received a mixed reception in parliament in September 1862. Some members claimed it would be too expensive, some wanted missionaries instead, and parliament passed Mr Grant’s resolution for an educational fund only on the condition that an equivalent sum be raised through private charity.58 The decision was not wholly surprising, given the government’s limited funds, the fact that many poor white children did not attend school, and the history of Tasmanian schooling being reliant on the involvement of the Church of England. This was an era when the state often tried to shift social responsibilities onto charitable bodies, and where charities in their turn were drawing on government funds.59 The attempt to make schooling in Bass Strait contingent on private charity, however, also suggests that the schooling of these children was being associated with benevolent institutions like industrial and reformatory schools, seen as a means of keeping poor children useful and out of trouble.

Nixon: see W. R. Barrett, ‘Nixon, Francis Russell (1803–1879)’, ADB online, vol. 2, 1967, pp. 285–8. 56  Phillips, Making More Adequate Provision, pp. 28–9. 57  Mercury, 4 September 1862, p.  6; Tasmania, Legislative Council, ‘Half-­Caste Islanders in Bass’s Straits’. 58  Mercury, 19 September 1862, p.  5; Tasmania, Legislative Council, ‘Half-­Caste Islanders in Bass’s Straits’. 59  Brown, ‘Poverty is not a Crime’, pp.  877–95; Phillips, Making More Adequate Provision, pp. 29–30, 35.

Ghosts of the Past, People of the Present: Tasmania 267

In addition, the authorities’ decision pointed to some uncertainty as to whether ordinary state obligations extended to the straits, underlining the marginal status that colonists had long assigned to these families, geographically, legally, and racially. James Grant was aware of this uncertainty, and drew attention to its political implications. He pointed out with concern that the islanders did not seem to be properly included in any electoral district and thus had no voice in parliament.60 Given that settlers in other colonies, as we shall see in the following chapters, either ignored or expressed horror at the possibility of Aboriginal men voting, Grant’s recognition of both their ancestry and their right to vote stands out. It was not only in parliament that the idea of obligations to the islanders as descendants of Aboriginal people was expressed. Clerical men were especially likely to call for support for missionary work on the grounds that they owed the islanders a debt. When Archdeacon Reibey had called in November 1862 for public donations to support missionary work in the region as a matter of Christian duty and obligation, he had remarked: In the working of the laws of God’s providence, we have dispossessed these poor people of this fair land. In that, we may hope, there was no sin; but surely sin would lie heavy at our doors, if we, blessed with civilization and Christianity, neglected ... to fulfil to them the simplest duties laid upon us by the requirements of Christian charity.61

In December 1863, with still no school on the islands, the islanders sent a deputation to meet Governor Thomas Gore Browne in Launceston, their first ever visit to a Tasmanian governor.62 On this occasion, the deputation included Lucy Beedon, her sister-in-law Lucy, a Mr Everet (probably George Everett, the son of Wottecowidyer from Cape Portland and the sealer James Everett), and Mr Richardson, a former teacher who had moved out to the islands. Their conversation seems to have been about the need for a teacher-­catechist, and the Mercury noted that the meeting was cordial and the governor promised them his support.63 Gore Browne, however, had little power in the matter. Pressure for a school came from another quarter when Bishop Nixon, in late 1864, concluded his eventful tenure as bishop of Tasmania with another appeal for an island mission. Colonists owed better treatment, he said, to ‘the aboriginal inhabitants of that fair land, which we have wrested from them’. He urged that it was not enough to support the handful of people at Oyster Cove, whom

 Mercury, 19 September 1862, p. 5.  Church News for the Diocese of Tasmania, 20 November 1862, vol. 1, no. 7, p. 95. 62  Launceston Examiner, 10 December 1863 p. 4. For the Everetts, see Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 222, 225. 63  Launceston Examiner, 10 December 1863, p. 4. 60 61

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he dubbed ‘the miserable remnant’. There were others, the islanders, who also commanded colonists’ attention. He explained: [T]here are off-­shoots of the old stock scattered throughout the Islands ... who have a strong claim upon our Christian care, in that they form no part of any particular charge within the Colony, and are utterly destitute of the means of grace.

They would, he promised, make exemplary subjects  – ‘simple-­ hearted people ... correct in their habits, and docile in disposition’.64 There was little government response, however, to these high-­status calls for missionary action. It would take another eight years of pressure before the government appointed a schoolteacher.65

 Church News for the Diocese of Tasmania, 21 November 1864. vol. 1, no. 31, p. 389. According to W. R. Barrett, the public response was weak. W. R. Barrett, History of the Church of England in Tasmania, Hobart: Mercury Press, 1942, p. 19. 65  Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 281. 64

11

‘A Refugee in Our Own Land’ Governing Aboriginal People in Victoria

Victoria would experience self-­government quite differently from Tasmania. By the time self-­government arrived, Victoria had moved into a new era. Most of the land lay under European control and large-­scale frontier violence had ended. However, unlike its southern neighbour, Tasmania, Victoria still had a substantial Aboriginal population who had remained on or close to their traditional lands and whose existence was recognised by government and settlers. If Victoria was one of the first colonies to host significant debate about how settlers should govern themselves, it was also the first to take seriously the question of how to govern Aboriginal people. Not only did it witness considerable democratic ferment and the rise of a vigorous liberal polity and reforming liberal governments, but also it was the first under the new regime of responsible government to erect the systems of institutionalisation and surveillance of Aboriginal people that would come to characterise all the colonies as the nineteenth century progressed. In Victoria, the humanitarian policies inherited from Britain would survive the transition to self-­government to a greater extent than in any other colony. It was, however, more than a policy survival or inheritance, since the policies of protection and latterly amalgamation developed by British authorities gradually transformed under colonial conditions into something much more focused on control. Victoria was the first colony to devise the systems of micro-­management and intervention into daily life that came to characterise colonial forms of Aboriginal institutionalisation from the mid-­ nineteenth to the mid-­twentieth century. Victorian Aboriginal policies thus carried within them both a British humanitarian inheritance and a colonial desire for settler governance of, and not with or for, Indigenous people. When self-­government came into being in 1856, the colony elected a liberal government led by William Haines, known as the ‘honest farmer’.1 The elections had been conducted by secret ballot, a major innovation that other countries would soon copy, often referring to it as the ‘Australian ballot’. In 1857, the legislature was further liberalised, with manhood suffrage (already  Betty Malone “William Clark Haines”, ADB online, accessed 15 April 2018.

1

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largely present in practice) confirmed, and members of the lower house no longer having to meet high property requirements. One consequence of manhood suffrage that few, if any, foresaw was that Aboriginal men now acquired the right to vote. In 1859, the Legislative Assembly instituted the English Chartist demand for elections every three years. In Britain, John Stuart Mill, for one, was impressed. ‘You have certainly now obtained a very democratic constitution’, he wrote to his friend, Attorney-­General Henry Samuel Chapman in July 1858, though he deplored the colony’s insistence on manhood, that is male, rather than universal suffrage. He was also less than enthusiastic about the colony’s adoption of a secret ballot, drawing on his father’s History of India to make the point that the secret ballot was only sometimes desirable. Now that the chances of people being coerced to vote in a particular way had declined, he wrote, what really counted was the duty of everyone to ‘be ready to avow and justify whatever he does’. He had also changed his mind about the wisdom of paying members of parliament, since to do so would be to create a political class, ‘a class of men without any fixed occupation but that of being in parliament’.2 In his book, Considerations on Representative Government, three years later, Mill praised the system of self-­government Britain had instituted in her settler colonies from 1848. Britain’s ‘colonies of European race’, he wrote, ‘equally with the parent country, possess the fullest measure of internal self-government’.3 They could alter their own constitutions, and Britain’s reserved powers were only ‘on questions which concern the empire and not solely the particular colony’.4 Philanthropists in Victoria saw an opportunity for change and began to lobby the new colonial government for a fresh Aboriginal policy. One of the key movers for a new approach was Thomas McCombie, whose 1845 essay on Aboriginal policy we discussed in Chapter 5. By 1856, he had become a merchant, a member of the Legislative Council, and an enthusiastic writer about the district. In 1858, in his book, The History of the Colony of Victoria, he acknowledged the violence of early colonisation but depicted it as securely in the past. He recalled, for example, how squatters around Geelong used to tie bells to the trees, to be rung if the natives attacked; these bells, McCombie said, were now pointed out to travellers as a nostalgic curiosity.5 This example illustrates how, through a process of memorialising, colonists could both recall  Mill to Chapman, 8 July 1858, reproduced in R. S. Neale, ‘John Stuart Mill on Australia: A Note’, Historical Studies in Australia and New Zealand, vol. 13, no. 50, pp. 240–1. 3  Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, p. 378. 4  Ibid., p. 379. 5  Thomas McCombie, The History of the Colony of Victoria, from Its Settlement to the Death of Sir Charles Hotham, Melbourne: Sands and Kenny, 1858, p. 41. Also Fergus Farrow, ‘McCombie, Thomas (1819–1869)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 132–3. 2

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the ‘frontier’ and distance themselves from it. McCombie’s work also reminds us of Scottish enthusiasm for British imperial adventure, as when he praised ‘Anglo-­Saxon’ colonists for building peaceful settlements around the world. ‘Few will deny,’ he confidently wrote, ‘that the Anglo-­Saxon excel any race the world has seen as colonizers.’6 Although sympathetic to Indigenous distress, he continued to insist that the British Empire had a moral mandate ‘to reclaim great countries, which were either unoccupied or held merely by a few erratic tribes’. At the antipodes, he expected, colonists would build ‘a second happy England’.7 While researching his book, however, McCombie had become concerned about contemporary Aboriginal circumstances, and in October 1858 he successfully moved in the Legislative Council for the appointment of a Select Committee to investigate. Victorian governments had hitherto shown little interest in such matters and on this occasion, McCombie’s own initiative was vital – according to Diane Barwick, he was the only committee member who attended all its hearings and was a key figure in drafting the final report.8 Under his leadership, the committee energetically collected information on the colony’s Aboriginal population with a view to developing a more ameliorative policy. It investigated practical subjects like Aboriginal numbers, ages, health, supplies, education, and access to land, as well as including lengthy ethnographic material about linguistics, racial science, craniology, diet, dress, ceremonies, funerals, and marriage. The committee also enquired into Indigenous people’s own forms of government, asking whether authority was monarchical, democratic, or priestly, how it was conferred, whether a class system existed, and how laws and punishments were enforced. It was evident that the committee saw the importance, in Foucault’s terms, of knowledge for governmentality.9 The committee regarded colonists’ own expertise as paramount, and did not consult directly any Indigenous witnesses. Following the gold rush, Victoria had become home to new networks of educated European men, aspiring to promote cultural progress and scientific enlightenment. This era saw the establishment with remarkable speed of new organisations like the Philosophical Institute, the Zoological Society, and the Royal Society of Victoria, and the rise of individuals of a scientific bent to positions of prominence, such as Ferdinand Von Mueller, the director of the new Melbourne Botanical Gardens, and the Argus editor Edward Wilson. There were plans to establish a university and

 McCombie, The History of the Colony of Victoria, p. 40.  Ibid., pp. 14–17, 40. 8  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 37–8. 9  Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104. 6 7

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a public library in Melbourne.10 Indeed, the Victorian authorities’ decision to sponsor the 1860 Burke and Wills expedition to cross the continent from south to north was, among other things, an expression of a new era of scientific ambition.11 In similar spirit, the members of the 1858 inquiry constructed themselves and their colony as an educated and cosmopolitan community, linked to European scientific trends, and safely separate from and superior to the Indigenous ­people they documented. The replies from the white witnesses, and their implications for colonial policy, varied. Some expressed the old contemptuous trope of Indigenous people as a race incapable of their own governance. C. J. Tyers, for instance, the Commissioner of Crown Lands for Alberton (with power over the distribution of land and the boundaries of squatters’ runs), told the committee that Indigenous societies had ‘neither government nor laws, but are as independent of each other as a herd of swine’.12 Others, however, testified to the authority of the elders, the role of meetings and group consensus, the importance of kinship networks, and the elaborate negotiations and rituals between different societies. That important intermediary, the Guardian of Aborigines, William Thomas, was an especially significant witness, having by this time had extensive dealings with the Kulin nations of southern and central Victoria for almost twenty years. He protested against their dispossession and urged the committee to support their claims for secure land and pay more attention to their cultures and beliefs. He described the Kulin confederacy and explained that an ‘aristocracy of priests, doctors, enchanters, dreamers, warriors, and councillors’ held authority.13 Thomas also, however, followed in the assimilationist and cultural genocidal tradition established in Macquarie’s time, and in Van Diemen’s Land, of wanting to remove Aboriginal children from their families and place them in training schools.14 McCombie presented the Select Committee’s report to the Council in January 1859.15 It provided shocking evidence of Indigenous depopulation, blaming poverty, illness, alcoholism, and the violence and vices of Europeans. The committee accused the Victorian government of having neglected Aboriginal people, observing with shame that the only attempt at protection (however  Garden, Victoria, p. 98; Linden Gillbank, ‘A Paradox of Purposes: Acclimatization Origins of the Melbourne Zoo’, in R. J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 74; Lever, They Dined on Eland, p. 107. 11  Garden, Victoria, p. 83. 12  Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines, p. 77. 13  Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines: together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices (1858–9), Melbourne: John Ferres, 1859, pp. 64, 68. 14  Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines, pp. 40–1. 15  Argus, 27 January 1859, p. 7. 10

‘A Refugee in Our Own Land’ 273

unsuccessful) had been a British, not a colonial, initiative.16 The committee’s emphasis on ethnography – with guiding questions adapted from those devised by the British Association for the Promotion of Science and the Ethnographical Society of Paris – pointed towards the kind of authority some Victorian colonists were hoping to develop over Aboriginal lives. Echoing sentiments expressed by the British Association, the committee’s report remarked upon: the irretrievable loss which science must sustain if so large a portion of the human race ... is suffered to perish before many interesting questions of a psychological, physiological, and philological character, as well as many historical facts in relation to them, have been investigated.17

These were ominous words when we consider the desecration, grave robbing, and dismemberment that would occur a few years later when William Lanney and Truganini died in Tasmania. The report appears to have had considerable support. While Victorians shared a common coloniser perspective proclaiming the inevitable disappearance of Aboriginal people, there was also a strong public view that their imminent demise meant the settlers owed something to what the Select Committee called the ‘remaining blacks’. 18As the Melbourne Church of England Mission to the Aborigines of Victoria had noted in its fourth annual report in 1858, the fact that the people were passing away and would soon be all gone meant it was now their Christian duty to do whatever they could for those who remained.19 Now, with the Select Committee report before it, the government agreed that greater intervention was called for, including the establishment of new reserves for agriculture, pastoralism, and missionary work. Missionary work was in fact already being revived. The Anglican mission at Yelta was struggling on, but there were plans to start new missions. Moravian missionary, Friedrich Wilhelm Spiekese, who had gone home in despair after the collapse of the Lake Boga mission in 1856, returned in 1859 and successfully established the Ebenezer mission further away from white settlement, at Lake Hindmarsh in the Wimmera region, the country of the Wotjobaluk people.20 The mission’s successful conversion of Nathanael Pepper in August 1860 inspired new hope in missionaries and government officials in the colony, and  Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines, pp. iii–iv.  Ibid., p. 25. 18  Select Committee Report, 1859, p. iii, quoted in Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 81. 19  Fourth Annual Report of the Melbourne church of England Mission to the Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne: Mason and Firth, 1858, p. 10, discussed in Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 83. 20  Jane Lydon, Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission, Lanham: Altamira, 2009, p. 90. 16 17

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Ebenezer became the model for the series of Aboriginal stations the government would establish during the 1860s.21 The renewed government and missionary attention to Aboriginal affairs in the late 1850s was creating a certain political and popular space into which Indigenous people themselves could move. Building on the connections and strategies they had established in the 1840s, they made claims to their ancestral country, and reminded colonists and the government of their dispossession. They approached individual settlers or authority figures who might prove sympathetic, as well as representatives of the Crown or the monarch herself. Their appeals were often personal, verbal, and performative; they drew on traditional conciliatory practices and developing them to suit colonial circumstances, for example introducing new elements like English-­language petitions and Queen’s birthday deputations. While Aboriginal victories were small and fleeting at this time, dispossession having left them with little bargaining power, Aboriginal claimants were laying the foundations for activist movements that would become more organised and widespread in the future. Indigenous Agency and the Reserves Policy As the government prepared to establish a system of government reserves for the support and control of Indigenous people, the latter expressed their own ideas of where such reserves should be and who should manage them. They began exerting pressure on government officials, even before the government had had a chance to put the new policy in place. On 28 February 1859, William Thomas received an unusual visit from Simon Wonga and Tommy Munnering, the sons of the late Woiwurrung leader, Billibellary. By this time, Wonga, aged about thirty-­five, had succeeded his father to a position of leadership among the Woiwurrung, while the younger Munnering had also known Thomas since childhood, when he had been educated briefly in the local mission school.22 Five men of the Daungwurrung nation of northern Victoria – Bearringa, Murrum-­ Murrum, Parnegean, Kooyan, and Burruppin – accompanied these two influential Woiwurrung men. They wanted support to start a farming reserve in their country on the Acheron River. At first, Thomas was sceptical, but they persuaded him of their sincerity, and he agreed to go with them in March to lobby the Surveyor-­General, Charles Ligar, and the Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey, Charles Duffy.23 The press coverage of this meeting conveyed a sense of the Kulin delegation as serious and dignified, putting their case clearly to these colonial officials. The Geelong Advertiser described their appearance as healthy 21 22 23

 Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming, pp. 12–26.  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 31, 39; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 123.  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 39–40.

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and poised: ‘Their countenances were intelligent and animated. Their entrance into the board-­room was made in an unembarrassed and quiet manner.’ Duffy agreed to set aside a reserve, the Advertiser said, and the delegates bowed and left, ‘their expressions of courtesy ... by no means ungracefully performed’.24 We know relatively little about how the Woiwurrung and Daungwurrung men experienced this meeting. Newspaper coverage revealed more about how colonists were seeing their own political subjecthood in relation to Aboriginal people. In some ways, it imagined a more progressive future, neither depicting the Indigenous speakers as exotic savages nor articulating a message of inevitable doom. However, the colonists’ wish to observe and evaluate was still very much present, and there was little sense that these Kulin men could play a wider role in the political world. Rather, newspapers portrayed their deputation in terms of charity and obligation, as an opportunity for the colonial government to prove its mature benevolence. One article in the Argus (reproduced from the Portland Guardian) argued that by recognising their duties towards these nearly ‘exterminated’ Aboriginal people, colonists would prove that Victoria was a highly advanced colony. ‘We have made enough money out of the black man’s patrimony already, and can afford now to deal with him on the basis of philanthropy rather than profit.’25 In the popular accounts of this meeting between Duffy and the Kulin, the figure of the Aboriginal played other roles too. The Argus journalist speculated about Aboriginal understandings of colonial society and power: Could the aboriginal, as he sat in [the] presence of a Minister to whom his humble request was proffered, appreciate the nature of the displacing power that has made him an exile from his own hunting-­grounds, and a refugee in his own land?

Without a hint of irony, given the colonists’ own use of force to assert their control of territory, he wondered whether the Aboriginal was aware of anything other than brute force: His traditions are of war and conquests. Has his mind given admission to the idea of a moral and intellectual domination, that governs without force and conquers without arms? If the mind of the aboriginal be capable of comprehensive thought, what must have been its operations as he sat in the board-­room of a stranger, and begged from him a boon of a bit of land.26

In these musings, the figure of the Aboriginal was imagined as an audience to settlers’ power and progress – almost as a stand-­in for settlers themselves,  Geelong Advertiser, 9 March 1859, p. 2.  Argus, 9 March 1859, p. 4; Portland Guardian, 7 March 1859, p. 3.  Ibid.

24 25 26

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admiring their own success and pondering their possible failings. The colonial viewer watched himself being watched by Aborigines, wondering about what they saw but apparently never asking them. The records of William Thomas, however, do provide us with a strong sense of the attachment and entitlement that Kulin people felt towards their ancestral country. Following their successful meeting with Commissioner Charles Duffy, the Daungwurrung men proceeded to lead Thomas around their country, showing him the mountains and waterfalls near Mt Albert and explaining which districts they wished to secure. Finally, in a gesture in mimicry of British squatters and selectors, but also pointing to their own ancestral claims, they marked out the boundaries of their new station by cutting ‘AB’ – ‘Black (Aboriginal)’ – into the trees with their tomahawks.27 The Woiwurrung developed good relations not only with William Thomas but also with John Green, who was to become an influential and at times controversial figure in Victorian Aboriginal-government-settler relations. A Scots Presbyterian, he had begun work in Victoria as a lay preacher in the goldfields, before starting to visit the Woiwurrung encampment at Yering. He and his wife Mary held services there and set up a school for the children, while trying to raise funds for a permanent mission. Their sympathy for Aboriginal people, and the close relationship they formed with the Woiwurrung leader Simon Wonga, would make them important mediators between Indigenous people and settler society in the region.28 They supported the Woiwurrung desire to establish a new station in their own country. In February 1860, as Jane Lydon recounts, the Woiwurrung left their camp in their traditional country at Yering and walked to Acheron, on the Upper Goulburn River, to join another clan, the Daungwurrung.29 There, however, they had no funds for tools or livestock, and the project faltered. At this point, in May 1860, following the recommendations of the Select Committee and further calls for Aboriginal reserves and a central body to administer them, the government appointed a Central Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines. The Board was to establish and administer reserves, and be supported by a network of local reserve managers and honorary correspondents. In some cases, it would subsidise stations established by  William Thomas, 28–9 February 1859, 4 March 1859, 16–18 March 1859, 23 March 1859, 13 April 1859, 5 June 1859, 10–11 June 1859, William Thomas Journal and Papers, 1850–59, (WTP) ML MSS 214/5 (microfilm CY3127), Mitchell Library; William Thomas, 2–4 March 1859, 13–19 March 1859, William Thomas Reports 1845–62, ML MSS 214/6-7 (microfilm CY3078). On mimicry in colonial situations, see Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, vol. 28, Spring 1984, pp. 125–33. 28  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 56–7. 29  Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 60. 27

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missionaries and in others would establish and fund stations itself. It quickly found itself faced with Indigenous demands for land at particular sites, supported in some cases by William Thomas and John Green. However, while Indigenous people wanted reserves in order to establish and maintain their communities free from interference, the Board had its own ideas about the purpose of reserves. As explained in its first annual report, it sought to confine Indigenous people on reserves ‘as closely as possible ... for their better management and control’, and, ominously, for the Board to assume guardianship over ‘orphan and deserted children’.30 In this report and the next, the Board acknowledged that colonists had a duty to protect Aborigines ‘and to a certain extent maintain them’, having taken their country. The Board recommended that Aborigines receive rations, clothing, and medicine, as well as missionary schooling and agricultural training.31 Over the next few years, it developed a network of guardians throughout the colony to oversee the distribution of clothing and rations, and to assist in the establishment of reserves.32 The Board’s membership consisted of prominent settlers, and although many of them were philanthropists, few had any close personal contact with Indigenous people. They were not chosen by the Indigenous people they governed, and were accountable not to Indigenous people, but to the government.33 They found an assertive Indigenous population with its own ideas about reserves, leading to negotiations and, on occasion, disagreements. One of the Board’s first tasks was to consider the future location of the Daungwurrung. William Thomas reported to the Board in July 1860 that he had met a deputation of Daungwurrung in February, and they had sought land at Acheron.34 The Board, however, put the temporary station at Acheron under the guardianship of local pastoralists, who in fact wanted the land for themselves and forced the residents to leave and to relocate to the far less suitable Mohican Station. The Daungwurrung appealed to Thomas and John Green for assistance. When William Thomas heard of the Mohican move, he wrote angrily to the Board, ‘I fear it will be long if ever they are satisfied with their removal, they say, “that is not the Country they selected, it is too cold and blackfellows soon die there”.’35 At this point, the Woiwurrung invited the Daungwurrung to join them  First Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines, Melbourne: John Ferres, 1861, pp. 5, 11.  First Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines, pp. 5, 11; Victoria: Second Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria, Melbourne, John Ferres, 1862, p. 15 (SLV). 32  Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 71. 33  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 43–4. 34  Lydon, Eye Contact, p. 62. 35  William Thomas to Robert Brough Smyth, 5 October 1860, reproduced in Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, p. 43; William Thomas to the Commissioner of Lands and Survey, 4 March 1859, in Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 41–2; 30

31

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in their country in the Yarra Ranges instead. Helped by Thomas and Green, the Woiwurrung advocates Simon Wonga and William Barak (Wonga’s kinsman who would succeed him as leading spokesman for their people) lobbied the Board to this end. A few years later, the Board agreed to the demands from the Woiwurrung and Daungwurrung to relocate, and in March 1863, the Greens and a party of Indigenous people made up of several different groups trekked to a new site in Yering, and named it Coranderrk.36 The Woiwurrung and Daungwurrung were not the only people pressing the Board in relation to the location and management of reserves. In Warrnambool, settlers concerned about Aboriginal poverty in their region began to call for a new reserve, and the Board reserved land there in 1861. It would be another four years, however, before the reserve, which would be called Framlingham, opened, and there was considerable negotiation about who would be in charge. According to Ian D. Clark, in 1862 the local Giraiwurrung people petitioned prominent local pastoralist Niel Black, asking him to persuade the government to appoint John McMahon Allan as their protector. A sympathetic colonist and honorary correspondent to the Board who had supplied the Giraiwurrung with food and medical aid, Allan had protested to the Board about their poverty, and taken an interest in their language. The petition seemed to have been penned by a European, and as Allan was wrangling with the Board at this time over pay and supplies, we should treat it with caution. Nonetheless, many of its statements did seem to reflect Giraiwurrung concerns, however imperfectly. The petitioners stated that Allan had been ‘our oldest and best friend in the district ... we don’t want to lose him’. Using words that implied both submissiveness and anguished need, they added: Government has been kind to us – Government has given us blankets and many good things – but Government has never given us a friend like Mr John Allen ... All the other things Government give us, without him, are no good – without him to take care of us, we will die.37

The document bore the names of ten men and five women, one of whom added her five children. Petitioning, as a political tactic, was for colonists just one among many; others included voting, standing for office, public meetings,

William Thomas, 11–12 July 1859, 19 July 1859, 6–8 August 1859, 12–13 August 1859, WTP, ML MSS 214/5 (microfilm CY3127). Also, Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003, p. 9; Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 41, 58; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 124–5. 36  Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, p. 9; Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, p. 51; Victoria: First Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria, Melbourne: John Ferres, 1861, p. 5; Lydon, Eye Contact. 37  Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, pp. 197, 199.

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and publications. For Indigenous people, however, petitioning was one of the few strategies available. The Giraiwurrung campaign did make an impression. Local physician and philanthropist, John Singleton, supported it, noting that Aboriginal women, in particular, had been asking keenly for a school for their children and for a secure place to live.38 Shortly afterwards, local colonists held a public meeting on the subject, and one Indigenous man, Michie, got up to speak. He explained which land would be acceptable and added that it should be secure and managed by Allan – ‘the Tooram blacks would . . . like to have Mr Allan to look over them. All the blacks would like that as long as they lived.’39 This was an affirmation of a personal, paternalistic bond with a particular colonist, as well as a reminder of people’s need for land of their own choosing. Eventually, the Framlingham station opened in 1865 on the Hopkins River, and while residents were not always satisfied with its management, they were clearly attached to the district.40 At the same time as the Giraiwurrung were attempting to ensure a sympathetic manager for the station that became Framlingham, the Gunnai people of Gippsland, a region by now almost entirely under settler control, were negotiating with the Presbyterian minister, Reverend Friedrich Augustus Hagenauer, as to the proper site for their mission.41 Hagenauer, a colleague of the Moravian missionary Spiekese and stationed at Ebenezer, wanted to establish a new mission in the Gippsland area. They explained to Hagenauer that they would not move to a foreign district, but nominated a local site on the Avon River at Lake Wellington; Hagenauer was encouraged by their willingness to establish a mission at ‘a place which they might call their own’.42 They were overjoyed, Hagenauer recorded, when he told them that the government had granted them secure land at last. When Hagenauer set up the promised station in 1863, which he called Ramahyuck,43 they held a foundational ceremony, praying and singing hymns. One man said, ‘Now let us have an hurrah like white man’, and they gave three cheers for the success of the mission, and for the Queen.44  John Singleton to Niel Black, 10 November 1862, in Niel Black, Records, 1838–1938, MS8996, Box 11, SLV.  Jan Critchett, Our Land Till We Die: A History of the Framlingham Aborigines, Warrnambool: Deakin University Press, 1980 (this edition 1992), p. 9; Warrnambool Examiner, 11 July 1862, p. 2, 22 July 1862, pp. 2–3. 40  When the Board tried to close the station in 1867 and move the people to Lake Condah, most refused to go. They protested to the Board and the chief secretary, and the decision was reversed. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, pp. 201–2, 208; Critchett, Our Land Till We Die, p. 14. 41  Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989, pp. 4–5. 42  Melbourne Association in Aid of the Moravian Mission to the Aborigines of Australia, Further Facts Relating to the Moravian Mission in Australia, 3rd paper, Melbourne, Fergusson & Moore, 1862, p. 4. 43  Lydon, Fantastic Dreaming, p. 105. 44  Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, p.  5; Victorian Association in Aid of Moravian Missions to the Aborigines of Australia, Further Facts Relating to the Moravian Mission in 38

39

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Meanwhile, the men of the Kulin nations were becoming especially adept at making their claims known. As a number of historians, including Diane Barwick, Ravi da Costa, Jane Lydon, and Penny van Toorn, have explored, they made the most of the opportunity provided by the huge celebrations staged in Melbourne in May 1863 to mark the marriage of Albert, the Prince of Wales, and the birthday of his mother, Queen Victoria.45 As Mark McKenna has noted, birthdays of the British monarch had long been occasions for lavish public spectacle in the Australian colonies. They were marked by holidays, plays and performances, pardons for criminals, public feasts, and bonfires, and settlers voiced a sense of affection for the Crown that was, if anything, amplified by their distance from ‘Home’. McKenna comments, ‘From the beginning, the monarchy in Australia was performed into being’, and this was a performance that ordinary people took part in with enthusiasm.46 In this tradition, Governor Barkly, who had come to the colony in 1856 with the experience of governing both British Guiana and Jamaica behind him, held a grand formal reception, at which many civic groups made a presentation. The performance of monarchy and subjecthood at Barkly’s reception was enriched and complicated when one final group arrived: a delegation of Woiwurrung and Daungwurrung men, accompanied by five of their little boys and one man of the Pangerang people from the north. The deputation, wearing European clothes and traditional possum-­skin cloaks and walking behind members of the Board, entered to loud cheers from the crowd. (According to one newspaper, several people from Gippsland and Western Port had planned to join them but did not arrive in time.)47 They presented a ‘loyal address’ to Queen Victoria, stating that the Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, and Daungwurrung people ‘send very many thanks to the Great Mother Queen for many many things’: Blackfellows now throw away all war-­spears. No more fighting but live like white man almost. Blackfellows hear that your first son has married. Very good that! Blackfellows send all good to him, and to you, his Great Mother, Victoria. Blackfellows come from Miam and Willum to bring this paper to the Good Governor. He will tell you more. All Blackfellows round about agree to this. That is all.48 Australia, 4th paper, Melbourne, Fergusson  & Moore, 1863, p.  7. See also Victoria: Fourth Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch Over the Interests of the Aborigines, 1864, p. 9. 45  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, pp. 66–7; Ravi de Costa, ‘Identity, Authority, and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 48, no. 3, 2006, pp. 669–8; Lydon, Eye Contact, pp. 39–44; van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 125. 46  Mark McKenna, ‘Monarchy: From Reverence to Indifference’, in Deryck M. Schreuder, ed., Australia’s Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 261–2, 265. 47  Age, 27 May 1863 p. 4; Leader: A Weekly Journal of News, Politics, Literature and Art, no. 387, vol. X, 30 May 1863, pp. 6–7. 48  Argus, 27 May 1863, p. 5.

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The Board’s report commented, ‘The conduct of the Aborigines was grave and dignified; and Wonga, the principal man of the Yarra tribe, addressed His Excellency with becoming modesty, and yet with earnestness.’49 Thomas and the Board Secretary, Robert Brough Smyth, supported the delegation and stressed that the idea of congratulating the Queen came from the Aboriginal people themselves. Yet the Board had its own reasons for supporting and assisting with the address so strongly; it could be seen as proof that the Board was succeeding in its work of civilising Aboriginal people. Given its difficulties with local settlers and public opinion, it is not surprising that Brough Smyth took the opportunity to remind the Governor and his audience of the Board’s hard work and limited funds – adding that they welcomed suggestions from all classes of colonists.50 The Aboriginal men also laid out gifts for the royal family. For the Queen, there were weapons, a basket, a fire stick, and a beautifully worked possum cloak; for Albert, more weapons and a shield, as well as gifts for the other princes. Later, they added a young women’s ceremonial girdle made of emu feathers for Princess Alexandra.51 Such exchanges were reminiscent of traditional Indigenous negotiations, and of the Kulin’s history of exchanging items with colonists in ceremonial and commercial contexts since their meeting with John Batman in 1835. They also presented their address in written form, inscribed on a parchment in Woiwurru and English with pictures of native plants, dingoes, kangaroos, and emus, and Indigenous families with their weapons and shelters. The Leader magazine explained that lithographic printers ‘in accordance with the suggestions of the aborigines’ had drawn these up.52 With the original document lost, it is hard to know now what to make of it as a visual text. Were the pictures of Aborigines, plants, and animals included by sentimental settlers, in a burst of imperial nostalgia, that paradox whereby colonists momentarily long for the ways of life they have destroyed?53 Or did the images have special meanings for the Indigenous delegates? One of them in particular, William Barak, would later become famous as an artist as well as a community leader, skilfully adapting European materials and producing paintings of ceremonial and social life, in which animal and bird figures mingled  Victoria: Third Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria, Melbourne: John Ferres, 1863, p. 11. 50  Age, 27 May 1863, p. 4; Argus, 27 May 1863, p. 5. 51  Age, 27 May 1863, p. 4; Herald 27 May 1863, p. 2; Leader: A Weekly Journal of News, Politics, Literature and Art, no. 387, vol. x, 30 May 1863, pp. 6–7. 52  Leader: A Weekly Journal of News, Politics, Literature and Art, no. 387, vol. x, 30 May 1863, pp. 6–7. 53  Penelope Edmonds, ‘Imperial Objects, Truths and Fictions: Reading Nineteenth-­Century Australian Colonial Objects as Historical Sources’, in Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy, eds., Rethinking Colonial Histories: New and Alternative Approaches, Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 2006, p. 79. See also the discussion of imperial nostalgia in Chapter 9. 49

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with the humans, perhaps as totems.54 This conciliatory gesture towards the Crown thus contained not only messages of loyal subjecthood but also traditional Kulin ways of seeing the world, enduring in this imperial setting. The Kulin address of 1863 was brief and apparently simple, but in fact raised several issues. It was notable for the familial language it employed, as the delegates addressed the ‘Great Mother Queen’, incorporating Indigenous traditions of kinship and seeking to draw colonists and outsiders into their communities. The Kulin, furthermore, recognised the importance of the monarch to the settlers. They had witnessed huge celebrations of the monarchy, experienced an atmosphere of charity and goodwill as well as an opportunity for performance and personal conversations with the governor. Mark McKenna has noted that for the settlers the Crown could be a symbol of racial identity and imperial triumph and at the same time a source of appeal, a safeguard against arbitrary rule and tyranny.55 While the Indigenous delegates of 1863 may have been victims of racial and imperial triumphalism, they made active and enthusiastic use of the Crown as a potential source of benevolent authority. Also significant was the promise made by the delegates to cease fighting and live in peace. This may well have been a reference to the hostilities that had existed historically between Kulin, Pangerang, and Gunnai (Gippsland) peoples, as well as to the need for different Kulin peoples to live together on Coranderrk. As Jane Lydon notes, this delegation to the Crown signalled a willingness to make new alliances, and to maintain and reshape old ones, against a backdrop of danger and loss.56 It is also possible to place the Kulin promise of peace in a more international context. During the early 1860s, the newspapers in Victoria had been full of tense and dramatic accounts of conflict between British and Ma¯ ori in New Zealand, starting with the 1860–61 war in Taranaki. This had been sparked by a dispute over whether or not a junior chief, Te Teira, had the right to sell land in the area without the consent of the rangatira (Ma¯ ori chief), Wiremu Kingi, which led in turn to the rise of the Ma¯ ori king movement. The dispute led also to lengthy debates about land ownership and sovereignty, including who had the right to declare government and deploy violence in New Zealand. We have not found evidence that the Kulin were conscious of these events, but such stories had certainly been prominent in the newspapers.57 Perhaps they intended their promise to live in peace and  Judith Ryan, ‘Barak: A Singular Artist’, in Judith Ryan, Carol Cooper, and Joy MurphyWandin, eds., Remembering Barak, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003, pp. 11–12; Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 16. 55  McKenna, ‘Monarchy: From Reverence to Indifference’, pp. 261–2, 265. 56  Lydon, Eye Contact, p. 42. 57  See for example, Argus, 2 February 1863, p. 7; 4 March 1863, p. 5; 21 March 1863, p. 5; 26 March 1863, p. 7; 18 April 1863, p. 6; 23 May 1863, p. 5; 26 May 1863, p. 6. 54

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dignity under the British Crown as a subtle reminder of what the alternative could have been. Governor Barkly assured the Kulin men that he would pass their gifts and good wishes on to ‘the Queen their “great mother”, as they call her, and her son’, adding that she loved all her subjects and would be glad to hear that they loved her.58 A month later, the Secretary of State, the Duke of Newcastle, wrote on behalf of the Crown, asking that the residents be told that the royal family were pleased by their gifts and their vows of loyalty, and that the Queen took great interest in their welfare and was delighted to hear that they would live peaceably.59 The Board noted that when ‘the gracious sentiments of Her Majesty were made known to the blacks, they appeared to be sensible of the kindness and favour shown to them’.60 That same month, the Victorian government gazetted the land at Coranderrk. It seemed to the Coranderrk residents that their campaign had worked. There is some argument over whether their public address was really a deciding factor in the reserving of the land. Barwick has argued it was probably a coincidence, while Penny van Toorn asserts that the presence of strong Kulin activism must be seen as influencing policy in general, whether or not the Queen was directly involved.61 It certainly fed into a wider climate of both confident Indigenous advocacy and settlers’ interest in governing Indigenous people.62 Whatever the connection between the address and the granting of the reserve, a powerful narrative of entitlement developed on Coranderrk, as the residents came to portray the station as a grant in their traditional country guaranteed to them by Governor Barkly and Queen Victoria. This, Richard Broome remarks, was ‘a powerful moral view of the world’, whereby ‘Queen Victoria, her government and settlers owed Aborigines a living because whites had occupied Aboriginal land and because Aboriginal people had agreed to “settle down” under the Queen on reserves’.63 Similar beliefs were expressed on other occasions. While the colonial authorities may have believed they ran the Ramahyuck station out of kindness, for example, the residents there seemed to take a different view,  Argus, 27 May 1863, p.  5; Robert Brough Smyth to William Thomas, 22 May 1863, and William Thomas to Robert Brough Smyth, 27 May 1863, in William Thomas Correspondence, returns etc, 1863, ML MSS214/19 microfilm CY3104; William Thomas, 25–6 May 1863, WTP, 1860–67. 59  Victoria: Fourth Report of the Central Board Appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria, Melbourne, John Ferres, 1864, p. 20. Also, Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, p. 66; Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006, p. 6; Argus, 18 February 1864, p. 5; Age, 18 February 1864, p. 4. 60  Victoria: Fourth Report of the Central Board, 1864, p. 12. 61  Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, p. 66; Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 125. 62  Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 125. 63  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p.  129. See also, Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, p.  66; Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked, p. 125. 58

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believing that the colonial authorities had incurred responsibilities towards the people they had dispossessed. According to Attwood, Hagenauer told the Board in 1867 that Indigenous people refused to see the station and their rations as charitable gifts from the government. Rather, he stated, they considered this ‘a just claim due to them by the country’.64 With the gazetting of Coranderrk, there were now six reserves, together with many more small campsites and ration depots. Richard Broome has justifiably characterised this as the most comprehensive reserve system in nineteenth-­ century Australia.65 Of the six, five were Christian missions receiving government support – Yelta, Ebenezer, Lake Tyers (opened in 1861), Framlingham, and Ramahyuck  – while Coranderrk was a government-­controlled station. Framlingham would come under direct government control in 1866 and a third government station opened at Lake Condah in 1867. After Yelta finally closed in 1869, there were three government stations and three Christian missions.66 The reserves would play an important role in Victorian Indigenous history, yet they never encompassed everyone. As Richard Broome points out, many Aboriginal people resisted the Board’s efforts to centralise and control them.67 Whether on or off the reserves, many worked for settlers to survive – the men often in pastoral work such as sheep washing and shearing, fencing and droving, and the women as domestic servants.68 Some continued to work on the remaining goldfields, while others earned money in rescue work and as police trackers.69 Some Indigenous men from the Murray River region joined up to work for the Queensland Native Police, about twenty leaving for Queensland in August 1864 and another 22 in September 1865.70 Indigenous men sometimes earned money through sport, including athletics and cricket. The men’s cricket skills led a white promoter, Edward Gurnett, to form an Aboriginal cricket team for inter-­colonial and international matches; the team played in February 1867 in Sydney, but when three of the players died from ill health, the Board tried to prevent another tour. As we shall see in the next chapter, however, the team would steal out of Victoria against the Board’s instructions and tour New South Wales before leaving for the famous tour of England in 1868. Intervention, Micro-­Management, and Control From its beginning, the Board pursued several means of extending its power and authority to determine and implement Aboriginal policy. It continued to  Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, pp. 61–2.  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 126.  Ibid., p. 126. 67  Ibid., p. 126. 68  Ibid., p. 148. 69  Ibid., pp. 149–51. 70  Ibid., pp. 155–6. 64 65 66

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stimulate ethnographic inquiry, following from the work of the 1858 Committee, especially supporting the activities of its Secretary, Brough Smyth. It gradually amassed a large ethnographic collection of its own, at times exhibiting items from it for the public, demonstrating Aboriginal intelligence and thus the value of its own endeavours.71 As Boucher suggests, this growing ethnographic knowledge produced ‘a powerful language of difference that could legitimate distinct practices of governance’.72 The Board also repeatedly sought clarification and then extension of its powers. With the assistance of the attorney general, in 1862 it drafted a Bill to grant it more powers to control the movements of Aboriginal people and to control Aboriginal children. The matter had little priority in the legislature, however, and was allowed to lapse. The Board had more success in ensuring that the government did not lift the restrictions on the sale of alcohol to Aboriginal people, as its counterpart in New South Wales had done that same year.73 Instead, it sent letters to police magistrates, reminding them of the law, and ensured that the new licensing laws, passed in 1864, retained the restriction and increased the penalty for infractions to £10.74 For the rest of the decade, the Board repeatedly sought from a largely uninterested government the legislation it needed to secure its control over Aboriginal people. While this battle for bureaucratic control was going on, the colony’s first royal visitor, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived in the colony in November 1867. The visit would reveal some of the distinctive features of Victoria as compared with Tasmania and the other colonies. One distinctive feature was the Board, which when it learnt of plans by the organisers to include Aboriginal dances in the entertainment, promptly banned Aboriginal people from the townships during the royal visit.75 As Jessie Mitchell suggests, the Board may have been worried not only by the possibility of drunkenness but also that Aboriginal activists might stage a protest in front of, or present a petition to, the Duke. The second distinctive feature revealed during the tour was the continuing ethnographic interest in Aboriginal people and culture. Dan-dan-nook, or King Jerry, apparently one of the last survivors of the Barrabool clan of the Wathawurrung, appeared at an event for the Prince bearing a book, Language of the Aborigines of the Colony of Victoria by Daniel Bunce, an

 Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, pp.  89–91; see also Sam Furphy, ‘“They Formed a Little Family as it were’: The Board for the Protection of Aborigines, 1875–1883”, in Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-­Century Victoria, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015, pp. 95–116. 72  Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 92. 73  The Board announced its support for the restrictions in its first annual report; First CBPA Annual Report, 1861, p. 6, quoted in Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 73. The New South Wales restrictions were re-­imposed in 1868. See Chapter 12. 74  Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 74. 75  Mitchell, ‘It will Enlarge the Ideas of the Natives’, pp. 197–216. See Argus, 28 October 1867, p. 5; and Victoria: Sixth Report of the Central Board, 1869, p. 34. 71

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English botanist, traveller, and journalist who had settled in western Victoria.76 Dan-dan-nook was far from the drunken man the Board feared would disgrace the colony in front of the Duke, but came wearing a new suit, with a rifleman’s badge and a medal from the athletics club showing that he had once been the fastest runner in the township. The press described him ‘taking his seat on the steps of the dais before the Prince arrived, and looking calmly upon the brilliant scene, as if he was the monarch of all he surveyed’.77 Dan-dan-nook planned to present the Duke with the book, which had Dan-dan-nook’s picture at the front and an inscription dedicating the book to the Duke.78 His status as the ‘last’ Barrabool man allowed him entry into this imperial milieu but it also isolated him, and ultimately, through confusion, he missed the Duke’s arrival.79 In attempting to ban all Aboriginal people from meeting the Duke, the Board had shown its omnivorous appetite for control, and for cutting off Aboriginal people from other possible sources of British and colonial authority. It finally succeeded in getting what it wanted in 1869, when parliament passed an Act for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria. In Leigh Boucher’s words, the new Act granted the Board ‘control over where Aboriginal people lived, how their children were raised, how their employment with settlers would be managed, and what happened to their earnings’.80 It was, in Richard Broome’s view, ‘a black mark in Aboriginal affairs and the history of human rights in Australia’.81 With vastly increased powers, the Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines now became the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines. The public reception of this Board, oscillating as it did between indifference and support, provides an interesting contrast to the huge hostility that greeted the earlier protectorate. In part, this reflects the changing nature of the settler population since the 1840s, in part the fact that the Aboriginal population no longer represented a threat, and perhaps most of all that this was a policy devised and managed by the settlers themselves, rather  Roy H. Holden, ‘Bunce, Daniel (1813–1872)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp. 176–7; Daniel Bunce, Language of the Aborigines of the Colony of Victoria, and Other Australian Districts: With Parallel Translations and Familiar Specimens in Dialogue as a Guide to Aboriginal Protectors, and Others Engaged in Ameliorating Their Condition, Melbourne: Slater, Williams and Hodgson, 1856, pp. v–x, pp. 1–59. 77  Geelong Advertiser, 3 December 1867, p. 2; Geelong Register, 2 December 1867, p. 2. 78  The mayor of Geelong presented the book instead, out of kindness or perhaps the wish to make a memorable local present, Argus, 2 December 1867, p. 5; 3 December 1867, p. 5; J. G. Knight, Narrative of the Visit of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh to the Colony of Victoria, Australia, Melbourne: Mason, Firth & Co, 1868, pp. 117–8. 79  Geelong Advertiser, 3 December 1867, p. 3; Knight, Narrative of the Visit of His Royal Highness, pp. 117–8. For more on Dan-dan-ook, see Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 1990, pp. 304–5, 330. 80  Boucher, ‘The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act’, p. 78. 81  Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 130. 76

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than something handed down from Britain and ‘Exeter Hall’. The spectacle of public servants being paid to ‘look after’ Aboriginal people was now a sign not of outside interference but rather of local sophistication and self-­management. There was also a major and decisive difference between the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines and its predecessor, the Port Phillip Protectorate: where the Protectorate had served as an awkward intermediary between settler society, unrepresentative government, and Aboriginal communities that were in some ways still self-­governing, the Board was clearly and unequivocally a settler project of governing and controlling Aboriginal people. By 1869, the colony had developed and legislatively authorised a system of Aboriginal protection, as Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell put it, ‘unparalleled across the settler empire’.82 In the liberal legislature of Victoria, Indigenous people had become a problem population to be managed, and, where possible, made useful to settlers. While the desire for protection had arisen partly from humanitarian sympathy with the circumstances of the colony’s Indigenous population, and in the early stages included some notion of Indigenous rights to compensation and support, by the end of the 1860s these aspects of the humanitarian project had withered away and been replaced by a sternly interventionist project. The desire to transform Indigenous people into recognisable European Christian subjects that had been there from the beginning had now joined with state power to produce an authoritarian regime that would last for a century. It would take several decades, but over time, most of the other colonies copied the Act and something similar to the renamed and revamped Board, adapting them to their particular interventionist regimes. As officials and Indigenous people struggled over the nature and management of reserves, both groups were developing strategies that would last well into the future. Officials learnt the value of ethnography for a science of government and realised that a programme of control like theirs needed a legislative basis. For their part, Indigenous people were creating a tradition of Indigenous activism that continues today. They had demonstrated, in their 1863 loyal address to the Queen, a grasp of the value of symbolic occasions and learnt a range of practical negotiating skills in their dealings with officials over the placement and management of reserves.

 Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-­Century Victoria, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015, p. 4.

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Aboriginal Survival in New South Wales

Why came these cursed strangers here, Intruders on our soil?1

(Anon, 1859)

When the first New South Wales parliament under responsible government opened in July 1856, news of the end of the Crimean war had just arrived. At a great banquet held on 17 July to mark the opening, the premier, Stuart Donaldson, offered a prayer of thanks for the fact that colonists no longer needed to fear war with Russia. Peace was, he said (to the cheers of his audience), essential for the future progress of ‘a new and rising country which lives by the arts of peace and dreads the horrors of war’. Despite the frontier violence within living memory in New South Wales and continuing unabated in the northern districts, he and his audience no longer classed this as war, and Donaldson made no mention of it. Instead, he praised the colony’s progress from the time it was inhabited only by the ‘blackfellow’ to the civilised community they enjoyed today.2 There was an atmosphere of self-­congratulation as a British people; Dr William Bland, a physician, philanthropist, former convict, and supporter of responsible government, took the president’s chair and remarked, ‘Free institutions are a part of every one of us, or we are a part of them. An Englishman is born a Constitutional Politician.’3 Notably, at this celebratory event, Britishness sat alongside and was entirely compatible with other identities. There was a strong sense of affinity with the United States – cultural, political, historical, and perhaps racial. The Sydney Morning Herald remarked, ‘There cannot surely exist any permanent causes of alienation between two nations, one in blood and language, and heirs of one inheritance of glorious traditions.’4 For those born in the colony, a sense of a dual or multiple identity

 SMH, Thursday 17 February 1859, p. 2.  Richard Thompson, ed., Report of the Proceedings at the National Banquet, held at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Sydney, pp. 25, 27. 3  Thompson, ed., Report of the Proceedings at the National Banquet, p. 23. 4  Ibid., p. 8. 1 2

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was evident. As George Robert Nichols, a radical politician, opponent of transportation and member of the ‘native-­born’ set of reformers, commented: Although an Australian by birth, I claim to be an Englishman, and I claim for the Englishman, the Scotchman, and the Irishman the rights I claim for the Australian. (Continued applause.) We all belong to one nation, and long may we continue united. (Cheers.)5

While the Council, now the upper house, consisted of members nominated by the governor, the members of the lower house, the Legislative Assembly, were elected under a broad but not universal franchise. It included many more members with liberal and radical ideals than had been possible under the old ‘blended house’ system, and a weaker pastoralist presence in parliament than the colony had ever experienced. In this shift to liberal politics, New South Wales was similar to both Victoria and Britain at this time.6 Politics in the early stages of responsible government were also volatile, with no clear party system, and many ministerial changes. In the first three years, there were three premiers, with conservatives Stuart Donaldson and Henry Watson Parker lasting less than a year (three months in Donaldson’s case and eleven in Parker’s) and liberal Charles Cowper lasting somewhat longer over two terms: one of five weeks and the other of a little over two years.7 The Northern Districts, 1856–1859 For their first three years, these struggling new colonial administrations were governing a vast territory, from the Murray River region bordering with Victoria in the south to the tip of Cape York. Despite British acceptance in principle of demands by settlers in the Northern Districts that they be separated from New South Wales to form a new self-­governing colony of their own, it would take three years for the details to be agreed and implemented. For these troublesome Northern Districts, the government’s Aboriginal policy was almost entirely concerned with policing the frontiers of pastoral settlement. Violent conflict between pastoralists and Indigenous people was subsiding around Moreton Bay to the extent that, in 1854, the Native Police force was almost halved, reduced from a total of 136 officers and troops to 72.8 Pastoral expansion in the north and west, however, was rapid, and frontier violence there escalated

 Ibid., p. 38.  Hirst, Australia’s Democracy, pp. 40, 46, 55–8. 7  Parliament of New South Wales website, www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/members/formermembers/pages/former-members-index.aspx. Accessed on 24 April 2018. 8  Select Committee of the Native Police Force, NSWLAVP 1856–7, vol. 1, p. 1207. 5 6

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during 1856 and 1857.9 Settlers there campaigned vigorously for protection from Aboriginal attack through more policing and more court convictions of Aboriginal offenders. As Libby Connors points out, the formal court system of the north was often quite weak when dealing with Indigenous people accused of crimes; many Indigenous prisoners escaped or were discharged because of a lack of evidence. Connors stresses also the importance in this uncertain legal zone of ongoing Indigenous political life – the parallel social, legal, and political structures continuing to operate in Indigenous societies, including those quite near to the centre of settler government in Brisbane.10 In the northern settlers’ campaign for separation from New South Wales, the demand for more policing against Aboriginal attack became a significant issue, helping shape a popular sense of the north as a distinctive and disputed zone, where white residents felt aggrieved and at risk and at odds with colonial authorities.11 Since the late 1840s, writers in the Moreton Bay Courier had justified the need to throw off the ‘paralysing chains’ of Sydney government partly on the grounds that these authorities had failed to protect colonists from Aboriginal attacks.12 In January 1856, just before the new system of responsible government was installed in New South Wales, the Courier raged, ‘Our fellow-­men, and our fellow country-­men are being murdered by the blacks, without help, and without redress.’13 From October 1856, northern settlers presented petitions complaining of inadequate policing to the new legislature. Gordon Sandeman, representing the Moreton, Wide Bay, Burnett, and Maranoa districts in the Assembly for a brief period between 17 April 1856 and 10 October 1857, was an energetic presenter of squatter demands in frontier areas.14 On 29 October, he presented a petition from settlers in the northern district of Maranoa, praying for protection from Aboriginal attacks.15 The petition complained there were no Native Police in the area, and destruction  Evans, ‘Across the Queensland Frontier’, p. 64.  Libby Connors, ‘A Hanging, A Hostage Drama and Several Homicides: Why Sovereignty in 1859 is Problematic’, Queensland History Journal, vol. 20, no. 12, November 2009, pp. 716–27. 11  Maurice French does identify protection from Aboriginal attacks as one of the factors driving separation, but many other historians have not touched on the topic, focusing instead of questions of labour, infrastructure, migration, and disputes – British and local – over the new colony’s borders and parliament. See French, ‘Squatters and Separation’, p. 806. There are several other relevant essays in the same, sesquicentennial, issue of the Queensland History Journal, including Keith Moore, ‘English liberty and people’s rights: the influence of heritage in achieving self-­government in Queensland.’ See also W. Ross Johnston, The Call of the Land: A History of Queensland to the Present Day, Milton: Jacaranda Press, 1982, pp. 33–4; B. A. Knox, ‘“Care is More Important than Haste”: Imperial Policy and the Creation of Queensland, 1856–9’, Historical Studies, vol. 17, no. 66, April 1976, pp. 64–83; G. P. Shaw, ‘The “Tangled Web” of Separation’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 29, no. 2, 1983, pp. 245–61. 12  Moreton Bay Courier, 30 January 1847, p. 2. 13  Moreton Bay Courier, 26 January 1856, p. 2. 14  Entry for 29 October 2856, NSWLAVP 1856–7, vol.  1; The NSW Parliamentary Record, Sydney 1957, vol. 1, pp. 194–5. 15  Entry for 29 October 1856, NSWLAVP 1856–7, vol. 1. 9

10

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of cattle was considerable. The petitioners specifically wanted European police – ‘a Mounted Police of white men . . . with two blacks to act as guides . . . who would be employed in prevention rather than in punishing depredations’.16 Sandeman, however, recognised the potential of the Native Mounted Police as the most likely body to offer good and cheap protection, and on 7 November moved that the Assembly appoint a select committee to enquire about the necessity for and functioning of the force.17 The resulting committee, chaired by Sandeman himself, proceeded to collect evidence from squatters, former squatters, the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Clarence, and the inspector general of police.18 The evidence these people provided was uniformly in favour of expanding the Native Police force; it was, they said, inexpensive and effective, and worked best if controlled locally.19 The report concluded that the Native Mounted Police force was ‘admirably adapted to protect life and property, and materially to assist the progress of the settler in the unsettled frontier districts’.20 It called for the expansion of this force and its stronger organisation, and recommended that it recruit troopers from foreign districts only.21 Despite northern settler complaints of being isolated and ignored, the report and subsequent public and parliamentary discussion indicate significant support in the southern half of the colony for their calls for greater protection against Aboriginal attack. In debate on the report on 6 and 10 February 1857, the vast majority of speakers supported the report. Many urged immediate support for the Native Mounted Police force, characterising it as a ‘frontier’ or ‘pioneer’ force.22 In the words of Richard Hargrave, a pastoralist and member for the New England and Macleay districts near what would later become the Queensland border, the Native Mounted Police force should ‘march parallel with the squatters as they occupied new country’.23 Premier Parker, who had been private secretary to Governor Gipps and then in 1843 married into the powerful Macarthur pastoralist family, said the force was the best method of protecting settlers. ‘The black troopers,’ he commented, ‘were unquestionably better men to run down offenders of their own body than any others.’24 He also urged they appoint a strong commandant of the force: to think of putting a military man, or a straight-­laced Government official, at the head of the force, it was out of the question. (Hear, hear.) ... the commandant of the native police force must be a man who was not afraid of the saddle – must, in fact, be a thorough  NSWLAVP, 1856–7, vol. 2, p. 427.  The Empire, 8 November 1856, p. 4.  Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1856–7, pp. 1157–216. 19  Central control under the Inspector General of Police had been introduced in 1854. 20  Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1856–7, p. 1162. 21  Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1856–7, pp. 1162–4. 22  SMH, 7 February 1857, p. 7; 16 June 1858, p. 4; 18 August 1858, p. 5. 23  SMH, 7 February 1857, p. 6. 24  SMH, 7 February 1857, p. 6. 16 17 18

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bushman. He trusted that, in dealing with this matter, they would receive the assistance of the country gentlemen in the House. (Hear, hear.)25

In dissent, Thomas Rusden, Hargrave’s fellow member for New England and the Macleay, said ‘he did not believe that it was either proper or Christian to employ blacks to hunt their fellow creatures to death’.26 Rusden’s voice, however, was a lone one indeed. Given the enormous support for the report’s recommendations expressed in the debate, including by Premier Parker, it was no surprise that the government accepted the report’s recommendation that it expand and decentralise the Native Police force, and instruct Commissioners of Crown Lands to assist Native Police wherever possible.27 There was some concern over the proposal to increase expenditure on the force when the Assembly broke into its Committee on Supply two weeks later, and indeed the amount voted was slightly less than the government proposed. Notably in the debate on Supply, John Robertson, a leading liberal politician who would the following year become Secretary for Lands and Public Works, echoed Rusden’s earlier dissent with some heat when he opposed the increase funding. The Sydney Morning Herald reported ’He did not wish to see see savages’ placed in the position of constables, to be used as blood-­hounds to track down offenders . . . being the natural enemies of the wild blacks, they murdered men, women, and children – all, in fact, that they came across, without discrimination’.28 With most of the increase approved, however, the Native Mounted Police force was quickly expanded. Frontier conflict in the northern districts continued, and the expansion of the Native Mounted Police force failed to keep up with demand for its services. The question of police protection remained a source of tension between northern settlers and the New South Wales government for another two years. In the parliamentary and newspaper debates on the issue in these years, there were complex dynamics between the local, the colonial, and the imperial. Northern district settlers frequently drew analogies between their own and other colonial situations, especially the war with the Xhosa in the Cape and the rebellion in India, then often referred to as the Indian Mutiny.29 The rebellion occurred in May 1857 when soldiers (referred to by the British as sepoys) rose against their British officers in the north-­western provinces and the regions between Meerut and Benares. It was prompted by a dispute over the alleged  SMH, 7 February 1857, p. 6.  Ibid. 27  Col. Sec. to Under-­Secretary for Lands, 5 September 1857, Lands in Letters, no. 57/3384, encl. with 58/1456, NSW Records Office, 3587. 28  SMH, 20 February 1857, p. 5. 29  See Angela Woollacott, Setter Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-­Government and Imperial Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, ch. 7, ‘The Australian Colonies and Imperial Crises: The Indian “Mutiny” and the “Maori Wars”’, esp. pp. 183–93. 25 26

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use of pig and beef fat in military rifles, and was widely seen as a ‘Sepoy mutiny’, or a Muslim rebellion, but it was also a culmination of tensions over trade, land tenure, governance, and military organisation.30 Australian newspapers covered the rebellion extensively, printing detailed, lurid stories of violence against the British, and colonists held meetings to raise money for the British survivors. The subject aroused popular fury, as well as occasional, tentative concern about the rising tide of imperial vengeance as British troops suppressed the rebellion. As historians have noted, this war created a stronger British sense of ownership over India (the Crown proclaimed formal control in November 1858), as well as a rise in racist hostilities and divisions.31 Northern settlers drew on India for comparisons with their own situation when, in October 1857, news of one of the largest attacks against the British in India coincided with news of a major Aboriginal attack on settlers at Hornet Bank station, on the Dawson River. In Kanpur, the forces of the Nana Sahib (born as Dhondu Pant) murdered the survivors of a British garrison, including some 200 women and children; at Hornet Bank, Jiman men on 29 October murdered eleven members and employees of the Fraser family. While the reasons for the attack at Hornet Bank were complex, and the culmination of a period of hostility as explored in detail by Gordon Reid, an important element was reprisal for the rape of Jiman women by the Native Police and by the Fraser sons. For the settlers, though, the attacks on women and children and the sexual dimension of the murders (the women were raped and then killed) reinforced the sense of a connection between the Indian and local situations. In response to the Hornet Bank killings, the Dawson River district – already marked by violent struggles over land – became the scene of horrific reprisals over the next few months, as squatters and the Native Mounted Police launched vigilante attacks on the Jiman and neighbouring communities. The number of Indigenous victims went unrecorded; estimates by Gordon Reid range from 150 to 300 or more deaths.32 The upper Dawson area remained tense throughout the following year, and prompted much public debate on what the government, and the settlers, should do.  See Salahuddin Malik, 1857: War of Independence or Clash of Civilisations? British Public Reactions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. xxii, chs. 7 and 8. 31  In a 1962 article, ‘The Indian Mutiny and White Australia’, J. V. D’Cruz observed how this atmosphere served to unite different classes and (European) ethnic groups in New South Wales in a shared sense of outrage. This in turn, D’Cruz argued, helps to explain the rush of anti-­ Chinese feeling and legislation in New South Wales at the time, as another Asian people became scapegoats; J. V. D’Cruz, ‘The Indian Mutiny and White Australia’, Twentieth Century, vol. 17, Spring 1962, pp. 52–7. 32  Gordon Reid, ‘From Hornet Bank to Cullin-La-Ringo’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol. XI, no. 2, 1980–1, pp. 62–5. See also Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 74–5 and Luke Godwin, ‘The Fluid Frontier: Central Queensland 1845–63’, in Lynette Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-­European Encounters in Settler Societies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp. 101–3, 107–8. 30

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There had been little commentary in either the Assembly or the Council, presumably in part because the liberal-­leaning government was uncomfortable with the role of the state-­funded Native Mounted Police and the extent of settler violence. Many northern settlers were furious at what they perceived to be government inaction, arguing that since the government in Sydney had done so little after the Hornet Bank murders, they had to take matters into their own hands. In complaining of government neglect, northern commentators insisted on the necessity for harsh reprisals, urged the importance of their impending separation from New South Wales, and drew analogies with India. On 19 May 1858, a settler in the Gayndah region, well to the east of the Dawson but the area to which many Aboriginal people had fled during the reprisals, asserted in the Courier that pastoralists were entitled to secure the land through violence. If attacked by Indigenous people, the settler wrote, they must ‘destroy them, as we would any other savage beast’. This writer evoked the Mutiny as a spur to aggression, but also expressed a grievance that public attention was more focussed on India than on what was happening in Australia’s north. The ‘cruel butcheries committed in the Wide Bay, Burnett, and Leichhardt Districts’, he wrote, were equal to or greater than the number of victims of the mutiny in India, yet where the latter had caused a universal outcry, ‘here has caused only a question to be asked in the Assembly, viz., if any return [list] of the victims has been received’. Drawing upon the image of bureaucracy evoked in Dickens’ recently published novel, Little Dorrit, he went on, ‘“oh circumlocution office!” the answer is no!! Within a very short space of time, some 25 men are cruelly murdered, and the Government know nothing about it!!!’. The Sydney-­based government was accused not only of bureaucracy but of a misplaced humanitarianism, borne of its distance from the scene of conflict: ‘In Sydney parties talk of ill-­using the poor Blacks, and hold them up as objects of pity, and yet dare not themselves go out of sight of a chimney top.’33 Northern settlers continued to draw a contrast between the response to events in India and northern New South Wales. Letter writers frequently took up the complaint that Sydney residents cared more about the faraway Britons in India than they did about their own fellow colonists in the north.34 In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald on 21 May 1858, George Serocold, writing from Cockatoo Station on the Upper Dawson and possibly a participant in the vicious reprisals after the Hornet Bank massacre,35 referred to both the recent Crimean war and the Indian rebellion to argue for greater support for settlers against Aboriginal people. ‘You,’ he said to his readers, ‘who have  Moreton Bay Courier, 19 May 1858, p. 2.  For example, see letters to Moreton Bay Courier, 19 May 1858, p. 2; SMH, 15 June 1858, p. 3. 35  George Serocold letter to editor, SMH, 21 May 1858, p. 8. Quoted in Richards, The Secret War, p. 23. 33 34

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shown generous sympathy to the widows and orphans of our brave soldiers! ... who have viewed with horror and indignation the fearful tragedies committed by the Sepoys! surely you will not refuse aid to those living within your own Australia.’36 Serocold went on: ‘it has been the proudest boast of our country, that wherever its flag flies it secures protection to its subjects ... let, then, such a lesson be taught these savages as will enable us to regain our moral ascendency.’ Another angry correspondent from the Upper Dawson wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald soon afterwards, on 15 June 1858: We all read in the newspapers the various accounts and indignant comments of the Press as regards the Indian mutiny, and the atrocities of the sepoys. We read of our Government wishing to put their hands into our nearly empty pockets to send a rich Government some aid, and we have naturally wondered at the silence and apathy of the Government and the public Press as regards the inhuman murders by the blacks.37

As the North Australian protested about the Sydney-­based government on 1 June 1858, ‘they take no notice of the war now raging on our frontier between the black and white races’.38 In this tense and angry atmosphere, powerful Darling Downs squatter Arthur Hodgson successfully proposed on 15 June 1858 that the Assembly appoint a Select Committee to report on the murders. On the suggestion of Henry Parkes, a leading liberal member of the house, the Assembly broadened the terms of reference to include a report ‘generally on the state of outrage between the white population and the Aborigines in the Northern Districts, with a view to providing for the better protection of life and property’.39 In the oral and written evidence given to the Committee, settlers advocated importing ‘Hottentot’ troopers (referring to Khoisan people from the Cape), adapting policing systems from India, New Zealand, and the Cape, and recruiting white officers from the Irish Revenue Police.40 They expressed a clear determination to seize the land at any cost and showed complete indifference as to the effects on Indigenous people.41 Many voiced their impatience with the Sydney government, and  Moreton Bay Courier, 9 June 1858, p. 3; SMH, 21 May 1858, p. 8.  SMH, 15 June 1858, p. 3. 38  North Australian, 1 June 1858. Also, 2 February 1858, 29 June 1858. 39  NSW Legislative Assembly, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Murders by the Aborigines on the Dawson River’, 3 August 1858, NSWLAVP, 1858. Available online at www.aiatsis.gov .au/sites/default/files/catalogue_resources/91884.pdf. Accessed on 24 April 2018. 40  NSW Legislative Assembly, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Murders’, pp. 12, 54, 55; David Killingray, ‘Guardians of Empire’, in David Killingray and David Omissi, eds., Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 14–15; Michael Sturma, ‘Policing the Criminal Frontier in Mid-­Nineteenth Century Australia, Britain and America’, in Mark Finnane, ed., Policing in Australia: Historical Perspectives, Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1987, p. 28. 41  Moreton Bay Courier (MBC), 18 August 1858, p. 4; NSW Legislative Assembly, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Murders’, pp. 5–7. 36 37

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sometimes with any notion of government at all. They challenged the state either to act harshly to suppress Indigenous resistance, or to allow squatters to do it themselves. The pastoralist Edmund Royds of the Upper Dawson warned the committee that if stronger policing were not provided, the ‘squatters would have to fight for themselves ... [they] would do what paid men never would do’.42 William Henry Gaden, of the Fitzroy River, urged that local white men should lead the Native Mounted Police, as men from Sydney would be useless: ‘They have no idea of the bush, and do not know how to manage the blacks.’ Harry Midland Pearce, a pastoralist from the Dawson district, agreed, stating: I think one good man on a station would be worth more than all could be sent from Sydney – a good bushman I mean ... I do not think much of the Sydney men at all to send into the bush.43

In this discourse, the isolated northern frontier was linked to the many other frontiers of empire through analogies with far-­away violence and demands for native police from other colonies. At the same time, humanitarianism and perhaps the rule of law itself were rendered marginal, precisely on the grounds that they were products of power in far-­away, urban Sydney. Some colonists who testified to the Select Committee made it clear that they wished to restrict or destroy Indigenous peoples’ means of communication. Several witnesses urged that the authorities do more to keep Aboriginal people ignorant of settlers’ activities and to prevent large ceremonial gatherings. Others worried that there was too much familiarity between white officers of the Native Mounted Police and their black troopers, or between native police and local Indigenous people, especially the women. Here, the problem, as far as the white male witnesses were concerned, was the possibility not that the women were being exploited and harmed but rather that they might obtain tactical information from the troopers or draw them into their own families, weakening the troopers’ loyalty to their white commanders.44 The report blamed the increase in frontier violence on the reduction of the Native Mounted Police in 1854–5 and recommended both its expansion and its management at a local level. When Hodgson moved on 17 August that they endorse the report, however, members of the Assembly strongly opposed it, some saying the government had already carried out its recommendations for the force’s expansion. Henry Parkes also objected that the Committee had ignored the Assembly’s instructions to extend its enquiries to a general investigation of how to better protect lives and property. The report was opposed

42 43 44

 NSW Legislative Assembly, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Murders’, p. 22.  NSW Legislative Assembly, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Murders’, pp. 17, 30, 37.  Ibid., pp. 10–11, 15, 19–22, 30–5, 45; Richards, The Secret War, p. 122.

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by 15 votes to three; the house was without a quorum and the matter ended in some disarray.45 In the northern districts, nevertheless, frontier violence continued, and an augmented Native Mounted Police was now involved. A newspaper correspondent from Rockhampton warned in November 1858 that the north was in a state of ‘war to the knife’,46 and speakers at a public meeting in November 1858 seeking separation of the northern districts from New South Wales, gave as one of their reasons their dissatisfaction with the level of police protection.47 Analogies with India persisted in northern settler discourse; a correspondent to the Moreton Bay Courier, signed ‘L’, wrote in May 1859 of a white woman on William Young’s station who had been attacked and molested ‘Indian fashion’, suggesting how gory tales from Kanpur and Delhi had become part of an Australian vernacular. At the same time, ‘L’ likened the New South Wales government to the British authorities in India; both of them, this writer claimed, sympathised more with native rebels than with their fellow Britons.48 In such accounts, colonists drew on and contributed to a language of imperial conquest and danger, while also implying that such global movements were failing to recognise and include them. Within a year, both northern settlers and, one might suspect, the New South Wales government, were relieved when control of the matter shifted in late 1859 to the government in the newly created colony of Queensland. From this point onwards, frontier violence fell outside the purview of the New South Wales government except for some lingering policing issues in the far north-­ east of the colony.49 With remarkable speed, frontier violence came to be seen by the white population of New South Wales as something far away in space and time. The north was no longer their responsibility, and New South Wales’s own history of frontier violence could be seen as long ago, part of history. New South Wales settlers could afford to express greater sympathy with Aboriginal people, now that they felt that they were no longer personally involved. In their coverage of the death and destruction occurring on the Queensland frontier in the 1860s, newspapers increasingly referred to punitive expeditions as ‘massacres’ or ‘atrocities’, and described the Native Mounted Police as ‘infamous and ferocious’. The shift in attitude in the Sydney Morning Herald in particular was signified by a poem published on 17 February 1859, and reproduced in the Moreton Bay

 SMH, 18 August 1858, p. 3.  Goulburn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser, 13 November 1858, p. 4; Maitland Mercury, 6 November 1858 p. 6S. 47  Moreton Bay Courier, 20 November 1858, p. 2, 30 January 1858, p. 3. 48  Moreton Bay Courier, 4 May 1859, p. 2. 49  Two small detachments of the Native Mounted Police were kept on the Darling for a brief time. 45 46

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Courier six days later.50 The poem was about a massacre that a correspondent to the Herald had originally reported in December 1846. It evoked a wounded aged chief crying out, after a massacre, in the spirit of Calgacus protesting against the Roman invasion of Britain: Why came these cursed strangers here, Intruders on our soil? We’ve yielded all we held most dear To these pale sons of toil. Our fathers roamed these forests free, The lords of hill and plain, Before the whites came o’er the sea, With evil in their train. The Herald’s more sympathetic attitude to Aboriginal people was perhaps not so surprising, given that by this time John West, he who had so deplored settler violence in Van Diemen’s Land, had moved to Sydney and been editor for a little over four years. For a paper that had long spoken for squatter interests, this change of tone indicated a shift in public attitudes. When full reports arrived of the devastating scope of the violent reprisals after the Cullin-la-ringo attacks of 1861, discussed in more detail in the next chapter, the Herald expressed disgust. Of the punitive expeditions by colonists, it said, ‘their vengeance was undiscriminating, and the innocent perished with the guilty’. The settlers, said the Herald, ought to remember ‘that they are the interlopers’ and ‘that after all the blacks are human beings’. It called for a Queensland government inquiry into the killings and commented, ‘we fear the evidence is irresistible that the destruction of the blacks is the aim as well as the result of our colonial policy’.51 Such responses, which continued through the 1860s, were indications of a change of attitude now that Aboriginal people were no longer a threat in New South Wales itself. Liberal Governments and Aboriginal Policy Liberal governments in New South Wales in these years were, however, scarcely egalitarian in their attitudes to Aboriginal people in their own colony. When the Cowper ministry came to power in September 1857, it embarked on a programme of electoral reform that only accidentally included Aboriginal people. Following Victoria and South Australia, parliament passed 50

51

 SMH, Thursday 17 February 1859, p. 2; Moreton Bay Courier, 23 February 1859; New Zealander, 23 March 1859.  SMH, 12 December 1861.

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in November 1858 an Electoral Act that introduced near universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, and abolished property qualifications for members of the Assembly. The Electoral Act granted the vote to ‘every male subject of Her Majesty of the full age of twenty one years’, excluding those of unsound mind, in receipt of ‘aid from any charitable institution’, or convicted of ‘treason felony or other infamous offence’ and not since pardoned. Most importantly, in a bid to exclude transient labourers, clause 9 stated that a person could only be entered on the roll of electors for a given district if he had lived there for at least six months.52 On 17 February 1859, less than three months after parliament passed the Act, and with an election coming up in mid-­year, a conservative pastoralist in the Assembly, Edward Flood, asked Charles Cowper as Colonial Secretary for clarification as to whether Aboriginal people would be entitled to vote.53 Could ‘the aboriginal natives of this colony’, he asked, ‘who are not qualified to give evidence in a Court of Justice’, be added to the electoral roll and entitled to vote? Cowper replied that ‘under the circumstances stated, or without any fixed habitation or abode’, they were not.54 While this was an ambiguous reply, and one could read it as suggesting that if they did have fixed abode, they could vote, it did convey a general belief that Aboriginal men were not entitled to vote. Some wanted the matter clarified further. On 14 October, another conservative pastoralist politician, Augustus Morris, asked for the relevant government correspondence on the matter to be tabled. One of his concerns, he said in speaking to the motion, was that if the six months’ residence qualification were insisted upon, it could lead to ‘the squatters, who wandered about as much as the aborigines’, being also disqualified; indeed, ‘nearly all the electors in the pastoral districts [moved] about within their districts at least once a year’.55 Squatter mobility was in fact one of the grounds for liberal and radical critique of the culture of pastoralism, suggesting that the squatters were wild and uncivilised, the antithesis of the civilised colonist building a new society. Such mobility also jars with the notion of ‘settlers’, as Galaway Yunupingu has so eloquently pointed out; it was the Europeans who roamed so far from home and Aboriginal people who stayed connected to their own country.56 Morris wanted to find a way to enfranchise squatters and disenfranchise Aboriginal men; rather than enforce the residence rule, he suggested, it would be better to bring in a short act specifically to disqualify Aboriginal men from voting. The Attorney General replied that he could not table any documents since there were none, the former Attorney General having given a verbal opinion only.  An Act to amend the Electoral Law, 22 Vic No. 20, 24 November 1858.  SMH, 18 February 1859, p. 4. Entry for 17 February 1859, NSWLAVP, 1858–9, vol. 1. 54  SMH, 18 February 1859, p. 5. 55  SMH, 15 October 1859, p. 4. 56  Galaway Yunipingu, speech to the National Press Club, Canberra, 13 February 1997. 52 53

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The matter did not again arise in parliament again for another fifteen years, during which time Aboriginal men did sometimes vote.57 One commentator who did not forget the question of Aboriginal voting rights was Roger Therry, former judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, and from 1856 to 1859 a nominated member of the Legislative Council. Therry was Catholic, of Irish background, who in the 1820s in Ireland had supported Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation and who, in colonial politics, acted as a strong defender of Catholic freedom and equality. He had been Attorney General Plunkett’s junior counsel in the Myall Creek trials in 1838. He was nevertheless in many ways politically conservative, being strongly opposed, for instance, to manhood suffrage. He left the colony in 1859, and published his reminiscences in 1863, in which he revealed his antipathy to Aboriginal people. He commented on what he saw as the huge amount of money governments had spent on attempting to civilise and Christianise them, entirely without success. He accounted for their rapid disappearance in several ways – their ‘dissipated habits, European diseases and vices, the excessive use of tobacco and spirits’, their loss of lands, the effects of ‘drought, disease, and hunger’, and the European use of guns and poison.58 When contemplating their probable extinction, he commented, ‘their disappearance could not well be regarded as a calamity’.59 In the context of a diatribe against the electoral laws of the colony that gave all adult men the vote, and thus empowered labourers, men without property, and ex-­convicts, he became especially bitter and sarcastic when reflecting on the fact that Aboriginal men could now vote. A ‘wild black fresh from the Bush, with whose intelligence a gorilla well might vie’, he railed, ‘if he but reside six months in a district, has an equal right to vote with the wealthiest and most intelligent commoner in the land’. So far, he wrote, no Aboriginal man of full descent had voted, but it was possible, and several ‘half castes’ had been placed on the electoral roll. It was even possible that an Aboriginal person could stand for election to the Legislative Assembly. ‘The Honourable Billy, the black fellow’, from Illawarra, or the Honourable ‘Moon-­ eyed Jemmy’, from the Clarence, may enter the House of Assembly and rise to be a minister of state.60

In a passage in the tradition of Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, which satirically urged the eating of children of the poor people of Ireland to make  See Anna Doukakis, The Aboriginal People, Parliament, and ‘Protection’ in New South Wales, 1856–1916, Sydney: The Federation Press, 2006, pp. 25, 31. 58  Roger Therry, Reminiscences of thirty years’ residence in New South Wales, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 1974 (first published 1863), p. 299. 59  Ibid., p. 300. 60  Ibid., p. 454. 57

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them beneficial to the public, Therry thought there were, perhaps, some advantages to such a scenario. Given the current scarcity of cotton goods because of the American civil war, he suggested, the Aboriginal could teach the colonists how to dispense with cotton goods altogether, by appearing in ‘puris naturalibus’, that is, in their natural state. As a minister of works, perhaps, the Aboriginal could save the colonists the cost of substantial houses of bricks and mortar, and show how they could live ‘in a cheap gunya or wigwam of simple construction’.61 Bribery and corruption would be minimal, since all that would be needed to bribe such a minister would be merely ‘a pipe or two of tobacco’. Governing ministries in danger of losing support in parliament could survive the next election with the help of Aboriginal voters, whom politicians could drive from the forest and then keep them ‘in one of the snug sunny inlets of Sydney harbour for six months previous to the election’.62 That a respected judge and defender of the rights of Catholics could so scorn the idea of Aboriginal political participation is telling indeed. As Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, Shurlee Swain, and David Phillips have pointed out, Aboriginal people had been included in the new franchise by default and without discussion within the colony; the idea that they could be active political subjects was widely considered irrelevant or preposterous.63 As we have observed, the idea of Aboriginal subjecthood was raised by colonial commentators not as a serious possibility, but rather as a means of mocking and deriding their fellow (white) statesmen and their policies. A Policy of Minimal Care Responsible governments in New South Wales made it clear from the beginning that, apart from providing police support for settlers in the northern districts, Aboriginal policy was a low priority. The contrast with the adjacent and in many ways similar colony of Victoria, its offshoot, is striking. In New South Wales, there was in the 1860s no Board, no network of protectors, little distribution of clothing and rations, and no missions or managed reserves. In the first two years, the new government refused to support plans to establish missions in Moreton Bay, Newcastle, and Sydney, and finally abolished government support for the mission at Wellington Valley.64 This meant the only  Ibid., p. 455.  Ibid. 63  Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, pp. 69–70. 64  Meeting of the Executive Council, 4 August 1856, Exec. Council Minute Book, minute no. 38K, p. 465, NSW Archives, 4/1533; ‘Estimates, 1856 – Territorial Revenue’, p. 5, in NSWLAVP, 1855, vol. 2; NSWLAVP, 1856–7, vol. 2, p. 1102; Sec. Lands to Rev. W. Watson, 30 March 1859 (copy), Col. Sec. in Letters, no. 59/2353, NSWSA, 4/3403; Barry Bridges, Aboriginal and White Relations, p. 699. 61 62

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aspects of government policy remaining from the old regime apart from policing the northern districts were the blanket distribution, and providing some medical and legal assistance. In October 1856, the Parker government transferred responsibility for Aboriginal policy (such as it was) from the Colonial Secretary’s Department to the newly created Lands Department, whose officials were uncertain what the task involved. In an attempt to define their responsibilities, they circulated a letter to the Crown Lands Commissioners, Police Magistrates, and Benches of Magistrates seeking information on numbers of Aboriginal people remaining, and views on the value of Government intervention, especially in funding medical assistance. As the Secretary for Lands wrote when sending the circular letter, they needed this information ‘in order to plan the matter on a satisfactory footing and to enable us to decide whether in future we shall attempt to care for the Aborigines at all, and if we do, attempt to show how we can do it more effectually’.65 The only reply preserved in the records is from the police officer at Casino, who wrote that while ‘morally, they are beyond all human assistance’ the distribution of blankets could help them.66 The Lands Department decided to extend the distribution of blankets and increase its support for medical assistance.67 If the Cowper-­Robertson government, with its programme of electoral and land reform, seemed dangerously liberal to some, on Aboriginal policy it differed little from its more conservative predecessors. It believed that in the ‘settled’ districts it need do little or nothing for Aboriginal people. This view became explicit at the meeting of the Executive Council on 23 May 1859, when it considered the despatch (discussed in chapter 9) from the Secretary of State, Bulwer Lytton, urging them not to despair over the Aboriginal situation.68 The Executive Council politely agreed that it was their duty not to despair, but firmly pointed out that all previous measures had failed, and that it was most unlikely that Aboriginal people would ever accept ‘the benefits with the restraints of civilisation’.69 There would be no further pressure from Britain, or from the governors, who one after the other continued to be given the traditional instructions to protect Aboriginal people in their person and in  Memo attached to Letter CCCL to Sec Lands, 20 March 1857, Lands in Letters, no. 57/1015, encl. with 57/3523 (NSWSA 3578). See also memo attached to letter Treasurer to Sec Lands, 16 January 1857, Lands in Letters, no. 57/198, encl. with 57/3523. 66  Police Officer, Casino to Sec Lands, 4 July 1857, Lands in Letters, no.  57/2541, encl. with 57/3523. 67  In 1858 the Assembly voted £200 for legal and medical assistance; after it was overspent by £375.11.6, the vote was increased to £300 in 1859 and £400 in 1860, it established during the 1860s at £500. See NSWLAVP, 1858–9, vol. 2, p. 607; 1859–60, vol. 1, pp. 1192, 1310; 1860, vol. 1, pp. 264, 764; 1861, vol. 2, p. 31; 1861–2, vol. 1, p. 1415. 68  Draft of despatch Bulwer Lytton to Denison, 19 February 1859, no. 13, attached to Denison to Bulwer Lytton, 13 September 1858, no. 133, CO 201/503. 69  Denison to Bulwer Lytton, 3 June 1859, no. 49, CO 201/508. 65

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their possessions, and to ‘further their conversion to the Christian faith and their advancement in civilisation’. Over the next decade, governments of varying political hues made it clear that they felt no obligation to do anything. Only occasionally were there calls for action on the grounds they owed Aboriginal people something in return for having taken their land. During the Council debate on the Land Bill on 9 May 1861, aimed at opening up pastoral land to small farming and agriculture, Colonel John Lamb moved that as the Bill made no specific provision for reserving land for Aboriginal people they could make compensation in other ways, such as in the form of small grants from the colony’s consolidated revenue ‘to be applied to the amelioration of the condition of the aboriginal natives, as occasion may arise’.70 Experience, he said, had shown that setting apart reserves did not work, but they needed to do something. Since we had ‘dispossessed the natives of their hunting grounds, and thereby deprived them of their wild animals’, he said, ‘and as our colonization had been the means of the mortality of large numbers of them, it was our duty to make some provision for the remnant’.71 Thomas Dangar, in the Assembly in September 1861, argued for the extension of blanket and medical assistance since ‘the Government has wrested the lands from these natives, and they ought to make some provision for them’.72 Two years later, William Redman in the Assembly made a similar argument.73 Since the Aborigines, he said, had been treated harshly and unjustly and had lost their land and hunting grounds, colonists should repay them for the land ‘quid pro quo’. These were, however, occasional voices indeed. The voices seeking government action along Victorian lines were very weak, drowned out by those insisting they could and should do nothing. The colonial governments had inherited a policy of providing some medical and legal assistance, alongside the annual blanket distribution. In the 1860s, the government gradually reduced medical assistance; it phased out the identified medical attendants, making the last appointment in 1864, so that by 1869, only Dr Charles V. Adams in New England remained. Although the vote for medical expenses remained at £500 each year, actual expenditure fell; from 1862 to 1866 it hovered between £220 and £310, falling by 1869 to £54.17.6.74  SMH 10 May 1861. A small grant was actually made on this occasion, see memo dated 28 May 1861 on letter Col. Sec. to US Lands, 14 May 1861, Lands in Letters, no. 61/2149, encl. with 61/1502, NSWSA, 3626. 71  A small grant of land was made after this, memo dated 28 May 1861 on letter Col. Sec. to Under-­Secretary for Lands, 14 May 1861, Lands in Letters, no. 61/2149, encl. with 61/1502, NSWSA 3626). Lamb’s term ended the following day. 72  SMH 29 September 1861. 73  SMH 13 April 1863. 74  NSW Blue Books for each of the following years: 1862 (Sydney, 1863), p. 59; 1864 (Sydney, 1865), p. 70; 1866 (Sydney, 1867), p. 69; 1867 (Sydney, 1868), p. 69; 1869 (Sydney, 1870), p. 63; 1875 (Sydney, 1876), p. 78. NSWLAVP, 1862, vol. 3, p. 1077; 1869, vol. 1, p. 855. 70

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The blanket distribution, on the other hand, steadily grew, from 2,215 in 1856 to 8,400 in 1880.75 With no protectors or other officials in place to negotiate with Aboriginal people, blanket distributions provided one of the few occasions for contact between Aboriginal people and country police and magistrates. When the blankets were due to arrive, usually on 24 May, the Queen’s birthday, Aboriginal people flocked into country centres to receive them, as country newspapers sometimes recorded.76 The Burrangong Argus thought the practice was kind but anomalous: ‘in fact, while hoping for their utter extermination, we have been providing them with the best means of prolonging their race’.77 There was very little assistance other than blankets, though the government did continue to provide some legal assistance, despite executive council approval, later revoked, of the attorney general’s suggestion in September 1863 that it be dropped for all except capital cases.78 The approach of minimal support was illustrated clearly when, in 1865, the Department of Lands and, in 1867, the Colonial Secretary’s department in turn refused to grant boats to Aboriginal people from the south coast who had requested them. The Lands Department noted, revealingly, that boat-­giving ‘was a matter more for private charity than for Government interference’, and that in any case there was real doubt as to ‘whether the petitioners would be capable of taking care of a boat’.79 This refusal was somewhat a departure, for earlier governments, since Governor Macquarie had donated a boat to Bungaree’s band at Georges’ Head in 1815, had sometimes provided cast-­off European boats to promote Aboriginal self-­sufficiency. The reference to private charity is revealing; at the time of its formation in 1844, the Sydney Aborigines Committee had provided at least one boat and in 1850 it had helped Jackey Goggey of Georges River to petition, successfully, the Governor Fitzroy for another in 1850.80 In the 1860s, colonial governments were less inclined to assist, though this attitude would later change. Significantly, there were moves towards accepting Aboriginal evidence in court, something that earlier Legislative Councils had strenuously resisted. In May 1860, Attorney General Hargraves accepted the evidence of a witness

 CCCL to Sec Lands, undated, Lands in Letters, no. 57/2348, encl. with 57/3523, NSWSA 3578; NSWLAVP, 1879–80, vol. 5, p. 1239.  Golden Age, 11 April 1862. 77  Burrangong Argus, 10 April 1869. 78  Meeting 21 September 1863, Exec Council Minute Book, minute no. 66/9J, NSWSA, 4/1545. The approval was later revoked. 79  ‘Nanny’ and ‘Lucy’ to Secretary for Lands, undated, Department of Lands in Letters, no. 65/6042, NSWSA 3693; E. P. Laycock et al. to Col. Sec., undated, Colonial Secretary in Letters, no. 67/3679, NSWSA 4/579. 80  Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain Sight to View, The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney, Sydney, NewSouth, 2017, pp. 30, 36, 63, 83. 75

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in court he described as ‘a very intelligent aboriginal [who] has been reared and in part educated among English settlers’, on the grounds that ‘if an aboriginal witness be competent in other respects to give evidence, his being an aboriginal is no ground to reject his testimony if given on oath’.81 In 1866, Chief Justice Stephen commented on a trial of an Aboriginal man for murder that the court had accepted the evidence of mission-­educated Aboriginal people. It would not be until 1876, however, that an act allowing Aboriginal evidence became law.82 Land and Labour Despite government indifference, the 1860s brought some better economic conditions for Aboriginal people. Given their declining involvement in Aboriginal affairs, governments abandoned the practice of collating reports from the Commissioners of Crown Lands, and collected information only on the rare occasions it was specifically required. Governor Young expressed the general view when he commented somewhat later, in 1865, ‘the time is gone by for collecting statistics’.83 Yet the Commissioner of Crown Lands reports collected before the practice was dropped now tell an important story. They clearly indicate that in the late 1850s, Aboriginal people were entering pastoral work in increasing numbers, and where they did, their survival chances were improving.84 They worked at shepherding, sheep washing, shearing, stock riding, and other labour-­intensive tasks. Employment including shearing was high north-­west of Sydney, on the Liverpool Plains and around Wee Waa and Walgett, and especially high in the far west of the colony, near the border with South Australia, where Aboriginal people provided the staple labour force and were therefore paid comparatively well.85 Survival was also more likely where Aboriginal people could supplement their earnings with some traditional food-­getting. At Brewarrina was one of the most extensive fish traps in the colony, the trap area having been reserved for them in the late 1840s.86 Near Hay, there were also extensive fish traps, and as Mary Gilmore tells us  Memo Attorney General, dated 8 May 1860, attached to letter Police Office, Bombala to Col. Sec., 21 April 1860, Col. Sec. in Letters, no. 59/1787, NSW Archives 4/3422. 82  Evidence Further Amendment Act, 40 Vic no. 8. 83  Young to Cardwell, 20 September 1865, no. 85, CO 201/535. 84  Murrumbidgee, Wellington, and New England and MacLeay CCL Reports for 1855, Col. Sec. in Letters, all encl. with 56/800 (NSWSA 4/3309); New England and Gwydir, Macleay, and Albert and Lower Darling CCL Reports for 1858, Col. Sec. in Letters, all enclosed with no. 59/1210 (NSWSA 4/3401); Murrumbidgee CCL to CCCL, 15 January 1861, Lands in Letters, no. 61/264 (NSWSA 3621); H. M. Eastman, Typescript 1952, p. 5, NSW State Library MS B1341. 85  Albert CCL report for 1855, Col. Sec. in Letters, enclosed with no. 56/800, NSWSA 4/3309; Albert and Lower Darling CCL Report for 1858. 86  Exec. Council meeting 18 July 1848, Exec. Council Minute Book, Minute no. 23 B, NSWSA 4/1524; Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 59–60. 81

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in her memoir, Old Days: Old Ways, Hay was a centre for assemblies, where Indigenous people discussed the use of the traps and held competitive games.87 On the Lachlan River, the Wiradjuri worked for Europeans in winter, and at other times fished and procured waterfowl and eggs at the lagoons and backwaters.88 Fishing was especially common on the south coast, becoming often the staple diet and the source of some income, and was important along major rivers such as the Manning, the lower Murrumbidgee and the Murray.89 It was also important for Aboriginal people in Sydney, where people fished both for subsistence and for commercial exchange. The combination of labouring for employers and traditional food-­getting meant mobility was high, as Aboriginal people moved from pastoral station to station and between the stations and the lakes, lagoons, rivers, and towns. One of the few moves towards ‘protection’ in these years came from pastoralists fearful of the effects of alcohol on their supply of Aboriginal labour. In 1862, when the legislature amended the Licensing and Publicans’ Act, it omitted the clause dating from Gipps’s era prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Aboriginal people, probably because the law had never been enforced.90 Subsequently, objections mounted to the lack of government intervention, usually on the grounds that alcohol made Aboriginal people a nuisance and a problem in country towns, or that it hampered them from being good labourers.91 In the Wentworth and Darling districts in the south west of the colony, pastoralists, many of them Presbyterian Scots, had made good use of Aboriginal labour in the 1850s when other labour was unavailable.92 By the mid-­1860s, the decline in the supply of Aboriginal labour was considered serious, and both clergymen and pastoralists in the area attributed it to the effects of alcohol. Rural labourers at times were prosecuted for frequenting Aboriginal camps. One newspaper correspondent wrote in the Deniliquin Chronicle on 6 May 1865 of Aboriginal people ‘reeling with intoxication, swearing, blaspheming, fighting, not only among themselves but in company with Europeans, who first tempt, then fraternise with, and lastly, abuse and maltreat them’.  Mary Gilmore, Old Days: Old Ways: A Book of Recollections, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1934, pp. 168–95. 88  Lachlan CCL Report for 1855, Col. Sec. in Letters, encl. with no. 56/800 (NSWSA 4/3309). 89  J. H. Bell, The La Perouse Aborigines: A Study of Their Group Life and Assimilation into Modern Australian Society, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1959, pp. 83–5; F. A. Fitzpatrick, Peeps into the Past: Pioneering Days on the Manning, New South Wales: Parramatta, 1941, pp. 35, 40; Rev. E. Strickland, The Australian Pastor: A Record of the Remarkable Changes in the Mind and Outward Estate of Henry Elliott, London: Wertheim, Macintosh, and Hunt, 1862, p. 76. 90  Col Sec memo attached to letter from Police Officer at Bourke, to Col. Sec., 24 September 1863, Col. Sec. in Letters, no. 63/5407, NSWSA 4/508. 91  Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 11 March 1862; Police Officer Bourke to Col. Sec., 24 September 1863. 92  Lower Darling CCL Report for 1856, enclosed in Denison to Labouchere, 14 March 1857, no. 55, CO 201/498; speech by Phelps in LA debate, SMH, 25 November 1867. 87

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In February 1866, 43 residents in the southern town of Wentworth and its surrounding district of the lower Murray and Darling signed a petition presented to the Legislative Assembly praying for the prohibition of the sale or supply of alcohol to Aboriginal people. The following November, in response to a request by the local Presbyterian minister, Rev. William Ross, a petition from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales was presented to the Assembly.93 Joseph Phelps, the member for Balranald, at the same time presented a private member’s bill, commenting that anyone who had ‘observed the great change that has come over them since the last Amendment of the Publican’s Licensing Act’ would support it.94 The Bill passed with little debate, and became law on 9 January 1868. Aboriginal people in this era did retain some access to pastoral land. Pastoral leases continued to stipulate their right of access to their traditional lands, and Heather Goodall reports that after 1851 squatters rarely refused Aboriginal people access to land for ceremonial purposes.95 On the other hand, one effect of the Cowper-­Robertson government’s Land Acts of 1861, of shifting some land from pastoralism to agriculture, was to reduce Aboriginal people’s access to land and employment. Whereas Aboriginal people could survive on pastoral land with a mixture of employment and traditional food-­getting, and maintain some aspects of traditional life through seasonal migration and ceremony, it was much harder to do so on agricultural land, with its more intensive system of farming and restricted space. As small farming expanded in the 1860s and 1870s, for example on the Manning and Macleay rivers and on dairy farms on the south coast, there was a lessening of demand for Aboriginal labour in those areas, and a consequent increase in poverty, alcoholism, and depopulation. Countering this pattern in later decades, however, as Heather Goodall has shown, would be the participation by Aboriginal people in the growth of agriculture through small government reserves of land specifically for their use.96 Extinction and Indifference A range of ideas contributed to a ‘laissez faire’ approach by the liberal governments of the period. The idea that contact with ‘civilised man’ had debased Aboriginal people became extremely common, and indeed this idea was to  Minutes of the Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales, October 1867, Sydney, 1867, minute nos. 44 (p. 20) and 70 (p. 27). For a copy of the petition, see NSWLAVP, 1867–8, vol. 4, p. 1005. 94  Entries for 12 and 14 V&PNSWLA, 1867–8, vol. 1; SMH 25 November 1867. 95  Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, p. 64. 96  Bell, La Perouse Aborigines, pp. 83–5; J. S. Ryan, The Land of Ulitarra: Early Records of the Aborigines of the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Armidale: University of New England, 1964, p. 181; Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 84–7. 93

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remain firm in Australian popular thinking for at least another century. One anonymous writer commented in the Yeoman and Australian Acclimatiser, ‘Miserably low originally in the scale of existence, in whatever light we view it, the fact cannot be denied that the Aborigines become tenfold more base by contact with civilised man.’97 Where their natural state had included ‘animal happiness and savage dignity’, in their present state they were ‘besotted drunkards and effeminate, spiritless and abject beggars’. Commentators repeated this theme endlessly; a few examples will suffice. In 1864, an English clergyman, Rev. H. W. Haygarth, who had lived for eight years in the colonies, suggested that Aboriginal people were now merely ‘debased specimens’ of humanity.98 The European observer could feel nothing but ‘pity, mingled with shame, that their intercourse with the white man should have apparently served only to eradicate their natural good qualities, few as they were, and to engraft the vices of European on their own’. Another clergyman, Rev. T. Sharpe, expressed a similar view a few years later, in 1869, when he wrote that, ‘In their savage state they were a more interesting race than they became after civilised men had intercourse with them’.99 Also widely shared was the idea that Aboriginal people were unintelligent, without the power of reason, and could not be ‘improved’, that is, made more like the British colonists themselves. There were, however, some dissenters, notably from the southernmost parts of the colony, adjacent to Victoria. In this area, closer to Melbourne than to Sydney, ideas sympathetic to Aboriginal people were more evident than in the rest of New South Wales. Gideon Scott Lang, a pastoralist from the Riverina who had many dealings with Aboriginal people on his station in the far southwest of the colony, for example, thought their capacity for subtle diplomacy, their fish traps at Brewarrina, and their capacity as trackers indicated a reasonable degree of intelligence.100 While few newspapers in New South Wales carried much discussion of the condition or nature of Aboriginal people, the Deniliquin Chronicle, situated near the Victorian border, was a notable exception. It was unusually pro-­Aboriginal for its time, one of its correspondents, for example, commenting, ‘Take half a dozen children as pure as snow and as many as black as soot, give them the same advantages, and it depends not on the colour which will shine the brightest’.101 On 6 May 1865, a correspondent from Echuca to the Deniliquin Chronicle described local

 Extract from the Yeoman and Australian Acclimatiser, 24 May 1862, in SMH, 9 June 1862.  Henry William Haygarth, Recollections of Bush Life in Australia during a Residence of Eight Years in the Interior, London: John Murray, 1864, p. 102. 99  Rev. T. Sharpe, ‘Kiama, 1869 etc.’, Papers, NSW State Library, A1502, p. 209. 100  Gideon Scott Lang, The Aborigines of Australia in Their Original Condition and in Their Relations with the White Men, Melbourne: Wilson and Mackinnon, 1865, p. 20. 101  Deniliquin Chronicle, 18 April 1868. 97

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Aboriginal people as ‘the unhappy remnants of a people nearly exterminated by the cupidity and vices of a civilised conqueror’. The overwhelming view was that Aboriginal people were doomed to disappear. Even J. D. Lang wrote in his famous 1857 text, Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia, ‘Alas, most of them have already disappeared from the face of the earth; the last man of the Sydney tribe or nation, once a comparatively numerous body of people, having died a few years ago’.102 A decade later, many would quote the comment made by painter and naturalist, George French Angas, in his book, Australia: A Popular Account (1865) that Aboriginal people were ‘fast dying out, and, in many places, they will, ere long, have totally disappeared. Wherever the white man locates himself, so surely do the inferior races give way: as the Red Indian and the Bushman have vanished before the colonists of North America and the Cape, so will the degraded nomads of Australia perish in like manner.’103 An overwhelming theme was disappearance rather than incorporation through amalgamation, though again the Deniliquin Chronicle departed from the prevailing view when it commented in 1866 that the disappearance of Aboriginal people would occur, not through death and reduced reproduction, but through ‘a gradual and beneficial mingling and absorption’.104 While the feeling that colonists ought to assist the remaining Aboriginal population was much less evident than in Victoria, there were the occasional voices urging a kinder approach. In 1867 and 1868, the Australian Churchman, an Anglican journal, ran a series of articles that discussed the mission question.105 One writer noted that there were successful missions in both Victoria and South Australia, but none in New South Wales.106 The lesson they should learn from earlier failures, this writer suggested, was not that all educational and civilising attempts would fail, but that purely religious missions would and that ‘industrial stations’ had a chance of success.107 No action, however, followed from these articles. The churches were not alone in displaying little interest in Aboriginal people in these years; there was also much less scientific interest in ethnography than in Victoria. The most notable exception was Anglican clergyman William Ridley who, in 1866, published his book, Kamilaroi, Dippil, and Turrubul: Languages Spoken by Australian Aborigines, based on his travels in 1855.108  John Dunmore Lang, Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia, Sydney: Cunningham, 1857, p. 134. 103  George French Angas, Australia: A Popular Account, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865, pp. 49–50. 104  Deniliquin Chronicle, 17 February 1866. 105  Australian Churchman, 21 December 1867 to 1 February 1868. 106  Australian Churchman, 21 December 1867, 11 and 18 January 1868. 107  Australian Churchman, 25 January 1868. 108  Rev. William Ridley, Kamilaroi, Dippil, and Turrubul; Languages Spoken by Australian Aborigines, Sydney, 1866. 102

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Ethnologists including Oxford Professor and leading figure in the development of the anthropology of religion, Max Müller, acclaimed the book and a revised edition titled Kamilaroi and Other Australian Languages was published in 1875.109 In some ways, official indifference could provide Aboriginal people with a degree of freedom. For example, Prince Alfred’s visit to New South Wales had vastly different consequences from those in Victoria. Where the Victorian Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines had been quite successful in limiting Aboriginal people’s opportunities to meet with the Prince, there was no such body in New South Wales. One notable event was a cricket match in Sydney between a team of Jardwadjali, Gunditjmara, and Wotjobaluk men from western Victoria and a team of officers from the Duke’s party. Up to 9,000 people at the Albert Cricket Ground in Redfern watched the men outclass the Duke’s team, demonstrate athletics and the use of spears, boomerangs and throwing sticks, and fend off cricket balls with a native shield. They also held a sham fight, dressed in black undergarments, possum skins, and lyrebird feathers.110 Such shows were, perhaps, especially easy to stage in New South Wales, where settler power was relatively secure, but where there was no protection board to curtail Indigenous travel, commercialisation and display. The interaction between Indigenous people and the Duke, however, ended in tragedy. A ‘grand corroboree’ was planned at Clontarf, on the north side of Sydney Harbour, and when it was announced that the Duke would distribute gifts and blankets at a public celebration, about 300 people gathered.111 By 11 March, people from areas as far away as Burrangong, Araluen, the Clarence River, and Moruya, had arrived, the presence of many made possible by the use of travel by steamship.112 The Empire said this was the largest Aboriginal gathering in the city that the current generation of colonists could recall, and Paul Irish points out that it was the first time since the arrival of Europeans that Aboriginal people from such widespread locations had gathered together.113 They would be disappointed, however, and in a shocking way. The Duke was making his way to Cabbage Tree Beach, where the people were getting ready to dance, when a mentally disturbed Irishman called Henry James O’Farrell emerged from the crowd and shot him. The Duke survived, but there was immediate chaos and an explosion of mob violence towards O’Farrell, police

 Niel Gunson, ‘William Ridley’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018.  John Milner and Oswald W. Brierly, The Cruise of H. M. S. Galatea, Captain H. R. H. the Duke of Edinburgh, K.G., in 1867–1868, London, W. H. Allen, 1869, pp. 373–4; SMH, 5 February 1868, p. 3; 6 February 1868, p. 2. 111  SMH, 29 February 1868, p. 5, 27 March 1868, p. 6. 112  SMH, 12 March 1868. 113  Reproduced in the Argus, 1 April 1868, p. 5; Irish, Hidden in Plain View, p. 97. 109 110

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and bystanders. The Indigenous crowd may have joined in; with approval (and perhaps embroidering), the Empire noted: The excitement and anger of the aborigines were as great, and more strongly expressed, than those of their white visitors; for upon learning that the assassin had not been summarily lynched on the spot, they asked for his body for the purpose of ‘roasting him’.114

A more peaceable account was given by John Weiman, who had travelled to Sydney with a group from Moruya who were to dance for the royal party. He apparently wrote to friends that they had been looked after at the Duke’s expense and were glad to hear that he was recuperating well. Through various responses, Aboriginal people were continuing to assert a royal connection.115 Conclusion We can suggest several reasons for the striking difference between New South Wales and Victoria in this period. The first is the legacy in Victoria of the Port Phillip Protectorate, which despite settler hostility, internal conflicts, and a general reputation for failure, had in fact established channels of communication between Indigenous people and government officials that were not evident elsewhere in New South Wales. As Jessie Mitchell has shown, Indigenous people maintained connections with some of the protectors long after the Protectorate itself had been abolished. The role of William Thomas, in particular, was important in the maintenance of a spirit of negotiation and exchange between Indigenous communities and government, a spirit that had strongly influenced the location and nature of several Aboriginal reserves in the 1860s. North of the Murray River, in the vast lands that became the colonies of New South Wales and Queensland, there was no equivalent to the protectors and especially the role of William Thomas. A second reason for the divergence between Victoria and New South Wales lies in the different character of colonial liberalism in the two colonies. In New South Wales, liberalism and humanitarianism were far more distinct. Although liberal politicians in New South Wales differed in their overall political philosophy from the squatters and conservatives they had largely politically displaced, they did not diverge from them significantly where Aboriginal policy was concerned. New South Wales liberals agreed that Aboriginal dispossession  Reproduced in the Argus, 1 April 1868, p. 5. The government searched unsuccessfully for a conspiracy, before hanging O’Farrell, amidst rising sectarian tensions. See H. J. Gibbney ‘Duke of Edinburgh, 1844–1900’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018; SMH, 27 March 1868, p. 6. 115  Argus, 7 April 1868, p. 7. See also Argus, 5–6 February 1868, p. 5, 30 March 1868, p. 1 supplement; Brisbane Courier, 25 January 1868, p. 4, 4 March 1868, p. 2; Sydney Mail, 14 March 1868, p. 4. 114

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had been necessary and just, that Aboriginal people had no claim to the land or to compensation for loss of land, and that the only useful material assistance was an annual blanket distribution and some medical help. They were not humanitarians. In Victoria, by contrast, in the figure of people like Thomas McCombie, liberalism absorbed some of the tenets of humanitarianism, notably a greater belief that they owed some form of compensation to Indigenous people for taking their land, and that ameliorative policies could have an effect. The irony was, perhaps, that while levels of settler goodwill were higher in Victoria than in the older colony, so too was the desire to control, manage, and assimilate. In New South Wales, Aboriginal employment and government indifference for a time allowed a space for Indigenous survival, family maintenance, and cultural continuity that was larger than its southern neighbour could provide.

13

Their Worst Fears Realised The Disaster of Queensland

As this chapter explores, settlers in Queensland understood themselves to be in a state of open warfare with Aboriginal people, and, free from metropolitan pressure and without a strong local church or humanitarian presence, proceeded to wrest the land from Aboriginal people as quickly as possible. Some Aboriginal groups resisted pastoralist invasion with unusual force, and the language of warfare was common. As Henry Reynolds has observed against those who argue that Aboriginal Australians would have fared better under British rule if they had been militarily stronger, the unusually strong Aboriginal resistance in Queensland resulted instead in uglier retaliations and even less space available to Aboriginal people in the civic and political realm.1 While land seizure was nothing new in the history of Australian colonisation, the paucity of countervailing and complicating forces made the process of dispossession in Queensland exceptionally brutal and occasioned greater loss of life. Given the rapid and ferocious spread of the Queensland frontier, it is not surprising that genocide scholarship concerned with Australian settler colonialism has tended to argue that Queensland, as much as or perhaps more than Tasmania, represents a case of settler colonial genocide.2 Even those, such as Henry Reynolds, who argue against the applicability of the term ‘genocide’ to Australian frontier history on the grounds that there is no evidence of genocidal intention, suggest that in Queensland we do see times they describe as ‘genocidal moments’ when there are clear intentions to destroy all Aboriginal people in a given district.3 Those British officials and public commentators who feared that granting self-­government to the Australian colonies could lead to policies destructive of Aboriginal life and liberty would see their worst fears realised in Queensland, though not quite in the way the Colonial Office officials imagined. Where they had envisaged that the colonies might now pass legislation authorising the  Henry Reynolds, ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland’, in Henry Reynolds, ed., Race Relations in North Queensland, Townsville: James Cook University, 1993, p. 62. 2  A. Dirk Moses, ‘An antipodean Genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2, no. 1, 2000, pp. 91–2. 3  Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain: The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Melbourne: Penguin, 2001, p. 130; Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 148–56. 1

313

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killing of Aboriginal people, and in the colonial constitutions had retained the right of veto over local legislation in order to prevent this happening, the frontier policies adopted in Queensland would not rely on legislation. Rather, the taking of land and suppression of Aboriginal resistance would depend on the administration of a particular kind of police force. With no official declaration of war and Aboriginal sovereignty unrecognised, there were fewer opportunities for formal negotiation and even less symbolic recognition than in other Australian colonies. When the colony held public celebrations in 1859 to mark the news of separation and the arrival of Governor and Lady Bowen, Aboriginal involvement was minor and equivocal. A suggestion by a letter-­writer to the Courier that the lives of two condemned Aboriginal prisoners, Dicky and Chamery, should be spared as a gesture of clemency to commemorate the occasion went unheeded; the two men were hanged for rape shortly afterwards, and a crowd of Aboriginal people were gathered and made to watch.4 The separation events themselves featured decorations, fireworks, a regatta, and a public holiday, but the Aboriginal presence was limited to a distribution of blankets.5 Several weeks later, however, Governor Bowen visited a camp at Eagle Farm Road to watch an Aboriginal dance, and some people came to town to dance in a paddock for Lady Bowen. The Aboriginal people who attended these dances may have hoped to forge better relationships with these new colonial authority figures, but the paucity of the evidence makes it hard to judge.6 The First Two Years of Self-­Government, 1859–1861 While Queensland’s campaign for separation from New South Wales had been hard-­fought, the colonists were unable during this time to follow it up with secure, stable, and broadly representative government of their own. Rather, they had achieved independence in an atmosphere of ongoing struggle and inequality, in a colony where government could still be tumultuous, undemocratic, and mistrusted, and where colonisation itself was very much a continuing and contested project. At the time of separation in December 1859, settlers had established their presence on only a quarter of the total land mass and many of them resided in far-­flung sheep stations.7 The colony began self-­government  Moreton Bay Courier, 27 July 1859: 2, 6 August 1859, p. 2.  Rod Fisher notes that annual blanket distributions had been reinstituted in Brisbane from 1848. Nevertheless, blanket-­giving did not become sufficiently regular or ritualised to assume the importance it did further south. Rod Fisher, ‘From depredation to degradation: The Aboriginal experience at Moreton Bay, 1842–60’, in Rod Fisher, ed., Brisbane: The Aboriginal Presence, Brisbane: Brisbane History Group, 1992, pp. 40–1. 6  Moreton Bay Courier, 8 October 1859, p. 3; 9 October 1859, p. 3; 13 December 1859, pp. 2, 3; January 1860, p. 2. 7  R. Evans, “‘Plenty shoot ‘Em”: The destruction of aboriginal societies along the Queensland Frontier’, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen 4 5

Their Worst Fears Realised 315

under the leadership of Robert Herbert without any experience of a local legislature and with, literally, an empty treasury; just before the arrival of Governor Bowen, someone stole the seven-and-a-half pennies remaining. To make matters worse for the new colony, the Sydney government, disgruntled by separation, had presented Bowen with a £20,000 bill for works carried out in the northern districts in earlier years. The new colony was beginning on a note of farce, behind which a human tragedy was unfolding. The government’s income, derived mainly from land, was insufficient to meet the cost of public works and administration.8 Henry Reynolds and Dawn May have observed that the financial situation led to a mood of both anticipation and deep insecurity, while Raymond Evans concludes: ‘To begin with, it represented a new venture in imperialism; that is, colonisation on the cheap and at arm’s length.’9 The pastoralist-­dominated government sought the rapid expansion of pastoral settlement to bring in much-­needed funds. As historian George Shaw argues, the squatters chose to ‘hail the north as a haven for the unrestricted capital investment in large scale squatting’ rather than adopt the land reforms occurring in the southern colonies encouraging smaller-­scale land use.10 Pastoralists were electorally dominant in part because of the restricted franchise operating until 1872, by which time the imbalance in the size of rural and urban electorates had become so much in favour of pastoralists that manhood suffrage posed little threat to their parliamentary dominance.11 The colony was supposed to have the same system of government as New South Wales, which would have meant manhood suffrage, but on the matter of the franchise, the Order in Council authorising separation was contradictory. When the matter was referred for clarification to Sir Alfred Stephen, the conservative chief justice of New South Wales and an opponent of the electoral reforms of 1858, he ruled that the voting qualifications for the new colony should be those of New South Wales prior to legislative reforms. As a result, a third of the men in the northern colony who could have voted under the 1858 Electoral Reform Act now found themselves ineligible.12 While the new Queensland legislature had the power to restore universal male franchise, its conservative composition

Indigenous Children in Australian History, New York: Berghahn, 2004, p. 163. Pastoralism generated 70 per cent of the colony’s revenue and 94 per cent of its exports, see French, ‘Squatters and separation’, p. 812. 8  Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 78–9; Gordon Reid, ‘That Unhappy Race’: Queensland and the Aboriginal Problem, 1838–1901, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006, p. 26. 9  Evans, A History of Queensland, p. 78; Henry Reynolds and Dawn May, ‘Queensland’, in Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995, p. 171. 10  George Shaw, “‘Filched from us”: The loss of universal manhood suffrage in Queensland 1859–1863’,Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 26, no. 3, 1980, p. 375. 11  Shaw, ‘Filched from us’, p. 384; Hirst, Australia’s Democracy, p. 58. 12  Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 79–80; Shaw, ‘Filched from us’, p. 373.

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meant that it chose not to do so. It chose also to maintain a nominated upper house, despite a campaign in 1861 to make it elected. According to Raymond Evans and W. Ross Johnston, most of the colony’s first politicians had little or no experience of government and apart from a vague division between country and town, there was no strong party culture or solid alliances. The urban population were developing strong political views, but perhaps lacked the experience to take effective action; according to Evans, the majority of new migrants came from poor backgrounds and arrived through assisted schemes, into an environment where young, strong labourers were in demand and education and artistry were often considered a waste of time.13 Members often acted individually and opportunistically, and had little understanding of parliamentary procedures. Afraid that anarchy might break out, Governor Bowen handpicked the Legislative Council (the upper house) mainly from wealthy squatters, while hoping to keep firm control of most matters himself.14 Alison Palmer and Craig Proctor argue that, in light of the colony’s political inexperience and initial scarcity of resources, Bowen had in fact sufficient authority and power to influence both the government and the administration on matters of Aboriginal policy.15 Certainly, in common with all the governors of these years, his royal instructions had been to ‘promote religion and education among the native inhabitants’, to ‘especially take care to protect them in their persons and in the free enjoyment of their possessions’, to ‘prevent and restrain all violence and injustice which may in any manner be practised or attempted against them’, and to take the necessary measures ‘for their conversion to the Christian Faith and for their advancement in civilization’.16 Palmer and Proctors’ point concerning Bowen’s opportunity to influence Aboriginal policy is probably true to a certain extent, but Bowen’s early reports to the Colonial Office indicate that his views were generally in sympathy with the pastoralist-­dominated government he oversaw. As Mark Finnane records, he wrote of an imperial mission to subdue the north, with Aboriginal people portrayed less as subjects of the Crown and more as unfamiliar savages, with whom some kind of border warfare might prove inevitable.17

 Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 83–90.  Ibid.  Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide, Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2000, p. 6; Craig Proctor, ‘The Office of Governor: Governors 1859–1920’, in Kay Cohen and Kenneth Wiltshire, eds., People, Places and Policies: Aspects of Queensland Government Administration 1859–1920, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1995, pp. 3–5. 16  Royal Instructions to His Excellency Sir George Ferguson Bowen, K.C.M.G., QLCVP, 1860, p. 5. 17  Mark Finnane, ‘Crimes of violence, crimes of empire?’, in Barry S. Godfrey and Graeme Dunstall, eds., Crime and Empire 1840s–1940: Criminal Justice in Local and Global Context, Oregon: William Publishing, 2005, pp. 52–3; see also Richards, The Secret War, p. 185. 13 14 15

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The Native Mounted Police under Responsible Government One of the first acts of the new government was to establish a Select Committee to report to the Assembly on the Queensland police force, including the Native Mounted Police (it was also, at the time, referred to as the Native Police, or the Native Police Force). The Select Committee, the first appointed in Queensland on any topic, was prompted by arguments over the unity and cohesiveness of the Queensland police in general, and especially over whether local magistrates or a central Inspector-­General should control recruitment and dismissals. (Magisterial power remained, but was phased out in favour of a uniform system during the 1860s.)18 Public consciousness of the need for policing was high, especially after the killing of the crew of the wrecked Sapphire on the Great Barrier Reef earlier that year, leading one writer to the Moreton Bay Courier to suggest that the government should borrow a man-of-war from Sydney and use it to bring ‘punishment’ to the Torres Strait.19 When discussing the regular police, the committee focused on straightforward administrative matters, but their findings on the Native Mounted Police were quite different and presented separately. Their task was to suggest how to make the force more efficient, in order to better support pastoralists. The committee did not seek Aboriginal opinions of the Native Mounted Police, or consider their treatment by it. The Native Mounted Police was widely regarded as a ‘frontier’ presence, with attendant hints of illegality, wildness, and distance, and there in the committee’s deliberations there was some discussion about whether colonists could perhaps form their own ‘protective force’ instead. If some of the language witnesses used suggested a body beyond the control of the state, the Native Mounted Police was in fact a government and not a private force. The committee recommended expanding the Native Mounted Police ‘as new country becomes occupied’ and recruiting Aboriginal troopers from far away districts to do so.20 Most witnesses agreed that the government should not increase the number of white troopers, as black ones were more effective in the bush.21 One witness, John Ferrett, member of the Assembly for Maranoa, thought that ‘by the present laws they [the Native Mounted Police] have the power of shooting a black fellow when they ought not’, and recommended that the police should be prevented from shooting Aboriginal people attempting to escape arrest, but this suggestion does not seem to have been pursued further.22  Lesley McGregor, ‘The Police Department 1859–1914’, in Kay Cohen and Kenneth Wiltshire, eds., People, Places and Policies, pp. 60–9. 19  Moreton Bay Courier, 27 March 1860, p. 2. 20  ‘Queensland: Final Report from the Select Committee on Police’, 5 September 1860, in Queensland: Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, Brisbane:, T. P. Pugh, 1860, pp. 534–65. 21  Ibid., pp. 534–65. 22  Ibid., p. 565. 18

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When the final committee report was tabled in the Assembly in September 1860, there appears to have been little debate, apart from some disagreement over who should appoint the white officers. The colonial secretary remarked with some pride that the Native Mounted Police would become more efficient now that Queenslanders had their own government, and reiterated the importance of retaining a police force in districts like Gladstone where ‘the blacks were numerous and daring’ and the government was still selling tens of thousands of pounds worth of land. The Assembly adopted the report without opposition.23 In the months after the select committee report, however, stories abounded of continuing Native Mounted Police atrocities. This led the Assembly to appoint yet another committee of inquiry in May 1861.24 As Gordon Reid notes, this would prove to be the only proper parliamentary report on race relations with Aboriginal people produced in Queensland during the colonial period and as such is worthy of some close attention.25 The events precipitating this second inquiry began when John Mortimer, owner of Manumbar sheep station 120 kilometres north-­west of Brisbane and relatively sympathetic to Aboriginal people, placed a paid advertisement in the Moreton Bay Courier alleging murderous behaviour by the Native Mounted Police on and around his station.26 At around the same time, Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler of the Native Mounted Police was accused of involvement in the murders of several Aboriginal people at Fassifern, 80 kilometres south-­west of Brisbane. Unlike the area around Manumbar, this was a long ‘settled’ district, where many Aboriginal people were already working for squatters. Following complaints of Aboriginal people killing stock, the Native Mounted Police had been called in. They surrounded an Aboriginal camp at night and opened fire, killing an unrecorded number of people. Such behaviour may not have been exceptional for the Native Mounted Police, but in this case, the employer of one of the dead men complained to the magistrate and coroner, Dr Henry Challinor. Challinor, who was also member of the Legislative Assembly for the seat of Ipswich, investigated and then reported to the attorney-­general that three people had died at the hands of the Native Mounted Police, with a pastoralist and the local police magistrate clearly implicated. Ratcliff Pring, the English-­born  Moreton Bay Courier, 8 September 1860, pp. 3, 6; ‘Queensland: Final Report from the Select Committee on Police’, pp. 534–65. 24  Malcolm Prentis is one of a number of historians to have investigated the series of events leading to the appointment of this second and most important Select Committee. Malcolm D. Prentis, ‘John Mortimer of Manumbar and the 1861 Native Police Inquiry in Queensland’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol. 14, May 1992, pp. 466–80. 25  Reid, That Unhappy Race, pp. 38–9. 26  Moreton Bay Courier, 16 March 1861, p. 3; Denis Cryle, The Press in Colonial Queensland: A Social and Political History, 1845–1875, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989, pp. 67–8; Prentis, ‘John Mortimer of Manumbar’, p. 474. 23

Their Worst Fears Realised 319

attorney-­general, refused to lay blame on those involved. Lieutenant Wheeler was simply reprimanded and moved to another district.27 Outraged, Challinor, like Mortimer, gave information to the Courier. At this time the newspaper was under the editorship of Theophilus Pugh, the West-Indian-born son of an English Methodist minister, who had served in the West Indies and was sympathetic to anti-­slavery and Aboriginal causes.28 In the months after the Fassifern incident, the Native Mounted Police attracted some other criticism, in the form of letters to the press complaining that the Native Mounted Police were brutal and undisciplined and that their excessive violence was making frontier conflict worse.29 One of the fiercest critics of the force was its own former commandant, Frederick Walker, whom we last met in Chapter 7 and who had been sacked in 1855; by this time, he was protesting publicly about the force he used to command. He alleged that the Native Mounted Police were recklessly vicious, preventing squatters from training Aboriginal people as useful labourers, and even tormenting and murdering their own native troopers.30 In April 1861, he wrote to the colonial secretary from Rockhampton, complaining that the Native Mounted Police had been attacking Aboriginal people near Comet River, where they had been working on Mr Rolleston’s station. The surrounding district of the Fitzroy River catchment, which included the Dawson, Comet, Nogoa, and McKenzie rivers, had been the scene of land grabs and notorious violence already, most infamously in relation to the Hornet Bank killings of 1857.31 Walker, alone with one servant on his own station nearby, said he felt anxious – ‘the whole tribe of blacks were dreadfully excited, and accused me and all Europeans of complicity in what they rightfully termed treachery’.32 William Blight, Lieutenant of the Native Mounted Police, in response to the questions from the colonial secretary, said that Lieutenant Patrick had had to fire upon the Aboriginal people in question in self-­defence, and that most squatters were perfectly happy to have the Native Mounted Police in their district.33  Luke Godwin points out that the Fassifern killings raise real questions about how we think about the ‘frontier’, given the relatively long history of colonialism here, the arbitrary outburst of violence from a ‘legal’ force, the official investigation that followed, and the weakness of the outcome. Note also that Wheeler continued to be accused of acts of racial brutality, before finally being arrested in 1876 for the savage murder of a young Indigenous man. He escaped custody and was later reported to have fled the country; Godwin, ‘The fluid frontier’, pp. 114–6; Reid, That Unhappy Race, p. 35. 28  Rosalind Kidd, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs, The Untold Story, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997, p. 13. 29  For example, Courier (Brisbane), 25 November 1861, p. 3; Maitland Mercury, 12 January 1861, p. 7S. 30  Evans, History of Queensland, pp. 72–3; Reid, That Unhappy Race, pp. 30–1. 31  Godwin, ‘The fluid frontier’, p. 101. 32  ‘Queensland: Final Report from the Select Committee on Police’, p. 577. 33  Ibid., p. 578. 27

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The publicity in the Courier, and the complaints to the colonial secretary, had an effect. In opening the colony’s second parliament on 30 April 1861, Governor Bowen recommended an inquiry to investigate the condition of the Aborigines and to inquire into ways to make the police more efficient. Bowen may have seen this as an opportunity for some review of Aboriginal policy by the fledgling government over which he now presided, but the Assembly was firmly under pastoralist control.34 The next day, Robert Mackenzie, a pastoralist born to a wealthy family in Ross-­shire, Scotland and now the member for Burnett (itself a scene of intense frontier conflict) and new colonial Treasurer, moved in the Assembly for a new Select Committee to inquire into the organisation and management of the Native Mounted Police, and in particular to consider the Manumbar, Fassifern, and two other incidents. In addition, the Assembly instructed it to inquire into ‘how far it may be practicable to ameliorate the present condition of the Aborigines of this Colony’.35 The members of the committee of seven, headed by MacKenzie, were nearly all pastoralists, and two owned stations in the area where the incidents under investigation had taken place. Every member was a known supporter of the Native Mounted Police (one had a son in the force) and opposed attempts to protect and support Aboriginal people.36 Significantly, Challinor, one of the few Assembly members known to be sympathetic to Aboriginal people, was not included. The committee spoke to thirty witnesses, its questions directed at finding ways to make the Native Mounted Police more useful to squatters. The chair questioned witnesses who were openly critical of the Native Mounted Police, such as Challinor and Mortimer, in a manner Malcolm Prentis accurately describes as ‘aggressive and pedantic’.37 Mortimer said that the Native Mounted Police had killed at least four Aboriginal people near his station, where he was employing them, and wounded two of his labourers. He believed there had been more victims; his workers invited him to view the bodies but he refused. Mortimer did not oppose the Native Mounted Police as such, but he objected to this violence. The attack had occurred, he said, despite the Aboriginal men having followed his advice not to run from the police but to identify themselves as in his employ.38  See Bowen to Newcastle, 6 September 1861 and 16 December 1861, cited in J. C. H. Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines: A documentary review’, Queensland Heritage, vol. 2, no. 7, 1972, p. 9. 35  ‘Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force and the Condition of the Aborigines Generally; together with the proceedings of the committee and the minutes of evidence’, ordered to be printed on 17 July 1861, Queensland: Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, 1861, accessible online at https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/catalogue_ resources/92123.pdf. Accessed on 14 May 2018. 36  See the report from Brisbane correspondent, The Argus, 8 August, 1861, p. 5, reprinted in the Hobart Mercury, 13 August 1861, p. 3; Prentis, ‘John Mortimer of Banumbar’, pp. 474–5. 37  Prentis, ‘John Mortimer of Banumbar’, p. 475. 38  Queensland, Legislative Assembly (QLA), Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, pp. 102–8. 34

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Some colonists portrayed the Native Mounted Police as a kind of buffer, rationalising their use of terror on the grounds that ordinary colonists, if they had to protect themselves, would be forced to do worse. Charles Frederick Doyle Parkinson, of Kenilworth station in the Burnett district, warned that if the Native Mounted Police were withdrawn, squatters would be driven to worse violence than ever – ‘If so, they must shoot everything they see that is black.’39 Others wanted the illegal activities of the Native Mounted Police to be made permissible, or in other words, for the law to recognise and support its own suspension. John Hardie, a squatter near Fassifern, for example, said he saw no problem with ‘dispersing’ a whole group of people if the identity of cattle thieves was unknown. He also called for the police to be authorised to shoot dead a particular Aboriginal man, believed locally to have raped a white girl, and for a change in the law – it was absurd, he claimed, that they were required to know the names of suspects before issuing a warrant.40 Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler, who stood accused of brutality, also insisted that warrants were useless and that it was common practice to ‘disperse’ people without them.41 Some other witnesses wanted the Native Mounted Police made into a more formal, military body, with powers of martial law. John O’Connell Bligh, acting commandant of the Native Mounted Police, saw them as in a state of warfare already, and combining images of law and military conflict he declared that the Aboriginal people regarded the Native Mounted Police as ‘officers of justice, to punish them when they deserve it ... nothing but fear prevents them from carrying on a regular system of warfare’.42 John Ker Wilson, who had been a squatter in the north for 20 years, told the committee he was concerned that all killings of Aboriginal people were, in theory, crimes under the law. Wilson drew a distinction between the actions of the Native Mounted Police, which he considered necessary, and random acts of violence by foolish settlers. At present, he claimed, magistrates were obliged to ignore all of these killings equally, a practice which made Wilson uncomfortable. ‘The system does not appear to me,’ he said, ‘to be a legal one, and it would be impossible to pass any law to legalise the acts of the Force, because you would have to pass a law to render killings no murder.’ The possibility that magistrates might prosecute all these killings equally did not seem to occur to Wilson, nor to the committee. Rather, he recommended that the government make the Native Mounted Police into a military force, so that they could declare any district they entered as being under a state of siege. ‘The acts of the Force would then be legal, and the magistrates could act with them; besides which, the Government would

 QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, p. 138.  Ibid., pp. 97–101. 41  Ibid., 1861, p. 31. 42  Ibid., p. 156. 39 40

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be relieved from a great deal of embarrassment’.43 Wilson was not the only witness advocating a military force and the declaration of martial law when necessary. Maurice Charles O’Connell, the president of the Legislative Council and a former soldier and then Commissioner of Crown Lands, had acquired several squatting properties and claimed to have ridden out with parties that pursued people into the scrub. He said he would have preferred a military unit with predominantly white troopers, and wanted to legalise and regulate some forms of violence by declaring certain districts to be under martial law.44 He disapproved of the Native Mounted Police in their current form, stating they were out of control and he could not condone their actions. They pursued a policy of ‘extermination’ with no regard for human life at all. ‘If you want to destroy the blacks by wholesale slaughter,’ he declared, ‘you could not find people more suited for the purpose than the Native Police.’45 Thus, even those (few) witnesses to the committee who were hostile towards the Native Mounted Police were not opposed to violent frontier policing per se. Few witnesses seriously doubted the need for violent assertion of British power in the north. In contrast to some settlers in Victoria and South Australia during this era, Queensland’s 1861 committee and its witnesses showed very little interest in governing Aboriginal people at all, though there was some limited interest in training them as labourers.46 William Ridley, the missionary who had raised concerns about dispossession in the north during the 1850s, was one of the few who suggested more missionary work, drawing Aboriginal people gradually into European life through light rural labour and schooling.47 Even two former missionaries, Augustus Rode and John Zillman, told the committee they would be reluctant to try any new ‘civilising’ projects, though Zillman did suggest employing Aboriginal people in the new cotton farming industry.48 Both men had been with Schmidt and Eipper’s missionary party in Moreton Bay in 1838 and were now farmers in the Caboolture district. Their early failures to make Aboriginal converts had left them discouraged, and they supported the presence of the Native Mounted Police, claiming it kept Aboriginal aggression in check. The only other government policy mentioned in evidence was the practice of regular blanket distribution inherited from New South Wales, which was continuing in some areas, and considered by settlers to be a conciliatory gesture  Ibid., p. 72.  H. J. Gibbney, ‘O’Connell, Sir Maurice Charles (1812–1879)’, ADB, online vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1974, pp. 350–1. 45  QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, p. 83. 46  Evidence of O’Connell, QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, pp. 84–7. 47  Reid, That Unhappy Race, pp. 43–7. 48  QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, pp. 60, 76–8; Reid, That Unhappy Race, p. 49. 43 44

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and a way of keeping track of the Aboriginal population. The blanket distribution was supported by the hierarchy of the Native Mounted Police, E. M. V. Morissett, commandant of the Native Mounted Police, and John O’Connell Bligh, the acting commandant, both favouring it as promoting friendly feeling. The witnesses to the committee generally endorsed the popular portrayal of Aboriginal people as impossible to bring under civilised rule, with no political views worth considering. One squatter, Jacob Lowe, said of the Aboriginal people ‘the only reason for their being in a state of subordination is to be found in their dread for a white man; it is not respect or love, but fear’.49 Another colonist of twenty-five years’ experience, John Davies, added, ‘If you want peace and quietness the blacks must be kept in a state of bodily dread.’50 Some witnesses were adamant that ceremonial gatherings ought to be broken up, insisting they were dangerous, for they allowed the exchange of information about settlers’ vulnerabilities, and could be a prelude to war.51 There was, however, some interest in how Aboriginal people understood the relationship between the white settlers and the Native Mounted Police. Some witnesses suggested Aboriginal people did not associate the Native Mounted Police directly with white colonists, or did not see white colonists as responsible for the force’s actions. The squatters Charles Hay and John Ker Wilson, for instance, told the committee that Aboriginal people did not necessarily assume the Native Mounted Police were aligned with the squatters, and indeed sometimes sought squatters’ protection against them.52 They were pleased by this disassociation, since it meant violence by black troopers did not lead to revenge attacks in the way violence by white troopers would have done.53 It is hard from this kind of evidence to determine how Aboriginal people saw the participation of Aboriginal men, some from nearby regions and others from far away. Some witnesses reported that local Aboriginal women were living with the troopers, and while these witnesses agreed (without much concern) that this might well be out of fear, they added that the women’s families may also have hoped to negotiate better treatment through these relationships.54 Notoriously, the committee’s report, released in July 1861, exonerated the force.55 It concluded that the Native Mounted Police had been efficient in reducing loss of life and of property for colonists, and that it would be unwise to replace them with white troopers and disastrous to disband it. Excessive  QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, p. 8.  Ibid., p. 58. 51  Ibid., p. 9. 52  Ibid., pp. 71–5, 79–82. 53  Ibid., pp. 71–5, 79–82. See also evidence by Leonard Lester, p. 110. 54  For example, QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, p. 156. 55  Evans, History of Queensland, p.  95; R.B. Joyce, ‘MacKenzie, Sir Robert Ramsay (1811– 1873)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 171–2. 49 50

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violence was blamed on individual officers, and the committee stated that while it did not approve of ‘indiscriminate slaughter’, they appreciated it was hard to make Aboriginal people amenable to British law. It recommended some changes to methods of recruitment, management, and discipline. The report also suggested there was no need for protective or civilising measures, since Aboriginal people were incorrigibly savage and that all efforts to civilise and control them had failed.56 The evidence taken by the committee, it said, ‘shews beyond doubt that all attempts to Christianise or educate the aborigines of Australia have hitherto proved abortive’, on the grounds that despite education, ‘the Natives of both sexes invariably return to their savage habits’. The report went on to say that they were ‘addicted to cannibalism’, had ‘no idea of a future state’, and are ‘sunk in the lowest depths of barbarism”. Missions and schools in the different colonies had ‘but partial success’.57 There was no recommendation for the formation of the office of Protector or Guardian on Victorian lines, despite Challinor’s suggestion in his evidence that they ought to do so, and little suggestion of support for missionary or other educational endeavour. The committee’s only recommendation for action to improve Aboriginal people’s social condition was to establish, on Zillman’s recommendation, a Missionary Cotton Company. The government would supply land and other assistance, and in return, it would seek to educate the children and employ the parents in cotton growing.58 The Assembly adopted the report, though there was no enthusiasm for the suggestion for a Missionary Cotton Company. It is worth noting, however, that there were dissenting voices against the committee’s report. Theophilus Pugh’s Courier (formerly the Moreton Bay Courier), for example, was appalled at the committee’s findings; we should not, it wrote, ‘protect aggression, and violence, and murder’.59 It also commented angrily on the section dealing with the condition of the Aboriginal people. The paper suggested that the committee members were ignorant and might learn from the great orators on the question of African slavery, such as Burke and Wilberforce, before again entering into ‘discussions on the nature of the savage, or the means for his civilisation’.60 Despite this dissent, the government continued to operate in the spirit of the report, on the one hand funding and maintaining the Native Mounted Police, which continued its task of quelling Aboriginal resistance often with little regard for Aboriginal life, and on the other excusing itself from virtually any responsibility for Aboriginal protection and welfare. There was in some areas an annual blanket distribution,

 QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, 1861, pp. 1–5.  Ibid., 17 July 1861, p. 4. 58  Ibid., p. 5. 59  Courier, 27 July 1861, p. 2; Cryle, The Press in Colonial Queensland, p. 67. 60  Courier, 27 July 1861, p. 2. 56 57

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and a few pockets of land were reserved for future missions in the southern region of the colony, but that was all.61 Three months after the tabling of the report a series of events occurred that were both shocking and unsurprising. On 17 October 1861, at the Cullin-laringo station, between Emerald and Springsure, near the district Walker had spoken about, a group of Aboriginal men attacked the homestead, killing nineteen Europeans: the Wills family, including most of their children and their employees. In recent months, this district had been stocked with sheep and white workers, and Horatio Wills, who had established the station, had favoured friendly accommodation with Aboriginal people. Luke Godwin suggests earlier violence by other settlers and the Native Mounted Police, which Walker and a neighbouring squatter, C. B. Dutton, had protested about in vain, may have prompted the attacks.62 Despite evidence of settler provocation through the abduction of two Aboriginal boys, settlers saw Aboriginal people as murderous and never to be trusted.63 To them, the murders simply proved Wills’ folly in trying to befriend Aboriginal people, and they launched a bloody campaign of retaliation. As Jonathon Richards comments, ‘If the Hornet Bank reprisals were bad, those that followed the Cullin-la-ringo episode were worse’.64 Seven Native Mounted Police detachments were sent into the region and they, along with local colonists, set out to kill or terrorise all Aboriginal people within reach, including some who had been working, apparently peaceably, on nearby stations.65 One letter in the Courier stated, ‘We all sincerely hope and trust that after this exploit of the niggers, strong measures will be taken for their suppression.’66 Henry Reynolds has identified the reign of terror after Cullin-laringo as one of Queensland’s ‘genocidal moments’, when police and colonists attempted to destroy particular Aboriginal societies completely.67 Gordon Reid names this and the earlier Hornet Bank bloody episode as key events in the developing psyche of the colony, occurring as they did just before and just after separation from New South Wales.68

 Kidd, The Way We Civilise, p. 14.  Luke Godwin, ‘The fluid frontier’, pp. 110–11; see also Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, Ringwood: Penguin, 1981 (1990), pp. 79–80. 63  See Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land, pp. 48–9. 64  Richards, The Secret War, p. 23. 65  Evans, History of Queensland, p. 95; Godwin, ‘The fluid frontier’, pp. 112–13. Note: Evans identifies the Aboriginal nation concerned as the Kairi, while Reynolds considers Wadja men to have been the original killers. Either way, the retaliatory violence by colonists seems to have been directed at multiple Indigenous societies in the surrounding areas. 66  Courier (Brisbane), 9 November 1861. 67  Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, pp. 122–30. 68  Reid, That Unhappy Race, p. 34. 61 62

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The Violent 1860s The spread of British settlement through the north continued to be uneven and at times chaotic. The economy remained almost totally dependent on pastoralism, and townspeople complained that the rural sector was over-­ represented in parliament.69 Employment rates were unpredictable, and there was a depression from 1866 to 1871.70 Racial and class politics in the region (already tense) were complicated further when gold was discovered in the late 1860s at Crocodile Creek, Gympie, Cape River, Gilbert Range and Normanfield. Attracting European and Chinese gold-­seekers, they saw violent clashes between Aboriginal people and the British and Chinese miners.71 Frontier violence continued during the 1860s and 1870s, as colonists moved north-­west towards the Gulf and south-­west into Channel country. Indeed, Raymond Evans suggests these may have been the most turbulent decades of all, with massive loss of life, mostly on the Aboriginal side. Evans and Henry Reynolds have observed that colonists spoke publicly of their sense of fear, anxiety and rage, and the language of ‘extermination’ was common.72 As we saw in Chapter 9, British officials had by the mid-­1860s become aware of and concerned by Queensland’s policy of open (if unofficial) warfare with Aboriginal people. When Secretary of State, Bulwer Lytton, challenged the colony’s approach to Aboriginal policy in 1865, after learning of frontier violence in Cape York, both Governor Bowen and the colonial government spoke strongly in defence of the existing policy. In preparing his response to Bulwer Lytton, Bowen consulted the colony’s executive council, and on 5 July 1865 forwarded it to Britain its view with his full support. The executive council’s argument could not have been clearer: we pay for the policing necessary for our own protection, we know best, and the imperial government has no place in this matter. ‘As every man practically acquainted with Australian Colonisation will testify’, the Council agreed, ‘nothing had occurred with regard to the Natives at Cape York but what has occurred, is occurring, and will continue to occur on the formation of every new settlement, and on the formation of every new pastoral Station throughout this continent’. The executive council went on to assert its authority in matters of Aboriginal policy. ‘The example of New Zealand,’ it continued, ‘assuredly shows the danger of divided authority in dealing with Native tribes, and the lamentable waste of blood and treasure arising principally from such divided authority.’ The settlement at Cape York, the council pointed out,  Johnston, The Call of the Land, p. 98.  Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 84–92.  Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 75, 104–5; Reid, That Unhappy Race, p. 70. 72  Evans, A History of Queensland, pp. 70–1, 92–3; Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp. 152–3; see also Raymond Evans, ‘The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars’, in Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, and John Docker, eds., Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2010, pp. 9–30. 69 70 71

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was being managed by the colonial government, which was paying for policing of Aboriginal-­settler relations; it was not, therefore, a matter for the Imperial government. The ‘entire cost of the Native Police Corps’, it pointed out, ‘is borne by the people of this Colony, who pay per head for protection more than [do] the people of the United Kingdom’. The Queensland government would, then, ‘continue to deal out impartial justice to both races of the Queen’s subjects in this Colony’, providing legal counsel for Aboriginal people charged with murder, and supplying blankets annually, and medical assistance.73 The request from Viscount Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State, in March 1866 for Bowen to explain further and supply regular reports seems to have angered Bowen, who then sought comments from all and sundry. He finally replied on 12 November 1866, forwarding the views of the executive council, Robert Herbert, and the commissioner of police, together with other material.74 Together these documents provide an insight into Queensland government thinking on Aboriginal policy at this time. The executive council commented that there were three ways to protect settlers in situations where there was a ‘numerous and hostile Aboriginal population’, namely provision of imperial troops, provision of a local police force, or leaving the settlers to protect themselves. The imperial government had chosen the first option in New Zealand, and the second in Queensland. That Queensland was saving the Imperial Treasury approximately ‘at least half a million sterling of British money yearly’ had never been acknowledged by Britain. The third option, of leaving it to the settlers, had in the past led to frequent massacres and terrible retribution by aggrieved settlers. Britain had been responsible for Aboriginal policy from 1788 until 1856, during which time ‘great cruelties were occasionally perpetrated on the Aborigines’, especially in Tasmania (a significant reference, pointing to the way in which the events in Tasmania decades earlier were particularly well remembered, as they are today). Now, under responsible government, the matter was under the control of the Native Mounted Police, who confined themselves ‘strictly to the law’.75 If the executive council was annoyed by Cardwell’s ‘please explain’, that was nothing compared to Robert Herbert’s comments of 20 June 1866. ‘Every method of dealing with these very dangerous savages,’ he wrote, ‘has been tried and I believe no more satisfactory system can be devised (unless perhaps by a very large expenditure of Imperial funds).’ The people of Queensland, he  Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, pp. 17–18, citing Bowen to Cardwell, Despatch 41, 5 July 1865, enclosure 3, Queensland State Archives, GOV/24. See also Reynolds, ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland’, p. 57. 74  Bowen to Cardwell, 12 November 1866, cited in Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 29, fn. 65. 75  Bowen to Cardwell, 12 November 1866, enclosure 1, cited in Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 29, fn. 66. 73

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went on, ‘endeavour humanely and conscientiously to deal with a difficulty which (it is feared) can never terminate except with the gradual disappearance of the unimprovable race’. Things were better, he suggested, under responsible government than they had been when Britain was more directly in charge: [I]t is an undeniable fact that since the establishment of Parliamentary Government has brought all classes of the community into closer contact with the administration, their good feeling and humanity has effectually operated to prevent the recurrence of acts of cruelty and oppressions which unfortunately occurred at an earlier period.76

Herbert was right about closer contact between government and settlers, but the results were far from those he described. Rather, the violence of earlier periods continued unabated. As Tracey Banivanua Mar argues, the atmosphere of violence in the north was neither marginal nor secret, but rather was widely considered a normal and inevitable part of the colonising process.77 The Native Mounted Police had become essential to colonial expansion and the establishment of colonial society. Colonists considered it well worth the cost, which was considerable. While the Native Mounted Police was cheaper than a similar force using white police, it was still a substantial expense; according to Henry Reynolds, the Native Mounted Police cost about £300,000 between 1860 and 1880, making it one of Queensland’s largest single items of expenditure.78 The cost in human lives was much greater; while the number is still unknown, historians Ray Evans and Robert Orsted-­Jensen contend the European settlement of Queensland may have led to over 60,000 Aboriginal deaths.79 Missions, Schooling, and Aboriginal Labour While many squatters favoured the Native Mounted Police policy and practice of keeping Aboriginal people off pastoral runs, others welcomed or tolerated their presence as labourers. Despite continuing violence, Robert Christison, whose daughter Mary Bennett would decades later become a major campaigner for Aboriginal rights and who enshrined the memory of her father in a notable biography, Christison of Lammermoor, in 1864 encouraged the local  Bowen to Cardwell, Despatch 61, 12 November 1866, enclosure 2, cited in Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 22. 77  Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Stabilising violence in colonial rule: Settlement and the Indentured Labour Trade in Queensland in the 1870s’, in Tracey Banivanua Mar and Julie Evans, eds., Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives, Carlton: University of Melbourne, 2002, pp. 146, 149, 151–52. 78  Reynolds, ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland’, p. 57. 79  Ray Evans and Robert Orsted-Jensen, “‘I cannot say the numbers that were killed”: Assessing violent mortality on the Queensland frontier’, Social Science Research Network, 2014, 2467836, pp. 1–11. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2467836. 76

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Dalleburra people to work for him on his station, Lammermoor, 300 kilometres west of the town of Bowen.80 The use of Aboriginal labour, however, could be a source of tension when it collided with the Native Mounted Police’s campaigns of terror.81 In October 1867, for example, Charles Cowper of Wahyanoorah on the Warrego River complained to the Queensland government that the Native Mounted Police were a dangerous hindrance to pastoralists, exacerbating trouble by attacking Aboriginal station workers.82 Given frontier violence and the danger it posed to Aboriginal employees, cotton and sugar planters, pearlers and some pastoralists chose to make use of indentured labourers from the western Pacific instead.83 Sugar growers, in particular, who grew in number from the mid 1860s, brought large numbers of Melanesian labourers into Queensland, in conditions of virtual slavery, to work on the plantations.84 Yet over time, as frontier violence receded in one region after another and the Native Mounted Police were no longer needed, pastoralists did turn to Aboriginal labour in greater numbers. This possibility was signaled from early on; in April 1867, at a public meeting in Bowen, northern settlers said it was time to reverse the policy of keeping Aboriginal people out and instead to allow them in, as was common in New South Wales.85 Despite some local and government opposition, northern employers did increasingly employ Aboriginal labour from around this time. The Kennedy district, which had been the scene of frontier conflict for some time, saw squatters beginning to employ Aboriginal people from 1869.86 As Dawn May points out, very often Aboriginal people from other districts, used to working for settlers, acted as intermediaries, assisting local people to adjust to their new circumstances. Despite a period of uneasiness, where frontier violence might re-­emerge and Aboriginal people again kept away from the stations, by the early 1870s, ‘letting in’ had become common in the north. When white labour departed for the goldfields on the Palmer River in 1873, Aboriginal people were increasingly employed on pastoral stations.87  Dawn May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from White Settlement to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 41.  Godwin, ‘The fluid frontier’, p. 112. For a discussion of Robert Christison and Mary Bennett’s biography of him, see Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights, Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2015, pp. 58–61. 82  Queensland: Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly during the second session of 1867, vol. 1, Brisbane, James C. Beal, 1868, pp. 1221–22. 83  Tracey Banivanua-Mar, “‘No Aboriginal Native of... the Islands of the Pacific”: South Sea Islanders and the Distant Vote of the Commonwealth’, in John Chesterman and David Philips, eds., Selective Democracy: Race, Gender and the Australian Vote, Armadale: Melbourne Publishing Group, 2003, pp .72–3; Evans, History of Queensland, pp. 100–2. 84  Evans, A History of Queensland, p. 100. 85  May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry, p. 41. 86  Ibid., p. 42. 87  Ibid., p. 44. 80

81

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There was limited interest in establishing missions in this period, but the little there was often included a desire to employ Aboriginal labour, seen both as a method of imparting civilisation and as supporting the commercial operations missions might need to survive, in the absence of government and missionary society support. The Select Committee’s Report on the Native Mounted Police in 1861 had led the way, with its enthusiasm for the idea of a Cotton Missionary Cotton Company. A similar idea lay behind the Queensland parliament’s resolution of August 1864, authorising (at Governor Bowen’s instigation) the government to grant land to anyone who would improve Aboriginal conditions by introducing missions or industrial schools.88 Bowen chaired a public meeting on 5 October 1864 in support of missionary proposals, at which the Reverend Alexander J. Campbell, a Presbyterian clergyman from Geelong, urged they do more to ameliorate the condition of Aboriginal people.89 Campbell described Victorian government policy and urged the meeting to support similar measures – setting aside reserves, supplying rations, and establishing a board to help administer Aboriginal policy.90 Queensland, however, with its continuing project of seizing the land and quelling Aboriginal resistance, was not Victoria, and philanthropic suggestions were usually ignored. As Gordon Reid comments, ‘The first decade of independence for Queensland had not produced any official acceptance of a responsibility to improve the conditions of the Aboriginal people, nor indeed of the notion that as the “original possessors of the soil”, to use a phrase commonly heard in Victoria at this time, they had any call upon the state.’91 Governor Bowen did manage to persuade the London-­ based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to send a missionary and a schoolmaster to Cape York, who began work in early 1867, but in the context of intertribal fighting, government abandonment of the nearest settlement, and insufficient support from the society, the mission soon failed.92 Despite the parliamentary resolution of August 1864, the Queensland government did not create any Aboriginal reserves until 1870.93 There was, however, some interest in the idea of training Aboriginal children and youth as labourers. The few mission projects of the 1860s, none of which received government support, took this approach. One Catholic priest, W. J. Larkin, wanted Aboriginal youths to be trained up by clergymen as translators, to encourage interactions that were more peaceful. In January 1866, he travelled around the Warrego, Barcoo, Nive, Flinders, and Thompson River districts and claimed to have seen terrible evidence of white cruelty. Bowen  See Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 12.  Ibid., p. 13. 90  Ibid., pp. 13–14. 91  Reid, That Unhappy Race, p. 76. 92  Gill, ‘Governor Bowen and the Aborigines’, p. 25. 93  Palmer, Colonial Genocide, pp. 67, 71. 88 89

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expressed some sympathy with his suggestion of establishing mission schools to train Aboriginal children as labourers, but Premier Herbert told Larkin that the government was too busy dealing with the financial crisis and a new railway project to spare any funds for his activities.94 One missionary managing without government assistance was Johann Gottfried Haussmann, who had been one of the lay missionaries at Nundah from its foundation in 1838 until its dissolution in 1850. In 1866, he returned to mission work, this time in the Beenleigh district on land acquired by his son, establishing a mission he called Bethesda that would last for seventeen years. Without government funding or the assistance of missionary societies, however, private missions of this kind were forced to be self-­sufficient, leading Bethesda, in the words of Regina Ganter and Lilia Vassilief, to hover ‘precariously between an unfunded mission and a commercial enterprise with cheap Aboriginal labour’.95 The uneasy relationship between civilising projects and economic exploitation was especially clear in plans to remove children from their communities and send them to work for settlers. As Shirleene Robinson notes, several newspapers in the north in the late 1860s enthusiastically took up the idea of removing Aboriginal children from their parents in order to make them ‘civilised’. The Port Denison Times, for example, reported in August 1868 on a scheme set up by the Reverend J. K. Black to remove children in the area from their communities and send them to the town of Bowen to be employed by local families, and followed up in May 1869 with a declaration the paper would itself assist such schemes.96 Prince Alfred’s Visit In February 1868, HRH Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, visited Brisbane, as part of his worldwide tour aboard the Galatea. Governor Bowen had just left Queensland to take up the post of governor in New Zealand, and this first-­ ever royal visit was hosted by Acting Governor Maurice O’Connell. It had by this time become accepted that a royal visit entailed some kind of Aboriginal presence or welcome. What would it be in Queensland, where frontier violence continued and there was little government ability to organise any kind of Aboriginal participation? As it turned out, Aboriginal people did figure in this public event, for the first time ever, and in a curiously revealing way. In a bold and rather provocative gesture, given recent heated debates about the Native Mounted Police  Reid, That Unhappy Race, pp. 51l –5, 72–74.  Regina Ganter and Lilia Vassilief, ‘German Missionaries in Australia’, www.missionaries .griffith.edu.au/qld-mission/bethesda-mission-1866-1881. Accessed on 14 May 2018. 96  Shirleene Robinson, Something Like Slavery? Queensland’s Aboriginal Child Workers, 1842–1945, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008, pp. 51–2. 94 95

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in parliament and the press, a squadron of the Native Mounted Police welcomed and escorted the royal party.97 Earlier that year, several politicians had called once more for the Native Mounted Police to be abolished or reformed, alleging that the force was committing atrocities and massacres as part of a policy of ‘extermination’. Other speakers opposed any attempt to weaken the force, warning that such a move would lead to worse violence and reiterating that protection of colonists must be the government’s first priority. Some commentators described Aboriginal people as animals who must be destroyed, and there were angry disagreements about whether they were British subjects at all. In the end, the opponents of the Native Mounted Police did not have the parliamentary numbers to ensure either the abolition or the reform of the Native Mounted Police.98 Its presence at the Duke’s welcome could be taken, then, as a clear government statement of their ongoing use and importance to the empire. The Native Mounted Police were, interestingly, not the only Aboriginal men present on this occasion. Before the royal ship docked, another group lined up along the gangway, to the surprise of the crowd. Thomas Petrie, a friendly colonist who spoke a little of the local Turrbal language, had encouraged them to participate, and organisers had more formally invited them at the last minute. They were, in Petrie’s words, ‘a band of natives, in war costume, with their bodies painted with various coloured clays, and their hair ornamented with feathers’. There were perhaps fifty or sixty men, carrying weapons – ‘an uncommonly fine looking lot ... in very high spirits’. Their country and clans were not recorded; since they had been camped near the city it is possible they had ancestral ties to the surrounding area. They lined up, the press noted, as neatly as soldiers, then marched in the royal parade, singing their ‘war song’, and stood to attention at the gates of Government House as the carriages passed through.99 Two men even climbed up on top of the enormous welcoming arch across Queen Street, and posed there like statues with their weapons.100 No doubt the organisers of the Duke’s welcome intended the Aboriginal presence to add an exotic touch, and perhaps having the Duke meet them  Judith McKay, “‘Celebrating in the streets”: A century of triumphal arches’, Queensland Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 2–4; Queensland Daily Guardian, 25 February 1868, p. 2. Queenslander, 29 February 1868, p. 2. 98  Brisbane Courier,16 January 1868, pp. 3–4; 31 January 1868, p. 2; 7 February 1868, p. 3; 15 February 1868, p. 6; 21 February 1868, p. 2. See also Richards, The Secret War, pp. 46, 95, 104. 99  Constance Campbell Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, Brisbane: Watson Ferguson  & Co., 1904 (1981), pp. 1–9, 210–12. See also Noeline Hall, ‘Petrie, Thomas (1831–1910)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 440–1; Queensland Daily Guardian, 25 February 1868, p. 2; Queenslander, 29 February 1868, p. 2. 100  Judith McKay, “‘Celebrating in the streets”: A century of triumphal arches’, Queensland Review, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 2–4. 97

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first was intended as a re-­enactment of some original moment of conquest. However, the Aboriginal men’s own perspectives seem to have been quite different. It appears they took the occasion seriously and prepared for it with elaborate care. Like many settlers in the crowd, they were disappointed by the Duke’s plain dress; they had been expecting something like the grand attire worn by colonial officials. If the Aboriginal men were performing their identity, they expected royalty to do the same. Still, they gave three cheers for the Queen and told Petrie they would be happy to appear like this again.101 They were paid in money and food, but this was not necessarily the only incentive. If these men were attached to the local area, they may well have felt it appropriate to be the first people to welcome the Duke. Perhaps they were hoping, too, for a stronger connection to the Crown, as is evident in Aboriginal people’s approach to representatives of the Crown in other colonies. If the Aboriginal men intended to make a statement about their own strength and dignity, they may not have been aiming it at the Duke alone. Great crowds of colonists were also watching, and for them, the frontier was by no means a distant memory. Thomas Petrie’s daughter, for example, recalled that her father was deeply aware of the atrocious violence committed against Aboriginal people around Brisbane, but insisted there was nothing he could do, since the authorities themselves condoned it.102 Few of the colonists present at the royal welcome knew that Aboriginal men would be making an appearance, and the newspaper coverage hinted at an atmosphere of fascination and alarm amongst the settlers present. One journalist wrote, only half-­jokingly, that the sudden arrival of the natives ‘suggested to timid minds dreadful thoughts’.103 The uneasiness surrounding this royal arrival seems to have been heightened by the fact that these traditionally dressed Aboriginal men were appearing at the same time and place as the Native Mounted Police. We have not found any mention of the two groups speaking or interacting, but both being present sent out some mixed messages. The presence of the men Petrie had invited on this peaceful and cheerful occasion served as an implicit denial of the clashes taking place elsewhere in the colony, while the Native Mounted Police contingent provided a visual reminder that clashes were, indeed, still occurring. At this celebration of monarchy, empire and settler progress, the theme of war and conquest was overt and uneasy – largely inarticulate, and yet startlingly present. It was a public theatrical moment of extreme uncertainty, unusual in the history of the Empire. However striking the Aboriginal display, though, and whatever the men’s hopes and intentions, it delivered few tangible benefits. It was no coincidence  Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences, pp. 210–12.  Ibid., pp. 1–9.  Queensland Daily Guardian, 25 February 1868, p. 2; Queenslander, 29 February 1868, p. 2.

101 102 103

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that the most detailed and verbally articulate addresses to royalty from this era – from Flinders Island in 1846, Coranderrk in 1863, and Point McLeay in 1867 – all came from Aboriginal settlements governed by missionaries and/or colonial officials. These figures of authority had made reference to the Crown as the fount of order, benevolence, and justice as part of their ordinary daily governance of Aboriginal people, and had actively assisted Aboriginal people to approach the Crown. They hoped to convey a message that the colonial authorities, also subject to the Crown, were supposed to be just and beneficial. The gap between this (supposed) good intention and the often-­oppressive realities of mission life was stark, and events celebrating royalty, perhaps paradoxically, often provided a space in which Aboriginal people could argue for better treatment, using a language of royal benevolence and civilised government. In Queensland, however, there seemed little official interest in governing Aboriginal people in any sustainable way, and government officials and politicians made few efforts to convince Aboriginal people that the government was kindly or fair. In Queensland, egregiously, the political space available to Aboriginal people was even smaller than elsewhere, and efforts to appeal to higher British authorities had little chance of success.

14

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different Aboriginal Policy in South Australia

When South Australia’s first parliament opened on 22 April 1857,1 colonists spoke proudly of their own colony’s heritage of progressiveness and law and order, reflected in their new political system, more liberal and democratic than that of the other colonies. Elections were held more frequently (every three years), the franchise for the upper house was relatively inclusive, and the colony shared with Victoria the distinction of introducing the secret ballot into its Electoral Act of 1856.2 Yet, despite the early image of the colony as a paradise for farmers and small landholders, pastoralism was vital to the colonial economy and expanding to the west and north. Squatters were powerful figures in the new government, albeit less so than elsewhere.3 The tensions between South Australia’s liberalism and conservatism, and its burgeoning middle class and squattocracy, would become evident in its mixed policies and processes for governing Aboriginal people. Some aspects of South Australia’s tradition of missionary and protectorate work for Aboriginal people survived, though to a lesser extent than in Victoria, while at the same time pastoral expansion, continuing frontier violence, and a desire for Aboriginal labour produced a harsh policing and punishment regime. Aboriginal Policy in the First Four Years of Responsible Government In the first years of the new political system, South Australia shared with New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, and Queensland a period of instability, with frequent ministerial changes.4 These short-­lived governments, generally  For an overview, see P. A. Howell, ‘Constitutional and political development, 1857–1890’, in Dean Jaensch, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, Netley: Wakefield Press, 1986, pp. 95–8. 2  John M. Williams, ‘The making of a South Australian Constitution: Fear, optimism and reform’, in ADB online, The Politics of Democracy in South Australia, Rose Park, State Electoral Office, 2007, pp. 15–16; Howell, ‘Constitutional and Political Development’, pp. 116–17. See https:// hekyll.services.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/54688. 3  Howell, ‘Constitutional and political development’, pp. 116–17. 4  Ibid., pp. 122, 131. 1

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liberal, had one thing in common: a wish to reduce government expenditure on Aboriginal people. They also shared a view that, since Aboriginal people had no future, there was no need for an extensive governing apparatus to support them. Their belief that Aboriginal people were a dying race was strengthened by a horrifying level of population decline in both the longer settled areas close to Adelaide and in the outlying pastoral districts.5 When Protector Matthew Moorhouse resigned in March 1856, the government decided not to replace him and transferred responsibility for Aboriginal people to the Crown Lands and Immigration department.6 In another attempt to reduce expenditure, and to encourage Aboriginal people to work for pastoralists, governments in the second half of the 1850s decided to issue rations only to those unable to work or support themselves through subsistence food gathering.7 While the protectorate, as such, ended with Moorhouse’s resignation, the government continued to rely on and support the one remaining mission, at Poonindie. The people there were suffering the effects of illness, a high death rate, and, in a manner reminiscent of Flinders Island, a low birth rate. In 1856, Reverend Matthew Hale, founder of the mission, left Poonindie to become the Anglican Bishop of Perth. Just before he left, he gathered the residents together and assured them that the land and livestock of the mission belonged to them, no matter which authorities came after him. Edward Hitchin, Secretary of the Crown Lands and Immigration department that had just become responsible for Aboriginal affairs, commented that Hale’s remarks had caused ‘much trouble and annoyance’, as the residents now believed that they were entitled to live at Poonindie. It was hard, he said, as he well might, to explain to them that, while the law permitted them to live on Crown leases, they were not automatically allowed to be at the mission.8 The Aboriginal residents over the following years, according to Peggy Brock and Doreen Kartinyeri, repeated Hale’s assurances that the land belonged to them.9  John Summers, ‘Colonial race relations’, in Eric Richards, ed., The Flinders History of South Australia: Social History, Netley: Wakefield Press, 1986, p. 307. Reports from 1859 indicated a severe decline in Aboriginal numbers, especially around the River Murray and Moorundie regions; Judith Raftery, Not Part of the Public: Non-­indigenous Policies and Practices and the Health of Indigenous South Australians, 1836–1973, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2006, pp. 77–8. 6  From then on, a tiny Aboriginal Office managed Aboriginal policy. See Brock, Outback Ghettoes, p. 14; Peggy Brock, ‘South Australia’, in Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp. 221–2; Raftery, Not Part of the Public, pp. 77, 81; Raynes, A Little Flour and a Few Blankets, p. 17. 7  Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Food and governance on the frontiers’, p. 28; Report of the 1860 Select Committee of the Legislative Council upon the Aborigines, South Australian Parliamentary Papers, no. 165 of 1860: Appendix, ii. 8  “South Australia: Report on the Poonindie Mission”, in Proceedings of the Parliament of South Australia, vol. 1, Adelaide: Government Printer, 1859, p. 11. 9  Peggy Brock and Doreen Kartinyeri, Poonindie: The Rise and Destruction of an Aboriginal Agricultural Community, Adelaide: Department of Environment and Planning, 1989, pp. 15–16, 5

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different 337

When Hale left, the government placed Poonindie under a trust and provided funding, pointing to the link between church and state which had long been part of Aboriginal governance in South Australia.10 This relationship between missionaries and government, however, was not always a smooth one. Poonindie attracted praise from some religious observers, such as the reverend Edmund K. Miller, who, after a visit, was impressed by the burgeoning Christian civilisation of the residents, describing them as pious and hardworking, keen to be educated, and deeply attached to the station, even asking to be buried there.11 The mission, he thought, had achieved much despite the poor housing conditions it provided and the terrible illness and mortality symptomatic of wider Aboriginal circumstances.12 The white overseer, he reported, had told him of the decline in the numbers of Aboriginal people living in the bush near the mis­ sion from 100 or 200 to around thirty or forty, and had commented that ‘their graves were to be met with in all directions, and were very numerous around Poonindie’.13 There were other supporters too; one of the mission trustees, G.W. Hawkes, wrote to the Lord Bishop of Adelaide praising the progress of the residents,14 and others described it as ‘‘the only successful experiment of civilizing and Christianizing the aborigines of Australia’’.15 The government officials now in charge of Aboriginal policy were less impressed. In a report in May 1859, two officials of the Crown Lands and Immigration Office  – Hitchin and Francis S. Dutton, the Commissioner for Crown Lands – said the residents lived and worked with too much freedom. Not only did the people erroneously regard the land and flocks as their own, but also the missionaries kept them too comfortably, ‘in a comparative state of idleness’.16 The new missionary, Octavius Hammond, however, denied this accusation, and praise for Poonindie continued to be repeated by supporters of missionary work in other regions, including Queensland and Victoria, who offered it as proof that Aboriginal people could indeed have a ‘civilised’ future.17

26–7; ‘South Australia, Poonindie Mission: Correspondence and Reports of the Poonindie Native Mission at Port Lincoln’, 1 November 1858, pp.  5–8, and ‘Report on the Poonindie Mission’, 25 February 1859, pp.  11–12, in Various papers of the governments of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, and Victoria, relative to the Aborigines, 1854 (RareLT 305.089915V42, SLV). 10  Harris, One Blood, p. 351; ‘South Australia: Poonindie Mission: Correspondence and Reports’, vol. 2, p. 1. 11  ‘South Australia: Poonindie Mission: Correspondence and Reports’, p. 5. 12  Ibid., p. 5. 13  Ibid., p. 5. 14  Ibid., p. 7. 15  ‘South Australia: Report on Poonindie Mission’, pp. 2–3. 16  Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 4, 6, 11. 17  For example, QLA, Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force, p. 166; Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines, pp. 41, 90.

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Poonindie was not for long the only South Australian mission. There remained in South Australia a humanitarian idea that colonists had a duty to govern Aboriginal people, and that South Australians had been, and should continue to be, distinguished by their unusually humane treatment of Aboriginal people. Some colonists expressed a sense of duty; as Christian conquerors who had seized the land, they had incurred responsibilities toward its people. With these concerns in mind, and spurred on by the reported success of Poonindie, Bishop Augustus Short chaired a public meeting in Adelaide in July 1857 to discuss what should be done. Those present petitioned the government to support the establishment of a new mission at Goolwa, on the Lower River Murray, approximately 65 kilometres south of Adelaide, to renew the old protectorate system, and to provide schools for Aboriginal children. The petition described South Australian settlers as the ‘national guardians’ of the Aborigines, and said they owed Aboriginal people care and protection, having deprived them of their livelihood.18 The following year, a group of people who had attended the meeting formed the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association (AFA), led by Protestant clergymen and prominent local citizens, with the pioneer settler and conservative politician George Fife Angas as president. The AFA would become a significant voice for missionary work, and, after some strenuous lobbying achieved several of its objectives, notably the revival of the protectorate and the establishment of a new mission. In October 1858, it petitioned for more compassionate Aboriginal policies, leading to a debate in the Legislative Assembly in which the prevailing view was that, while there was little chance that policies designed to uplift Aboriginal people could succeed, it was nevertheless important to demonstrate their own good intentions. William Milne, a merchant and former Commissioner of Crown Lands, declared that the government was obliged to try any scheme for Aboriginal improvement, no matter what the result: ‘they would then at least have the satisfaction of knowing that they had done their duty’.19 There was little consideration of what policies Aboriginal people themselves might prefer and the Assembly members found the idea that Aboriginal people could make political claims simply laughable. When one member asked whether civilising missions would need Aboriginal people’s co-­operation in order to succeed, Henry Barrow, a former preacher and journalist, replied scornfully that they did not. ‘If it were necessary,’ he exclaimed, ‘to have the co-­operation of the native races in all  South Australia, House of Assembly, ‘South Australia: Condition of Aborigines’, ordered by the House of Assembly to be printed 21 October 1857, in South Australian Parliament, House of Assembly, Petition from Aborigines Friends Association (with Other Documents) (RareLT 305.089915V42, SLV). 19  South Australian Advertiser, 30 October 1858, p. 3. For more on Milne, see Dirk van Dissel, ‘Milne, Sir William (1822–1895)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp. 255–6. 18

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different 339

grants and on all questions concerning them, the best way would be to have some intelligent native sitting in the House able to state his views on those subjects from his own standing-­point’. This brought, as the transcript indicates, ‘great laughter’, as did Barrow’s comment that ‘he thought the House would be quite prepared to do justice without such an able representative being present’.20 Once again, as we have seen in other Australian colonies, the image of an Aboriginal person taking part in elected government was portrayed as an absurdity, and, implicitly, as proof of the maturity and success of white settler government in comparison. At the same time, an emphasis on the importance of showing kindness was again evident the following June in the Legislative Council, when Sir Samuel Davenport  – landowner, President of the AFA, and trustee of the Poonindie mission – expressed his concern at the abolition of the protectorate three years earlier. He also asked what had happened to the revenue from the lands supposedly reserved for the benefit of Aboriginal people. Like many others, Davenport assumed Aboriginal people would probably die out, but that settlers should show them greater kindness in the meantime. South Australians, he said, had always been distinguished by their kind treatment of the natives, recognising that Aboriginal people had ‘a right and property in the soil’.21 A number of articles in the Advertiser in these years expressed similar themes, with various writers urging colonists to treat Aboriginal people with kindness, as was their duty, but also accepting that as a people they were probably doomed. Though advocating kindness, these articles denied that Aboriginal people had rights to their country, dismissing such a notion as ‘mawkish philanthropy’, and in a mixture of religious language and imperial ruthlessness, portrayed the destruction of weaker human races as God’s will.22 As Judith Raftery argues, even the AFA, though enthusiastically philanthropic, tended to construct Aboriginal people as a people apart, not members of the general public, and subject to philanthropy rather than ordinary civic rights.23 The Uncertainty as to Aboriginal People’s Political and Legal Status The belief that Aboriginal people had no role in politics led to some confusion and concern over their voting rights, just as it did in Victoria and New South Wales. In the Assembly in August 1859, during a debate over the Electoral Act Amendment Bill, liberal member, Lavington Glyde, expressed his dismay at  South Australian Advertiser, 30 October 1858, p. 3.  South Australian Advertiser, 8 June 1859, p. 3. 22  South Australian Advertiser, 2 August 1858, p. 2; 30 October 1858, p. 2; 5 May 1859, p. 2; 2 May 1861, p. 2. 23  Raftery, Not Part of the Public, p. 81. 20 21

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reports that a number of Aboriginal men were on the electoral roll. Assuming that they could not possibly take a real part in government, Glyde speculated that unscrupulous squatters hoping to rig the vote had enrolled them. Just as Augustus Morris would do in New South Wales a mere two months later, he argued that they should introduce legislation to exclude Aboriginal men, and added that ‘if Germans who were not naturalised were prevented from voting he certainly thought aborigines should be’. Another speaker, Thomas Reynolds, disagreed and suggested that a handful of Aboriginal men might be ‘civilised’ enough to vote responsibly. Glyde was, in any case, unsuccessful in his call for legislative change; the Attorney-­general was uncertain as to Aboriginal men’s voting rights but stated that he did not have the power to override the Constitution Act, and the issue seems to have been dropped. Glyde’s comments, however, pointed towards a much wider uncertainty concerning Aboriginal political subjecthood.24 While a few Aboriginal men may have cast votes, colonists treated them in general as British subjects only when it justified their coming under the purview of English law; colonial government remained something that was done to them, not by them. As Glyde’s comments indicated, the question of who should be included in, and who excluded from, the body politic was important not only in relation to the political status of Aboriginal people but also to those of non-­British descent, particularly the colony’s large German population (approximately 7% of the population in 1856). German settlers had been arriving in South Australia in significant numbers since 1838, as Lutherans fled persecution under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. An accepted part of South Australian colonial life, they were often praised for their piety and tenacity, especially as farmers, at times when the colony was struggling to survive. They were discursively included in the body politic in the language of Anglo-­Saxonism, which was increasingly used as a racial term, and carried with it claims that Anglo-­Saxons were naturally expansionist, and good at governing themselves and others.25 Writing of American racial Anglo-­Saxonism, Reginald Horsman has argued that the idea of an essential, original link between Britons and Germans, strengthened by the bond of Protestantism, had helped to create a unified political culture in 24 25

 South Australian Advertiser, 24 August 1859, p. 2.  Leigh Boucher, ‘Trans/national history and disciplinary amnesia: Historicising White Australia at two fins de siecles’, in Jane Carey and Claire McLisky, eds., Creating White Australia, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009, pp. 51–3. See also Penelope Edmonds, ‘White spaces? Racialised geographies, Anglo-­Saxons exceptionalism and the location of empire in Britain’s nineteenth-­century Pacific Rim Colonies’, in Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, eds., Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2007, pp. 363–8; Marilyn Lake, “‘Essentially Teutonic”: E.A. Freeman, liberal race historian. A transnational perspective’, in Catherine Hall and Keith McLelland, eds., Race, Nation, Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the present, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, pp. 56–73.

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different 341

the United States.26 Similar ideas were evident in South Australia. At an electoral meeting in 1857 in the wine-­growing Barossa district, where there was a strong German population, one speaker, William Blakewell (later to become the Assembly’s member for Barossa) contrasted the liberties of South Australia with the tyrannies from which many of these settlers had fled. They should treat naturalised German colonists here, he said, as equals. To be a British subject is so glorious a privilege  – so priceless a possession  – that I would give it to all who deserved it ... We are of the same race. The English people are themselves descended from settlers who come originally from Germany. The proudest boast of an Englishman ... is that he is an Anglo-­Saxon ... We English people are, in fact, a chip out of the old block – the old German block.27

Similarly, in the 1858 Hand-Book to the Colony of South Australia, the writer remarked on how gratifying it was to see the success of German settlers  – ‘industrious Saxon colonists liv[ing] so harmoniously with their Anglo-­Saxon brethren’.28 Inclusion of Germans within Anglo-­Saxon subjecthood was sometimes evident in public commentary on Aboriginal matters. In a letter to the Register in 1856, ‘Humanitas’ lamented that South Australian colonists were neglecting Aboriginal people and leaving them to die, thus ‘callously neglecting the first duties of conquerors’. Even those who had come fleeing tyranny and danger in Europe, ‘Humanitas’ added, seemed to have forgotten their duties towards the dispossessed, now that they were ‘breathing freely in the undisturbed possession of a conquered territory’. Being included as South Australian settlers and free British subjects also meant, in this instance, being included as colonisers of Aboriginal people and their lands. Some commentators, like ‘Humanitas’, hoped to see settlers, including the Germans, taking a more humane approach – not as equals, but rather as guardians of a native population assumed to be incapable of governing themselves.29 The Select Committee, 1860 Despite widespread feeling that missionary work would surely fail, the AFA was, in fact, successful in establishing a new mission. It focused its efforts on the Lower Murray River region and in 1859 succeeded in establishing at Point McLeay a new Congregationalist mission among the Ngarrindjeri. English  Reginal Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1986. 27  Register (South Australia), 14 January 1857, p. 3. 28  Editor of the Australian and New Zealand Gazette, A Hand-­Book to the Colony of South Australia, London: Algar and Street, 1858, p. 10. 29  Register (South Australia), 4 July 1856, p. 3. 26

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clergyman George Taplin who had been working in labouring and clerical jobs in the colony since 1849, was appointed head of the new mission in March 1859. In May, Taplin gained government approval for the chosen site, but when the neighbouring wealthy pastoralist, John Baker, had to remove his grazing cattle from the site a dispute erupted.30 Baker would prove a formidable adversary to the mission and its objectives; as a member of the Legislative Council, he moved on 4 September 1860 for an inquiry. He wanted the governor to commission a report on government spending on Aboriginal people, the reservation of land for their benefit, and the present state and condition of the Aboriginal population. The council, however, thought a select committee was more appropriate, and one was duly appointed.31 While the hostility between Baker and missionary George Taplin initially shaped the enquiry, the committee considered broader issues as well. It had a mixed membership; in addition to Baker, clearly opposed to government and missionary action, its members included the AFA’s president, George Fife Angas, Poonindie mission trustee, Samuel Davenport, George Waterhouse (merchant and pastoralist, who would become premier the following year), with George Hall (shipping agent and company director) acting as its chair. It seemed that the committee might not go entirely to Baker’s plan. The committee’s scope was broad, and it examined 19 witnesses, including George Taplin, Frederick Monk (secretary of the AFA), various figures in the Anglican Church, members of the police force, and a prison superintendent. In an unusual decision, it consulted several Aboriginal witnesses, all from Poonindie mission.32 They had, however, little chance to make much impact; they were the last of all to be interviewed, spoke only briefly, and presented no united voice. One woman, Parako, reported illness and poverty among her people, and hinted at the cultural tensions at Poonindie between the young men and women from different regions. A man called Panyarra stated that he liked Poonindie because he could live there away from the influence of the older people, whom he called wicked. The committee paid little attention to these remarks, and did not seem to take the witnesses seriously.33 The committee’s final report, known as the Report of the Select Committee upon ‘The Aborigines’ and tabled in the Council on 16 October 1860, represented the diversity of its membership and perhaps the breadth of its inquiries.  Harris, One Blood, pp. 334–57; South Australia, House of Assembly, ‘South Australia: Condition of Aborigines’, 21 October 1857; South Australian, 30 October 1858, p. 3; 14 November 1859, p. 3. 31  Raynes, A Little Flour and a Few Blankets, p. 17. 32  Raftery, Not Part of the Public, pp. 86–7. 33  South Australia, Parliament, Legislative Council, Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council, upon ‘The Aborigines’; Together with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, Adelaide, W.C. Cox, 1860, pp. 1–6, 99–100. 30

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different 343

It recognised that Aboriginal people had had ‘an equitable title to the lands they occupied, and of which they are virtually all dispossessed’, and concluded that they had lost much and gained little from British rule, suffering as they were from sickness, hunger, disease, alcohol, and social breakdown. As the report put it: The subject referred to this Committee is one embracing the whole question of the responsibilities of civilized nations in taking possession of territory previously occupied by nomadic and uncivilized tribes, who, despite any questions of law or expediency, had an equitable title to the lands they occupied, and of which they are virtually dispossessed. In a utilitarian sense, it may be argued that the aborigines were not making the best use of the land; at the same time, they were enabled, while in undisturbed possession, to supply all their physical necessities, and of this ability they are deprived by our occupation of their inheritance.

Harking back to the original instructions to the Resident Commissioner on the colony’s foundation, and recalling missionary efforts made in the past, the committee agreed that Aboriginal people were entitled to compensation for their loss, and called for a new protectorate and wider rationing systems.34 This was all considerably more than was evident in New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania at the time, and was somewhat akin to the Victorian report of the previous year, though it lacked the Victorians’ interest in Aboriginal people’s cultural life and its ambitious reserves policy overseen by a board. Despite some recognition of a need for compensation and greater support, however, the report’s view on Aboriginal rights and its recommendations for Aboriginal welfare were ambivalent. It insisted that the British invasion was justified on utilitarian grounds, as the original people were not making enough use of the land, and asserted that Aboriginal people were probably doomed as a race. The report also suggested that land that had previously been set aside for Aboriginal use should now be leased to settlers and the revenue thus raised spent on the revived protection and rationing policy. It concluded by arguing that child removal was essential if Aboriginal people would ever be Christianised, no matter how cruel this might seem to ‘pseudo-philanthropists’.35 The report was thus a mixture of humanitarian and conventional settler thinking, and as such, it predictably attracted a range of responses. A hostile article in the South Australian Advertiser responded to the humanitarian  On the idea of compensation in humanitarian discourse in the Australian colonies, see O’Brien, ‘Humanitarianism and reparation in colonial Australia’. 35  Graham Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, Rigby: Adelaide, 1979, pp. 84–95; South Australian Advertiser, 31 October 1860, p. 3; ‘Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council upon “The Aborigines”, printed 16 October 1860’, in Proceedings of the Parliament of South Australia: 1860, vol. 3, Adelaide: Government Printer, 1860, p. 2. 34

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aspects by mocking the suggestion that Aboriginal people could have rights to land, and declaring that they were a dying race whose disappearance would be good for Australia. It also disparaged the committee’s decision to speak to the Aboriginal witnesses, sneering that they ‘doubtless, felt themselves plenty honoured by taking chairs (presuming they were sufficiently civilised to sit upon them)’.36 The South Australian Register, on the other hand, described the report as ‘reasonable and generally incontrovertible’, though it demurred at the suggestion of extensive child removal.37 Colonial Governance of Aboriginal People 1861–1867 As the government acted on some of the Select Committee’s recommendations, expenditure on certain aspects of Aboriginal policy, cut back in the 1850s, grew in the 1860s. With the appointment of Dr John Walker as Protector in November 1861, and of two part-­time sub-­protectors in 1863 and 1866, the protectorate was restored, though it would virtually disappear for twelve years when Walker resigned in 1868 and was not replaced.38 The government also granted reserves for missions in the remote Cooper Basin in the north, leading to Moravian and Lutheran missions starting in 1867 at Koppernamanna and Lake Killalpaninna, respectively.39 Yet the cornerstone of the government’s Aboriginal policy in this period was the expanded rationing system. The number of ration depots quadrupled in the six years from 1861 to 1868, rising from 14 to 58, and spreading beyond the Murray and Lakes district, which had hitherto been the focus.40 Rationing was one government policy that many pastoralists supported, hoping it would reduce Aboriginal attacks on and stealing from pastoral stations.41 Although Aboriginal people retained their right of access to their traditional land (a right of which the government had occasionally to remind unfriendly pastoralists) in many pastoral areas this land had become unable to sustain them.42 As Robert Foster has noted, the overstocking of much of the  South Australian Advertiser, 31 October 1860, p. 2.  South Australian Register, 31 October 1860, p. 2. 38  Robert Foster, ‘Rations, coexistence, and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour in the South Australian pastoral industry, 1860–1911’, Aboriginal History, vol. 24, 2000, p. 5; Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements, p. 109. 39  Christine Stevens, White Man’s Dreaming: Killalpaninna Mission, 1866–1915, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. 40  Later, however, the number declined, and they were never enough to meet Aboriginal needs. Foster, ‘Rations, coexistence and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour’, p. 10; Raftery, Not Part of the Public, p. 91. 41  South Australian Register, 30 April 1864, p. 2; 19 May 1865, p. 2; 9 November 1865, p. 2; 23 November 1865, p. 2; 13 December 1865, p. 2; 30 December 1865, p. 2. 42  Foster, ‘Co-­existence and Colonization’, pp. 248–51; Foster, ‘Rations, coexistence, and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour’, p. 15. 36 37

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countryside, by pastoralists who had yet to learn just how arid the country was, damaged supplies of native food and water. When drought hit in the middle of the decade, the deaths of massive numbers of native and introduced animals further increased Aboriginal poverty and malnutrition.43 As one contributor in the Advertiser in January 1864 commented, Aboriginal people whose traditional sources of food had been undermined resorted to begging and stealing from the stations. They were learning nothing of ‘the “whitefellows” Government’ other than through their occasional contact with the police.44 While some commentators argued that an expansion of state power, drawing ever more people into regimes of charity, rationing and control, would benefit Aboriginal people, it was always clear that the priority was settler safety in frontier areas. In December 1865, a petition signed by 1,133 people asked for government relief for food supplies and a sub-­protector for Aboriginal people in the north. The pressure for action had some results, with new ration depots opening at Mt Deception, Umberatana, Blinman, Mattawanarrggala, and Port Augusta. As elsewhere, these ration depots served not only to discourage theft and resistance, but also to attract Aboriginal people to pastoral stations as labourers.45 The question of the legal status of Aboriginal people continued to be a vexing one for administrators. Crown authorities had always insisted that they were British subjects, and subsequent colonial governments had agreed, but the issue had not been resolved in practice, or in public debate, by the time self-­government commenced. The police commissioner from 1853 to 1867, Major Peter Warburton, was strongly of the view that they ought not to arrest Aboriginal people for crimes committed against each other. He doubted whether Aboriginal people came under British law in relation to their own internal affairs, and advised the Chief Secretary in 1857 that British legal punishments were in any case useless and impracticable in remote regions. While the government never officially adopted his approach, it may well have influenced what took place on the ground.46 As Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster point out, the police tended to leave traditional law in place as long as it did not harm settler interests, though they were by no means consistent in this approach.47 It seems that in many areas Aboriginal peoples’ political and social lives continued without much deliberate government or police intervention. The other side of the policy, however, was the continued use of the law against Aboriginal people  Foster, ‘Rations, coexistence and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour’, p. 15; Raynes, ‘A little flour and a few blankets’, p. 20. 44  South Australian Advertiser, 8 January 1864, p. 2. See also South Australian Register, 9 July 1864, p. 3. 45  Raynes, ‘A little flour’, p. 20; Foster, ‘Rations, coexistence, and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour’, pp. 2–5, 11; Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Reading the elusive letter of the law’, pp. 301–2. 46  Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Reading the elusive letter of the law’, pp. 302, 305; ‘Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council upon “The Aborigines”, printed 16 October 1860’. 47  Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Reading the elusive letter of the law’, pp. 302, 305. 43

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who did harm settler interests. The contradiction between allowing some legal pluralism for inter se crimes and applying English law when settler interests were involved led one writer to comment in the Register in 1865: . . . the blackfellow is left to his savage habits and his savage customs ... until he does something wrong; and then he is instantly a privileged British subject – privileged to be tried by twelve men sitting in a box, and to be sentenced by a Judge whose words are incomprehensible to him.48

The operation of the law on the frontiers of settlement was in practice patchy and partial, for all the reasons Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster outline – difficulties in collecting evidence and conducting inquests, absence of willing witnesses, unreliability and settler sympathies of local officials, obstruction of evidence, and disappearance of key suspects. In the courts, a major problem was the lack of clarity over what constituted ‘self-­defence’ in a frontier situation; courts often acquitted those settlers charged with committing violent crimes against Aboriginal people on this basis.49 A key aspect of applying British law to Aboriginal people was policing. South Australia did not develop a Native Police Force similar to that doing so much damage in Queensland; the attempts of the early 1850s to start a South Australian native police force had failed, and were not repeated. As Amanda Nettelbeck and her colleagues point out, however, there was disagreement over whether the mounted police serving in rural areas were a military or civil police force, and even the Commissioner of Police, Major Warburton, thought they ought to be regarded as a military force. After an inquiry in 1858 into police killing two Aboriginal men after an attack on a sheep station, the Attorney General reminded Warburton that they were in fact a civil body who should be very careful about the taking of life.50 However, in frontier conditions, both arrest and imprisonment could involve considerable danger to health and life. Aboriginal men accused of crimes were still forced to walk long distances to the nearest court for trial; on Warburton’s order, neck chains were used, and at night, prisoners were chained together by the hands. The Anglican clergyman, Edmund K. Miller, had witnessed near Poonindie in 1858 some Aboriginal men being brought in for stealing cattle, chained by the neck and dragged on foot for a hundred miles over three days – ‘I need scarcely say, they looked the personification of misery and exhaustion’.51 There was a high rate of Aboriginal death in prison, especially if long sentences were involved.52  South Australian Register, 26 August 1865, p. 4.  Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, ‘Colonial judiciaries, Aboriginal protection and South Australia’s policy of punishing “with exemplary severity”’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp. 327–8. 50  Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements, pp. 76–8. 51  ‘South Australia: Poonindie Mission: Correspondence and Reports’, p. 5. 52  Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements, p. 130. 48 49

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different 347

These practices had led the Select Committee on ‘the Aborigines’ in 1860 to call for protectors to be given powers to stage summary trials in local districts for Aboriginal people accused of non-­capital offences towards Europeans or one another  – a suggestion Warburton supported. Summary justice, said the report, in punishing offenders on the spot would cut down on the cost of sending prisoners long distances and end the disgraceful practice of capturing Aboriginal witnesses and sending them to the cities in chains. The report hoped that summary punishments would also prove more acceptable to Aboriginal communities.53 However, it seems that Protector Walker, when appointed in November 1861, was not given such powers. The practices of law and punishment in South Australia are illuminated by a comparison with Queensland. There, the attack by a group of Aboriginal men on a household at the Cullin-la-ringo station on 17 October 1861 had been met with widespread retaliation spearheaded by the Native Mounted Police, constituting one of the bloodiest episodes in Australian frontier history.54 In South Australia, some murders of settlers by several Aboriginal men at around the same time were met in a very different way. In March 1861, a group of Aboriginal men apparently murdered a pregnant woman, Mary Ann Rainbird, and her two children at a property just outside the mining town of Kapunda, South Australia’s second largest town. The popular reaction to the murders was furious. Some commentators spoke of banishing the whole Aboriginal population to Kangaroo Island – a notion possibly borrowed from the seclusion of Aboriginal people on Flinders Island thirty years earlier – while many spoke of the need to frighten the natives into submission, stating that the niceties of British law were useless on the frontier.55 There was, however, no punitive expedition of the kind that would happen in Queensland later that year. Six men, possibly of the nearby Ngadjuri people, were arrested instead and send by train to prison in Adelaide, along with two Aboriginal women and two children who were called as witnesses and kept in gaol. At the ensuing trial, four of the men – known as Kapunda Robert, Bobby, Google-­eyed Jemmy, and Jemmy Alick – were found guilty, although none ever properly confessed and the evidence was inconclusive.56 The four men were hanged inside Adelaide Gaol on 7 June 1861, a crowd gathering outside the gaol with some attempting to watch from higher ground.57 Local newspapers were angry that the authorities had hanged the convicted men where their countrymen could not see them, and the ensuing public and  Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, pp. 84–95; South Australian Advertiser, 31 October 1860, p. 3; ‘Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council upon “The Aborigines”, printed 16 October 1860”, p. 2. 54  Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, pp. 122–30; Reid, That Unhappy Race, p. 34. 55  South Australian Advertiser, 2 May 1861, p. 2; 29 May 1861, p. 3. 56  Peter Lindy, The Rainbird Murders, Norwood: Peacock Publications, 1993, pp. 23, 26, 29, 33, 53–4, 57, 66. 57  South Australian Advertiser, 8 June 1861, p. 2; Lindy, The Rainbird Murders, pp. 72–83; Anderson, ‘Punishment as pacification’, p. 15. 53

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parliamentary debate revealed a great deal about South Australian approaches to punishment of Aboriginal people for capital crimes. Only three years before, the colony had banned public executions. Such executions had for over 20 years been held in Adelaide and many people treated them as public entertainment, but respectable society found this reminder of earlier British public executions increasingly distasteful and barbaric and in 1858 called successfully for the practice to be banned.58 Despite some suggestion in the parliamentary debate that they ought to make an exception for Aboriginal offenders, the act as passed had applied to all.59 With frontier violence continuing, politicians began debating how to allow for public hangings of Aboriginal people to continue, and one Aboriginal man, Manyelta, from Streaky Bay, was publicly hanged in 1860 in spite of the change in the law, through the expedient of declaring the local police station, with its publicly visible gallows, a gaol.60 As John Maguire has argued, the need to intimidate Aboriginal people overcame the disgust many colonists came to feel towards public hangings.61 Parliament responded to public pressure in May 1861 with an Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals, providing for an exception to the law, whereby Aboriginal criminals could be hanged publicly, as near the scene of their crimes as possible.62 When debating this bill in the Assembly on 28 May (the same day as the Legislative Council postponed discussion of the Select Committee Report on Aborigines), the members made many references to the Rainbird killings.63 Most members agreed that public hanging of white men was an offensive practice, especially in urban areas, demoralising the white population and encouraging ‘depravity and horrible scenes’ at the scaffold. However, while a couple of members tried to argue that public executions of Aboriginal people were equally ugly and uncivilised, most of their colleagues disagreed. In their speeches, several members assumed that public hangings of Aboriginal people, especially in remote areas where many of the viewers would be Aboriginal, would have a positive impact, forcing Aboriginal people to understand the might of British law and their need to submit to it. This was the theory of the admonitory aspect of public assembly executions, as Foucault evokes at the beginning of Discipline and Punish. Several members recalled how effective the summary hangings of the two men accused of the Maria killings had been back in 1840 in discouraging  Lindy, The Rainbird Murders, p. 72.  Anderson, ‘Punishment as pacification’, p. 14. 60  Ibid., p. 15; John McGuire, ‘Judicial violence and the “civilising process”: Race and the transition from public to private executions in colonial Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 29, no. 111, October 1998, p. 200. 61  McGuire, ‘Judicial violence and the “civilising process”’, pp. 190–1. 62  Alex C. Castles and Harris, Lawmakers and Wayward Whigs, p. 22; Raynes, ‘A little flour and a few blankets’, p. 18. 63  South Australian Advertiser, 29 May 1861, p. 3. 58 59

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Aboriginal attacks on settlers, and many references were made to the need ‘to strike terror into the breasts of the natives’, rather than messing about with ‘tedious process’. Edward Grundy said ‘a system of terror’ was necessary to protect settlers in remote districts, who ‘had a right to look to Parliament for protection’.64 ‘If native criminals were executed in gaol’, he asked, ‘‘how would other blacks know that they were executed?’ Thomas Magarey insisted that if South Australian laws differed from those in Britain, it was in response to their particular circumstances; in the case of the mutiny in India, he said, the British authorities had acted differently from how they did at home, and it was the same in this colony. Such extensive debates about the state’s right to kill Aboriginal men reminded observers that frontier conflict was ongoing. The bill was passed by 23 votes to nine.65 However, as it turned out, after five public executions in 1861 and 1862, the law fell into disuse, but remained on the statute books until 1972.66 This brief reinstatement of public execution for Aboriginal people in South Australia suggests that Foucault’s narrative in Discipline and Punish of an historical transition from public execution to private incarceration needs modification in a settler-­colonial context. Punishment under colonial conditions did not follow any simple timeline.67 Orderly and sometimes humanitarian forms of government could and did co-­exist with the continuing invasion of Aboriginal lands, and with laws and practices that enshrined the values of the frontier. The Far North Pastoralism in the 1860s moved far beyond Adelaide to the opposite end of the continent, the far north. If the era of self-­government had begun for Queensland and Victoria with separation from an older settlement (New South Wales), for South Australians it became a time of moving into a new northern district, a satellite colony of sorts, where the long-­distance policy and guidance would come not from London but from Adelaide. The move to the far north of the continent was prompted in part by the fact that by the mid 1860s, most land suitable for pastoralism in the arid north of the colony had been effectively taken and settlers were looking further afield for new pastoral land. The successful south-­north crossing of the continent by John McDonnell Stuart in 1862 resulted in promising tales of fertile lands in

 Ibid., p. 3.  Act to amend Act No. 23 of 22nd Victoria intituled ‘An Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals’. May 1861, repealed 38/1876, s. 3, www.dspace.flinders.edu.au/jspui/handle/2328/2358. 66  Anderson, ‘Punishment as pacification’, p. 21; McGuire, ‘Judicial violence and the civilising process’, p. 201. 67  See Nettelbeck and Foster, ‘Colonial Judiciaries, Aboriginal protection’, pp. 319–36. 64 65

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the far north.68 As P. F. Donovan explains, there was a certain mood of entrepreneurial enthusiasm in South Australia at this time; not only were copper mines at Kapunda and Burra doing well, but also there had been several good harvests. Pastoralists were looking to expand their runs and businessmen were seeking new areas in which to invest. In this atmosphere of entrepreneurialism and desire for new pastures, Governor Richard MacDonnell strongly encouraged plans for South Australia to expand its borders northward, lobbying the Colonial Office and funding exploratory missions himself.69 His replacement, Governor Dominick Daly, was also enthusiastic, and others urging settlement of the far north included the local press and the powerful lobby group the Pastoral Association. The Colonial Office was at first reluctant to accede to these demands for an extension of the colony’s borders, fearing South Australia could not govern effectively from the other side of the continent. On the other hand, it had no other definite plans for the region, and did not want the trouble and expense of establishing a settlement directly under the Home government.70 Eventually the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Duke of Newcastle, consented, and in 1863, the colony’s size was officially almost doubled by the addition of 1,347,523 square miles.71 The British government added the Northern Territory to South Australia under Royal Letters Patent, and on 12 November 1863, South Australia passed the Northern Territory Act, allowing for the sale of some 200,000 hectares of rural land.72 There was a common assumption that the new lands would prove profitable, and perhaps a general pleasure that their colony was expanding.73 The act also provided for the appointment of a Government Resident and other officers for ‘order and good government’.74 The first official colonists from South Australia travelled to the northern coast by sea in April 1864, led  P. F. Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities: A History of South Australia’s Northern Territory, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981, p. 26.  Since 1857, he had called for South Australia to expand westward into the strip of land separating the colony from Western Australia, and still classified as part of New South Wales. MacDonnell had secured the support of both houses of parliament, despite objections from New South Wales, and the land, measuring 181,869 km2, had been granted to South Australia in 1861. See also Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements, p. 125. 70  At first, many Queenslanders assumed their own border would stretch further westward, and Governor Bowen demanded and was granted for Queensland the rich land at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1862. However, Bowen also told the Colonial Office that Queensland did not have the population or revenue to control all of the north. Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities, pp. 29–31; Gordon Reid, A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal–European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910, Burwood: Melbourne University Press, 1990, p. 28. 71  Howell, ‘Constitutional and political development’, p. 166. 72  Tony Austin, Simply the Survival of the Fittest: Aboriginal Administration in South Australia’s Northern Territory, 1863–1910, Darwin: Historical Society of Northern Territory, 1992, p. 11. 73  Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities, pp. 32–5. 74  Jamie Dalziel, ‘Pastoral leases in the Northern Territory and the reservation of Aboriginal rights, 1863–1931’, University of New South Wales Law Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 1999, p. 475. 68

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by the new Government Resident, Colonel Boyle Travers Finnis. Finnis’s career reminds us that we cannot easily separate histories of urban colonial government from histories of violent expansion into ‘remote’ areas. A military man, Finnis had also before this expedition been a successful civil servant in Adelaide – a deputy surveyor-­general, commissioner of police, colonial secretary, acting governor, and the first premier of South Australia under responsible government.75 The Advertiser noted that three members of the expedition had been appointed special magistrates and six sworn in as special constables; the newspaper welcomed the strong police presence, claiming it would ensure ‘the enforcement of law, the preservation of order, the protection of life and property’.76 The instructions given to the party clearly illustrate how the South Australian government envisaged how colonisation ought to proceed. The party included Dr F. E. Goldsmith, appointed protector of Aborigines for the new settlement, who would double as its medical officer. Apart from awareness of the Macassan trepang trade, there was little knowledge of the realities of Aboriginal social, political, or economic life in the far north. Goldsmith was instructed to learn Aboriginal languages, provide them with medical care, foster ‘a friendly feeling’, protect them from alcohol and sexual violence, provide rations to the needy and encourage the healthy to work, while protecting any native industries like the trepang trade. He was also instructed to recognise ‘the power and prerogatives of the chiefs’, and, if possible, get their concurrence in any punishment or reward meted out by the British to members of their tribes. At the same time, Goldsmith was also told to educate the natives about their duties and privileges as British subjects ‘amenable to and protected by our laws’.77 These instructions clearly derived from a history of South Australian colonialism: the wish for a systematic, humane, and orderly protectorate, moulding people for British subjecthood, but also a consciousness of the practical shortcomings of such an aim, and the ongoing uncertainty over how far British law really extended to Aboriginal people. A further echo of South Australian colonialism was evident in the instructions given to the Government Resident about the survey and sale of land in the Northern Territory. These included an order that: The Surveyors must be instructed to leave, where desirable, blocks of land, which must be marked on the plans as aboriginal reserves ... to secure to the natives quiet possession of their favourite places of resort, with free access to wood and water.78

 Douglas Lockwood, The Front Door: Darwin 1869–1969, Adelaide: Rigby, 1968, p. 23.  South Australian Advertiser, 20 April 1864, p. 2. 77  Ibid. 78  South Australian Register, 26 April 1864, p. 6. 75 76

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This system had already been effectively abandoned in South Australia itself, where most reserves were not actually set aside for Aboriginal residents and did not necessarily benefit Aboriginal people financially, and where it had become apparent that the Aboriginal economy had in any case little use for tiny blocks of land. The South Australians planning to colonise the north were thus adopting a system which had already proven in the south to be only faintly beneficial to Aboriginal people and only equivocally supported by the state. The instructions to the Government Resident also suggested the now usual mixture of good will and aggression, and a willingness to enforce British ‘law’ through unlawful violence. Finnis was ordered to avoid confrontation with the Aborigines and at the same time be ready to defend his camp from attack: ‘You will show them that while you are anxious to gain their goodwill and confidence by kindness and judicious liberality, you are able to repel, and, if necessary, punish aggression.’79 In the orders given to Finnis’s party, we can discern a vision of a new settlement with stable and thoughtful government from the start. But the official instructions also showed a wish to bring British and South Australian authority into being, first by proclaiming it, and then defending it. Thus, the ruthless conquest of a foreign land could be reconfigured in terms of ‘protecting’ a country declared to be already theirs. Profiting from pastoral expansion into the Northern Territory, however, would prove much harder than expected. It all went downhill very quickly, as the settlement witnessed a tragic replay of earlier conflicts. When the new colonists attempted to settle at Escape Cliffs, on the mouth of the Adelaide River, between 1864 and 1866,80 the local Djerimanga people quickly became suspicious and hostile towards the invaders, treating them with contempt, taking items from their camp, spearing their horses and then attacking a member of their party. A Djerimanga man was shot dead in response, leading Protector Goldsmith to stage a formal inquest. He concluded justifiable homicide and blamed the poor choice of location. After Djerimanga men appeared painted in mourning, and speared more horses, Finnis sent out a punitive expedition that raided and burned the Djerimanga camp, shooting at least one elderly man as he tried to flee. Later on, Aboriginal men would kill another member of the colonists’ party.81  South Australian Register, 19 April 1864, p. 2.  Brian Reid, ‘The health of the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory during the South Australian government period of administration, 1863–1910’, Northern Perspective, vol. 19, no. 2, 1996, p. 28. 81  The full extent of the violence may not have been recorded; some contemporary accounts suggest more extensive hostilities. See Austin, Simply the Survival of the Fittest, p. 13; Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities, pp. 55–6; Lockwood, The Front Door, pp. 23–4; South Australian Advertiser, 15 December 1864, p. 3; 24 December 1864, p. 2; 27 December 1864, p. 4; South Australian Register, 15 December 1864, p. 3; 16 December 1864, p. 2; 28 August 1865, p. 3; 30 August 1865, p. 3. 79 80

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As reports of the conflicts and in particular the punitive expedition trickled back to Adelaide, the AFA expressed deep concern, but other commentators thought the problem was not the punitive expedition as such but rather the general picture of confusion and disunity.82 Another said that while South Australia had always tried to deal compassionately with Aborigines, some violence was inevitable because of the natives’ propensity to steal.83 A royal commission later chastised Finnis for his actions, but nothing much was done, and the settlement was abandoned in 1867.84 The whole episode demonstrated just how little settlers had learnt in their dealings with Aboriginal peoples. ‘John Baker been steal our Prince’: Aboriginal Political Strategies Aboriginal activism in the 1860s took various forms. Although the decade saw some important improvements at Poonindie as the death rate fell, births rose, and the mission became a financially self-­supporting farm, it was also a decade of discontent.85 There were skirmishes over authority when white government-­appointed officials began to take charge in ways the residents disliked. While their first missionary, Matthew Hale, had run the station almost entirely through Aboriginal labour, the new overseer, Alexander Watherston, hired more white men and alienated many residents with his authoritarian manner. He complained furiously that the people were refusing to follow his orders and deliberately withholding their labour, and demanded new powers to compel them to work.86 At Point Macleay, where the Ngarrindjeri were still struggling for survival after years of sickness and violence,87 there was a sense of community and the people developed close, if sometimes troubled, relationships with their missionary, George Taplin. A number of people converted to Christianity, leading to the rise of some Aboriginal evangelists like Allan Jamblyn and James Unaipon, but also to cultural clashes.88

 One writer in the Register called for Finnis to assert stronger control, mocking the ‘ridiculous’ notion of ‘shooting a black-­fellow and then holding an inquest upon his body’; South Australian Register, 18 October 1864, p. 2. 83  South Australian Register, 25 January 1865, p. 3. 84  In 1870, Finnis returned to the Northern Territory to work for the British Australian Telegraph Company; Reid, A Picnic with the Natives, pp. 31–3. 85  Peggy Brock, ‘Writing aboriginal collective biography: Poonindie, South Australia, 1850–1894’, Aboriginal History, vol. 11, 1987, pp. 117–22. 86  Brock, Outback Ghettos, pp. 36–7. 87  In 1864–1865, their missionary George Taplin reported a particularly high mortality rate, especially among the children; Harris, One Blood, pp. 358, 363. 88  Harris, One Blood, pp. 364–5. 82

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The Point Macleay residents, and people nearby along the lakes and rivers surrounding the mission, also requested the government to supply them with boats. The local sub-­protectors supported them, calling on the government to provide people with canoes for fishing and travel, and by the middle of the decade the government had supplied boats at the Coorong and Lake Wellington.89 By the end of the 1860s, some Aboriginal people made their case to government directly, explaining that they needed the government to provide them with boats since their country no longer supplied enough timber to enable them to build their own canoes. In addition, the native evangelists William MacHughes and James Unaipon said they wanted boats in order to travel up the Murray and preach to foreign communities.90 Not all of these requests succeeded, but a general policy had been put into place, and canoes and fishing equipment were distributed at ration depots on the Murray, the Coorong, coastal regions and the Lake Eyre Basin during the 1860s and 1870s.91 In these appeals, we can discern the intertwined ideas about Christianity, honest labour and compensation for the dispossessed, which shaped humanitarian policy and Aboriginal activism then and since. Aboriginal people still wished to negotiate directly with the governor whenever possible, but frequently found their attempts to do so thwarted by government officials. When Governor Daly reached the township of Robe during a tour of the colony’s south-­eastern district in February 1863, the town residents staged a large public welcome that included fifty Aboriginal people. They gathered in front of the hotel in which he was staying, performed for him, and gave three cheers ‘in the true British style’. Mr Warren, the sub-­protector, gave them flour and tobacco, and leading local citizen George Ormerod gave them some shirts and trousers so they would look decent for the governor. This was all very well, but they expected more. The Advertiser noted that ‘several attempts were made by the owners of the soil to address His Excellency, and to solicit him to cause suits of clothes to be sent down to them as well as rations’. It seems likely these were people who recalled the old practice of the governor’s levees in Adelaide, where gifts, performances, and personal relationships with this vice-­regal figure were encouraged. Unfortunately, little else seems to have been recorded of this occasion, but it is clear that the people concerned did not get a proper hearing. The Advertiser remarked, ‘they had not the fortitude

 ‘South Australia: Report on Poonindie Mission’, minutes, p. 86; South Australian Advertiser, 27 March 1865, p. 6.  Aborigines’ Friends Association, Report Read at the Eleventh Annual Meeting, Adelaide: Shawyer & Bowen, 1869, p. 4; Report by Sub-­Protector of Aborigines, 28 April 1873, in South Australia, Aborigines Office, Report from Protector of Aborigines, Adelaide, Aborigines Office, 1873. 91  Foster, ‘Rations, coexistence and the colonisation of Aboriginal labour’, p. 20. 89

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to make known their wants to His Excellency.92 When Governor Daly visited Poonindie in September 1865, the overseer, Alexander Watherston, appears to have discouraged the residents from meeting with the Governor, though there was a display of scriptural readings by some of the men, intended as a demonstration of their progress towards British civilisation.93 It was not only the governor with whom Aboriginal people sought to engage; they also wished to address or meet with representatives of the royal family. In June 1863, the people at Point Macleay sent an address, written in English and their own language, to Queen Victoria congratulating her on the marriage of her son, the Prince of Wales, as the Kulin had done in Victoria.94 So far, we have not found any more details of this message; the Kulin address, which had been reported in the South Australian papers, may well have inspired it.95 When HRH Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited four years later, in November 1867, the mission residents achieved a much closer connection with royalty than ever before. When Prince Alfred’s party stopped at Woomeran, Loveday Bay, near the mission, about five hundred Aboriginal people gathered from the surrounding districts. On this occasion, the mission residents asserted their people’s connection with the Crown, their dignity, and equal subjecthood, as well as their complex involvement with missionary paternalism. The importance of the occasion went beyond the duke’s arrival; according to their missionary George Taplin, they were keen to see one another too, and the surrounding days were punctuated by Aboriginal church services and meetings of all kinds. At the same time, they were also eager to reach out to the monarchy. Like the men who performed in Brisbane at Tom Petrie’s instigation, many of them dressed up for the occasion and practised marching ‘so as to appear in an orderly manner before the Duke’. Of all the meetings Aboriginal people in the colonies had with the Duke, this was probably the most impressive. Upon the royal arrival, the missionaries led the way to the lake with the schoolchildren holding flags, and the men marched down to the causeway and cheered. The older people wore traditional cloaks, while the younger ones were in European dress. The people had written and signed an address, read out by an adolescent boy called George Pantuni, who welcomed Alfred and wished him a safe journey. He explained that the old men were going to dance for their visitors the way they used to before the white people came, but that the prince must not misunderstand this and think that they were ‘wild blacks’. In fact, Pantuni continued, these people had had

 South Australian Advertiser, 28 February 1863, p. 3.  Ibid., 11 September 1865, p. 3. 94  Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 18 July 1863, p. 5; South Australian Register, 25 June 1863, p. 2. 95  South Australia Register, 29 May 1863, p. 3; 1 June 1863, p. 3; 2 June 1863, p. 3. 92 93

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a Christian education and gathered every Sunday ‘to pray to the same God and hear of the same Jesus as your Royal Highness does.’ He went on: Some have given up native customs and become real Christians, and many others are learning the way. Many of us got an honest living by working like white people. We have often been told about the Queen your mother, and we hope and pray that God will always bless her.

When Ngarrindjeri people claimed respectable subjecthood here, they did so on the basis of their participation in mission life and acquiescence to Christianity. This model of subjecthood was troubled and limited, but also crucial, at a time when some people living in other districts were labelled ‘wild blacks’, declared to be outside of the law, starved, and terrorised. The Duke listened attentively to Pantuni’s greeting, and the people were pleased when he summoned his piper to play for them. Later, the men of Point Macleay painted themselves and danced for hours before a fascinated crowd. Here, they were drawing on traditional practices but also on colonial strategies of dancing and singing for British viewers, which, as Michael Parsons notes, had long been associated with Queen’s birthday celebrations and greetings for the governor.96 The Ngarrindjeri women also sang and danced, but were offended when a white man in the crowd asked them to take off their clothes. ‘What for blackwoman do that,’ one asked in reply, ‘when whitewomen no do it?’97 They also became frustrated and angry when colonists disrupted their exchanges with the Duke. Taplin noted the residents’ annoyance (and his own) when the event organisers failed to invite Ngarrindjeri people there in time, tried to keep them away from the royal landing, failed to introduce George Pantuni properly, and pressured people to dance when they were not ready. John Baker, who had opposed Taplin and the mission all along, caused particular offence. He was accused of being the one who made the improper suggestion to the female dancers, and later, when the Ngarrindjeri men planned to take the Duke on a kangaroo hunt, they found that Baker kept them away. A meeting with the Duke was a means of asserting dignity and connections to the countryside, both to this figure of Crown authority himself and to the white and black people watching, and the Ngarrindjeri resented any hindrance. They complained

 Michael Parsons, ‘The tourist corroboree in South Australia to 1911’, Aboriginal History, vol. 21, 1997, pp. 46–69. 97  Account reproduced in the Argus, 19 November 1867, p.  5; George Taplin, Diaries, 3–11 November 1867, PRG 186-1/12, vol. 6, fiche 4 of 5 (in the Edith Gertrude Beaumont Papers, State Library of South Australia). Also, Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, pp. 85–95, 151; J. D. Woods, eds., The Native Tribes of South Australia, Adelaide: E. S. Wigg & Son, 1879, pp. 111–13. 96

A Question of Honour in the Colony That Was Meant to Be Different 357

bitterly to Taplin, ‘John Baker been steal our prince.’98 Nevertheless, for all their difficulties, Aboriginal people in South Australia had much more contact with the Prince than had their counterparts in Victoria. Conclusion South Australia had long been Britain’s best hope for an Aboriginal protection policy running alongside a project of colonisation and emigration. The notion of protection and to some degree of Aboriginal rights had been embedded in the colony’s founding documents, and over the next twenty years, British officials saw South Australia as less troublesome in Aboriginal affairs than other colonies. It had, after all, been founded on principles of protection, and the spirit of liberalism, inspired by John Stuart Mill, was an important part of South Australian colonial culture. Furthermore, it had not been a site for receiving transported convicts, who were in other colonies so frequently blamed, then and later, for injury to Indigenous people. Yet in South Australia, like the other Australian colonies, ongoing pastoral expansion had made policies of protection and respect for Aboriginal rights more or less impossible. Although the transition to self-­government strengthened the hand of liberals and democrats in colonial politics, they had developed little consistent Aboriginal policy of their own. The desire for honourable colonisation had been nowhere more evident than in South Australia, and therefore, when colonisation brought dishonour for the colonisers and massive destruction for the colonised, nowhere more clearly defeated.

 Taplin, Diaries, 11–13 November 1867. See also Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, pp. 83–6.

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Part IV

Self-Government for Western Australia

15

‘Little Short of Slavery’ Forced Aboriginal Labour in Western Australia, 1856–1884

There is clear evidence that in the pearling industry there is a state of things little short of slavery.1

Governor Robinson, 9 March 1881

[I recommend a] law to protect them from slavery, or being forcibly abducted to perform unremunerated labour.2 Duncan McNab, 25 May 1883

The first thing the modern observer notices about Western Australia’s journey to self-­government is how much later it took place compared with similar colonies in Australia, North America, southern Africa, and New Zealand. New Zealand and the other Australian colonies had all gained self-­government by 1856; most of the Canadian colonies had not only gained self-­government by the late 1840s, but by 1867 had already federated to form the independent nation of Canada, and the Cape Colony in South Africa had gained self-­ government in 1872. The delay would make the Western Australian story significantly different from that of the other colonies. When politicians in Britain and Western Australia came to consider the question of responsible government in the 1880s, they did so in a very different imperial context from the one that had framed debates in the 1850s. As Norman Etherington points out, the imperial experience of settler self-­government over the previous thirty years, with its dire consequences in New Zealand, Queensland, and the Cape Colony, had made imperial policy-­makers more wary.3 From an imperial perspective, a major problem arising from self-­government was the way in which

 Robinson to Kimberley, 9 March 1881, printed in Correspondence Relating to the Question of Police Protection to Settlers in Outlying Districts, Promulgation of Pearl Shell Fishery Regulations, and Protection of Aboriginal Natives, WALCVP, 1881, p. 5. 2  Letters from the Rev. D. McNab relative to the settlement and civilisation of Aborigines of Western Australia, WALCVP, 1883, p. 9. 3  Norman Etherington, ‘The Western Australian Constitution in Its British Imperial Context’, speech to Constitutional Centre of Western Australia, 25 October 2003, viewed 31 May 2010, www.history councilwa.org.au/Papers-of-Interest.html. 1

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harsh settler policies towards indigenous peoples endangered both imperial security and the honour of the empire. We devote our last two chapters to tracing and interpreting Western Australia’s distinctive trajectory towards self-­ government. In this chapter, we compare Aboriginal policy in Western Australia to that developing in the Australian colonies that had attained self-­government decades before, while in the next we explore in detail the ways in which the question of Aboriginal policy affected the struggle for and eventual granting of self-­government in 1890. In both chapters, we explore the importance of the continuing and sometimes bitter controversy over the management and treatment of Aboriginal labour. The charge that settlers in the northern districts in the pearling and pastoral industries had instituted a system of Aboriginal slave labour would intensify in the 1880s to such an extent that the fitness of the colony for responsible government came under challenge. The importance of the Aboriginal labour question to the colonisation of the northern region of Western Australia also raises questions for our understanding of the nature of settler colonialism itself. At the very least, it suggests a complication to Patrick Wolfe’s proposition that settler colonialism is characterised by a ‘logic of elimination’, founded on a desire for Indigenous people’s land resources rather than their labour.4 Aboriginal Policy 1856–1870 In 1856, British settlement was concentrated in the south-­west corner of the vast colony. The introduction of convict transportation in 1850 had augmented the colony’s tiny settler population to such an extent that, of the adult male population of 5,100, around 3,000 were convicts or ex-convicts.5 There was some gradual expansion, with a growth in wheat farming to the east of Perth in the 1850s and sheep farming in the Pilbara to its north in the 1860s. Under governors Sir Arthur Kennedy (1855–1862), Dr John Hampton (1862–1868), and Sir Benjamin Pine (1868–1869), government attention to Aboriginal policy was minimal. As in the self-­governing colonies, there was a programme of cost-­cutting in the 1850s; when Britain in 1857 abolished direct funding for the protector (a position already compromised by its transformation in 1849  Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, pp. 387–409.  Kennedy to Labouchere, no. 99, 6 October 1856, cited in Isla MacPhail, A Constrained and Cautious Liberalism: Western Australian Parliamentary Electoral History, 1829–1901, PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2016, p. 68. ‘Adult’ here meant over 15 years of age. South Australia had proven much more attractive to British and other immigrants, with the result that although it was slightly the older colony (by seven years), Western Australia’s settler population in 1856 was less than one sixth the size of that in South Australia, and remained so throughout the 1860s. In 1856, South Australia’s population was recorded as 56,264, Western Australia’s as 8751; in 1870, the figures were 94,894 and 15,511 respectively. ABS Historical Statistics, Table 1.1.

4 5

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into Guardian of Natives and Protector of Settlers), Governor Kennedy made no attempt to continue the position using colonial funds.6 Unlike Victoria and South Australia, the government reserved no lands for Aboriginal use and there was little government support for missionary and educational activity.7 The main exception was a grant from 1861 of £100 per year to the New Norcia Benedictine mission, which was succeeding in building a Catholic Aboriginal community.8 The first Bishop of Perth, Mathew Hale, who arrived from managing the Poonindie Mission in South Australia in 1856, tried hard to establish a greater Anglican church commitment to missionary endeavour among Aboriginal people, but was limited, as Malcolm Allbrook points out, in what he could achieve when a pro-­Aboriginal stance threatened both his personal standing and that of the church.9 There do not appear to have been any attempts by governors Kennedy, Hampton, and Pine to act diplomatically as conciliators or friends of Aboriginal people, as earlier governors in this and the other colonies had done. Government officials, under the mistaken impression that Prince Alfred would include Perth in his forthcoming visit to Australia, began preparing in August 1867 for the visit and, as in most other colonies, included an Aboriginal corroboree performance in their ceremonial plans. As it turned out, the prince bypassed Western Australia and sailed straight to Adelaide, but when, having recovered from the shooting in Sydney, he did visit Perth in February 1869 at the beginning of his second Australian visit, the idea of an Aboriginal performance seems to have been forgotten.10 It seems as if the small colony had rather exhausted itself preparing lavishly for a visit that did not happen in 1867, and, without a governor present when the prince did come, managed only a modest welcome. British policy in Western Australia focused on the operations of the law, punishment, and imprisonment to manage both frontier conflict and labour relations.11 It sought to secure land for the settlers not by the kind of government-­sanctioned killing of indigenous people occurring in Queensland but rather through a policy similar to that of South Australia, with its focus on policing, arrest, and imprisonment. In this colony, which had been remarkably  Hasluck, Black Australians, pp. 79–80.  WA Government Gazette, 18 June 1878, p. 145 and 6 August 1878, p. 6, quoted in Hasluck, Black Australians, p.  114; Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-­Century Western Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2004, p. 126. 8  The Inquirer and Commercial News, 13 November 1861, p. 3. 9  Malcolm Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s Empire: Framing a Distant Colony, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014, p. 210. 10  Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 23 August 1867, p. 3, 27 September 1867, p. 3, 11 October 1867, p. 2; Jess, ‘The Royal “Snub”’, Finding Family, www.ancestrysearch.wordpress .com/2015/04/03/the-royal-snub/; The Herald (Fremantle), 6 February 1869, p. 2, and supplement, p. 1. 11  Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 7. 6 7

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comfortable with convict transportation long after that system had become abhorrent to the eastern colonies, a culture of imprisonment was evidently alive and well. To manage this disciplinary regime in such a huge and scarcely settled colony, governors established a network of Government Residents in newly settled districts. Far from the seat of government in Perth, these Residents had the power to appoint Justices of the Peace (JPs), preside over Petty and Quarter sessions, and generally attempt to impose and maintain law and order.12 In times of major disturbance, the Resident could swear in special constables to arrest Aboriginal people on suspicion of having committed a crime, a practice that could lead to government authorisation of settler violence against Aboriginal resisters.13 Governors found it extremely difficult to monitor and control the Residents’ actions, with dire consequences in many cases for Aboriginal people. Thus, while British authorities were creating a system of governmentality through the structure, language, and paraphernalia of the justice system, they were in fact also installing and maintaining the arbitrary and often unlawful power of self-­interested officials and pastoralists. As in the other Australian and Canadian colonies, stock theft and stock killing were a major means of both Aboriginal resistance and economic survival in pastoral areas.14 Police would arrest any suspected Aboriginal offender and bring those charged, chained together, along with Aboriginal witnesses, also chained and effectively imprisoned, to the nearest centre for sentencing and punishment.15 Under Governor Kennedy, the powers of magistrates were increased when the 1849 ordinance permitting magistrates and JPs to summarily try Aboriginal people and pass sentences on them was amended in 1859 so that the maximum term of imprisonment a magistrate could impose was extended from six months to three years.16 Despite these arrangements, settlers in the frontier districts, like their counterparts in the other colonies, were dissatisfied with the level of protection provided to them. An article in the West Australian Times in November 1863 urged the government to supply military protection for the pastoral, timber, and mining industries; it was the role of government, the writer suggested, to support expansion and to do otherwise  Wilma Mann, ‘Sagacious seers and honourable men: Pearling, Aboriginal labour and representations of Australian colonialism’, in J. Bailey, ed., Papers in Labour History, no. 14, 1994, pp. 57–74, esp. p. 59. 13  Hasluck, Black Australians, pp. 110–1. 14  Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements, p. 135. 15  See Mark Finnane and John Maguire, ‘The uses of punishment and exile: Aborigines in Colonial Australia’, Punishment and Society, vol. 3, no. 2, 2001, pp. 285–6. Kay Forrest, The Challenge and the Chance: The Colonisation and Settlement of North West Australia 1861–1914, Carlisle, Western Australia: Hesperian Press, 1996, pp. 58–60. 16  An Ordinance to Provide for the summary trial and punishment of Aboriginal offenders in certain cases, 12th Vict. No. 18, 1849; An Ordinance to amend ‘An Ordinance to provide for the Summary Trial and Punishment of Aboriginal Native Offenders in certain cases’, 23 Vict. No. 10, 1859. 12

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was to abrogate its imperial duty: a government ‘content to do nothing towards extending the means of the Colony  . . . is a mere nonentity as an originating Power’.17 The government under John Hampton was, in fact, very much in favour of pastoral expansion, and encouraged it through new land regulations in 1864 that raised the maximum lease area to 100,000 acres and lowered rents payable by new settlers in the north-­western districts.18 The result was not only the extension of pastoralism in new areas, but also, predictably, the destruction of Aboriginal economic self-­sufficiency in those areas leading to frontier conflict, Aboriginal poverty, and incarceration.19 Settler governance in Western Australia was not only a matter of securing settler claims to the land and putting down Aboriginal resistance, but also, more than in any other colony, one of managing Aboriginal labour. While the availability of convict labour in the 1850s and 1860s eased the perennial labour shortage, by the end of the 1860s, with the economy expanding, transportation ended, and convict sentences expiring, labour scarcity was again a serious issue. Aboriginal labour became essential in the north, both in the pearling industry and on the pastoral stations. When the pearlshell fishing began in 1867 off the Pilbara coast in the North West, Yaburara and other Aboriginal labour was extensively used, very often by force or trickery. Pearlers were sometimes also pastoralists, able to take Aboriginal men, women and children from their pastoral stations and encourage or force them to work in pearling. When the pearling season ended, pastoralists would employ Aboriginal people on the stations.20 Pearlers often tricked many Aboriginal people into believing they would be working in their own country when in fact they took them hundreds of miles away.21 The work was extremely dangerous, the high death rates among Aboriginal pearl divers leading to a constant search for new workers.22 The Yaburara suffered, too, from a smallpox epidemic in 1866, and the effects of pastoralism on their traditional food sources.23 For many, stealing food became their main means of survival. Very often, frontier violence and labour exploitation were intertwined, as occurred at Flying Foam Passage, in the pearling district on the North Westcoast, in 1868. The events have been narrated by several historians – Tom Gara, Kay

 West Australian Times, 19 November 1863, p. 2.  WA Government Gazette, 24 August 1864, VIII, para 1–7; see Neville Green, ‘Aboriginal sentencing in Western Australia in the late 19th century with reference to Rottnest Island prison’, Records of the Western Australian Museum, vol. 79, supplement, 2011, p. 78. 19  Nettelbeck et al., Fragile Settlements, p. 135. 20  Forrest, The Challenge, pp. 78–81. 21  Ibid., p. 79. 22  Ibid., p. 165. 23  Mark McKenna, From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories, Melbourne:, Miegunyah Press, 2016, p. 127. 17 18

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Forrest, and most recently and in most detail, Mark McKenna.24 From them we learn that all the conditions for conflict were present, with Yaburara losing food sources and resorting to stealing and white men taking sexual advantage of Yaburara women. A group of about nine Yaburara men killed police constable William Griffis and his two associates (a pearler and an Aboriginal assistant) while rescuing a relative named Coolyerberri, who had been arrested and chained by the neck to a tree for stealing flour and other stores. (It is possible that the attack on Griffis was also motivated by revenge for his having abducted Aboriginal women.)25 In response, the local Government Resident, Robert Sholl (whose sons were involved in pearling), organised an attack – part-­revenge, part(in Foucault’s terms) admonitory spectacle of punishment – using two parties of special constables, each led by a prominent local settler; the reprisal escalated into a series of massacres over a three-­month period, killing between 30 and 60 Yaburara.26 As in the case of the Hornet Bank and Cullin-la-ringo conflicts in Queensland some years earlier, these events were seen by combatants at the time as indicating that they were engaged in a war. They also resulted in the near-­ destruction of the Yaburara. It would be seventeen years, however, before the extent of the killings would become generally known. When the story became public in 1885, it would play a significant role in debates over Aboriginal policy and in the moves towards self-government.27 Aboriginal Policy under Representative Government At the time of the Flying Foam Massacre, Western Australia was still a Crown colony, without representative government. Transition to representative government had, in fact, been foreshadowed almost twenty years earlier when the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850 provided that representation could be introduced just as soon as a petition with sufficient signatures requesting it was presented. The first such petition was presented to the council and forwarded to the secretary of state in 1865, but met with an unusually long silence from Britain, itself in a state of upheaval over electoral issues that would result in the Reform Act of 1867.28 Four years later, in July 1869 (in  T. J. Gara, ‘The flying foam massacre: An incident on the North-­West Frontier, Western Australia|’, in Moya Smith, ed., Archaeology at ANZAAS 1983, Perth: Western Australian Museum, 1983, pp. 65–94; McKenna, From the Edge, pp. 128–36; Forrest, The Challenge, pp. 58–63. 25  Gara draws attention to the account given in the reminiscences of John Watson, a former pearler, written in 1933. Gara, The Flying Foam Massacre, pp. 90–1. 26  Gara, The Flying Foam Massacre, pp. 90–2; McKenna, From the Edge, pp. 128–36; Forrest, The Challenge, pp. 58–63. See also Mann, ‘Sagacious seers’, pp. 60–1; B. Shepherd, ‘Pearling’, in J. Gregory and J. Gothard, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2009, p. 669. 27  Gara, The Flying Foam Massacre, p. 90; McKenna, From the Edge, pp. 138, 145. 28  Brian De Garis, ‘The history of Western Australia’s Constitution and attempts at its reform’, University of Western Australia Law Review, vol. 31, no. 2, December 2003, pp. 142–4; Brian De Garis, ‘Political Tutelage’, in C. T. Stannage, ed., A New History of Western Australia, 24

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the middle of Benjamin Pine’s brief period as governor), a second petition to the Legislative Council finally put in train a successful move to representative government. This petition had the active support of a new governor, Frederick Weld, who arrived on 30 September 1869. Born in Dorset, Weld had migrated at the age of 20 in 1844 to New Zealand, where he became in turn a prosperous sheep farmer, an advocate of self-­government, a member of parliament, and for a year from November 1864, Premier of the colony. After a tumultuous period in the context of the New Zealand wars, he retired from politics and turned to a career as an imperial administrator; Western Australia was his first posting.29 An enthusiastic advocate of representative government, one of his first tasks was to put pressure on a reluctant conservative council to pass the necessary legislation. It finally agreed, passing the Legislative Council Act 1870 (33 Vict. No. 13) which installed the new system of representative government on 1 June 1870.30 In practice, the council was more powerful than its limited formal powers suggested (it could not introduce money bills or exert control over Crown lands and revenue). Weld and his successors generally sought to gain council support for major changes or reforms, in part because they needed the co-­operation of the relevant officials to have policy enacted, and in part because there was a general long-­term expectation that responsible government would eventually be appropriate.31 Weld brought to the role of governor a greater concern with Aboriginal policy than had been evident since John Hutt’s term in the 1840s, almost thirty years earlier. On his arrival in September 1869, Bishop Salvado, the Benedictine Abbot of New Norcia, welcomed him, and the two formed a friendship that was to have consequences for Weld’s Aboriginal policy.32 With his New Zealand background, the harsh attitude of the settlers towards Aboriginal people initially shocked him, as did the mounting evidence of forced labour and the physical abuse of labourers in the rapidly expanding pearling industry. Weld was determined to do something to improve the situation and, on his encouragement, Colonial Secretary Frederick Barlee, presented a memorandum on Nedlands: University of Western Australia, 1981, pp. 297–325; Martin Gibbs, ‘The archaeology of the convict system in Western Australia’, in Australasian Historical Archaeology, vol. 19, 2001, pp. 60–72; C. T. Stannage, The People of Perth: A Social History of Western Australia’s Capital City, Perth: Perth City Council, 1979, pp. 78–83. 29  T. S. Louch, ‘Weld, Sir Frederick Aloysius (1823–1891)’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018. 30  The franchise for elected members was restrictive – voters had to own £100 of freehold property or pay £10 per annum rent, and only those who owned freehold property of £2,000, or £100 rental per annum were eligible to stand for election. W. F. P. Heseltine, The Movements for Self-­Government in Western Australia from 1882–1890, BA Hons thesis, University of Western Australia, 1950, pp. 1–-14. 31  Weld also worked with an Executive Council, consisting of the three official members of the Legislative Council and three other appointed members. It was even more limited in its powers than the Legislative Council, meeting only at the governor’s discretion, and addressing an agenda entirely set by him. See Heseltine, The Movements for Self-­Government in Western Australia, p. 9. 32  Forrest, The Challenge, p. 82.

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Aboriginal policy to the new blended Legislative Council in its first session, on 15 December 1870.33 A committee of inquiry was appointed, the report of which suggested in August 1871 that the government could grant land to Aboriginal people under certain strict conditions.34 The following year, council passed new land regulations whose main purpose was to allow for long-­term pastoral and mining leases at low rents, but did also provide for the reserve of land specifically for Aboriginal use.35 Under these regulations, the government in 1874 reserved 29 acres for the New Norcia mission.36 New Norcia was, in fact, something of a success story in these years, emphasising teaching a range of craft skills to its Aboriginal residents. Notably, Bishop Salvado trained a married Aboriginal woman, Helen Pangerian Cuper in Morse code, and then appointed her as the local telegraph officer without telling the government she was Aboriginal.37 Aboriginal mission residents also became known for their skill at sheep shearing and playing cricket. Weld also attempted to establish government control and regulation of labour practices in the rapidly expanding pearling industry. In an attempt to curb some of the worst abuses of Aboriginal workers, he introduced into the Legislative Council and ensured the passing of two regulatory Acts, in 1871 and 1873.38 These acts prohibited kidnapping, or ‘blackbirding’, and the employment of women, an indication that pearlers had used Aboriginal women quite extensively as divers.39 As Governor, however, he did not have the network of independent government officials necessary for enforcing the act; indeed, Robert Sholl, the Government Resident of the relevant district, had himself, through his sons, vested interests in pearling.40 Without effective government intervention, the ill treatment of Aboriginal divers continued. The 1871 legislation did, however, prompt some pearlers to introduce workers from a range of Malay-­ speaking places to Australia’s north, the number rising each year to almost 800 arriving in 1875 alone. Mistreatment of these workers, however, led the Dutch administration in Batavia to regulate the trade, ending it abruptly the following

 The Herald (Fremantle), 17 December 1870, p. 3.  Grants could be made to Aboriginal people recommended by the principal of a Native Industrial Institution, but the land could not be sold or transferred, and the governor could resume such grants if the land remained unimproved or uncultivated for three consecutive years; Aboriginal Natives: Report of Select Committee, WALCVP, 1871. 35  WA Gazette, 20 March 1872, cited in Forrest, The Challenge, p. 88. Amended in 1873, they were subsequently known as the Land Regulations of 1873. 36  Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 114. 37  John H. Smith, Rosaldo Salvado: Commemorating 200 Years, New Norcia, Benedictine Community of New Norcia, 2014. 38  Aborigines, Employment in Pearling Act 1871 (34 Vict. No. 14); Pearl Shell Fishery Regulation Act 1873 (37 Vict. No. 11). 39  Forrest, The Challenge, p. 80. 40  Ibid., p. 155. 33 34

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year.41 In a related move, Weld oversaw in July 1874 an amended Ordinance for the summary trial and punishment of Aboriginal offenders that removed the authorisation of magistrates and JPS to sentence Aboriginal offenders to whipping of up to two dozen lashes.42 In the second half of 1874, there was a brief flurry in the Legislative Council of support for the idea of responsible government. Many in the council were wary of introducing responsible government, with its higher cost and propensity to open the door of parliament to working and middle class people who could challenge the authority and economic policies of the small colonial elite.43 They felt they could get their own way better under the existing system, a feeling that was, perhaps, a product of the lack of any serious disagreements with British policy at the time. On the other hand, the system of representative government had its limitations, and some members of parliament were becoming restive. In July 1874, the Legislative Council endorsed the motion of the relatively radical member, Lee Steere, expressing support for responsible government on the grounds that ‘it would give the colony more freedom to develop its land and raise loans for public works’.44 These would prove, indeed, to be key reasons for wanting self-­government, but it would take another decade for the Council to agree wholeheartedly. When Barlee as Colonial Secretary presented Council ten days later with a draft constitution, speedily drawn up at the Council’s request by Governor Weld and based on other colonial constitutions, especially that of South Australia, the Council was divided and wanted more time to discuss the details. Accordingly, Weld dissolved parliament and called new elections, which revealed broad support for self-­government but division over that perennial problem in colonial politics of whether the upper house should be elected or nominated. The British conservative government, elected earlier that year and led by Benjamin Disraeli, was displeased to learn that matters had gone so far without it being consulted, and pronounced the move premature in view of the small population of only 26,000 people, and the high proportion of adult males of convict background.45 And there matters stood when Weld’s term ended in early January 1875. When  Mike McCarthy, ‘Before Broome’, Great Circle, vol. 16, no. 2, 1994, pp. 76–89. Available at www .search.informit.com.au.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/fullText;dn=950808138;res=APAFT, accessed 21 November 2012. See also R. Moore, ‘The management of the Western Australian pearling industry, 1860 to the 1930s’, Great Circle, vol. 16, no. 2, 1994, p. 127. 42  An Act to amend ‘An Ordinance to provide for the summary trial and punishment of Aboriginal Native Offenders in certain cases’, 38 Vict. No. 8, 17 July 1874. 43  Brian De Garis, ‘Constitutional and political development’, in David Black, ed., The House on the Hill: A History of the Parliament of Western Australia 1832–1990, Perth: Parliament of Western Australia, 1991, p. 52; Heseltine, The Movements for Self-­Government in Western Australia, p. 54. 44  Ibid., p. 50. 45  Ibid., p. 51.

41

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the new Governor, William Robinson, reported to council that there was British opposition to a new constitution, it responded with a resolution that responsible government should nevertheless be proceeded with; faced with British government intransigence and considerable internal disagreement, however, the issue faded away.46 When the Legislative Council returned to the question of responsible government in July 1878, there was yet another new governor in place, Major General Harry Ord, and council itself had changed composition after a recent election.47 One of the new members, Stephen Henry Parker, the locally born member for Perth, would become the colony’s leading enthusiast for responsible government. He moved a resolution for responsible government on 12 July 1878, and would do so several times more over the next seven years, his resolutions becoming known as his ‘annual joke’.48 He formed a Reform League to pursue the matter in 1878, though this soon died away for lack of support.49 The extent of the colonial elite’s coolness towards the idea of self-­government was evident from the first issue of the West Australian in November 1879. It wanted, it said, to distance itself from the pro-­responsible government stance of its predecessor, the West Australian Times, under different owners. There were, the new newspaper announced, ‘grave objections’ and ‘serious dangers’ which ‘should hold back the wary and the prudent’ before ‘taking a leap from known ground to an uncertain and precarious foothold’.50 The situation was, however, to change more rapidly than the West Australian could have imagined. There was some rather limited government attention to Aboriginal welfare after Weld left in early 1875. Both Robinson and Ord, his successor, attempted to improve government regulation of the use of Aboriginal labour in the pearl­ ing industry, Robinson in 1875 instigating yet another Pearl Shell Fishery Act with more stringent regulations and Ord in 1879 creating the position of inspector of Pearl Shell Fisheries in an effort to increase compliance.51 Under  For a detailed discussion of these events, see MacPhail, A Constrained and Cautious Liberalism, pp. 119–34. 47  Ord was governor from 12 November 1877 to 9 April 1880. 48  WALCPD Parliamentary Debates, (hereafter PD), Perth: Government Printer, 1878, p. 249. See also De Garis, ‘Constitutional and Political Development’, pp. 51–2; P. J. Boyce, ‘The governors of Western Australia under Representative Government, 1870–1890’, University Studies in History, vol. IV, no. 1, 1961–1962, p. 131; P. R. Millett, ‘“. . .under the tutelage of Downing Street”: British convicts and the attainment of representative and responsible government in Western Australia, 1850–1890’, Perth: The Constitutional Centre of Western Australia, 2006, p. 18; De Garis, ‘Self-­Government and the Evolution of Party Politics 1871–1911’, p. 335. On the ‘annual joke’, see Heseltine, The Movements for Self-­Government in Western Australia, p. 25. 49  De Garis, ‘Constitutional and Political Development’, p. 53. 50  West Australian, Editorial, 18 November 1879, p. 2. 51  Pearl Shell Fishery Regulation Act 1875, 39 Vict. No. 13; WA Government Gazette, 1879, p. 350, cited in J. S. Battye, Western Australia: A History from Its Discovery to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925, available online via Project Gutenberg, 2005. 46

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Governor Ord, the government began to make substantial reserves of land for Aboriginal use under the 1873 regulations, starting with a reserve of 50,000 acres between the Murchison and Sanford rivers.52 The Anglican Bishop of Perth worked hard to establish a mission in the north, forming a church mission committee in 1878 to explore the possibilities.53 Governor Robinson and Aboriginal Policy, 1880–1883 When William Robinson’s second term as governor began on 10 April 1880, it inaugurated a tumultuous three years for Aboriginal people and Aboriginal policy. As indicated in our epigraph to this chapter, the continued abuse of Aboriginal labour in the pearling industry led him to write to the Secretary of State, the Earl of Kimberley, on 9 March 1881 that there was clear evidence that it constituted ‘a state of things little short of slavery’.54 He introduced more stringent regulations, restricting the age of divers, reducing the legal diving depth, and requiring pearling employers to return workers to their own country after six months’ work.55 The employers complained that they would be ruined; so great was their hostility that Robinson hastily amended the legislation to allow deeper diving depths and the hiring of Aboriginal workers as domestic labourers in the off-­season, rather than returning them to their country.56 With their working conditions thus poorly protected, Aboriginal labourers remained essential to the industry for the rest of the decade.57 The abuse of Aboriginal labour was also rife in the growing pastoral industry in the north.58 After a series of explorations in the 1870s in search of new stock farming opportunities, millions of hectares of pastoral land in the northern districts were opened for settlement in the 1880s. With little access to either free or convict labour, pastoralists turned to Aboriginal people for their main labour supply. Aboriginal women worked as shepherds and wool classers, while the men sheared the sheep, and managed the horses and drays used to transport the wool. Neville Green describes a situation in which pastoralists would sign up as many Aboriginal workers as possible, to ensure sufficient labour for the shearing season. In the off-­season, he says, ‘the workers were sent into the  Hasluck, Black Australians, p.  114; The Western Australian Times, 21 June 1878, p.2; The Inquirer and Commercial News, 3 July 1878, p. 3.  Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 101; Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 114. 54  Robinson to Kimberley, 9 March 1881. 55  Ibid.; Pearl Shell Fishery Regulations under 39 Vict. No. 13, WALCVP, 1881, A15, p. 5. 56  Hunt, ‘Gribble affair’, pp. 10–1; Hugh Edwards, Port of Pearls: A History of Broome, Adelaide: Rigby, 1983, pp. 45–7. 57  Hasluck, Black Australians,31; Su-Jane Hunt, Spinifex and Hessian: Women’s Lives in North West Australia, 1860–1900, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1986, p. 103; Mann, ‘Sagacious seers’, p. 59. 58  Forrest, The Challenge, p. 104. 52

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bush to fend for themselves’.59 On cattle stations, Aboriginal people worked in a wide variety of occupations from stock-­riders to station hands. Whereas pearling often involved the separation of individuals from their clan and country, this was less often the case in pastoralism, where it was to the settlers’ advantage to keep whole families and communities on their own land. Families frequently lived on the sheep and cattle stations, working for food and clothing rather than wages, making them extraordinarily cheap for the employer and prompting suspicions of a system of slavery.60 Very often, Aboriginal pastoral labour was forced labour. Aboriginal workers were required to sign a contract with a mark or a cross, and once they did so, they were treated as property of the station, unable to leave of their own free will.61 Many were beaten, forced to live in impoverished circumstances, and exposed to sexual exploitation and violence. Those whom employers sent into the bush when their labour was not needed would be regarded as absconders if they did not return when their employers needed them again.62 It was a brutal system, and the only source of regulation of pastoral labour was through the draconian Masters and Servants Acts governing European and Aboriginal workers alike.63 The punishment for not working was severe, ranging from physical beatings to being charged with absconding and taken to a magistrate for sentencing. Arrest often meant being taken long distances, chained by the neck, a practice that was at the time, as Jane Lydon explores, criticised by many but nevertheless stubbornly maintained for decades.64 If found guilty, Aboriginal people were generally sentenced to gaol, which in the early years usually meant the notorious Rottnest Island; later, gaols were built in the north.65 In short, the justice and prison systems enhanced the power of the pastoralist employers. The main charge leading to transportation to Rottnest, however, was stealing or killing stock. When the northern settlers complained of high levels of stock theft, Governor Robinson in May 1882 sent Robert Fairbairn to investigate. A respected magistrate who had previously served in the Kimberley district and undertaken government inquiries, Fairbairn was now Government Resident at Busselton in the south.66 To the northern settlers’ chagrin, he reported that stock theft was less prevalent than the settlers had claimed, and that in any case the settlers themselves were often to blame, since they allocated shepherding  Green, ‘Aboriginal sentencing’, p. 82.  Forrest, The Challenge, p. 126.  Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 101. 62  Green, ‘Aboriginal sentencing’, p. 82. 63  Ibid., p. 82, n. 6. 64  Jane Lydon, The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights, Sydney: NewSouth, 2012, pp. 38–55. 65  Finnane and McGuire, ‘The uses of punishment and exile’, p. 286. 66  Western Mail, 24 November 1906, p. 26. 59 60 61

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duties to unsupervised women, who turned a blind eye when their male relatives engaged in sheep stealing. He also pointed out that with native foods scarce, many Aboriginal people outside the pastoral stations were hungry, and thus more likely to steal stock. Where Aboriginal people had conducted violent attacks on settlers themselves, he reported, these were nearly always reprisals for white men’s taking or abusing Aboriginal women.67 Fairbairn’s report, however, sent mixed messages; although relatively understanding of Aboriginal people’s motivations for stock theft and attacks on settlers and critical of settlers, it recommended as a solution more policing in the Gascoyne and Murchison regions, and he himself while in the region sentenced 29 Aboriginal men to prison terms on Rottnest.68 Despite its recommendation of increased policing, the report outraged northern settlers. When Robinson accepted it and had it tabled in the Legislative Council along with other documents, the pastoralists’ many supporters in the Legislative Council were also appalled. They saw Governor Robinson’s acceptance of the report as defending Aboriginal people rather than the settlers themselves. Conflict over the report strengthened the emerging belief that British ‘autocracy’ (here embodied in the Governor) was associated with being ‘soft’ on Aboriginal people while self-­government would mean freedom to pursue the ‘hard’ policies that were necessary for colonial development. In a bid to counter Fairbairn’s report and the Governor’s approving comments on it, Maitland Brown, a conservative pastoralist member of the council, moved for the further consideration of ‘depredations committed or attempted by natives during the last six years’, and requesting the tabling of various documents.69 When the council received the report on 18 September, a long and angry debate ensured which continued three days later.70 Then, in council on 22 September 1882, Stephen Parker took the opportunity provided by the Fairbairn report to attack the Governor and to promote the self-­government cause. He drew attention to the huge settler dissatisfaction with the government for not doing enough to protect their lives and property, then unsuccessfully moved a motion that the government’s attitudes on this question ‘were all that could reasonably be expected from an Executive which does not represent the country, and is responsible only to Her Majesty’s Government for its administrative action in reference to disputes between the aboriginal and white races’.71 Before the Legislative Council could further discuss Aboriginal policy, however, Governor Robinson prorogued parliament the next day, bringing the session to an end.72  R. Fairbairn to Governor Robinson, 16 August 1882, National Archives of Great Britain, Records of the Colonial Office, Western Australia, Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, Despatches, 18/197. 68  Instructions to and Reports from the Resident Magistrate Despatched by Direction of His Excellency on Special Duty to the Murchison and Gascoyne Districts, WALCVP, 1882. 69  Papers and Correspondence relative to the Native Question, WALCPD, 5 September 1882, p. 294. 70  WALCPD, 5 September 1882, p. 294, 18 September 1882, p. 390, 21 September 1882, pp. 428– 40. 71  Ibid., 22 September 1882, p. 182. 72  Ibid., 23 September 1882, p. 471. 67

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Though the settlers and the Council saw the Fairbairn report as pro-­Aboriginal and anti-­settler, its practical outcome in fact suited the settlers. Acting on Fairbairn’s recommendation, Robinson authorized an increase in the presence of magistrates and police in the northern districts, and appointed Charles Foss, former pastoralist and sheep scab inspector, as itinerant stipendiary magistrate for the Gascoyne and Murchison districts.73 In this role, Foss had the power to convict and sentence Aboriginal people arrested for crimes such as sheep stealing for periods of up to six months; after the amendments of 1874, only resident magistrates could impose the longer sentences of up to three years. He regularly exceeded this limited however, passing many longer sentences, including sentences of three years. For the frequency and length of the gaol sentences he imposed, Foss became known as an especially draconian magistrate, one newspaper describing his approach as one of ‘transporting the whole of the native inhabitants to Rottnest’.74 In November 1882, the liberal Inquirer raised concerns about Foss’s wholesale deportation of Aboriginal people to Rottnest Island, and the consequences of overcrowding in the prison there.75 Though perhaps the government official best known for his propensity to send Aboriginal people to Rottnest, Foss was not alone. Many others were also inclined to sentence Aboriginal people to gaol for stock stealing, notable examples in the Murchison and Gascoyne region including Justices of the Peace such as brothers Everard and Leonard Darlot, and Edward Bush.76 The Interregnum, February–June 1883 When Robinson left for the governorship of South Australia in mid-­February 1883, his opponents in the Legislative Council and the press were ready with their own programmes of action. It was to be over three months before the new Governor, Frederick Broome, arrived, and in the interim, Chief Justice Henry Thomas Wrensfordley was appointed acting governor. It was to be an eventful few months for both the self-­government cause and for Aboriginal policy. The first issue to draw attention was the rising number of prisoners arriving from the north at Rottnest Island. When the Attorney General became aware that Foss had sentenced many Aboriginal men to sentences beyond the limits of his authority, the Legislative Council met in a special session on 13 April 1883, in which it passed the government’s Natives Convictions Validity Act, retrospectively validating Foss’s sentences.77 Thus, some strikingly unlawful steps were  Lord Gifford, then Colonial Secretary, had appointed Foss as Stipendiary Itinerant Magistrate, on the advice of Attorney General Onslow. Forrest, The Challenge, p. 143. 74  Forrest, The Challenge, 142. 75  Inquirer, 8 November 1882, p. 5; Katherine Roscoe, ‘“Too many kill” em. too many make “em ill”: The commission into Rottnest prison as the context for section 70’, Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 30, 2016, p. 45. 76  Green, ‘Aboriginal sentencing’, p. 80. 77  An Act to give Validity to Certain Summary Convictions of Aboriginal Natives of the Colony, 46 Vict. 26, 19 April 1883; WALCPD, 13, 16 and 18 April 1883. 73

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taken to render a magistrate’s illegal actions legal, in the name of imposing ‘law and order’ on the frontier. Then in May, the following month, proposals for Aboriginal policy came from quite a different direction, the churches. Duncan McNab, a Scottish Catholic priest who had actively sought better Aboriginal protection and welfare in Queensland, had been attending to the Aboriginal prisoners at Rottnest. His approach was practical and future-­oriented. On 11 May, he wrote to the acting governor urging that the prisoners be educated and employed. ‘Even in Queensland,’ he wrote, ‘when natives are imprisoned for a considerable time, they are taught some trade, at which they can employ themselves when released’. They could be profitably occupied in making fishing nets, boatbuilding, cooperage, shoemaking, tailoring, and saddlery, rather than the ‘hoeing or scratching the soil practiced here’. They should also be taught ‘the leading truths and morals of the Gospel’. Encouraged by Wrensfordsley’s warm reply, McNab wrote a second letter with more detailed suggestions. He criticised the general acceptance of the excuse of ‘self-­defence’ when settlers murdered Aboriginal people caught at stock-­stealing. ‘Let their right to live’, he wrote, ‘and to land for their maintenance be acknowledged, and secured to them, in compensation for the damage they have sustained by the advent of Europeans into their country’. In a practical vein, he said they needed rations, implements for fishing and tillage, exclusion from places selling intoxicating liquors, proper housing, clothing, and medical assistance. He especially urged the setting aside of reserves of land for their use, reminding the governor that the law already allowed for such reserves; it was up to the governor to assign the land to them. If they contracted regular marriages, they should have the right of transmitting that land to their children. He was not, however, in favour of Aboriginal Protection Boards, for wherever they are established, he wrote, possibly thinking of the continuing population decline in Victoria, ‘the natives have perished, or are rapidly disappearing’.78 McNab had many other suggestions for government protection of Aboriginal rights, notably a ‘law to protect them from slavery, or being forcibly abducted to perform unremunerated labour’.79 At the same time, Bishop Parry sought new legislation to provide for the sick, needy, and aged Aboriginal people through a system of depots on the Victorian model.80 Settlers and the conservative press supported the proposal, in part because, in shifting the emphasis to welfare provision in the south, it diverted official attention away from labour practices in the north and in  Letters from the Rev. D. McNab relative to the settlement and civilisation of Aborigines of Western Australia, WALCVP, Second Session, 1883, pp. 1–9, last quote on p. 8. 79  Letters from the Rev. D. McNab relative to the settlement and civilisation of Aborigines of Western Australia, WALCVP, 1883, p. 9. 80  West Australian, 29 May 1883, p. 3. 78

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part because welfare provision would help maintain some Aboriginal labour in southern districts. Edward Read Parker, a wealthy settler who had established a large station in the Eastern Districts, supported Parry and criticised Robinson for taking no action. Under Robinson, he said, there had been no medical provision, and Aboriginal people had become beggars. The government is ‘simply abandoning the helpless old natives of Western Australia – and particularly of this south-­west portion  – to their fate, and to a most deplorable state of existence’.81 In its leader in the same issue, the West Australian went further, contrasting the neglect in the southern districts with what it saw as the much better situation in the north. Aboriginal people in the north, it said, were employed, and were fed well. Accusations of forced labour were unfounded: ‘There is rarely, we are confident, any compulsion in obtaining native labour, and the natives very soon learn the nature of agreements and of their rights.’82 Broome and Aboriginal Policy, 1883 These were, however, merely proposals, and when Frederick Napier Broome arrived in June 1883 as the new governor, he found in place little Aboriginal policy other than ineffective regulations in the pearling industry and in the north a pattern of extensive policing, arrest, and imprisonment. Destined to become especially important for both Aboriginal policy and the granting of responsible government, Broome had, like Weld, been a sheep-­farmer in New Zealand; he had also been a journalist and writer in London, before embarking on a colonial administrative career. He had been colonial secretary in Natal from 1875–­8, and lieutenant governor of Mauritius in 1880, thus gaining experience that was to shape his approach to Aboriginal policy.83 Now, in Western Australia, he quickly turned his attention to Aboriginal policy. First, he addressed the problem of the appalling treatment of Aboriginal prisoners at Rottnest. In July, only a month after he arrived, in response to newspaper reports concerning an outbreak of disease at the prison, he sent Alfred Waylen, the Colonial Surgeon, to investigate. Waylen reported on 3 August that the gaol at Rottnest was indeed crowded as alleged, resulting in an epidemic of

 Ibid.  Ibid., 1 June 1883, p. 3. 83  His experience in Natal was to prove especially important for his approach to Aboriginal policy. He had gone there as one of the colonial officials accompanying Major General Sir Garnet Wolseley, sent to Natal as acting lieutenant-­governor after a crisis. Broome had overseen some changes to Natal’s system of native administration, especially the codification of native law. See Ann Curthoys and Jeremy Martens, ‘Serious collisions: Settlers, indigenous people, and imperial policy in Western Australia and Natal’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 20, 2013, p. 128. 81 82

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influenza leading to many deaths.84 It was clear that the long-­standing policy of arrest and imprisonment was proving a humanitarian disaster. The deaths at Rottnest were a symptom of a much larger problem. The desperate desire for Aboriginal labour in the north, and the role of magistrates and JPs in forcing Aboriginal people to work and punishing stock stealing, were responsible for so many people being imprisoned there for long periods.85 In an attempt to lessen the summary powers of magistrates to arrest and sentence Aboriginal offenders, and thus stem the tide of prisoners arriving at Rottnest, Broome arranged for the introduction into the Legislative Council on 13 August of an Aboriginal Native Offenders Bill, which reduced the years of imprisonment magistrates could impose from three years to two.86 In debate, John Forrest, Surveyor General and at 36 years of age new to the Legislative Council, and later to play a major role in Aboriginal policy and indeed in Western Australian history, supported the Bill’s provisions limiting the length of sentence that magistrates could inflict. Forrest was, at this point, a complex figure in relation to Aboriginal matters. A member of both the Executive and Legislative Councils and closely connected to pastoralists, especially his brother, Alexander, he was also a former explorer and a qualified land surveyor, and experienced in dealing with Aboriginal people, who, he said, should be treated as friends, not enemies.87 In his view, the settlers should be just and merciful and recognise they were the ones in power while Aboriginal people were weak and had no voice in how they were governed.88 Now, in the debate, he opposed long prison sentences, and deplored the processes whereby Aboriginal people suspected of relatively minor offences were captured, taken to court chained by the neck, a brutal process often taking weeks, tied to a tree at night, then tried at court, sent by ship in chains, and then kept for years at Rottnest. His alternative was to empower magistrates to impose more immediate and effective forms of punishment (it should be ‘prompt and certain’);  Inquirer and Commercial News, 27 June and 4 July 1883; Western Australia, Parliament, 1883, Report by the Colonial Surgeon on the Condition of the Sick Native Prisoners at Rottnest Prison, Parl. Paper A11. 85  The Inquirer and Commercial News, 27 June and 4 July 1883; WALCPP, No. A11. Report by the Colonial Surgeon on the Condition of the Sick Native Prisoners at Rottnest Prison, 3 August 1883. 86  The Bill was entitled An Act to consolidate and amend the laws providing for the Summary Trial and Punishment of Aboriginal Native Offenders in certain cases, 13 August 1883, WALCPD, 1883, pp. 207–17, esp. p. 209. 87  F. K. Crowley, ‘Forrest, Sir John (1847–1918)’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018; Elizabeth Goddard and Tom Stannage, ‘John Forrest and the Aborigines’, in Bob Reece and Tom Stannage, eds., European-Aboriginal Relations in Western Australian History, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Department of History, p. 53; Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 104. 88  13 August 1883, WALCPD, 1883, pp.  210–1. Goddard and Stannage, ‘John Forrest and the Aborigines’, p. 54. 84

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although he did not specifically mention whipping, this appears to have been what he meant. A Select Committee appointed by council considered the matter further, and, though divided, recommended magistrates be granted the power to flog Aboriginal offenders in lieu of imprisonment.89 In the end, however, council passed the Bill without any reference to flogging.90 These debates over flogging versus sending prisoners in chains to a harsh island prison are a late echo, perhaps, of the convict era, and a reminder that unfree labour provides a thread linking Australian convict and frontier histories. Nine years later, Forrest would return to the question of flogging, and this time succeed. At this point, given the largely pro-­pastoralist complexion of the council, Broome decided to consider the question of Aboriginal policy more generally and to circumvent the council. On 30 August, the day before the debate on the Native Offenders Bill, he reported to the secretary of state that he was considering a range of options.91 He noted the churches’ suggestions that the colony establish a series of ‘native centres or mission stations, assisted by Government, such as are established in Victoria’, and said he had decided that, once the Legislative Council session had ended, he would appoint a Native Commission to hold a thorough inquiry. As promised, at the close of the parliamentary session he appointed John Forrest to head a committee of inquiry into the treatment of Aboriginal prisoners and into other matters concerning Aboriginal people, notably measures for the support of the destitute, elderly, and ill.92 Broome had reason to hope, perhaps, that he would be able to balance pastoralist and Aboriginal interests, and that Forrest would be a mediating force. The other members of the committee included, in view of the Rottnest question, the comptroller of convicts, John Frederick Stone, and the colonial surgeon, Alfred Robert Waylen, as well as two MLCs with very different politics  – the conservative Maitland Brown, member for Fremantle, and the more liberal George Shenton, member for Toodyay. Interestingly, no members from the northern districts, who could be expected to oppose any action constraining

 The Select Committee recommended flogging. In dissent, the Attorney General, Hensman opposed the recommendation concerning flogging, while Maitland Brown, McKenzie Grant, and T. Cockburn Campbell, sought the granting of JPs even more powers of imprisonment and flogging. Select Committee Report, 25 August 1883, WALCVP. 90  WALCPD, 31 August 1883, p. 424; Aboriginal Offenders Act 1883 (WA), 47 Vict. No. 8, 8 September. See also the Select Committee report on 25 August 1883, which recommended flogging. 91  Broome to Derby, 30 August 1883, printed in WALCVP, 1884. 92  Neville Green, ‘From Princes to Paupers: The struggle for control of Aborigines in Western Australia 1887–1898’, Early Days, vol. 11, pt. 4, p. 448. For announcement of his intention to appoint an enquiry, see Broome to Derby, 30 August 1883, in ‘Correspondence between the Excellency the Governor and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Colonies’, WALCVP, No. 21, 1884, pp. 8–9. 89

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northern employers, were represented. In October and November 1883, the commission began work, interviewing both Aboriginal and non-­Aboriginal witnesses concerning conditions at Rottnest.93 Then, for a period of about six months and for reasons which are unclear, the inquiry appears to have stalled. While the commission was in abeyance, public attention to Aboriginal matters reached a peak when a particularly appalling case of cruelty to an Aboriginal person came before the Supreme Court in Perth in January 1884. The previous September, Charles Clifford, an expiree (former convict) described variously as ‘a man of colour’, a ‘creole’ and a ‘half-­caste’, was committed for trial by the Cossack bench for the manslaughter of an Aboriginal man named Thackabiddy.94 When a station owner named George Gooch saw Thackabiddy near some sheep and carrying a spear and other throwing weapons, he ordered his station hand, named in the records only as Keen, to arrest him. In the ensuing altercation, Keen shot Thackabiddy through the chin and neck. Gooch and Keen then ordered Clifford to take Thackabiddy to Carnarvon to be tried for sheep stealing, though in fact there was no evidence offered that any sheep stealing had occurred. As was common practice, Clifford chained Thackabiddy by the neck and attached the end of the chain to the saddle of Clifford’s horse. While Clifford rode, the wounded Thackabiddy was to walk the entire way, a distance of more than 40 miles. After a struggle between Clifford and Thackabiddy that resulted in Thackabiddy falling to the ground, Clifford dragged him along the ground behind the horse, ‘sometimes on his back, sometimes on his stomach, sometimes scrambling on his hands and knees’.95 At the end of the day, Clifford tied Thackabiddy tightly to a tree and left him without fire, food, or water. The following day, he was found dead; he was later buried at Carnarvon with the chain still around his neck.96 When the case came before a jury at Carnarvon, it decided that it could blame neither Clifford nor anyone else for Thackabiddy’s death, on the grounds that those arresting, and wounding, him had acted in self-­defence, despite there being no evidence of violence by Thackabiddy before his capture. Dissatisfied with this verdict, the magistrate at the Geraldton Quarter Sessions reported the matter to authorities in Perth, an action the press speculated had been the result of direct pressure from Governor Broome. Clifford’s trial at the Supreme Court in Perth on a charge of manslaughter took place on 9 January 1884.97 In his opening address as prosecutor, Alfred Hensman, the Attorney General, refuted the suggestion the governor had been involved and spoke at length on  See Roscoe, ‘“Too many kill” em’, pp. 43–57.  The Daily News (Perth), 17 September 1883, p. 4; Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 145. 95  Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 145. 96  Hannah McGlade and Jeannine Purdy, ‘“No jury will convict”: An account of racial killings in Western Australia’, Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 22, 2001, p. 94. 97  Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 145. 93 94

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the rights of Aboriginal people to equal treatment before the law. Clifford, he said, should have been charged with murder rather than manslaughter. Stephen Parker, lawyer and advocate of self-­government, conducted the defence, arguing that the treatment given Thackabiddy could not have caused or accelerated his death. Parker spoke scornfully of the idea that anything untoward had happened to Thackabiddy: his being left without food, shelter, and clothing was of no consequence, only ‘Exeter Hall’ would consider this an injustice.98 After Hensman’s eloquent final speech detailing the brutal treatment meted out to Thackabiddy, the jury deliberated for about ten minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty.99 Press reaction was generally one of horror at the verdict. Even the conservative West Australian commented that, while it had long argued that charges of mistreatment of Aboriginal people were unfounded, here was a case where there was undoubted cruelty.100 It could only protest that ‘the story of the inhuman barbarity perpetrated at the Gascoyne stands unmatched among our annals’. It is little wonder, the paper continued, that some scorn the notion of English justice ‘when such an atrocity is permitted to go uncondemned’. The Inquirer was also appalled at the implications that an Aboriginal person could be killed with impunity: We have no doubt that nearly every person who was present at the trial in question had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and had shuddered with lively sympathy at the author’s powerful sketch of that infamous and brutal slave-­driver Legree; but that was only fiction, while the terrible tale they hear narrated with unblushing effrontery by a mere lad was a veracious story, which proved that truth is indeed frequently stranger than fiction.

The reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1884, over thirty years after the famous novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe depicting slavery in the United States was first read in Australia, is telling. As Jane Lydon notes, the novel was widely read in Australia but comparisons with the treatment of Aboriginal people were rare.101 The connection, however, as we shall shortly see, was soon to increase. The Inquirer also suggested that this was not an isolated case, and joined with the West Australian in deploring the decision.102 The case came to the attention of the Earl of Derby, the Secretary of State, who wrote to Broome asking  West Australian, 16 January 1884.  The Daily News, 10 January 1884, p. 3; West Australian, 12 January 1884, p. 3; West Australian, 16 January 1884, p. 4. See WALCVP, 1884, Paper No. 21, p. 55. For a discussion of this case and its implications, see address by Chief Justice of the WA Supreme Court, Wayne Martin, Custodial Transport Forum After Dinner Address, Perth, www.supremecourt.wa.gov.au/_files/ custodial_transport_forum_07082008.pdf, 7 August 2008. 100  West Australian, 12 January 1884, p. 3. 101  Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, and Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 59. 102  The Inquirer and Commercial News, 16 January 1884, p. 2. 98 99

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whether he had made any further attempt to bring the perpetrator to justice; Broome replied that Attorney General Alfred Hensman had regretfully advised him that there was no means of doing so.103 Despite the questionable performance of the Legislative Council and the courts where Aboriginal rights were concerned, Broome during 1884 began to support demands for responsible government for the colony. Soon after his arrival, in conformity with his instructions from Derby to discourage colonial demands for responsible government, he had transmitted to the Legislative Council the British government’s reasons for not granting responsible government thus far.104 As Derby explained, the British government was concerned at the difficulty of governing such a vast colony from Perth, the likely need to divide the colony into two, and its desire not to grant colonists control over the vast Crown Lands in the north.105 A year later, Broome began to urge the Colonial Office to divide the colony into two, as suggested, and grant responsible government to the southern part while retaining the northern districts as a separate Crown Colony. In the north, where the ‘native difficulty’ most certainly remained, notably in the pearl shell fisheries, he agreed with the Secretary of State that responsible government was not appropriate. As far as the south was concerned, however, he wrote, responsible government should be given ‘so soon as it is clearly shown that the great body of the people really and earnestly desire it’, and in his view there was no doubt that they would. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote to Derby, ‘that such a proposition does not require to be proved in the case of a community of 30,000 British subjects of pure race, dwelling in a peaceable land, not vexed by any ‘native difficulty’ and raising last year among themselves (south of the Murchison) a revenue of £239,286.’106 The Colonial Office reply, some months later, was to agree rather reluctantly that if the electors were in favour of a change to the constitution, the British government would consider it.107  Derby to Broome, no. 20, 11 March 1884; Broome to Derby, no. 89, 8 May 1884. This case is discussed in Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘“Equals of the White Man”: Prosecution of settlers for violence against Aboriginal subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia’, Law and History Review, vol. 31, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 381–3. 104  Derby’s despatch was in response to a request sent from the Legislative Council on 16 April for clarification concerning under what conditions Britain would grant the colony responsible government. Governor’s Message (No. 32): Responsible Government, WALCPD, 30 August 1883, p.  398; Edward Sweetman, Australian Constitutional Development, Melbourne: Macmillan, 1925, p. 344; Boyce, ‘The Governors of Western Australia’, p. 134. 105  Broome transmitted the reply to Council on 30 August. Despatch from the Right Honorable the Secretary of State for the Colonies, relative to the Terms and Conditions upon which Her Majesty’s Government would grant Responsible Government to Western Australia, 23 July 1883, WALCVP, 1883, second session. 106  Broome to Derby, 9 April 1884, CO 18/202, p.  264; Sweetman, Australian Constitutional Development, p. 344. 107  Derby to Broome, 14 July 1884; Sweetman, Australian Constitutional Development, p. 345. 103

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At the same time, Broome continued to put pressure on the Legislative Council on Aboriginal matters by ensuring that it received important relevant documents. One was the Inspector of Fisheries Report of May 1884, detailing some illegal labour agreements although otherwise suggesting all was well in the pearling industry.108 He also arranged for the tabling of correspondence between himself and the secretary of state for the colonies concerning the situation at Rottnest, the trial of Clifford for the manslaughter of Thackabiddy, and his continuing attempts to gain information on the problem of illegal labour contracts.109 Finally, on 12 September 1884, he was able to table the most important report of all, the report of the commission he had appointed in September 1883 to enquire into Rottnest and other Aboriginal matters.110 After completing its enquiries in October 1883, the committee had resumed its investigations around May 1884, seeking in writing the views of key people on aspects of Aboriginal policy. In May, it had received replies from the Bishop of Perth and the New Norcia mission on educational and missionary provision, and another reply on 14 July 1884 from Robert Sholl, Inspector of Pearl Shell Fisheries, on the situation in the pearling industry. The long-­awaited report was extensive, and in its relative liberality the effect of excluding northern settlers was evident. In relation to Rottnest, it recommended a range of reforms to reduce overcrowding and improve prisoner health. It also addressed the vexed question of the hiring of Aboriginal labour, which was considered so valuable in the development of the colony, recommending increased government control of employment practices that were so brutal they were exacerbating the decline in the Aboriginal population.111 The committee’s report noted that ‘fifty years of settlement by Europeans has had the effect in the “Home District” of causing the gradual disappearance of the native race. We fear that this will continue . . .’ The report expressed a hope that this would not be the case in future, and that some means could yet be found to ‘maintain, on the soil owned and trodden by their forefathers, the descendants of the Aboriginals of Australia’.112

 Broome to Colonial Secretary, 24 July 1884, enclosing Report by the Inspector of Pearl Shell Fisheries for the Season 1883–1884, WALCVP, 1884. 109  Correspondence between the Excellency the Governor and the Right Honorable The Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1884. 110  Report of a Commission appointed by his Excellency the Governor to Inquire into the treatment of Aboriginal native prisoners of the crown in this colony: and also into certain other matters relative to Aboriginal Natives, WALCVP, No. 32, Perth: Government Printer, 1884. 111  Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, p. 448. For announcement of Broome’s intention to appoint an enquiry, see Broome to Derby, 30 August 1883, No. 65, in Correspondence between the Excellency the Governor and the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1884, pp. 8–9. 112  WALCVP, 1884. Report of a Commission appointed by his Excellency the Governor to Inquire into the Treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners of the Crown in this Colony: and also into Certain other Matters Relative to Aboriginal Natives, Parliamentary Paper No. 32, Perth: 108

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The report also argued that they, the colonists, had a responsibility to do what they could for Aboriginal welfare. The large revenues now being raised ‘from the sale and lease of lands which were originally possessed by its native inhabitants’, the report argued, made it entirely ‘reasonable that some portion of this revenue should be devoted to the amelioration of their conditions’.113 They had a duty to ‘see that the natives be kindly treated; that they be helped with food and clothing; that missions be encouraged; and that the old, the infirm and the sick be provided for’.114 To oversee these tasks, it recommended the establishment of a board ‘for the management of all matters connected with the Aboriginals, and to which all moneys to be expended on them should be entrusted’.115 A board could not only gather information and opinion systematically, but could also develop the expertise needed to oversee the implementation of government policy.116 In recommending a board, the commission was following the example of Victoria, and possibly, the much more recent example of New South Wales, where on 2 June 1883 the government had finally established its own Board. For a Protection Board to work effectively, it needed some kind of system of local protectors. Given the vastness of the colony and the difficulty of having sufficient government representatives on the ground, the report suggested that where necessary, Justices of the Peace could be appointed to the position of Honorary Protector, and charged with the duty of ensuring that employed Aboriginal people were ‘not ill-­used’. The report opposed setting aside large reserves or encouraging Aboriginal people to farm, on the ground that this had proved unsuccessful in the past, but it did support allocating small reserves of land and government financial support to privately-­run missions. Even there, though, the report considered that such missions were unlikely to succeed: ‘It seems impossible to expect that much will or can be done. The experience of fifty years finds us at a point as if we had never begun, notwithstanding that good and able men have devoted their lives and means to attempting their improvement’.117 Despite the virtual absence of any education or ‘civilisation’ policy for many decades, the claim that Aboriginal people could not be improved despite massive well-­meaning effort thus lived on in settler discourse and influenced government thinking. Although the commission probably borrowed the idea of a Board from Victoria, its report had little in common with Victorian policy with its civilising and education program, and project of micro-­management. It was suggesting, rather, minimal action to assist Aboriginal people to survive, especially in areas needing their labour. Government Printer, p. 9. Available at www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview/?pi=nla.aus-vn10573515x-s9-e, accessed 21 January 2013.  On the notion of compensation, see O’Brien, Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism, p. 79. 114  Report of a Commission into the Treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners, 1884, p. 9. 115  Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, p. 448. 116  Leslie R. Marchant, Aboriginal Administration in Western Australia 1886–1905, Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981, p. 26. 117  Report of a Commission into the Treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners, 1884, pp. 5–6. 113

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In addition to arranging for the report to be tabled in the Legislative Council, Broome also published it in the Government Gazette and transmitted it to the Secretary of State.118 It was clearly in the direction he wished to move, and he probably hoped it might help assuage British government fears of the effects of responsible government on Aboriginal policy. He appointed to Rottnest Island prison on 23 October a new superintendent, W. H. Timperley, instructing him to act on the report’s recommendations.119 As it turned out, however, action on the other recommendations in the report, such as the appointment of an Aboriginal Protection Board, would not occur for another year. Broome had decided to go to England, where he could press for government loans for infrastructural development (railways, telegraph, and port facilities) to an extent Britain had so far been unwilling to meet.120 He left on 8 November and would not return until 16 June 1885.121 In those seven months, so much would change. Conclusion Western Australia’s difference from the other colonies in the period from 1856 to 1884 highlights something a little unexpected. The protectionist impulse of the 1840s survived better in the rapidly expanding self-­governing colonies of Victoria and South Australia, with their more liberal politics, than in British-­ controlled Western Australia with its tiny settler population and exclusive focus on economic development. On the other hand, the difference between Western Australia and Queensland in the management of frontier conflict is striking. Where Queensland relied on the Native Mounted Police force to ‘disperse’ Aboriginal people resisting settlement, with significant injury and loss of life, Western Australia in these years did not experience the killing fields on the Queensland scale. Instead, the colony under British authority saw a formal, public display of the ‘justice’ system – police, courts, and prisons – in an attempt to achieve pastoral expansion enabled by a system of enforced labour. These long-­standing policies of extensive punishment and imprisonment to secure dispossession and a supply of Aboriginal labour, however, brought the colony a reputation so negative as to endanger the colonists’ belated push towards responsible government. The logic of settler colonialism in the circumstances of Western Australia was not elimination as much as exploitation.

 Broome to Derby, ‘Transmitting the Report of the Native Commission’, 28 October 1884, Despatch No. 194, Papers Respecting the Treatment of Aboriginal Natives in Western Australia, WALCVP, 1886. 119  Report on Rottnest Prison for the Year 1886, WALCVP, 1887, no. 5, p. 3. See Roscoe, ‘“Too many kill” em’, p. 53; Green and Moon, Far from Home, vol. X, pp. 29–30. 120  F. K. Crowley, ‘Broome, Sir Frederick Napier’, ADB online, accessed 27 July 2018. 121  West Australian, 11 November 1884, p. 3, 17 June 1885, p. 3. 118

16

‘A Slur upon the Colony’ Making Western Australia’s Unusual Constitution, 1885–1890

We are brought to the disturbing, if altogether impracticable conclusion, that we have no business in this country.1

Western Mail, 21 August 1886

In those days we sadly called ourselves ‘Cinderella’, but the Fairy Prince – Responsible Government – was not far off, and I am proud to remember that my dear husband, then Governor of the colony, was one of those who helped to open the door and let Prince Charming in . . .2 Mary Anne Broome, 1904

In 1885 and for a couple of years afterwards, the colony of Western Australia witnessed a remarkable coincidence in timing. Just as colonists at last asserted a united, multi-­partisan movement for settler self-­government on the basis of the colony’s economic and social advancement, accusations that settlers in the north were imposing a form of slavery on Aboriginal people became a matter of public controversy. The charge of slavery was not only disturbing in itself, but was a clear allusion to a backward social and economic system that stood against everything colonists wanted to proclaim about themselves – civilised, progressive, and responsible. As this chapter outlines, the conjunction of these two developments had a significant impact on the negotiations for self-­government and the colony’s 1889 constitution. The first six months of 1885 changed the economic fortunes of the colony. With the discovery of gold in the Kimberley and an attendant gold rush, immigration increased and the economy expanded. More enduring than the gold rush was the rapid expansion of pastoralism in the north, especially in the Kimberley region. During the two years from 1883 to 1885, in journeys that Mary Durack would evoke in her popular novel, Kings in Grass Castles, parties

 Western Mail, 21 August 1886, p. 22.  Mary Anne Broome, Colonial Memories, London: Smith Elder, 1904, available online at www .archive.org/stream/colonialmemories00barkuoft/colonialmemories00barkuoft_djvu.txt. Accessed on 4 June 2018.

1 2

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of settlers such as the Duracks and the Macdonalds trekked cattle overland long distances across northern Australia from Queensland to the Kimberley.3 As pastoralism flourished, the churches became concerned at the lack of any effective government policy to protect, civilise, or offer Christian instruction to the Aboriginal people in the affected regions. Bishop Parry’s mission committee applied several times for land for a mission and finally succeeded in gaining 150,000 acres of land for the purpose at the Gascoyne in 1884.4 In what would prove to be a controversial move and after a considerable search, the Church of England in 1885 appointed Reverend John Gribble to go to the area and begin establishing a mission. Gribble seemed ideal, given his significant success in New South Wales, where he had established the Warangesda mission on the Murrumbidgee and, with fellow missionary, Daniel Matthews, an Aboriginal Protection Association whose pressure resulted in 1883 in increased government support for reserves and missions for Aboriginal people in New South Wales.5 He had recently returned from a visit to England, where he had met and spoken to many prominent humanitarian and anti-­slavery individuals and organisations, and, as Jane Lydon argues, his immersion there in an abolitionist tradition primarily focussed on Africa helped frame his understanding of what he saw in Western Australia.6 The uneasy mix of pastoral expansion dependent on Aboriginal labour and a new interest in missionary activity influenced by anti-­slavery concerns would lead to serious public conflict over Aboriginal policy that lasted through 1885 and 1886, and never quite went away. When Gribble arrived in Perth from Sydney in August, Bishop Parry took him to Government House where Broome, who after a seven-­month absence had returned to the colony on 16 June, gave him a warm welcome.7 Gribble then went north on 25 August, travelling to the Gascoyne, the district Fairbairn had visited three years earlier, where the employment of Aboriginal labour was extensive, and where Charles Foss, who was still Government Resident, had been handing out so many severe sentences to Aboriginal people. It was a visit likely to bring trouble, and as the West Australian presciently pointed out, a missionary presence in the area was bound to conflict with the squatters’ desire for Aboriginal labour. New Norcia’s

 Bolton, Land of Vision and Mirage, p. 45.  Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p.  101; Hasluck, Black Australians, p.  114; Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s Empire, p. 210. 5  Ann Curthoys, ‘Good Christians and useful workers: Aborigines, church and state in New South Wales 1874–1883’, in Sydney Labour History Group, eds., What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982. 6  Jane Lydon, ‘Christian heroes? John Gribble, Exeter Hall and Antislavery on Western Australia’s Frontier, Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 30, 2016, pp. 59–72. 7  Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 102. 3 4

‘A Slur upon the Colony’ 387

success, it commented, depended on its isolation and self-­sufficiency, but no such seclusion would be possible in the Gascoyne.8 While Gribble was exploring the possibilities for establishing a mission, Broome was returning to the task he had begun a year earlier of gaining Legislative Council support for a policy of sustaining and protecting Aboriginal people. On 21 August 1885, he re-­presented to Council the Forrest Commission Report on Aboriginal policy (he had already placed it before the Council the year before) along with copies of his own correspondence with the Secretary of State on Aboriginal policy issues.9 Council responded on 11 September by accepting some of the report’s suggestions but not others. While it agreed that the government should assist private missions with funds and grants of land and supported reforms to the prison at Rottnest, it declared ‘a Board of Management at Perth’ unnecessary. It recommended instead the establishment of an ‘Aboriginal Department’ under the Colonial Secretary, supported by a widespread network of protectors, consisting of Government Residents, Resident Magistrates, Police Magistrates, JPs, and chosen settlers, who would distribute funds for medical and poor relief.10 In the Council’s view, a department would be much more responsible to government policy (and the wishes of the pastoralists) than an independent board. With Broome in favour of establishing a Board on the Victorian model and the Council adamantly opposed, the question of Aboriginal policy was at this point engulfed by what historians now call the ‘Gribble affair’.11 It began on 9 December when Gribble gave a public lecture in Perth, chaired by Bishop Parry, reporting on what he had seen in the Gascoyne region.12 He spoke of seeing Aboriginal men being forced to work when they were ill, and of men arrested on suspicion of stealing sheep being kept for several weeks at a police station awaiting a magistrate, chained around the neck to each other and manacled at the ankles, fastened to a tree during the day and to the floor of a shed  West Australian, 30 October 1885, p. 3.  See Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council Appointed to Consider and Report upon Questions Connected with the Treatment and Condition of the Aboriginal Natives of the Colony, Parl. Paper A15, WALCPP, 1885, p. 170. 10  Council appointed a Select Committee whose report Council adopted without debate on 11 September, reported in The Daily News, 12 September 1885, p. 4 and 14 September 1885, p. 3. 11  This controversy has attracted extensive historical attention, with detailed accounts beginning with Su-Jane Hunt, ‘The Gribble affair: A study in colonial politics’, Studies in Western Australian History, no. 8, 1984, pp. 62–73. Hunt’s essay is also reprinted as an appendix to the reissue of J. B. Gribble, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, Perth: University of Western Australia with Institute of Applied Aboriginal Studies at the Western Australian College of Advance Education, 1987. Other accounts include Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 138–58, and Harris, One Blood, pp.  407–51. See also Sue-­Jane Hunt, ‘“The Gribble Affair”: a study of Aboriginal–European labour relations in North-­West Australia during the 1880s’, History Honours Thesis, Murdoch University, 1978. 12  West Australian, 11 December 1885, p. 3; The Inquirer and Commercial News, 11 December 1885, p. 2; Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s Empire, p. 210.     8     9

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at night. He hinted at much worse; on their present social condition, he said, ‘he must be silent that night’. He had seen, he said, ‘some things which were very sad to him and which he had no idea of seeing, and which, had it been so ordered, he had rather not have seen’. His oblique references here to sexual exchange and abuse, a matter that he dealt with subsequently, may have been due to the presence of women in the audience. The colony needed, he said, a special Act to protect Aboriginal labour other than in pearling, and a system of native protectors to enforce it. Very often, he said, Aboriginal workers were told they would only have to work for six months, and then were kept on for three or four more years. None of this was entirely new, but Gribble was to make these claims publicly and often. When Gribble returned to the Gascoyne on 18 December, he encountered rising levels of hostility. Feeling that their honour and reputation were under attack, impassioned meetings of settlers in the area denounced him.13 On 28 December an angry meeting at Carnarvon, after hearing Gribble deliver an hour-­long lecture, called on him to resign; those attending then appointed a delegation of pastoralists including the conservative Maitland Brown to wait upon the governor and condemn the mission.14 By January 1886, a petition was circulating to have Gribble removed.15 Never a man to take a step backwards, Gribble continued his campaign to expose settler abuses of Aboriginal people. He sent his diary, kept for three months while in the Gascoyne and detailing the abuses he witnessed, to the Perth newspapers; two of them, the liberal Inquirer and the conservative West Australian, published it in full.16 The diaries told a similar story to the one given at the Perth lecture on 9 December but in far more detail, and drawing attention to the situation of extensive sexual relations between white men and young Aboriginal women, at times amounting to sexual servitude, which he had only hinted at in the lecture.17 He also labelled the ‘native labour system’ on the Gascoyne as a ‘system of bond service bordering on slavery’. Aboriginal people, he wrote, were at times ‘recruited in a way which does not give the native the least freedom of will’, and he told of a case he had witnessed of a young man being ‘dragged and compelled to go into bond-­service’. He drew especially attention to the sexual dimension of the labour system, including the failure to provide clothing, which he found especially disturbing for the young women, so often assigned to work for white men. ‘Assignment of native females against their will for purposes of immorality’, he wrote, ‘is a sign of slavery’. As Jane Lydon points out, it was  Harris, One Blood, p. 415.  Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 102; Hunt, ‘The Gribble affair’, p. 65, West Australian, 30 December, p. 3. 15  Green ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 101. 16  Hunt, ‘The Gribble affair’, pp. 65–6. 17  Inquirer and Commercial News, 13 January, pp. 2–3. 13 14

‘A Slur upon the Colony’ 389

Gribble’s bringing the term slavery into public debate that most upset the settlers.18 By February, there was such a storm over his allegations that the Church of England Mission Committee, anxious about the isolation of the church from the community and with Bishop Parry away in England, turned against him and forbade him to preach in the Carnarvon township.19 Gribble also widened awareness of his allegations by writing, against Bishop Parry’s advice, to the London-­based Aborigines Protection Society.20 The APS was undergoing a revival in the 1880s, and while it played little role in the self-­ governing colonies, it was still a force in relation to Western Australia. Though disturbed by what it knew of what was happening in the self-­governing colony of Queensland, the Western Australian scandal was much more troubling in the sense that Britain was ultimately responsible. While Queensland brought dishonour on the British Empire generally, Western Australia was bringing dishonour also directly to Britain itself. In its journal, The Aborigines’ Friend, the APS had already censured Western Australia in 1884 for the high mortality rates on Rottnest; it now wanted action taken against the colony’s widespread system of forced labour, inhumane treatment, and imprisonment.21 The Society had for some years been receiving letters from David Carley, an ex-­convict settler who had spent many years in the Cossack region and had witnessed the brutal treatment of Aboriginal people in the pearling industry. His letters informed the APS of the Thackabiddy case, the dire situation at Rottnest, and the kidnapping of Aboriginal youths for labour in the pearl fisheries. Despite Carley’s low social status as an ex-­convict, the APS took his allegations seriously, noting that they were to a certain extent ‘corroborated by reports in the local newspapers’.22 Now, the Society received reports from Gribble very similar to Carley’s and Gribble was someone it knew. Its secretary, Frederick Chesson, had met Gribble during his visit to England in 1884; Gribble had taken his advice to write a book about Australian Aboriginal people, publishing that year his manuscript on his experiences in New South Wales.23 The APS was becoming increasingly concerned. On learning that Carley had, contrary to the usual protocol, written a letter directly to the Secretary of State, Earl Granville, rather than to the Governor, detailing the ‘harsh and lawless treatment of the aborigines’ by pearlers and other settlers, Chesson wrote to Granville himself, on 24 February 1886.24 In his letter he referred to  Lydon, ‘John Gribble’, p. 60.  Harris, One Blood, p. 419. 20  Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, p. 170. 21  The Aborigines’ Friend, No. IV, vol. II, New Series, 1884, p. 173; Heartfield, The Aborigines Protection Society, pp. 114–18. 22  The Aborigines’ Friend, No. VII, vol. II, New Series, 1886, p. 316. 23  J. B. Gribble, Black but Comely: Aboriginal Life in Australia, London: Morgan & Scott, 1884; Lydon, ‘John Gribble’, pp. 65–6. 24  The Aborigines’ Friend, No. XII, vol. III, New Series, 1888, p. 315. 18 19

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the similar information received from Gribble, pointing out the society was well acquainted with Gribble and his good work, in particular his combination of ‘the qualities of prudence and zeal’. The APS recommended stronger government intervention in districts using Aboriginal labour and, like Gribble, saw the situation as one of slavery, or something very like it.25 In a second letter to Granville on 5 May, Chesson referred him to Gribble’s statement about the ‘virtual system of slavery’ on the Gascoyne River.26 When Granville asked Broome about the truth of Chesson’s allegations, Broome asked resident magistrates across the colony to report on whether they were accurate for their own region.27 Most replied that there was no truth in them, but in a letter in April 1886 one magistrate, Colonel E. F. Angelo, the Government Resident at Roebourne whom Gribble had met, supported them and described the employment of Aboriginal labour in the district as ‘a disguised but unquestionable system of slavery’.28 While Gribble’s charges were gaining credence in England, they were being vociferously challenged in the colony. By the middle of the year, the church had refused him permission to preach at the Cathedral in Perth, withdrawn his missionary licence, and closed the barely-­begun Gascoyne mission.29 Far from withdrawing from the fight, Gribble stepped up his campaign to have his charges known and heard. On 29 May, he submitted for publication a booklet, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, which reprinted his diary extracts and copies of letters to him from Carley alleging cruelties to Aboriginal people in the north, described the Thackabiddy case, and mentioned the Flying Foam Massacre.30 After alluding to slavery in Africa and America, and to Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gribble said the booklet would reveal the practice of slavery in Australia. He also spoke to several meetings in Perth, including one with a large audience at the Working Man’s Hall on 12 June 1886.31 Mrs Gribble supported his work by organising the collection of second-hand clothing to send to Aboriginal people in the Gascoyne, assisted by two other women, Mrs John Brown and Helen Cave, the latter of whom had written to the Inquirer about their efforts.32 On 26 June, Gribble went to the eastern colonies and reported on what he had seen, placing two long articles outlining his claims with the Melbourne Daily  The Aborigines’ Friend, No. VII, vol. II, New Series, 1886, p. 317.  Ibid., 1886, p. 337.  Ibid., p. 338. Neville Green, ‘From princes to paupers: The struggle for control of Aborigines in Western Australia 1887–1898’, Early Days, 11, pt. 4, p. 448. 28  Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, p. 449. See also Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 159–73. 29  Forrest, The Challenge, p. 148. 30  J. B. Gribble, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, Perth: Inquirer and Commercial News, 1886. 31  Inquirer and Commercial News, 16 June 1886, p. 2 and 23 June 1886, p. 5. 32  Helen Cave, ‘To the ladies of Perth, Fremantle, and Guildford’, Perth, 16 June 1886, published in Inquirer and Commercial News, 23 June 1886, p. 2. 25 26 27

‘A Slur upon the Colony’ 391

Telegraph on 6 and 9 July.33 The reaction in Perth to this public shaming in other colonies and, through Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land, overseas, was one of absolute outrage; Su Jane Hunt describes it as nothing less than hysterical.34 The Legislative Council and the newspapers angrily denounced him at length.35 The Gribble affair strengthened Broome’s determination to act, and be seen to act, on matters of Aboriginal policy; it also paradoxically strengthened his hand somewhat in relation to a refractory and pro-­pastoralist Legislative Council. On the one hand, he set out to assure his superiors there was no significant problem, telling the Secretary of State on 12 July 1886 that the government and the police were vigilant in preventing the abuses Gribble described, denying the charge of kidnapping, and enclosing a letter from none other than Charles Foss, the Resident Magistrate at Carnarvon, which predictably denied Gribble’s charges entirely.36 He also assured Granville that he was introducing an Aborigines Protection Bill into the legislature to address certain issues, such as the provision of clothing for Aboriginal labourers, a matter raised by both Gribble and the group of women led by his wife supporting him.37 For Broome, British attention to the colony’s treatment of Aboriginal people was providing him with an opportunity to act at last on the recommendations made two years earlier in the Forrest Commission Report. When he received a letter dated 31 July 1886 from David Forrest, a highly respected pastoralist and brother of the much better-­ known John Forrest, which described kidnapping of Aborigines to work on the pearling luggers and the system of forced labour on pastoral stations, it was clearer than ever that something had to be done.38 On 13 August, the Aborigines Protection Bill was placed before the Legislative Council. Against the views expressed by the Council the previous year, the Bill proposed to establish an Aborigines Protection Board, and contained a potentially unpopular clause permitting traditional owners to continue hunting on their tribal lands.39 It also addressed at some length the perennial problem of Aboriginal labour contracts, providing for a system of written contracts that stipulated in lieu of wages the supply of food, clothing, blankets and medical assistance.40 That Broome was the guiding influence behind  Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, p. 152.  Hunt, ‘The Gribble affair’, p. 67. 35  WALCPP, 31 August 1886, p. 582; Hunt, ‘The Gribble affair’, pp. 67–72. 36  ‘Alleged Cruelties in Western Australia’, The Aborigines’ Friend, No. VII, vol. II, 1886, p. 340. Foss is misspelled in The Aborigines’ Friend as Mr. C. D. V. Fors. 37  The Aborigines Protection Society, Annual Report for 1885–1886, No. VII, vol. II, 1886, p. 348. 38  Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, p. 449. 39  According to Green the Bill had already been drafted before the Gribble affair; Green, ‘Aborigines and white settlers’, p. 107. 40  It also provided for a system of apprenticing Aboriginal children under 14. Hetherington describes the apprenticeship provisions as ‘a system of slavery that removed parents’ control over their children and placed it in the hands of the pastoralists’; Penelope Hetherington, 33 34

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the Aborigines Protection Bill was evident when Acting Attorney General Septimus Burt formally introduced the debate on the Bill in Council on 16 August. Burt appeared very uncomfortable in having to introduce the Bill at all, and began his speech of introduction by commenting that the settlers of the colony had ‘with but very rare exceptions been renowned through the length and breadth of Australia for the exceedingly humane manner in which they had treated the aboriginal natives with whom they came in contact’. Indeed, Burt was so defensive of the status quo in introducing the bill, that he was unable to argue effectively for its provisions.41 Legislative Council debate at the second reading on 27 and 30 August focussed on the all-­important question of labour contracts and the associated matter of punishment, to the near-­exclusion of other matters; the Aborigines Protection Board, for example, was scarcely mentioned. Most extra-­parliamentary debate also focussed on the labour question; the editorial on 16 August 1886 in the Daily News, for example, discussing the labour contract provisions at length and the other provisions only briefly.42 One of the few newspapers to discuss the Bill’s provision to create the board and appoint Native Protectors was the Western Mail, the weekly version of the West Australian. It was highly critical of the status quo, commenting sharply that if colonists considered Indigenous people’s situation as if it were their own, ‘we are brought to the disturbing, if altogether impracticable conclusion that we have no business in this country’. The paper outlined the new system of protection proposed in the Bill, and perceptively noted that the new policy would depend very much on ‘the fitness, earnestness, and tact of the members of the Board’. Even more astutely, it thought the whole experiment would stand or fall on ‘the question of cost’.43 While many Council members were unhappy with the Bill, they appear to have realised that some government action was required after so much public controversy and in the light of growing British concern. After amending the Bill to reduce the level of protection of Aboriginal labour, the Council passed the Aborigines Protection Act (50 Vict. 25) on 19 August; it received royal assent on 2 September 1886.44 When it came into force on 1 January 1887, the governor immediately appointed a Board and transferred the administration of Aboriginal affairs to it. To keep the Board in close connection with the executive, Broome appointed the Colonial Secretary, Malcolm Fraser, as chair, and the Colonial Surgeon, Alfred Waylen and the new Attorney General, Charles Settlers, Servants, and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth Century Western Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2002, p. 155.  As the Inquirer and Commercial News pointed out on 25 August 1886, p. 5. 42  Daily News, 16 August 1886, p. 3. 43  Western Mail, 21 August 1886, p. 22. 44  Minute 19 and 30 August 1886, WALCVP, 1886; West Australian, 21 August 1886, pp. 5–13 and 1 September 1886, p. 3. 41

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Warton, as members. The remaining members were MLCs George Shenton and Charles Harper chosen on the basis of their knowledge of Aboriginal questions and ability to explain Board decisions to the Council when required.45 In addition, the Land Regulations passed on 2 March 1887 reconfirmed Aboriginal rights of use and occupancy. Though mentioned in leases since the regulations of 1851, the rights had never been consistently observed.46 Against the objection of pastoralists, Section 113 clarified the situation, referring to ‘the full right [of] the aboriginal natives of the said Colony at all times to enter upon any unenclosed or enclosed but otherwise unimproved part of the said demised premises for the purpose of seeking their subsistence there from in their accustomed manner’.47 The Aborigines Protection Society wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies expressing its pleasure that the Board had been created and other measures taken to improve the welfare of Aboriginal people.48 Yet it was clear at the outset that it would not be easy for any government to change or challenge the entrenched culture of forced labour in the north. It would prove even more difficult to change the perception that Western Australia practised a form of slavery in relation to Aboriginal people. On 19 September 1886, a month after Council passed the Aborigines Protection Act, the New York Times aired Gribble’s claims in a story headed ‘Slavery in Western Australia’. Western Australia’s practices of forced labour had entered international consciousness and would remain there for decades to come. Though Gribble left the colony in June 1887, after losing his defamation case against the West Australian for calling him ‘a lying canting humbug’, his claims would not be forgotten; indeed, a government inquiry twenty years later would effectively declare them vindicated.49 The Effect of Aboriginal Policy Questions on the Campaign for Responsible Government Throughout 1886, the year that controversy over Aboriginal policy was at its height, the movement for responsible government steadily gained in popularity. When the conservatives finally swung their support wholeheartedly behind it, it became at last a strong bipartisan political movement. A Reform Association  Report of the Aborigines Protection Board, 21 April 1887, WALCVP, 1887.  The regulation had been announced in the WA Government Gazette on 17 December 1850. 47  Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, p. 450; Reynolds, ‘The Mabo Judgement’, p. 39. 48  APS to Secretary of State, 20 January 1887, published in The Aborigines’ Friend, No. IX, vol. II, New Series, 1887, pp. 394–7. A few months later, in its annual report for 1886–1887, the APS noted approvingly that Broome had at last taken legislative action to ‘put things for the future on a better footing’; Annual Report, The Aborigines’ Friend, No. IX, vol. II, New Series, 1887, p. 435. 49  Harris, One Blood, p. 427; Hunt, ‘The Gribble Affair’, pp. 67–72. 45 46

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formed by Stephen Parker and others in December 1885 included people from a range of class backgrounds and political persuasions, such as radical and trade union figures, several members of the Legislative council, and prominent citizens like Alexander Forrest and John W. Hackett, proprietor of the West Australian.50 Within ten days, the Reform Association had a membership of 400. With Hackett on board, the West Australian at last in January 1886 came out in support, saying its previous suspicions had been based only on its poor opinion of the advocates of responsible government, not on the idea itself.51 By July, the Western Mail, its weekly counterpart, was describing the present system as coming to an end.52 The conservatives’ change of heart had a number of elements. Extensive personal conflicts for the previous two years between Broome and the Chief Justice, Alexander Onslow (conflicts which had diverted attention from other issues), had revealed even more clearly than usual the unsatisfactory relationship in the existing system between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.53 Crucially, the middle and working classes were both growing, and they were seeking a more popular democracy. Perhaps, conservatives appear to have reasoned, it would be wise to move towards responsible government before those classes became unmanageable, to take control of the campaign for self-­government while they were still, as Brian de Garis puts it, ‘in a position to control the outcome’.54 In addition, local politicians wanted to assert settler control over the whole colony, and to refute suggestions that it be divided into two parts, a self-­governing south and a British-­controlled north. As Jeremy Martens argues, the control of land policy and keeping the colony intact now became crucial aspects of the colonial campaign for responsible government.55 After many false starts and disagreements over strategy and timing, the move to responsible government finally gained traction in mid-­1887, when the Council and Governor Broome united in saying the time had arrived for its introduction. On 6 July 1887, Council endorsed Stephen Parker’s motion saying the time had come, and that the colony should remain ‘one and undivided under the New Constitution’.56 Broome agreed to pass on these views to the Secretary of State immediately, and declared his public support for responsible government, citing increased colonial revenues, growing population (the  De Garis, ‘Constitutional and political development’, pp. 53–4.  Western Mail, 9 January 1886, copying the WA leader. 52  Western Mail, 24 July 1886. 53  De Garis, ‘Constitutional and political development’, p. 54; F. K. Crowley, Australia’s Western Third: A History of Western Australia from the First Settlements to Modern Times, Melbourne: Macmillan, [1960] 1970, p. 91. 54  De Garis, ‘Constitutional and political development’, p. 55. 55  Jeremy Martens, ‘Crown land, territorial integrity and responsible government in Western Australia’, Studies in Western Australian History, pp. 33–4. 56  Minutes, 6 July 1887, WALCVP, 1887, p. 34. 50 51

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non-­Indigenous population had now reached over 40,000), and majority public support. Broome was, however, more prepared than was the Council to envisage a division of the colony into two, with the southern colony only gaining responsible government and the northern colony remaining a British Crown Colony.57 Broome realised, as most colonial politicians did not, that Colonial Office disapproval of the colony’s record on Aboriginal affairs could endanger its claim for responsible government.58 The imperial government had learnt over the previous three decades, to its cost, some of the disadvantages of granting colonial self-­government for settler–­indigenous relations.59 With most of the Western Australian land mass still in Aboriginal hands, it seemed likely that under a system of settler self-­government the continued exploration and settlement of these vast northern lands would lead to a rapid increase in frontier violence, as it had in Queensland. In other words, Britain’s own reputation concerning Western Australia was a little shaky; if the colony were self-­governing, the situation would be even worse. On the other hand, Britain did not wish to control so directly settler colonies like Western Australia forever, and self-­ government had the distinct advantage of transferring many administrative costs and responsibilities from Britain to the colonies themselves. When, therefore, the Legislative Council finally took up the cause of self-­government with genuine determination in July 1887, it would encounter a potentially willing but also wary Colonial Office, and beyond it, an unpredictable and possibly critical British parliament. Anticipating British government disquiet at the possible consequences for Aboriginal people of granting the settlers responsible government, Broome suggested in a despatch to the Secretary of State on 12 July 1887, just a few days after Council had formally declared the time had come, that they could include measures for Aboriginal protection in the Western Australian constitution. Funding of the newly-­constituted Aborigines Protection Board could come from reserving £5,000 annually from colonial revenue, a system he knew from his service two decades earlier in the colony of Natal. Britain could keep the Board, he suggested, under the control of the governor and not hand it over to the new elected colonial government; the Board’s separate funding would ensure its independence from colonial treasury decisions and indeed colonial  Broome to Holland, 12 July 1887, printed in ‘Correspondence respecting the Proposed Introduction of Responsible Government into Western Australia’, presented to both Houses of Parliament June 1889, British Parliamentary Papers, 1889 p. 14. For the estimate of 40,000 see the Blue Book Report for 1886, WALCVP, 1886, p. 4. 58  For further discussion of the relationship between Aboriginal policy matters and the granting of responsible government to Western Australia, see Curthoys and Martens, ‘Serious collisions’, p. 15. 59  Norman Etherington, ‘Empire, relations with’, in Jenny Gregory and Janice Gothard, Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2009, p. 319. 57

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pressures and politics.60 While angry with Broome when it learnt some months later that he had suggested the new constitution grant the legislature no control over the Aborigines Protection Board, the West Australian agreed that he had correctly anticipated Colonial Office opinion. English statesmen in general, it acknowledged, ‘have good reason to distrust the discretion of Australian Parliamentary Governments in dealing with native affairs’, and referred to the treatment of Aboriginal people in Victoria, NSW, and Queensland.61 Negotiations between the Legislative Council and the British government on the precise form of the new Constitution would take two years. Broome prorogued parliament from 22 August until 15 December 1887. It was not until 3 January 1888 that Secretary of State Henry Holland specifically agreed to Broome’s suggestion concerning the Aborigines Protection Board, commenting that ‘the Aboriginal inhabitants of the colony [should be placed] under the care of a body independent of the Parliament of the day’.62 When Council came in March and April 1888 to debate the question of responsible government and in particular the Secretary of State’s despatches on the matter, it disagreed vehemently. Council passed a resolution on 6 April 1888 that ‘no ground whatsoever has been shown for placing the interests of the aboriginal population in the hands of a body independent of the local Ministry’.63 The resolution, however, had little effect. When Broome, after prolonged discussion with the British authorities, presented a draft Constitution to Council on 17 October, it provided in Clause 58 that the Aborigines Protection Board be responsible to the Governor rather than the legislature. Clause 58 also provided that the Board would be allocated funding of £5,000 per annum that would convert to one per cent of the annual revenue of the colony when that revenue exceeded £500,000.64 The same day, Broome also presented a Bill to amend the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886 that would clarify the nature of the Board, the powers of the Governor concerning labour contracts, and the authority of both the Board and the Governor to create and manage Native Reserves. In the Council’s second reading debate on both Bills over several days in November 1888, the effects of the Gribble allegations were still strongly evident. The Council members recognised that they would have to accept both Clause 58 of the Constitution Bill and the amendments to the Aborigines Protection Act, but they were far from happy. In a debate on 2 November on the  Broome to Holland, 12 July 1887. United Kingdom, Parliament, 1889, Correspondence respecting the Proposed Introduction of Responsible Government into Western Australia, Parl. Papers, British Parliamentary Papers, c. 5743, p.  14; Curthoys and Martens, ‘Serious collisions’, esp. pp. 114–15, 128. 61  West Australian, 7 November 1887, p. 2. 62  Holland to Broome, 3 January 1888, in Further Despatches from the Right Honourable Secretary of State for the Colonies relating to Responsible Government, WALCVP, 1887–1888, p. 2. 63  Minute 6 April 1888, WALCVP, 1888, p. 93. 64  Minute 17 October 1888, WALCPD, 1888, p. 44. 60

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Constitution Bill, Alexander Richardson, a northern pastoralist, opposed the requirement to set aside £5,000 for Aboriginal welfare, since the white population would increase and the Aboriginal population (he took for granted) would decrease.65 When the debate resumed on 5 November, William Marmion, member for Fremantle, said of the clause concerning control of Aboriginal affairs, that he would fight it to the bitter end if he thought there was any chance of success. It is, he said, ‘a slur upon the colony that it should go forth that we are not worthy to be trusted with the management of the aboriginal race without special legislation of this kind. I think that it is a blot upon us, that will take many years to wipe out, and that it will always remain a stigma upon us, in the eyes of the other colonies’.66 Yet for all the indignation at the ‘slur upon the colony’, most of the debate was about other aspects of the Bill, and despite their objections, these settler politicians agreed to Clause 58 so that they could obtain responsible government, many hoping to have it removed later.67 In debate on the accompanying Aborigines Bill the following day, hostility to Clause 58 in the constitution Bill resurfaced. As the West Australian put it, ‘member after member uncorked some part of the feeling which was bottled in his breast’.68 Stephen Parker represented the general view when he said that since the Secretary of State would not give way on the question of Aboriginal management, ‘we have no other course open to us’.69 William Marmion predicted the measure would lead to conflict between the Governor and the Ministry, and ‘if I saw any loophole I would get out of it, but I don’t’. Radical member for Perth, John Horgan, said that they should delay the bill: ‘It was an insult to the people and to the representatives of the people.’ Edward Scott, member for Perth who the following year would become the city’s mayor, agreed it was ‘a slur upon the colony to have it go forth that Western Australia of all the colonies of the group is the only one that requires some restraints placed upon it . . .’ Charles Harper, farmer and newspaper proprietor, thought the danger was not purely symbolic. Governors, he pointed out, might be influenced by the ideas of the Exeter Hall school, and if the colony were to be assigned a governor of that type, then he could influence the Aborigines Protection Board.70 Alexander Richardson, and Robert Sholl, member for the Gascoyne, particularly objected to the provisions concerning the governor’s power to grant land for Aboriginal use, to which Septimus Burt responded that the governor had had that power for years, and in any case, it would serve no purpose, since even if granted land the Aboriginal people would never use  WALCPD, 1888, 2 November 1888, p. 188.  WALCPD, 1888, 5 November 1888, p. 212. 67  Ibid., p. 235. 68  West Australian, 8 November 1888, p. 2. 69  WALCPD, 1888, 6 November, p. 239. 70  Ibid., p. 243. 65 66

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it.71 John Forrest, on the other hand, thought it was desirable to set aside land reserves, which would help keep Aboriginal people out of the towns where they wander, ‘drinking and getting demoralized’. Forrest expressed a view heard more often in other colonies, that Aboriginal people, ‘as the original possessors of the soil, have a claim upon us, and I don’t see why we should be jealous of their having an inch of land for themselves’. In any case, it was not a major matter, since ‘Natives, we know, soon disappear before the white man.’72 The Bill passed its second reading.73 A separate debate two weeks later, on 19 November, on the question of protecting settlers in the Kimberley from Aboriginal attacks, was haunted by Gribble’s internationalising of his accusations. Alexander Forrest moved in the Legislative Council that the government must do more to ‘protect settlers in the Kimberley and their property from the treacherous hostility of the aborigines’. He wanted the government to appoint special constables to form an armed expedition to ‘leave a lasting impression upon the minds of these aborigines’.74 Robert Sholl seconded the motion, though its wording concerned him lest it led the outside world to believe that their intention was to ‘send an armed force out to decimate those natives’. Alexander Richardson, a pastoralist with interests in the Kimberley agreed, and in order to ward off criticism from certain people ‘either here, or in Exeter Hall circles at home’, moved an amendment which removed the reference to an armed expedition and spoke more vaguely of ‘strong and prompt measures’ to protect the settlers. (The continued use of ‘Exeter Hall’ to denote one’s humanitarian enemies is, perhaps, a little ironic, given that Western Australian settlers were at the same time vehemently denying charges of slavery, the very system for which Exeter Hall was best known for helping abolish.) The Colonial Secretary, Malcolm Fraser, also regretted the original wording, which ‘really seems to advocate an internecine war between the two races, white and black’. The settlers he said, had a right to protect themselves, but they ‘must not go out and hunt up the natives like they would kangaroos’.75 They must not adopt the Queensland practice of ‘dispersion’. Alexander Forrest’s brother, John Forrest, deprecated the strongly anti-­Aboriginal tone of much of the debate, and suggested that instead of arming the police and swearing in special constables, the best thing to do would be to have police camped out in places where Aboriginal attacks on property and people were most troublesome.  Ibid., pp. 239–41.  Ibid., p. 244.  Ibid., p. 245. 74  Ibid., 1888, 19 November, p.  314. See also Chris Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’: Policing in the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905, Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2017, pp. 203–5. 75  WALCPD, 1888, 19 November, p. 319. 71 72 73

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When the debate resumed on 28 November, the Colonial Secretary placatingly announced that the government would increase police numbers in the area. Members were not easily cooled down, and William Marmion spoke passionately of ‘[t]he treachery, the annoyance, the losses, the dangers which these settlers have to put up with in their efforts to open up the district’ which would ‘break the hearts of most men’.76 The government, managed from Britain, had failed to support them, which he thought inconsistent: ‘We know very well that in other parts of the world the British Government does not show much squeamishness in dealing with aboriginal races in countries which they have subjugated. They do not allow any “Exeter Hall” or false sentiment to influence them when British enterprise and British pluck are brought to bear in the settlement of other territories.’ Charles Warton, the Attorney General, agreed with Marmion’s disparagement of Exeter Hall, which he thought ‘a collection of fanatics, who oppress those of their own race all over the world’. The government, however, he insisted, was not guided by Exeter Hall principles; ‘England, in her policy of colonisation, has always acted on the old Roman maxim, of putting down those who oppose you, and sparing those who submit to you.’77 The amendment softening the wording of the original resolution was then put and passed by 12 votes to 7; Council then passed the amended resolution without division. The colony was slowly moving towards gaining a new constitution. After elections in early 1889, which strengthened Council’s support for responsible government, the Council in April again debated the Constitution Bill. By this time, the Bill had been redrafted, and Clause 58 had become the soon-tobe-famous Clause 70. After extensive debate on a range of matters, including on amendments suggested by the Secretary of State, Council passed both the Constitution Bill and the Aborigines Protection Bill on 26 April.78 Broome reserved both Acts and on 29 April 1889 sent them to the Secretary of State. When an Enabling Bill, known as the Western Australian Responsible Government Bill, came before the British parliament in mid-­1889, the House of Lords supported it but the House of Commons emphatically did not. The press in England was generally opposed, especially The Times, which on 4 May 1889 called Western Australia ‘diminutive, stagnant, unprogressive and commercially inactive’. Some weeks later, on 26 June 1889, The Times published a reply from Broome himself, emphasising the growth in the Western Australian population to 42,000 non-­Aboriginal people, considerably more than the 28,000 equivalent population in Queensland when it was granted its  WALCPD, 1888, 28 November, p. 391.  Ibid., p. 394. 78  An Act to provide for certain matters connected with the Aborigines, 52 Vict. 24, reserved 29 April 1889, assented 28 October 1890. 76 77

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own constitution in 1859. When the Bill was presented to the House of Lords for its second reading on 11 July, British press comment was again adverse, the Daily News expressing the common view when it said it was hard to understand why the government was ‘in such a hurry to hand over this enormous territory to the mere handful of people who are now settled upon it’. According to The Times on 16 July, ‘The Imperial patrimony should not be squandered in this reckless fashion . . . the unoccupied Crown lands of the Colony really belong rather to the larger community of the United Kingdom than to the smaller community of the Colony.’ The Secretary of State informed Governor Broome on 23 July that it would be impossible to pass the Bill through both houses that session, but he still hoped that the principle of constitutional change would be accepted.79 With progress on the Bill stalled in England, the Legislative Council in Western Australia then stepped up its campaign, seeking the support of the other colonies, which was readily forthcoming. While for colonists in Western Australia, the most important point was, as Jeremy Martens points out, that self-­government would bring to Western Australia settler control over land policy, for the other Australian colonies there would be another important consideration  – that Western Australia be part of emerging plans for colonial federation. When Henry Parkes moved on 7 August 1889 in the NSW Legislative Assembly that the House address Her Majesty the Queen on the matter, he emphasised the importance of an equal basis of all the colonies for federation. To cheers, he proclaimed that ‘the day is now come when we may safely act upon the maxim of Australia for the Australians’. ‘We know,’ he went on, ‘the marvellous power of free government in developing the energies of a people.’ Two months later, Parkes would deliver his famous ‘Tenterfield Oration’, frequently seen as inaugurating the successful federation movement of the 1890s.80 There was considerable discussion in the New South Wales parliamentary debate on the issue of the ideas of Greater Britain and imperial federation. E. W. O’Sullivan said: ‘To every man who desires to see Australia kept as the home of white men, and who desires to see the future of this continent assured, this is a most serious matter.’ Apparently untroubled by (or possibly ignorant of) Gribble’s highlighting of the question of slavery in Western Australia, he continued: ‘We have a virgin soil upon which we can build up a liberalism more pure and ennobling that that which any other country has managed to attain . . . We are not borne down by the incubus of slavery.’81

 WALCPD, 24 July 1889, p. 8.  SMH, 25 October 1889, p. 8. 81  The New Constitution for Western Australia, Debate in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, Wednesday, 7th August 1889, Sydney, Government Printer, 1889. 79 80

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In December 1889, on Legislative Council initiative, a delegation went from Western Australia to London for four months to argue the case for responsible government. It included Broome (who had heard he would not be renewed as governor and his replacement would be William Robinson), Stephen Parker, and Sir Thomas Cockburn-­Campbell, a former editor of the West Australian.82 In London, a Select Committee of both houses of parliament, established on 27 February 1890, questioned the delegation at great length.83 Parker assured the committee that the Aborigines Protection Board would continue, and Cockburn-­Campbell disingenuously insisted that the northern lands under dispute were ‘useless for colonization’.84 The Select Committee recommended amendments to the Constitution, particularly to do with management and control of the Waste Lands, agreed that the colony did not need to be divided, and left Section 70 intact. After considerable disagreement and delay, the British parliament finally passed the Bill on 25 July 1890. The Western Australian Enabling Act received royal assent on 15 August 1890, just in time for the new governor (William Robinson, returning for his third stint) to be able to proclaim the new constitution on his arrival in the colony, which he did to large crowds and much celebration on 21 October 1890.85 Aboriginal Policy Under Self-­Government, 1890–1901 The system of responsible government ushered in on 21 October 1890 would last only a decade. Through the 1890s, an intercolonial political movement towards federation gathered speed, though it was less popular in Western Australia than elsewhere; through a series of intercolonial conventions and referenda, a new national constitution was hammered out and the new nation was inaugurated on 1 January 1901. From that date, Western Australia ceased to be a British colony and became a state within the new Australian nation. A decade can be quite a long time in settler colonial history. In Western Australia, further gold discoveries underpinned a significant rise in the size of the settler population, from 53,177 in 1891 to 193, 601 in 1901.86 Continuing pastoral expansion in the north pressed heavily on the lives and livelihood of Indigenous people, undermining food sources and forcing people to work for settlers in order to survive. Driven by hunger and sometimes revenge,  Boyce, ‘The Governors of Western Australia’, p. 139.  Report of Select Committee on the Bill for Responsible Government in Western Australia, House of Commons, Select Papers, 1890, xviii, p.  160ff; House of Lords, Sessional Papers, 1890, xiv, pp. 646–7, 886. Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, p. 452. 84  Martens, ‘Crown land, territorial integrity and responsible government in Western Australia’, p. 39. 85  An Act to Enable Her Majesty to Assent to a Bill for Conferring a Constitution on Western Australia, 25 July 1890; Boyce, ‘The governors of Western Australia’, p. 139. 86  Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Historical Population Statistics, 2014, Table 1.1. 82 83

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Indigenous people responded with cattle-­stealing and killing; in their turn, pastoralists and police turned to increased levels of violence and repression. It would, in fact, be one of the bloodiest decades in the colony’s history.87 In the far north, a man named Jandamarra for some years worked with the police, but made a dramatic defection in 1894, leading an attack on police that resulted in large scale revenge attacks and a manhunt that lasted two and a half years.88 To make matters worse, the bifurcation of power between a colonial government responsible for policing and punishment and a Protection Board under the authority of a relatively powerless governor, would prove to be a disaster. As the first premier of Western Australia as a self-­governing colony, John Forrest was focussed on economic development and public works; despite earlier expressions of sympathy for Aboriginal people he was now determined that they should not stand in the way of pastoral expansion. In this he had full legislative support; an undemocratic franchise and unbalanced seat distribution meant that representatives from old colonial families dominated the Legislative Assembly, while every member of Forrest’s ministry owned pastoral stations in the North West and Kimberley.89 Marginalised by Forrest on a wide range of issues, and concerned at the direction the colony was taking on Aboriginal matters and his inability to prevent it, Governor Robinson retired early in 1895.90 Free from external restraint, and in response to increased Aboriginal resistance and frontier conflict in the north, parliament in the early years after gaining responsible government passed a number of Acts designed to increase pastoralist control over Aboriginal people. In a bid to prevent cattle killing, it amended the Aboriginal Offenders Act 1883. As we saw in the previous chapter, under Governor Weld’s influence, magistrates and JPs had lost the authority to sentence Aboriginal offenders to flogging in 1874, and attempts led by John Forrest to reintroduce it in the Native Offenders Act of 1883 had failed. Now, Forrest was in charge, and in 1892 at his instigation, parliament amended the Act to authorise the official use of flogging of Aboriginal offenders.91 The Act was made even harsher with further amendments the following year.92 As Mark Finnane and John McGuire show, the use of corporal punishment at a time when it was generally rejected as inhumane and not formally practiced or sanctioned in other Australian colonies was a direct response to heightened  Forrest, The Challenge, pp. 204–5.  Violent conflict continued in the Kimberley area until the 1920s. See Howard Pederson, ‘Frontier violence, Kimberley’, in J. Gregory and J. Gothard, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Western Australia, 2009, pp. 394–5. The events surrounding Jandamarra have been portrayed in the 2011 film, Jandamarra’s War. 89  Owen, Policing in the Kimberley Frontier, p. 259. 90  Ibid., pp. 264, 268. 91  An Act to amend ‘The Aboriginal Offenders Act, 1883’, and to authorise the Whipping of Aboriginal Native Offenders, 55 Vict. No. 18, 1892. 92  Aboriginal Offenders Act Amendment 1893, 56 Vict. 15, 1893.

87 88

‘A Slur upon the Colony’ 403

Aboriginal resistance.93 In addition to such legislative changes, the government made the use of police against Aboriginal people much harsher through new appointments to senior positions and new regulations.94 While major conflict was unfolding in the North, the Board in Perth operated, as the constitution required, under the authority of the governor. It was funded by an annual grant of £5,000 until 1893, after which time the grant rose each year, reaching £28,000 by 1897.95 This near six-­fold increase in just four years indicates how rapid was the increase in the colony’s wealth, a result primarily of gold discoveries in the 1890s. From the beginning of his premiership, Forrest had wanted the Board abolished and in 1894, the year the grant began to rise, succeeded in having parliament pass a Bill to that effect. When Robinson relayed it to Britain for assent, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Marquess of Ripon, was not enthusiastic. Although Joseph Chamberlain, his replacement from June 1895, was more interested in imperial expansion than Indigenous protection and thus more inclined to support the colony’s repeal Bill, he was slow to do so and the Bill became ‘stale’. In 1897, with the Board’s funding rising rapidly, Parliament passed a second repeal Bill and this time, the British Government promptly endorsed it. The Aborigines Protection Act (61 Vic. No 5) abolished the Board and established in its place an Aborigines department, and removed the provision for funding of 1 per cent of colonial revenue.96 Forrest immediately slashed the expenditure on Aboriginal affairs  Finnane and Maguire, ‘The uses of punishment and exile’, pp. 284–5.  Owen, Policing in the Kimberley Frontier, pp. 286–94. 95  Hasluck, Black Australians, p. 119. 96  Section 70, however, was not dead yet. When a Royal Commission to Enquire into and Report upon the Administration of the Aborigines Department and the Condition of the Natives (the Roth Report) in 1905 was critical of coercive labour practices, the role of police, and a failure of government to provide for Aboriginal welfare, there was huge public debate, leading F. Lyon Weiss to challenge the validity of the 1897 repeal of Section 70 on the grounds that the proper procedures had not been followed for securing royal assent. British Government law officers agreed, leading the Western Australian Parliament to repeal the contentious section for a third time; finally, it was properly approved. See Peter Johnston, ‘The Repeals of Section 70 of the Western Australian Constitution Act 1889: Aborigines and Governmental Breach of Trust’, University of Western Australia Law Review, vol. 19, 1989, pp. 318–51, esp. pp.  336–9; Steven Churches, ‘Put Not Your Faith in Princes (or courts) – agreements made from asymmetrical power bases: The story of a promise made to Western Australia’s Aboriginal people’, in Peter Read, Gary Meyers, and Bob Reece, eds., What Good Condition? Reflections on an Australian Aboriginal Treaty 1986–2006, Canberra: Australia University Press, 2006, pp. 6–8; Green, ‘From princes to paupers’, pp. 446–62. Despite its second repeal in 1905, section 70, remained important for over a century for Aboriginal activists and their supporters, who believed that the second repeal was also questionable and that Aboriginal people were now owed one per cent per annum of state (formerly colony) income for each year since 1897. Don McLeod, a white man who worked closely with Aboriginal people for decades, filed proceedings in the Western Australian Supreme Court in 1993; when the case came before the High Court of Australia in 1998, Crow Yougarla, an Elder of the Strelley mob that had long worked with McLeod, was the leading plaintiff. Yougarla eventually lost his case in 2001, with the High Court ruling unanimously that the colony after 1890 had the power, after all, to amend its constitution without placing the 93 94

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Self-Government for Western Australia

back to £5,000, a pitiful amount that could not support any kind of welfare or protection policy, and in 1898 appointed a friend, Henry Prinsep, as head of the department.97 With minimal funding and no statutory powers, there was little Prinsep could do other than arrange for the supply of some rations and attempt to strengthen Aboriginal people’s position in labour contracts.98 As the century closed, policies of protection and welfare had reached a very low ebb. When Western Australia was transformed in 1901 from a colony to a state within the new Australian nation, it retained, like the other states, its control over Aboriginal policy. Indeed, the Australian Constitution explicitly excluded the Commonwealth government from legislating on Aboriginal policy or counting Aboriginal people in the census.99 In this new environment, public conflicts in Western Australia over matters of Aboriginal policy remained bitter. The oligarchic power enjoyed by John Forrest and his ministers in the 1890s, however, would not be repeated. Forrest himself left for Federal politics in 1901, and rapid population increase and economic changes brought with them a rise in anti-­pastoralist, liberal, and radical politics. Importantly, new forms of Aboriginal politics emerged, with men such as William Harris leading Aboriginal campaigns against discriminatory policies and Aboriginal advancement.100 While Aboriginal activists and their supporters would grow in number and strength in the next decades, however, oppressive and discriminatory policies denying Aboriginal people their right to freedom of movement, employment, and family security would continue into the 1960s.

relevant Bills before both houses of the British Parliament. See Ann Curthoys, ‘The impossibility of Section 70: Aboriginal rights and the contradictions of settler colonialism’, Studies in Western Australian History, vol. 30, 2016, pp. 13–28; Ann Genovese, ‘Narratives of authority: Translating Yougarla’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 15, 2013, pp. 145–68.      97  Allbrook, Henry Prinsep’s Empire, Chapter 8, pp. 237–270.      98  Owen, Policing in the Kimberley Frontier, pp. 379–80.      99  Australian Constitution Act 1900, clauses 51 and 127, available at www.foundingdocs.gov.au/ item-sdid-82.html. Accessed on 4 June 2018. 100  Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940, UWA Publishing, Crawley, 1992, p. 270ff.

Conclusion

In tracing the relation between governments and Indigenous peoples in Australia, our narrative began with the question of British honour (Sir George Murray’s concern that the disappearance of Aboriginal people from Van Diemen’s Land would leave an ‘indelible stain’ on Britain’s reputation) and ended with one of colonial honour (Western Australian politicians calling Section 70 a ‘slur upon the colony’). The question of honour is not yet resolved, haunting present generations as they grapple with the legacies of the British Empire. The meanings of the history we have narrated and explored in this book vary according to people and place, and in this conclusion, we consider its implications for future histories of settler colonialism, for continuing debates over the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Australia’s political institutions, and for modern British historical consciousness. For historians of settler colonialism, one implication is that we can no longer write political history in isolation from Indigenous histories. We cannot ignore the many ways in which, in settler societies, the experience of colonisation informed political subjectivities and shaped popular rhetoric of liberty, security, self-­determination, and independence. As Angela Woollacott has pointed out, a significant number of colonial politicians in the first few decades of responsible government had either direct or indirect experience of frontier violence.1 Our own narrative shows again and again that both before and after the introduction of responsible government in the 1850s, colonial legislatures included pastoralists and former pastoralists with a direct interest in ensuring that Indigenous people did not impede their drive for pastoral settlement and personal profit in international markets. Indeed, the influence of colonisation on the development of responsible government and a particular form of parliamentary democracy goes even further. As we show, politicians with quite different backgrounds, no direct experience of frontier violence, and often with liberal and sometimes radical political views also shared a political vision in which Indigenous people, both individually and collectively, did not figure. While they may not have  Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-­Government and Imperial Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, Chapter 6 ‘Frontier violence and political manhood’, pp. 152–78.

1

405

406

Conclusion

shared the pastoralist vision of economic development and sought in contrast a society based on a diversity of economic activities and social classes, these liberal politicians did share with their conservative counterparts a worldview in which their own ‘civilisation’ was by right displacing a backward, ‘savage’, and doomed people. Yet, as we also show, alongside this attempted erasure of Indigenous people from political life was a continuing consciousness that the land had once been occupied by someone else, ‘the original occupiers (or possessors) of the soil’. Such an awareness could be a source either of moral discomfort, as Henry Reynolds in This Whispering in our Hearts suggests it sometimes was, or of self-­congratulation that they had established ‘civilised’ society where there had been none before, a view expressed in many political speeches in colonial legislatures and public meetings, especially around the time of gaining self-government.2 The tension between moral anxiety and supersessionist ­triumphalism so evident in the period under study in this book has lasted up to the present day. We have also narrated a history of Indigenous attempts to resist, and to negotiate with, the new forms of power colonisation brought with it. Once British and settler colonial power was, after a fierce struggle, entrenched, Indigenous people explored a variety of ways to insist on their own identity as sovereign peoples and maintain family life and community under adverse circumstances. In the early years, they had encountered British governors, the formal leaders of the incoming population and the representatives of imperial power. Indigenous people sought to develop and maintain familial relationships with these governors, and beyond them with the British Crown they represented. Later, as gubernatorial power receded and colonial society grew and diversified, they engaged with a variety of institutions of power, from the local to the colony-­wide. In order to assert their rights to land and self-­determination, they adopted such claim-­making techniques as petitioning, letter writing, relaying their wishes through intermediaries, and giving evidence to inquiries. This is a history of creative adaptation in what were difficult and often impossible circumstances, and of flexibility in the face of an imposed political system that was complex, unfamiliar, and often hostile. In the face of the widespread assumption of racial hierarchy and the general view that colonisation would soon render Indigenous people extinct, however, Indigenous activists and ­leaders had a difficult time making their claims heard. In the past couple of decades, most public debate about the relationship between Aboriginal Australians and government has focused on federal and national issues and conflicts. Yet for most of Australia’s history since 1788, Indigenous political engagements with governments have been with imperial, colonial, and state governments rather than with the Australian government.  Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998.

2

Conclusion 407

There was very little inter-­colonial consultation on Aboriginal matters before 1901, and even after federation, the formulation and implementation of policy remained a state matter. When the Australian government, influenced by international trends in the management of indigenous peoples, began in the late 1930s to favour policies of Aboriginal assimilation, they could do little outside the Northern Territory (which they had controlled since 1911) other than act in an advisory and coordinating role. Aboriginal organisations accordingly pressed state governments on a variety of issues, including housing, land, education, and social equality. From the late 1950s, in reaction to the unresponsiveness of these governments to most if not all of their demands, Aboriginal organisations began to press for constitutional change to allow Commonwealth government jurisdiction on Aboriginal matters, a move that voters finally endorsed resoundingly in a referendum in May 1967. The Australian Constitution was then amended to grant the Commonwealth the power to make laws specifically concerning Indigenous people. While Commonwealth legislation overrides any state laws in conflict with it, since 1967 state governments have continued to play a significant role in Aboriginal policy, passing legislation on matters such as Indigenous cultural heritage, land rights and management, native title, marine resources, and nature conservation. At both national and state levels, there continues to be a debate over what political institutions best acknowledge Indigenous presence, history, identity, and claims. Although Australian governments and people now recognise (to varying degrees) that colonisation had destructive consequences for Indigenous people and that non-­Indigenous Australians have inherited benefits from colonisation, they are a long way from reaching agreement on appropriate forms of restitution and compensation, or on the political system required if Indigenous claims are to be truly met. Underlying these debates are many concerns, including questions of national sovereignty and indeed the very notion of ‘nation’ itself. For the past ten years, the period we were researching and writing this book, two quite different and indeed contradictory processes concerning Indigenous political rights have been occurring which clearly demonstrate the lack of agreement at a national level. One is a federal government policy known as ‘the Intervention’, which imposed government controls on Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory reminiscent of earlier paternalistic forms of punitive governance over Indigenous people whose origins are explored in this book.3 The other is the campaign for Indigenous recognition in the nation’s Constitution, involving calls for constitutional reforms that would remove the Australian government’s ability to pass discriminatory or  ‘The Intervention’ is shorthand for an Australian government policy established in 2007 entitled Northern Territory National Emergency Response, replaced in 2001 by the very similar Stronger Futures Policy.

3

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Conclusion

detrimental legislation but preserve its capacity to pass laws for the positive benefit of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.4 Both the Intervention and the Recognition campaign have proved highly controversial within Indigenous communities. Anger over the Intervention and debates over Constitutional recognition revived and strengthened earlier calls for a treaty. After lengthy negotiation and consultation, a group of Indigenous leaders issued on 26 May 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which seeks ‘a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution’ as well as, among other things, ‘truth-­telling about our history’.5 The language of First Nations here signifies a statement that Indigenous sovereignty continues; as the Uluru Statement asserts, Indigenous sovereignty ‘has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-­exists with the sovereignty of the Crown’. The Uluru Statement calls for a treaty, in local terms a ‘Makarrata Commission’, to ‘supervise a process of agreement-­making between governments and First Nations’. The statement seeks, in other words, not only a new Constitution but also a treaty in which Indigenous people decide on an equal basis with the Crown how to achieve mutual recognition and a new governmental framework. Despite government rejection of the proposal in October 2017, the statement’s calls for both a treaty and constitutional change remain a spur to further debate and activism. As societies produced by a history of settler colonialism wrestle with the task of forging political structures that recognise dual forms of sovereignty, Indigenous and non-­Indigenous, it helps to understand how and why we have the political system we do. This book draws attention to the origins and longevity of the role of state (originally colonial) governments in managing, controlling, and in some cases responding to the claims of Indigenous people. While the referendum of 1967 did a great deal to make Australians aware that at its foundation in 1901 the Australian nation did not properly include Indigenous people, there is little comparable public knowledge of the history of state constitutions and political institutions. It is not well known, for example, that the colonial constitutions of the 1850s, though so much closer in time to the dispossession of Indigenous people and seizure of their lands, did not recognise Indigenous prior occupation or indeed Indigenous people’s very existence. Only the Western Australian constitution of 1889, in Section 70, recognised the existence of Aboriginal people, and Section 70 was repealed after only seven years in operation. The failure of these colonial constitutions to include and recognise Indigenous people and their prior occupation of the  Recognise Campaign for Constitutional Recognition, statement of aims available at: www.racgp .org.au/yourracgp/faculties/aboriginal/campaigns/recognise-campaign-for-constitutionalrecognition/ 5  ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, 26 May 2017, Referendum Council, available at: www .referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Referendum_Council_Media%20 Release_Uluru_Statement_from_the_Heart_3.pdf. 4

Conclusion 409

land prefigured and underpinned the exclusions enshrined in the Australian Constitution in 1901. While the colonial and their successor state governments were responsible, as we show in this book, for so many destructive and discriminatory policies, it is important to note that state governments have made some of the most notable efforts at restitution and establishing new consultative structures. Under the conservative Commonwealth government led by John Howard from 1996 to 2007, there was a refusal lasting over ten years to observe the call from the national Bringing Them Home Report of 1997 to apologise for the systematic policies of child removal carried out by state and Commonwealth governments until the 1970s. During these years, state and territory governments all issued their own apologies, most of them in 1997, with Queensland following in 1999 and the Northern Territory in 2001. It was only after a change of government that the Commonwealth government finally apologised in 2008. This pattern of state initiative is continuing. On 6 June 2016, Western Australia proclaimed the Noongar Recognition Act, one of the outcomes of the South West Native Title Settlement, a negotiated agreement between the Western Australian government and the Noongar people.6 On 18 March 2017, the indigenous Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority signed an agreement with the South Australian Government, as part of a state policy seeking to ‘give Aboriginal nations greater power to determine how they will work with government to drive improvement in outcomes for Aboriginal South Australians’.7 Since February 2016, the Victorian Government has been working on a process to develop a treaty with Aboriginal Victorians, committing in April 2017 substantial funding to support a process that is expected to take some years.8 In June 2018, legislation passed through Victoria’s lower house to create a framework for the negotiation of a treaty, or several treaties, between Indigenous people and the state of Victoria. For historians, it is interesting that Victoria, the colony in which some aspects of British humanitarian policies of the 1840s best survived into the self-­government era, albeit accompanied by intrusive systems of micro-­management and control, is now the state with arguably the most radical and innovative policies. For theorists of settler colonialism, such developments, along with similar and indeed much stronger forms of recognition of Indigenous sovereignty in both Canada and New Zealand, suggest a need to challenge the idea that societies that were once settler-­colonial cannot find a pathway to decolonisation.  Government of Western Australia, South West Native Title Settlement, available at: www.dpc .wa.gov.au/lantu/south-west-native-title-settlement/Documents/Noongar%20Recognition%20 Act%202016%20Flyer%20-%20June%202016.pdf. 7  Government of South Australia, Department of State Development, 18 March 2017, Media Release, available at: http://statedevelopment.sa.gov.au/news-releases/all-news-updates/16336. 8  Government of Victoria, Aboriginal Victoria, available at: www.vic.gov.au/aboriginalvictoria/ treaty.html. 6

410

Conclusion

The other major player in the history outlined in this book is Britain – British governments, legislators, explorers, missionaries, entrepreneurs, commercial companies, and settlers. In modern Britain, however, there is little feeling of connection with the history we have explored. The granting of self-­government in the nineteenth century to the Australian colonies, and then in the twentieth of independent nationhood to a federated Australia, resulted in a perception that Indigenous dispossession and its aftermath is part of Australian but not British history. As a result, while there is growing public awareness of Britain’s slave-­owning past, prompted not least by the ‘Legacies of British Slave-­Ownership’ Project headed by Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, and Keith McClelland at University College, London, the same is not true of Britain’s role in the destruction and exploitation of Indigenous peoples and societies.9 In recent years, two historians have drawn attention to this very particular form of historical denialism. In an essay entitled ‘Imperial Complicity’ published in 2014, Zoë Laidlaw traced the long tradition of British denial of responsibility for imperial crimes such as the dispossession and large-­scale displacement of indigenous peoples in Britain’s settler colonies. She points out that while it has become ‘increasingly difficult to underplay Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and slavery’, in British historical consciousness ‘it is settlers and their descendants who must bear responsibility for the crimes of settler colonialism’. Britain’s complicity in the destruction of indigenous peoples remains ‘almost completely unremarked’. Laidlaw urged historians to adopt approaches to imperial history which can ‘illuminate the complicity of those who, while spatially removed from Britain’s settler colonies, oversaw, endorsed and enabled its processes: the politicians and civil servants; the land promoters and emigration agents; the supportive families of migrants; and the landed classes who paid the passages of their too numerous tenants’.10 In the same year, in his book, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, Tom Lawson set out to show in detail the nature and consequences of British policy and settlement in Tasmania. Lawson is primarily a historian of the Holocaust, who turned to Tasmanian colonial history as both a case of  Legacies of British Slave-­Ownership, website at: www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/. Even in the case of slave-­ ownership, it is worth noting, there is still much more attention and understanding of Britain’s abolition in 1807 of the slave trade and then in 1833 of slavery in British possessions. Awareness of the enormous sums the British government spent in the 1830s on compensating British slave-­owners, however, is helping to draw attention to just how much British society had benefited from slavery. Investigation of the subsequent uses of these compensation monies is showing how the legacy of slavery lived on in various forms of economic development and exploitation around the world. See Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, and Keith McClelland, eds., Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, Manchester: Manchester ­University Press, 2014. 10  Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Imperial Complicity: Indigenous Dispossession in British History and History Writing’, in Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, and Keith McClelland, Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, pp. 142–3.

9

Conclusion 411

genocide and an aspect of British history. He noted that the early twenty-­first century Australian ‘history wars’ over the question of genocide in Australian history, were observed in Britain with detachment, ‘as if it were very little to do with “us” somehow’.11 There is ‘little or no acknowledgement within wider memorial culture today’, he wrote, ‘that Britain has such a genocidal past’. Although he could have discussed any of the Australian colonies as examples of genocide, he says he chose to focus on Tasmania since there the wholesale destruction of Aboriginal lives occurred under direct British control. While the fact of self-­government from the mid-­1850s could enable British readers to see what happened in the other colonies ‘as the sins of the errant sons of Britain rather than their metropolitan parents’, this was not possible in the Tasmanian case; British readers could not avoid Britain’s own role.12 We hope this book contributes to a greater understanding of Britain’s role in the destruction and exploitation of Indigenous peoples generally. We have explored Britain’s role not only in Tasmania, but also in Britain’s other Australian colonies. It was not only in Tasmania, after all, that Britain was directly in control when dispossession, frontier violence, and extensive Indigenous population decline occurred; Britain presided over these processes in every colony. Modern New South Wales and Victoria were both under British control when most frontier violence occurred, while South Australia and Western Australia were sites of extensive frontier violence both before and after the granting of self-­government. It was only in Queensland that most dispossession took place after the granting of self-­government and, even there, considerable destruction had already occurred by the time of self-­government in 1859. We show in detail the wide range of policies towards Indigenous people that Britain developed in order to create, maintain, develop, and benefit from its Australian colonies, including policies of dispossession, displacement, punishment, exploitation, child removal, and assimilation. We show how British officials held the interests of Britain to be paramount, even when the rights, livelihoods, and indeed very existence of Indigenous peoples were threatened. Sporadic British attempts to manage expansion into other people’s lands without bloodshed and destruction proved a failure. British governments and officials may not have intended to oversee mass destruction, but on a day-to-day basis, they did. They told the settlers that the land was Britain’s, having been claimed by the British Crown, a view that licensed settlers to see Aboriginal people as interlopers on their own land and as an impediment to settlement that needed to be pacified and/or removed by whatever means possible. Both British officialdom and British settlers on the ground were acting to advance  Tom Lawson, The Last Man, A British Genocide in Tasmania, London: I. B. Taurus, 2014, p. xviii.  Ibid., p. xx.

11

12

412

Conclusion

their own interests and the combination of British policy and settler desire for land and profit produced shocking results. British policies before the granting of self-­government, furthermore, helped shape what happened after. The new settler governments represented mainly Britons and their descendants, settlers whose ideas about racial hierarchy and British entitlement to the land provided a framework for continuing, shaping, and escalating policies of destruction, containment, and exploitation. Britain left a political, economic, social, legal, and cultural legacy in its colonies long after it granted them self-government. The implication of our analysis for the present is that metropolitan Britain shares with British-­founded nation states like Australia a moral responsibility to acknowledge and respond to Indigenous claims for restitution, compensation, and sovereignty. While Indigenous people have quite rightly directed most of their demands to Australian state and federal governments, for that is where the relevant power currently lies, this may not always be the case. As we show in this book, Indigenous people have always stressed their relationship to the Crown, and the British Crown’s responsibility to take notice of their grievances. Indigenous people are likely to continue to press Britain to acknowledge its role in this history and may in future seek ways to make amends. Britain has, after all, after a period of strong resistance to Indigenous claims, joined in the international process of returning Indigenous human remains and cultural artefacts to Indigenous groups who request them. Furthermore, in a new era of international law and recognition of an international indigenous constituency, new legal instruments may emerge in future that are able to assess indigenous claims against more than one nation state. The work of historians on the multiple agencies and interests involved in the creation of this historical tragedy will come to have meanings and consequences we cannot yet foresee.

Index

Aboriginal cricket team, 284 Aboriginal Evidence Act 1840 (WA), 135 Aboriginal Evidence Act 1846 (SA), 135 Aboriginal missions. See missions Aboriginal people. See Indigenous people Aboriginal policy Britain. See British Aboriginal policy colonies. See headings for each colony e.g. Queensland — Aboriginal policy Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 (Vic), 286 Aboriginal Protection Association, 386 Aboriginal reserves. See reserves Aborigines Protection Act 1886 (WA), 391–92, 396 Aborigines Protection Board (WA), 392, 395, 396, 402, 403 Aborigines Protection Society (APS) (NSW), 78, 80, 81, 138 Aborigines Protection Society (APS) (UK), 9, 22, 92, 135, 393 Aboriginal policy and representative government in Australia, 177 amalgamation policy, 238 debate over colonial constitutions, 237 frontier violence in Queensland, 239 impact of convictism, 166 imperial control over Aboriginal policy, 115 New Zealand self-government, 215 protection of Canadian Indians, 109–11 recognition of Maori rights, 175 rights of Aboriginal people, 12 settler criticisms of, 144 and slavery controversy in Western Australia, 389–90 Aborigines’ Friends’ Association (AFA), 338, 339, 341, 353 Acheron station, 277 Act to Provide for the Better Government of South Australia (1842), 125, 160 Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals 1861 (SA), 348 Adams, Charles V., 303 Adams, Thomas, 189

Adelaide Chronicle, 96 Adelaide River settlement, 352–53 agriculture, 307 Albert (Prince of Wales) celebrations to mark his marriage, 280–83 gifts from Kulin nation, 281 Alexandra (Princess), gift from Kulin nation, 281 Alfred (Prince, Duke of Edinburgh) Aboriginal people banned from Victorian towns during visit, 285–86 attempted assassination in Sydney, 310 cricket match for, 310 grand corroboree in Sydney, 310 meeting with Oyster Cove residents, 259 meeting with residents of Point McLeay mission and surrounding districts, 355–57 royal tour of Australian colonies, 251 visit to Queensland, 331–33 visit to Western Australia, 363 Allan, John McMahon, 278, 279 Allbrook, Malcolm, 363 Allen, George, 193 Allen, Jack, 149 Allison, William Race, 203, 264 Allport, Morton, 260 amalgamation/assimilation theory, 117–19 Angas, George Fife, 338, 342 Angas, George French, 309 Angelo, E. F., 390 Annan, William, 137 Anthropological Society, 247 anti-slavery movement, 105 anti-transportation movement and campaign for responsible government, 162–64 success of, 173 views on Aboriginal-settler relations, 164–71 apolgy to Indigenous Australians, 409 Apsley mission, 90 Archer brothers, 143

413

414

Index

Arden, George, 84, 131 Arendt, Hannah, 11 Argus (newspaper), 275 Arnold, Thomas, 265 Arthur, George as Governor of Upper Canada, 108 as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, 9, 29–30, 40–43, 60, 69, 71 recommendations regarding Protectorate, 73 Arthur, Mary Ann, 149, 248, 258, 259, 260 Arthur, Walter George (Ben Lomond man), 13, 66, 149, 150, 151, 264 assimilation policy, 136 assimilation/amalgamation theory, 117–19 Attwood, Bain, 55, 60, 284 Australasian Chronicle, 124 Australia Felix, 52 Australian (newspaper), 77, 83, 106, 113 Australian colonial historiography division within, 1–6 on anti-transportation movement, 163 treatment of Aboriginal matters, 4–6 Australian Colonies Government Act 1850, 155, 173–79, 216 Australian Constitutions Act 1842, 125 Australian Courts Act 1828, 37, 62 Australian Patriotic Association, 62, 63, 103, 107, 109, 125 Auty, Kate, 79 Awabakal people, 38, 57, 90, 182 Backhouse, James, 57 Baggama (Wiradjuri man), 64 Bagot Commission, 137 Bagot, Charles, 137 Baker, John, 342, 356 Baldwin, Robert, 158 Ballantyne, Tony, 10 Banks, Joseph, 32 Bannister, Saxe, 45–47, 60, 68, 71, 105, 116, 118 Barak, William (Woiwurrung man), 278, 281 Barkly, Henry, 280, 283 Barlee, Frederick, 367, 369 Barrow, Henry, 338 Barrow, Peter, 99 Barwick, Diane, 55, 192, 271, 280, 283 Bass Strait islanders. See Furneaux Islanders Batman treaty, 55, 64 Batman, John, 55, 187, 281 Bearringa (Daungwurrung man), 274 Beedon, Lucy, 19, 264, 265, 267 Behrendt, Larissa, 16 Ben Lomond people, 65

Benbow (Boonwurrung man), 192 Bendyshe, Thomas, 247 Bennett, Mary, 328 Bentham, Jeremy, 44, 45 Berry, Alexander, 193 Berry, R. J. A., 261 Bethesda mission, 331 Big River people, 40, 41, 42, 65 Bigambul people, 200 Bigge reports, 35 Bigge, John Thomas, 35 Billibellary (Woiwurrung man), 187, 274 Bingham, Henry, 139 Biraban (Awabakal man), 37, 39 Black Line of Tasmania, 41 Black War of Southern Queensland, 142 Black Wars Black Line of Tasmania, 41 Black War of Southern Queensland, 142 in Tasmania, 40–41 Black, J. K., 331 Black, Niel, 278 Blakewell, William, 341 Bland, Revett (or Rivett) Henry, 99, 101, 202 Bland, William, 288 Blaxland, John, 76 Bligh, John O’Connell, 321, 323 Bligh, William, 34, 123 Blight, William, 319 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, 286 Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines, 284–86 Bonwick, James on British instructions to governors, 13 on Governor Denison, 205 on Indigenous survivors of warfare, 43 interest in Indigneous Tasmanians, 248 The Last of the Tasmanians, 248–50, 260 on Oyster Cove Aboriginal settlement, 204, 205, 258 on transfer of Flinders Islanders to Port Phillip, 79 on William Lanney, 257, 259 Boonwurrung people, 55, 146, 192 Border Police, 86, 146, 147 Botany Bay penal settlement, occupation of land, 32–33 Boucher, Leigh, 285, 286, 287 Bourke, Richard, 51, 55, 106, 115 Aboriginal policy, 54, 56 annexation of Port Phillip district, 55 on political representation, 62, 63 recognition of squatters’ rights, 53

Index 415 Bowen, Diamantina, 314 Bowen, George, 243, 244, 314, 316, 320, 330 Boyce, James, 80, 223 Boyd, Benjamin, 168 Brett, Andre, 240 Brisbane, Thomas, 40 British Aboriginal policy amalgamation/assimilation theory, 117–19 assimilation policy, 136 Australia before 1830, 31–38 in Canada, 119, 176 colonisation and, 43–47 costs and funding, 136 and destruction of Indigenous societies, 19–20, 410–12 equal treatment before the law, 96, 174, 202, 203 evangelical humanitarianism and, 9, 58–61 imperial control over colonial legislatures, 70–71, 131 legal practices adapted to frontier situations, 202 and pastoral expansion (1831–4), 53–58 protection. See protection of Aborigines self-government and, 114–19 transfer of control to colonies, 208, 220, 235, 237, 240 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 273 British colonisation decline of indigenous peoples in wake of, 248–50 imperial control over land, 64, 128, 217 liberal opposition to, 44 liberal support for, 44–45 and native policy, 43–47 and protection of Aborigines, 58–61 as source of shame to Britain, 59 Whig enthusiasm for, 48–53, 109 Whig opposition to, 44 British imperial history historical denialism, 410 and modern British historical consciousness, 410–12 native policy and colonial self-government, 2–4 new imperial history, 6–10 British imperialism, as God’s will, 207 British military protection, 172–73 British monarchy celebrations associated with, 280 Indigenous people’s connection with, 250–51, 282, 311, 333, 355 King Charles II, 47 Prince Albert. See Albert (Prince of Wales)

Prince Alfred. See Alfred (Prince, Duke of Wales) Princess Alexandra, 281 Queen Victoria. See Victoria (Queen) British North America Act 1840 (Union Act), 113, 158 Brock, Peggy, 94, 336 Bromley, Walter, 92, 93 Broome, Frederick Napier, 374, 386, 390, 401 Aboriginal policy, 376–84, 387, 391, 392, 395 conflict with Onslow, 394 and self-government for WA, 394–96, 399 Broome, Richard, 146, 200, 283, 284, 286 Brough Smyth, Robert, 281, 285 Brougham, Henry Peter (1st Baron), 106 Broughton, William Grant, 68, 76, 77 Brown, Joan, 263 Brown, Maitland, 373, 378, 388 Browne, Thomas Gore, 240, 241, 258, 259, 267 Brownrigg, Marcus, 265 Bruce, James (8th Earl of Elgin), 158, 176 Brune, Thomas, 66 Bruny Island people, 42 Bruny, Davy, 149 Buller, Charles, 45, 104, 109, 111, 115, 125, 128, 156 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 240, 302, 326 Bumsted, J. M., 108 Bunce, Daniel, 285 Buntingdale mission, 183 bunyip aristocracy, 227–28 Burke, Edmund, 11 Burruppin (Daungwurrung man), 274 Burt, Septimus, 392, 397 Burton, William, 81 Bush, Edward, 374 Buxton, Edward, 215 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 59, 67, 109 Cahir, Fred, 210 Calder, James Erskine, 67 Campbell, Alexander J., 330 Canada assimilation policy, 242 Bagot Commission, 137 British Aboriginal policy, 119, 176 control over Indigenous policy, 242 Legislative Assemblies, 108 protection of Indigenous people, 109–11 rebellion against the British authorities, 108 representative government, 34 responsible government, 158, 159

416

Index

Cape Colony Bourke’s governorship, 54 convict transportation, 162, 215 imperial native policy, 46, 59, 67 new constitution, 219, 228 representative government, 215–16 Captain Jack (Kadlitpinna), 93 Cardwell, Edward, 244, 327 Carley, David, 389 Carlyle, Thomas, 245 Cave, Helen, 390 Cell, John, 3 Central Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines, 276–78 chaining of Indigenous people in South Australia, 98, 346, 347 in Western Australia, 364, 366, 372, 377, 387 Thackabiddy case, 379 Challinor, Henry, 318, 320, 324 Chamberlain, Joseph, 403 Charles II (King), 47 Chauncy, William Snell, 161 Chesson, Frederick, 244, 389, 390 Chinese immigration, opposition to, 213 Chinese indentured labour, 212–13 Christison, Robert, 328 Church Missionary Society, 57, 60, 90 Clark, Bessy, 258, 260 Clark, Ian D., 278 Clark, Robert, 150, 205 Clarke, Andrew, 169 class divisions, 18 Clifford, Charles, 379 Clutterbuck, James Bennett, 147 Cochrane, Fanny, 149 Cochrane, Peter, 5, 133, 163, 178 Cockburn-Campbell, Thomas, 401 Collins, David, 249 colonial liberalism critique of squatter land and labour policies, 168 form articulated in Empire, 226 in New South Wales, 311 opposition to indentured labour trade, 212 in Victoria, 312 Colonial Observer, 121, 123, 124, 130 Colonial Times, 114 colonisation, settler philosophy of, 82 Colonist, 77, 83 Commercial Journal and Advertiser, 82, 83, 120 Commissioners of Crown Lands and proposal for Aboriginal reserves, 195 annual reports, 141, 188, 221, 239, 305

appointment, 53 assistance to Native Police, 292 powers and role, 86 and proposal for Aboriginal reserves, 191 squatters’ opposition to, 130 Connors, Libby, 143, 290 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 12 convict transportation anti-transportation movement, 162–64 to Cape Colony, 162, 215 ends to New South Wales, 107, 120, 174 ends to Tasmania, 174, 218, 219 impact of gold rushes, 218 impact on Indigenous population, 165–66 investigation by select committee, 63, 104–5 likened to slavery, 105 opposition by British reformers, 104–8, 218 and political representation, 63 and representative government, 103, 107, 120 resumption to New South Wales, 162, 174 and self-government, 161–64 to Tasmania, 104, 161 to Western Australia, 170, 362, 364 convicts role in frontier violence, 105, 165–66 Cook, James, 32 Coolie Association, 134 Coolyerberri (Yabuarara man), 366 Cooper, Charles, 95 Coranderrk reserve, 278, 282, 283 Cornwall Chronicle, 204 Council of Foreign Plantations, 47 Courier (Brisbane), 324 Courier (Hobart), 173, 204 Cowper government (NSW), 298 Cowper, Charles, 168, 192, 194, 289, 299 Cowper-Robertson government (NSW), 302 Crimean War, 243, 288, 294 Crook, – (Reverend), 78 Crookes, John, 165 Crown Colonies, government of, 16 Crown Lands Occupation Act 1836, 53 Cullin-la-ringo station massacre, 298, 325, 347, 366 Cunningham, Richard, 64 da Costa, Ravi, 280 Daily News (Perth), 392 Dalla people, 143 Dalleburra people, 329 Daly, Dominick, 350, 354, 355

Index 417 Dan-dan-nook (or King Jerry) (Barrabool clan), 285 Dandridge, J. S., 264 Dangar, Thomas, 303 Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land (Gribble), 390 Darling, Ralph, 33, 37, 38, 40, 46, 49 Darlot, Everard, 374 Darlot, Leonard, 374 Darvall, John Bayley, 229 Darwin, Charles, 245, 246, 249 Daungwurrung people, 55, 88, 274, 276, 277, 280 Davenport, Samuel, 161, 339, 342 Davies, John, 323 Day, Edward, 76 de Garis, Brian, 394 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 12 defence of colonies lack of military threat, 172–73 self-government and, 243 Deniehy, Daniel, 227, 228 Deniliquin Chronicle, 308, 309 Denison, Caroline, 205 Denison, William, 150, 151, 162, 205, 206, 232 Diamond, Marion, 168 Dickens, Charles, 245 Dickson, John, 194 Disraeli, Benjamin, 369 Djabwurrung people, 88, 196 Djadjawurrung people, 88, 196 Djerimanga people, 352 Donaldson, Stuart, 288, 289 Donovan, P. F., 350 Douglas, James (14th Earl of Morton), 32, 148 Douglass, Henry, 212 Draper, Nicholas, 8, 410 Dredge, James, 73, 78, 88, 89 Duffy, Charles, 274, 276 Duncan, William A., 120, 132 Dunlop, David, 139 Durack, Mary, 385 Durham (Lord). See Lambton, John (1st Earl of Durham) Durham Report (1839) content, 109, 111 failure to mention Indigenous people, 109 manifesto for effective settler colonialism, 112 recommendations, 111, 112 response to, 112–14 stance on Aboriginal rights, 111 Durundur station, 143 Dussart, Fae, 9, 41, 70

Dutton, C. B., 325 Dutton, Francis, 161, 337 Eardley-Wilmot, John, 149 East India Company, 134 Ebenezer mission, 273 Elbourne, Elizabeth, 7, 20, 48 Electoral Act 1856 (SA), 335 Electoral Reform Act 1858 (NSW), 299, 315 Ellinghaus, Katherine, 262 emancipists, 113 Empire (newspaper), 212, 216, 226 Etherington, Norman, 361 Ethnographical Society of Paris, 273 ethnography, 273, 285, 287, 309 Ethnological Society, 247 Eurkea, 231 evangelical humanitarianism and imperial native policy, 9, 58–61, 68 loss of ground in public discourse, 183 Evans, Julie, 7, 145, 301 Evans, Raymond, 33, 315, 316, 326, 328 Everett, George, 267 evolutionary theory, 247 exclusives, 35, 36, 62, 63, 113 exploratory expeditions massacres of Indigenous people, 54 pastoral expansion and, 52 Eyre, Edward John, 245 Fairbairn, Robert, 372, 374, 386 federation movement, 400, 401 Fels, Marie, 146 Fereday, George, 265 Ferrett, John, 317 Finnane, Mark, 316, 402 Finnis, Boyle Travers, 351, 352, 353 fish traps, 305 Fisher, Robin, 187 Fitzgerald, Charles, 170, 185 Fitzgerald, Robert, 192 Fitzroy, Charles, 192 abolition of Protectorate, 196 and Aboriginal policy, 194 annual blanket distribution, 140, 199 deployment of Native Mounted Police, 200 and Indigenous access to pastoral leases, 196 as New Zealand Governor, 129 on institutions for Indigenous people, 197, 220 on Protectorate, 190 response to Grey’s 11/2/1848 despatch, 190 Fleming, John, 76 Fletcher Moore, George, 99

418

Index

Flinders Island Aboriginal settlement campaign to remove superintendent Jeanneret, 149–51 closure, 151 conditions, 77 petition to Governor Gipps, 78–80 petition to Queen Victoria, 150 protest over conditions, 65–67 regime under Robinson, 57 removal of survivors to Oyster Cove, 151 return of Islanders from Port Phillip, 149 Tasmanian Aborigines taken to, 43, 68, 69 transfer of residents to Port Phillip, 77, 78–80 Flinders Island Chronicle, 65 Flood, Edward, 299 Flying Foam Passage massacre, 365 Ford, Lisa, 8, 16, 23, 36 Forrest, Alexander, 377, 394, 398 Forrest, David, 391 Forrest, John, 377, 378, 391, 398, 402, 403, 404 Forrest, Kay, 365, 366 Fortescue, Chichester, 240 Foss, Charles, 374, 386, 391 Foster, John L., 192, 193, 194 Foster, Robert, 97, 189, 211, 344, 345, 346 Foucault, Michel, 348, 349, 366 Framlingham reserve, 278–79 Franklin, Jane, 67, 114 Franklin, John, 67, 114, 149, 262 Franklinford station, 196 Fraser, Malcolm, 392, 398 free trade policy, 156 Fremantle School, 184 French, Maurice, 142 Frith, Henry, 258 frontier conflict. See headings for each colony, e.g. Queensland — Aboriginal-settler conflict Furneaux Islanders, 206, 222, 258 ancestry, 261 government neglect, 265 growth of community, 261 marginal status, 267 meeting with Governor Browne, 267 offer to take in Oyster Cove survivors, 264 official denial of Aboriginality, 206, 262, 264 pension recipients, 262 petition for land, 263 request for assistance to fund a school, 265–68 visit by Bishop Nixon, 222–23 Gaden, William Henry, 296

Gamalarai people, 38 Ganter, Regina, 331 Gara, Tom, 365 Gawler, George, 92, 93, 96 genocide, 15–16 New South Wales, 224 see also Lemkin, Raphaël Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 12 in New Zealand, 241, 242 history wars over, 411 in Queensland, 313, 325 Tasmanian Aborigines, 31, 204, 250, 411 Gibbes, John, 76 Gibson, John, 199 Gill, J. C. H., 243 Gilmore, Mary, 305 Gipps, George, 73, 75 and admissibility of Aboriginal evidence, 85, 135 annual blanket distribution, 136, 137–40 defeat by squatters on land issue, 140 increases tax paid by squatters, 132 on Indian indentured labour, 106, 107, 134 on Indigenous labour, 136 on land regulations and Aboriginal policy, 130 and Myall Creek massacre, 76, 82 protection of Aborigines, 74, 76, 89, 141 on public funding of missions, 90 squatters opposition to, 136, 137 and Waterloo Creek massacre, 75 Giraiwurrung people, 278 Giustiniani, Louis, 57 Gladstone, William, 140, 162, 236 Glenelg (Lord). See Grant, Charles (1st Baron Glenelg) Glyde, Lavington, 339 Goderich (Viscount). See Robinson, Frederick John Godwin, Luke, 325 gold rushes anti-Chinese sentiment, 213 convict transportation and, 218 and Eurkea rebellion, 231 impact on Indigenous people, 209–12, 238 Queensland, 326 and self-government, 219 transformation of colonial life and politics, 209 Western Australia, 385, 401 Goldsmith, F. E., 351, 352 Gooch, George, 379 Goodall, Heather, 181, 307 Goodman, David, 4 Gossner Mission institute, 91 Gouger, Robert, 45 governors

Index 419 powers, 34 recognition of Indigenous leaders, 93 relationship with Indigenous leaders, 37 relationship with Indigenous people, 37–38, 65, 94, 192, 205, 212, 250, 258–59, 354, 363 Grant, Charles (1st Baron Glenelg), 60, 67, 72–74, 106 Grant, James, 263, 266, 267 Granville (Earl). See Leveson-Gower, Granville George (2nd Earl Granville) great chain of being, 39, 183 Green, John, 276, 277 Green, Mary, 276 Green, Neville, 102, 371 Grey, Charles (2nd Earl), 49 Grey, George, 9, 106, 118 background and views on Aboriginal policy, 96 draft constitution for New Zealand, 214 as Governor of New Zealand, 157, 214 as Governor of South Australia, 96–98, 125, 135, 160 and Maori wars, 241 response to frontier violence, 97–98 Grey, Henry George (3rd Earl) (formerly Vicount Howick) on admissibility of Aboriginal evidence, 190 and convict transportation, 162, 174 on convictism and representative government, 62 on Indigenous rights to land, 188 influences on, 49, 115 on land policy, 217 on medical aid to Indigenous people, 198 membership of Molesworth Committee, 104 model of self-government for Australia, 158 on New Zealand self-government, 156, 214, 215 protection of Aborigines, 22, 60 on reserves for Aboriginal use, 188 on responsible government in Canada, 158 on schooling for Indigenous people, 190, 197, 198, 220 as Secretary of State for the Colonies, 187 on summary punishment, 202 Gribble affair, 387–91 Gribble, John, 386, 393 Gribble, Mary Ann Elizabeth, 19 Griffis, William, 366 Griffiths, Charles, 145 Grimshaw, Patricia, 7, 109, 301 Grundy, Edward, 349 Guardian of Aborigines, 196, 272

Guardian of Natives, 202 Guardian of Natives and Protector of Settlers, 196 Gunditjmara people, 310 Gunnai people, 192, 279, 282 Gurnett, Edward, 284 Gurney, Samuel, 176 Hackett, John W., 394 Hagenauer, Friedrich Augustus, 279, 284 Haines, William, 269 Hale, Matthew, 185, 336, 337, 353, 363 Hall, Catherine, 7, 8, 183, 245, 410 Hall, E. S., 81 Hall, George, 342 Hamilton, Edward, 194 Hammond, Octavius, 337 Hampton, John, 362, 363, 365 Handt, J. C. S., 57, 90 Hardie, John, 321 Hargrave, John, 304 Hargrave, Richard, 291 Harper, Charles, 393, 397 Harris, Alexander, 147 Harris, William, 404 Haussmann, Johann Gottfried, 331 Hawes, Benjamin, 159, 174, 177 Hawkes, G. W., 337 Hawksley, E. J., 12, 124, 228 Hay, Charles, 323 Haydon, George Henry, 147 Haygarth, H. W., 308 Head, Edmund Walker, 242 Hensman, Alfred, 379, 381 Herbert, Robert, 315, 327, 331 Hickford, Mark, 128 Hindmarsh, John, 61 Hirst, John, 4, 163, 178 historical denialism, 410 historiography. See Australian colonial historigraphy history wars, 411 Hitchin, Edward, 336, 337 Hodgkin, Thomas, 109, 176, 238 Hodgson, Arthur, 295, 296 Holdridge, Chris, 164 Holland, Henry, 396 Horgan, John, 397 Hornet Bank massacre, 293, 294, 319, 325, 366 Horsman, Reginald, 340 Horton, Robert Wilmot, 45 Howard government (1996–2007), 409 Howe, Joseph, 158 Howick (Viscount). See Grey, Henry George (3rd Earl)

420

Index

Hull, Hugh Munro, 258 human origins, debate over, 245–46 Humane Policy (Bannister), 43–47, 68 Hume, L. J., 121 Hunt, James, 247 Hunt, Su Jane, 391 Hunter River Black Association, 81, 82 Hunter, Ann, 98, 99, 100, 202 Hutt, John, 98–102, 367 Hutt, William, 98 indentured labour association with servility, 107 association with slavery, 106, 134 Chinese indentured labour, 212–13 from Pacific islands, 168 in Western Australia, 99 Indian indentured labour, 107, 133–35, 168, 212 liberal opposition to, 212 public debate in NSW over Asian indentured labour, 106 racial thinking and, 134 Indian indentured labour, 106–7, 133–35, 168, 212 Indian Lands and Properties Act 1860, 242 Indian Rebellion (Indian Mutiny), 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 349 Indigenous activism forms in South Australia in 1860s, 353–57 on Flinders Island, 148–51 petition from Flinders Islanders to Queen Victoria, 150 petitioning as political tactic, 278 strategies, 274 Indigenous labour abuses in pastoral industry, 371 employment in Victoria, 284 forced labour and trickery in pearling industry, 365 forced labour on pastoral stations, 372 importance, 15, 106 in New South Wales, 305–6 on pastoral stations, 202, 210, 305, 328–29, 371–72 place in colonial society and economy, 106 regulation in pearling industry, 370, 371, 382 in Western Australia, 99 Indigenous leaders acknowledgement by governors, 37 relationship with governors, 93 Indigenous people. See also names of nations or groups, e.g. Noongar people admissibility of evidence, 85, 135–36, 192–94, 304

calls for a treaty, 408 conflict with settlers. See headings for each colony, e.g. Queensland — Aboriginalsettler conflict connection with monarchy, 251, 311, 333, 355 constitutional recognition, 407, 408 debasement following European contact, 307 as doomed to extinction, 182, 198, 210, 240, 309 equal treatment as British subjects, 61, 96, 97, 174, 176–77, 177 as foreign enemies, 95 intelligence, 308 land rights. See Indigenous rights in land massacres. See massacres of Indigenous people place in settlers’ political rights discourse, 119–24 political participation, 123–24, 172, 233, 301, 339 relationship with Australia’s political institutions, 406–10 relationship with governors, 37–38, 65, 94, 192, 205, 212, 250, 258–59, 354, 363 Tasmanians. See Tasmanian Aborigines traditional food-getting and employment, 189, 305, 307 voting rights, 10–12, 339 Indigenous protest and negotiation complaints to protectors, 86–87 mid to late 1830s, 67 petition from Flinders Islanders to Governor Gipps, 78–80 written protest, 65 Indigenous rights, 12–13 missionaries’ support for, 183 Indigenous rights in land access to pastoral and other lands, 188, 187–88, 191, 195, 196, 201, 237, 307, 393 failure of Britain to recognise, 32 ignored in South Australia, 94 Indigenous demands for recognition, 87 land policy and, 127–31 minimal recognition, 129 not recognised in South Australia Act, 51 recognition in South Australia, 13, 61, 92 as threat to British sovereignty, 129 Inquirer (newspaper), 374, 380, 388 Intervention policy, 407 Irving, Terry, 5, 121, 172, 226 Irwin, Frederick, 169, 185, 203 Jamaica, suppression of rebellion, 245 Jamblyn, Allan, 353

Index 421 Jamison, John, 62 Jardine, John, 243 Jardwadjali people, 310 Jeanneret, Henry, 149, 151 Jiman people, 293 Johnston, Anna, 38, 68 Johnston, W. Ross, 316 Jones, Benjamin, 164 Jones, Benjamin T., 5 Kamilaraay people, 74, 224 Kartinyeri, Doreen, 336 Kaurna people, 93, 94 Keith, Arthur Berriedale, 2 Kennedy, Arthur, 362, 363, 364 Kenny, Robert, 55 Kilcoy station, poisoning of Indigenous visitors, 143 King, George, 184 king-plates, 37 Konishi, Shino, 29 Kooyan (Daungwurrung man), 274 Koppernamanna mission, 344 Kudnarto, Mary Ann, 189 Kulin nations, 55, 192, 272, 282 delegation to lobby for agricultural reserve, 274–76 gifts for British royal family, 281, 283 loyal address to Queen Victoria, 280, 281–83 La Fontaine, Louis-Hyppolyte, 158 La Trobe, Charles, 74, 88, 89, 90, 190, 191 Lackland, Jacob, 165 Laidlaw, Zoë, 7, 24, 48, 69, 410 laissez faire, 44 Lake Boga mission, 184, 224, 273 Lake Killalpaninna mission, 344 Lake Macquarie mission, 38, 76, 77, 90, 182, 183 Lamb, John, 303 Lamb, William (2nd Viscount Melbourne), 60, 63 Lambton, John (1st Earl of Durham), 108–12, 171 land policy and Aboriginal rights, 127–31 British control over, 64, 128 control by colonial legislatures, 217–18, 218, 236 Land Regulations 1887 (WA), 393 Lang, Gideon Scott, 308 Lang, John Dunmore and Aborgines Protection Society, 78 on colonial nobility, 228 on convict transportation, 218

declaration of independence, 133 election to Legislative Council, 132 evidence to British Select Committee, 68 evidence to Molesworth Committee, 105 on frontier violence, 164 on Indian indentured labour, 134 on missions, 39, 77 on extinction of Indigenous people, 309 on political representation, 121, 125 republicanism, 172 Zion Hill mission, 90 Langhorne, George, 57 Lanney (or Lanne), William, 257, 258, 259, 260, 273 Larkin, W. J., 330 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 85, 249 The Last of the Tasmanians, 248–50 Lawson, Tom, 20, 249, 250, 410 Lee Steere, James George, 369 Lee, Richard, 247 Lee, William, 130 Legislative Council Act 1870 (WA), 367 Lemkin, Raphaël, 15, 16, 31, 250 Lester, Alan, 7, 9, 24, 41, 48, 70, 119, 214 Leveson-Gower, Granville George (2nd Earl Granville), 390 Lewis, George Cornewall, 115 liberty, 10–12 as founding princple of South Australia, 161 Indigenous claims for, 148 Indigenous peoples’ right to, 116 multi-racial population as threat to, 168 as right of Britons, 120, 121, 171 Ligar, Charles, 274 Lithgow, William, 76 Liverpool Plains, 54, 74 logic of elimination, 14, 15, 362 London Missionary Society (LMS), 38, 39, 57, 68 Lonsdale, William, 53 Lowe, Jacob, 323 Lowe, Robert, 120, 125, 132, 168, 171, 172, 192, 193 Lutheran missions, 184 Lydon, Jane, 10, 259, 276, 280, 282, 372, 380, 386, 388 Mabo case, 180 Macarthur, Hannibal, 76 Macarthur, James, 62, 120, 124, 130, 133, 192 Macarthur, John, 36, 62 Macarthur, William, 194 Macdermott, Henry, 121 MacDonnell, Richard, 350 MacHughes, William, 354 Mackay, John, 106

422

Index

Mackenzie, Evan, 143 Mackenzie, Robert, 320 Maconochie, Alexander, 146 Macquarie, Lachlan, 35, 37, 38, 56, 304 Madden, Robert, 203 Magarey, Thomas, 349 Maguire, John, 348 Mahroot (Eora man), 138 Main, J. M., 160 Mandler, Peter, 120 Mansell, Edward, 223 Mar, Tracey Banivanua, 328 Maraura people, 97 Maria shipwreck, murder of survivors, 95–96 Marmion, William, 397, 399 Marsden, Samuel, 39, 68 Marsh, Matthew, 229 Martens, Jeremy, 394, 400 Martin, James, 83 Marx, Karl, 50 massacres of Indigenous people, 193 by Mitchell’s third exploratory expedition party, 54 Fassifern incident, 318 Flying Foam Passage massacre, 365 Macintyre River region, 200 Myall Creek, 75, 193 poisoning at Kilcoy, 143 Port Phillip district, 56 Queensland, 244 reprisals for Cullin-la-ringo station killings, 325, 366 reprisals for Hornet Bank station killings, 293, 294, 319, 325, 366 South Australia, 97 Waterloo Creek, 75, 83 Masters and Servants Act 1847, 168, 212 Masters and Servants Acts, 372 Matilda (Pyterrunner), 149 Matthews, Daniel, 386 May, Dawn, 315, 329 Mayne, William, 191 McClelland, Keith, 8, 410 McCombie, Thomas, 148, 270–71, 272, 312 McDonald, Helen, 246 McEachern, James, 120 McGuire, John, 402 McHugh, Paul, 23 McKenna, Mark, 129, 133, 280, 282, 366 McKenzie, Kirsten, 104, 105 McLeod, Don, 403 McMinn, W. G., 4 McNab, David, 117, 119, 242 McNab, Duncan, 375

Melbourne (Lord). See Lamb, William (2nd Viscount Melbourne) Melbourne, A. C. V., 4 Melville, Henry, 114 Mercury (Hobart), 258 Merivale, Herman, 171, 188 on Aboriginal reserves, 198 amalgamation policy, 117–19 background, 117 on colonial control of Aboriginal policy, 221, 237 on employment of Indigenous people, 15 on granting of responsible government, 214 on legal adaption in frontier situtations, 202 on schooling for Indigenous people, 221 on self-government and Aboriginal policy, 244 support for establishment of Queensland, 239 Merri Creek school, 184 Michie, Archibald, 171 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 45, 50, 241–42, 245, 270 Miller, Edmund K., 337, 346 Milligan, Joseph, 149 Milloy, John, 137 Milmenrura people, 95, 96 Milne, William, 338 missionaries and Aboriginal policy, 38–39 relationships with Indigenous people, 196 in South Australia, 92 support for Aboriginal rights, 183 in Victoria, 273 missionary colonialism, 18 Missionary Cotton Company, 324 missions. See also names of mission, e.g. Lake Macquarie mission criticisms of, 77 failure, 90, 91, 182, 183, 309 funding for, 225 New South Wales, 56, 90, 183, 301, 309, 386 Queensland, 90, 143, 183, 329–31 South Australia, 184, 185, 336–38, 341, 344, 354 successes, 185 Victoria, 183, 224 Western Australia, 184, 185, 363, 371, 378, 383, 386 Mitchell, Jessie, 39, 196, 285 Mitchell, Thomas, 52, 54, 183, 190 Mohican Station, 277 Molesworth Report, 105, 107, 108 Molesworth, William, 45, 104, 106, 107, 174, 236

Index 423 Monk, Frederick, 342 Moor, Henry, 194 Moore, Keith, 230 Moorhouse, Matthew, 92, 97, 336 Mordialloc station, 196 Moreton Bay extent of settlement, 33 labour shortage, 167 representatives on NSW Legislative Council, 142 separation movement, 141–45, 230 Moreton Bay Aborigines’ Friends Society, 224 Moreton Bay and Northern Districts Separation Association, 230 Moreton Bay Courier, 144, 145, 230, 231, 298, 318, 319 Morissett, E. M. V., 323 Morris, Augustus, 299, 340 Mortimer, John, 318, 320 Motte, Standish, 12, 115 Mounted Police Force, NSW, 201 Mounted Police Force, WA, 53 Müller, Max, 310 Mundy, Godfrey, 206, 227 Munnering, Tommy (Woiwurrung man), 274 Munro, Margery, 262 Murray, George, 29, 30, 40, 69, 405 Murrum-Murrum (Daungwurrung man), 274 Myall Creek massacre, 75, 193 Myall Creek trials, 80, 81–84, 85, 135, 138, 144, 181, 192, 193 Narrang Jackey (Wiradjuri man), 65 National Colonisation Society, 45 Native Institution, Parramatta, 38 Native Mounted Police (NMP) abolition in Victoria, 210 atrocities committed in Queensland, 320–25 Colonial Office view of, 200 cost, 328 deployment to crush Aboriginal resistance, 23, 146, 201 escort for Prince Albert and royal party, 332 establishment, 146 expansion of force, 292, 317 formation by Gipps, 146 on goldfields, 210 in parade celebrating Victorian separation, 179 in Port Phillip district, 200 La Trobe’s view of, 191 northern force, 200–202 NSW Executive Council support, 195 NSW South Wales Select Committee inquiry into, 291–92 in Port Phillip district, 145–47

Queensland inquiry into efficiency, 318 Queensland inquiry into organisation and management, 320–25 recruits from Victoria, 284 size of force, 195, 200, 201, 289, 296 warfare with Indigenous people, 201 Native Police, 75 Native Training Institution, Poonindie, 185, 197 Natives Convictions Validity Act 1883 (WA), 374 natural selection, 247, 249 Nettelbeck, Amanda, 9, 97, 100, 189, 345, 346 New Norcia mission, 186, 363, 367, 368, 382, 386 New South Wales. See also Port Phillip district, See also Moreton Bay Aboriginal voting rights, 10–12 banquet to celebrate opening of parliament (1856), 288 debate over constitution, 226–31 electoral reform, 298 end of convict transportation, 107, 120, 174 first elections, 131 immigrants in 1830s, 119 moral corruption, 105, 107 near universal male suffrage, 299 oligarchy, 126, 131 pressure for political representation, 61–64 representative government, 126, 131 responsible government, 288 resumption of convict transportation, 162, 174 shift to liberal politics, 289 visit by Prince Alfred, 310 New South Wales — Aboriginal policy admissibility of Aboriginal evidence, 304 annual Aboriginal feasts, 37, 56 annual blanket distribution, 56, 65, 136, 137–40, 199, 302, 304 ban on sale of alcohol, 306–7 evolution 1788–1830, 31–38 following NSW Select Committee report, 194–97 following self-government, 23 granting of boats, 304 investigation by Legislative Council committee, 76, 78 Lands Department responsibility for, 302 legal assistance, 302 liberal governments and, 298–301 medical assistance, 198, 302, 303 minimal care following responsible government, 305 protection policy, 74–84 under Governor Bourke, 52, 54, 56

424

Index

New South Wales — Aboriginal-settler conflict Dawson River district, 293–97 escalation in 1820s, 38 Hornet Bank massacre, 293, 294 in 1830s, 54 Macintyre River region, 200 Mounted Police deployed against Indigenous people, 54 Myall Creek massacre, 75 northern districts 1856–9, 298 pre-1820s, 33 punitive expeditions, 84 settler opposition and resistance to protection policy, 74–84 Waterloo Creek massacre, 75, 83 New South Wales — Legislative Assembly franchise, 289 Select Committee on Murders by Aborines on the Dawson River (1858), 295–97 New South Wales — Legislative Council composition, 62, 125, 131, 289 defeat of Native Evidence Bill (1849), 192–94 demand for greater powers, 178 establishment, 36 first election, 131 franchise, 131, 178 powers, 63, 125, 131 Select Committee on the Condition of Aborigines (1845), 194 Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines (1845), 138–40 squatter dominance, 132 New South Wales Act 1823, 37 New South Wales Constitution Act 1842, 129, 131 New South Wales Constitution Committee (1853), 227 New South Wales Legislative — Assembly Select Committee on the Native Police Force (1856-7), 291–92 New York Times, 393 New Zealand control over Maori policy, 215, 240–42, 326 Maori king movement, 282 Maori wars, 241, 282 purchasing of land from Maori, 128 responsible government, 214–15 self-government, 156–58 Treaty of Waitangi, 129 New Zealand Company, 128 New Zealand Constitution Act 1846, 157, 175, 214 New Zealand Constitution Act 1852, 215 Ngadjuri people, 347 Ngarrindjeri people, 341, 353, 356

Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority, 409 Ngiyamba people, 38 Nichols, Bob, 138 Nichols, George, 192, 193, 289 Ninghi Ninghi people, 33, 90, 143 Nique, Peter, 91 Nixon, Francis Russell, 222–23, 267 Noongar people, 99, 101, 102, 409 Noongar place names, 99 Noongar Recognition Act 2016 (WA), 409 Northern Territory Adelaide River settlement, 352–53 colonisation by South Australia, 350–53 included within borders of South Australia, 350 Northern Territory Act 1863 (SA), 350 Northern Territory Intervention, 407 NSW Advertiser, 89 Nunn, James, 75, 83 O’Brien, Anne, 181 O’Brien, Bartholomew, 198 O’Brien, William Smith, 233–34 O’Connell, Maurice, 123, 322, 331 O’Farrell, Henry James, 310 O’Halloran, Thomas, 95, 97 O’Sullivan, E. W., 400 Okaparinga Jack (Mullawirraburka), 93 Onslow, Alexander, 394 Ord, Harry, 370 Ormerod, George, 354 Orphan School, Hobart, 205 Orsted-Jensen, Robert, 328 Orton, Joseph, 73 Outline of a system of legislation (Motte), 115 Oyster Bay people, 40, 41, 42 Oyster Cove Aboriginal settlement closure, 260 conditions, 205, 248 funding for, 257 initial optimism of Indigenous people, 204 meeting of residents with Prince Alfred, 259 number of residents, 257, 258 relationship of residents with Governor, 205 resettlement of Flinders Islanders, 151, 203–4 visits by residents to Government House, 258–59 Pacific Islander labour trade, 168, 329 Paine, Tom, 11 Pakington, John, 214, 216, 217, 218, 236 Palmer, Alison, 316 Pangerang people, 280, 282 Pangerian Cuper, Helen, 368 Pantuni, George, 355, 356

Index 425 Parker government (NSW), 302 Parker, Edward Read, 376 Parker, Edward Stone, 73, 78, 87, 88, 89, 196, 223 Parker, Henry Watson, 289, 291, 292 Parker, Stephen Henry, 370, 373, 380, 394, 397, 401 Parkes, Henry, 212, 226, 229, 295, 296, 400 Parkinson, Charles Frederick Doyle, 321 Parnegean (Daungwurrung man), 274 Parry, Henry, 375, 386, 387, 389 Parsons, Michael, 356 Pastoral Association of New South Wales, 132 pastoral expansion and Aboriginal policy (1831–34), 53–58 exploration for new lands, 52, 54 Northern Territory, 349 Queensland, 142, 315 Western Australia, 365, 385, 401 pastoral industry abuse of Indigenous labour, 371 employment of Indigenous labour, 202, 210, 305, 328–29, 371–72 forced Indigenous labour, 372 pastoral leases Indigenous people’s right of access, 188, 191, 195, 196, 201, 237, 307, 393 pastoralists. See also squatters desire for cheap labour, 167, 168, 169 electoral dominance in Queensland, 315 liberal critique of land and labour policies, 168, 169 weakening of grip on power, 166 Paul, Mandy, 189 Pearce, Harry Midland, 296 pearling industry forced Indigenous labour, 365 regulation of use of Indigenous labour, 368, 370, 371, 382 reliance on Indigenous labour, 365, 371 Peel, Robert, 124, 156 Pelham-Clinton, Henry (5th Duke of Newcastle), 219, 232, 283, 350 penal settlements, 33 Pepper, Nathanael, 273 petitioning as political tactic, 278 Petrie, Thomas, 332, 333 Petrow, Stefan, 256, 260 Phelps, Joseph, 307 Phillip, Arthur, 32, 37, 61 Phillips, David, 7, 301 Phillips, Derek, 265 Pickering, Paul, 121 Pikampul people, 224 Pine, Benjamin, 362, 363, 367 Pitts, Jennifer, 44

Plomley, N. J. B., 79 Plunkett, John, 76, 81, 82, 135, 192, 193 Point McLeay mission, 341, 353, 355 poisoning of Indigenous people, 143 Polding, John Bede, 185 political representation and control of lands, 64 convict transportation and, 63 pressure for, 61–64 political rights discourse place of Indigenous people in, 119–24 Poonindie mission, 190, 197, 212, 336–38, 342, 353, 355 popular constitutionalism, 121 Port Phillip Association, 54–55 Port Phillip district. See also Victoria annexation by New South Wales, 55 establishment of government presence, 53 massacres of Indigenous people, 56 occupation, 52 separation from New South Wales, 178, 179 separation movement, 145–48 settlement without government sanction, 54–55 Western Districts, 52 Port Phillip Gazette, 84, 148 Port Phillip Herald, 145, 172 Port Phillip Patriot, 146 Port Phillip Protectorate, 287 abolition, 194, 195, 196 appointment of protectors, 73 closure of stations, 89 cost of, 191 demands for recognition of Indigenous land ownership, 87 establishment of stations, 86, 88 Indigenous people’s complaints to protectors, 86–87 Indigenous people’s relationship with protectors, 84 settler opposition and resistance to, 84–90, 145, 147 Prentis, Malcolm, 320 Price, Charles, 171 Pring, Ratcliff, 318 Prinsep, Henry, 404 Proctor, Craig, 316 protection of Aborigines implementation of policy, 72–74 New South Wales, 74–84 Port Phillip District, 84–90 South Australia, 91–98 uncertainty over method, 85 Western Australia, 98–102

426

Index

protectors appointment and duties, 71, 72–74 funded from colonial revenues, 73 Indigenous people’s relationship with, 92, 311 as intermediaries, 86 role, 196 under authority of governors, 71 Pugh, Theophilus, 319, 324 Queensland. See also Moreton Bay establishment of colony, 297, 314 gold rushes, 326 pastoral expansion, 142 public celebrations to mark separation, 314 responsible government, 314–17 restricted franchise, 315 Royal Marine outpost on Cape York, 243 separation from New South Wales, 239 visit by Prince Alfred, 331–33 Queensland — Aboriginal policy annual blanket distribution, 322 Britain’s concern over, 326 controlled by local government under pastoralist control, 239, 244 deployment of Native Mounted Police, 326–28 following self-government, 23 Queensland — Aboriginal-settler conflict Black War of Southern Queensland, 142 British concerns over extent of violence, 239 Cape York, 243, 244, 326 Cullin-la-ringo station massacre, 325, 347 Dawson River district, 293–97 frontier violence, 142–45, 326 genocide, 313, 325 and inquiry into Native Police, 320–25 number of Aboriginal deaths, 328 open warfare, 313 reporting of frontier violence, 297 violent clashes on goldfields, 326 Queensland — Legislative Assembly Select Committee on Native Police Force (1861) (Qld), 320–25 Select Committee on Police (1860), 317–18 Queensland — Legislative Council appointment to, 316 Queensland — settler-Aboriginal conflict, 181 R v Jack Congo Murrell, 81 R v Kilmeister, 81 race theory, 247 racial diversity, 18 racial thinking, rise in, 245 Raftery, Judith, 339

Ramahyuck mission, 279, 283 Rebellion Losses Act 1849 (Can), 158 Redman, William, 303 Reece, R. H. W., 37, 56, 181 Reform Act 1832, 59 Reibey, Thomas, 262, 265, 266, 267 Reid, Gordon, 293, 318, 325, 330 Repeal of Waste Lands (Australia) Act 1855, 236 Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements), 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 75, 104, 118 Report on the Affairs of British North America. See Durham Report Report on the Best Means of Promoting the Civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia (Grey) (1840), 96, 119 representative government, 17, 34 and convict transportation, 103, 107, 120 colonies. See names of colonies republicanism, 133, 171, 172 reserves Christian missions in Victoria, 284 control by Executive Government, 195 creation welcomed by Indigenous poeple, 192 establishment recommended, 188 government stations in Victoria, 284 New South Wales, 194, 195, 197, 386 Northern Territory, 351 possibility of creation, 128, 175, 187 Queensland, 330 South Australia, 189, 352 Victorian policy and Indigenous agency, 274–84 Western Australia, 363, 368, 371, 375, 383 responsible government, 17 and Aboriginal rights, 233–34 British debates over new colonial ­constitutions, 235–38 British power of veto over colonial laws, 236 colonies. See names of colonies dark side, 241–42, 242 New Zealand, 214–15 Reynolds, Henry, 60, 79, 188 on British Aboriginal policy prior to ­responsible government, 181 on conflict in traditional Indigenous life, 142 on cost of Native Mounted Police in Queensland, 328 on frontier violence in Queensland, 239, 313, 325, 326 on genocidal moments, 313, 325

Index 427 on genocide, 15 on Indigenous access to pastoral leases, 237 The Law of the the Land, 180 on protests by Flinders Islanders, 65, 150 on Robinson’s unwritten treaties with Tasmanian Aborigines, 42 on self-government and Aboriginal policy, 6 on support for Aboriginal rights, 183 This Whispering in our Heart, 406 Reynolds, Thomas, 340 Richards, Jonathon, 325 Richardson, Alexander, 397, 398 Ridley, William, 224–26, 309, 322 Robe, Frederick, 160 Roberts, Stephen, 129, 131, 140, 217 Robertson, John, 292 Robinson, Frederick John (Viscount Goderich), 49 Robinson, George Augustus approach to protection of Aborigines, 71, 85 as Chief Protector of Aborigines, 73, 87, 89, 188, 190 on creation of reserves, 188 Friendly Mission to Tasmanian Aborigines, 42–43 supervision of Bruny Island settlement, 42 supervision of Flinders Island settlement, 58, 65, 67 transfer of Flinders Island residents to Port Phillip, 77, 78–80 on using force against Aboriginal people, 77 visit to Oyster Cove settlement, 205 Robinson, Shirleene, 331 Robinson, William, 370, 371–74, 376, 401, 402 Robson, Lloyd, 265 Rode, Augustus, 322 Roe, Michael, 129 Rogers, Frederick, 3, 22, 236, 244, 245 Rosaldo, Renato, 261 Ross, William, 307 Roth Report, 403 Rottnest Island Aboriginal prison, 101–2, 184, 372, 373, 374, 376, 382 Royal Society of Tasmania, 260 Royds, Edmund, 296 Rusden, Thomas, 292 Russell, John (1st Earl), 100, 104, 107, 112, 115, 124, 156, 174, 214, 236 Russell, Lynette, 79, 287 Ryan, Lyndall, 40, 42, 56, 58, 65, 79, 206, 250 Sadlier, – (Lieutenant), 78 Sale of Waste Lands Act 1842, 127, 129, 132, 175, 187 Sale of Waste Lands Amendment Act 1846, 141, 187, 217

Salvado, Rosendo, 186, 367, 368 Sandeman, Gordon, 290 Sapphire, killing of shipwrecked crew, 243, 317 Saunders, – (Reverend), 78, 81 Schmidt, Karl Wilhelm, 91, 139 Scott, Edward, 397 Scott, Marian (or Maria), 262 Scott, Robert, 77, 81 secret ballot, 269, 299 Select Committee of the Legislative Council upon the Aborigines (1860) (SA), 341–44 Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements (1836–7), 67–71 Select Committee on Murders by Aborines on the Dawson River (1858), 295–97 Select Committee on Native Police Force (1861) (Qld), 320–25 Select Committee on Police (1860) (Qld), 317–18 Select Committee on the Aborigines (1858) (Vic), 271–73 Select Committee on the Bill for Responsible Government in Western Australia (1890), 401 Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines (NSW) (1845), 138–40, 194 Select Committee on the Disposal of Lands in the British Colonies (1836), 64, 112 Select Committee on the Native Police Force (1856–7), 291–92 Select Committee on Transportation (1837), 63, 104–5 self-governing colonies, and Indigenous people, 22–24 self-government, 16–17 advantages for Britain in granting, 242 background, 20–21 and British Aboriginal policy, 114–19, 244 as British birthright, 120–21 British views on, 155–60 colonial demands for, 160–64, 216 convict transportation and, 161–64 devising of new colonial constitutions, 226–34 Indigenous political participation, 123–24, 172 New Zealand, 156–58 place of Aboriginal people in future, 171–73 political rights discourse of settlers, 123–24 separation movements Moreton Bay, 141–45, 230 northern districts of New South Wales, 290 Port Phillip, 145–48

428

Index

Serle, Geoffrey, 4 Serocold, George, 294 settler colonial studies, 14 settler colonialism attention to Indigenous histories, 405 and decolonisation, 409 Durham Report as manifesto for, 112 logic of elimination, 14, 15, 362 logic of exploitation, 384 nature of, 13–16 reverse narratives of victimhood, 204 tension between moral anxiety and triumphalism, 406 settler philosophy of colonisation, 82 settler society assumption of Indigenous inferiority, 39, 183 sources of conflict within, 17–19 settler-Aboriginal conflict. See headings for each colony, e.g. Queensland — settler-Aboriginal conflict Sharpe, T., 308 Shaw, A. G. L., 85 Shaw, George, 315 Shenton, George, 378, 393 Sholl, Robert, 366, 368, 382, 397, 398 Short, Augustus, 338 Sievwright, Charles, 73, 89 Singleton, John, 279 Skira, Irynej, 263 slavery abolition in British colonies, 59 anti-slavery movement, 105 in British Empire, 8 controversy over abuse of Indigenous labour in WA, 387–91 convict system likened to, 105, 168 debates over abolition, 62 forced Indigenous labour in pearling industry, 362, 365, 367, 371, 391 forced Indigenous labour on pastoral stations, 362, 372 in British Empire, 410 Slavery Abolition Act 1833, 8, 62 in Tasmania, 249 smallpox, 51, 56, 365 Smillie, William, 92 Smith, Adam, 11, 44 Smith, Benjamin, 155 Smith, Charles, 138 Smith, Harry, 216 Smithies, John, 100, 184 Snodgrass, Kenneth, 75 South Australia banning of public executions, 348 colonisation of Northern Territory, 350–53 debate over new constitution, 231

demands for self-government, 160–61 early public image, 91 establishment of colony, 50–51, 61 Executive Council, 113 extension of borders to include Northern Territory, 350 founding values, 161 German settlers included within AngloSaxon subjecthood, 340–41 limited representative government, 178 representative government, 51, 125 self government, 113 voting rights of Indigenous people, 339 South Australia — Aboriginal policy annual Aboriginal feast, 93 chaining of Indigenous prisoners/suspects, 98, 346, 347 expenditure, 336 following responsible government, 335–39 following self-government, 23 ignoring of Indigenous rights in land, 94 Indigenous people as British subjects, 61, 97, 345 Indigenous people as foreign enemies, 95 initial protection plan, 60 inquiry into spending, reserves and condition of popuation, 341–44 land grants to Aboriginal women married to white men, 189 legal pluralism, 345 policing of Indigenous people, 346 protection policy, 94–98 public hangings of Aboriginal offenders, 348–49 ration distribution, 189, 212, 336, 344 recognition of Indigenous rights in land, 13, 61, 92 responsibility of Crown Lands and Immigration department, 336 restoration of protectorate, 338, 344 summary execution of Indigenous offenders, 95, 96, 348 summary punishments for Indigenous offenders, 98 uncertainty over political and legal status of Indigenous people, 339–41 South Australia — Aboriginal-settler conflict Adelaide River settlement, 352–53 frontier violence, 95, 181 massacres of Indigenous people, 97 murder of Maria shipwreck survivors, 95–96, 348 murder of Rainbird family, 347 Rufus River region, 97 settler opposition and resistance to protection policy, 94–98

Index 429 South Australia - Legislative Council establishment, 125 South Australia — Legislative Council composition, 160 franchise, 178 Select Committee upon the Aborigines (1860), 341–44 South Australia Act 1834, 51, 61, 113, 160 South Australian Advertiser, 343 South Australian Association, 50, 104 South Australian Colonization Commission, 51, 98 South Australian Gazette, 94 South Australian Legislative Council, 135 South Australian Register, 96, 113, 344 South West Native Title Settlement,, 409 Southern Australian (newspaper), 96, 113 Spiekese, Friedrich Wilhelm, 273 squatters approach to colonisation, 164 cancelling of licenses, 130 dominance of NSW Legislative Council, 132 licensing system in New South Wales, 53 outrage at Land Sales Act, 129 residence qualification for voting rights, 299 Stanley, Edward (14th Earl of Derby), 124, 134, 137, 140, 380, 381 Statham, Pamela, 169 Stephen, Alfred, 305, 315 Stephen, James, 60, 134, 135, 159 Stephens, Ward, 77, 81 Stevenson, George, 92 Stirling, James, 53, 60, 101 Stone, John Frederick, 378 Stradbroke Island mission, 183 strategic outposts, 33 Stuart, John McDonnell, 349 Sturt, Charles, 92 supersessionist beliefs, 40, 122 Supreme Court of New South Wales, 36 Suttor, George, 81 Suttor, William, 194 Swain, Shurlee, 7, 301 Swainson, William, 157 Swan River Colony. See Western Australia Sydney Aborigines Committee, 199, 304 Sydney Chronicle, 123, 163 Sydney Gazette, 89 Sydney Herald (later Sydney Morning Herald) on Asian indentured labour, 106 on Durham Report, 113 on missionaries, 81 on Myall Creek trials, 81, 82 on protection policy, 77

opposition to protection policy, 78, 80 settler philosophy of colonisation, 82 Sydney Monitor, 113 Sydney Morning Herald (formerly Sydney Herald), 132, 288, 295, 297 Symmons, Charles, 99, 101, 102, 184, 196, 202 Taplin, George, 342, 353, 355, 356 Tasmania bushrangers, 71 convict transportation, 104, 161 corruption, 105 devising of new constitution, 232 education system, 265 end of convict transportation, 174, 218, 219 free assisted immigration, 49 Indigenous activism on Flinders Island, 148–51 limited representative government, 178 name change, 237 reflections on extinction of Indigenous population, 207 representative government, 126 separation from New South Wales, 36 Tasmania — Aboriginal policy. See also Oyster Cove Aboriginal settlement, See also Flinders Island Aboriginal settlement Black Line, 41 closure of Flinders Island settlement, 151 denial of Aboriginality of Furneaux Islanders, 206, 262, 264 evolution 1788–1830, 31–38 following self-government, 22 marital law, 40 neglect of Furneaux Islanders, 264–65 relocation of Flinders Islanders to Oyster Cove, 151, 203–4 removal of Indigenous population to Flinders Island, 41–43, 68, 69, 206 schooling in Furneaux islands, 266 under responsible government, 256–58 Tasmania — Aboriginal-settler conflict escalation in 1820s, 38 prior to 1830, 29–30 warfare, 40–41 Tasmania — Legislative Assembly property-based franchise, 256 Tasmania — Legislative Council appointment to, 126 composition, 36, 256 establishment, 36 franchise, 178, 256

430

Index

Tasmanian Aborigines. See also Furneaux Islanders and debate over human origins, 245–46 declared extinct, 260, 261 expected extinction, 257, 258, 259 explanations for supposed extinction, 246–48, 249 on Flinders Island. See Flinders Island Aboriginal settlement genocide, 31, 250, 411 histories of, 248–50 at Oyster Cove. See Oyster Cove Aboriginal settlement scientific interest in human remains, 246, 248, 260 so-called last man, 259, 260 Taylor, Miles, 156 Taylor, Rebe, 246, 261 Thackabiddy case, 379, 382, 389 Thomas, Judy (Pollerelberner), 223 Thomas, William appointment as assistant protector of Aborigines, 73 appointment as Guardian of Aborigines, 196 arrival in Sydney, 78 boundaries of Woiwurrung country, 87 evidence given to Select Committee (1858), 272 Indigenous people’s complaints to, 87, 187 recruitment of police, 146 support for Indigenous demands for reserves, 192, 274, 276, 277, 311 support for Kulin address to Queen Victoria, 281 Thompson, Deas, 193 Thompson, Thomas Perronet, 174 Threlkeld, Lancelot, 38, 39, 46, 57, 68, 77, 78, 182, 196 Times (London), 209, 218, 260, 399 Timperley, W. H., 384 Toorbul (Turrbal) people, 33, 90, 143 Towns, Robert, 213 Townsley, W. A., 265 Treaty of Waitangi, 129 Trial and Summary Punishment Act 1849, 203 Truganini, 149, 258, 259, 260, 261, 264, 273 Tuckfield, Francis, 88, 184, 196 Turnbull, Clive, 250 Turnbull, Paul, 247 Tyers, C. J., 272 Tylor, Edward, 246 Uluru Statement from the Heart, 408 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 12

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 12 Unaipon, James, 353, 354 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 380 Undanbi people, 33, 90 Van Diemen’s Land (VDL). See Tasmania van Toorn, Penny, 280, 283 Vassilief, Lilia, 331 Victoria. See also Port Phillip district celebration of separation from New South Wales, 179 devising of new constitution, 231 establishment of colony, 178 Eurkea rebellion, 231 limited representative government, 178 local government, 231 promotion of cultural progress and scientific enlightenment, 271 responsible government, 269 secret ballot, 269 self-government, 269 treaty with Aboriginal Victorians, 409 Victoria — Aboriginal policy Aboriginal Protection Act 1869, 286 banning of Indigenous people from towns during royal visit, 285–86 Board for the Protection of the Aborigines, 286 Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines, 284–86 British humanitarian inheritance, 269 Central Board to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines, 276–78 following self-government, 23, 269, 270 intervention, micro-management, and ­control, 269, 284–87 La Trobe’s views on, 191 protection. See Port Phillip Protectorate reserves policy and Indigenous agency, 274–84 restrictions on sale of alcohol, 285 Victoria — Aboriginal-settler conflict duration of frontier violence, 181 end of frontier violence, 200 massacres of Indigenous people, 56 Native Police deployed to crush Aboriginal resistance, 146 settler opposition and resistance to protection policy, 84–90 Victoria — Legislative Assembly elections every three years, 270 manhood suffrage, 269

Index 431 Victoria — Legislative Council franchise, 178 Select Committee on the Aborigines (1858), 271–73 Victoria (Queen), 150, 151, 251 address from Port McLeay mission, 355 celebrations in Melbourne to mark birthday (1863), 280–83 gifts from Kulin nations, 281 response to Kulin loyal address and gifts, 283 Vincent, Henry, 102, 184 Wadawurrung people, 179 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 43, 44–45, 49, 64, 98, 109 Walker, Frederick, 202, 319, 325 Walker, George Washington, 57, 149, 248 Walker, John, 344, 347 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 247 Warburton, Peter, 345, 346, 347 Ward, John M., 3, 133, 163, 186 Warrandyte station, 196 Warton, Charles, 392, 393, 399 Waswo, Richard, 11, 131 Waterhouse, George, 342 Waterhouse, Richard, 5 Waterloo Creek massacre, 75, 83 Wathawurrung people, 285 Watherston, Alexander, 353, 355 Watson, Henry, 92 Watson, William, 57, 64, 90, 196 Waylen, Alfred Robert, 376, 378, 392 Weiman, John, 311 Weld, Frederick, 24, 367–69, 369, 402 Wellington Valley mission, 57, 64, 76, 90, 183, 301 Wentworth, William Charles, 192 advocacy for representative government, 36, 62, 114, 133 dissatisfaction with Australian Colonies Government Act, 178 on Myall Creek trials, 135, 193 opposition to democracy, 229 opposition to representative upper house, 227, 228 support for Indian indentured labour, 134 Weraerai people, 76 West Australian (newspaper), 370, 376, 380, 386, 388, 394, 396, 397 West Australian Times, 364, 370 West, John, 79, 164, 206–7, 234, 298 Western Australia campaign for responsible government, 393–401

convict transportation, 170, 203, 362, 364 early economic failure, 50 employment of Aboriginal labour, 99 foundation as colony, 50 Gibble affair, 387–91 gold rushes, 385, 401 Government Residents’ powers, 364 indentured Chinese labour, 170 labour shortage, 99, 169, 365 pastoral expansion, 365, 401 proposed division into two colonies, 381, 395 representative government, 126, 178, 366 responsible government, 369–70, 381 royal visit by Prince Alfred, 363 self-government, 160, 373, 401–4 slavery controversy, 385, 387–91 Western Australia — Aboriginal policy Aboriginal Native Offenders Bill, 377 Aborigines Protection Act 1886, 391–92 Aborigines Protection Board, 392, 395, 396, 402, 403 authorisation of punitive expeditions, 53 before representative government, 362–66 before self-government, 24 chaining of Indigenous offenders/suspects, 364, 366, 372, 377, 387 expenditure, 403 flogging of Aboriginal offenders, 378, 402 following representative government, 367–69 following self-government, 25, 401–4 inquiry into treatment of Aboriginal prisoners, 378, 382–84, 387 management of Aboriginal labour, 365 military actions against Indigenous people, 54, 60 protection, 98–102 public conflict over, 386 regulation of use of Indigenous labour in pearling industry, 368, 370, 371 responsible government campaign and, 393–401 Rottnest Island Aboriginal prison, 101–2, 184, 372, 373, 374, 376, 382 summary trial and punishment of Indigenous offenders, 100, 202–3, 364, 369 under Governor Broome, 376–84, 387, 391, 392, 395 under Governor Robinson, 371–74 welfare proposals from churches, 375

432

Index

Western Australia — Aboriginal-settler conflict Aboriginal resistance and reprisals in 1890s, 402 criticism of settler behaviour, 57 Flying Foam Passage massacre, 365 government response to frontier violence, 100 in 1830s, 53 Mounted Police force role, 53 policing, arrest, and imprisonment, 363, 377 reprisals for taking or abuse of Indigenous women, 373 settler dissatisfaction with protection provided, 364, 373 stock theft and stock killing, 364, 372–74 Thackabiddy case, 379–81 Western Australia — Legislative Council composition and role, 53 Western Australian Constitution (1899) Section 70, 25, 399, 401, 403, 405, 408 Western Australian Enabling Act (1890), 399–401 Western Australian Journal, 114 Western Australian Missionary Society, 57 Western Districts of Port Phillip, 52 Western Mail, 392, 394 Westgarth, William, 147 Wheeler, Frederick, 318, 321 Wik case, 180 Wills, Horatio, 325

Wilson, Edward, 271 Wilson, John Ker, 321, 323 Windeyer, Richard, 78, 82, 135, 138, 140 Wiradjuri people, 38, 57, 65, 90, 130, 306 Wiradjuri wars, 74 Woiwurrung language, 196 Woiwurrung people, 55, 87, 146, 192, 276, 277, 280 Wolfe, Patrick, 14, 72, 362 Wonga, Simon (Woiwurrung man), 274, 276, 278, 281 Wonnarua people, 77 Wood, Rebecca, 80 Woollacott, Angela, 10 Woolley, Charles, 259 Wotjobaluk people, 273, 310 Wrensfordley, Henry Thomas, 374 Wyatt, William, 92 Wynyard, R. H., 240 Yaburara people, 365, 366 Yelta mission, 224, 273 Yougarla, Crow, 403 Young Ireland insurrection, 233 Young, Henry, 231, 257, 258, 305 Yunupingu, Galaway, 299 Zillman, John, 322, 324 Zion Hill mission, 90, 91, 138, 143, 183