Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies 036756579X, 9780367565794

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EMPIRE AND INDIGENEITY

Indigeneity is inseparable from empire, and the way empire responds to the Indigenous presence is a key historical factor in shaping the flow of imperial history. This book is about the consequences of the encounter in the early nineteenth century between the British imperial presence and the First Peoples of what were to become Australia and New Zealand. However, the shape of social relations between Indigenous peoples and the forces of empire does not remain constant over time. The book tracks how the creation of empire in this part of the world possessed long-lasting legacies both for the settler colonies that emerged and for the wider history of British imperial culture. Richard Price has written widely on British social, labor, and imperial history. His most recent book, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth Century Africa (2008), was awarded the 2010 prize for the best book in British history post-1750 by the North American Conference on British Studies.

EMPIRE AND INDIGENEITY Histories and Legacies

Richard Price

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Richard Price The right of Richard Price to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Price, Richard, 1944– author. Title: Empire and indigeneity : histories and legacies / Richard Price. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Taylor and Francis, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020053237 | ISBN 9780367565787 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367565794 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003098447 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Indigenous peoples—Oceania—Social conditions. | Imperialism. | Great Britain—Colonies—Oceania—History—19th century. | Oceania—Colonization—Social aspects—History. | Oceania—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DU40 .P75 2021 | DDC 323.193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053237 ISBN: 978-0-367-56578-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-56579-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09844-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Iona McQuade Price and Lesley Danson

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsx List of abbreviations xiii

Introduction: problem and perspectives

1

 1 Engagements Introduction 15 Agency and engagement  16 Order and disorder  27 Cultural and social intimacies  32 Knowledge and observation: a different eye  38 Conclusion 43

15

 2 Mentalities Introduction: the discourse of humanitarianism  50 Culture and governance  51 Sensibilities and psychology  58 Anxieties 66 Conclusion 70

50

  3 Policies: conciliation and coercion Introduction: policies and history  79 Conciliation 80 Sir George Arthur and Van Diemen’s Land  84 The disenchantment of Sir George Arthur  96 The inner turmoil of Sir George Arthur  102

79

viii Contents

  4 Policies: protection Arthur and the history of protection  112 Protection history and typologies  114 Protection and governance  119 The failure of Port Phillip Protectorate  122 Transforming protection  126 Conclusion 132

112

  5 Policies: racial amalgamation in New Zealand Introduction 139 Racial amalgamation in discourse and policy  140 Sir George Grey and racial amalgamation  142 Racial amalgamation and the law  147 Land and dispossession  149 The period of pre-emption: before c. 1863  152 Dispossession post-1860  158 Conclusion 164

139

  6 Violence and the coming of colonial order Introduction 173 The structures of violence  174 The state and violence  176 Salutary terror and normalization of violence  183 The psychology of colonial violence: fear  186 The psychology of colonial violence: blindsight and splitting  189 The psychology of colonial violence: regimes of silence and denial 191 The psychology of colonial violence: projections and narratives  196 Conclusion 200

173

  7 Law and sovereignty Introduction: law and empire  208 Uncertain sovereignty: the continued importance of natural rights 209 When lawlessness was the law  213 Exceptionalism or assimilation?  215 Aboriginal evidence and the oath  217 Inter se  220 Stabilization: positivist law and Aboriginal rights  225 Conclusion 228

208

Contents  ix

  8 Settler politics and the coming of a new racial order Introduction 235 The exhaustion of the humane policy agenda  237 Settler consciousness  240 Reconciling liberalism to empire in nineteenth-century political theory  251 Conclusion 260

235

  9 Legacies in modern Indigenous politics Introduction: the past in the present  267 The silences of settler society  268 Making modern Indigenous politics  271 Disruptions 282 Conclusion 290

267

10 Legacies in imperial culture Introduction 297 Humanitarian narratives  299 Silence, forgetting, and distancing  303 Networks 308 Heroes and villains  310 Conclusion 318

297

Bibliography—primary sources 325 Bibliography—secondary sources by chapter 329 Index352

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making, and along the way I have incurred many scholarly and personal debts. I could not have done the research for this book without the support of the College of Arts and Humanities and the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. The college provided me with two years of research leave, and the Department of History supported travel to Australia and New Zealand, which allowed me to work in various archives. I want to recognize, in particular, Professor Philip Soergel, the chair of the Department of History for his considerable generosity with research funds. I also wish to thank the Miller Center for the Study of History for inviting me to present working papers to my faculty colleagues who listened patiently and responded with helpful comments, critically evaluating my evolving thoughts and ideas. The ideas in this book, and various papers marking the progress of research, were presented at other institutions over the ten years I have been working on the project. At all of these places, I was received graciously and invariably received useful criticism and feedback, and I want to thank them all. I was honored to be invited to deliver the Founding Historians’ Lecture at my alma mater, the University of Sussex, in December 2010, and in that same year, the subject of this book was given as a plenary address to the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore, Maryland. I  presented the ideas contained in my chapter on colonial violence at several conferences over the years: at a workshop on the “Anxieties of Empire” at the University of Gottingen organized by Harald Fisher-Tiné and Christine Whyte in the summer of 2012; at a workshop on “Violence, Colonialism and Empire” organized by Philip Lawson and Amanda Nettelbeck held at the British Academy, London, in July 2014; at two annual meetings of the North American Conference on British Studies in November 2014 and November 2017; and at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, in February 2017. Similarly, I delivered papers on my thinking about the humanitarian impulse in early nineteenth-century governance

Acknowledgments  xi

at the Universities of Tasmania and Adelaide in early 2016, at the American Historical Association meeting at Atlanta in the same year, where I was part of a panel that included Dane Kennedy, Kate Darian Smith, and Penelope Edmonds. Further presentations on the same theme were given to the workshop on “Protective Governance and Its Intermediaries” at Australian National University in Canberra in April 2017 and at the workshop on “Civil and Human Rights in Australia” at University College Dublin organized by Amanda Nettelbeck in April 2018. In the spring of 2017 I  was fortunate enough to be offered a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. In the beautiful surroundings, deep in the Cape wine country, and well-appointed facilities of the institute, I began to draft this book. I want to thank Henrik Geyer, then director of the institute, and Professor Bill Nasson of the History Department at Stellenbosch for facilitating this opportunity. I cannot speak highly enough of the professionalism and the quality of the service that was provided by the staff of the institute. The three months I spent there were some of the most enjoyable and productive of my career. It was also a pleasure to be part of a variegated community of international scholars from many different disciplines from whom I learned a lot. One of the pleasures of working on this book has been to learn about new fields of Australian and New Zealand history and get to know some of the many wonderful scholars in those fields. I was impressed with the generous welcome and reception I received from them all. In particular, however, I must single out Amanda Nettelbeck of the University of Adelaide. I have learnt a lot from her work; we have many overlapping interests, and references to her books and articles are scattered liberally through this book. She facilitated opportunities to present my work to scholarly audiences, but at a more personal level, Amanda was unfailingly helpful and generous with her time and advice when I was working in the South Australian archives and as I was working through the project. She read a portion of the manuscript and offered me constructive and helpful comments. I doubt she will agree with everything I have written, but I want to acknowledge my considerable professional debt to her. Henry Reynolds is, of course, a pre-eminent historian of Australia and readers of this book will realize I have drawn heavily upon his work. Henry Reynolds was enormously generous with his advice and his time, and it was a great pleasure to meet him on two occasions, both times centered on food. First in New York and then again at his home in Richmond, Tasmania, where I also had the pleasure of meeting his wife, Senator Margaret Reynolds. In Tasmania, also, Penelope Edmonds (now at Flinders University) was a welcoming host and was generous in sharing her own important research on humanitarianism. Likewise I had separate meetings in Hobart with James Boyce, Kristyn Harman, and Nicholas Brodie, who patiently listened to my thoughts and answered my questions. Lisa Ford (University of New South Wales) kindly read and commented on the chapter in this book on the law and sovereignty, and Shaunnagh Dorsett (University of Technology, Sydney) shared a pre-publication copy of her important book Juridical Encounters. Maori and Colonial Courts 1840–1852. In Auckland it was a great pleasure to meet Damen

xii Acknowledgments

Salesa over lunch, who shared his thoughts and knowledge about Sir George Grey and other aspects of the history of New Zealand. Other scholars whom I wish to recognize include John Pocock, who, at an early stage of this project, offered encouragement and, with his deep knowledge of New Zealand history, pointed me in exactly the right bibliographic directions. My good friend John Belchem as usual provided generous support and a close reading of an early draft of the manuscript. Likewise, I benefited from readings by my colleagues Dane Kennedy, Phillippa Levine, and my ex-student, Charles Reed. Robert Ross, the eminent historian of South Africa, was also kind enough to plow through the full manuscript and provide a valuable list of corrections, suggestions, and comments. Joanne Lewis of London School of Economics also read and commented on the later portion of the manuscript. Thank you all for your attention and support. I  also want to thank Robert Foster of the University of Adelaide for help with various references, and Cassandra Pybus for saving me from some solecisms regarding the Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini and for commenting on a paper I delivered at the University of Tasmania. My good friend and eminent scholar of linguistics, David Lightfoot, read an early draft of the Introduction. Thanks to his trenchant and valid comments, the current version is, I hope, somewhat improved from the original. I would also like to thank Rob Langham, my editor at Routledge. Throughout the process of putting this book into production, he has been accommodating, supportive, and a pleasure to work with. I want to pay a special tribute to my early mentor, Ranajit Guha. He did not read this manuscript, but his silent influence informs and infuses its spirit, as they have much of my previous work. His presence is not only reflected in the subject matter of the book—the social experience of empire—but mainly in what I learned from him about the questions to ask of the evidence, how to search for the dynamic of historical agency, and the importance of using particular examples and stories to illuminate the big themes of the historical process. The staffs of the various archives from London to Hobart were invariably helpful and efficient in providing the original material that this books rests upon. I thank them all for their assistance. My greatest thanks, however, must go to my wife, Adele Seeff, an esteemed Shakespearean scholar in her own right. She has labored mightily in working to improve the presentation of my arguments, she read through two versions of the book, and I  could not have had a better editor. The book has been markedly improved by her attention and suggestions, and to the extent that it has any literary virtues credit is due to her. But more than that, I need to acknowledge her companionship, support, and love, which bring joy to my life every day. Finally, this book is dedicated to two women whom I  deeply appreciate if in different ways. Lesley Danson spent her life as an outstanding educator of primary school children and, in addition, has been a good sister to me. And my granddaughter, Iona McQuade Price, who is the best little girl in the world, and, without doubt, will grow up to be an exceptional woman. She has brought a bright new pleasure to my life.

ABBREVIATIONS

Auckland City Central Library Auckland Institute and Museum Mitchell Library, Sydney National Archives, UK National Archives of New Zealand South Australian State Library State Records of South Australia Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office Turnbull Library, Wellington

ACCL AIM ML NA NANZ SASL SASL TAHO TL

INTRODUCTION Problem and perspectives

At the heart of every imperial experience is the encounter between empire and Indigenous peoples. The entanglements that result from this contact shape the histories of the particular site of colonization and also the wider imperial formations of which they are a part. This book is about the consequences and legacies of the encounter in the early nineteenth century between the British Empire and the First Peoples of (what were to become) Australia and New Zealand. I  have two overarching purposes. First, I  want to explore the content of the imperial encounter with the indigenes of the southern seas in the early nineteenth century. What was distinctive about this historical moment, and how did it shape the way empire evolved in that part of the world? And, second, what were the legacies of the period for the history of the settler colonies themselves and for the wider history of British imperial culture? It is for this reason that the book is titled, Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies. Although I have embedded my arguments in the case studies of Australia and New Zealand, the themes I discuss resonate across the histories of the other settler colonies of the British Empire as well as the greatest settler colony of them all, the United States. The history of Indigenous-imperial relations is determined primarily by the particular circumstances in each colony, but there were strong similarities between South Africa and Canada, for example, and their Australasian counterparts. Responding to Indigenous culture and politics was a challenging question everywhere for policy makers in metropolitan centers like London and on the colonial frontiers of empire. Naturally, there were many other issues that consumed the time of the overworked cadres of imperial officials, aside from the matter of the Indigenous presence. But from the standpoint of history, policy toward Indigenous peoples was the most momentous because it was an issue that was to occupy an abiding presence in the subsequent history of the colony and its imperial extensions.

2 Introduction

Unlike other issues, such as the occasional financial crises that afflicted colonies like South Australia, for example, the question of how relations with indigenes should be regulated was not an issue that could be “solved.” The consequences and the implications of the encounter between the imperial presence and Indigenous peoples extended way beyond imperial policy makers in the colonies or in Whitehall, and it continued to reverberate throughout the decades. These reverberations can be heard within imperial culture: in the theory and practice of political liberalism, for example, in the way international law was formulated, and how empire should be located in the civic culture of its metropolitan centers. Much of my focus in this book, therefore, is on how indigeneity echoed through the official networks of policy makers and the ruminations of political and legal theorists. But I am by inclination and origin a social historian who is interested in what the lived experience of empire reveals about the internal dynamic of imperial culture and how it translated to the social and cultural formations that comprised the sinews of the imperial presence. I have brought this perspective to the evidence as I examined the impact of indigeneity on the mentalities, behaviors, and even psychologies that were engaged by the imperial encounter. Thus, the reader will find that I make my arguments by presenting evidence of social interaction and behavior that appears to me to reveal significant aspects of the dynamic of imperial relations. Indeed, the early origins of this book lie in a small trace that I stumbled across in the South African archives when I was researching an earlier work on the British and the Xhosa. This was a moment when Governor Sir George Grey seized upon the political disarray caused by the millenarian movement of cattle killing that engulfed Xhosa society in 1857–58 to dismantle the power of the Xhosa Chiefs. He wasted little time in bringing the leading chiefs to trial on what amounted to trumped-up charges. When his attorney general raised concerns as to the legality of his actions, Grey responded with an exculpatory memo that was partly devised to justify his actions to his superiors in London, but which also bore signs that Grey was arguing to convince himself that he was, in fact, doing the right thing.1 It was the tortuous logic of Grey’s argument that struck me, an argument that suggested a fault line in the countenance of certainty that Grey generally presented to the world of imperial policy and that historians have endorsed as a characteristic of the man and his rule. It made me wonder: what did this moment signal about the impact of the encounter between imperial power and Indigenous people on people such as Grey? What were the tensions and anxieties that accompanied the imperial encounter? And more broadly, what did it reveal about the way policies Grey was to implement were reconciled with the self-image Britain held of its empire as embodying its liberal civic and political culture? As the questions posed by this vignette suggest, however, this book is not only set in a wider imperial context, it is also written from the imperial side of the frontier of empire. If it were to be written from the Indigenous side of the frontier, it would obviously take a very different shape. Nevertheless, an archival footing in the world of empire by no means implies discounting the agency of Indigenous peoples

Introduction  3

in the imperial story. The days are long gone when the history of empire could be taken to mean the story of the imperial presence alone. I have tried to reach across the frontier of empire and enter Indigenous people into the story, according them an autonomy and agency while, at the same time, trying to assess their impact on the behavior of the imperial actors on the stage. In the course of writing this book, however, it has become apparent that the idea of a “frontier” itself has distinct limitations, although the term is too convenient to abandon. Of course, there was a geographical and cultural frontier, or a series of frontiers, running through the imperial experience. But the word suggests a sharp divide that was clearly demarcated when, in reality, the point at which the Indigenous and imperial worlds met was a porous, shifting, ill-defined boundary not only in geographical terms but also in social, political, and cultural terms as well. And it was this way because the making of empire itself was anything but a clear-cut process. Empire was not made simply by the descent of imperial power onto Indigenous shores, nor was it maintained purely by the deployment of the varied machinery of imperial power. The social and power relations of empire were diverse and multi-faceted; they far exceeded the simple binary of hegemony and resistance. Power in empire was sought not just through various kinds of physical and cultural violence, although, again, there was surely plenty of that. It would be foolish to deny the importance of direct force, or of various efforts at subordination to imperial social relations. But the Indigenous-imperial relationship in empire was entangled and complex, and it contained a wide range of social arrangements, including exchange and interchange, negotiation, mutuality, cooperation, and dependence and inter-­dependence. I  am hardly the first historian to make this kind of argument, but it is this conception of the social relations of empire that has guided the way I  have read evidence and frame arguments.2 How the social relations of empire were ordered depended upon the circumstances within which those relations were played out. It is obviously the case that patterns of engagement between the forces of empire and Indigenous peoples evolved and changed over time. I am concerned to track that change. The particular conditions under which the imperial presence first intrudes into Indigenous society have long-lasting historical consequences, and I begin this book, therefore, with a consideration of the imperial order of the early nineteenth century in the southern seas. In the first chapter I argue that the imperial order in the early nineteenth century was shaped by openness and instability. This was a very different empire than the one that evolved by the later nineteenth century. Empire was not constructed according to an established blueprint. It emerged from the messy process of history and its final shape was not pre-determined. Only once the edifice of empire had been completed did it seem as if that was the empire that had been intended all along. But in the early nineteenth century the encounter between imperial and Indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand was characterized by entanglement rather than by a deeply demarcated contest between an imperial hegemon and traditional polities and cultures. This was an imperial world in which

4 Introduction

the qualities of exchange, conciliation, negotiation, and racial crossings existed side by side with the more familiar elements of conflict, violence, and imperial power. Indeed, to speak of imperial power in the context of this era is often an overstatement. It is more accurate to imagine a world where such power was qualified and incomplete. The pattern of social relations described in Chapter 1 was convergent with the discourse that explained empire to imperial actors in this period. This is the focus of the second chapter. Over the period, c. 1820 through 1840, imperial enterprise and policy was articulated through the language of a “humanitarian mentality” that rested upon religious and secular assumptions about a common humanity. This was a culture—an ideology almost—that imagined an empire of racial coexistence where the social relations of race would be driven by collaboration and cooperation rather than by violence and oppression. This chapter describes this discourse, the sources that fed its conceits, and the internal anxieties and contradictions that it embodied. The succeeding chapters—Chapters 3 through 5—will explore the efforts to translate “humanitarian” ideas into policies that expressed its aspirations for such an imperial world: the policies of conciliation, protection, and racial amalgamation. Violence is integral to empire, and the sixth chapter turns to the distinctive nature of colonial violence in this period. The dark dilemma of the early ­nineteenth-century empire was precisely the polarity between its “humanitarian” sentiments and the fierce violence that coursed through its veins. Historians have taken this polarity to define the period. Certainly, this opposition posed a serious and troubling quandary for many observers of empire at this moment and was the reason why a “humane policy” toward Indigenous peoples was the proclaimed aim of humanitarian spokespersons. Yet violence was also one of the rocks upon which the humanitarian mentality foundered. Violence could neither be divorced from the policies humanitarians favored, nor was it possible to control the violence that accompanied settler deluges into Indigenous lands. Indeed, the structure of violence in the period mirrored the instabilities of the imperial formations of the period. Humanitarians could not do without it to bring imperial order to Indigenous peoples, but neither could colonial barbarity be managed by the puny nature of the imperial state. The unstable, open character of the imperial formation of the early nineteenth century also conditioned other aspects of empire building. In the seventh chapter, I take up the question of the law and sovereignty in this period. Neither the role of the law nor the basis of sovereignty claims was clearly defined during those years. There was considerable uncertainty within imperial policy-making circles as to how the law should be applied, driven in part by the constraints that existed on how it could be applied. Similarly, there was debate about the basis of sovereignty claims by imperial actors. The footings for the establishment of the law and for the assertion of sovereignty had to be laid through historical experience. They could not be achieved simply by transporting the principles of the Common Law from England, nor merely by paging through works by

Introduction  5

the various philosophers of international law in order to find the conditions for sovereignty claims that fit the particular colony. The uncertain social formations of this imperial regime during the first part of the nineteenth century were decisively changed with the coming of responsible and representative government in the southern seas, which began in the 1850s. Chapter  8 addresses the way settler politics introduced the political and social arrangements that were to shape imperial politics and culture until the middle years of the twentieth century. It is an irony of history that it was settler colonialism emanating from the periphery rather than metropolitan determinations that defined most closely what British imperialism meant.3 Settler politics and power grew in tandem with shifting cultural trends in the metropole that provided the intellectual frameworks for the racial order for the British Empire from the later nineteenth century. A key aspect of this process for my purposes was the way humanitarian discourse changed its function from a language that reminded Britain of the violent price of empire to a rhetoric whose vision of Indigenous peoples was integrated into the racial hierarchy of imperial culture. One consequence was that the anxieties and instabilities within humanitarian mentality that had revolved around the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the imperial presence seemed to have been resolved. The “problem” of Indigenous peoples that had dogged early nineteenth-century imperial politics was promptly removed from the center stage of the British Empire. But history has a habit of bequeathing legacies that are not so easily evaded, and which ultimately present themselves for a reckoning. And in the final two chapters of the book, my attention shifts to those legacies in both the settler colonies and imperial culture. Chapter  9 argues that the Indigenous rights political movements in Australia and New Zealand invoked the inheritance of the period of the early nineteenth century. They presented the unpaid bill, as it were, for the failures of that period to resolve the fundamental questions that policy makers had struggled with around the questions of land, law, and sovereignty. And Chapter 10 takes up the legacy of this early period in imperial culture to argue that it was the moment when important strategies were developed, which allowed imperial culture to reconcile the seamy underside of empire with the liberal civic culture of Britain itself. Working on this book has led me to think carefully about how to understand historical processes and the assumptions that are made when interpreting and explaining wide-ranging historical events. There are two issues in particular that are worthy of remark because they are fundamental to following the arguments that I put forward here. The first is that I have come to have a deeper appreciation for the importance of contingency in history. The relationship between agency (the room for action in any particular historical situation) and structure (the material and ideological forces that condition action and behavior) is, of course, a long-standing matter of contention and debate. I have always had high regard for the determinacy of structural forces, but recently I have gained fresh respect for Marx’s observation that history is made by individuals only under the conditions that are close at hand, and that are not of their own choosing. I was reminded of this insight as I sought

6 Introduction

to understand the actions of such policy makers as Sir George Arthur and George Augustus Robinson, two of the key actors who presided over the near extinction of the Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land. These men were boxed in as much by immediate circumstances they could not control as they were conditioned, for example, by their own ideological limitations. Being aware of contingent factors is useful because it may bring us closer to understanding how contemporaries faced their choices for action. Furthermore, as I was completing the final versions of this book, the Covid-19 pandemic struck with deadly force, seemingly out of nowhere, upending lives and politics and transforming expectations around the globe in ways that only weeks before would have been unimaginable. This was an unwelcome reminder that, important though long-term structures are, the immediate circumstances that people face are equally critical to understanding how they act.4 The second issue that was raised by my thinking about this book had to do with how we should consider the movement from one imperial epoch to another. Specifically, how should we understand the imperial formations of the early nineteenth century in relation to those that had evolved by the later nineteenth century? What was the relationship of the one to the other? To what extent did the early nineteenth century foreshadow the structures of colonial rule and the racial order of high imperialism? I think that often an unexamined assumption views the early nineteenth century as laying the groundwork for the structures of settler colonial rule and of the racial order of high imperialism. Figures like Grey or Edward Eyre, for example, may easily be seen as the precursors of that later empire. They spanned both epochs, were each associated with the “humanitarianism” in the early period, and then became notorious for the direct suppression of Indigenous politics and the brutal repression of Indigenous leaders in the later period. Indeed, their various manifestations of “humanitarianism” (such as Grey’s well-documented commitment to ethnographic recovery of Indigenous culture) may easily be seen as smoothly integral to their imperial governance of Aboriginal peoples.5 Yet, in trying to understand the actions and motivations of such people as Grey and Eyre, I found it useful to appreciate how the early nineteenth-century empire was a foreign country where they did things differently, thought about things differently, and had different aspirations.6 If we climb down from the privileged perch that allows us to look back from the present, we may glimpse more clearly the conditions that constrained and guided those who occupied that foreign land. Only then can we appreciate more fully the decisions made, and actions taken, by the historical actors of the time. We have the advantage of knowing how the story of the past unfolded. But for the actors, the end of their story was not foretold, and those who were part of the drama of empire at the time could not anticipate how the narrative they were writing would conclude. It is useful to remind ourselves that history always contains alternative possibilities and endings and, moreover, that the historical actors of the period saw potential that is not necessarily revealed by our conceptual frameworks. These players had their own vision of what the end game of empire would be, and it is not always useful to view those visions through the condescension of the present.7

Introduction  7

This in no way implies that conceptual frameworks derived from our contemporary experience are to be eschewed. Their asset is to allow us to read the evidence more fully. But we need also to be wary of their capacity to confine and limit our comprehension of historical processes. In particular, contemporary value systems do not necessarily allow us to read the intentionality of historical figures, which also have to be placed within the context of the times. In addition, of course, outcomes are dependent upon many variables: they do not simply echo original intent. Outcomes that differed from their initial purpose suggest the role of multiple contingencies, many of which would typically be beyond the reach or control of the historical actor. In what follows, I have tried to acknowledge this conception of historical causality by getting behind the evidence—while recognizing my privilege of being in front of it—in order to observe where history might have gone. Doing this enables us to appreciate more fully the place where history ended up. It also brings into sharp relief an early nineteenth-century empire that was not merely a prologue to the later era of high imperialism. When this perspective was joined with my view of imperial power as being conditional during this period, I was led to depart from the two most influential conceptual approaches to the history of this period. The first is those analyses of power relations that tend to follow Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality to emphasize the ways liberal society draw subaltern cultures into a web of control through government policy and ideological agents of civil society such as the law and missionaries. The second is that of settler colonial studies which argues that settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand have distinctive historical structures of power that work toward “eliminating” the Indigenous presence. Both of these approaches have produced interesting and significant works of scholarship, and this book draws deeply on the detailed work produced by historians working within those paradigms or implicitly accepting their premises. Indeed, one anonymous reviewer of this manuscript was clearly taken aback by my failure to—as they put it—build upon this previous body of scholarship, as if it were an established fact that it was impossible to reject. My own prejudice is that such a formula is a prescription for scholarly group think. The essence of historical and intellectual exchange is precisely the presentation of different perspectives and interpretations, all of which may have more or less value and efficacy. It is all the more important, then, to explain why I have not chosen to frame this book within those scholarly tendencies. Governmentality and settler colonial studies are, in fact, closely related. Both seek to provide a framework within which the social relations of empire may be explained. Their emphasis is sharply focused on the instruments of control and hegemony that colonial and settler regimes used to subordinate Indigenous races, and, as a consequence, each perspective foregrounds the power of imperial governmentality as the key determinant in imperial social relations. The Foucauldian notion of governmentality, for example, rightly draws attention to the power dimensions that pervade all social relations. These were fully on display in the humanitarian initiatives that feature large in this book, and the history of its

8 Introduction

policies has been largely written within this context.8 Yet, there is a consequent danger in over weighting the muscular power of the imperial presence. We know well enough the extensive ambitions inherent in imperial power, but we also need to recognize that those aspirations had to grow and develop and were not fully extant at the beginning of an imperial presence. In addition, attention needs to be directed to the differences in the structures of power between imperial settings, and to the distinctive features of the structures of imperial power in various epochs. The early nineteenth century presented a very different imperial social formation in this respect from the structures that came after the mid-nineteenth century. Most of all, however, governmentality makes it difficult to escape from the idea that historical agency was the handmaiden of imperial or settler forces. It is true that within the histories written from this perspective, there is often a recognition that humanitarian structures of governance were of necessity capable of providing spaces for Indigenous action. But in this period in particular, I would argue that we need to place the ambiguities and nuances of the practice of humanitarianism at the center of our understanding of the power relations between the force of empire and the Indigenous people. From the very beginning, Indigenous people engaged actively with empire; they possessed and realized agency in dealing with empire. Naturally, their agency was confined by the countervailing agency of imperial and settler forces. But Indigenous people were infinitely ingenious in responding to the opportunities and the threats posed by the imperial presence. And the culture of humanitarianism provided discourses and allowed spatial opportunities for Indigenous agency to navigate within the imperial nexus and ultimately to find ways to erect degrees of protection and autonomy from its intrusions. The imperial history of our period in particular was played out under the shadow of this conjuncture, as well as being shaped by imperial power. Indeed, imperial actors at the time were acutely aware of the need to enter the constraint of Indigenous power into their calculations, and history likewise needs to take this dynamic fully into account. It is difficult to do this if imperial relations are viewed through the prism of governmentality. Settler colonial studies, on the one hand, promises a more capacious framework for understanding imperial-Indigenous relations and, on the other hand, possesses a more limited theoretical scope than governmentality.9 It rests on the distinction originally drawn by Lenin between colonialism and imperialism. The former—for Lenin, a lesser category—was the act of carving up the world by the European powers on the way to the imperial stage of world capitalism in which colonialism was embedded. But the more recent origins of settler colonial studies lie in the first generation of post-colonial thinkers (mainly from the Francophone world) such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, and, a little later, Ashis Nandy. Their project was both analytical and political. It was also a venture that highlighted the enmeshed relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. Their key insight was to see the connection as pathological: the colonizer and the colonized were entrapped in a system of mutual engagement from which each needed to be liberated if the distorting cultural, social, and psychological effects of colonialism were to be overcome in both the colony and the metropole.10

Introduction  9

In its most recent iteration, settler colonial studies has retained this combination of scholarly and political dimensions. Like the first generation of post-colonial scholars, the contemporary theorization of settler colonialism combines a heuristic scholarly device with an overt political project, and the boundaries between the two tendencies have become increasingly blurred. In the foundational statements of Patrick Wolfe, settler colonial studies tied its political affiliation most closely to the struggles of the Palestinian peoples in the Middle East. More recently, as settler colonial studies has become a full-blown scholarly orthodoxy, with its own journal and an increasing tendency to debate within itself, it has sought to expand its relevance to the programmatic issues within Indigenous peoples’ movements everywhere. But, in contrast to the early post-colonial thinkers, the dialogues of settler colonial studies fail to convey the complex intricacy of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer.11 Settler colonial studies is grounded in a narrative of Indigenous loss in the face of violent imperial and settler power. Settler colonial studies proceeds along two key lines of inquiry: first, that settler colonialism is a structure and not merely the event of invasion; and, second, that it is inherently eliminationist of Indigenous peoples. The first claim that settler colonialism was a structure usefully directed attention to the long-term historical dynamic of settler society. But the second claim, regarding the tendency toward elimination, reflected Wolfe’s original question for his study, which was whether the category of genocide could be applied to the Australian case.12 Wolfe’s answer was that it generally could not. Although he recognized that settler colonialism was capable of genocide, he suggested that it was not inherently genocidal. Settler colonialism did not want the disappearance of the “native” in the way that the Nazis wanted to wipe the Jews from the face of the earth or that Stalin was willing to see the effective genocide of the Ukrainian people in the famines of the 1930s. Settler colonialism certainly contained groups that would have been happy to see the extermination of Indigenous people—and some, like the Beohuks of Newfoundland, suffered this fate. However, as a structure it did not demand their demise because, for example, their labor was often needed to support settler economies. What settler colonialism implied was the elimination of the Indigenous as a separate category, the dissolution of their society, and the consequent disappearance of traditional practices and forms. In the face of some scholarly debate, Wolfe was quite willing to double down on his claim that settler society was inherently and structurally eliminationist, and, indeed, the intellectual viability of settler colonial studies rests upon that pivotal claim. For Wolfe this was the defining characteristic of settler colonialism; there was no other. As Wolfe has asserted, settler colonial theory was and is a binary system.13 The phenomenon Wolfe identified is easily recognized. Indigenous cultures and peoples were threatened with extinction from the Western physical and cultural presence. Settlers spoke the language of “extirpation” with growing frequency, and from the mid-century on, racial theorists began to predict the disappearance of the “weaker” Indigenous races of the world—including the powerful Maori. All of these were part of the imperial experience—and settler societies have been

10 Introduction

slow to acknowledge the crimes that were committed in their name. Nevertheless, these dark forces varied greatly both in character and in extent from place to place. In addition, it is easy to assume from this schema that the logic of elimination was the dominant logic present in the cauldron of imperial culture. But, in fact, this was not the case. The social and cultural relations of empire were more varied than that, and, at the very least, there needs to be a reckoning between this organizing principle of the imperial encounter and the other forms that also marked the social relations of empire. What do we do with the other forms of imperial social relations such as co-existence, cooperation, and other engagements across racial boundaries? Was the logic of elimination present in all policy decisions of the settler world? If not, what weight did it hold in both general and particular cases? And, most importantly of all, did it work? The problem with the “logic of elimination” theory is that it is a blunt instrument of analysis which fails to capture complexity in settler-Indigenous relations. It does not allow for any assessment of their interrelationships outside of a category of elimination.14 As Tim Rowse has pointed out, the only plot line to the settler colonial studies narrative is its inevitable and constant triumph in subordinating the indigene. In a curious way, therefore, it mirrors the projection of the most extreme form of settler consciousness itself. Its determinism has little room for subtlety and promotes the reduction of all themes to one context. It is striking in this respect, for example, that the category of hybridity is unknown to settler colonial studies. Yet, hybridity is also present in the imperial exchange. We may make that point simply by pointing to the way Indigenous cultures around the world have fused Western religious ideas with their own. Or, take the case of assimilation. Assimilation obviously has the potential to enfold and eliminate Indigenous cultures, customs, and people. The child removal programs in Australia and Canada were examples of that. But assimilation cannot simply be defined by such policies; it is also a feature of social life in the world and takes many forms, not all of which are negative. Assimilation is one way for cultures to deal with one another; historically, it may have negative and positive results both for the cultures who are assimilated and for those that are doing the assimilation.15 In addition, and most significantly, the awkward truth is that the story of Indigenous peoples is not only a story of loss. It is also a story of survival and adaptation in the face of the various assaults made upon their societies and cultures by settler colonial forces. As has been pointed out by other historians, Indigenous peoples have not been eliminated in any sense of the term. This is the case with even those most vulnerably placed, such as the First Peoples of Australia. They suffered widespread dispossession, their cultures were besieged, but the logic of elimination best describes only one aspiration of settler colonial society; as it has played out on the historical stage, the Indigenous experience has been far wider than the threat of elimination alone. And, of course, conceptualizing Indigenous histories around loss leaves the question of Indigenous agency in a conceptual limbo land. Indeed, by insisting upon the logic of elimination as the necessary framework for Indigenous history, the logic of elimination both implicitly denies agency and diverts

Introduction  11

attention from the ways in which Indigenous action has been deployed against and in response to the forces of imperial and settler rule.16 It is on the rock of Indigenous history itself, therefore, that the limitations of settler colonial studies are revealed as a device of historical analysis. This has been best expressed by Shino Kinoshi, who, after a careful and sympathetic discussion of the range of scholarship inspired by settler colonial theory, concludes that it is of limited value for explaining the historical interplay between Indigenous people and settler society. As Kinoshi writes, The transnational, and structuralist, aspects of the approach . . . are evidently challenged by the sheer diversity of local histories and case studies as well as the supple and complex nature of both Indigenous identities and the ways in which we form connections to country, culture, kin, and newcomers. And Kinoshi concludes that “a strident adherence to Wolfe’s theory leaves little space for Indigenous (or even settler) agency and seems to offer too pessimistic an outlook for our futures.” A similar point has been made by Aloysa Goldstein, Manu Vimalassery, and Juliana Hu Pegues, who, while generally sympathetic to the settler colonial studies project, note that the emphasis in settler colonial studies on structure over event has the effect of installing a purely descriptive typology which tends to replicate colonial mindsets and fails to provide “a way to address generationslong dynamics of anti-colonial survival and resistance.”17 In the final analysis, then, the problem with the determinism of Foucauldian social relations and settler colonial studies is not that they do not describe something real but that they erect screens that filter historical events and evidence to predetermine the historical conclusions that they draw. They fail to allow room for the multi-faceted nature of the movements, tendencies, and possibilities of the period. They impose categories that make perfect sense to us looking back from the twenty-first century, but that ensnare only a limited view of the world occupied by people like Grey. They simplify and flatten out the historical process. An imperial actor like Sir George Grey, for example, is inevitably tagged as an agent of settler rule. What else could he be? What other category could he fit into? Reading the humanitarian mentality of the period through a Foucauldian lens locates it precisely as an ideological script for imperial subordination and its spokespersons as mouthpieces for its pieties. How else may we make sense of it and of them? In such schema there is insufficient allowance for the fluidity, uncertainty, and pure chance that are integral elements in the historical process. Working on this book has made me more acutely aware of how the historical dynamic in empire lies as often in the fractures, tensions, and dissonances that empire creates as it seeks to make real its supremacy. An imperial actor like Grey, for example, was not alone on the stage of empire; he neither wrote the script of the imperial narrative nor did he control how the story line played out. Grey was continually hemmed in by a range of forces that ranged from his own internal milieu and ideology to the independent action of Maori. It is the job of the historian to capture that intricacy, but this is hard

12 Introduction

to do if that history is seen as the unfolding of an imperial hegemony whose end result was preordained: in the case of this book, as if the early nineteenth century was merely the drawing room for the racial order of the high imperialism that had emerged by the 1890s.18 This book, then, represents my effort to comprehend how the relationship between empire and indigeneity played an important role in the imaginings that people like Grey and others held about empire at this moment; how it shaped the policies they endeavored to install in the government of the empire; how it was critical in the formation of settler politics; and finally, how it bequeathed significant legacies for future generations to struggle with. The most lasting lesson I have learned from working on these issues, however, is that imperial rule, like any other political order, rested upon a wide repertoire of social interactions to express its presence and realize its power. The realities and texture of imperial rule may not be captured through the narrative of hegemony alone. Engagement, negotiation, and exchange were also present in empire. Indeed, on a day-to-day level, they were surely the primary ways in which Indigenous peoples met with the forces of the imperial presence. Such themes need to be added to the paradigms of power, hegemony, and resistance as the narrative anchors around which imperial history may be written. And so it is with those themes that this book begins.

Notes 1 See Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 327–30. 2 Among the works that capture this complexity and that have influenced me in this respect are Tracey Banivanua Mar, “Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: T ­ racing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse,” Aboriginal History  37 (2013):  1–38; Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (­Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Inga Clenndenin, Dancing with ­Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans 1773–1815 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 1997); Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (London: Routledge, 2013). More broadly, Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3 The importance of the settler colonies to British imperialism has recently been reemphasized by Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 4 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth of Louis Napoleon (New York: McGraw–Hill, 2008), 1. The importance of contingency has recently been underscored by Bain Attwood’s Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2–4, passim. 5 Leigh Dale, “George Grey in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,” in Writing, Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, ed. Peter Hulme and Russell McDougal (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 20–24. More generally, Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2001). I will discuss Grey historiography more fully in Chapter 5. 6 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), 17. 7 The possibility of alternative endings is also a theme of Attwood’s Empire and Native Title; see, for example, pp. 4, 124.

Introduction  13

8 The most accomplished use of Foucauldian approaches—which are present, if unstated in most of the scholarship on humanitarianism—is Alan Lester and Fae Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also, Alan Lester, “Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2015): 1–16; Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, “Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early Nineteenth Century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand,” New Zealand Geographer 64 (2008): 205–20. See also Penny Edmonds and Anna Johnston, “Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016); Penelope Edmonds, “Emancipation Acts on the Oceanic Frontier: Intimacy, Diplomacy, Colonial Invasion and the Legal Traces of Protection in the Bass Strait World,” Law & History (2017): 21–44; Penelope Edmonds, “Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections,” Journal of Australian History 35, no. 2 (2011): 201–18. 9 Settler colonial studies is a fast-moving field, at least in the number of studies it generates, and it is not my intention to provide anything like a complete survey here. For a good beginning bibliography, see Tate A. LeFevre, “Settler Colonialism,” in Oxford Bibliographies, accessed May  29, 2015, doi:10.1093/OBO/97801997665670125. The most complete conceptual statement is Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Settler Colonial Studies (Melbourne, 2010) is the major scholarly journal. 10 V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Eleventh Impression), Chapter IV; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: New York University Press, 1963); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan, 1974); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Asis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Asis Nandy, “The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India,” Psychiatry 45 (August 1982): 197–218. 11 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409, doi:10.1080/14623520601056240. See also Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999). And for more recent considerations of the political relevance of settler colonial studies, see Alyssa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, “The Ethical Demands of Settler Colonial Theory,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 426–43. 12 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”; Thomas Crotty, “Beyond Genocide: A  Comparative Analysis of the Elimination of Australia’s Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander People,” Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies, University of Technology ePress (2017–18), doi:10.5130/nesais.v2i1.1470; Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research I, no. 3 (1999): 315–52 for the argument that the category of genocide does fit. See also John Docker, “Are Settler-­ Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-Reading Lemkin,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 81–101. The idea, of course, is a curious repeat of theories popular from the mid-nineteenth century that weaker races were destined to disappear. For my take on this question, see pp. 81–101. 13 For this, see Patrick Wolfe, “Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 257–79. 14 Where such a logic may end is illustrated in Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, “The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism,” Arena Journal 37–38 (2012): 42–59, which argues that the policy of self-determination by Indigenous peoples is merely a settler colonial trick to remove political difference of Indigenous peoples and thus establish the supremacy of settler legitimacy. See also Damien Short, “Australia: A Continuing Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 1–2 (2010): 45–68, for the confusing

14 Introduction

logic of an argument that conflates the reconciliation process and land rights legislation with cultural genocide. 15 Tim Rowse, “Indigenous Heterogenity,” Australian Historical Journal 45 (2014): 297–310; Lorenzo Veracini, “Defending Settler Colonial Studies,” Australian Historical Review 45, no. 3 (2014): 311–16, which denies that settler colonial studies as a paradigm rests on the “logic of elimination,” thereby in effect conceding Rowse’s case. 16 See also J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “ ‘A Structure, not an Event,’ Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016), accessed July 15, 2020, doi:10.25158/1.5I.7. See also Tony Ballanytine, “Contesting the Empire of Paper: Cultures of Print and AntiColonialism in the Modern British Empire,” in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (London: Routledge, 2014). 17 Shino Konoshi, “First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonialism and Indigenous History,” Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 3 (2019): 304, accessed July 27, 2020, doi:10.1080/ 1031461X.2019.1620300; Aloysa Goldstein, Many Vimalassery, and Julian Hu Pegues, “Introduction: On Colonial Knowing,” Theory and Event 91, no. 4 (2016), accessed July 27, 2020, www.muse.jhu.edu/article/633283. Lorenzo Veracini has replied to these kinds of critiques in “Decolonizing Settler Colonialism,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41, no. I (2017): 2–18. 18 This, of course, is an observation made by others, particularly historical anthropologists such as Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15. For a good example of history writing that recognizes the inadequacy of such perspectives, see Julie Evans and Giordano Nanni, “Re-Imagining Settler Sovereignty: The Call to Law at the C ­ oranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, Victoria 1881(and Beyond),” in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, ed. Zoe Laidlaw and Alan Lester (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 24–44.

1 ENGAGEMENTS

Introduction The social order of the early nineteenth-century empire in the southern seas until the 1850s and 1860s was a distinctive historical formation. The early nineteenth century was not the waiting room for the imperial racial and social order of the late nineteenth century. It is obviously true that it contained elements that were to blossom into the social and racial structures of the era of high imperialism from the last third of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. But the social relations of the early nineteenth-century empire contained impulses that suggested a configuration between empire and indigeneity that was different from the racial order that eventually emerged. The imperial formation of this historical moment was distinguished from the era of high imperialism by the way that its rhythms were not determined by the power and influence of the imperial hegemon. The fully fledged imperial system from the later part of the century was defined, in the words of Ranajit Guha, as “dominance without hegemony.” By contrast, in our period dominance itself could not be assured. The imperial topography was marked by relationships conditioned by the “often overwhelming vulnerability and uncertainty of the European presence in the face of Indigenous self-assuredness.” It was an empire where the imperial balance of power was itself being constructed. At every level, the imperial frontier in south Pacific was a contested space. The imperial presence did not descend upon empty lands, even though one part of its imagination liked to believe that this was so. In the imperial encounters of this time Indigenous forces were able to deploy a variety of resources to engage with the strangers that landed on their beaches. They were not necessarily weakly matched. Furthermore, the imperial terrain did not instantly become a settler domain. Settlers could not be assured that their interests would predominate in policy making and, what is more, they had not yet attained the capacity to ensure that they would prevail.1

16 Engagements

The imperial history of the early nineteenth century was shaped by the disparate and multi-variate character of encounters and engagements. Indeed, the first moments of contact typically reflected the range of modes of engagement. In addition to violence, imperial encounters were characterized by “forbearance and attempts at negotiated peace making.” From Cook’s first meetings with local indigenes through the early years of Australasian encounter, Europeans and indigenes fumbled to learn about each other. The elements that were apparent in those years—the searching for ways to cooperate, the raw, often sexualized, brutality, the stabs at learning about each other, the efforts to live together, the breakdown of those efforts into misunderstanding and violence—were all elements that echoed repeatedly throughout the next fifty years.2 Indeed, it was not obvious for some years to come that violence would come to define the subsequent history of encounters. The vision that dominated the imperial discourse in this part of the empire spoke a language that aspired to see a “humane” policy of “conciliation,” and “amalgamation” as the qualities that would predominate in this empire. They understood empire to be a violent process. But they anticipated the “civilizing process” to result in an empire of cooperation and melding rather than the settler colonial empire that did emerge. And they believed this is not simply through the authority of their own ideology but because of what they saw and experienced in their encounters with Indigenous people. Of course, their assumption was that it would be British ideals that would be the major influence in defining these new societies as different cultures were set on the path of improvement that the British themselves had trod over the centuries. This was a process that was seen to be inherent in human development. History, it was believed, had shown that empire in one form or another was important in pushing the process along—just as today historians have come to accept that empires are the very core of world history. But precisely because the imperial encounter contained a range of experiences that included those of cooperation, conciliation, and exchange, the idea that an empire of racial reconciliation could result from imperial enterprise was not something that was a delusion or a hypocritical pretense. Of course, we know that History was to prove otherwise. But History had yet to decide the matter. Thus, I wish to start by identifying the main themes of imperial engagement with Indigenous peoples in this period. I shall focus on four areas where the patterns of engagement between indigenes and representatives of British imperialism reflected the fluidity and ambiguity that ran through imperial-Indigenous relationships during this period. Those areas are: how the agency of Indigenous people qualified imperial power relations, order and disorder, intimacy and intermediaries, and knowledge and observation.

Agency and engagement The dynamic of power relations in the empire is complicated and complex. Imperial power is achieved through negotiation and cooperation as well as force.3 At some point Indigenous actors must be enlisted. The vocabularies, the codes, and

Engagements  17

the systems of imperial power were not pre-formed and unchanging. Structures of imperial power had to be built and established. In the early years of empire, they were not unpacked from the boats and erected like the iron bungalow kits that became popular by the 1830s. The basic apparatus of imperial power took time to create. Different configurations of power distinguish different times. How may we describe the contours of power in the early nineteenth century? The one feature of power relations that stands out in the historical landscape of the early-nineteenth-century empire in the southern seas is the large role allowed to Indigenous agency. The themes of engagement were not driven solely from the imperial side. The terms of encounter were defined as much by the strength of Indigenous peoples as by the power of the imperial presence. Imperial encounters were more likely to be moments of negotiation than the opportunity to display imperial power. This was true at every level of encounter, from the perspective of high politics to the personal relationship between, say, the explorer or the reconnoitering imperial agent and his guide. In contrast to later years, indigenes did not engage with empire in the expectation that they would become imperial subjects. How long they remained in this state of innocent ignorance is not clear. But this initial phase of the imperial process lasted into the 1830s in Australia and in New Zealand into the 1860s. Certainly, Indigenous polities of this area did not respond to the European invasions as if they were anticipating their ultimate subordination within an imperial system. How could they have foreseen this? They were not confronting finely honed technologies of rule. More likely, they met ramshackle institutions operated by inefficient strangers who were hardly models of a self-confident imperial hegemony. What was experienced was the presence of newcomers who were understood within Indigenous cultural terms and who, it was recognized from the beginning, had to be accommodated in one way or another. They dealt with empire and its agents as equals—local monarchs wrote to British Kings and Queens, for ­example—as bargainers, confronters, negotiators, conciliators, and where necessary as resisters. There was a spectrum of reactions to the imperial presence that revealed Indigenous agency, and it is within that context that the discussion of power relations at this moment of empire must be placed.4 A distinctive space existed for Indigenous agency in this period. As Banivanua Mar has pointed out, indigenous peoples . . . still related to the imperial world at this time as sovereign peoples, albeit within widely varied constraints . . . [and the] archival records of Indigenous protests, though sparse, remain indicative of a widespread expectation that colonisation could be contained, if not stopped, by the rights and sovereignty of native peoples.5 The power relations of this period were not way stations to the racial power structures of the later nineteenth century when engagements and relationships were governed by a more uniform and coded set of procedures and habits. By contrast,

18 Engagements

in the early period there was a greater degree of indeterminacy and openness to the nature of imperial engagements. Indeed, the engagements of the early nineteenth century in the southern seas were unpredictable and contained a range of possible tempos, which included the qualities of caution, reciprocity, misunderstanding, exchange, mutuality, and, of course, violence. Naturally, this mix hardly conjured a benign and rosy world order. Initial encounters were unpredictable blends of violence and warily circumspect reciprocal exchange. Captain Cook’s initial encounter with the Maori at Poverty Bay on October 9, 1769, was marred by violence with the death of a Maori chief in spite of his instructions and personal intention to avoid violence. This first meeting was an appropriate staging of the ambiguities of the pattern of engagement that was to follow. Power struggles and ungoverned violence were inescapable parts of this mix. But there was also room in these encounters to imagine relationships that transcended mere violence and distance and were defined instead by mutual cooperation.6 Let us take a closer look at some specific examples of encounter that will serve to illustrate the key elements that were in play during this period. King George’s Sound was a remote place on the southwest coast of Western Australia. But thirty years prior to actual settlement there had been continuous contact between Aboriginal people and passing ships. These early contacts were casual and intermittent, and not necessarily pleasant. When the settlement at King George’s Sound was established in 1826, one of the initial party was speared. The officer in charge refrained from any retaliatory action and instructed that force was to be used only in self-defense. This was a familiar response in these early encounters. Both Arthur Philip at Manly Beach in 1790 and George Grey on his expedition to Western Australia in 1838 had been speared and insisted on no reprisal. Indeed, Grey had quickly grasped the place of spearing in Aboriginal culture, which related the nature of the offense to the part of the body attacked. In this context, spearings were understood to be a defensive reaction to what was perceived to be an external threat rather than to be a signifier of savagery. The officer at King George’s Sound, a Captain Lockyer, was clearly working within this tradition. But the incident provides an interesting little sidelight on the different context of Aboriginal violence in this period. Spearing by Australian Aboriginal people was culturally contextualized instead of being racially contextualized, even if it was “unprovoked.”7 Thus, in the early years of the settlement, named Albany, violence was understood as the result of cultural ignorance rather than seen as ineluctable to intercultural contact. This illustrated a quality of cultural openness which sought a basis for understanding that went beyond the confines of Britishness. It entertained the humanity of the Aboriginal people and an attempt to understand the encounter as one of cultural difference. And there was the characteristic humanitarian quality of pity and sympathy—which we shall discuss in the next chapter—which it was hoped would provoke reciprocal behavior from the indigenes. The early officials exhibited a curiosity about local people and a commitment to good relations, that was not unusual for “first” contacts, but it contrasted at the time with the state

Engagements  19

of race relations elsewhere in the continent. Strong, even intimate, relationships were formed between individual Britons and Aboriginal interlocutors. There was the case of Dr. Alexander Collie, for example, the first resident at King George’s Sound who chose to be buried next to his Aboriginal friend Mokere, who himself had died in Collie’s house. Similarly, Captain Collett Barker, resident agent at the Sound between 1828 and 1831, exhibited many of the traits that may be seen in people like Grey and Eyre at this stage of the imperial system. Barker recorded Aboriginal customs, which he demanded be respected. When he learned that the Aboriginal people were offended by mentioning the name of deceased kin, he ordered the settlement to observe this taboo. Following the death of a local Australian Aboriginal person from snake bite, he attended the ceremony and “to shew my sympathy with them [sat by the corpse] mingling my tears with theirs.” He was for a long time fondly remembered by the local people, a memory that was reported to be the reason why relations at the Sound were for a long time on a good footing. An early Western Australian settler, George Moore recorded that “at King George’s Sound, it is said that they never molest white people, but they have deadly feuds with each other.”8 Before an organized colonial system was created to bring colonial order, these kinds of stories were an important theme of encounter history. Thus, the first forty years of contact with the Narungga peoples of South Australia contained elements that could be imagined to presage a very different, and more pacific, system of exchange than ultimately evolved. In this case, the tone had been set by the initial contact by explorers like Flinders in 1802, whose arrival and behavior had fortuitously conformed to Narungga visiting rituals and established a good footing for future visits. From these early encounters until the formal settlement of the area after 1836, the Narungga of Kangaroo Island and the associated areas encountered Europeans largely on their own terms, avoiding them if they chose, or interacting if it seemed wise. Small communities of sealers established themselves particularly on Kangaroo Island, and their interaction with the Narungga was a combination of cooperative economic interactions and the violence that was typically associated with sealing settlements. The sealers lived in mixed-race communities that contained the usual complement of forced female Aboriginal laborers abducted from Van Diemen’s Land and kidnapped from the local tribes. But this meeting ground was not characterized by gross power inequities. The Narungga were largely able to control the terms of the interaction, much of which was conducted according to Narungga customary protocols. This uneasy balance was conditioned in part by the nature of the European presence which did not make large labor demands. Economic exchange operated at a fairly low level. The long period of gradual and growing acquaintance of Europeans by the Narungga enabled the latter to manage the dynamic of interaction successfully. It allowed the Narungga to learn what situations to avoid and what contexts were to be trusted. Indeed, when more continuous contact began to be established from the later 1830s, informed observers expected that peaceful and cooperative interaction would be possible. This proved too optimistic, of course. Tensions grew through the 1840s as a more

20 Engagements

intensive settlement began. And by the end of the decade, the earlier formation of uneasy cooperation had crumbled to be replaced by the familiar pattern of sporadic violence.9 This model of initially hopeful contact followed by descent into unstoppable violence was to be found elsewhere, even in Van Diemen’s Land, site of one of the most disastrous encounter histories in the annals of the British Empire. The violent decimation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people became the dominate theme of race relations only from the 1820s. It is true that the future was foreshadowed in the Risdon massacre at the very beginning of settlement in 1803, when an Aboriginal hunting party chanced upon a group of uneasy and drunken soldiers that resulted in fifty or so Aboriginal deaths. But there also emerged a tradition of racial interaction that was more cooperative and mutual. In the early years there is less evidence of a relentless hostility and conflict from either sides of the racial line. Largely peaceful contact and balanced power relations marked the first two decades of contact. Indeed, until the early 1820s contact between the races was relatively rare. A careful local study suggests that it is not possible to read from early contact the degeneration of relations that began from the early 1820s. Tasmanian Aboriginal people were neither particularly hostile nor particularly eager for contact. Convicts—who were the only representatives of European settlers until the island was opened to free settlers in 1818—were neither especially cruel nor prone to violence against the local indigenes. There was tension and conflict over competition for food—the early colony like others faced serious food crises at several points. But the bush rangers posed a more serious threat than the Indigenous people. It is likely that a painful lesson had been learnt by the Aboriginals from the Risdon massacre which reinforced the common pattern for them to remain elusive in the presence of Europeans. On the other hand, indigenes were curious about the Europeans and wanted to take a look at what was going on in early Hobart. There are reports of visits to the town. It was also recorded that the local Aboriginal people were unperturbed by the sound of musketry. This may have reflected the fact that the spear was a more accurate weapon than the musket. In individual combat, the balance of power often lay with the Indigenous people. Indeed, there was no reason for Aboriginal people to fear “Europeans taking over Aboriginal land or Aboriginal culture,” and they “were in a position to interact and co-operate with early settlers without fear, once the Aborigines had decided upon the appropriate behaviour to adopt towards the Europeans.”10 It was in this context, then, that even Van Diemen’s Land contained space for more equable Aboriginal-settler relations. Although the Aboriginal people were initially wary of these incomers, they were also willing to enter into economic exchange of seal skins for flour, tea, and other Western products. Trading relations between the sealing communities of the Bass Straits and the central highlands were to be found from around 1814. Aboriginal men such as the famous leader Mannarlargenna were part of the sealers hunting voyages. Indeed, Aboriginal men travelled widely across the maritime region in these year, and they also participated in the developing agricultural economy particularly at harvest time. And there was

Engagements  21

a growing involvement of Aboriginal people in the white man’s politics. They were part of the campaign against the bushrangers—whose relationship with Indigenous people was both fraught and close—as well as being intermediaries between the government and other Aboriginal groups. The existence of that tradition of behavior likely informed the efforts in the later 1820s to pursue what was regarded as a conciliatory policy toward the Aboriginal people. By the time George Augustus Robinson, the “great conciliator” of the local indigenes, came to rely upon Aboriginal helpers to in his missions to remove the remaining natives of the interior and ship them to Flinders Island, there was a long-established tradition of such cooperation.11 There was nothing particularly special about this cooperation. Dependence on the Indigenous peoples was an everyday experience of empire at this moment in time. The missionary experience was dominated by this very fact. They were often the first harbingers of the coming imperial storm, and the very nature of their enterprise brought them into close contact with local power structures. This was as true in the Eastern Cape as it was in New Zealand, where from the beginning missionary activity was governed by a highly complicated pattern of dependency. Missionaries lived in a hybrid world created by Maori. The rhythm of missionary lives and the economies of their mission stations were dictated almost entirely by Maori priorities. The Maori guided the missionaries in their explorations—as did other indigenes elsewhere. It was the Maori who instructed their visitors on the effective use of land. There was an intermingling of languages, with Maori insinuating itself into mission usage and resulting in a kind of creolized English. Such was the intermingling of the races in these cultural respects that the “systematic” colonists associated with the Wakefieldian New Zealand Company complained that there was too much contact for the good of the imperial mission.12 Power relations in the early empire of the southern seas were an ever-changing equation in which indigenes possessed initiative and agency. The quality of this can best be captured by individual stories such as that recounted by George Moore, an early settler to Western Australia. Moore arrived in 1830 and left ten years later. He served as advocate general for the colony, he kept a detailed record of his time there, and he was in frequent contact with the Aboriginal people. On one rather remarkable occasion he needed help from them in guiding a group of shipwrecked Britishers to safety. The man he wanted to lead this effort was a local man named “Weeip,” who had been prominent in earlier negotiations and whom Moore evidently trusted. The problem was that Weeip was wanted for instigating the murder of a British soldier, and his son was already in prison for participating in the actual offence. Nevertheless, Moore saddled up and rode around the neighborhood in search of Weeip, whom he eventually found, and with a combination of hand signals, pidgin English, and some Aboriginal words he had acquired offered a bargain. Moore promised Weeip that in exchange for contacting the beached passengers and bringing them to safety, Weeip’s son would be freed and that he would receive a pardon for his attempted murder. Weeip agreed and the stranded passengers were saved. Moore claimed that he kept his side of the bargain and secured the son’s

22 Engagements

liberty and a pardon for the father. But even if that was not true, the point of the story is clear. Problems could not be solved, nor could life go on, without collaboration between the colonizer and the colonized.13 Another reflection of the unstable nature of power relations during this phase of colonization were the rituals of exchange and engagement that evolved to mediate encounters between whites and First Nations people. Rules of engagement in Canada were by this time well established, but in Australia and New Zealand they had to be discovered, and re-discovered. It was obvious that there was a ritual process that structured Aboriginal responses to encounters, and Europeans recognized the need to observe or to create formalities that would enable peaceful communications to be conducted. People like George Grey or George Moore were alert to Aboriginal signs of assurance and tried to read meaning through their behavior. The same was true, of course, from the other side of the encounter. Aboriginal people attempted to stage formal meetings with the European strangers, who found it difficult to read the signs and respond appropriately. On the other hand, it is clear that Indigenous peoples quickly developed sophisticated appreciations of European intentions and behaviors. But such situations left plenty of room for misunderstandings, and to that extent the potential for violence was baked into the dynamic of encounter. Cultural mis-readings, therefore, were an important element in the contours of the engagements in this period. We shall return to that matter at a later stage when we consider the structures of colonial violence. For the moment, it is important to register the ways in which the imperial side of the encounter worked to create the basis for communication and interchange.14 Explorers were among the first white people Indigenous people encountered and especially eager to create channels of communication that would facilitate cooperation between the European strangers and the local people. George Grey’s expedition up the west coast of Australia in 1838 developed such protocols on the march. But Grey’s encounter with Aboriginal people and his near-fatal encounter with them was an example of how not to do it. More experienced, or mature explorers (Grey was only twenty-seven and completely inexperienced in exploration) quickly developed strategies to get them through encounters with local Aboriginals with the aim of minimizing that kind of danger. Bigger and more sophisticated exploration outfits made provision for facilitating communication before setting out. Music was one such strategy. Music was integral to maritime life, and as early as the fifteenth century, it was adopted as a means of communicating with indigenes. In our period, it reflected Enlightenment notions that music was a shared quality of humanity and could serve as a shared vocabulary of contact. In any case, it had potential for diminishing the possibility of violence and increasing the likelihood of positive communications. Captain Cook’s second voyage used bagpipes to successfully foster peaceful communication with Maori in Dusky Bay in 1773. Baudin took a group of musicians on his 1804 voyage to Australasia, and their performance played a role in his notably peaceful encounter with the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Music may have been a common instrument of crossrace contact during these years. There are reports of joint Aboriginal and Scottish

Engagements  23

musical events in the camps of the early days of the Port Phillip settlement (that was to become Victoria).15 Like missionaries, of course, explorers were reliant upon native peoples for such basic needs as carrying their supplies or guiding them through the local environment. What Europeans discovered on their explorations was more often the exposure of known Indigenous routes. The near-disastrous experience of George Grey’s celebrated expedition down the coast of Western Australia is just one example of what happened when hapless Britishers set out into unknown territory with only their naive wit to guide them. Edward John Eyre had good reason to resent that Grey’s reputation outpaced his in spite of the fact that he was the better explorer. Eyre’s explorations of South Australia were always accompanied by Aboriginal scouts. Indeed, he estimated their services above white members of his parties, and he took particular pains to keep them happy when the other members of the party grew restive. On one occasion he faced a mutiny from the whites in his group, half of whom deserted him. The black members remained loyal, as did his overseer who was, himself, a West Indian.16 Charles Sturt, the Australian explorer, experienced the problem of violence at first hand on his early expeditions. He responded by observing the meeting rituals and conventions of the Aboriginal people themselves and copying them when he encountered parties of local people. He developed a series of gestures designed to signal friendship and strategies intended to ensure a smooth confrontation. Thus, he would deliberately send Aboriginal members of his own party out in advance to make contact and warn them of Sturt’s arrival. On the maxim that “we pursue a course of kindness toward them, and we find them altogether as friendly,” he would encourage some brave souls to enter his camp and familiarize themselves with the nature and size of the party. Indeed, the first overland trip from Sydney to Adelaide through the Murray River valley got through peacefully by practicing Sturt’s strategies and rituals. This was notable because this area was later to erupt in a virtual war between local indigenes and the overlander parties that began to move through the area bringing large numbers of livestock to the growing colony.17 Like Sturt, Eyre recognized the importance of observing rituals of peace for successful contact with Aboriginal people. This was particularly true during his early explorations when he exercised great caution in how he proceeded. His prescription for a peaceful encounter emphasized deliberate and calm behavior in which peaceful intentions were conveyed by such actions as laying his gun on the ground. It is not surprising that by the time he was appointed magistrate and protector at Moorunde in South Australia, Eyre had developed a reputation for being very skilled at communicating with Aboriginal people. It was carefully constructed meetings of this sort that gave hope to people like Eyre and Grey that the imperial encounter could be peacefully managed.18 Such efforts were matched, of course, on the Aboriginal side of the encounter, although we know far less about this or the cultural assumptions behind them. Aboriginal people, too, were concerned to learn from European encounters to facilitate contact and exchange. It was noted on the Rufus River, for example,

24 Engagements

how they used European objects to suggest their familiarity with European ways and prior successful contact. When they offered fish, or women, to the Europeans they were trying to lay the basis for conciliatory engagement. Australian Aboriginal people showed great interest in European equipment and often crowded around drays containing ordinary items like pots and pans, which they frequently tried to make off with. Such encounters would be interpreted by Europeans as theft, but they are better viewed as Aboriginal desire to gain and learn from the exchange.19 As was true elsewhere, Aboriginal intermediaries aided successful initial encounters. Both adventurous pioneers and more permanent officials on the frontier such as the protectors quickly developed relationships with individuals who could be used in this way. By their very nature these relationships involved negotiation and trust building. And naturally, too, such strategies did not eschew hints of force. A  high level of anxiety pervaded groups who were setting off into the virtual unknown, whether they were explorers or driving livestock. Such circumstances were custom built for trigger-happy reflexes which the presence of Aboriginal intermediaries could not necessarily prevent. But it is important to acknowledge that a major theme of these colonial interactions was the search for instruments of conciliation. This was particularly true, of course, among those (like Eyre, Sturt, and Grey) whose “humanitarian” belief systems fostered the desirability of respecting Aboriginal presence and the possibility of cultural cooperation. Overlanders driving livestock were another story, as we shall have occasion to note. The expectation that imperial encounters could lead to relationships of mutual understanding rather than conflict and confusion was an important reality of this period. It was not merely an aspiration. And although it was driven by imperial mentalities that will be addressed in the next chapter, it possessed basis in social reality. The empire in the southern seas produced enough evidence that cultural encounter could produce hybrid societies that would make this particular imperial experiment different from those of the past. This was a conceit that was widely shared within the “humanitarian” world and the world of colonial officialdom. But the experience of New Zealand lay at the heart of this particular conception. Most accounts of New Zealand in these years highlighted the way cultural encounter with Maori proceeded through mutual exchange and interaction. These were not panglossian accounts of the interchange between Maori and British. What they did suggest was that both sides were capable of adjusting to each other and cooperating across a range of experiences. It is not surprising therefore that policy toward Maori in the early years rested on the assumption that cooperative and integrative relations were possible. The evidence for this could be seen in the commonality of cross-race family units, the intermingling of Christianity with Maori traditions, and the enthusiastic engagement of Maori in economic enterprise, which mirrored the wider adoption of Western culture and material goods.20 Naturally, issues of power were inseparable from this mixing. Personal relationships obviously had their functional side. Western men brought access to external trade, for example, and Maori women were an entree to internal markets and other networks. What sympathetic observers found healthy about the interaction—such

Engagements  25

as the way intermarriage was functionally successful—others would find morally dubious. The point that I wish to make, however, is that such structures of engagement were reflective of an empire which had no simple model of imperial governance. Plenty of experiential evidence suggested that governance did not flow from the imperial center but, rather, was navigated around the Indigenous presence. These sources gave a credence to the idea of an empire of racial cooperation and to “conciliation” as a viable policy option.21 An interesting illustration of this is gained by noting an expedition that Sir George Grey took in the summer of 1849–50 to Taupo in the region of the Tongariro volcano to attend the funeral of an important chief. This was a small episode in the annals of empire, and its diplomatic or political purpose seems to have been in the nature of an imperial outreach to build trust and establish relationships. It has been described by a latter-day jurist as a “journey into custom” by which is meant that Grey was engaging with Maori culture less as a governor and more as a mediator who might arbitrate Maori political contentions but who was ultimately apart from them. The trip had nothing of the manner of an imperial retinue. There seems to have been no agenda. It proceeded as a camping trip, combined with a journey of exploration, observation, and inspection. The iwi paid attention to the caravan as it progressed through and used Grey’s presence to mediate intra-tribal disputes. For Grey the trip was much an opportunity to gather ethnographic information as to show the flag. Indeed, some Maori expressed disappointment that he was not dressed in official plumage! Grey’s party included several Maori, notably his close associate Pirikawau, who was his teacher and probably the author of Grey’s various publications on Polynesian languages and customs. On this trip Pirikawau was a key intermediary. Once they got to the funeral site, it was clear that they were to have no role apart from that of bystanders. An inter-tribal dispute was ongoing as to where the chief should be buried. The chief ’s iwi wanted him buried in the crater of the volcano, but this was opposed by another faction. Grey was not part of all this; he relied on Pirikawau to explain what was going on. When they tried to negotiate access to the volcano—which had been a major object of the trip—they were told “in a rather cavalier manner” that they could do this but if the opposing Maori group went with them “they would have to take the consequences.” This thwarted the purpose of the trip and to avoid becoming involved in a local war, and evidently having no leverage to negotiate it out, they abandoned the whole enterprise and went back to Auckland.22 As late as the 1840s, the imperial presence could remain largely outside Maori politics. And this vignette also suggests how the search for conciliatory means of communication was a practical necessity as much as a cultural choice. The hegemon of imperial power was an elusive presence; power relations were fluid and uncertain throughout the imperial pyramid. The lonely shepherd in his hut or the nervous pastoralist experienced this stark reality at the personal level. But it was also something that was very much in the minds of policy makers at the slightly more secure level of the local colonial capitals. When Grey failed to implement the

26 Engagements

new constitution the Colonial Office sent him in 1847, he focused on the way the balance of power in the colony did not lie with the imperial hegemon. He pointed out how well Maori had fought in the recent wars that had only recently sputtered to a close. The new constitution failed to recognize that power, and Grey rightly claimed that any attempt to govern New Zealand in the face of Maori hostility was doomed to failure. Married to that were the tendencies within Maori culture to engage with the British influence which were already yielding good results, Grey claimed, and contained the promise of a collaborative regime.23 In this report, Grey was projecting colonial reality. His next dispatch to London provided vivid illustration of the fragility of imperial rule in instances of continued attacks by Maori on Wanganui, which led him to declare martial law. Like many imperial conflicts, there was no decisive military defeat of the Maori, even though once imperial rule was firmly established, it was assumed that there had been. The reality was that these “little wars” ended in truces when for various reasons both sides found it to their advantage to stop fighting. Maori power was not diminished by these events, even if they were given some bloody noses. They continued to hold the demographic and advantages that they had since the first encounters of the 1760s. So it is not surprising that a major theme of Grey’s dispatches to the Colonial Office throughout his first term as governor was that the Maori were not to be trifled with. They were more than a military match for the British, but, more than that, their social and political sophistication—their “remarkable traits of character” as he put it—made it essential to include them in whatever arrangements were made to organize New Zealand society; otherwise they would be a constant threat to European settlement.24 If the character of personal engagements and those of a political-military nature revealed the uncertain balance of power relations in this early stage of empire, the same was even more true in other spheres of colonial encounter. Take the case of Maori economic engagement with agents of empire in New Zealand. The aptitude of the Maori to enter into capitalist style economic relations was unusual and was not to be paralleled in Australia or probably in South Africa. Nevertheless, it stands as an illustration of how colonial engagement was as much a matter of entanglement than it was of dominance or hegemony. The Maori demonstrated an almost instant talent for Western-style trade relations. They immediately grasped the usefulness of what Europeans had to offer—although they were not unique in this respect. Indigenous peoples quickly recognized the benefits of the material goods that Westerners brought with them. But the Maori were particularly forward. They had heard about nails and understood their utility. So when James Cook came sailing by, they asked him about them. Most of all, they understood the significance of the guns the Europeans used to resolve disputed situations. They adapted cultural practices to ease economic exchange, dropping their preference for the fixed price in favor of the haggling that pakeha seemed to favor. Equally, they imposed their preferences on the Europeans where appropriate, such as favoring personal connections with trading partners. It was this, for example, that underpinned the frequency of cross-race sexual and affective relations in early New Zealand. They

Engagements  27

quickly identified which products were most in demand from the British, organizing timber and flax production to meet the demand. And soon after Cook’s visits they set themselves up as suppliers to visiting vessels, even when the products were not used by the Maori. Pork and diary production began soon after this, for example. They adapted to changing economic opportunities and circumstances. When the sealing trade declined, the mixed-race communities that it had produced turned to whaling. And when whaling declined in the mid-1840s, those families switched to agriculture.25 Maori understood the principles of labor market economics. They understood the scarcity value of their labor and reportedly did not come cheap. They entered into the transnational flows of labor on the whaling ships that began to crowd the Tasman sea in the early nineteenth century. They were in Western Australia as early as 1826 and were found as far east as Nantucket—Melville’s model ship for Moby Dick had a partial Maori crew. Certainly, by the first decade of the nineteenth century, Maori were visiting Sydney on a regular basis and were doing such a thriving trade in smoked heads that Governor Darling issued a decree against it. The economy of the Tasman sea was not an economy that danced solely to imperial preferences. The economic relations that had grown from c. 1790 onward were a hybrid construct where elements of British commercial practices melded with Maori cultural options, but where the upper hand remained with the local people. And this pattern of adaptation and adoption continued well into the 1850s. Only after that did British commercial dominance begin to erode and ultimately diminish Maori economic advancement. But there was nothing in this early period that would have led either Maori or pakeha to anticipate what the end game of this stage of imperial engagement would look like.26

Order and disorder The power relations sketched earlier contained the potential to evolve into a “middle ground” such as that described in Richard White’s celebrated study of the Great Lakes area from the middle seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. Pre-1840 New Zealand in particular certainly possessed markers that suggested an embryonic middle-ground formation. But unlike North America, social, political, and economic organization in the southern seas during these years was never able to attain the historical space that would allow an alternative to the imperial system to develop. The power equation was too unstable to allow anything more than hints of a different system to emerge. New Zealand, for example, as elsewhere in the region, might have possessed elements of a “middle ground,” but it was in the main a landscape of social disarray and disorganization. Certainly, its main theme was the absence of an imperially derived order. Imperial social formations had yet to impose their discipline on this geographic space.27 Disorder could be found at every level of social relations. It was vividly expressed in the various sexual scandals that erupted on occasion in the region. The cases of missionaries going astray, siring children with native women, wives forming

28 Engagements

inappropriate liaisons were reflections of a society that was free from the restraints of strong social norms. Naturally, there was nothing necessary to such episodes. The small world of missionary communities, for example, was more likely to foster a stifling conformity precisely to guard against such transgressions. But that is exactly the point: there was no telling which way the moral compass could swing in a society with few social, legal, political, or cultural constraints. The needle could gyrate wildly either way. Scandals such as that of Thomas Kendall, who quickly formed a sexual relationship with the daughter of an important Maori chief, or those from the London Missionary Society in the Polynesian islands, whose behavior called forth a team from London to find out what had gone wrong, revealed a destabilized moral chaos that needed to be brought under control.28 Nor was it only missionaries who were at risk in this respect. The small contingent of officials sent out to rule these disorderly places were not always paragons of virtue. As befitted an overflow convict colony, Van Diemen’s Land had a deserved reputation for an absence of moral leadership. Army officers engaged in “shameless dissipation” with reports of mass drunkenness over many days. Governors were no better. David Collins, who had established the colony in 1803, had left his wife in London and took the wife of a convict to comfort him whilst in Hobart. William Sorell (lieutenant governor from 1816 to 1824) had a succession of mistresses as he careered around the empire, and in Hobart, he lived openly with his latest paramour. These liaisons haunted his administration, and when the upright John Bigge, who had been appointed by the government in the early 1820s to inquire into the governance of these colonies, came visiting he refused to meet formally with the lieutenant governor. Indeed, the purpose of Bigge’s Eastern Commission (as it was known) was precisely to recommend how to bring imperial order to such places. Bigge presaged the coming force of evangelical morality: Van Diemen’s Land under Lieutenant Governor Sir George Arthur (1824–36) was to become a model of social and moral order within a very short space of time.29 Ultimately the threat to political and social order was of most concern to those responsible for imperial authority. The forms of disorder, of course, varied between colonies. In the case of South Africa, its most obvious manifestations were the trek Boers, who several times made good on their desire to escape from imperial rule. In Australia it was the bushrangers who were a permanent feature of the landscape until well into the nineteenth century. And it is worth taking a look at the bush ranging phase of Van Diemen’s Land history to illustrate this point. Van Diemen’s Land was an open island prison surrounded by the effective wall of very cold seas, but there was nothing to stop convicts escaping to the bush, apart from the not inconsiderable fear of survival in that hostile environment. It emerged as a social problem around 1815, and its most famous representative was Michael Howe, a classic social bandit who gave himself the title of “lieutenant governor of the woods.” Howe epitomized another aspect of disorder in his cross-race alliance with the Aboriginal group led by Mannalargenna and his Aboriginal companion, Mary, who bore him at least one child. Equally, Aboriginal trackers were crucial to Howe’s capture, although he might also have been betrayed by his companions.

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Bush ranging always had some cultural appeal as an antidote to the brutal regime of convict discipline, and bush rangers were sometimes hailed as heroes by those who looked on them as “martyrs to convictism.” Unsurprisingly, in an age of Luddism and insurrectionary tendencies back home, this was enough to shake the dust off the shabby colonial administration. Thomas Davey, then lieutenant governor, declared martial law in 1815 specifically to organize an effective campaign which his successor William Sorell brought to completion with the destruction of Howe’s gang and the bludgeoning to death and decapitation of Howe himself.30 Bush ranging was relatively quickly overcome in Van Diemen’s Land—a second wave was effectively crushed by the mid-1820s. But the campaign against bush rangers provided the government with a proving ground for techniques that could be turned against the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The same strategies—martial law, roving parties, and Aboriginal trackers—were used in the succeeding Black War against the Indigenous people. As the fate of Howe illustrates, also, brutal methods were used that slotted easily into the regime of convict discipline. To the mid-Victorian chroniclers of early Tasmanian history, the bush rangers were merely symptomatic of the wider state of moral depravity in the colony.31 Following the investigations of the Bigge Commission in the early 1820s, however, governors were appointed who embodied the evangelical moral resoluteness within the Victorian turn of mind. Its highest form was found in Van Diemen’s Land in the person of the morally upright and supremely efficient Sir George Arthur, who arrived in May 1824. Arthur was deeply embedded in the overlapping networks of Evangelicals and colonial officials, and his job was to bring social, moral, and political order to the island.32 It must be said that Arthur succeeded in his mission like nobody else before him, and probably none after, either. Before he arrived Hobart was unsafe at night; convicts wandered around without restriction; robberies were common. Arthur initiated a program of town improvement, launched a building program, initiated a field police, and constructed proper barracks. After a couple of years he could boast that there had not been a single burglary in Hobart in eighteen months. The model prison complex of Port Arthur that Arthur also constructed embodied his idea of reforming behavior through strictly ordered control.33 Arthur’s evangelical discipline was policed by an extensive bureaucratic system that regulated the lives of both the convicts and the free settlers. He created a board of discipline in 1830 to administer his righteous code. Arthur’s moral sword knew no favorites. If free settlers wanted convict servants to work for them, they had to prove that were morally worthy of being example setting employers. Allowing convict servants to eat Christmas dinner with the free family was enough to call punishment upon their heads. The harshness of his prison regime occasioned some pretty serious criticism even at the time. His moral rectitude showed little mercy to bushrangers or convicts. Arthur is interesting because he embodied the dependence of evangelical “humanitarian” reform upon coercive control. As we shall argue, Arthur was guiltily complicit in the destruction of the Indigenous Tasmanians. But he was without pity toward convicts. To Arthur, the local Aboriginal

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people were children of god who needed his empathy and pity. The latter, by definition, hardly deserved pity, only an unrelenting reformative discipline to lash them back into moral probity. In pursuit of this goal Arthur unleashed a reign of terror that was unprecedented in the history of Australia, perhaps even the empire. He used the scaffold unmercifully. There were more hangings in his term of office than ever before or since—a total of 260, with 160 in 1826–27 alone as the campaign against the bush rangers reached its grisly climax. By the time he had finished, Van Diemen’s Land was probably the most heavily policed and surveilled state in the world before the advent of the German Democratic Republic. There was one policeman to eighty-eight residents, and most of the policemen themselves were convicts. Small surprise that there was general rejoicing in the streets when Arthur left to be replaced by the more genial Sir John Franklin.34 Sir George Grey, too, was taken aback by the disorder that confronted him when he arrived in Adelaide to take over the governorship of South Australia from the fumbling hands of Sir George Gawler in May 1841. A few years later he wrote a letter to his uncle describing the social chaos that had confronted him. It was a colony with a heterogeneous population: Germans escaping religious persecution, Chinese, Indians, Frenchmen, Natives, Catholic priests, English country bumpkins, and Irish all accustomed to different laws, all ignorant of one another not knowing what will grow, not accustomed to acting together, with no common interests, ignorant of the nature of the Government under which they are to live, of the personal character and capacity of their governor who had arrived from the other extremity of the earth to govern them they did not know how—such was the nature of the society into which I was thrown. What was worse was that they tended to import the struggles of the old country into the world of the new. Germans had fled Prussia to escape religious discrimination, but immediately began to factionalize and “wishing to establish here that persecution from which they themselves had fled only a few months previously.”35 Bringing order to the colonies was something that was left pretty much to chance. The quality of the governor and other officials was of key importance at a time when the infrastructure of rule was thin. It took strong-minded men like Arthur and Grey to impose their will and even then they could not ensure that it would be done. New settlements did not come with a ready-made police force, for example. They had to raise the resources for that themselves. It was two years after South Australia was created that the first public meeting was held to debate the question of public order and the need for a police force. The newly established Port Phillip Protectorate moved more rapidly. A police court was established six months after the governor of New South Wales had proclaimed his authority over the area in 1835.36 In nascent urban areas from the 1830s through to the 1850s, an arc of order was created to embody the coming of settler society. Penelope Edmonds has tracked

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this for Melbourne, (originally Port Phillip), which was created in 1835 by a group of buccaneering transplants from Van Diemen’s Land seeking new pastures for their ever-hungry flocks of sheep. Originally, Port Phillip was as wild a place as could be found. Bacchanalian corroberees between whites and Aboriginal people sprang up alongside the usual arbitrary personal and collective violence. Order arrived in the familiar cast of high-minded, evangelical administrators—in this case the Moravian Charles Joseph La Trobe—assisted by George Robinson and his harried band of protectors of Aborigines. But order hardly came with a wave of a wand. Aside from the horrible violence against the Indigenous people in the countryside, the Town Council did not get around to imposing its colonial order on the town until the mid-1840s when a spate of legislation was passed against various Aboriginal “nuisances” that befouled the pavements of an increasingly white-dominated urban environment. Early Port Phillip had been dotted with camps housing Aboriginal people. These were increasingly regulated by the Protectors and then removed from sight altogether—coincident with the abolition of the Protectorate itself, this phase of its work having been completed. The process of creating a settler order out of frontier disorder was not finished until the 1860s. By then, few Aboriginal people came into the urban center of Melbourne, where twenty years before they had mingled freely and openly.37 Constructing an ordered society out of disorder was not simply a matter of institutions, buildings, and law, however. To the evangelical mind of the early Victorians, the most pressing task was to bring moral order to the licentious social classes that threatened to overwhelm frail islands of probity. This was a very powerful sentiment that should not be underestimated. Indeed, this mission could join with geo-political considerations in the decision to officially colonize, as was the case with New Zealand. The social disorder that characterized New Zealand before 1840, and particularly places like Russell on the Bay of Islands which was described as “pandemonium on earth,” played into (and was played up by) those groups pressing for the British state to step in and establish an official presence, which it duly did. This was not a disorder that was associated with Maori society. It was not a classically imperial reason for colonization. It was rather an appreciation of the moral disorder that followed from the promiscuous presence of white races of several nationalities without the leavening of institutions of moral governance.38 To early Victorian eyes the absence of the restraining and reforming influences of bourgeois morality posed a serious affront to this imperial world. For Victorians, social order rested upon domestic order. Troubling portents of social disarray were presented by the mixed-race communities that were spawned by this moment of empire such as the sealing settlements in the Bass Straits. These communities sparked evangelical anxiety because they seemed to presage degeneration of both whites and Aboriginals. The sealing economy rested upon white enslavement of Aboriginal women. Equally, white males were being integrated into the networks and culture of Aboriginal society. Such exchange was necessary if these communities were to survive economically and politically. But the different moral structures—the practice of polygamy and the lack of proper marriages—of these

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island communities in the Bass Straits led George Augustus Robinson to advocate the break-up of functioning domestic and economic units as part of his mission to “save” the Indigenous people of Van Diemen’s Land. In his campaign to remove these women from their men, Robinson used the image of violent coercion by the white men to justify his case. It was not the “barbarism” of Aboriginal society that worried him, but, rather, the way this imperial connection worked to undermine the transmission of civilized values to the Indigenous Tasmanians. This was not without some reason. These were rough frontier societies, and it was not difficult to portray the sealers as committing the same sort of violence against their “wives” that settlers practiced against Indigenous peoples—violence which Robinson and others were committed to stopping. The truth, however, was more complicated. These communities were founded upon a productive exchange between Indigenous cultures and the sealer incomers. Even Robinson had to admit that relationships were often affective and that they gave their children both loving care and education. Indeed, they were, in some way, models for a future mixed-race empire. It is fitting that it was in these communities that Aboriginal culture, politics, and demography lived on to become the force it is today in modern-day Tasmania.39 The sealing communities were reflections of the spaces in this empire where distinctive patterns of engagement between Indigenous peoples and “colonizers” could be constructed. They were microcosms of the wider themes of exchange, reciprocity, and mutuality that run through race relations during this period. While these communities hardly replicated the domestic ideals of Victorian society, neither were they founded on violence alone. They reflected a local economy that tied together the white sealers and the Aboriginal tribes of the interior who each years negotiated the supply of female labor. Two of the daughters of Mannalargenna, one of the leading chiefs, whose position was increasingly tied up with this economic network, lived with sealers. Through their “wives” the sealers were allied with the clan structures of the bigger island. The relationships between the “straitsmen” and the clans were reciprocal. But it needs to be emphasized that the rules of the relationship were determined by the clans. Even the “marriages” of the women to the sealers followed clan rules. Both sides gained from the arrangements. The clans provided the former with labor, expertise, and companionship and support outside of the sealing season, and they benefited from the trade that the sealers generated.40

Cultural and social intimacies The social formations of this part of empire at this period were fluid and unstable. Social relations and social and cultural intimacies were not defined by the priorities of the imperial presence. They were the product of negotiated power relations at a time before Indigenous power had been eroded into a subordinate subjection. How then were the cultural and social intimacies of this period distinctive? In this respect, the outstanding feature in this part of empire was the porous and ill-defined boundaries between the Indigenous and imperial worlds. There

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was constant engagement, observation, and involvement of one kind or another. Cross-race relations were easier to establish in this period than they were to become later in the century. William Dawes, the astronomer with the First Fleet, quickly developed an interest in Aboriginal culture and formed a close relationship with the Aboriginal woman Peteygarang, from whom he learned a lot and with whom he may have been romantically involved. Dawes may not have been a typical member of the settler community. He became more sympathetic toward the First Peoples of Australia during his stay in the colony, and after being cajoled into serving on a punitive expedition, he made it clear to Phillip that he would not obey such an order again. But neither was Dawes an unknown type. Racial crossings were a significant characteristic of the social landscape of this period and they ranged the spectrum of social possibilities. When New South Wales governor Richard Bourke moved to establish colonial authority over Port Phillip (later the state of Victoria) that free-booting entrepreneurs from Tasmania established in 1835, his instructions included the encouragement of inter-racial marriage between Aboriginal men and white women.41 We have already gestured to the centrality of inter-racial marriages or relationships to the history of New Zealand in this period. In South Island in particular they were firmly rooted in the economic structures of the region. Although crossrace marriages in the imperial setting may be seen as a way for the intruders to gain access to Indigenous land, they may not be reduced simply to yet another strategy of imperial hegemony. In the case of New Zealand, and even as we shall see the cross-race relationships in the Bass Straits, their terms were as likely to be set by Indigenous customs and culture as by the priorities of the outsiders. Angela Wanhalla has demonstrated that they ran the gamut in terms of emotional and affective character, were not transient merely to this period, and even though they were replaced by a different racial regime after the 1860s, they continued to be a presence throughout the nineteenth century. What distinguished the early nineteenth century, however, was the openness with which they were received, even though official missionary opinion ultimately came to associate them with moral disorder and sexual degradation. They existed in plain air with a body of discrete protocols and patterns. If they were transactional on the part of many of the British men—and often polygamous—it was equally true that means of divorce were available for Maori women. Indeed, these relationships were structured largely in terms of Maori kinship and cultural priorities. In some places they installed permanent communities. Their significance and promise should not be judged by their later categorization. It was only in the 1850s that such arrangements became controversial and begin to be disparaged on racial grounds. And this was a historical process, not something implicit in them from beginning when they might be seen as harbingers of a multi-racial society; after the 1850s they were stigmatized as signs of social degradation.42 Personal contact was a particularly central theme to how cross-race relations were imagined. George Grey’s recruitment of Indigenous staff members—a sort of embryonic Indigenous professionalization—was unusual for a governor. But

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the search for intermediaries was not. It was a common theme to the experience of colonial administrators during this period. From late 1827 through 1828 as Sir George Arthur was casting about for a policy that would “conciliate” the Aboriginal tribes, he spent some time and effort trying to cultivate the Aboriginal man Kickerterpoller (“Black Tom”) to serve as an emissary to the tribes of the interior. Kickerterpoller was a likely candidate for such a role. He moved easily between the Aboriginal and the colonial worlds. He was credentialed by Gilbert Robertson, a magistrate and member of Arthur’s colonial establishment (who was himself a mixed-race West Indian) vouched for him as someone “I cannot speak with too much praise” for his knowledge of the customs of the tribes who had served as an interpreter for Tasmanian Aboriginals that Robertson had captured. Kickerterpoller even played a role in policy formation, dismissing Arthur’s idea to control Aboriginal movement through a system of passports but approving of his response of an offshore island as a haven for the indigenes. It is hardly surprising, then, that Kickerterpoller became an associate of George Robinson on his “friendly missions” to the inland tribes.43 This kind of consultation and contact between colonial governors and Indigenous subjects could be important at moments of policy crisis. Following the famous Pinjarra massacre in Western Australia, in March 1835 a meeting was brokered by Miago between Governor James Stirling and the local Bindjareb people in an attempt to create a framework for peace. Miago was well qualified to do this. He was well known to the small settler community. He had been active as a gobetween and mediator since 1833 and was described by the local settler press as an “ambassador for peace.” Later he was to serve as a guide on the Beagle during its 1837–38 on its hydrographic expedition along the coast, and he was also to become an informant for Grey.44 Virtually every colonial official who operated at the local level in this period needed intermediaries. George Robinson relied heavily upon a permanent group of Aboriginal men and women on his “friendly missions” into the Tasmanian interior. Matthew Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines for South Australia, recruited several such men who regularly accompanied him in his visits to the various tribal groups. Indeed, even those who were considered terrorists could also be used for such purposes. And the early push in Australia to create native police forces was predicated on the assumption that they would play the role of intermediaries as well as enforcers of imperial order.45 Similarly, behind every successful missionary in this period stood native helpers and facilitators. Often they combined the services of domestic servant with a teacher, providing instruction in the language or culture. Protectors of Aborigines in Australia always had a stable of close Indigenous associates, recruited from a variety of sources, not excluding prisoners taken during the frequent clashes with settlers. This was the case with Pulkanta, for example, captured during conflict at the Rufus River in August 1841 and entrusted to the care of Matthew Moorhouse, who sent him off with Edward Eyre to establish the Moorunde station. Pulkanta was only one of a number of Indigenous aides to Eyre who accompanied him on

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his various expeditions to the surrounding tribes. These relationships were not simply instruments of governance. They were functionally useful to both sides of the imperial frontier. They provided a resource for Indigenous agency or at least a familiarity with the ways of the colonizer that could be exploited.46 Such relationships also possessed significant possibilities for bargained exchanges between the races, which included European assimilation into Indigenous cultural and social communities. In the mid-1820s the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld and Awabakal chief Biraban began the translation of St. Luke’s Gospel. This was an enterprise that involved genuine collaboration and mutual learning by both parties. It reflected the willingness of Aboriginal peoples to work with aspects of Western culture, and it demanded that Threlkeld acquire a deeper understanding of Aboriginal culture with Biraban as his teacher. Biraban was a skilled intermediary between the settler and Aboriginal worlds who managed to preserve his life and integrity. From his very early days he had moved between the two; he was the equivalent of a cultural guide when visiting scholars and clergy wanted to experience contact with Aboriginal society. He also served the imperial state as a tracker whose skills were used to hunt down escaped convicts.47 But there was a deeper purpose behind such intimacies. Personal contact was a key mechanism of the humanitarian conception of how the civilizing progress happened. It was expected that such contacts would inject cultural change into individual Indigenous people who would then carry the germ of civilization to others of their race. Thus, after several years with Moorhouse and Eyre, Pulkanta was set loose to return to his tribe as an agent of civilizational change. Aboriginal women who demonstrated an aptitude for Victorian domesticity and Christianity could be married off to suitable candidates from the male white working class and begin to produce a cross-race class of settlers. Although this was not a common occurrence, the mere fact that it was toyed with during this period is reflective of the space that existed for alternative social relations that in a later era would become unthinkable. It was a key strategy of protectors to develop benefactor-type relationships on both a personal and an organizational level. Pulkanta is reported to have formed a close attachment to Eyre, although it is likely to have been transactional on both sides.48 For this generation of settlers there was an everyday intimacy occasioned by spatial realities of closeness. These intimacies defy easy classification. Much attention has been paid to the sexual dimension, but they were usually more than one dimensional, and, indeed, each one surely contained considerable ambiguity. William Dawes’s relationship with Peyteganna may have included a sexual component, but it was also about cultural exploration. In the case of the Bass Straits communities, sexual relations expressed a wider incorporation into networks of community and economy. We do not know how common these kinds of relationships were. But they represented opportunities for cross-race relationships cutting across the colonial divide that became more difficult as the century wore on. Nicholas Brodie, for example, has written about a close friendship that was claimed by ex-convict James Gravenor and the celebrated Aboriginal woman Truganini. They had met as members of George Robinson’s journeys into the Tasmanian interior. Gravenor

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was a convict member of the group, and Truganini was one of Robinson’s closest Aboriginal collaborators. They reputedly remained friendly until her death, and Gravenor spoke at her funeral. Similarly, Maurice Meyrick, an early South Australian settler, formed such a close relationship with the headman of a local group of First Peoples that he was inducted as a member of the tribe.49 As significant as the frequency of such intimacies are the psychology and moods they generated. Some sense of this may be gained by returning to the record of contact and conversations with Aboriginal people by George Moore, the West Australian settler mentioned earlier. His memoirs provide a good example of the conflicted emotions that were triggered by the contacts between indigenes and settlers in a landscape without way points of knowledge, before a system of knowledge had been created that would allow him to navigate through the territory of the Indigenous world. Moore’s descriptions of his interaction with Indigenous people are streaked with contradiction. One moment he is sympathetic toward native lives; the next moment he is harshly condemnatory. On one page he expresses approval of their culture; on the next page he is fearful and wary. At one instant he is convinced that conciliatory relations are possible and desired, but this is quickly replaced by a willingness to exercise physical violence, even against women. The absence of a consistent, rationalized tone and framework to his account, the conflicting and clashing dispositions were not the product of a confused mind. It was the precise reflection of this historical moment when Indigenous-imperial relations were provisional and impermanent. The following story—among several that could have been selected—captures this reality. It concerns an unexpected encounter between Moore and a notorious chief Yagan, the son of a leader in the resistance to the colonial presence who had been arrested for the murder of a settler. Yagan thought that his father was on board ship awaiting punishment. In fact, he had already been executed and Yagan himself was a wanted man, as were some of the other Aboriginal people who accompanied him. Moore was with other whites and some Indigenous allies, but he was clearly outnumbered by the opposing party. From the way Moore described the encounter, it was most likely contrived by the Aboriginal people in order to conduct negotiations about the violence between them and settlers. In any case, that is what happened. Both Moore and Yagan laid out their respective positions. Moore tried to impress upon the Aboriginal interlocutors that British justice would punish them and settlers equally for murders or theft. Moore understood Yagan to reply, “You came to our country; you have driven us from our haunts, and disturbed us in our occupations: as we walk in our own country, we are fired upon by the white men; why should the white men treat us so?” This was a sentiment with which Moore had some sympathy—he referred to Yagan as the “Wallace” of his tribe, in reference to the medieval Scottish king who also resisted English dominion. Although Moore was not sure that he understood Yagan correctly, what impressed him was how “he came forward, avowed himself, and entered into a long argument and defense of his conduct . . . and I confess he had almost as much of the argument as I had [and] . . . delivered himself boldly.”

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The key issue Yagan wished to get across was that should his father be executed, he would take revenge. Moore replied, “Ya-gan kill all white man, soldier man and every man kill Yagan,” at which Yagan “scowled a look of daring defiance, and turned on his heel with an air of ineffable contempt.” Moore recorded how even though they were in sight of symbols of imperial authority such as a magistrate’s residence, and a barracks, he was powerless to prevent “this proclaimed and dangerous outlaw, with a price on his head, and threats (not idle) on his tongue” escape unmolested. At that moment Moore records considerable sympathy and respect for Yagan’s courage and articulateness. He deprecates the idea of using ruses or artifice to capture him or ambushes to kill him. “There is something in his daring which one is forced to admire.” Yet a short while later, Yagan was killed. And in a common colonial ritual, his head was cut off. Moore expressed regret that he did not have it himself, although he thought it would find a home in a museum back home.50 Two things impress me about this story. The first is the mixed emotions that Moore expressed regarding Yagan. He was uncertain how to categorize Yagan. Their encounter was quite intense and somewhat personal—Yagan was there to try and secure the release of his father. Moore probably correctly understood the point that Yagan was making about settler intrusion and violence. But the fact that he interpreted Yagan’s diatribe as he did is itself significant. It reflected the unease he felt about what the British were doing there. Moore could not decide whether to regard Yagan as “an unfeeling savage” or a man worthy of respect. This was a moment of intense tension and conflict between settlers and local Indigenous people, and Moore’s account swerves between recording moments of peaceful contact and musings on the need for conciliation and the difficulties of achieving it. “If we do not make an effort to come to a friendly understanding and arrangement with them they will annoy us, for we are not able to drive them away so as to secure ourselves, without their extermination”—which he clearly did not want.51 The second outstanding feature of this vignette was the volatility that was integral to the encounter: how the emotions of peace and conciliation and violence and conflict were interlinked in unstable combination. Moore’s relations with the indigenes were intimate and complicated. He had no fixed view of them: were they savages to be treated as such, or did they possess qualities of decent sensibility? Each sentiment could replace the other in an instant, depending on what he saw and experienced. The result was that the boundaries between peace and not peace, violence and conciliation were unstable, and easily and suddenly breached. In the midst of that tense encounter both men kept their distance. Yagan kept his spear handy; Moore swings from wishing he had more force available to effect a capture to respecting Yagan’s quality of argument and his defense of his homeland. The thinness of the partitions between Moore’s emotions was reflective of the way the intimacies of the period easily shaded from one state to another, and how they may be seen as symptomatic of the “disorder” of the period. Moore was frequently in close contact with the Aboriginal people and was not sure what to make of it or of them: in what ways were they savages or not? This is another way of

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saying that the conventions of intimacy had not yet been established; the boundaries of empire at this moment were unstable and this was just one example of that. But Moore’s volatility was not a function of cultural blindness. On the contrary, it is obvious that he was constantly alert to the meaning of the signs he was seeing. The problem was that his eye had yet to become a fully formed imperial eye.

Knowledge and observation: a different eye How did the agents of imperial mission process and understand what they were seeing during their encounters with Indigenous peoples? What were the qualities of the knowledge that they then created? If it is the case that agents of the colonial mission saw their world through an “imperial eye,” what was the character and nature of what they saw? It is obviously true that the gaze of people like George Moore or George Robinson were filtered through notions of cultural hierarchy and a variety of Christian assumptions about universal humanity. It is equally true that visual observations and the conditions under which it occurred are inseparable from power relations. But the colonial eye at this historical moment occurred within a context where there was no authoritative system of colonial knowledge. The eye that people like Robinson and others possessed, therefore, contained a degree of attentive vigilance which was alert to the “realities” of Indigenous agency which it then had to negotiate and compromise with. It was also an imperial eye that rested upon the kind of cultural intimacies we described earlier.52 Indeed, one purpose of such intimacies was to allow cultural interchange and understanding to be created. There was a strong consciousness in people like Sir George Grey that colonial knowledge depended upon close contact with Indigenous peoples. Grey’s contribution to the ethnography of the Maori world stands as a long-lasting example of such an effort. Grey was typical rather than being unusual. In this period, colonial knowledge was formed by the kind of relationships that Grey forged and that people such as the protectors and missionaries produced. As this suggests, the key feature of colonial knowledge in this period and in this geography was the absence of a formal knowledge system, produced by colonial “experts” with a long history of encounter to draw on that allowed the agents of empire to frame and comprehend what they saw and experienced. Such a system of colonial knowledge production only came with the end of the nineteenth century and the development of new disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.53 The case of Edward Shortland, in South Island New Zealand in the early 1840s, is an example of how colonial knowledge was produced in this period. Shortland served as both a sub-Protector of Aborigines and later as an interpreter for various land commissions of the time. He became fluent in the Maori language, and he was an enthusiastic collector of cultural information about Maori. Like Grey he became an expert on their culture and ethnography, publishing two books on the subject. Shortland’s knowledge was based on intimate relations with the Maori that came from his dependence upon them to facilitate his work. On one occasion he spent

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six days in conversation with one chief. The quality of his knowledge was bound to be open to Maori understandings. This was not purely intentional on his part. As an early visitor, his reliance upon the Maori was much greater than it would have been later. He only knew where he was going thanks to his Maori guides. But his dependent proximity to Maori meant that what he might have wanted to see through his “imperial eye” was continually challenged by the “realities” that were produced by his relationship with the iwi. And this determined what he came to understand about the Maori. To take one significant example, the maps that he presented in his reports and in his later books were in fact drawn by the Maori. In this case, then, it was the Maori who were creating colonial knowledge not the imperial surveyors. Tony Ballantyne has made the point that the quality of knowledge Shortland produced was fundamentally different from later knowledge structures that emerged from the 1860s. His was a knowledge that was distinctive from the “increasingly disembodied and depersonalized forms” that were produced when knowledge had been systematized and categorized by colonial authorities or academic disciplines.54 So how may we describe what constituted the imperial gaze at this particular moment? I  think it contained two groups of qualities. First, it was above all an inquiring eye. It was concerned to learn, to gather facts, and to look at its subjects with a dose of cultural relativism. Of course it brought its own expectations, perspectives, and judgments. But one is struck by the eagerness to observe and record. There is a quality of wanting to know, rather than a quality of already knowing. And the second cluster of features that the imperial eye possessed was its capacity for mis-readings and its volatility. These qualities derived precisely from the fact that there was no established body of accepted data that would enable observers to comprehend everything they were seeing; they did not yet have the categories into which they could fit the behavior, the customs, and rituals they might observe. But there was a significant element of cultural relativism running through the imperial gaze at this time. These themes were to be found in books such as the journals of their expeditions published by Edward Eyre and George Grey. They were typical examples of a genre initially established by Captain Cook; they included a narrative part that told the story of the expedition, its adventures and dangers followed by large sections that described Aboriginal cultures and customs in all their complexity. Eyre’s contained a more prominent programmatic content than Grey’s because Eyre included the knowledge he had gathered from his time at Moorunde, whereas Grey’s journals were those of a neophyte to the world of Australia. Naturally, they brought their own judgmental views to understand the indigenes. This is more evident in the case of Grey, who believed in the progressive development of cultures rather than the more common notion Indigenous peoples were regressed from a prior higher state. He found the backwardness of the Aboriginal people precisely to lie in the stronghold of traditional cultural forms. But there was a sharp distinction between his normative perception and his recording of the songs, the art, even the poetry that he noted as well as the rituals around death

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and belief in sorcery. It is the quality of cool acceptance of what he observes that is the key thing I wish to emphasize.55 The observational account of The Southern Districts of New Zealand by Edward Shortland is another example of this genre. It is a 300-page survey colored by a cultural relativism toward the Maori. It took seriously the history of the Maori as they themselves recorded it through oral tradition—an account that is now generally accepted. Shortland presented the Maori version of their stories with minimal comment and no condescension, in a similar way that Grey too recorded his ethnographies. Even cannibalism is treated as matter of fact. When Shortland recounted an invitation to witness evidence of supernatural beliefs, he both admits failure to understand and a failure to find evidence of cheating. Indeed, in a striking passage he draws a parallel with rituals in Christian Europe that appealed to supernatural forces.56 The concern to observe and record was echoed in the popularity of making vocabulary lists. This was often one of the first things missionaries did when they got settled in their mission place, and explorers and settlers, too, did the same thing. It is no surprise that Grey published a Vocabulary of the Dialects Spoken by the Aboriginal Races of South West Australia soon after he had completed his journey down the western side of the continent. There are many such collections. They were part of the imperial project—a way of “becoming familiar with their associations and trains of thought” so that we can “stimulate the faculties and promote the intellectual progress of a barbarian tribe,” and they demonstrate the importance that was attached to philology as a way of understanding human origins. When Grey was governor at the Cape, he sponsored and helped fund a major project of this sort directed by Wilhelm Bleek.57 The observational eye was important also in policy formation. Soon after he arrived in New Zealand, Sir George Grey was presented with memoranda that addressed the key issues that confronted him. One of the documents written by Reverend Octavius Hadfield, a long-standing missionary expert on the Maori, addressed the key area of land policy. It provided a detailed description of Maori land practices, and the many notations in Grey’s hand show that he studied it closely. It was a handbook on the complexities of Maori land law and the policy it outlined was the policy Grey followed. But to regard this document as a blueprint for imperial governance would be too simplistic. It proposed a hybridized policy that mixed imperial authority and traditional Maori land customs and social hierarchies. Chiefly authority would be maintained; they would be given the status of magistrates and thus would be associated with the imperial state. The governor would retain control over land sales, and they would be administered in the context of the complexities of Maori rights to title. This was not a prescription for a settler land policy. Indeed, quite the reverse; it was designed to prevent their distorting the land market with the introduction of capitalist practices, which some Maori were only too pleased to adopt.58 The modes of observation and the creation of knowledge about Indigenous peoples were riven with incoherence and tension—reflecting again the fluid instability

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of imperial systems in the period. This was particularly the case among missionary observers who suffered from the disadvantage of exaggerated prior expectation. They tended to arrive at their location anticipating an implicit receptiveness from their waiting flock, believing that God’s word was the key to unlocking common attributes of humanity. When this did not happen, and particularly when they encountered the complicated arena of Indigenous politics, crisis and despair could easily be triggered. Most, of course, adjusted to these circumstances in one way or another. But the challenge missionaries faced was common to all those engaged in observation and knowledge building: how were they to understand what they were seeing? How were they to know whether what they thought they were seeing was safe to act upon? This was a challenge that could not always be met with the urbanity that we have so far recorded. Indeed, it was all too possible for it to generate tension and anxiety, which in turn fueled the volatility and instability that characterized the frontier of empire at this time.59 There were many incidents that could be taken to illustrate this point, some of which had significant policy ramifications, like the celebrated Boyd affair in New Zealand when the massacre of some British seamen in 1809 was sparked by what Maori interpreted as ill-treatment of a chief ’s son. But they typically erupted from small-scale encounters that seldom resonated beyond their transient moment. The story we recounted earlier of Captain Lockyer’s experience in establishing a garrison at King George’s Sound in southwest Australia is one such example. As we have noted, after an initial, encouraging friendly contact, a watering party was suddenly attacked in view of Lockyer and several others. The fact that Lockyer took a broad view of this event suggests how the power of humanitarian discourse of conciliation extended fairly low down the colonial chain of command. But it also illustrates how he was confronted with events that he had no ready-made framework to understand. Even when Lockyer did learn the context, he still mis-read the meaning of the event. It turned out that a party of nearby sealers had kidnapped some Aboriginal women for sexual services and, in an unrelated incident, had attacked some men. The spearing was an act of judicial retribution. Lockyer interpreted it as revenge. But this was not right; it was too stylized and ritualized for that. Similarly, he mis-read other signs, such as the initial friendly contact, which was a reconnoiter by the Aboriginals to assess Lockyer’s own intentions. The men who had lingered around Lockyer’s party helping them hunt kangaroo and birds was interpreted by Lockyer as reflecting a curiosity about things British on the man’s part. In fact, it was more likely that he was a spy to communicate to his fellows the appropriate moment for the act of retribution.60 Just to recount the reconstruction of this event is to convey a sense of the tangled complexity of this single encounter. It was an insignificant event in the wider history of British colonialism, but it is significant in revealing how confusing and uncertain the experience of encounter must have been. Contemplating this enables us to understand more completely why the recorded evidence from settlers is riven with volatility and instability. Let us glance again at the West Australian settler, George Moore, to illustrate this. He seems to have been a similar type to Lockyer,

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well-intentioned and wanting to be well-disposed toward the Aboriginal people. At one point, he writes how the natives are not so despicable a race as was at first supposed. They are active, bold, and shrewd, expert in thieving, as many (and myself among the number) have experienced; they are courageous when attacked . . . [and how] we are on good terms with them. I  walk occasionally to and from Perth, through the woods, alone and unarmed; so you may perceive, from this circumstance, we are not in much dread of them. ‍ hen some pages later, he reports how on encountering a group whose behavior T his party could not understand, they prepared for an attack and quickly struck camp in a bit of a panic. No attack came and “curiosity seemed to be their only motive in remaining with us.” And so it went. He had some pigs stolen and immediately prepared “to watch and attack the natives, and kill, burn, blow up, or otherwise destroy the enemy.” A few pages later, observing how a husband behaved toward his wounded wife, he was again favorably impressed with the humanity of the local indigenes, but shortly thereafter he was again on his guard, preparing for a possible attack on his house, “my guns in readiness, and in a convenient situation for instant use.”61 Such volatilities were reactions to a changing tempo of relationships that were outside clearly defined parameters of knowledge. When Moore sees what he interprets as friendship, he feels conciliatory and optimistic that understanding—and therefore peaceful accommodation—is possible. When he experiences violations of his standards, he feels a puzzled outrage—“I give the natives up as wholly devoid of gratitude or good feeling.” The truth was that he was constantly struggling to reach an understanding that was perhaps impossible to achieve. Thus, on another occasion when a pig was stolen, he recorded how the people he suspected insisted on denying their involvement “and pretended to be so very angry with some whom they named that I believed them sincere.” But he admitted, “it is difficult to ascertain the real fact” and he yearned for certainty: “I wish it was either peace or war between us.”62 Moore was a thoughtful settler, in constant contact with the local Aboriginal people, and whose diary is full of the accounts of those encounters. He noted the things they eat, he tried to analyze their family relationships, he observed their customs, he was sensitive to their expressions, he worried a lot about how best to handle them, and how to read their intentions, he negotiated with them, and he advocated policies that allowed them to give evidence and thus avoid arbitrary justice. His instincts were to avoid resort to force in his relations with Aboriginal people. But we can see from these few passages how incomprehension and misunderstanding fueled his volatility. No more than Lockyer could he read Aboriginal behavior in such a way as to contextualize their thefts, for example. Only when he thinks there is mutual understanding—as in the earlier encounter recorded with Yagan—do things fall into their proper place for him. But they can just as easily be displaced and turn him to violence.

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Cultural mis-readings, then, were integral to the relationships of this period and were ingrained at every level of colonial encounters. We shall have occasion to return to this question when we consider the matter of colonial violence. To some extent, the fog of misunderstanding was recognized at the time. In the memo from Octavius Hadfield to Sir George Grey that I cited earlier, he warned how the land market had been seriously disrupted by settlers who had no understanding of the intricacies of Maori land-holding customs. The lack of competent interpreters resulted in mis-readings of intentions and expectations, and many disputes had arisen with much bad feeling on both sides. It was this, Hadfield reported, that fed the social tension that led to the war that Sir George Grey was currently fighting. Grey was to take that lack of knowledge very much to heart.

Conclusion The engagements of the colonial encounter at this historical moment in the British Empire of the southern seas occurred in conditions that were relatively unstructured by culture and convention. And, at the local level, imperial structures were hardly hegemonic or even dominant. Only on occasion did the global reality of superior British power intrude into the local realities. The imperial forces, for example, experienced several serious defeats before peace with the Maori was declared in 1846, and this was a peace that reflected more a stalemate than a defeat for Maori forces. It was not so much that the British approached Indigenous peoples from a position of weakness. It was more that power was diffused and fragmented. There was not much of an “imperial center,” either politically, legally, or even militarily. The imperial state in Australia hardly existed until the 1830s. And in New Zealand the colonial state did not establish its dominance until the 1860s. Nor—as this chapter has endeavored to show—had an imperial culture been formed that could exercise its sway over how engagements with Indigenous people should be structured.63 These realities created a receptivity to conceptions of how imperial social and political relations might be structured going forward that pictured an imperial regime that revolved around conciliation and collaboration across the racial lines. Understanding this vision is necessary to understanding how and why those who were making empire in the early part of the century behaved as they did and believed what they did. And it is to that matter of the mentalities of empire at this moment that I now want to turn.

Notes 1 The cite is from Julie Evans, “Beyond the Frontier: Possibilities and Precariousness along Australia’s Southern Coast,” in Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, ed. Lynette Russell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 152. More generally, Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Anne Salmond, Between Two Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773–1815 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 1997).

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2 Salmond, Between Two Worlds, 397, a process that has been described memorably in Inga Clendennin, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (New York: New York University Press, 2005). On the various styles of engagement during this period, see, for example, “Introduction,” Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam, Indigenous Intermediaries (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2015), 1–10; Amy Roberts and Daryle Wesley, “Cultural Contact and Indigenous Australians,” Special Edition of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 42 (December 2018): 2. 3 Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Mark Doyle, Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax (London: Routledge, 2016). 4 See the important article by Tracey Banivanua Mar, “Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse,” Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 1–28. This article traces those themes in the three very different locations of Port Phillip, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Tahiti. 5 Ibid., 3. And it is necessary to read the imperial sources through this insight. 6 Rachel Standfield, “Violence and the Intimacy of Imperial Ethnography: The ‘Endeavour’ in the Pacific,” in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, ed. tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Chicago and Urbana: Chicago University Press, 2009), 32–33, 35; Salmon, Between Two Worlds, 2–23, 27; James Cook, The Journals: Prepared From the Original Manuscripts by J.C. Beaglehole for the Hakluyt Society, 1955–67, selected and ed. Philip Edwards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 70. There is an enormous literature on encounter in this part of the world that illustrates these assertions. For representative examples, see Thomas, Islanders; Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land. Marquesas 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980); Leonard Bell, “Augustus Earle’s The Meeting of the Artist and the Wounded Chief Hongi, Bay of Islands, New Zealand 1827, and His Depictions of Other New Zealand Encounters,” in Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840, ed. Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 1999); Mark Houlahan, “The Canon on the Beach: H.T. Kemp Translating Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim’s Progress,” in Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840, ed. Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 1999); Salmond, Between Two Worlds. 7 Although on other occasions, neither Philip nor Grey were reluctant to use force. Clendennin, Dancing with Strangers, 110, 129–30; George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, vol. I (London: T and W Boone, 1841), 158–60 and for spearing, vol. II, 255–56; Tiffany Shellam, Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George’s Sound (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia, 2009), 88–90. 8 John Mulvaney and Neville Green, eds., Commandant of Solitude: The Journals of Captain Collett Barker, 1828–1831 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), 33–35, 270–71, 283; George Moore, Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia (London: Walbrook, 1884), 23; Shellem, Shaking Hands at the Fringe, 78, 88–90, 209–12. It is worth nothing that George Grey’s first official position was as resident magistrate at King George’s Sound. 9 This account comes from the excellent thesis by Skye Kirchauff, “The Narungga and the Europeans: Cross Cultural Relations on the Yorke Peninsular in the Nineteenth Century” (MA thesis, School of Politics and History, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 2008), esp. 13–22, 25–29, 30–72. For Kangaroo Island’s sealing communities, see Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2008). 10 Marie Fels, “Culture Contact in the County of Buckinghamshire, Van Diemen’s Land 1801–11,” Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings 29, no. 2 (1982): 47–79; Maria Moneypenny, “Going Out and Coming in: Collaboration and Cooperation between Aborigines and Europeans in Early Tasmania,” Tasmanian Historical Studies 5, no. 1 (1995): 65–68; Mary Nicholls, ed., The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood

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1803–1838 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1977), 217; TAHO, Reminiscences of the Black War in Tasmania, MSS. by N.J. Emmett Taken by His Brother in 1873. NS 1216, pp. 1–2; James Bowick, The Lost Tasmanian Race (London, 1884), 28–30. 11 Moneypenny, “Going Out and Coming in,” 68–70; Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). 12 Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 4–6; Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 88. For the Eastern Cape, see Price, Making Empire, 44–45, 88–89. For missionary dependence, see also Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005), 58–59, 86–88. The story of Samuel Marsden’s contact with Maori is an excellent example of the cultural exchange and interchange that marked these kinds of missionary-Indigenous relationships. See Rachel Standfield, “Reciprocal Relationships and Early British Encounters in North of New Zealand,” in Indigenous Mobilities Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ed. Rachel Standfield (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2018), 60–70. 13 Moore, Diaries of Ten Years of an Eventful Life, 226–29. 14 For Canada, see Janna Promislow, “ ‘It Would Only Be Just’: A Study of Territoriality and Trading Posts Along the Mackenzie River 1800–27,” in Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (London: Routledge, 2013), 35–34; Sylvia Hallam, “A View From the Other Side of the Western Frontier: Or, I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There,” Aboriginal History 7, no. 2 (1983): 134–56 for a consideration of these issues. 15 For an interesting discussion on the significance of music in these encounters, see Vanessa Agnew, “A ‘Scots Orpheous’ in the South Seas, or, the Use of Music on Cook’s Second Voyage,” Journal of Maritime Research 3, no. 1 (2001): 1–27, doi:10.1080/215333 69.2001.9668310; Rachel Standfield, ed., Indigenous Mobilities, 195; Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby, “Cross-Cultural Inquiry in 1802: Musical Performance on the Baudin Expedition to Australia,” in Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, ed. Darian Smith and Penelope Edmonds (New York: Routledge, 2015), 17–35. 16 For the dependence of explorers on Indigenous guides, see Dane Kennedy, The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 159–94; Standfield, Indigenous Mobilities Across and Beyond the Antipodes, 1, passim; Edward John Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative of Residence and Exploration in Australia 1832–1839, ed. and intro. Jill Waterhouse (London: Caliban Books, 1984), 141–50. 17 Daniel George Brocke, To the Desert with Sturt: A  Diary of the 1844 Expedition, ed. Kenneth Peake-Jones (Adelaide: Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Inc., 1975), 35–37, 43; Steven Hemming, “Conflict between Aborigines and Europeans along the Murray River and the Darling to the Great South Bend 1830–1841,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia  22, no. 1 (1984): 1–18. 18 South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, August 4, 1838, 3–4; Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative of Residence and Exploration in Australia 1832–1839, 129, 153, 157–59; Brock, To the Desert with Sturt, 7, 18. Practices like ostentatiously dropping weapons on the ground were probably a common gesture. When Captain Lockyer was confronted by a group of Australian Aboriginal people at King George’s Sound in 1827, he did the same thing. See Tiffany Shellam, “Making Sense of Law and Disorder,” Anthropology and History 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 81. 19 Heather Burke, Amy Roberts, Mick Morrison, and Vanessa Sullivan Burke, “Space of Conflict Aboriginal/European Interactions and Frontier Violence on the Western Central Murray, South Australia, 1830–41,” Aboriginal History 40 (2016): 145–79.

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20 Examples of this kind of literature are F.E. Maning, History of the War in the North of New Zealand Against the Chief Heke in the Year 1845: Told by an Old Chief of the Ngapuhi Tribe. Faithfully Translated by a “Pakeha Maori” (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1864); Ernst Dieffenbach, New Zealand and Its Native Population (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1841). From a later period, Annabel Cooper, “Our Old Friends and Recent Foes: James Cowan, Rudall Hayward and Memories of Natural Affections in the New Zealand Wars,” New Zealand Journal of History, NS 14 (2013): 152–70. 21 Dieffenbach, New Zealand and Its Native Population, 16–28. 22 Sir George Grey, Journal of an Expedition Overland from Auckland to Taranaki by Way of Roorua, Taupo, and the West Coast: Undertaken in the Summer of 1849–50 by His Excellence the Governor in Chief of New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1851); Alex Frame, Grey and Iwikau: A Journey into Custom (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2002). 23 NA, CO 209/52, Original Correspondence: Despatches, Grey to Earl Grey May 3, 1847, ff. 247–71; James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 1996), 204–11; James Rutherford, Sir George Grey K.C.B. 1812–1898: A  Study in Colonial Government (London: Cassell, 1961), 81–118; Edward Shortland, Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders (London: Longmans, Brown, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1856), 229. 24 NAUK, CO 209/53, Original Correspondence, Despatches, Grey to Earl Grey, July 1, 1847, ff. 1–14. CO 209/72, Original Correspondence: Despatches, July  9, 1849, ff. 199–200. On the pretense of military success, see James Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict: The Maori, the British and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1986). 25 Bellich, Making Peoples, 67–75, 143–52. Maori economic ingenuity was noted at the time; see Dieffenbach, New Zealand and Its Native Population, 16–17, 20; A. Pakeha Maori, Old New Zealand etc., ed. Frederick Maning (London, 1876), 7–14. For a slightly later example of Maori enterprise in carving out an economic sector of their own, see Ben Schrader, “Native Hostelries in New Zealand’s Colonial Cities,” Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS 25 (2017): 16–39. 26 Vincent O’Malley, The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642–1840 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012), 32, 110–34; Michael King, History of New Zealand (Rosedale, NZ: David Bateman, 2003), 102–7, 112–13. 27 Richard White, The Middle Ground (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Vincent O’Malley’s excellent book The Meeting Place so characterizes pre-1840 New Zealand. Disorder was a theme of contemporary comment; see Reverend Joseph Orton’s comments in Alex Tyrell, A Sphere of Benevolence: The Life of Joseph Orton, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary (1795–1842) (Melbourne: State Library of Victoria, 1993), 91–95. 28 Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire, 138–39; Judith Binney, The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall (Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1968); Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Mission in the South Seas 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), 155–62. See Karel Schoeman, “A Thorn Bush That Grows in the Path”: The Missionary Career of Ann Hamilton, 1815–1823 (Cape Town: South African Library, 1995) for the interesting case of a wife who rebelled against the constraints of missionary culture. 29 On Van Diemen’s Land see, Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 60–71. On the morality of the government establishment in this period, see James Bonwick, The Bushrangers; Illustrating the Early Days of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart: Cat and Fiddle Press, 1967), 2; Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 56–84. Bigge similarly disapproved of New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s policy of integrating ticket-of-leave men into the political life of that colony. 30 James Bonwick, The Bushrangers, Illustrating the Early History of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 1967; repr. 1854), 50–57, 85; Lyndall Ryan, “Struggle for

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Recognition: Part Aborigines in Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century,” Aboriginal History I, no. 1–2 (1977): 32; Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 152–54; James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc., 2008), 78–83, 166–69. 31 Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 55–58, 74–75; TAHO, NS323/1/1, Adam Amos, Diary 1822–1825, and TAHO NS 61/3, Diary of James Cubbiston Sutherland for the problem of bushranging in the mid-1820s; ML, A 2171, Arthur Papers, vol. 11, Letters from Colonel Balfour, 1823–1826, for the tactics to be used against bush rangers and the striking parallels with those used almost immediately after this campaign against the Indigenous Tasmanians. Charles Rowcroft, The Perils and Adventures of Mr. William Thornley: One of the Pioneer Settlers of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart, n.d. [1846]). 32 For Bigge, see Kirsten McKenzie, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For networks, see ML, AY 2164. Arthur Papers, vol. 4, Correspondence from Sir James Stephen, 1823–1854. 33 Allport Library (Hobart), Memo on Aborigines from Mr. Johns 12.6.1889 and Other Memories of Aborigines, Early Hobart and Norfolk Island. MSS. No accession number, catalogued under title. ML, AY 2164, Arthur Papers, volume 4, Correspondence from Sir James Stephen, 1823–1854, Arthur to Wilberforce, October 9, 1828. The silent system chapel and cells at Port Arthur are perfectly preserved relics of this punishment regime. 34 Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 162–74; Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire, 82–82. 35 SASL, PRG174/17A-32, George Fife Angas Papers, George Angas to unknown correspondent, February 2, 1843; SASL, D 7063, Sir George Grey Papers, Letters from Adelaide to His Family, Grey to Uncle, January 16, 1845, where he writes how things are getting better; “disorder is being conquered; the settlers are working well and colony progressing. Progress is working. In two years’ time it will be a highly prosperous community.” 36 Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 167–70; see for evidence of the limits of Grey’s power in South Australia. Michael Cannon, ed. in chief, The Aborigines of Port Philip 1835–1839 (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982), 36–37. South Australia, the convict free colony, was also the first to establish a centralized police force. 37 Penelope Edmonds, “The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces Around Earl Melbourne,” in Making Settler Colonial Space, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 136–45. For Port Philip, see James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia (Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc., 2012). 38 For the importance of this theme of moral order, see Penny Edmonds, “Emancipation Acts on the Oceanic: Frontier: Intimacy, Diplomacy, Colonial Invasion and the Legal Traces of Protection in the Bass Strait World,” Law  & History (2017): 21–44; Salesa, Racial Crossings, 88–91. 39 James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1893), 82–83, 89; Lyndall Ryan, “The Struggle for Recognition: Part Aborigines in Bass Strait in the Nineteenth Century,” Aboriginal History I, no. 1–2 (1977): 33–34. For a wonderful study of these communities, see Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier (Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 2011); see Russell, Roving Mariners, 103–5 for these communities as cross-cultural formations. 40 These were not idyllic peaceful communities. With the decline of sealing by the 1820s, alliances with the clans came under strain and the violence that Robinson saw and believed reflected the moral disorder of the communities was a reflection of that. See Ryan, “The Struggle for Recognition,” 30–32; Cameron, Grease and Ochre, 96–100, 104, 115–20. 41 Clendennin, Dancing with Strangers, 156–57; Ross Gibson, “Patyegarang and William Dawes: The Space of Imagination,” in Making Settler Colonial Space, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 242–54. See the interesting novelistic reconstruction of the relationship between Dawes and Petyegarang by Jane Grenville, The Lieutenant: A Novel (New York: New York University Press,

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2010); Frances M. Thiele, “LaTrobe and the Bureaucrats: How the Best of Intentions Failed to Protect the Aboriginal People of Port Phillip,” 146, unpublished paper, 2017, Academia.edu., accessed October 2, 2019. 42 Salesa, Racial Crossings, 88, 181–82; Angele Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart Intermarriage in New Zealand (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2014); Kate Stevens, “ ‘Every Comfort of a Civilized Life’: Interracial Marriage and Mixed Race Responsibility in Southern New Zealand,” Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS 14 (2013): 87–107. The same general pattern may be seen in Canada, also, where from the 1840s mixed marriages began to be discouraged by the Hudson Bay Company. See Ken Coates, Best Left as Indian: White and Native Relations in the Yukon Territory 1840–1973 (Kingston on Hull: McGill, Queen’s University Press, 1991), 76–77. 43 Nicholas Dean Brodie, “ ‘He Had Been a Faithful Servant’: Henry Melville’s Lost Manuscripts, Black Tom, and Aboriginal Negotiations in Van Diemen’s Land,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2017): 45–64; TAHO, CSO1/1/331/7578/16, Microfilm Reel Z1830, Papers of Gilbert Robertson, Robertson to Colonial Secretary, November 28, 1828. 44 Tiffany Shellam, “Miago and the ‘Great Northern Men’: Indigenous Histories from InBetween,” in Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes, ed. Rachel Standfield (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2018), 187–93. 45 SASA, GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book May 21, 1840–January 6, 1857, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary December  18, 1840, March  13, 1841; Amanda Nettelbeck and Russell Smandych, Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Canada (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2016), 95, 100. 46 Personal contact was a key part of the psychology of how social relations in empire were understood within the context of humanitarian mentality. I shall address that issue in the next chapter. Amanda Nettelbeck, “Colonial Protection and the Intimacies of Indigenous Governance,” History Australia 4, no. 1 (2017): 32–47. 47 For this story, see Helen Carey, “Lancelot Threlkeld, Biraban, and the Colonial Bible in Australia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 2 (2010): 447–78; Australian Dictionary of National Biography, accessed March  20, 2019, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/biraban-1781. It is interesting to note that George Grey played a crucial role in bringing this project to publication in the face of opposition from powerful churchmen like Archbishop Broughton. 48 Nettelbeck, “Colonial Protection and the Intimacies of Colonial Governance,” 5–7. 49 Nicholas Dean Brodie, “ ‘The Last Man Left to Tell the Tale’: Challenging the Conciliation Master Narrative in Van Diemen’s Land,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (2017): 86–102. Cassandra Pybus claims that Gravenor did not know her that well. But Pybus also writes about other cross-race intimacies in Truganini’s life with John Dandridge and his wife, for example; see Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2020), 250–52, 255–56, 263; H. Meyrick, Life in the Bush (1840–1847): A Memoir of Henry Howard Meyrick (London: Routledge, 1939), 142. 50 Moore, Diaries of Ten Years of an Eventful Life, 190–92, 205–6. For Yagan and his father Midgegooroo, see Pamela Statham, “James Stirling and the Pinjarra,” Studies in Western Australian History 23 (2003): 167–94. 51 Moore, Diaries of Ten Years of an Eventful Life, 119–20. 52 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) is the standard work. Anna Johnston, “George Augustus Robinson: The ‘Great Conciliator’: Colonial Celebrity and Its Postcolonial Aftermath,” Post-Colonial Studies 12, no. 2 (2009): 153–72. For the different ways of seeing—and particularly its ­technology—in this period, see Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). 53 For missionaries and early anthropological knowledge, see Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007).

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54 Giselle Byrnes, “The Imperfect Authority of the Eye: Edward Shortland’s Southern Journey and the Calligraphy of Colonization,” History and Anthropology  8, no. 1–4 (1994): 207–35, for a post-modern interpretation that nevertheless demonstrates how that Shortland’s eye was a more open and observational eye than a representational eye. For a contrary perspective that is closer to my argument, see Tony Ballantyne, “Strategic Intimacies: Knowledge and Colonization in Southern New Zealand,” Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS 14 (2014): 4–18; the cite is from p. 6. See also Marjan Lousberg, “Edward Shortland and the Protection of Aborigines in New Zealand, 1840–1846,” in Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies, ed. Samuel Furphy and Amanda Nettelbeck (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 115–32. Of course, other styles of observation were possible. For an example of a more wary and hostile gaze, see SASL, D4440(L), James Coutts Crawford, Diary, For another example of how Indigenous knowledge created imperial knowledge through maps, see John Gascoigne, “Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange in the Age of the Enlightenment,” in Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archive, ed. Shino Konoshi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2015), 131–46. 55 George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, During the Years 1837, 38 and 1839, vol. II (London, 1841), Chapters 9–17 deal with his observations about Aboriginal culture. Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1; Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and Their State of Relations with Europeans in Two Volumes, vol. II (London: T and W Boone, 1845), 147–508 deals with the customs and culture of the Indigenous peoples. Both books assert their humanity and the role of white violence against them. 56 Edward Shortland, The Southern Districts of New Zealand: A Journal with Passing Notice of the Customs of the Aborigines (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1851), 14–16, 64–80. 57 George Grey, Vocabulary of the Dialects Spoken by the Aboriginal Races of South West Australia (Perth, 1839). For another example, with similar traits of discovery and inquiry, see John Philip Gell, “The Vocabulary of the Adelaide Tribe,” The Tasmanian Journal 1, no. 2 (1841): 109–24. Moore, the Western Australian advocate general, reported in 1839 that every morning he was in Perth, he devoted a couple of hours with the governor and an interpreter to the formation of a vocabulary of the native language. See Diaries of Ten Years of an Eventful Life, 376. 58 Auckland City Central Library, GNZMss 17, Rev. Octavius Hadfield, “System of Government Among the New Zealand Tribes, 1846.” 59 See, for example, Price, Making Empire, 43–44 for the story of James Laing. 60 The Boyd affair delayed the planned arrival of missionaries by several years. Shellam, “Making Sense of Law and Disorder,” 75–88. 61 Moore, Diaries of Ten Years of an Eventful Life, 33, 78, 119–20, 168, 181. 62 Ibid., 198–99, 372. 63 Belich, Making Peoples, 206–8; Lisa Ford and David Andrew Roberts, “Expansion, 1820–1850,” in The Cambridge History of Australia. Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 121–48.

2 MENTALITIES

Introduction: the discourse of humanitarianism The dominant discourse of empire—particularly as it applied to Indigenous ­peoples—from the 1820s to the 1860s was expressed through the language of “humanitarianism.” Simply put, humanitarianism was directed toward creating an imperial regime of virtue through a “humane policy” that would protect Indigenous people from the violence that typified imperial regimes in order to lay the foundations for an empire of racial collaboration. The triumph of the abolitionist movement in 1833 was taken to demonstrate that an ethical racial policy for empire was attainable and that this was the moment for it to be achieved. As a justification of the purposes and ends of empire, early nineteenth-century humanitarianism emerged in the context of the expansion of British control in the South Pacific. This is hardly surprising: the challenge of ruling Indigenous peoples presented itself most clearly in that zone during this period.1 Humanitarianism possessed a wider currency than colonial elites or policy makers in the Colonial Office. It shaped the discourse of empire at all levels, provided the context for policies, and it was appropriated by settler politics once they came to displace the imperial factor in governance. In addition, this was the moment when the language of humanitarianism was attached to the vocabulary of British imperial culture. It was in this period that the idea that the British Empire could be a “liberal” empire, an empire of liberty and freedom, for Indigenous peoples was melded into the civic culture of Britain, and by the end of the nineteenth century had been baked into the popular and the political discourse on empire. And it was a narrative that possessed a long afterlife, available as a rhetorical instrument in contemporary discussions of British identity.2 Understanding how humanitarian mentality worked in this part of the empire is therefore important for the rest of this book. I shall focus on three broad themes.

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First, on the relationship between the culture of humanitarianism and governance. My interest lies in the ideological and cultural architecture of humanitarianism, how it shaped the mental world of colonial agents such as Edward Eyre and George Grey in the story of empire in this period. Humanitarianism offered narratives that allowed missionaries, colonial officials, and others to understand the history of which they were a part and to inform policies that they could formulate and pursue. It contained a set of moral and mental imperatives to guide their engagement with Indigenous peoples and a vocabulary of how to talk about and with them. It was an ideology and guide to action that justified and explained empire to those who were engaged in its creation. My second focus goes beyond the ideological level to explain the emotions and subjective psychology that animated humanitarian actors, particularly as those sensibilities were triggered by their encounters with Aboriginal peoples. These responses are important to understanding the nature and fate of policy actions. They were important, also, because they reveal how the imperial encounter conditioned the fate of humanitarian discourse as it confronted the failure of its expectations that a new moral empire would be created in the southern seas and as it met the growing challenge from settler politics from the 1850s. Finally, I am interested in the way those subjective elements produced anxieties within the culture of humanitarianism that explain why its expression in policy was fraught and fragile, and why its repertoire of policy options and ideas was soon exhausted. Those tensions within the ideology of humanitarianism were activated when Indigenous agency met the sensibilities of the humanitarian mind as it tried to realize and implement a “humane policy” for empire.

Culture and governance The humanitarianism of this period is typically treated by scholars as a strategy of governance. The power equations of twentieth-century humanitarianism have been transposed to the context of humanitarian action in the early nineteenth century. This perspective is an important corrective to earlier scholarly traditions that viewed humanitarians on their own terms without attending to their social context or ideological purposes. Much of the more recent scholarship has closely picked apart the racial and gender implications of the policy prescriptions humanitarians envisioned for the future of Indigenous peoples. In the process the coercive implications to the humanitarian desire to bring a social and domestic order to Aboriginal peoples have been emphasized. My focus on the story of humanitarianism in this period is somewhat different.3 The difficulty in seeing humanitarianism primarily through the lens of a system of governance is not the false attribution of governing imperatives; rather, it is the way it diminishes the role of historical contingency. Humanitarian governance did not spring forth, fully clad, sword on hip, Bible in one hand, and Adam Smith’s works in the other, ready to begin the business of colonial rule. Regimes of colonial governance emerged out of historical processes, which involved indigenes as

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well as settlers and officials. In that sense, humanitarianism had to learn to become an instrument of colonial governance. The work that humanitarianism did in the southern seas was not determined by them alone. In addition, we need to be sensitive to the changing status of humanitarianism. Its role as an agent of governance emerged only after it had been adopted by settler politics as the rhetorical hypocrisy for a racialized oppression of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Humanitarianism became a discourse to justify colonial governance once the imperial state and the missionaries had been displaced from policy making and replaced by settler colonial regimes. Until then it is better viewed as a culture that provided a theory of how the colonial encounter could play out. It was a guide to policy and a programmatic aspiration that reached for an end to the violence historically associated with empire and the creation of an empire of racial reconciliation. It sought ways to build upon the realities of engagements described in the previous chapter and mediate between the imperial presence and the Indigenous presence. Once responsible government was granted to the colonies, the larger aspirations of humanitarianism to protect and ensure the place of Indigenous peoples in the imperial system were shunted aside in tandem with the increasingly oppressive policies that were imposed upon them. Settler states needed to rationalize their rule over Indigenous peoples in place of the rule of the imperial state in alliance with the missionary interest. Humanitarianism was conveniently available for this duty. Thus, its role shrank from expressing a vision of empire to become the legitimizing discourse for British imperial culture.4 Humanitarianism must be understood against the backdrop of the “age of revolution” when utopian schemes to remake the social order were common to the intellectual and political discourses, and millenarian religious movements promised a new moral world. People like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Saint Simon articulated these impulses in various plans that aimed to master destiny over nature. Such projects spawned breathtaking schemes of social engineering, which were given serious consideration at the highest levels of policy making. The vision of empire could hardly avoid being similarly inflected with a sense that history was moving to reorder the world. When we contemplate the aspirations of imperial policy makers—particularly at the local level—during this period it is impossible to ignore the audacity of their ambitions. People like Sir George Grey believed that it was possible to engineer racial amalgamation between Maori and Pakeha within the near future. Humanitarians like George Augustus Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land, who sought to remake the world of the local Aboriginals by transporting them all to Flinders Island in the Bass Straits, reflected the same kind of social engineering ambition that led Robert Owen to transport several hundred “cooperators” across the ocean to the wilderness of Indiana. Both reflected profound assumptions about how the social and racial order could be constructed. Both insisted on a tight control over subaltern lives. Both combined visionary schemes with coercive prescription.5 The idea that “humane policies” could be part of the imperial project was not new to the early nineteenth century, but it re-emerged in the mid-1820s, as part of a debate about colonial rule and the treatment of subject peoples. The triumph of

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abolitionism was taken as a providential sign that history was moving in that direction and demanded the determined application of the moral capital generated by abolition to the protection of Aboriginal people. The influential Buxton circle, for example, believed that this was the appropriate moment to seek to permanently change the relationship between settlers and Indigenous peoples. In spite of an acute awareness of the competition from other discourses and the contingencies of politics, optimistic scenarios could be traced throughout the imperial regime.6 By the 1830s, therefore, the imperial world was full of discussion of how humanitarian principles could be manifested in policy actions. One of the most prolific contributors was Saxe Bannister, who articulated most fully how humanitarians imagined a “humane policy” for empire. Bannister had spent the early 1820s in North America researching Indian policy, and it was from that experience that he first laid out what was to be a constant set of themes in his writings: that the Indigenous peoples were in no way inferior to the white races, and that their current plight was entirely the result of the deleterious effects of “hard treatment [by whites] and bad government.” He served as attorney general of New South Wales for several years in the mid-1820s and was in the Cape Colony, where he gathered considerable material on the violence of settler colonialism which he incorporated in his 1830 publication, Humane Policy. His arguments resonated well with the humanitarian lobby in Britain; they echoed the messages that Dr. John Philip was sending from Cape Town about the need to break the cycle of violence visited by colonial contact upon Indigenous peoples.7 Although Saxe Bannister was prolific, he was generally on the margins of the official world. He had a running battle with the Colonial Office after a disagreement about his service in New South Wales and he soon fell out with the main humanitarian lobby group, the Aborigines Protection Society, because of the timidity of its policy proposals. This may account for the fact that he is a relatively unappreciated figure. But he gave considerable thought to the question of policy toward Indigenous peoples. Indeed, the scope of his schemes illustrates the social engineering ambitions of imperial thinkers. His books, Humane Policy, or Justice to the Aborigines in New Settlements (1830) and in the later British Colonization and Colored Tribes (1838), laid out policies designed to protect Aboriginal peoples from the ravages of lawless frontier regimes. He favored the retention of Aboriginal policy by the imperial government who should work to turn “mischievous squatters into useful settlers.” He proposed that there be specific laws to protect Aboriginal society. He envisaged an imperial Aboriginal Department, to formulate and administer health, education, and land policy as they affected native peoples and to be a center for the study of Aboriginal peoples. He foresaw an extended system of protectors as a civil service for Aboriginals, watching over their interests and the actions of extra-state bodies like the Hudson Bay Company. He urged that native people be appointed to its ranks. He wanted a sort of legal pluralism that would be administered by direct agents of the Crown and whose punishment regime would be tied to cultural difference among the native peoples. Such ideas in one form or another were current in policy circles in the southern empire.8

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The official expression of this spirit, of course, was the much-studied Select Committee of 1837. The Report of the Select Committee may claim the status of the first human rights document for Indigenous peoples. It served as a summary of humanitarian culture and an articulation of the reasons why new efforts be made to protect Aboriginal rights, particularly in the newer colonies in the southern seas. The key element to this discourse was the need to break the historical tie between empire and violence and the moral necessity to pursue a policy that would redeem the nation for its past offenses against Indigenous peoples and prevent their extinction, which was the feared end game of empire. The Select Committee highlighted how the discourse of humanitarianism was framed by the historical association between empire and violence.9 Indeed, the relationship between humanitarianism and violence was at the heart of the humanitarian mentality. So when Sir George Murray made his famous remark to Sir George Arthur, the lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, that the possible extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people “would not fail to leave an indelible stain on the character of the British government,” he was expressing a commonplace to humanitarian culture that this was a moment to correct and remedy the course of history.10 Behind this belief lay an alternative reading of the history of the British Empire that highlighted a historical narrative tracing a line of virtue from people like Roger Williams or William Penn, or the Indian Agent William Johnston in North America, who were portrayed as representing a tradition of racial mutuality, mixing, and reconciliation. Bannister was more of an historian than most humanitarian publicists. He argued that racial prejudice was a construction of modern times and was an “obstacle to the total amalgamation of races, which is indispensable to their sure enjoyment of political rights.” He pointed to the restraint that had characterized Cook’s interactions with local peoples. He took to ferreting out obscure ordinances from the Stuart era that asserted the power of the Crown to defend Indigenous societies and to arguing for the Privy Council to reassert its power to check the infringements on Indigenous peoples’ rights by despotic colonial governments.11 Humanitarian discourse was represented at all levels of the colonial world. It was obviously present among the missionary enterprise where the idea of a multi-racial Christian commonwealth was fundamental to missionary culture. The Colonial Office from the 1820s through to the 1850s was dominated by humanitarians. The colonial bureaucracy from the 1820s was peppered with “humanitarian” governors and officials, and missionaries were the commanding network in policy formation. Debates around such issues as colonization in South Australia, Protectorate policy, and the Waitangi Treaty were conducted within the terms of humanitarian discourse. The Colonial Office often received memos from governors framed within the language of humanitarian principles, while at the same time hinting at the challenges that implementing humane policy involved.12 It was to be expected, perhaps, that such sentiment would be expressed in official communications, particularly when the occupant of the Colonial Office was Charles Grant, the most pro-humanitarian colonial secretary of the century. But the discourse of humanitarianism extended beyond the world of colonial officials.

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Henry Reynolds has pointed out how humanitarian sentiments shaped the settler discourse of the period when it debated the virtues of humanitarian policies, the morality of settlement, or the justice of the Aboriginal grievances in the loss of their land.13 Humanitarian discourse shaped thinking and discussion in both the private and personal spheres. Take the case of Foster Fyans. Fyans was an imperial foot soldier. He made a career as a minor imperial official, moving around from one uncomfortable post to another on the margins of empire. After a spell commanding troops in Norfolk Island, he was appointed commandant of Moreton Bay and later to the magistracy at Geelong as that part of the frontier was being opened up. Fyans hardly fit the mold of what contemporaries referred to as a “philanthropist.” He was a soldier not afraid to wield the sword: at Norfolk Island he had been reprimanded for his use of excessive force in repressing a riot. At Moreton Bay he hosted the visiting Quaker team of Backhouse and Washington during their tour of the South Pacific in the later 1830s, and his contempt for the duo was pretty obvious. He took delight in taunting them by describing in detail the effects of lashing on a man’s back, even offering to put on a demonstration for them. On the other hand, his relations with local Aboriginal people were good, and when he had occasion to be in Sydney, he took a couple of them (who had gone there in search of another officer from Moreton Bay to whom they were personally attached) under his protection, securing them lodgings, taking them around the town, and even introducing them to Governor Bourke. At Geelong the local Aboriginals were a perpetual presence. His major problem was in controlling the unbridled flood of settlers streaming in from Van Diemen’s Land who were reluctant to submit to his authority. His contact with Australian Aboriginal people followed the pattern we described in the last chapter—wary contact, accompanied by considerable fear on the part of the whites and occasional near clashes. His observations on these relations were largely matter of fact. When he did make qualitative judgments the language was the language of pity drawn from the “humanitarian” mentality. Thus, one harrowing night uncertain whether the local people were hostile or friend induced this observation: “There can be no good in insulting and injuring the natives; we were intruders taking possession of their ground and their water and no doubt these poor aborigines might have travelled far to stop on this ground that we accidentally fell in with.”14 Fyans is an example of how deep into colonial society the language of humanitarian discourse penetrated, but this did not make him one. Reverend Joseph Docker, on the other hand, was. Docker was a Church of England clergyman who occupied a sheep run in New South Wales. He was also engaged in missionary work and he was a colonial whistleblower. His relationship with the local Aboriginal people seemed to fulfill the humanitarian’s dream of what the colonial encounter could be. He successfully employed them as shepherds, finding them not only trustworthy and honest but better workers and employees than whites. A recent incident on a nearby sheep run had led to fierce retaliation by the owner (who also happened to be a local justice of the peace) in conjunction with the Mounted Police. Docker claimed that the police had unleashed a “reign of terror”

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against the local Aboriginals who were being shot indiscriminately and several of his workers abused during such raids. Docker’s humanitarian sentiments were naturally outraged and no doubt were reinforced by the effects that these raids were having on his efforts to turn his workers into good wage laborers. “There exists,” he reported, “amongst the settlers around me a most inveterate and deadly hatred of the aborigines which I cannot account for. For my part I dread the visits of the Police more than I should those of the wildest savages of the bush.”15 Even more revealing of the way humanitarian discourse haunted the language and thinking of settlers at this moment was a speech given by Richard Windeyer in Sydney in 1842. Windeyer made the case for settler claims to the land, and his speech was an early statement of what was to become mainstream settler consciousness. But he made his case in a split and hesitant way. The very title of his speech, “The Rights of Aborigines in Australia,” suggested how he was arguing on humanitarian grounds since it was exactly their “rights” that humanitarians argued needed to be protected. Windeyer began by placing Aboriginal culture in the moral vacuum of a Hobbesian world with none of the restraining institutions of civilized society. Aboriginal people knew nothing of private property and its utility for an ordered society. Their land was the equivalent of waste land, and thus settlers who could exploit the land with greater efficiency had the right to develop it for their own use. But it was exactly at this moment that Windeyer’s reasoning began to falter, and this is notable because it was precisely this assertion that was to lie at the heart of settler claims to the land and to become the crucial argument for settler rights over Aboriginal rights Windeyer clearly did not yet feel comfortable making it. He lingered on this last theme, as if it needed elaboration and shoring up. In particular, he felt obliged to take issue with the recently expressed views of Matthew Moorhouse (the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia) that the Aboriginal people did indeed have a sense of territorial possession and that there was something similar to the British practice of primogeniture. This was a commonplace argument within colonial humanitarian discourse, and for this reason Windeyer was at pains to refute it. But in doing this he abandoned the ground of reasoned, empirical fact that had previously characterized his address and appealed essentially to emotion. His argument turned ad hominem, claiming that Moorhouse had obviously been fooled by clever Aboriginals because his claim defied what everyone could see about them if they cared to look around. He offered no “facts” for this argument, only what was obvious from the settler eye—that Aboriginal land use did indeed reflect a “terra nullius.”16 But then Windeyer’s argument began to soften. He drew back from an earlier suggestion that Aboriginal people were characterologically deficient and once again began to argue on humanitarian terms that it was the ecology of Australia that explained their low level on the ladder of civilization, not their inherent personality traits. This was, of course, a central humanitarian precept—that cultural and historical circumstances determined racial difference. The resources to allow the permanent settlement of the land were not available to them. But still Windeyer remained uneasy about his argument, arguing that although the rights of the

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settlers to the land are established, why, he asked, is it that “our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?” (my italics). And his answer was conscience is what . . . thou quibblest of his laws, of his land, of his physical food, of his title and the title to the things that perish; but has thou not in thy possession the great birth right of all and has not shared it with him?17 The hesitancies and ambiguities that Windeyer expressed reflected his own history in the colony. On the one hand, he had been involved in the foundation of the local Aborigines Protection Society in 1838; on the other hand, he was a defense counsel for the stockmen who murdered Aboriginal people in the celebrated Murrell murder trial. The context of the speech itself mirrored these ambiguities in that it was part of a lengthy debate and so may not even have reflected Windeyer’s own views. But that is precisely the point. Windeyer used the discourse of humanitarianism both to argue for an increase in philanthropic, humanitarian-type activity and to associate them with settler sentiments. The speech may be read as an unsuccessful struggle to escape from the confines of humanitarian reasoning into the clarity of racist hierarchy. Thus, in the final analysis, Windeyer falls back on the humanitarian duty and responsibility cast upon us by fit means of education to make him conscious of the dignity, the holiness of the Mind he shares with ourselves [and how] . . . the clear recognition of any right in another involves the moral necessity of respecting it. I tell this story not to claim for Windeyer the status of humanitarian settler but rather to illustrate how the discourse of humanitarianism confined the thinking even of those who sought to overturn its predominance.18 Windeyer’s speech was an early expression of an emergent settler discourse that we shall address in a later chapter. For now, I want to make two observations. First, at this moment, the settler contention with humanitarian discourse in the main remained confined to private spaces like diaries or personal exchanges. It was not unknown for such views to be expressed in official circles, although it was more rare.19 And second, as the Windeyer speech suggests, settler consciousness grew in tandem and in reaction to humanitarian discourse. It was only when settler governance arrived that these views could be expressed in political and civil spaces, even though they had been bubbling away under the surface from the beginning. Given the reach of humanitarian discourse, it is not surprising, therefore, that this period has been regarded as marking the beginnings of the modern notion of humanitarianism and human rights in the sense that an “imagined empathy” for the plight of others and the duty to do something about it became a prominent part of civic consciousness. Obviously, the anti-slavery movement was the prime manifestation of this. But it was a sentiment that permeated many other sectors of society, including the treatment of personal psychology in novels and the treatment

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of bodies in medicine and death. If the feelings of empathy and compassion were not themselves new to this period—and arguments have been made that they can also be seen operating in the early modern period—what is clearly new is their elevation into public values as moral beacons that should be acted upon by both individuals and collectivities. It was this that made them so relevant to the humanitarian discourse on empire.20

Sensibilities and psychology The subjective logic of the humanitarian mentality was shaped by a fusion between religious currents and secular rationalism. The religious face of humanitarianism derived from the evangelical revival of the early eighteenth century, which by our period reached across the various religious denominations. This religious sensibility was reinforced and authenticated by secular arguments about human nature and the social psychology of human interaction that were derived from people like Adam Smith. Let us start with the religious element.21 The evangelical spirit was a Calvinist faith that demanded atonement for the depravity of mankind by a constant search for salvation by works. It was a “vital religion,” meaning that Evangelicals were expected to live out their faith in an active way; every act was motivated by Christian perfection. Deep personal conversion and conviction were important characteristics of the evangelical faith. But for our purposes the most important quality was the commitment to providential faith—the idea that an active God permeated all the discourses of society.22 Providential faith was a bedrock of evangelical theology, and the power of humanitarian discourse was provided by the fact that this belief was wider than the religious sphere. The idea of an active God and a providential direction to action permeated the discourses of society, including the new science of economics. In terms of personal behavior action, though vital, was also fraught. What happened was not within human control or determination. One could act but not know whether and to what extent God’s plan was being followed. How could one know whether an action was following God’s plan or not? It could only be judged by results, but even then it was not clear whether unfortunate results were the consequence of some human mistake or the result of God’s will. Thus, the humanitarian mentality was rent with uncertainty. In the privacy of their diaries, missionaries were prone to engage in tortured self-debate to reassure themselves that they were following God’s will. The humanitarian belief system contained an inherent brittleness. It was liable to snap if it faced—as it ultimately did—challenges to its credibility.23 The diary of Reverend Joseph Orton, a Methodist missionary, who cycled between Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s, is full of self-­ questioning that he is following the path God has set for him.24 The voluminous diaries detailing George Augustus Robinson’s expeditions into the wilderness to capture Indigenous Tasmanians are full of similar kinds of sentiments. Although his diaries are often read as if he knew exactly what he was about to do, particularly as

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regards his relationships with the Aboriginal people, the reality was very different. At those moments when he admitted being uncertain as to what was happening, he would fall back on his faith in God: “I knew God would deliver me from danger and he who had hitherto crowned my labours with such abundant success would not suffer me to perish if my trust was wholly placed in him.”25 The theology of Evangelicalism was rooted in a vision of the ultimate helplessness of mankind. But its anthropology rested on a monogenesis conception of racial origin which assumed a universal humanity and pointed toward cultural relativism and the essential spiritual equality of mankind. It was an article of evangelical faith that Indigenous people shared a common nature with Europeans. But since they did not yet have knowledge of Christianity that would liberate them from sin and savagery, they were empty vessels ready to be filled with the nectars of civilization. Indigenous peoples were, therefore, both the same as Western peoples in their essential humanity and different in terms of their culture. This left open the possibility that they were not inherently inferior in terms of intelligence and potential and that it was their differences that needed to be reckoned with in the colonial encounter. The belief that racial difference was cultural as opposed to genetic led the humanitarians in empire to constantly be on the lookout for signs that Aboriginal peoples possessed the same nature as whites and to assert from these observations the basic humanity they shared with Europeans. Humanitarians were eager to record evidence that illustrated the innate intellectual equality between Indigenous peoples and Europeans. Thus, to take a typical example one of the Protectors of Aborigines from Port Phillip wrote to Robinson about how “the native personality is in fact a gentle and civilized one in terms of feeling and attachment” and how “by the cultivation of their dormant intellect [we should enable] an opportunity of being able to compete with us in the higher attributes of our being.”26 Such sentiments were widely held. An early settler to New South Wales recorded that Aboriginal people acquired reading and writing as easily as Europeans and argued that it was “the circumstances under which man is placed than upon any innate impulse of his own” that explained their lack of civilization. Sir George Grey would have agreed that culture was the signifier of racial difference. At a time when Darwin was beginning to insist on the sharp difference between civilized and uncivilized people, Grey, following the mainstream anthropological assumptions of the day, wrote that Australian Aboriginal people “are as apt and intelligent as any other race of men I am acquainted with: they are subject to the same affections, feelings, appetites and passions as other men, yet in many points of character they are totally dissimilar to them.” For Grey, as for most humanitarians, it was their cultural practices that impeded the realization of their innate capacities, which was why Christianity was so necessary for Indigenous peoples.27 It was, thus, on the unlikely ground of cultural relativism that Evangelicalism met the Enlightenment. The British Enlightenment was dominated by stadial notions of civilizational progress combined with Lockean ideas of political exclusion. But alongside this, a strong anti-imperial critique within European Enlightenment thought expressed by people such as Diderot and Herder in Europe also

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found resonance in Britain, where it was echoed by Burke, Bentham, and Smith. The essence of their concern about empire focused around two seemingly contradictory notions: universality and diversity. Shorn of its religious undertones, this current of Enlightenment thought was predicated on the idea that all humans were free individuals who were shaped by their cultural contexts. And since societal change was thought of as a cultural process, it also recognized the importance of diverse cultural worlds. This sensibility fed into the British humanitarian mentality where it fused with notions of providential design and guidance. These values had breadth and depth in the culture of Britain, and Europe, too, for that matter. They also suggested a very different kind of imperial structure than that which emerged by the later nineteenth century. And they gave sustenance to the sensibilities of British humanitarianism that a different kind of empire was not only morally desirable: it was also imaginable.28 These convictions were reinforced by the notion of moral virtue that was entered into the discourse of empire by Edmund Burke. Although he was by no means the only eighteenth-century thinker to raise the question of the morality of empire, he was the most articulate and the most dramatic, since he spent the last years of his political life in futile pursuit of Warren Hastings. But the issue was wider than Hastings alone as Burke’s earlier engagements with Ireland and American independence demonstrate. For Burke, as for humanitarians, it was not a question of empire or no empire. He recognized that empires were an inescapable part of world history. And since this was so, the question was the character of imperial rule, whether it should be driven by the “spirit of conquest” or obligation and trust. In that regard, Burke’s sentiments and message complemented the more religious-based morality that inspired missionary endeavors. The important question was how empire was run, the policies that it pursued. Burke was aware of the complexities of relationships in empire. He was aware of the linkage between power and race. In the context of his day, he was a cultural relativist whose critique of empire anticipated in certain respects that of the twentieth century. He deplored what he called the “geographical mentality,” which led the British to effortlessly assume their own cultural superiority and deny appropriate respect for other cultures and peoples. He was referring mainly to the case of India, but it was a sentiment that was transferable to other cultures, too, and fed into notions of sympathy and pity that were triggered in the humanitarian mentality as it encountered Aboriginal societies.29 Humanitarians, then, did not rely upon religious faith alone for their notion of how the colonial encounter should unfold. If Edmund Burke injected the notion of virtue into discussions of empire, it was Adam Smith who provided evidence endorsing humanitarian assumptions that racial contact could produce mutual understanding. The idea that social mutuality was a basic human characteristic was not simply authorized by religious faith. It was given secular, rational support by Smith, who elaborated the idea in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and provided a psychology of human interaction that fitted well with religious notions of a universal humanity. Smith’s book reflected the eighteenth-century interest in the dynamics of human emotions. Hume had addressed the question of how passions were aroused;

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sympathy played a key role in Burke’s moral philosophy. But it was Adam Smith’s description of the role of empathy and compassion in human relations in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that provided the most complete account. And it is this explanation that is most useful for helping us read the mental underpinnings of the humanitarian mind and understand the psychological dynamic that informed the humanitarian encounter with indigenes. Smith argued that empathy and sympathy were practiced not merely because they followed the ancient dictates of Christian religion to love one’s neighbor. They were expressions of one’s own self-love, such that “it is a great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us.” These qualities, therefore, were reciprocal. Being virtuous toward others was important “because it excites those sentiments in other men.” In this respect, Smith broke quite brilliantly with the more conventional arguments of eighteenth-century liberalism that rested social connection on the grounds of material self-interest and social contract. He explicitly rejected Mandeville’s assumption that every passion was essentially vicious and the utilitarian idea that the pursuit of selfish interests was productive of social good. And he offered a contrast with Locke’s more utilitarian conceptions of civil society that in a colonial setting favored settler dominance. To that extent, he projected a view of human nature that paralleled the humanitarian tendency to believe that history demonstrated the potential to realize progress and enlightenment through Christianity. He was arguing that mutuality and reciprocity were psychologically wired into human relationships and were expressed through such values as empathy, compassion, and sympathy. The sympathy felt for the subjects of tyranny, for example, rested upon a recognition of how we would feel if we too were victims of such oppression. Likewise, the tendency to identify with those who seek revenge against tyranny “arises from the sympathetic indignation which naturally boils up in the breast of the spectator, whenever he thoroughly brings himself to the case of the sufferer.” So, sympathy and empathy were in one’s psychological self-interest: they formed a connection with others that would be reinforcing.30 Put most simply, then, Smith’s basic argument was that human existence was predicated on sociability and mutuality. There was an inherent tendency in human society to behave virtuously toward one another because of the reciprocal advantages that lay in the approval and appreciation of others. But there was nothing altruistic in this altruism. It flowed from a calculus that being virtuous would excite those sentiments in other men . . . all these characters [of virtue] have an immediate reference to the sentiments of others. . . . Our sensibility to the feelings of others . . . is the very principle upon which manhood is founded. Smith’s description of human behavior and psychology emphasized an essentially optimistic view of human nature in its natural form. “Man naturally desires to be loved,” he wrote, and “he naturally dreads not only to be hated, but to be hateful. . . . He desires not only praise, but praiseworthiness. . . . He dreads not only blame, but

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blameworthiness.” Smith’s sanguine view of human nature fit well with the mentality of the humanitarian. Virtuous behavior, the exercise of values like prudence and justice, produced agreeable effects in the donor and inspired a reciprocal generosity in return because the advantages of mutuality far outweigh those of creating hostile dislike.31 Smith’s description of human relations as tending naturally toward a mutual reciprocity fused with the religious tenet of humanitarianism to claim a universal humanity. The values that humanitarians brought to the colonial encounter were not simply demanded by Christian charity. They were key descriptors of how human relationships worked. And since it was an article of faith among humanitarians (in contrast to popular, vulgar sentiments among settlers) that indigenes possessed the same human qualities as Europeans, the humanitarian expectation was that there was a reciprocity built into their interactions with Indigenous peoples. It is hard to know what level of sophistication accompanied this mindset. It would be reasonable to assume an awareness that individuals did not hold these qualities in the same degree. Smith recognized that sensibility was likely to be conditioned by social circumstances and that social groups would have different levels of sensibility. “Profligate criminals,” he pointed out, “have frequently little sense of the baseness of their own conduct, and consequently no remorse.” And a similar scale applied to less civilized peoples whose hard lives prevented them from developing the sentiments of sympathy of those from more civilized nations. The savage, he wrote, was habituated to distress and in continual danger; “he can expect from his countrymen no sympathy or indulgence.” And “before we can feel much for others, we must in some measure be at ease ourselves” so it was to be expected that the savage “expects [sic] no sympathy from those about him” and are indifferent to emotions that would move those from more civilized societies. It would, therefore, take more sympathy and empathy to trigger the same reaction in them as that of more advanced peoples. But the different levels of sensibility flowed from different cultural practices and were essentially those of degree, not of kind.32 Such admissions provided grist for the humanitarian mill. They described exactly how humanitarians imagined the colonial encounter working—that contact with Europeans possessed of the right kinds of sensibility would establish close relations with Aboriginal people and model behavior for them to imitate. Smith’s emphasis on the importance of intimacy in triggering sympathy and reciprocal mutuality spoke directly to the mentality of humanitarianism as it worked in the colonial encounter. If developing ties of mutuality was a natural part of human social interaction, then intimacy played a key role in that process. When Hume asked how human passions were aroused, he answered it was by intimacy. It was through an intimate awareness of other situations that empathetic identification was aroused and humanitarian action could begin. This perception runs through the humanitarian encounters of the period.33 Intimacy, then, was important to the humanitarian mentality both because it described an essential aspect of social interaction and because it facilitated empathetic identification. Empathy was essential to the mobilization of humanitarian sensibility. It had been put into the civic culture by the appeals of the abolitionist

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movement to identify with the human predicament of slave suffering. Henceforth, narratives of missionary endeavor served to arouse the empathy of the evangelical public, just as the abolitionist public had been fed heart-rending stories of slave sufferings. These strategies easily carried over to the plight of the indigenes in the face of the settler onslaught.34 Here is George Augustus Robinson, on the reasons for Aboriginal violence against settlers: How can we wonder at their committing outrages upon the white inhabitants? Who is there to avenge their wrongs? The children have witnessed the massacre of their parents . . . their country has been taken from them . . . the kangaroo, their chief subsistence, have been slaughtered wholesale. . . . Can we wonder at the hatred they bear to the white inhabitants? . . . This . . . resentment can and ought only to be extinguished by British benevolence. . . . We should make some atonement for the misery we have entailed upon the original proprietors of this land. . . . [I]t is only necessary for me to have a different complexion to walk the bush and be shot at. The most wanton cruelties have been practised upon them and who is there to whom they can make their grievance known?35 ‍In this passage, Robinson reveals the tendency in humanitarian discourse to bring a cultural relativism to understanding Aboriginal society. In this particular case, he treats Aboriginal violence as a product of unbalanced power relations. Others, like Grey, Eyre, and Sturt located Aboriginal cultural difference within the same relativist frame of reference. Their claim was not that native cultures had the equivalent value as British or European cultures. Rather, they were asserting that local cultures contained the same elements as those in superior cultures and were therefore worthy of respect and attention. They were standing against the notion that there was an inherent racial difference between Indigenous and imperial culture. Eyre was typical in challenging the catalog of vices that informed the typical settler view of Australian Aboriginals as “irreclaimable, unteachable . . . cruel, bloodthirsty, revengeful and treacherous.” Eyre argued for a more nuanced understanding of Aboriginal people, where, as in other races, the “excesses of unrestrained passions” were matched by a sensibility “to the better emotions of humanity. Many of his worst traits,” Eyre suggested, were “the result of necessity, of the force of custom. . . . With capabilities for receiving and aptness for acquiring instruction, I believe he also has the capacity for appreciating the rational enjoyments of life.” Eyre pointed out that Aboriginal vices were no more than those of a very large proportion of men ordinarily denominated civilised. On the contrary, I believe were Europeans placed under the same circumstances, equally wronged, and equally shut out form redress, they would not exhibit half the moderation of forbearance that these poor untutored children of impulse have invariably shewn.

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And like others, he argued that their violence was triggered by the aggressions that emanated from whites.36 The empathy that was evoked by such contact followed from the humanitarian belief that racial difference was a cultural artifact and not an inherent or essential quality of character. The humanitarian mentality, therefore, was receptive to the cultural potential of Indigenous peoples, and it was this that differentiated it from the racial assumptions that took hold from mid-century. This stance on cultural difference was consonant with the more open attitudes toward racial mixing in this period and was the context for the cross-race relationships of people like Grey. But, of course, this distinction of the humanitarian mentality was quite modest. It did not presage a diverse world or envision different paths of development for different societies. But there was a certain democratic sense behind the idea that these cultures were composed of human beings with the same emotions and drives as Europeans. And this value remained available for critics of empire to build upon, and for Indigenous politics to deploy. The assumption that a universal humanity connected the races, the effort to understand and to relativize the Aboriginal experience, and the belief that intimate contact was essential for the civilizing process to be ignited led the humanitarian mind to be alert to verifiable evidence that authenticated this understanding of colonial contact. Humanitarian literature is full of recording those small signs of wonder that demonstrated this historical process of cultural change in progress. In the early 1840s in South Australia the reports of both Matthew Moorhouse—the Protector of Aborigines for the colony—and Edward John Eyre—then stationed at Moorunde—suggested that intimacy and example were working the way it was imagined. In early 1844, for example, Moorhouse optimistically listed the indications that the corner of the civilizing process had been turned. At the same time Eyre was also recording similar signs of change. He reported a drop in violence, the increased engagement of Aboriginal people in labor and cultivation, and a diminution of Aboriginal fear of the white man. On trips to the Rufus River, previously the scene of violent conflict, he had met with friendly interaction with the tribes, and for the first time, members of the tribes were willing to accompany him back to Moorunde, where, in a nice illustration of imperial pageantry, a “parade of military force [which] as well as the exaggerated stories told by the Moorunde natives, impressed them with the power and influence of the soldiers, while the kind treatment and presents they received proved the good will of the white men.”37 Similarly, Edward Shortland in April  1845 described how the mere presence of a resident government officer at Maketu in the South Island had triggered an observable decline in theft by local Maori. In Australia, excited reports were common that the learning skills of Aboriginal children demonstrated their equal or superior intelligence to white students. In July 1844, Grey wrote to the Colonial Office with the detail that in a three-month period seventy children had learned the alphabet and multiplication tables and could tell time. This was the same mentality that led efforts to bring a classical English education, complete with Latin and Greek Western education to the Xhosa in the eastern Cape at about the same time.

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It is easy to dismiss such programs as reflecting the arrogant superiority of Western imperial mentality. But in the context of the time it suggested a capacious conception of racial difference.38 The casting around for hints that history was moving in the direction ordained by humanitarian assumptions reflected an inherent optimism imperial relations could be reformed. Underlying this was the idea expressed by Adam Smith that virtue would predominate in human behavior because doing evil produced guilt and allowed no peace of mind. This assumption fused with the evangelical confidence that history could be mastered and that past vices could be atoned. The pain and suffering that had been inflicted and continued to be inflicted upon Indigenous peoples could be redeemed. This was the point of breaking the tie between violence and empire. Yet the conditions that induced this optimism could also create anxieties, tensions, and ambiguities that were never fully resolved and created important instabilities within the humanitarian world. These tensions compromised the capacity of the humanitarian world to comprehend racial difference. They drew limits that constrained humanitarianism from realizing its potential to encompass Indigenous difference. Thus a path was cleared for humanitarianism to collude with the very violence and coercion that it condemned in imperial encounter and aspired to transcend. How may we understand such complexities?39 The answer lies in the very values of the humanitarian mindset itself. There was no single emotional register. Sympathy could be evoked through intimate contact as the example of Richard Penney suggests. Dr. Richard Penny had spent some time in the Lake Alexandra area of South Australia, where he claimed to have established trust relations with the tribes that made the area safe for whites. He then became familiar with the Ngarrindjeri at Encounter Bay, where he was moved by the suffering brought on by their exposure to venereal and other diseases. He wrote to George Grey in 1842 offering his services to do the same work among the peoples in the Upper Murray valley who had recently proved ferocious in the face of overlander parties. Whether Grey took advantage of this selfless offer is not recorded. But to take Penny at his word is to glimpse the potential that existed within the humanitarian mind for a capacious model of the imperial encounter.40 But for every Richard Penny, there were a dozen George Moores, who, as we noted earlier, found himself swinging rapidly from respect to scorn from his observations of Aboriginal behavior. If intimacy assisted empathetic identification, it could also lead to pity and disdain. Both disdain and pity were present in humanitarian mentality. The same emotional see-saw was experienced by Joseph Orton, a strong and articulate defender of Aboriginal rights, whose views on Indigenous Australians were packed with contrary tensions. On the one hand, they were “a most degraded race of human beings.” On the other hand, “they are notwithstanding a most interesting people having minds quite capable of comprehending and hearts capable of feeling.” Orton was full of pity not only for their plight but also for their beliefs. And, concurrent with his pity for their well-justified fear of whites, he derided their “ludicrous” beliefs in relation to natural phenomena.41

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Such contradictions were symptoms of the instability than inhered to the humanitarian mentality as these tightly linked inconsistencies jostled for dominance in each encounter. At an abstract level, they expressed the paradox within all humanitarian reasoning between its role as “a relation of domination and a relation of assistance.” Humanitarian activity is imbued with ambiguity toward the objects of its efforts. And this feeds “the compassion fatigue, the wearing down of moral sentiments until they turn into indifference or even aggressiveness toward the victims of misfortune.” Disturbing this delicate balance led pity to tip over into contempt and a charitable sympathy shift to a dismissive rejection. The Smithian emphasis on mutual reciprocity, which fitted well with evangelical Christian notions about universal humanity, anticipated a similar reception from the object of its attention. Thus, everything depended on the way the social and psychological dynamic of the encounter played itself out. The cultural politics of the imperial frontier were not conducive to maintaining a stability within this bundle of emotions and sentiments.42

Anxieties The challenge humanitarians faced was how to maintain their grip on values such as empathy in the conditions of the colonial encounter. Empathy is a strong emotion, and it was particularly strong within the humanitarian mindset, which sought to arouse “the moral power of anti-slavery discourse toward the plight of Indigenous peoples.” Empathy was naturally part of the humanitarian outlook because it involves “a particular cognitive outlook—a sense of self as a part of a common humanity.”43 It works out of a deep sense of morality, as if no other course was open. And it affirms and confirms the self-identity of those who practice it. But empathy can also be random and inconsistent, and, most importantly, it is conditional upon its object. The object of empathy has to be perceived as deserving. If that object fails to demonstrate worth, empathy itself is jeopardized. Thus, a deep instability is embedded in the quality of empathy, which may be triggered by the response of those to whom it is directed. This volatility was inherent to the mentality of humanitarianism. I have noted how divergent views about Indigenous peoples could be held at the same time in the same person. Joseph Orton, for example, struggled to balance the contrasting evidence he found in Aboriginal culture such as their love of children and their practice of infanticide. Orton’s sense of cultural difference did not extend to viewing such contrasts with equanimity. He possessed what has been called the “double vision” of humanitarian visions of Indigenous people: the tension between their belief in universal humanity and their repulsion at the depravity they saw in certain Indigenous customs such as cannibalism. The limits of cultural relativism were met when humanitarian mentality met traditions and customs they could not tolerate. Most of the time Orton, for example, was a good enough humanitarian to be able to balance these contrasts. Still, in a less committed humanitarian, circumstances could easily arise that would destabilize such an equilibrium. And this was particularly the case when the colonial encounter failed to play out according to the predictions of the humanitarian script.44

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Anxiety was triggered in humanitarianism by the impact of its encounter with Indigenous cultures. Humanitarians constantly struggled to reconcile the behavior of Indigenous peoples within the boundaries of their expectations. The circumstances of the encounter were crowded with moments that exposed the volatile sensitivities of humanitarian cultural politics. There is an interesting story about the experience of Captain Bromley, the first Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, who landed in the colony brimming with a heady, naive optimism that his interaction with local indigenes would proceed quickly and smoothly. He planned to learn the language, “reconcile them to European habits and win their affections.” Instead, he soon found himself a pawn in Aboriginal hands. Using food to create mutual connection and dependence, he offered them porridge. But they insisted on bread. Since there was a shortage of biscuit from which to make bread, Bromley began to make oatcakes at his own expense. When Aboriginal people refused these, he sat down and ate the cakes himself in order to try and persuade them to stay within his civilizing domain. In fact, they were converting him. He suffered “great anxiety” each time they threatened to leave and pull the plug on his humanitarian designs. He was so anxious they stay that he became their advocate and urged the government to distribute their precious biscuit supplies. This was not the only trouble besetting poor Captain Bromley. He was plagued by Aboriginal thievery. And even though he was authorized to use force, he refused. Bromley deserves credit for this commitment to humanitarian tolerance, but it is clear that this particular interchange had not followed the humanitarian play book. Indeed, the script had been thrown out by its intended audience who substituted their own show. Bromley soon resigned and left. But his experience captures the immediate complexities of the colonial encounter that nonplussed the humanitarian mind.45 The central challenge the colonial encounter presented to the subjective world of humanitarianism was to its fund of empathy. Compassion fatigue would emerge when the expectations humanitarians held about the dynamic of reciprocity and mutuality failed to evolve or, as in the case of Bromley, evolved in unanticipated ways. The key moderator of the pressure on empathy was the behavior of the local Aboriginal people. Indeed, one of the thoughtful governors of the period, John Hutt, of Western Australia, put his finger on this in a long dispatch to the Colonial Office on Aboriginal policy when he concluded that “much [of the success of policy] will depend on the way we exercise our power, but still more upon the character and disposition of the Aborigines themselves.” And this was precisely the point. The assumptions and emotions that humanitarian discourse prescribed for framing the colonial encounter could only succeed if the Indigenous people operated in ways that were recognized by the discourse. Otherwise, the resources of humanitarian mentality were stretched to comprehend behavior. Empathy was supposed to foster mutuality; intimacy was supposed to generate closeness and understanding. When the expected result failed to occur, anxieties were created that could shift the boundaries of humanitarian behavior toward coercive repression. A story from the diaries of George Robinson will illustrate this point.46

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It concerned an Aboriginal woman named Wayler, whom Robinson had “rescued” from the sealers in the Bass Straits. Wayler did not want to be rescued. She promptly absconded and returned to her sealer “husband.” This was not surprising. Robinson was rescuing these women more for his own good rather than because they wanted to escape. His narrative described Aboriginal women as acquired either by force or by commercial transactions and were in bondage to the white men. He could not imagine that they might want to stay where they were. Thus, his empathy and pity were being rejected. He could only explain this displacement of his own narrative about Wayler by turning her into a disruptive anomaly. She was, he explained, an “Amazon” woman who terrorized both white and native communities, many of whom she had murdered. And in claiming her own freedom instead of accepting the offer of his kind of freedom, she was a potential source of rebellion amongst the Aboriginal people. He attached a key importance to capturing her and keeping her isolated. It was a “most fortunate thing that this woman was apprehended and stopped in her murderous career.” True or not, the importance of this story is the way it demonstrates how empathy could be denied when Wayler’s cunning and enterprise contradicted the (empathetic) narrative Robinson had constructed to describe sealer wives. Robinson’s emotional resources had been exhausted. He had no choice but to imprison her.47 Empathic fatigue was a constant condition of the colonial frontier. In 1830, Sir George Arthur set up a committee of local worthies to advise him on Aboriginal policy and sought input from the settler community. Running through the many letters he received in response were anecdotal stories that, on the one hand, admitted the terrible violence visited upon the Tasmanian Aboriginals and, on the other hand, related how settler kindness had been met with treachery. This was a trope that enabled settlers to comprehend their failure to understand Indigenous peoples’ behavior. It was a condition illustrated by the experience of George Lloyd, a Tasmanian settler who was reputed to be sympathetic to the local Aboriginal people, but who lost his empathy when he had some potatoes stolen. It was not the actual theft of the potatoes that made him angry; it was the principle of the thing: “if they had wanted the potatoes they could have asked but they would rather steal” was how Lloyd saw it. We might regard this as a case of cultural difference. To the settler it was a refutation of the efficacy of empathy.48 In Van Diemen’s Land, the struggle to retain empathy soon faded away. But it was a struggle that was commonly experienced throughout this period. From the very different context of New Zealand, the diary of missionary, John Hobbs illustrates how it was an ongoing process. In recording the death of a local chief and observing the genuine sorrow of his wife—which Hobbs identified as evidence of a shared humanity—he was also led to reflect on the way in which he has conducted himself during my residence in New Zealand. . . . His pride, his falsehood, unbounded avarice and duplicity can only be convened of my considering that he is of his Father the devil, and under his immediate control. But does the compassionate Christian say, “But

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while the Lamp holds out to burn the vilest sinner may return?” the reply is “He is destitute of that knowledge by which alone his salvation is possible?” Here I cannot but remember a former expression made by him. . . . I do not wish to hear about Jesus Christ, I wish to hear about tommy hawks [sic] etc, and he appeared to me always to breathe the same spirit when anything relative to another was said.49 Hobbs was a recent arrival in New Zealand, so one presumes that he was going through a period of adjustment. Reading ahead in his diaries shows that he continued to hold to his faith in the humanitarian program. A few years later he recorded optimistic signs that the civilizing process was engaged by the growing number of Maori who used table place settings for dinner or were wearing European clothes. So, Hobbs did not lose his empathy. Indeed, nowhere do his diaries suggest that the chief ’s rejection of Christianity revealed an inveterate racial incapacity. But he clearly had to work hard in his head to retain his humanitarian belief in a universal humanity.50 Empathy, then, was inherently unstable and fragile. Compassion fatigue is a normal accompaniment of humanitarian empathy. The fragility of sympathy was recognized by eighteenth-century commentators as a feature of humanitarian sensibility. It is possible to read the story of this phase of humanitarianism as an inflated example of this phenomenon. E.J. Eyre’s journey from humanitarian explorer to imperial tyrant is a case in point. Even during the period when he was an intrepid explorer, surviving considerable hardship and surrounded by unknown dangers, his behavior revealed hints of the fragility of empathy. During his expedition across the Nullabor desert, a misunderstanding led to a potential conflict situation with his Aboriginal companions. His empathy disappeared and he immediately perceived them as a threat rather than as helpful partners. On this occasion he recovered his empathetic equilibrium and set off across the desert with only six helpers, including four Indigenous Australians. Eyre and one of the Aboriginal men were the only ones to survive the trip.51 It was only when Eyre moved into the space of government by taking the position of Resident Magistrate at Moorunde at the end of 1841 that his attitudes began to shift. What had changed was his context. The mutual experiences of closeness and dependency that had characterized his encounter with Indigenous people as an explorer were progressively diminished. He had moved into a space where he was in authority rather than dependent on the Aboriginal people for his survival. It was here that he began to draw up his policy plans that were published a few years later in his Journals of Expedition of Discovery in Central Australia and that were premised upon directed coercion. He had not lost his sympathy for Aboriginal rights or his empathy for their plight. But it was contextualized differently; it was joined, for example, with the claim that if violence was to be avoided, control of the Aboriginal people was essential. Thus, even as he considered how to implement humanitarian remedies for the Aboriginal dilemma, his attitudes changed. At Moorundie, for example, Aboriginal land loss was defined more in terms of their

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loss of food than in terms of dispossession. He continued to address the question of dispossession. But his vision of its remedies narrowed. He now conceived Indigenous land rights as confined to the elders as the only legitimate claimants—thus opening the way for dispossession, which he would compensate for by handouts of food and other goods.52 George Augustus Robinson also had to work to retain empathy, and his capacity was frequently tested during his expeditions to “rescue” the Van Diemen’s Land Aboriginal people.53 His detailed Diaries of his “friendly missions” reveal how frequently his empathy was challenged by the behavior of his Aboriginal associates. Robinson’s empathy may have been rooted in his evangelical religion, but it was kept in check by dependence upon the Aboriginal members of his party, and by his awareness of how reliant he was on them for logistical support and for his successful negotiations with the tribes he aimed to remove. Thus, his relationship with Kickerterpoller (“Black Tom”) one of the leading members of his Aboriginal team whom Robinson could hardly afford to alienate. Kickerterpoller was an independent character whom Robinson found hard to control. Robinson was infuriated by his “obdurate and callous” behavior, his resistance to “all my advice and reproof,” and to the fact that “he appeared to act independent of me. The man is innately wicked.” Even when Kickerterpoller offended Robinson by his libidinous behavior, leading Robinson to remark that “not twenty women would satisfy,” he was “necessarily compelled to suppress my feelings” because of the priority of keeping the party together.54 Similarly, Robinson was aware that at times he was being manipulated by his Indigenous helpers for their own purposes. “This is a very trying and harassing service,” he confided to his diary, “I cannot effect anything without these people and yet I am harassed and perplexed by them. They are a peculiar people to manage. There is the constant anxiety of their absconding, all the odium of which would be imputed to me.” But then he overcame this wave of resentment and self-doubt, and a few sentences later he is full of praise for his “sable friends.” Robinson possessed a large reservoir of empathy. He got wearied, and he never totally lost his compassion.55

Conclusion Understanding the internal dynamics of the humanitarian mentality is a necessary prologue to reading the mental world that drove policy making and animated individuals (like Robinson, Arthur, and George Grey) who were making the empire during this period. It is also necessary to understand the inherent weaknesses in humanitarian discourse. But it is important to understand the imperial imagination of the humanitarian mentality within the context of the engagements discussed in the previous chapter. They provided the material evidence that allowed humanitarians to believe they could make an empire of racial reconciliation. Evaluating this fantasy requires more than categorizing it as an imperial initiative cloaked in a religious vision. It went beyond a conception of history as the unfolding of providential design and virtue. This religious sensibility was fundamental, of course,

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particularly to the individual drives of someone like Robinson. Among such people there was the sense that they were at the end of history, that the secrets of historical progress were now known. And this millenarian imagination was reinforced and its power enhanced by secular sources in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought, which revealed the dynamic of human psychology. When publicists for the humanitarian perspective looked at the history of imperial relations, their mental world rested on Christianity as not only a key to human interaction but also an understanding that the qualities of empathy, pity, and sympathy could inform the world of empire if properly applied. But this humanitarian construct was dependent for its validation upon the reception it received from the Indigenous peoples that it encountered in the empire. And this was the rub. Not every aspect of the colonial encounter served to upset and de-stabilize humanitarian expectations. The imperial encounter was above all marked by mixed signs as to how the social relations of empire could be constructed. There was cooperation and exchange at the imperial frontiers as well as violence and conflict. There were moments when humanitarian expectations were fulfilled, in many cases, for example, when the missionary message was received and embraced and converts made. There were times when “small signs of wonder” seemed to demonstrate the truth of humanitarian discourse that the finer angels of human nature were being evoked in Aboriginal hearts and minds and the essential equality of humankind was revealed. This was the basis for an optimism that sustained people like Robinson as they attempted to live out the expectations of the humanitarian mentality. But, there was also a frequent struggle to hold at bay the fatigue of compassion and empathy. And this injected a volatile dynamic to the humanitarian discourse that was to be increasingly important in the years ahead. In the final analysis, of course, humanitarian mentality was not capacious enough to receive the colonial encounter in a way that could accommodate racial difference as we might understand it. At any historical moment, humanitarianism will at some point meet that same dilemma. But the humanitarians of the early nineteenth century could not foresee that fact. They were not operating with the expectation that they would fail and become the servants of an imperial order where racial domination rather than racial cooperation was the governing motif. They were the human rights advocates of their time. They were the most ready to accept racial difference, and this fact is not unimportant. But there were clear limits to their tolerance, although there were ongoing debates about those limits. Missionaries had to decide whether polygamy would be a disqualification for membership in their congregations. Colonial administrators had to decide where the limits of the application of the law should lie, which parts of Indigenous law and custom could be ignored, and which had to be proscribed. George Robinson had to decide whether to ignore Kickerterpoller’s blasphemy and rebelliousness. Where the frontier of empathy lay and the limits of “humane” policy drawn were not pre-determined. Sooner or later, however, those limits hove into view and it was at that point that humanitarianism moved from being a vision of social relations in empire to a system of governance. For it was at

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that point that it had to contemplate the appeal to imperium whether in the assertion of superior moral or legal codes or possibly more coercive methods. This dynamic was to be one of the key features of the policies that the humanitarian mentality imagined could bring about the kind of empire that they wanted. And it is to the matter of policy formation, its relationship to the themes of this and the previous chapter, that I shall now turn. Three main lines of policy emerged from the humanitarian mentality that were imagined would provide “humane” governance for the Indigenous peoples in the newly acquired colonies in the southern seas. The following chapter focuses on the idea that conciliatory relations could exist between the imperial state, settlers, and Indigenous peoples. Chapter 4 addresses efforts to protect Aboriginal people from the violence that accompanied the building of empires. And Chapter 5 examines the hope that a “racial amalgamation” could occur between the races as a way of avoiding extensive violence and as a model for a new kind of imperial society.

Notes 1 South Africa was the major locus of humanitarian attention thanks to its strong connection to the humanitarian networks in London through people like John Philip. The importance of South Africa is illustrated in its prominence before the Select Committee on Aborigines 1835–1837 and in the literature on the humanitarian agenda such as Saxe Bannister’s, Humane Policy, or Justice to the Aborigines or New Settlements (London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830). On John Philip, see Tim Keegan, Dr. Philip’s Empire: One Man’s Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth Century South Africa (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2016). 2 As in Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008). 3 This is a notion that pervades all of the scholarship on humanitarianism and its policies. The best example of this position is Alan Lester and Fae Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also, Penny Edmonds and Anna Johnston, “Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016); Elspeth Martini, “The Tides of Morality: Anglo-American Colonial Authority and Indigenous Removal, 1820–1848” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013). For a critique, see Abigail Green, “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered and National,” Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (2014), accessed November 12, 2014, https://doi-org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/10.1017/S0018246X14000156. Also Anne O’Brien, “Hunger and the Humanitarian Frontier,” Aboriginal History 39 (2015), on the need to historicize humanitarianism. Contemporary works that have been influential in this body of work include Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard Brown, Humanitarian Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (New York: Penguin, 2009). For an interesting essay that recognizes the power of humanitarianism as a moral force, see Lynn Festa, “Sentimental Visions of Empire in Eighteenth Century Studies,” Literature Compass 6, no. 1 (January 2008). 4 For a fuller consideration of these issues, see Chapter 8. 5 Owen at New Lanark and in New Harmony, Indiana, was probably more successful than Robinson in regulating the lives of his charges. Robinson never could rid his charges on Flinders Island of the desire to hunt and wander. Empire is not typically thought of as a utopian enterprise. But its ambitions and presumptions surely count as such. Schemes

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6

7

8

9

such as the Niger river expedition of 1840–1 suggest this theme. See Harold Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Anti-Slavery Expedition to the River Niger 1840–41 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). On utopianism among missionaries, see Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 34, 47, 102–8. Owenism had a distinctly imperial element; see Malcolm Chase, “Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society,” in Robert Owen and His Legacy, ed. Noel Thompson and Chris Williams (Cardiff: Cardiff University Press, 2011). Christina Twomey, “Protecting Slaves and Aborigines: The Legacies of European Colonialism in the British Empire,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 10–29; Zoe Laidlaw, “Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 749–68; Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 106–23. For the moral capital banked by abolitionism, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 170, 177, 456–59. For Saxe Bannister, see Saliha Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 75–76, 89–91, 95, 98–100, 102–4, 110–23; 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 Studies 4, no. 3 (2003): 29–30; Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Bannisters and Their Colonial World: Family Networks and Colonialism in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, ed. Karen Dubinsky and Adele Perry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 49–75. Saxe Bannister was an example of how humanitarians could be implicated in violence. As a colonial official New South Wales in the mid-1820s, he had endorsed methods of salutary terror. Saxe Bannister’s policy proposals tended to be recycled through his several publications. But they touched the main points that were to be found expressed at the imperial and policy levels. Thus, he wanted more government support for missionary work; funds to be set aside from land sales to be used for Aboriginal policy; crown control over land title; and sales and extension of titles to native peoples. He wanted the law to be modulated to take into account Indigenous customs. See, for example, Bannister, Humane Policy, 40–48, 70–73, 196, 234, 244–48; Saxe Bannister, British Colonization and the Coloured Races (London: William Ball, 1838), ix, 15, 268–88. Other examples of prominent humanitarian publicists in London included Montague Hawtrey, notable for his support of a policy of racial amalgamation. See, An Earnest Address to the Inhabitants of New Zealand with Reference to Their Intercourse with Native Inhabitants (London, 1840) and see his later Justice to New Zealand, Honor to England (London, 1861); Standish Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation for Securing Protection to All the Aboriginal Inhabitants of All Countries Colonized by Great Britain (London: John Murray, 1840), who argued for an extension and elaboration of the protectorate system; Dandeson Coates, The Present State of the New-Zealand Question (London, 1838). This was the theme of the Aborigines Protection Society, Report of the Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (London: William Ball, 1837). A  representative example was expressed by William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838), 9–10: The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people . . . are not to be paralleled by those of any other race. . . . Is it fit that this horrible blending of the names of Christianity and outrage should continue? . . . and [it] must continue until the genuine spirit of Christianity in this kingdom shall arouse itself, and determine that these villainies shall cease.

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10 NAUK, CO 408/7, Van Diemen’s Land, Original Correspondence, Sir George Murray to Sir George Arthur, November 5, 1830, f. 82. 11 Saxe Bannister, Records of British Enterprise, the Control of the Privy Council over the Administration of Affairs at Home; in the Colonies; and in India (London: James Ridgway, William Benning & Co, 1848). 12 For multi-racial ideals of missionary culture, see Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 13–16. Reverend Joseph Orton, a leading Methodist missionary, served as advisor to Chief Justice Burton of New Zealand when he was drafting an Act that aimed to regulate Maori-settler relations. See Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Travelling Laws: Burton and the Draft Act for the Protection and Amelioration of the Aborigines 1838 (NSW),” in Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagement and Legacy, ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren (London: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 171–85. Thus, John Hutt wrote from Western Australia in 1839. Knowing the feeling on this point which pervades the Government and the public mind in England, and having had it thoroughly pressed upon my attention before sailing for this country, I have since . . . taken every opportunity of ascertaining the present condition of the native inhabitants . . . and the relative position they stand towards the settlers.” He went on to provide the conventional description of Aboriginal people as a mixture of the attributes of universal humanity—“active, handy, daring, intelligent and faithful”—and at the same time containing the vices of “savage nations” who had yet to emerge “from the simplest and most elementary state of barbarism. NAUK, CO 18/22, Western Australia Original Correspondence Despatches, Hutt to Glenelg, May 3, 1839, 237–47. 13 Henry Reynolds in This Whispering in Our Hearts (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen  & Unwin, 1998), especially Chapter  1; Anne O’Brien, “Humanitarianism and Reparations in Colonial Australia,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, no. 2 (2011). For an example in the colonial press, see September 24, 1831, Colonial Times (Hobart), which provides a critique of Arthur’s policy from a humanitarian perspective. Some early settlers were even motivated to work among the tribes to forward the work of conciliation. Dr. Richard Penney wrote to George Grey in 1842 explaining how he had spent several years with the Ngarrindjeri at Encounter Bay because he was moved by the suffering brought on by their exposure to venereal and other diseases. He offered his services to do the same work among the peoples in the Upper Murray valley who had recently proved ferocious in the face of overlander parties. Richard Penny to Grey, January 12, 1842, South Australian State Archives, Miscellaneous Reports. Colonial Secretary’s Office. GRG24/90, Item 387. In May 1840, Penny had been the first to discover a group of shipwrecked families who had been murdered by local people and had occasioned a punitive expedition to take revenge. Judging from this letter to Grey, Penny was evidently not dissuaded from his humanitarian leanings by his experiences. 14 Foster Fyans, “Reminiscences 1810–1843,” State Library of Victoria, MS 6939, pp. 293, 315–18, 394–98, 428, 444, 469–70. 15 NAUK, CO 201/309 New South Wales, Original Correspondence, Despatches, Gipps to Stanley, April 9, 1841, ff. 70–73. 16 ML, A 1400, Richard Windeyer, “On the Rights of Aborigines in Australia.” MSS. of a lecture, A 1400, Mitchell Library, 1842, 22–23, 27–28, 30–33, 34, 42–43. For this context of the speech, see, accessed August 6, 2019, https://residentjudge.com/2011/03/08/ this-whispering-in-our-hearts-by-henry-reynolds/. Windeyer had emigrated to Sydney in 1835. He became a prominent barrister and parliamentarian and farmed an extensive estate in the Hunter Valley. Australian Dictionary of National Biography, accessed August 6, 2019, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/windeyer-richard-1060. 17 Ibid., 43–44. 18 Elizabeth Elbourne comments on the speech in her “Sin of the Settler,” 32. Another example of the way humanitarian discourse could frame discussion was the reaction to

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the punitive expedition known as the Maria Massacre in 1840. Not only did the actions of the governor and the police commissioner lead to serious discussion in the Colonial Office about charging them with murder, it also occasioned a sharp debate within the colony itself. See, Judy Hamman, “The Coorong Massacre: A  Study in Early Race Relations in South Australia,” Flinders Journal of History and Politics III (1973): 1–9. 19 By the early 1830s they were beginning to be openly expressed in the press. The murders of two prominent men in Tasmania triggered exterminationist sentiment to be openly expressed. See The Tasmanian and Austral-Asiatic Review, February 26, 1830, 471. And Reverend Joseph Orton in September 1840 recorded a visit he made to Paramatta, where Captain Raine, a settler, “expressed his regret that they were not allowed to shoot a few of them” in return for some affray that had occurred. This entry also contains evidence of the power of the humanitarian discourse at this moment when Raine admitted that it was only the fear of being hanged that restrained them. “Such a sentiment,” Orton reported, “speaks volumes on the subject of the tender mercies and equity of the Europeans towards the robbed, oppressed, starved Aborigines of a country arbitrarily wrested from them by Christians [sic] under the sanction of a Christian government.” See ML A1714, Orton, “Papers, Journal, vol. 1–2, 1832–1841,” entry of September 11, 1840, 110 and entries August 13, 1839, 309 and September 14, 1840, 111 for similar encounters. 20 Brendan Simms and D.J.B. Trim, eds., Humanitarian Interventionism: A  History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12–14; Wilson and Richard, Humanitarian Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, 1–2; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, a History (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Thomas Lacqueur, “Bodies, Detail and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176–204. 21 Ian Bradley, Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London: Routledge, 1976), 51. Domestic evangelicalism was intimately connected with empire through missionary support societies. By the 1830s, the evangelical influence in British civic culture was reaching its apogee. It was rightly written many years ago that “whichever way his temperament led [the Victorian of 1830 found] . . . at every turn controlled and animated by the imponderable pressure of evangelical discipline.” G.M. Young, Victorian England. Portrait of an Age, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1953), 1. 22 Bradley, Call to Seriousness, 14–28. 23 See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) for the centrality of providential religion to the culture of early Victorian Britain. 24 ML (Mitchell Library), A1714, Rev. Joseph Orton, “Papers, Journal vol. 1 & 2, 1832– 1841,” May 31, 1833, May 18, 1839. For another example from this part of the world, see David McLaren, Journal Kept During His Voyage in the South Australian from England to South Australia November 26th, 1836 to April 23rd, 1837. South Australian State Library, PRG 790/2 and from South Africa, the case of John F. Cumming, see Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 28–30, 74–76. 25 N.J.B. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 2nd ed. (Hobart: Quintus, 2008), 296–97 and also, 310, 906. ML A7094. Rev. W. Schofield to Robinson, 16 May 1830, Robinson Papers, Volume 33. Correspondence and Other Papers, 1829–30 for a good expression of this providential faith. 26 Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Creation of ‘Knowledge’ About Aborigines in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Paper delivered at Canadian Historical Association, 2003, Toronto; Ian Macfarlane, Public Finance of Port Phillip 1836–1840: Historical Records of Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 344. See also Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 111–13; Andrew Ross, “Christian Missions and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Change in Attitudes to Race: The African Experience,” in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions 1880–1914, ed.

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Andrew Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 85–105. For a major statement of this belief, see John Phillip, Researches in South Africa (New York: Harper and Bros., 1969 reprint; originally published in 1828), 315–17, 328–29, 355. And see the sermons published by the London Missionary Society, Sermons Preached in London at the Formation of the Missionary Society (London, 1795) for examples of this, particularly Samuel Greathed, 56–57. 27 For Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery, vol. II, 374. For other examples, see Edward Stone Parker, The Aborigines of Australia: Lecture to John Knox Young Men’s Association in the Melbourne Mechanics Hall 10 May 1854 (Melbourne, 1854), 26–28; P. Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales (London, 1827), 202–3; Charles Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes, ed. and intro. D.W. Baker (Canberra: Pandanus Books, reprint, 2006), 84. 28 Sankar Muthu, Empire in Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3–9, 69, 274–78. See also Sankar Muthu, “Conquest, Commerce and Cosmopolitanism in Enlightenment Thought,” in Empire in Modern Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 199–231. For the contrast between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century sensibilities, Muthu has this to say (p. 278): The categories under which human diversity were theorized  .  .  .  [in the] eighteenth century included—among others—climate, national character, race, moeurs, Kultur, stadial accounts of social development, and sociological distinctions among agriculture, hunting and pastoral lifestyles. This very diversity of languages about difference, and the variety of meanings ascribed to each one, may have enabled the development of unusual and at times nuanced accounts of cultural pluralism. . . . In contrast, by the nineteenth century, the language of race, which was first developed in the influential natural histories of the eighteenth century . . . had overtaken other conceptual contenders and was much more frequently deployed . . . to categorize non-European peoples. 29 Duncan Bell, “Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 283–84; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 62–71; Uday Mehta, “Edmund Burke, Empire, Self Understanding and Sympathy,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, Empire in Modern Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 156–59, 183. More generally on Burke, see Richard Bourne, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. 160–69, 171, 281–82, 328, 338– 39, 353–54, 371–75, 552–53, 628–29, 657–63. Burke’s focus on imperial morality was directly reflected in the popular expressions of the humanitarian perspective on empire by people like the popular writer Howitt; see his Colonization and Christianity, 40–41, 67, 92. 30 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 25, 113, 76. 31 Ibid., 113–14, 152, 264. A similar argument is made by Julian Beard, “Conciliation in New South Wales,” in Australian Aborigines and Others, ed. Joelle Bonnevin et al. (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015), 156–76. 32 Ibid., 120, 139–42, 204–10. For Adam Smith on universal humanity, see Emma Rothschild, “Adam Smith in the British Empire,” in Empire and Modern Political Thought, Empire in Modern Thought, ed. Sankar Muthu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 195–97. For how Adam Smith was enlisted as a defender of Empire, see Marc Palen, “Adam Smith as an Advocate of Empire, c. 1870–1932,” Historical Journal 51, no. I (2014): 179–98. 33 Thomas W. Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity and the Work of Narrative in the Making of ‘Humanity’,” in Humanitarian Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard Brown, 31–42.

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34 Wilson and Brown, “Introduction,” in Humanitarian Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, 19, for intimacy and humanitarianism. 35 Plomley, Friendly Mission, 237 and see p. 310 for another example. Such arguments were scattered throughout humanitarian musings. A similar argument was made about Xhosa violence by the Methodist missionary Stephen Kay. See SOAS, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Kay Journal, June 20, 1826, Fiche 52. 36 Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, 153–56, 166–68. 37 Kathleen Hassell, The Relations between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia 1836– 1860 (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 1921 reprint, 1966), 86, 92–93. 38 NANZ, Misc 17 1, Edward Shortland Letterbook 1842–1854, Shortland to the Chief Protector, April 11, 1845; NA, CO 13/38, South Australia: Original Correspondence: Despatches, Grey to Stanley, July 9, 1844, ff. 190–94. CO 13/37, South Australia: Original Correspondence. Despatches, ff.160–62; CO 18/27, Western Australia: Original Correspondence: Despatches Hutt to Stanley, May 15, 1841, ff. 342–69. Michael Ashley, “African Education and Society in the Nineteenth Century Eastern Cape,” in Beyond the Cape Frontier, ed. Christopher Saunders and Robin Derricourt (London: Routledge, 1974), 199–212. 39 For the way humanitarians came to terms with colonial violence, see Elizabeth Elbourne, “Violence, Moral Imperialism and Colonial Borderlands 1170s–1820s,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016), doi:10.1353/cch 20160003. 40 Richard Penny to Grey, January 12, 1842, South Australian State Archives, Miscellaneous Reports. Colonial Secretary’s Office. GRG24/90, Item 387. In May 1840 Penny had been the first to discover a group of shipwrecked families who had been murdered by local Aboriginals and had occasioned a punitive expedition to take revenge. Judging from this letter to Grey, Penny was evidently not dissuaded from his humanitarian leanings by his experiences. 41 ML1714 Orton, Papers, Journal Vol. 2, May 28, 1841, 268; Alex Tyrell, A Sphere of Benevolence: The Life of Joseph Orton Wesleyan Methodist Missionary (1795–1842) (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 153. 42 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 3; Samuel Moyn, “Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 397–415 for compassion fatigue. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 49–50, 192–93, observes that from a psychological perspective contrary values are intimately connected and that empathy and compassion are inherently imperialist because they are a way of authenticating the identity of the giver as benign and good and securing gratitude from the subject. 43 Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy Across the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 12. This book is primarily focused on the representations of empathy in visual and print literature as part of its appeal to the general public. Of more relevance to my concerns here, see Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 216–19, 265. 44 ML A1714, Rev. Joseph Orton Papers, Journal, vols. 1–2, 1832–1841, April 19, 1839, 231, May 21, 1839, 255, May 28, 1839, 268. For the double vision notion, see Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700, 129, 132. 45 Hassell, The Relations between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia 1836–1860, 19–22. 46 NAUK, CO 18/22, Western Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Hutt to Glenelg, May 3, 1839, ff. 237–47. 47 Plomley, Friendly Mission, 329–34. 48 For various stories that follow this pattern, see TAHO, CSO1/323/7527, Vol. 8. Suggestions as to the Capture of the Natives, 178–82, 194–95; and see also, TAHO, CSO1/323/758, Vol. 8, Colonial Secretary, Correspondence, Robert O’ Connor to W. Parramour, December 11, 1827, 63–75; Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1991), 50–55.

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49 Auckland War Memorial Museum, MSS 144, Rev. John Hobbs, Diary of John Hobbs, Vol. 2, April 11, 1827. 50 Ibid., Vol. 4, September 23, 1833, Vol. 7, November 19, 1848, March 23, 1849. 51 The most convincing account of Eyre’s career trajectory has been proposed by Julie Evans, who resists the temptation to see him as an example of the inevitable unfolding of the “governmental” impulses of humanitarian hypocrisy. Here I  follow her interpretation, Julie Evans, Edward Eyre, Race and Colonial Governance (Otago, NZ: Otago University Press, 2005), 154–55. 52 Ibid., 161–64, 166. 53 We shall discuss Robinson’s character in this respect more fully in the next chapter. The treatments of Robinson that best capture the culture, ideology, and psychology of his actions are those of Inga Clendennin, “Reading Robinson,” in Tigers Eye (New York: Routledge, 2000); Cassandra Pybus, “A Self-Made Man,” in Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to the Friendly Mission, ed. Anna Johnston (Hobart: Quintus, 2008). 54 Plomley, Friendly Mission, 591–92, 171, 455, 534 for dependence, 450. Kickerterpoller was cited in another source as an example of incorrigibility. He was reputed to have murdered a man who had been in the act of giving him bread and with whom he had lived for two years. See TAHO, CSO1 323 758, Vol. 8, Colonial Secretary, Correspondence, Robert O’Connor to Parramour, December 11, 1827. 55 Plomley, Friendly Mission, 552. By the time he left his position as chief protector at Port Phillip, however, he had likely given up on his mission to “save” the Australian Aboriginal people; see Thiele, “LaTrobe and the Bureaucrats,” 114.

3 POLICIES Conciliation and coercion

Introduction: policies and history How is the contrast between the claims of humane governance to seek an empire of racial reconciliation and its ultimate results of violence and dispossession to be understood? To what extent were those outcomes the consequence of the very project of “humane policy” itself? In approaching this question, I want to emphasize how empire was made through contingent encounters whose outcomes were not pre-determined. Policy formation was a messy process, driven less by purposeful intent and more by conditional circumstances that were neither foreseen nor foretold by ideology.1 The sources reveal confusion, uncertainty, and indeterminacy surrounding the actors at every stage of their work. The assumption within the humanitarian community that colonial encounters could be mastered for the better existed within a context of bureaucratic instability. Policy was not made or executed by a professional bureaucracy with an effective command structure. Even the most efficient officials like Sir George Arthur, who in theory exercised near dictatorial control, could not guarantee that his intentions would be implemented by the settler magistracy or others—often convicts—who represented imperial order in Van Diemen’s Land. Policies were not rolled out from pre-determined plan of humanitarian governance toward imperial hegemony. It was a more confused process, with a high degree of experimentation and of stumbling through on a day-to-day basis.2 A fragile imperial authority was augmented by the Indigenous peoples themselves. Humanitarian policy makers had a well-established play book of policy programs. But when they tried to act their script on the stage of the colonial frontier, they faced confusion and bewilderment. They might want to conciliate Aboriginal people, but was there anyone to negotiate with or to create the trust relationships that their social psychology prescribed as the basis for civic society? And, if there was, did sufficient common ground exist to allow meaningful dialogue?

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Furthermore, in order to carry out their conciliatory projects they were dependent, to an extent that is hard to accurately measure, on Indigenous agents as interpreters and intermediaries. But this meant that the Indigenous peoples possessed their own agency and were not necessarily reliable agents of humanitarian projects. Governance, therefore, took place in a context that would have given any Foucauldian theorist a nightmare. It was nuanced and contingent, and it was conditioned and shaped by the material realities of the time. This is relevant to the question we have already touched upon as to whether policy toward Aboriginal peoples was genocidal.3 The debate over genocide always comes back to original intent. Many elements of Australian Aboriginal policy over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries fit the definition of genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948, from the private and state-sponsored violence to be discussed in Chapter 6 to the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their natural homes in order to assimilate them into white culture. But when we look at that question in the context of Tasmania, in particular, it becomes very clouded. In Tasmania (nor Australia as a whole) it was never official policy to exterminate the Aboriginal people. But this existed within a context of growing sentiment within the settler community for extermination and which competed for policy dominance with the “humane policy” inclinations of Lieutenant Governor Arthur and George Robinson. Neither of them desired the result that followed in part from their policies. Indeed, it was their aim to avoid such a catastrophe, and it was precisely this that Robinson and Arthur congratulated themselves on once it was all over. Still, this hardly exonerates them, especially Arthur, whose declaration of martial law in 1828 enabled genocidal inclinations among the settlers by allowing Aboriginal people to be shot on sight. And if we accept the 1948 Declaration that includes “bystanders” to genocide as equally culpable as the perpetrators, then if Arthur were a contemporary policy maker, he would stand convicted.4 But the split between settler attitudes—which hardened markedly as the Black War heated up during the late 1820s—and official policy that sought a “humanitarian” bias suggests that in order to understand how Arthur would end up in the dock, we need to look more closely how state policy itself was formulated. How did that policy teeter at the verge of genocide to threaten the survival of the Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land? And, furthermore, how did Arthur and Robinson manage the enormous contradiction between their humanitarian claims and the results of their actions? It is those questions that I am primarily interested in exploring because it is those questions that put us behind the evidence to illuminate the inner history of empire making as it evolved on the ground. It is a story that is shocking precisely because it was composed of so many prosaic elements.5

Conciliation There was nothing peculiar about the idea that conciliation could shape official relations between British and Indigenous peoples.6 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, a repertoire of conciliatory strategies and gestures had entered

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into British approaches to the Aboriginal peoples. Using methods borrowed from North America, Lachlan Macquarie was the first governor in Australia to launch a series of conciliatory policy initiatives that were intended to create channels of communication and trust. He established a Native Conference in 1814 accompanied with ceremonies and gorgets and other “badges of distinction” that were awarded to particularly loyal Aboriginal people. These efforts were continually renewed despite the persistent eruption of frontier violence. They were encouraged by the reciprocal response from the local people, as, for example, when in the spring of 1833, Aboriginal leaders of the Whadjuk Nyungar peoples requested a conference with Governor Stirling of Western Australia to try and put an end to persistent conflict. In Tasmania, Arthur’s administration produced “proclamation boards” that portrayed in cartoon-like detail the conciliatory message he wanted to convey to the tribes. These were nailed to trees in the expectation that Indigenous Tasmanians would notice them and absorb the peaceful message they conveyed.7 As these examples suggest, conciliation was a significant presence in the dynamic of imperial encounter. Policy alternatives are never binary, and acts of conciliation did not mean that violence was surrendered as an instrument of policy. Those governors who doggedly pursued a policy of conciliation were also willing to wield weapons of violence. This was true from the beginning in Australia, where Governor Philip was prepared to take a spear in the thigh without retribution. But he was equally prepared to send an expedition to collect ten Aboriginal heads in retaliation for a spearing of one man who had been out hunting. Similarly, with Macquarie, whose policy of trying to forge alliances with Aboriginal tribes established his credentials as one of the most serious “humanitarian” governors. But he, too, was capable of using the strategy of violence and terror to discipline unruly tribes. As indeed was Saxe Bannister, the foremost theorist of humane governance, during his term as attorney general of New South Wales.8 Conciliation and coercion were linked; they were alternatives, not contradictions. In many cases the violence that challenged a conciliatory regime was the product of the uncontrollable dynamic of disorder on the frontier—the kind of settler-driven violence that we shall examine in Chapter 6. This was different in official minds from the deliberately punitive punishment by the state, a variant of the salutary terror that emerges as a policy in the armory of imperial rule in this period. Indeed, it was a general rule of imperial policy that coercion was regarded a necessary stratagem on the road to a conciliatory regime.9 This was accepted even by the high priests of humanitarian policy, the Select Committee of 1837. The same kind of reasoning was part of Edward John Eyre’s mindset when he arrived at Moorunde in 1841 to initiate conciliatory relationships with the local Aboriginal people. On the one hand, he reported that he had taken various measures to bring them more around us . . . since it is only by mixing . . . with us that they can learn . . . of our customs and dispositions towards them as to make them aware of what our intentions are in coming to their country and to induce in them the same friendly feeling towards us as that which we evince towards them.

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On the other hand, this effort, he was careful to note, would be aided by the presence of troops “as the mere exhibition of a sufficient force is often sufficient to deter aggressions.”10 Similarly, one of Colonel George Gawler’s first acts as governor of South Australia (1838–41) was to organize a festival at Government House whose theme was to set the tone that Gawler hoped would establish rule through conciliation. Aboriginal people mingled with settlers—they demonstrated their skills in spear throwing, danced, sang songs, listened to an address from the governor about the need for cooperation. He intended this festival to be an annual affair to be held every year on May 24, the Queen’s birthday. Gawler encouraged other efforts at socializing that he hoped would set the tone for rule through conciliation. Like other Australian governors, Gawler tried to establish customs that would encase this lofty objective. This was the same Gawler who a couple of years later sent an illegal punitive expedition to avenge the murder of shipwrecked passengers from the Maria. Then, soon after, Matthew Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines, was dispatched to restore conciliatory relations. He used some Aboriginal helpers to make contact, provided food whenever he came across a group camping. But the local Aboriginal people tended to flee on the approach of his party, and he had to admit that “object of our visit was not fully accomplished.”11 George Grey, who succeeded Gawler at Adelaide, was more interested in putting in place policies for the ages—he sponsored schools and hospitals—and it was under him that food distribution in South Australia became systematized and part of a web of conciliatory policies. Dispensing food became a key part of governance by conciliation. It was among the package of measures the Colonization Commission on South Australia prescribed for dealing with the Aboriginal tribes. The original intention had been to link food with work in an attempt to instill liberal capitalist values into the Aboriginal people. When this failed to show immediate results, such moments became opportunities to build trust relationships and spark habits of reciprocity and mutuality in the imperial relationship. Eyre pioneered this holistic approach at Moorunde with considerable success. But he was not the only one. Grey instructed the magistrate at Port Lincoln to make amends to natives for any loss of provisions due to Europeans driving away game; to acquaint the natives with the power and friendly intentions of the Europeans. To give them an interest in conciliating the favor of the white man and to induce them to preserve the property of the distant settlers. Regular gatherings to distribute food were also opportunities for educational civics meeting at which local Aboriginal people were instructed in the institutions of government and informed of latest policies. Grey’s successor, Frederick Robe, continued this policy, and by the early 1850s there were fourteen stations where “feasts of the full moon” were offered to the local indigenes every month who responded to these offerings. Aboriginal groups began to time their migrations to fit in with the distribution schedule. Thus, the Lake Darling tribes were encouraged to stop

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over at Moorunde and participate in the distribution of food as they made their way to the May 24th celebrations in Adelaide.12 In the official mind, coercive policies could be fitted a conciliatory framework, too. Grey wanted the law to be adapted to what he believed was true of Aboriginal culture in an effort to create a context for conciliatory acceptance by Indigenous Australians of the British presence. He sent a list of principles to his magistrates in South Australia that were designed to ensure that the application of the law be proportionate and that it fit the crime. Thus, his prescriptions were that food would be withheld for those who “misbehaved” and imprisonment was to be limited to short periods. Once freed, prisoners were to be instructed that this penalty had been administered for deterrence not vengeance. Corporal punishment was to be administered by members of the offender’s tribe, thus presumably engaging the Indigenous peoples themselves in the administration of imperial law.13 Let us linger over these instructions for a moment. At one level they are a proclamation of imperial power and illustrate the tie between coercion and conciliation. If we read them through contemporary sensibilities and contemporary theories of culture and power, they reveal the dynamics of imperial humanitarian governance. Read contextually, however, they reveal a search for a way forward that will obviously privilege the imperial presence while at the same time recognizing Aboriginal difference. It suggests an attempt to create policy that takes an understanding of that difference into account and to use it to establish lines of communication and mutuality. Grey was employing his ethnographic insights and his “humanitarian” sentiments to forge a policy that would reconcile the competing forces present at this imperial frontier. It was his version of a policy that would secure the dominant needs of the imperial factor with minimal damage to the Aboriginal people. It was a policy that emerged from observing what he thought he saw in Aboriginal society through the lens of his understanding of history. His attitude toward the role of punishment followed from his observations of Aboriginal culture and customs. These led him to believe that Aboriginal punishment theory was driven by revenge, which needed to be replaced with an emphasis on redemption. Similarly, his policy on imprisonment reflected his version of accommodating cultural difference within the context of creating a viable British ruling presence. About the same time that Grey was penning these instructions to the magistrate at Port Lincoln, he was writing in a similar vein to the Colonial Office. To the Colonial Office he explained the need for moral relativism in framing a punishment policy for Aboriginal people who “may commit many actions which are in our sight extremely culpable and yet in as far as he deems them to be virtues it would be difficult for us to assert that any degree of moral guilt whatever attaches to him.” It was necessary to tailor punishment to their cultural habits. Otherwise, it could not serve to create a basis for mutual understanding. Thus, he deemed the death penalty to be “the worst punishment which could be inflicted” because the conditions of their lives had accustomed them “to view death under a variety of forms and circumstances so that they have in some degree become habituated to it, and to face death or danger in a daring manner is considered by

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them an act of heroic virtue worthy of emulation.” Imprisonment, on the other hand, was “novel and frightful in the extreme. . . . [T]he loss of liberty is an almost inconceivable idea. He has never heard of such a thing and . . . it is almost impossible that he can imagine it.”14 Throughout the imperial encounters of this period, therefore, we observe efforts to find avenues that would lead to conciliatory relations with Aboriginal peoples and stimulate the habits of mutual trust and connection. In order to gain a fuller sense of the contradictions and tangled dynamic of the search for such a “humane policy” in empire, it is instructive to look in some detail at the role conciliation played in the policy of Sir George Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land.

Sir George Arthur and Van Diemen’s Land Sir George Arthur was Lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land from May 1824 until the end of 1836. Arthur arrived in Hobart as the colony was undergoing fast-paced changes. Free settlers had been admitted from 1818, and by 1824 their numbers equaled the convicts. In addition, in 1826 the Van Diemen’s Land Company had been granted a quarter of a million acres in the remote northwest to raise sheep to fuel the insatiable demand of the woolen mills of Industrial Revolution Britain. Van Diemen’s Land was rapidly shifting from what Arthur described as an “extensive gaol to the empire”—which had received 40  percent of the convicts transported to Australia—to a true settler colony.15 Arthur’s immediate problem was the threat posed by the bush rangers, and his policy against them served as the proving ground for the tactics employed against Indigenous Tasmanians. Roving parties aided by Indigenous guides chased down the bush rangers. Martial law was first declared to deal with bush rangers, and a free use of the gallows deployed against them. By the end of his term, Arthur had brought fiscal and social stability to the colony; he had installed an efficient colonial bureaucracy; he had reorganized and implemented a strict convict regime. Aboriginal policy was another matter altogether, however. As Darwin was to point out, the “problem” of the Aboriginals was to be solved by their virtual eradication. Arthur struggled to regard this a success; indeed, it troubled and puzzled him.16 Until the early 1820s the Aboriginal “problem” in Van Diemen’s Land was at a fairly low level. But the coming of settler pastoral agriculture disrupted the ecology of Aboriginal land use and brought both groups into close and often hostile contact. From the winter of 1823 the relative tranquility was rudely disturbed. A free settler’s diary records the sudden appearance of Indigenous people as a threatening presence. Adam Amos was a district constable in Swan Port, whose main concern seems to have been keeping tabs on his convict servants. Suddenly on May 8, 1823, he was confronted with a group who surrounded his house. Their purpose was unclear. It may have been peaceful, since Amos records that a woman approached the house while the others remained in the bush. But Amos was scared and tried to shoo her and the others away. This did not work. “I fired small shot at about 50 yards distance they run off I fired another piece loaded with ball over their heads to

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let them know I had more pieces than one. I durst not leave the house as none of my eldest sons were at home nor my servant man.” And from then through 1825 when the diary ends, a picture is painted of a continual state of emergency in which Amos was pre-occupied with chasing either bush rangers or Aboriginal people.17 Violence was a fact of settler life from the early 1820s, but it only became a matter of serious governmental concern from the end of 1826. In an attempt to bring the Tasmanian Aboriginal people to heel, Arthur revived the roving parties. Thus, the Black War was launched, which initiated a prolonged spate of killings by the roving parties.18 The exact numbers are unknowable. But from a total of, perhaps, 5,000–7,000 in 1803, some 250 remained by 1835. Many killings went deliberately unrecorded. Disease played some role in their demise. But death by killing was a common fate. There were some notorious mass killings, such as the aptly named Cape Grim massacre in the northwest of the island when a group of Aboriginals was driven off the edge of a cliff by Van Diemen’s Land Company employees.19 Although such activities were never endorsed by government officials, government policy left room for such actions. This was particularly true after April 1828, when Arthur declared martial law as part of a policy that sought to confine the Indigenous people to their mountain fastness in the northwest of the island.20 Arthur wanted to draw a line between Aboriginal and white areas, protected by a line of police posts. Any Aboriginal person found in the settled district of the central plains could be detained and shot if resisting. The climax of this phase of policy came when he organized the Black Line in September–October 1830 in an attempt to clear the settled areas of the native population. At the same time, Arthur always linked conciliation and coercion together. His proclamations urged the proper treatment of Aboriginals, and he offered rewards for apprehending them alive.21 Previous lieutenant governors had issued proclamations to the same effect. David Sorell had issued a strongly worded one in March 1819 that put the onus for violence squarely on the settlers whose “cruelties . . . [were] repugnant to Humanity and disgraceful to the British character” and threatened “condign punishment” against anyone who was proved to have maltreated Aboriginal people in the hope that it may yet remove from their minds “the impressions left by past cruelties.” Unsurprisingly, none of this seems to have been implemented. Sorell, like the other governors, did not control a government bureaucracy that would respond to his orders. The administration of justice depended on the settler and convict class whose members were implicated in the killings.22 Arthur, then, was following previous governors in proclaiming conciliation as a theme of government policy in the colony. Arthur faced a scale of violence that went beyond the low-level pattern of individual killings of Sorell’s time. And he anxiously struggled with a problem that persistently evaded his control. Far from being a deliberately calculated set of actions, Arthur’s policy and actions in Van Diemen’s Land were uncertain experimentations that lurched between prioritizing conciliation and coercion. In short, Arthur was in search of a policy. He was trying to find a policy that would work, and this involved navigating between the different pressures on him from the settlers, the Aboriginal groups, and the Colonial

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Office. The latter had clearly expressed its desire for a policy that avoided staining the reputation of the British government, and this was also the policy that Arthur himself preferred. Arthur’s influence over the other two parties posed the more challenging question.23 The first mention of Aboriginals in Arthur’s Executive Council appeared on November 25, 1826. Reports had been received of several serious attacks on settlers by Aboriginal groups, and two days later when the issue was picked up again, the sentiment in the Executive Council was to authorize individuals to use the force of law as Aboriginal people appeared in threatening numbers. This was a pretty open-ended statement, and it seems to have been followed by an authorization to the police magistrates that they could respond to hit-and-run attacks by pursuing the culprits with military or volunteer forces. From the outset, however, Arthur was exploring other policy solutions in addition to coercion. In the course of the debate, he trotted out the standard humanitarian line about Aboriginal violence being a revenge for prior aggressions upon them by the “stock keepers and others.” But he agreed that whatever its origins, “it had become absolutely necessary to prevent further outrages and murder by every possible means.” Still, he demurred when it was suggested that Tasmanian Aborigines should be expelled from the settled districts—a policy he was driven to accept eighteen months later. And he sought the advice of the Council on the release of an Aboriginal man who had been detained for murder but whom he wanted to use as an intermediary to make open communications with the tribes. From the start he was looking around for intermediaries.24 This initial discussion set the tone and pattern for the next few years: Arthur groping for a balance between coercion and conciliation, and the Executive Committee reflecting majority opinion within the settler community on the whole leaning toward coercion. This position was well expressed by Thomas Anstey, a leading free settler and magistrate who was representative of the persons Arthur relied upon for the administration of the colony. At one stage he was put in charge of coordinating the roving parties. Unlike other settlers, he seems to have decided from the beginning that the Aboriginals were treacherous, and “I  regarded the black natives with feelings of distrust and I have never allowed them to approach my house.”25 Arthur was in a difficult position as regards settler opinion. He was an executive official obliged only to take advice from his Executive Committee. This was the period when governors held despotic power. But Arthur made a practice of surveying colonial opinion, and the records are full of letters from individual settlers offering advice and anecdotes about relations with the Aboriginal people. Thus his trolling of public opinion suggests not only competing tensions in his own mind but most of all the weakness of Arthur’s own control over his administration of Aboriginal policy.26 Thus, in late 1830, just at the moment when he was to initiate the Black Line, he issued a proclamation urging settlers to conciliate the Aboriginal people and treat them with humanity, only to have to retreat from that position and sanction

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coercive measures in the face of an organized settler outcry that forwarded to him evidence of Aboriginal atrocities and the well-publicized murder of a settler named James Hooper. At about the same time, he received a directive from the Colonial Office pushing him in the opposite direction and insisting that settlers who killed Tasmanian Aboriginal people be brought before a court of justice to determine whether they had committed murder. When he brought this before the Executive Committee, they argued that for settlers to be subject to criminal prosecution if involved in death of Indigenous people would spark a major crisis of confidence that could lead them to abandon farms or suspend their labor. Thus, martial law was extended and the effort began to capture the Aboriginals and to “place them in some situation of security where they can neither receive nor inflict injury that destroy their lives.” It was in this context that removal of the Indigenous Tasmanians to Flinders Island began to be seen as a possible “humanitarian” solution.27 The immediacy of settler pressure competed with pressure from the Colonial Office epitomized by Sir George Murray’s injunction to avoid a policy that would stain the reputation of the British government. This was a pressure that Arthur was obviously anxious to appease, not least because it was aligned with his own self-image. As a deeply religious humanitarian, Arthur needed to be seen as worthy in the eyes of God. When he justified to the Colonial Office certain actions that seemed to contradict their instructions, and the humanitarian discourse that underlay it, he was not only protecting his political position. He was also protecting his self-­identity. It was not a sign of hypocrisy, for example, that he justified coercion as a means to create the conditions for conciliation. This was one of the strategies—salutary terror—that the humanitarian mind used to accommodate the reality that violence was inescapable in the colonial encounter.28 The balancing act between the Colonial Office, the settlers, the indigenes, and his own conscience framed Arthur’s search for a policy that would satisfy each element. The dilemma emerged clearly as he ramped up pressure on the indigenes from 1828. At first, he hoped to respond to the growing violence by increasing the police protection for settlers. But this proved inadequate because he was unable to control the settlers from taking matters into their own hands and launching killing sprees. He was being advised to try and remove the Aboriginals from harm’s way and put them on an island. But he was skeptical that this would work. In any case he could find no one on the Indigenous side to negotiate with. So, there was the problem of persuading them to go. And even if he did remove them to an island, he correctly identified the problems that were to be tragically realized at the Flinders Island settlement in the early 1830s. They could not be expected to settle down happily and learn the practices of cultivating the soil in one place. He feared for their health and survival if they were relocated. It suggests that he was ultimately driven to the island solution by the contingent and spontaneous evolution of events. In the event, as we shall see, it was something of a desperate measure, not something that he was anticipating in 1828. Arthur was caught in a vice. If he did nothing, settlers would continue their killings and the outcome humanitarians dreaded would be in prospect: the

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extermination of the race. This would be catastrophic for Arthur’s reputation in the Colonial Office. It would also be a grave blow to his conscience. Yet his negotiations with the Aboriginals had proved futile. And even if he did manage to move them to an island and safety, it was not obvious that they would survive there. So initially, in 1828, he chose a middle path. Coercion would close off the settled districts to the Indigenous people and confine them to “some remote quarter of the island which should strictly be reserved for them and to supply them with food and clothing and afford them protection from injuries by the stock keepers on condition of them confining themselves peaceably to certain limits.” He was aware of the fragility of that policy, but calculated it better than submitting to the clamour and urgent appeals which are now made to me for the adoption of harsh measures. I cannot divest myself of the consideration that the aggression originated with the white inhabitants and that therefore much ought to be attempted in return before the blacks are treated as an open and accredited enemy by the Government.29 By April 1828, it was clear that his plan was not working. Violence continued. The Aboriginal people were in full-scale resistance and interlocutors were as scarce as ever. Settler voices were being loudly broadcast at meetings and in petitions. Even though he knew the origins of the violence rested on the settlers and convicts, the origins were now academic. The situation was threatening to escalate beyond his already spotty control. Once again he tried to balance coercion and conciliation. He turned up the pressure, even though this would surely result in more deaths. He issued a proclamation that established a line of police posts across the settled districts that Aboriginal people were forbidden to cross. Settlers were to be recruited to assist in the maintenance of the line and were authorized to prevent and detain any Aboriginals they found trying to migrate over the boundary. But he insisted that if they had to be detained, they were “to be treated with the utmost humanity and compassion.” Force was only to be used as the last resort and only then in the presence of “a magistrate, military officer or other officers of government.” Like other proclamations that had been issued since the time of David Collins, this one threatened prosecution of whites who ill-treated Aboriginals, and it even invited the Indigenous people to report such violations! It also sought to accommodate the policy to the cultural habits of the indigenes. Exceptions to the travel ban included those “travelling to the sea coast annually according to their customs to seek shell fish for sustenance,” which was to continue until “their habits shall have been rendered more regular and settled.” Passports were to be issued through the chiefs to secure their passage through the settled districts. These conditions were all a fantasy. And his current Aboriginal intermediary, Kickerterpoller, told him they were. The conditions for such an ordered solution to the problem did not exist. So, they were a deliberate deception to ensure the purity of his position in the official record, or they were wishful thinking, or they were his attempt to persuade himself

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that conciliation was still in play. Probably, it was a mix of all three. But they also demonstrated the limits of Arthur’s control over the implementation of policy.30 The situation continued to spiral out of control. The effort to balance coercion with conciliation failed to stem the violence. Settlers had not thought much of his efforts at conciliation, and no Tasmanian Aboriginal people had stepped forward to negotiate. An uptick in violence in October 1828 was the excuse for additional coercion. Martial law was declared. The proclamation abandoned his imprecations of April to refrain from the use of force and allowed soldiers to shoot on sight. Settlers were still subject to the law unless acting in self-defense, but in fact an open season was declared against the Aboriginal people. Arthur justified this to the Colonial Office, by resorting to the familiar trope that conciliation would come out of “strong measures” because they will be the means of putting a speedy stop . . . to the lawless warfare which has been lately carrying on between the natives and the settlers and stockmen, by compelling the former (to whom it may be possible to make known through such as may be captured, the consequences of remaining in the settled districts) to retire to those parts of the Colony which are excepted from the operation of Martial Law. . . . [T]he use of arms is still in no case to be resorted to until other measures for driving them off shall have failed. . . .  [E]very means in my power which are most consistent with humanity will be used, even at the present extremity, for bringing about a good understanding with these wretched beings.31 This is a very revealing account of how humanitarian discourse justified a morally redemptive coercion as opening the way to conciliation. But it also suggests how Arthur was searching for a line of action that would break the impasse that each oscillation of policy seemed to produce. It turned out that Arthur’s pursuit of a viable course of action became increasingly desperate as time went on and nothing seemed to work. Take the case of the roving parties. It might be thought that by this time using the roving parties would have been a fine art. But as late as 1829 their successes were seen as at best episodic and argument continued about how to organize them. In a precedent for the way Arthur was to use George Robinson, in November 1829 he appointed the magistrate Gilbert Robertson to lead a party with the object of “capturing one or two of the principle tribes and conciliating their leaders and subduing the unhappy spirit under which they are at present acting.” Robertson was given a contract for a year to wander around the interior trying to find them, although Arthur was not sanguine as to the result. Arthur was willing to pay well— as he was in the case of Robinson two years later—and he promised Robertson land if he should succeed and support for his family should he be killed.32 Robertson was the mulatto son of a West Indian planter who had been educated at Edinburgh. Although he was closely associated with the efforts to capture and confine Aboriginals in the 1820s, he identified himself as an humanitarian. In fact,

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it was precisely this that attracted him initially to Arthur when Robertson wrote to him condemning settler massacres and expressing a sympathy with the Aboriginals plight—Arthur’s approving annotations on these letters are worth noting. Robertson fit the profile of an humanitarian conciliator, and had Robertson remained in command of the efforts at conciliation, the fate of the local indigenes might have been very different. In fact this party did have considerable success. With the aid of Kickerterpoller Robertson succeeded in capturing Eumarrah, one of the important leaders of the large Oyster Bay tribe. But Robertson’s leading role did not last long. By May 1829, Arthur had appointed Thomas Anstey to coordinate the roving parties and had put Robertson and two others under his command. This may have been because Robertson was a contentious character. Or it may have signaled a move to a more coercive policy. Anstey certainly had a different attitude toward the Aboriginal people. But this move was another sign of the volatile shifts that marked Arthur’s policy. It was as if he were searching for the best combination of men and methods to lead the local indigenes toward his vision of conciliation.33 At first it seemed that the Anstey option would work. In May 1829 he wrote to Arthur how the roving parties were harrying and “disturbing them [Aboriginals] in their originary [sic] haunts.” A few months later it was obvious that few had been captured, and they were mainly women and children. Arthur was disheartened at “the total want of success of all the parties who have been employed under your direction against the Aborigines” and (not for the first time) inquired as to how Anstey thought the system of the roving parties could be made more effective. Earlier in the year, Anstey had recommended a central direction of parties divided into groups of three, each one commanded by other prominent settlers. He wanted the convicts to be applicants for ticket of leave status, which would guarantee they “can be kept in good behavior.” He further suggested that the aim of the roving parties should be to deter Aboriginal people from entering the settled areas and force them to be confined to the mountainous areas of the island.34 This suggests how Arthur was engaged in an ongoing search for a policy solution. Arthur knew what he wanted. He wanted to subdue the Indigenous Tasmanians so that the settlers could get on with the business of development. He wanted this to be done as peacefully as possible. If that meant leaving the wild two-thirds of the colony to the local indigenes, then Arthur would have been happy with that. But if that was impossible because they wanted to maintain their old habits of migration, then an island might be a better answer. The problem was that he was unable to settle on a policy that could achieve either solution, and he was, therefore, open to any creative ideas that might come his way. There was no shortage of people willing to give advice. One such correspondent was a man named Jorgen Jorgenson, one of the flotsam and jetsam that tended to wash up in this remote colony. But like Robertson, Jorgenson stood out as someone with a genuine interest in the local indigenes and who took the idea of conciliation seriously. A  letter to Arthur in January  1828 illustrates the fluid nature of policy at this moment and affords a glimpse into the ideas swirling around those who were responsible for implementing policy in the colony. He described a

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policy of conciliation that bore close similarities to the policy Robinson was later to implement and reflected the “utopian” social engineering character of imperial policy. The “scattered tribes” should be collected and conciliated by stationing small units of “good” whites among them to model to the Aboriginal people by their behavior and general demeanor “a belief of peaceable and friendly intentions towards them.” The expectation was that the Indigenous people would absorb and emulate such behavior. The whites would be trained in human relations; they should dress in a certain way to “excite veneration”; they would travel around the country, avoiding premature contact but merely to show their pacific nature. They should shun all offensive conduct, and if attempts were made to attack them, they should retreat and not respond until their lives were imminently threatened. And even then they should not shoot to kill. Stock keepers and shepherds—symbols in the humanitarian imagination of the worst of Western civilization—should be prevented from encroaching on these lands unless they were absolutely needed.35 This proposal was a programmatic expression of the humanitarian expectation of how the social psychology of human relations could create a “humane policy.” Jorgenson’s idea of planting little islands of civility and civilization among the Aboriginal lands paralleled the notions that underlay the efforts of people like Grey and Eyre to model “civilized” behavior, which would then get transmitted into Aboriginal culture by the very power of its example. Jorgenson assumed the same kind of process. It may be seen as the translation of Adam Smith’s arguments about how reciprocal kindness would produce parallel good will and establish a pattern of mutual relations. The need for physical restraint toward the Aboriginal people that Jorgenson emphasized reflected the humanitarian reading of cultural difference. It was essential to treat “savages” with greater toleration because their sensibilities were not the same as those of “civilized” Westerners. The assumption that a reciprocal Aboriginal response would be triggered by humanitarian action, of course, was the hitch. Arthur had not the benefit of Foucault or experience of twentieth-century history to understand that this was a problematic assumption or that it was merely a self-serving rationalization for imperial domination. What he did have was his own firm belief in the righteousness of his civilizing mission and evidence of mutuality that he saw all around the empire—even in Van Diemen’s Land, where, for example, individual indigenes were always part of the effort to corral and tame their fellow tribes people. So, a key part of Arthur’s search for an effective policy was to seek ways of opening lines of communication and contact with the Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the expectation that this would afford a means of conciliatory negotiation.36 Arthur sought negotiating partners from the beginning of the crisis. His first proclamation of November  26, 1826, had expressed the hope that the “leading men” of the Aboriginal tribes could be enlisted as interlocutors. It was thought that the Proclamation Boards that had been posted around the island would encourage some to step forward. As late as the end of 1830 the issue was discussed in the Committee for the Care of the Aborigines that he had appointed that year. Arthur seized any opportunity that presented itself to build trust relationships. He thought he could

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engage the wives of sealers in the Bass Straits to open lines of communication. When, in early 1828, a group of Aboriginal people appeared in Hobart, he immediately brought them to Government House, gave them food and shelter with the intention of enlisting them to begin a dialogue with the interior tribes. But they disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived and that possibility was closed off. As he explained to Sir George Murray in April 1829, The main difficulty as I have before described, in conciliating these people is the impossibility of communicating with them, and from the fact of their being divided into different tribes all in hostility, and speaking a language so diverse as to be unintelligible to each other.37 There was another alternative that had not escaped Arthur’s attention. Capturing reluctant intermediaries was an established tactic when no brave souls like Eva (the intermediary for Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape) or Bennelong (Philip’s main contact in Sydney) were willing to come forward. Gilbert Robertson’s capture of Eumarrah in 1828 led Arthur to hope that he could be used as a conduit to the tribes. He both cajoled and courted Eumarrah into becoming an effective intermediary. Understandably, the Aboriginal chief waxed hot and cold in his relationship with the British. He had been badly treated when first detained, but after a year in Richmond gaol, he had appeared before the Executive Council and agreed to join Robinson’s first mission to the tribes. He soon absconded but then turned himself in to the Launceston authorities, whereupon Arthur asked him to join the Black Line, which he duly did. He again decamped and returned to his tribe in the settled districts where he harried settlers before encountering Robinson in August 1831 who re-employed him on his latest mission to the Big River people. He stayed with Robinson and went to Flinders Island before dying of dysentery in Launceston hospital in 1832.38 Arthur placed high hopes in Eumarrah. It was known that he had participated in violence against settlers and had been involved in the murder of a Mrs. Cunningham. But none of this seeped through to London—who presumably would have been nonplussed by the whole relationship. Instead, Arthur reported to London that he was impressed with Eumarrah’s demeanor, “his apparently artless manner, and strong protestations of attachment [and] he was gradually confided in more and more, until at length, I felt a confidence that he would be greatly instrumental in carrying into effect the measure so ardently desired for conciliation.” He entertained him at Government House and provided him with a convict servant who would report back on his suitability as an agent of conciliation. Arthur felt that the mutual reciprocity of universal humanity was in play. When this proved not to be the case, and Eumarrah abandoned the Black Line, Arthur’s hopes were dashed for building a trust relationship. He explained to Sir George Murray that he had entrusted him to conduct a party to the Natives, assuring him that they should be clothed and fed and protected, but to my disappointment and

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sincere regret, he availed himself at the first moment to abscond and has I fear rejoined his Tribe with the most hostile intentions.39 It is impossible to know the inner story of Eumarrah’s intentions, but he was clearly playing his own game, and doing it with some skill. Arthur’s repeated attempts to win him over epitomized the difficulties that beset the search for agents of conciliation. Eumarrah’s behavior mirrored the reluctance of the Indigenous Tasmanians as a whole to be “conciliated” which they almost certainly associated with a form of imprisonment. It is noteworthy, however, that in the final analysis Eumarrah did become an agent of conciliation. In late 1831, he contacted Alexander McKay, one of the roving party leaders, with information about a group of Aboriginal people who wanted to be conciliated. And as a member of Robinson’s missions, he actively helped with the move to Flinders Island. Although it is plausible to assume that he did this because he could see that the imperial side had won the long Black War, it is also clear that he attempted to do so on his own terms.40 Arthur’s attempts to find a stable policy in his dealings with the Tasmania Aboriginal people were constantly frustrated. But Arthur’s experience was not unique, merely one example of the way Aboriginal agency served to undermine the viability of humanitarian discourse more broadly. We may understand how the failure of conciliatory efforts generated a crisis of faith in the humanitarian narrative by noting the experience of John Batman. Batman was the son of an early south pacific missionary. He was born in New South Wales in 1800. By 1820 he had settled on a farm in Van Diemen’s Land and quickly became part of the group around Thomas Anstey that served as the provincial backbone of Arthur’s administration. Batman had a long history of entangled relations with Aboriginal people, which spanned the spectrum of violence to conciliation. He played a leading role in the campaign against the bush rangers and similarly as a leader of a roving party. Yet, there is evidence that had a humanitarian side, and his name attaches to the only treaty that was ever recorded between the British and the Australian Indigenous peoples.41 The early Tasmanian historian James Bonwick claimed Batman had a deep understanding of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. He had grown up among them, took an interest in their crafts, had close relations with those who worked for him, and had been made an honorary chief of one of the tribes. This may all be true. At the time, the Quaker James Backhouse reported that Batman had this reputation. In a report to Arthur, Batman wrote that the extermination of the local indigenes was “an alternative too dreadful to be thought of and which [?] God in his infinite mercy will yet interpose to avert.” Furthermore, he had sheltered a group at his home after the failure of the Black Line. Batman, then, was an example of how cross-race intimacies could operate in this period.42 But it is equally true that Batman epitomized how conciliation was paired with violence. One roving party he led captured ten people without any violence, but the record of the other four of his roving parties was hardly unblemished. On another occasion his group killed fifteen Aboriginal people. Two others were

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wounded and could not keep up, so “I  was obliged to shoot them,” he casually reported. Arthur caught the contradiction that Batman represented when he noted that “Batman ‘whose sympathy for the much injured and unfortunate race of beings was second only to that of George Augustus Robinson’s, [also] had much slaughter to account for.’ ” Slaughter did not necessarily ruffle humanitarian confidence in its own mission. What disrupted the conviction of humanitarians was evidence that their conciliatory efforts were not being received by Aboriginal people with reciprocal mutuality.43 In February 1830, Batman joined the chorus of voices that were filling Arthur’s ear with advice on Aboriginal policy. He offered to launch a mission of conciliation to the remaining Indigenous Tasmanians. Batman explained to Anstey that he intended to use some of his Indigenous acquaintances to contact the Oyster Bay tribe and persuade them to come in from the bush. He planned to use two Aboriginal men from Sydney who worked for him and send them out with two of the local Aboriginal women he had recently captured and who were living on his settlement. This moment is interesting for a variety of reasons. It illustrates the reliance of these efforts on Aboriginal interlocutors. Indeed, Batman pointed out that the local Aboriginal people were so distrustful of whites that only native go-betweens would have the credibility to convey the governor’s desire to conciliate. It is additional evidence that Batman did, indeed, have close relations with native people. It is another example of how humanitarian mentality saw intimate personal contact as a key to creating the conditions for good race relations. Batman lodged the Aboriginal women on his farm, and he spent considerable energy persuading the local settlers to suspend their trigger-happy attitude while he gave this conciliatory initiative a chance.44 Although he was initially full of optimism about its chances for success, he was soon to be disappointed. What followed was a confusing episode that exposed the fragile complexities of conciliation and the stresses to which the humanitarian mindset was exposed. Batman believed that the time spent on his farm and his generous treatment had conciliated the Aboriginal women. In a nice example of how humanitarians were always looking for those tell-tale signs that Aboriginal peoples had the same inner psychology as themselves, he told Anstey that he saw evidence of common “humanity” in their response to his kindness. He believed that a mutual trust relationship had been established, which could be used to send the women out to bring the rest of the tribe in. “I am almost certain this plan will succeed,” he optimistically predicted. Anstey was not so sure. But Arthur, having seen all his previous efforts come to nothing, was excited at the prospect of a breakthrough for his policy. And so on April 13, 1830, the women and his Aboriginal workers from Sydney were sent out to make contact with the Oyster Bay tribe.45 Two days later the Sydney Aboriginals returned without the women, claiming that they had fallen ill and that the women had given them the slip. This induced a mild panic in Batman, who dashed off three letters to Anstey in one day, each of which had a different tone—a sure sign of his anxiety. The first, written before the

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Aboriginal people reappeared, talked of his coordination with a roving party led by John Danners to ensure that they were not molested. The second announced the arrival of the Sydney men with their story about the women absconding. At this point, Batman’s good feelings about the Aboriginal people cracked, and he asked Anstey what he should do: “I am now at a loss to know what to think of this wretched race of people—I now think they are not to be reconciled by any means.” Batman hardly knew what was true. When he interrogated the Sydney men, they confirmed the commitment of the women to contacting the tribe and their need for more supplies to continue their journey. Anstey expressed his suspicion about the truthfulness of this account. But Batman and Arthur were anxious, in the former’s words, to give “those poor people every chance of being friendly if they wish.” And so the Sydney men were sent back out with supplies. By the beginning of May, it was clear that Batman and Arthur had been deceived. The scheme had collapsed. The Sydney Aboriginal men returned with the tale that they had lost contact with the women and, after three weeks of walking, had failed to locate a single member of the tribe. At which point, Batman’s faith in conciliation was shaken: “I now think they have no thought of returning back again and have entirely forgotten their promises” [sic]. So “after this trial and to no purpose,” he intended to pick up the roving party again and pursue them and “endeavour to capture them.” One suspects that Anstey was not surprised and might even have been relieved, since he minuted on the letter that this clearly marked the failure of the hope of conciliation “through the agency of the captured women. I [will] send this letter to Mr. Burnett for the information of the Lt. Governor who will receive with regret the certain intelligence that force is our only recourse.”46 This was not quite the end of the affair, however. A  few days later, some of the women who had stayed at Batman’s farm earlier reappeared. One of their group had been killed by timber workers, and the others captured and abused by some settlers. Batman’s humanitarian sentiments were re-engaged, and Arthur was outraged at their treatment and demanded action against the settlers. It did not happen, of course. Batman tried to get the murderers arrested, but the local commandant refused to release the captured women to serve as witnesses and it would seem the case collapsed.47 What was the effect of all of this on Batman? He never entirely lost his humanitarian leanings, as his response to the treatment of the women mentioned earlier illustrates. But it does seem that by September 1830, he had come round to Anstey’s position that coercion was the only alternative. Thus, he was active in the Black Line. Yet when he returned home from the Black Line, he found a group in his front yard, including one of the women from the earlier episode. He gave them sanctuary for about nine days, a welcome gesture at a time when they would certainly have been shot on sight. And then they disappeared in the middle of the night. They took all the arms and provisions they could carry to become a guerrilla gang. To make matters worse, they were joined by a young man who Batman had used as a guide and who he thought had been “civilized.”48 Batman’s experience with the Aboriginal people on this occasion put him on an emotional roller coaster, which displaced any humanitarian instincts and beliefs

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he may have possessed. But Batman’s story was merely one example of how the humanitarian mentality was stretched, tested, and deflated by its encounter with the Van Diemen’s Land Indigenous people. Sir George Arthur’s own education in Aboriginal policy invoked a similar range of emotions and feelings that vividly illustrated the dilemma of efforts to install a “humane policy” in the face of Aboriginal agency and action.

The disenchantment of Sir George Arthur Arthur’s experience of failure was different from Batman’s, although it caused him more anguish. Initially, Arthur expected that his proffering of a humane policy would be the basis for mutual relations between the Indigenous people and the imperial state. By 1830, however, he knew very well that from his high moral ground he had presided over the near destruction of a “free people.” This led him to a desperate search for a way to redeem his humanitarian conscience and allow him present to the Colonial Office an honorable solution that avoided that “indelible stain” on his reputation that Sir George Murray had warned about. By 1829, the tone of Arthur’s mind dispatches to London had lost the ­business-like, positive tone of his previous reports to reflect a deepening anxiety as he contemplated the continued failures of his attempts to bring about a peace of conciliation. In early 1828, for example, a dispatch to Viscount Goderich sifted through the difficulties that faced him. Originally the victims, the local Aboriginal people had proven to be impossible to deal with, and the settlers were threatening to take matters into their own hands. Everything he tried seemed to be stymied. His efforts to reach out were unsuccessful. His attempt to use minimum force had failed. There was growing sentiment for ethnic cleansing. But he was skeptical that this was feasible or that it would help the Aboriginal people who would not “tolerate so great an aggravation of their injuries, as they would unquestionably consider removing them from their native tracts.” He would prefer, he said, to settle them in some remote part of the island where they could be supplied with food and protected from the ravages of the settlers.49 A few months later, the situation had not improved. He was haunted by the fact that the Indigenous people were “now filled with enmity and seek revenge against the whole body of white settlers.” And although he understood that rage, he had to deal with its results. This was the prelude to yet another ratchet on the scale of oppression: the attempt to confine the Aboriginal people outside of the settled districts and the permission to shoot on sight to any who wandered across that line.50 In September 1829 he poured out his frustrations again in a dispatch to Sir George Murray and began to shift blame for his failures to the “cunning . . . and intelligence” of the Indigenous people. Their military strategy cleverly exploited his weaknesses by appearing and disappearing at will to strike his thinly stretched forces who were so stressed by their duties that discipline and control were difficult to maintain.51 By the early part of 1830, Arthur had become obsessed with the failure of his policy to attain its desired end. In a long dispatch to the Colonial Office, he replayed

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the familiar humanitarian line that the origins of the conflict lay in the maltreatment the indigenes had received. But their resistance to conciliation was not a natural reaction and could only be explained by their character. His disappointment in Eumarrah’s behavior that occurred over the same year likely reinforced the cracks that appeared in his humanitarian identity from now on. Conciliation had failed because the Aboriginal people had shown themselves to be “a most treacherous race.” The kindness and humanity that had been offered them “has not tended to civilize them in any degree, nor has it induced them to forbear from the most wanton and unprovoked acts of barbarity, when a fair opportunity presented itself of indulging their disposition maim or destroy the white inhabitants.”52 It was not supposed to be this way. Even when he was facilitating the dogs of settler war, conciliation continued to be proffered in the hope that it would be picked up and the mutuality it promised brought into play. His worldview told him that humankind was driven ultimately by the same psychology, that outreach was supposed to be followed by outreach, especially if it was backed up by a swift whip of the lash to open the eyes of the obdurate. Mutuality and reciprocity were supposed to be triggered. So, the failure of this program to incite the flame of conciliation was especially destabilizing for Arthur. He recognized virtue and promise in the character of the local Aboriginals. He continued to reject the idea that they were “as devoid of intelligence as has hitherto been supposed.”53 Indeed, at the very moment he was reporting to the Colonial Office that they were unable to accept his hand of friendship, the first signals appeared that Arthur’s failures might get resolved and the fiasco of conciliation turned into a humanitarian success story. The first was the appointment of a Committee on the Care of Captured Aborigines. And the second was the entrance of George Augustus Robinson into the official record, who had recently made his first expedition into the interior where he had met with some success.54 The appointment of a Committee on Aborigines in early 1830 composed of local humanitarian was a shrewd move. It provided Arthur with cover for his policies, particularly for the policy of removal. But its main function was to provide a narrative for Aboriginal policy that exculpated Arthur and a context for the killings that restored the viability of the humanitarian project. The saga of the Indigenous people of Van Diemen’s Land was established as a story of their victimization by convict and settler violence and a casualty of their own savage state that led them to reject Arthur’s persistent offers of mutual negotiation and conciliation. Humanitarians like Arthur were thus left untainted by the tragic results of the story.55 More immediately important, however, was the choice of George Robinson to conduct a negotiated removal of the Aboriginal people. Arthur’s earlier attempts at reaching and conciliating the interior tribes had all flamed out.56 Robinson’s emergence as the savior of the policy of conciliation was a gradual process. He had been part of Arthur’s network since March 1829 following his appointment as superintendent of Bruny Island, where the Nuenonne people captured during the Black War were settled. By the end of that year Arthur had given him permission to launch the first of four expeditions into the interior. It was only after his

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second mission in October 1831, however, that Arthur settled on Robinson as his one best hope of salvaging the policy of conciliation. By this time it was historical legacy and reputation that mattered. The final murders of settlers had taken place two months before. And although that event threw the settler community into an alarmed panic, the Indigenous people had been effectively defeated. To that extent, Robinson’s friendly missions were mopping up operations.57 Robinson’s missions “saved” only about 200 people. But they validated the policy of conciliation, and Arthur could use their success to rescue his humanitarian self-image. The British government could breathe a sigh of relief that its hands were clean; and Robinson could bask, not only in his material reward but also in the certain knowledge that he had earned a place in heaven.58 Even though the missions may be portrayed as ethnic cleansing, in their execution they were exercises in negotiation. In official accounts, Robinson rendered the capture of the Aboriginal groups as a smoothly run operation whose success he modestly attributed to providential guidance. For his part, Arthur put it about that Robinson possessed a charismatic talent that allowed him to acquire “a most extraordinary influence over [the] minds” of the Aboriginal people. But Robinson’s journals reveal that it was neither charisma nor an all-knowing providence that secured his success. It was a more prosaic collection of talents deployed throughout continual setbacks and touch-and-go moments. Those talents were the instruments of a policy of conciliation: negotiation, building trust and mutuality, dependence on native collaborators, and some delicately displayed threats and cajoling.59 Robinson’s journeys were hardly a victory parade through the wilds of Tasmania. He worried constantly about whether those he had collected would abscond. This was a fear that never diminished, and it extended even to those Aboriginal people who were part of his party. On his first trip between January and October 1830, for example, he chewed over how to discourage two men who had recently joined his party from running away. He was aware that they were only loosely tied to remaining with him and that if he was to be too assertive, they might leave, warn others, and undermine his mission. He thought about moving into their hut with his loyal natives. But, when they resisted this idea, he reconsidered for fear that they would “arm themselves against me and . . . [take] our lives.” Indeed, he felt sure that “had I made the attempt doubtless our lives would have been sacrificed, as they were two resolute men.” After much thought, he decided to bluff that he would leave them to the mercy of nearby soldiers, even though he admitted to himself that he could not back it up. The bluff worked, and next morning they all trudged off with his group through the forest.60 As with all conciliation efforts, success depended on the building of mutual trust particularly with the Indigenous members of Robinson’s team. There was a steady core of these, the husband-and-wife team of Truganini and Woorrady being in the front rank, and then others like Kickerterpoller, and some less visible ones such as “Jack and Kit,” who were referred to on the last expedition. The trust relationship was strongest with Truganini and Woorrady. Truganini had saved his life on one dramatic occasion when he had been attacked by those

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he was trying to conciliate. But there were times when his faith wavered even in them. For the rest, his trust was never unqualified. Robinson worried constantly about how exactly to negotiate with those who accompanied him and on whom his success depended. It has always been with considerable reluctance that I have at any time ventured to reprove, but when necessity has required it I have been necessarily compelled thereto from a sense of duty, and it is a matter of astonishment that all the counselling and reproof that I have from time to time had occasion to bestow on some of them, particularly on Black Tom, that still this individual remains obdurate and callous to all my advice and reproof.61 On another occasion he was shown a hidden cache of spears and guns, which he took as a sign of Aboriginal trust in him. But then he learned that they had concealed the existence of another cache. These guns were symbolically important; they were the weapons that had killed Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker in August 1831, whose murder caused a virtual panic in Hobart. Eumarrah supposedly knew where the guns were, but it took two weeks of negotiating and cajoling before he agreed to take Robinson to collect them. When he did, Robinson interpreted this as a bonding moment of mutual trust. “The surrendering of these arms to me is a further and convincing proof of their confidence in me.”62 Preserving the trust relationship, however, required continual maintenance. The moment when the Aboriginal captives were about to be transported to one or other of the islands that had been chosen for them was always a moment of worry for Robinson. After his second mission, he was astonished that the group scheduled to go to Swan Island obeyed his orders to get into the boat “here was no force, no violence, no tying of hands, no muskets etc. I said come and they came, go and they went.” Once the boat had cast off, “I began to feel more comfortable,” and once on the island, “it was certainly a most singular and successful undertaking that could be conceived. The natives were now at liberty to roam about, no necessity to watch them.” Here lay the origins of the affirming narrative that this conciliation effort was a model of its kind for the peaceable way it had been carried out. But it was a narrative that was constructed only after moments of anxiety and trepidation.63 At these moments, Robinson’s dependence on his native helpers was fully exposed. That dependence was a condition of Robinson’s success. And he was fully aware of it. In his long and difficult search for the Big River people at the end of 1831, he remarked, “I cannot effect anything without these people and yet I am harassed and perplexed by them.” The Indigenous members of his party provided logistical support, guidance through the bush, and they were the lead negotiators with those he sought to rescue. Robinson, therefore, needed to attend to ensuring their cooperation. During his second expedition of October  1831 to October  1832, he had trouble with two new men who had joined him to track down the others in their tribe. He used a variety of strategies to gain their

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cooperation. He threatened to report them to the governor unless they promised to help him, in which case he would testify to Arthur that they had peaceful intentions. And once again he believed that by showing such resolve, he had won their confidence. Except that he hadn’t. The next day, after being with him for a fortnight, they absconded, and he blamed his native helper Kickerterpoller for not working hard enough to “render them contended.” Indeed, “Black Tom” had “neither called them back nor told me they were going home but came and sat by the fire quite unconcerned.” This led Robinson to ponder his reliance upon Kickerterpoller and his ilk: “he is a bad man and a depraved disposition [who] . . . would sacrifice my interest to his base purpose and drive the people away so that he might cohabit with the women.”64 Robinson’s reputation depended on his Aboriginal companions. His Indigenous assistants did the real work of conciliation; they were the ones who negotiated with the interior tribes: one striking example of how empire depends on its subalterns and victims to realize its policies. Indeed, while Robinson was away in Hobart, Truganini herself initiated and led a mission from Macquarie Harbour to the southwest and returned with seven members of the Ninene people. Robinson never knew what arguments or methods his companions used to persuade the tribal groups to come in from the forests. While they were away, Robinson was filled with anxiety. Often they were gone for hours, sometimes several days. He worried about their motives, whether they were carrying out his instructions or not, would they succeed in returning with the people he needed, and was he being manipulated by them? He was conscious that his success and reward rested upon the actions of his Indigenous assistants, since if they absconded “the odium . . . would be imputed to me. . . . All my exertions, all my anxieties, hardships and dangers will be estimated as nothing.” And then when they meet his needs—as in a difficult river crossing—relief is expressed through fulsome praise for the skill and “great tractability of my sable friends. My ears is [were not] assailed by impious execrations, as would be the case with the same number of white men.”65 By the last of his journeys, when he gathered up the Tarkine people on the west coast, Robinson was living out the legend that was already being created for him. He was in a stronger position to cajole and threaten his magical qualities. To motivate his Aboriginal assistants, he told them that if the Tarkine people gave any trouble, he would send for the Sydney natives (whom Batman had used) and that it was folly for them to think that they could escape “for I who had sought out and subdued all the natives could find them out.” But, as he admitted to himself, this was all a ruse, “for I well knew that they could easily escape my search and more­ over I never could resort to force and could not think of injuring them.” And his dependence on the Aboriginal members of his team remained. He had to negotiate with them as to the right tactics to use to bring in the remaining free Aboriginal people. And when they succeeded, he relied upon his Aboriginal team to show a display of force to keep the captured people, so that “the wild Aborigines now gave up all further thought of going away.”66

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With the successful removal of the remaining Aboriginal people to Flinders Island, both Robinson and Arthur could rest easy. Robinson could enjoy his status as the empire’s expert on Indigenous and take pride that the mild and benevolent measures of the colonial administration towards the aboriginal inhabitants of this island have been carried into complete effect [and in respect to the nature of the policy] . . . a pleasing circumstance presents itself . . . namely that it cannot hereafter be said that those people were harshly treated that they were torn from their kindred and friend that they were forced from their country. . . . [T]heir removal has been for their benefit, and in almost every instance of their own free will and consent. They have been removed from danger and placed in safety in a suitable asylum  .  .  . where they are brought under moral and religious inculcation.67 ‍Arthur was equally assuaged, although he surely knew what the removal to Flinders Island portended. Robinson never did admit the role he played in their subsequent virtual extinction through illness and death. Even though Aboriginal mortalities began the moment they were gathered into Robinson’ hands, he rested safe in the knowledge that he had rescued them and consistently sent misleadingly optimistic reports from Flinders Island. Arthur was a more troubled soul than Robinson. As early as 1831, he had reasoned that even “if they should pine away it is better that they should meet with their death in that way whilst every act of kindness is manifested towards them, than that they should fall a sacrifice to the inevitable consequences of their continued acts of outrage upon the white inhabitants.” But Robinson’s success ended Arthur’s own particular fear that he would be saddled with the shame of the humanitarian conscience, that he had presided over the violent disappearance of a race. Robinson’s success served not only to rescue the humanitarian discourse, it also allowed Arthur to continue to be associated with that discourse and, indeed, to play a role in the revitalization of the humanitarian agenda.68 By February 1832, Arthur could smell the sweet odor of success. Robinson had conciliated the two big tribes in the south and had embarked upon his final task of scouring the west and northwest coast. Arthur announced to London that the problem of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people was now approaching its end and that in spite of the many wrongs that they had committed, “Her majesty’s government will continue to regard them with the utmost compassion and continue to extend both protection and kindness towards them.” But at the moment he glimpsed an end to the problem, a new tone began to enter his dispatches. It is a tone that suggests how traumatic the whole episode had been. Arthur did not bury his trauma. He returned to it several times to reflect on the whole sorry story and to process it in his own mind. It was a way for him to resolve the crisis of “humane policy” that had been posed by the events of the Black War.69

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The inner turmoil of Sir George Arthur Arthur’s first response to the failures of his policy was puzzlement. In 1830 he was genuinely confounded by the failure of his policies to gain any purchase. His attempt to use the Black Line to herd the Indigenous people out of the settled areas was an act of desperation, rather than a viable and smart strategy. Indeed, he knew this was true. As he was about to launch the Black Line, he wrote to Archbishop Broughton asking for a religious blessing for his policy, expressing anxiety about its risks but asserting that his effort “is grounded in the merciful design of saving them from utter destruction” and all he could do is “trust that the hand of God is with me and that I may have the satisfaction of founding a colony of these wretched savages.” He wanted Broughton to write a special prayer for success that clergy would announce and to organize “a general thanksgiving if these miserable savages are delivered into our hands.”70 The tone of this letter points to the unease, perhaps a mild panic, that Arthur felt at this moment. It was a moment of considerable disquiet in Hobart—there had been a recent spate of nine murders by Aboriginal people—and Arthur himself may have been caught up in that. He was aware that the Black Line initiative was risky, and the letter suggests that he expected it to fail. Most of all, however, the letter displays Arthur’s disquiet as an agent of humanitarianism, faced with tribes who do not or cannot accept his proffered hand of conciliation and aware that the logic of his policy reinforced the tendencies within the settler community that supported their extirpation.71 Ironically, it was at this moment things began to turn around for Arthur’s policy of conciliation. The Tasmanian Aboriginals had, in fact, been defeated, although this was not immediately understood by Arthur or anyone else. The Aborigine Committee was about to establish the official humanitarian narrative vindicating his policy. Robinson’s missions were meeting with success. And once he realized all this, his humanitarian vision began to recover. As he recognized the potential success of Robinson and was politically shielded by the work of the Aborigines Committee, Arthur re-discovered his equilibrium. We can date this to the beginning of 1832 when he notified the Colonial Office that the conciliation of the Indigenous people was now complete—even though Robinson was to take another two years to finish the business. His faith in the humanitarian narrative was again expressed with an assured self-confidence. Of course, he acknowledged that Providence had played its role in his success. But, most importantly, he could now treat the Aboriginal people with the generosity they deserved: as objects of his heartfelt empathy unalloyed by admissions of their cultural incapacity.72 As a sign Arthur was recovering from his own trauma, he was ready to draw lessons from the whole sorry affair. There were three policy lessons to be drawn from his experience: the need for treaties, the need for official structures of protection, and the need for governmental (and settler) restraint. As he regained confidence he began to re-write the experience in his own head. In early 1835 he wrote to Glenelg in the Colonial Office claiming that the biggest error in Van Diemen’s Land

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was the failure to make a treaty at the very beginning of colonization and urged that mistake not be repeated in the new colony of South Australia. It seems that he had forgotten the amount of ink he had spilled, complaining there was no one among the Aboriginal people he could find with treaty-making powers.73 In his effort to assay his failures into pointers for others, he wrote unbidden to Governor Stirling of Western Australia in late 1835 suggesting a policy that would save “you from the painful situation in which for so many years I  was placed.” He urged a “determined system of conciliation” to be followed even through conflict. He emphasized the importance of recognizing Aboriginal land rights, and chiefly power. Serious efforts should be made to establish habits of mutuality and reciprocity from the outset. Officials should learn the native languages and maintain constant relationships. A  system of gift-giving should be established as part of the negotiations in exchange for the land that was being used by settlers.74 But for the next few years, he could not put his experiences to bed. He continued to mull over them, the better to draw lessons. In July 1837, he wrote a mea culpa to Glenelg repudiating the salutary terror he had presided over. He admitted that he had made serious mistakes in the early years of his administration “from which injurious consequences resulted,” attributing them to the fact that both the white settlers and convicts and the Aboriginal people were at “untutored” stages of civilization. Both needed to be educated into civilized behavior. As regards the Indigenous people, he then added the most remarkable extension: [I]n the settlement of a new country the very first consideration has to be the mental condition of its inhabitants and how no conduct of the savages towards “the intruders” should ever be the cause of retaliation [my italics] all the while the inhabitants remain destitute of reason and understanding. . . . No provocation, no demonstration of hostility, no recollection of injuries they may have inflicted can constitute a justification for any act of violence towards them— nothing indeed, short of self-defense in the last extremity. ‍ nd as to the exemplary violence he had used, he now realized that its effect was to A stimulate the Aboriginal people become “more cunning and more adroit warriors.” Instead, conciliatory measures should be pursued from the start and, even against repeated acts of violence from the indigenes, should be “pursued with calm and determined perseverance.”75 Such themes were repeated elsewhere, in letters to fellow humanitarians and in the last memo he wrote as lieutenant governor as he passed his office over to Sir John Franklin. These later documents reveal Arthur’s restored faith in the humanitarian perspective. The hints of the racial incorrigibility of the Van Diemen’s Land Indigenous people that had loomed in his dispatches of the later 1820s were missing. The conventional humanitarian belief that culture, not nature, shaped human character and human potential reappeared in full bore. Thus, he reported how the Aboriginal children of the Hobart Orphan’s Home are “as quick of

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apprehension and . . . possess as retentive memories as their white companions.” Likewise, his faith in the universality of man was restored: the deficiencies of the adult Aboriginals were the product of circumstances “rather than of any inherent natural inferiority of constitution, or original dullness of perception.” Even more glorious was the evidence that the indigenes possessed moral sensibility, the glimmerings of a “first cause” that was more reasonable than the beliefs of ancient Greeks or Romans. They believed in good and evil, they did not worship idols, they were amiable and honest, “they do not treat their wives in the harsh manner other savages are said to do, on the contrary there is an appearance of affectionate confidence, and good will which could not exist if all were cruelty and lordly domination.” To Franklin he explained how “perplexed” he had found the creation of an Aboriginal policy. The challenge was how to preserve in my measures that degree of forbearance which such considerations of justice demanded, and, at the same time, to extend the protection which seemed to be essential to the existence of the community involved a struggle between two opinions of the most painful and distressing character. His greatest blessing was that “divine Providence” had allowed him “to press to a decisive result a policy in which the eventual interests and safety of the natives were, . . . a subject of the deepest and most anxious concern.” Even though their numbers were much diminished, it is gratifying to me that in its collective capacity, this community is guiltless of their blood, that peace, conciliation, and kindness towards them have marked the course of Government, and there is still a remnant living to enjoy the fruits of that compassion, which I  would have gladly extended to the whole race.76 Arthur had recovered his equilibrium; he had stilled the tensions in his own mind that the colonial encounter had induced. His legacy that has captured the attention of historians is, naturally enough, his role in the near destruction of the Indigenous people of Van Diemen’s Land. But at the time, what caught the attention of the Colonial Office was the policy prescriptions that issued from his psychological recovery from the trauma of his policy failures in Van Diemen’s Land. He left Van Diemen’s Land at the end of October 1836 and arrived in London at the height of evangelical control of the Colonial Office. Lord Glenelg was struggling to enshrine humane policy principles in the governance of the new Colony of South Australia and was a receptive audience for Arthur’s ideas as to how to do that as well in the new established Port Phillip settlement. Out of this conjuncture came the attempt to install a policy of Protection for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand.

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Notes 1 The assumptions around which most recent accounts of this period are written tend to be more deterministic than this. See, for example, Penelope Edmonds and Anna Johnston, “Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. I (Spring 2016), doi:10.1353/cch.2016.0013; Lester and Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government, 246, 275, where such policies categorized as “an organizing grammar that represented invasion in terms of white civility,” a way of achieving a “penetrative hegemony” over Indigenous peoples cloaked in a rhetoric of humanitarian concern. 2 Thus the case of Edward Curr, director of the Van Diemen’s Land Company in the northwest of the island. The policy of the Directors of the Company in London was to conciliate the local indigenes. However, Curr was deeply implicated in the terrible violence against the Indigenous Tasmanians in this area. In correspondence with Arthur he uses denial and evasion and the rhetoric of humanitarianism to avoid honest reporting of the extent and nature of violence. See Ian McFarlane, Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania. A History (Hobart: Fullers, 2008), 89–128. For an argument about the control that Arthur could exercise over the governmental process, see Nick Brodie, The Vandemonian War (Richmond, VIC: Hardie Grant Books, 2017). But note the reservations about this expressed in Benjamin Madely’s review in “From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 3 (2018): 467. 3 I cannot hope to encompass the large literature on colonial genocide here. For an excellent consideration of the issue as it applies to Australia as a whole, see Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research I, no. 3 (1999); Thomas Rogers and Stephen Bain, “Genocide and Frontier Violence in Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. I (2016): 83–100, doi:10.1080/14623528.2016.1120466. The case for genocide in Tasmania is made by Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: Routledge, 2014); Benjamin Madley, “From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (January  2008): 77–106. See also Dirk Moses, “Genocide,” Australian Humanities Review 55 (2013): 23–44. For the policy as an act of ethnic cleansing, see James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc., 2008), 261–78. See also Lyndall Ryan, The Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen  & Unwin, 2012), 87–103 for the key stage in Arthur’s policy where she avoids the categorization of genocide. Most of the focus of the historiography of Van Diemen’s Land violence against the Aboriginal people has been to establish narratives and uncover details. For the most recent contribution, see Brodie, The Vandemonian War. 4 As we know, settler colonialism could accommodate those who wished for genocidal outcomes. It was precisely settler sentiment for extermination that Arthur and Robinson were contesting. See Rebe Taylor, “Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self-­ Determination in Tasmanian Historiography,” History Compass 11, no. 6 (June  2013): 405–18. And Lynette Russell, “Remembering and Forgetting: Discovering the ‘Secret History’ of Tasmania,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 3 (2018): 446–40, doi:10.108 0/14623528.2018.1486288. 5 My interpretation of the evidence is close to that of Henry Reynolds in The Fate of a Free People: A Radical Examination of the Tasmanian Wars (Ringwood: Penguin, 1995). 6 On the importance of conciliation in this period, see Marete Falk Borch, ConciliationCompulsion-Conversion: British Attitudes Towards Indigenous Peoples 1783–1814 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004); Kate Darien Smith and Penelope Edmonds, Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (New York: Routledge, 2015); Julian Beard, “Conciliation in New South Wales,” in Australian Aborigines and Others, ed. Joelle Bonnevin et al. (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015).

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7 Kate Darian Smith, “Gorgets and Breastplates: Frontier Diplomacy in North America and Australia,” Paper delivered the American Historical Association, Atlanta, 2016. The last gorget displayed in the Museum of Australian History is dated 1986. For the Proclamation boards, see Penelope Edmonds, “ ‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections,” Journal of Australian Studies 35, no. 2 (2011): 201–18; Darian Smith and Penelope Edmonds, eds., “Introduction,” in Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, 7–8; for Western Australia, see Amanda Nettelbeck, “ ‘We Should Take Each Other by the Hand’: Conciliation and Diplomacy in Colonial Australia and North West Canada,” in Darian Smith and Edmonds, Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, 41–43, 46–50. 8 Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 31–33; Tracey Banivanua and Penny Edmonds, “Indigenous-Settler Relations,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 345–45. 9 For the point that conciliation and coercion were twined, see Mark Condos and Gavin Rand, “Coercion and Conciliation at the Edge of Empire: State Building at the Edge of Empire: Waziristan, 1849–1914,” The Historical Journal 61, no. 31 (2018): 695–718. 10 Aborigines Protection Society, Report of the Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (London: William Ball, 1837), 13. GL: NZ E7, Sir George Grey, Letters From E.J. Eyre, Eyre to Grey, November  24, 1841. By the same token, we should note that Eyre punished one of the white workmen who was accused of stealing two pair of trousers from Tenberry. An Aboriginal man who served as a guide and interpreter to Eyre. It would seem that the native complained to Eyre, which Eyre probably read as evidence of the building of mutual trust and suggested that a conciliatory basis for relationships was viable. The trousers were discovered, and the white man humiliated by being dismissed from government service, “all of which seemed to delight the natives amazingly.” 11 Hassell, Relations Between Settlers and Aborigines, 28–29; Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, December 18, 1840, SASA, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book May 21 1840–January 6 1857. GRG 52/7/1, for the Maria massacre. 12 SASR, GRG 18/1 Grey to Magistrate of Port Lincoln, September 23, 1841. Robert Forster, “ ‘Feasts of the Full Moon’: The Distribution of Rations to Aborigines in South Australia, 1836–1861,” Aboriginal History 13, no. 1–2 (1989): 63–79; Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, “Food and Governance on the Frontiers of Colonial Australia and Canada’s North West Territories,” Aboriginal History 36 (2012): 21–41. See also, Anne O’Brien, “Hunger and the Humanitarian Frontier,” Aboriginal History 39 (2015), 109–34. The adjustment of Aboriginal migration patterns to fit in with these distributes may, of course, also be seen as creating imperial dependency. And by the mid-1850s the function of food distribution shifted from modelling interchange and cultural engagement to resembling more a welfare hand-out when food supplies from other sources fell short. But this was part of a general shift in the nature of humane policy directions that we shall address later. 13 SRSA, Ibid., Grey to Magistrate of Port Lincoln, September 23, 1841. 14 Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions, Volume II, Chapters  10 and 12 for his observations on Aboriginal culture and custom. The coincidence between his instructions to the magistrate and his report to Colonial Office is worth noting as throwing doubt on the oft-made claim that Grey was an untrustworthy reporter of colonial affairs, writing only what served his own interest. NAUK, CO 13/20, South Australia. Original Correspondence Despatches, Grey to LJR, June 11, 1841, ff. 335–42. 15 An evangelical holding strongly Calvinist religious beliefs, Arthur was tightly connected to the humanitarian network in London. He was held in high regard in the Colonial Office, most notably by James Stephen, with whom he had a close and intimate

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relationship and whose nephew was employed in Arthur’s administration. After Tasmania Arthur went on to a distinguished career in Canada, where he implemented the Durham Report and then to serve as governor of the Bombay Presidency from 1842 to 1846. Arthur has come in for a lot of criticism from present-day historians. But this is not new. Criticism of his policy began with Henry Melville, The History of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land From the Year 1824 to 1835 (London, 1835). See also, James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London, 1870). For a judicious account of his governorship, see Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 68–87, 112–18, as well his, The Fate of a Free People. The standard biography of Arthur, good for basic narrative and facts, is A.G.L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart., 1784–1854 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980). Lester and Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 37–76, provide a coherent summary of his career, which emphasizes the authoritarian implications of his evangelicalism. The best analysis of his policy towards Aboriginals is Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 261–316. For his close relationship with Stephen, see ML AY 2164, Arthur Papers, Vol. 4, Correspondence from Sir James Stephen, 1823–1854. It is worth noting that nowhere in this correspondence is the question of Aboriginal policy discussed. 16 ML A 2183, Arthur Papers, Vol. 23. Letters from Sir George Arthur 1822–1850, Backhouse to Buxton, October 22, 1834; A 2181, Arthur Paper, Vol. 21, Letters to Sir George Arthur, 1831–32, Backhouse to Arthur, March 31, 1831. His convict policy was controversial. See Alexander Maconchie, On Colonel Arthur’s General Character and Government (Adelaide: Sullivan’s Cove, 1989); Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of Various Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (London: Routledge, 1906), 430. 17 Pastoral farming had the same effect elsewhere in the settler colonial world; see Mohamed Adikhari, ed., Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2014). Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 32–35. TAHO, Adam Amos, “Diary, 1822–25” NS323/1/1. 18 There is a large body of scholarship on the Black War. The latest account is Brodie, The Vandemonian War. See also Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004). The pioneering study was Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1948). But this scholarship had been anticipated by James Bonwick, The Lost Tasmanian Race (London, 1884). For the roving parties, see Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 199–202; Ryan, The Tasmanians, 87–105; Reynolds, The Fate of a Free People, 33–35; Brodie, The Vandemonian War, 30–32, 71–86, for an in-depth study of one such party. 19 Lyndall Ryan, “ ‘Hard Evidence’: The Debate About Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania,” in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australians, ed. Francis Peters-Little, Anne Curthoys, and John Docker (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2010), 39–50. Cape Grim was only one of several massacres in the territory controlled by the Van Diemen’s Land Company; see Clements, The Black War, 172–78; McFarlane, Beyond Awakening, 89–128. 20 McFarlane, Beyond Awakening, 136–37. 21 The Black Line involved 2,000 men acting as a beating force across the island to drive the Tasmanian Aborigines into a peninsular on the southern tip. It was an amazing feat of logistical organization, and a total disaster; only two indigenes were caught, although there may have been unrecorded killings of others. For the ramshackle operation of the Black Line, see Eleanor Cave, “Journal During the Expedition Against the Blacks: Robert Lawrence’s experience on the Black Line,” Journal of Australian Studies 37, no. 1 (2013): 34–47, doi:10.1080/14443058.2012.756057. 22 Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, 2; Bonwick, The Lost Tasmanian Race, 36–37. 23 Thus, Arthur’s policy escalated in harshness from 1826. But so did his search for a viable conciliatory policy. The two were always combined in his actions. See Julie Evans and

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Tessa Fluance, “Securing the Settler Polity: Martial Law and the Aboriginal Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2013): 16, 20. 24 TAHO, Executive Committee, Minutes, November 25 and 27, 1825–28, December 14, 1826. EC3/1/1.TAHO, Executive Committee, Minutes. 25 TAHO, CSO1 323 7578, Vol. 8, Colonial Secretary, Correspondence, March  18, 1830, 339–45 for the full letter. It is significant to note that Chief Justice Pedder remained opposed to coercion throughout the whole episode. 26 ML, A 2188 Arthur Papers, Vol. 28. Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–37, for a sample of petitions and meetings. See also TAHO, CSO1 323 758, Vol. 8 “Colonial Secretary, Correspondence,” 63–75, 299–303, 320–25, 339–45, for a sample of fascinating letters from settlers seemingly in response to invitations from Arthur to submit suggestions. 27 NAUK, CO 280/25, Van Diemen’s Land, Original Correspondence. Despatches, ff. 375–78, 390–96. 28 See Chapter 6. 29 NAUK, CO 280/16, Van Diemen’s Land, Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, January 10, 1828, ff. 44–49. 30 NAUK, CO 280/16, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Huskisson, April 17, 1828,” ff 334–37. 31 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 100–21; NAUK, CO 280/17, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Murray, November 4, 1828, ff. 375–78. 32 NAUK, CO 280/20, Van Diemen’s Land Original Correspondence Despatches, Arthur to Murray, April 4, 1829. TAHO, CSO1/1/331/7578/16, Reel Z1830, Papers of Gilbert Robertson, November 28, 1828, to Arthur, laying out his conditions for working the next 12 months to gather all the Aboriginals from the settled districts. 33 Robertson was angered by his displacement by Anstey as the leader of the roving parties and became a leading critic of Arthur in his newspaper The True Colonist, and at one point he was sued for libel by the lieutenant governor. By the mid-1830s he was ruined and destitute. See, ML, A 2210, Arthur Papers, Vol. 50, Gilbert Robertson, Anstey to Arthur, September 4, 1829, on Robertson’s failure to report sufficiently on his roving party. See Ryan, “Massacre in Tasmania? How Can We Know?” ANZLH E-Journal (2006): 5–7 for his role in documenting massacres. On his capture of Eumarrah, see Elspeth Martini, “The Tides of Morality: Anglo-American Colonial Authority and Indigenous Removal, 1820–1848” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2013), 129–30. It should be noted that his methods included coercion. See also Cassandra Pybus, “The Colourful Life of Gilbert Robertson,” John West Memorial Lecture, Launceston Historical Society (2011). For Robertson’s attitude towards Aboriginal people, see TAHO, CSO1/1/331/7578/16, Reel Z1830, Papers of Gilbert Robertson, 167–69, 175–76. 34 ML, A2180, Arthur Papers, Letters to Sir G. Arthur, 1829–30, Vol 20, Anstey to Arthur, May 25, 1829; TAHO, CSO1/320/7578, Vol. 5, Reports of Roving Parties, Report From Anstey, October 13, 1829; TAHO, CSO41/1, Letterbook of Correspondence to District Police Magistrates, 3 March 1828–11 March 1831, Burnett to Anstey, June 19, July 10, 1829. 35 ML A2209, Arthur Papers, Vol. 49, Letters to Arthur 1824–1839, Jorgenson to Arthur, January 5, 1828. The son of the Danish royal watchmaker, he had a colorful life including a stint with the British secret service as a spy in Paris but ended up in Newgate for theft, for which he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1826, where he soon found himself part of the colonial bureaucracy. He was assigned to the newly formed Van Diemen’s Land Company and explored the north and northwest. He was given a ticket of leave, made a constable, and appointed to head one of the roving parties. Jorgensen came to a sticky end, felled by alcoholism, and he ended his days scrimping out a living as a writer for the illiterate and picking up whatever government work came his way. He died a virtual pauper in 1841. See Australian Dictionary of Biography, “Jorgen Jorgenson”; N.J.B. Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1991); Graeme Calder, Levee, Line and Martial Law (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 2010), 69–71. ML A. 2209, Arthur Papers, Vol. 49, Jorgenson to Arthur, January 5, 1828.

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36 I have suggested earlier how the engagement of Aboriginal peoples with the agents of empire was a dominant theme of this period. This was true even in Van Diemen’s Land, where they were the most reticent of all Indigenous peoples to connect with settlers. But Australia was different from New Zealand or South Africa in that the bases for engagement, negotiation, and reciprocity with Indigenous peoples were weaker there than they were in New Zealand and South Africa. There were many reasons for this, primarily the different nature of Aboriginal culture and society. But one of the consequences was that efforts to find a basis for conciliation during the Arthur period were bedeviled by the same kind of volatility that marked the search for a policy. 37 Cited in Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, 74; NAUK, CO 280/20, CO 280/20, Van Diemen’s Land Original Dispatches, Arthur to Sir George Murray, April 4, 1829, f. 205–206, CO 280/16 Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, January 10, 1828, ff. 44–48; Arthur to Huskisson, April 17, 1828, ff. 334–37, Penelope Edmonds, “ ‘Failing in Every Endeavour’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections,” Journal of Australian Studies 35, no. 2 (2011): 201–18 for the conciliation boards Reynolds has written about the attempt to find negotiating partners in Fate of A Free People, Chap. 5. Arthur’s hope that the wives of sealers in the Bass Straits could serve as intermediaries referred to earlier was a further example of his search for intermediaries. 38 See “Eumarrah,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography; NAUK, CO 280/30 Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, October  25, 1831, Arthur to Goderich, ff. 149–50. For a very good analysis of Arthur’s relationship with Eumarrah, see Martini, “The Tides of Morality,” 118, 129–31, 137–39. 39 Cited in Martini, “The Tides of Morality,” 130, 140; Plomley, Friendly Mission, 504. 40 TAHO, CSO1/318/7578 Vol 4, Reel 1826, Papers Relating to the Aborigine Committee, 58–59. For his participation in Robinson’s 1831 mission, see Plomley, Friendly Mission, 518–20, 522–29, 544–47, 571–81, 528. 41 For Batman’s treaty with the Kulin people of Port Phillip, see Boyce, 1835, 72–73 and Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (Carlton, VIC: Penguin, 2009), 13–39. The treaty idea may have originated with Arthur. 42 James Bonwick, John Batman: The Founder of Victoria (Melbourne, 1867), 2, 67; Alastair Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines (Malmsbury: Kibble, 1987), 34, 223; Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1893), 504–6; Arthur Papers, Vol. 15. Colonial Secretary Correspondence 1827–34, A  2175 (Mitchell Library), Report from Batman, 11 November  1830. And for similar sentiments from Batman, see ML, A 2188, Arthur Papers. Vol. 28. Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–37, Batman to Colonial Secretary, June 16, 1829. Bonwick claimed that his sympathy for Aboriginals derived in part from the fact that he had grown up among them as a child and was therefore very familiar with their ways; they did not hold the same kind of fear for him that they did for settlers whose contact was less common. Backhouse also reported that Batman was indignant that a recent murder of an Aboriginal man had gone unpunished. 43 Bonwick, Batman, 4–5, 67; Bonwick, in The Lost Tasmanian Race, 117 put out another version of this event in which Batman’s party was acting in self-defense, having been attacked by some Aboriginal people. See also Campbell, John Batman, 32–33, Penelope Edmonds and Michelle Berry, “Eliza Batman’s House: Unhomely Frontiers and Intimate Overstraiters in Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip,” in Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony, ed. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 123–26. 44 Campbell, John Batman, 36–39; there is a report that he led a friendly mission to the northwest part of the island and this would have been a couple of years before Robinson scoured that area; see NAUK, CO 280/24, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Murray, April 15, 1830, ff. 404–5. 45 TAHO, CSO1/320/7578, Vol. 5. Reel 1828, Reports of Roving Parties, 178–86. As evidence of their sensibilities, he instanced the case of the death of a baby whom the

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mother requested be buried it in his garden: “The next morning at sun rise I found her crying over the grave” and there is a note in the margin “grief of mother over dead child”, which seems to indicate how this was a sign of their humanity. Arthur made approving and optimistic comments on the letter. 46 Ibid., 178–86. 47 Campbell, John Batman, 40; TAHO, CSO1/320/7578, Vol. 5. Reports of Roving Parties, 195–96. 48 Campbell, John Batman, 43–49. 49 NAUK, CO 280/16, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, January 10, 1828, ff. 44–49. 50 Ibid., Arthur to Huskisson, April 17, 1828, ff. 334–39. The Proclamation announcing this policy, however, contained the usual futile orders that Indigenous people were to be “persuaded to retire behind the line.” But if persuasion failed they were to be captured without force and “Prisoners are to be treated with the utmost humanity and compassion. . . . Whenever force cannot be avoided, it is to be resorted to and employed with the greatest caution, and forbearance.” 51 NAUK, CO 280/21, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence, Despatches, Arthur to Murray, September 12, 1829, ff. 334–40. 52 NAUK, CO280/24, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Murray, April 15, 1830, ff. 400–2, 404–5, 440. 53 NAUK, CO 280/21, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Murray, September 12, 1829, ff. 334. 54 To a Captain Vicary at Bothwell, for example, he wrote in February 1830 approving of the promises of indulgence you have held out to the woman who appears to have been instrumental in bringing about the friendly communication already established, and with the view of further conciliation directions have been given to send twenty five blankets and some tea and sugar . . . for distribution among the natives [which] . . . would seem to His Excellency to be all that the natives are likely to wish for. TAHO, CSO41/1, Letterbook of Correspondence to District Police Magistrates, 3 March 1828–11 March 1831. Letters From the Colonial Secretary Representing Lt. Gov Wishes and Instructions. Arthur to Captain Vicary, February 16, 1830. And for the Aborigines Committee and Robinson, see NAUK, CO280/24, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Murray, April 15, 1830, ff. 405–6. 55 TAHO CBE1/111 Reel Z2744, Committee for the Care of Captured Aborigines. Minutes of Meetings, February 17, 1830–September 18, 1832; TAHO, CSO1/1/332/7578 Vol. 17. Reel Z1830, Aborigines Committee. Report, March 19, 1830. 56 The shift to emphasis on Robinson may be seen in TAHO, CSO 41/1, Letterbook of Correspondence to District Police Magistrates, Letters From the Colonial Secretary Representing Lt. Gov Wishes and Instructions, Order of December  23, 1829, and Arthur to Anstey, January 19, 1830. 57 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 151–53; TAHO, NS65/1/1, Rev. William Bedford, Papers, Correspondence 1821–1852,” for the Memo of October 6, 1831, that Robinson presented to Arthur at Launceston; Plomley, Friendly Mission, 428, 483 fn.4, 477; NAUK, CO 280/28. Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, April 4, 1831, ff. 420–23. Other conciliators such as Anthony Cottrell were also in the bush, but they tended to work with Robinson. 58 For a while Robinson was regarded as the empire expert on Aboriginal peoples. It is a sign of Arthur’s desperation that he compensated Robinson very generously. Robinson knew his scarcity value and parlayed his four missions and later stints on Flinders Island and at Port Phillip into a sufficient fortune to set him up in a comfortable retirement in Bath. For his final mission he received £400 in advance, £700 if successful, and £200 pension p.a. to his wife if he died plus money to children. Arthur was defensive about the cost; but argued that Robinson had achieved such success that the expenditure justified. And, of course, this was small change compared to the cost of the Black Line. NAUK, CO280/41, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, March 18, 1833, ff. 40–43 for Robinson’s compensation.

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59 The idea that these missions were in fact negotiations has been established before by Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 139–46; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 175–76, 193. For the view that Robinson possessed charismatic powers, see TAHO, GO 52/6, Letterbooks of General Outward Correspondence. Outgoing letters from the Lt. Governor, Arthur to Buxton, January 31, 1835; Calder Papers, Papers re the Aborigines of Tasmania, ML A597, Reel 1162, Calder to Kennerly May 1876 [n.d]. 60 For the fear of absconding, see Plomley, Friendly Mission, 178, 298–300, 454, 764–65, 769–70. 61 Ibid., 591–92, 686. Truganini is the subject of a powerful biography by Cassandra Pybus, Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2020). 62 Ibid., 524–28, 544–45. We know little about the internal dynamics of the group that Robinson led. Apart from Robinson’s diaries there is only one other account that I know of—a newspaper article written by one of the convict members of the party in the 1870s and discovered by Nick Brody. See Nicholas Dean Brodie, “ ‘The Last Man Left to Tell the Tale’: Challenging the Conciliation Master Narrative in Van Diemen’s Land,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (2017): 86–102. 63 Plomley, Friendly Mission, 300–1, 663–65. 64 Ibid., 455 and fn. 44, 552. For other examples of dependence and cajoling, see 298, 441–43, 527, 544, 878; Pybus, Truganini, 90–91, 96. 65 Ibid., 546–54. For other examples of dependence on natives and the necessity to be continually negotiating, see pp. 149, 520, 561; Pybus, Truganini, 140. 66 Ibid., 663–65, 763–64; Pybus, Truganini, 141. 67 Ibid., 858. 68 NAUK, CO 280/28, Van Diemen’s Land, Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, April 4, 1831, f. 43. Pybus, Truganini, 170–71. 69 Ibid., Arthur to Goderich, February 7, 1832, f.10. 70 TAHO, GO53, Private Secretary’s Letterbooks: Letters Sent under Signature of Private Secretary to Lt. Gov. Representing the Views of the Lt. Gov, Arthur to Broughton, October 4, 1830, This is an un-catalogued letter, unpaginated at the beginning of the volume. 71 See also a similar letter in reply to a petition of land proprietors, ML, A2188, Arthur Papers Vol. 28, Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–37, February 22, 1831. 72 “It is impossible” he intoned, “not to reflect with sorrow the indiscriminate vengeance by which these savages have been influenced, but as their wrongs have been many great. But Her Majesty’s Government will continue . . . to regard them with the utmost compassion and continue to extend both protection and kindness towards them.” NAUK, CO 280/33, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Goderich, February 7, 1832, ff. 10–12. 73 NAUK, CO 280/55, Van Diemen’s Land Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Glenelg, January 25, 1835, ff 56–63. 74 TAHO, GO52/1–8, Letterbooks of General Outward Correspondence. Outgoing letters from the Lt. Governor, Arthur to Stirling, 19 December  1835, Arthur to Buxton, December 18, 1834. 75 Cited in Michael Cannon, ed., The Aborigines of Port Phillip 1835–1839 (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982), 26. This letter was written when Arthur was back in London and working on the Port Phillip Protectorate project. He was also awaiting another colonial assignment and, no doubt, was interested in impressing his humanitarian credentials on Lord Glenelg. But the fact that the same sentiments are repeated elsewhere and out of this time frame suggests that they had a genuine place in his psyche. 76 NAUK, CO 280/68, Van Diemen’s Land Original Correspondence Despatches, Arthur to Franklin, October 29, 1836, ff. 171–75.

4 POLICIES Protection

Arthur and the history of protection Arthur was not alone in thinking about imperial Aboriginal policy. Robinson, too, was eager to transfer his expertise at conciliating “the most savage tribes” to a wider sphere. And where better than the south of Australia where the pace of colonization in Australia was picking up? South Australia was about to be declared a colony, and some Van Diemen’s Land entrepreneurs seeking more land for their flocks of sheep and encouraged by Arthur himself (who may have had a share of the investment) had just established the Port Phillip settlement where they had just signed a unique treaty for Australia with the Kulin people. Robinson pointed out that the south Australian Aboriginal people had not yet been fully exposed to the “vicious propensities and baneful influences” that came with white settlers; they had not been “incensed” by this contact into fierce and hostile opponents.1 Robinson proposed to use the model of Flinders Island to “lay the foundation of an institution [in south Australia] which (if properly directed) would effectuate the benevolent purposes now under consideration.” The local Indigenous people would be separated into stations and thus protected from the influx of settlers and the violence that they carried with them. The stations would be staffed by assistant protectors, coordinated from a central office that would be headed by him. But the original part of his proposal was that the Flinders Island inhabitants also be removed to south Australia. His thinking was that they would be ideal intermediaries to the local people and would be living examples of the success of the policy of conciliation that had brought them to the safe place they now occupied.2 This plan had been gestating for some time. The idea for Robinson to transfer his talents to the amelioration of Aboriginal people on the Australian mainland had first been mooted in early 1835. By then Robinson saw how saving the Aboriginals from destruction was both a God-given mission and a profitable career

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opportunity. But the growing number of deaths of on Flinders Island was also of concern. There were already troubling doubts about the suitability of its climate and the nature of its water supply. At the same time that he was receiving positive stories about Aboriginal progress toward “civilization,” Arthur was also writing to London that Flinders Island was not the ideal place he had reported a couple of years earlier, and that this was a good reason to remove them all to the mainland. Robinson was in a state of denial about the death rate on the island, but his anxiety was reflected in the urgency he pressed Arthur to support yet another removal in October 1836.3 By the time Arthur arrived in London at the beginning of 1837 the moment was propitious to translate these ideas in to policy. They were consistent with ideas that Saxe Bannister was floating (and were echoed also by the Select Committee on Aborigines,), who proposed the creation of a specialized bureaucracy to administer Aboriginal policy. Arthur went to work at lightning speed. By November 1837 it was agreed that four protectors be appointed under Robinson’s supervision for the newly established Port Phillip area. By December, Arthur had interviewed and selected Charles Sievwright, William Thomas, John Dredge, and Edward Stone Parker as Robinson’s staff. He drafted the description of their duties issued by Glenelg in a formal letter to Governor Gipps of New South Wales in January 1838, although the protectors were not to arrive until the end of the year.4 This inaugurated a new phase in the idea of protection for Aboriginal peoples. And for the next twenty years or so the policy of Protection lay at the heart of imperial policy toward Aboriginal peoples. It played a major role in the decision of the British to insert themselves more prominently into New Zealand politics from the later 1830s.5 The Port Phillip Protectorate was the most ambitious expression of a vision of the humanitarian discourse that imagined a new start in imperial policy toward Indigenous peoples. And the experience of the Port Phillip Protectorate occupied a central place in the story of the policy of Protection in Australia in this period. But it was only one of several such regimes to be created over the coming years, nor was it the first such effort. It is not my intention to offer a complete history of Protection policy in this period. Nor shall I attempt to cover all the implications that Protection had for the lives and conditions of the Aboriginal peoples who encountered it. Protection was a complicated and many-sided policy, and its implications have been more fully explored by other historians, most notably, Amanda Nettelbeck, Fae Dussert, and Alan Lester.6 What follows draws largely upon the work of these scholars. My intention, however, is more limited and has a slightly different focus. First, I want to emphasize how the Protection of this period was consistent with the distinctive imperial formations of the empire in the southern seas discussed in the first chapter, and from the cultural assumptions that flowed from them. In its optimistic belief that Protection of Indigenous peoples was a worthy and a realistic policy, it reflected that fluid openness that marked the social and political contours of empire at this moment. It was central to a humanitarian discourse that imagined a colonial engagement of racial collaboration and cooperation. Although it was deeply

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embroiled in the structures of rule, it also provided a sphere where social relations that went beyond governance could be constructed and performed between indigenous peoples and imperial intruders. And this leads to my second argument, which is to highlight the distinction between Protection policy in this period and what it was to become after the 1850s. The policy of Protection of the early nineteenth century may not be equated with the policies of Protection that were created in the settler colonial state in the era of high imperialism. As Jesse Mitchell has underlined the local dynamics that emerged from  .  .  . the early nineteenth century [made this] an interesting period, rather different to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when government bodies, protection boards and missionaries gained much greater power over people’s working, cultural and family lives. I wish to emphasize the significant change in the tone and ideals of racial politics that underlay the departure from early nineteenth-century practices and aspirations.7 And the third theme that I want to address is the role Protection played in the wider sweep of the Aboriginal engagement with empire and settler colonialism, and to assess its significance for the development of racial politics in the colonies of Australia and (to a lesser extent) New Zealand. The latter is also a question to which I shall return later in the book.

Protection history and typologies The idea that imperial powers had a special protective responsibility toward Indigenous peoples goes back to the origins of modern empires themselves. It first appeared in sixteenth-century Valladolid in the debates between Bartolomé Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepulveda, which mark the moment when the moral dilemma of modern empires was first articulated. Las Casas was subsequently appointed Protector of Indians in the Spanish Empire. Protection was not, therefore, purely a British humanitarian invention. It was found in all the leading imperial European powers of the early modern period, and there was a global discourse of Protection that was a common theme in the European contemplation of empire and went way beyond Britain. In other words, Protection was always inseparable from imperial governance.8 In Britain, however, it was rooted in constitutional and legal doctrine: in return for Indigenous peoples ceding of sovereignty, the Crown assumed special guardianship duties. The expression of this idea could be seen in special orders in council in the reign of Charles II, and in the Proclamation of 1763, which attempted to draw a line between British settlement in North America and the Indian politics west of the Appalachian Mountains. And this was the deep root of the twentieth-century idea of Imperial Trusteeship, which emerged particularly after the First World War. The policy of Protection, then, was already well established in imperial policy

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before the 1830s, and the idea that the Colonial Office and the British Parliament retain control over policy relating to Indigenous peoples remained dominant, even into the period of settler government.9 Protection was another example of the way the imperial project was inevitably a project of social engineering. Protection implied a powerful imperial state. Any success it might have was a function of the capacity of the colonial state to assert its authority. Observant humanitarians like Reverend Joseph Orton recognized this. He noted in his diary in 1844 how the protectors had to be endowed with real power over the settlers if the policy was to have any chance of success. Historically this had always been so. In our period, it was imagined that this power would be exercised to place a shield around Aboriginal culture within which the civilizing process could occur. But Protection also assumed a psychology of imperial contact whose nature we have discussed in an earlier chapter. Protection was essential to allowing the natural historical processes of civilizing through culture contact to be enacted.10 Indeed, this had been evident from the early part of the century in the legislation devised to regulate the conditions of slave life and employment. It was not simply a matter of protecting slaves from the oppression of masters. It was as much a matter of creating the environment for cultural growth and improvement, which in the case of the slave communities of the West Indies and the Cape meant their engagement in the business of wage labor. Protection was not simply defensive; it was also prescriptive and coercive. The protective legislation in slave societies included the regulation of masters’ behavior and also laws against vagrancy to combat slave idleness. Protective legislation inevitably expanded the powers and personnel of the state. Guardians of slaves and others officers—the names varied from place to place—were typically accorded large if sometimes unspecified powers. Often this included legal authority, as in the case of the special magistrates in the West Indies who possessed supervisory powers over both masters and slaves to ensure that the obligations of both sides were observed.11 It is thus evident that there was not just one type of Protection. The protective regimes of slave societies at the Cape and in the Caribbean were different from each other and from those floated in Australia and New Zealand. The Port Phillip Protectorate has often served as a model for the fate of protection policies, but it was different from the South Australian experience, which was different again from Western Australia, and New Zealand was different from them all. What this suggests is the key importance of context—both local and imperial—in understanding the character and dynamic of Protection policies.12 Protection regimes were shaped according to the perceived needs of the particular colonies. The remit of the Port Phillip Protectorate was unusual in being defined from the Colonial Office. Generally speaking, each governor defined the particular emphasis required by the circumstances of their particular colony. In Western Australia, Protection came to be strongly associated with a policing function. But initially this was only one aspect of the office’s duties. The original appointment had been made at the urging of settlers who felt in danger of being

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overpowered by the local Aboriginal people. This was in marked contrast to the other Australian colonies where, from the beginning, protectors were seen by settlers as an alien imposition. In Western Australia it was imagined that the protector would be someone who would collect knowledge about the Indigenous people in order to better understand them. Out of this it was hoped a system of conciliation would emerge that would lead to negotiated arrangements with the local Aboriginal tribes. In this context then protectors were as much intermediaries and creators of colonial knowledge as they were active progenitors of British civilization.13 During the governorship of John Hutt (1839–46) the legal and policing function attached to the office in Western Australia began to be emphasized more strongly. Hutt made Protection part of a wider policy of “more expansive set of ‘experiments’ in Aboriginal management that included . . . education and training schemes, but also policing and imprisonment.” It was under Hutt that the notorious island prison of Rottnest was created. The centerpiece of his strategy was to bring the Aboriginal people under the law so that they could be both protected from settler violence and taught the “civilizing” habits of British law through punishment. Under Hutt, therefore, the creation of networks of conciliation went alongside a system of social reform through institutional control that tied education of children, for example, into the same matrix of policy as policing, punishment, and prison.14 In New Zealand, the work of the protectors was as colonial mediators. Governor Fitzroy (1841–45) established the Protectorate, and his conception of the office was closer to the Saxe Bannister model of a department of government responsible for Aboriginal affairs. George Clarke, a gun-maker-turned-missionary who had been in New Zealand since 1820, was appointed chief protector, and he soon made the office a significant power in the colonial government, employing ten people, two of whom were his sons. Fitzroy’s instructions to Clarke revolved around two issues. The first was the traditional role of protector, to secure Maori interests and rights from encroachment. In the process of this personal contact, protectors were to gradually introduce European customs. The second purpose was that protectors would act as land agents for the state and negotiate purchases with any Maori who wished to sell.15 The formal powers of the protectors, therefore, were considerable. It was common for them to have the status of magistrates, and in New Zealand this came with rights of summary jurisdiction in matters involving Europeans and Maori. In practice they did more than this. They negotiated intra-Maori disputes and were avid observers and ethnographers in their own right. Unlike the Australian protectors, they had no need to do much in the way of religion. The Maori were deeply entwined in Christianity and other aspects of Western culture before the Protectorate was established. The New Zealand Protectorate probably came closest to realizing the aims of humane policy. It greased the gears of the imperial connection with the Maori and served to ease the various engagements that tied Maori and Pakeha together.16 In South Australia, at Glenelg’s insistence, the Letters Patent establishing the colony had stipulated the importance of protecting the rights of the Aboriginal

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people. Unlike Port Phillip, or New Zealand, there was no attempt to create a protectorate bureaucracy. The governor exerted sole authority. And into the 1850s the Government of the Colony was more supportive for the work of the protectors than the other colonies. For most of our period, that work was done by one man, Matthew Moorhouse, who arrived in the colony in 1839, became protector soon after, and served in that role until 1856. Moorhouse worked in conjunction with various other officials, such as local magistrates and the various sub-protectors, and he was part of the wider community of humanitarian-minded people and worked with them on a variety of humanitarian projects, such as the creation of a Christian village for Aboriginal people at Poonindie. Moorhouse had a wide remit. He was responsible for the well-being of all indigenes in the colony. He was particularly assiduous in trying to extend them protection of the law, and in the Adelaide district, he established the Aboriginal school as well as supervised the location where local Aboriginal people were settled.17 Moorhouse did not have a high political profile, nor has his name figured much in the historiography. Yet he is a useful reminder that the humanitarian world was populated by such modest, even humble, people. He was not interested in using his government position to build a career or accumulate a wealth portfolio as Clarke and Robinson did. A  doctor by training, he was far closer in type to the dogged missionary who tried to live out their faith and social commitment to the humanitarian agenda to the best of their abilities while enduring discomforts that were capable of eroding the commitments of others. His reports suggest a conscientious, serious, and earnest attachment to his duties. He spent long periods out in the bush searching out reports of violence, on missions of conciliation, staying in their camps, eating their food, and checking on the work that the mission stations were doing to conciliate the local indigenes. His style of engagement with Aboriginal people contained the elements that were characteristic of the way humanitarians tried to comport themselves with Indigenous peoples in this period. He was anxious to make personal contact, to display the positive values of British civilization, and in the process to familiarize himself with their customs and culture. These were occasions also for the development of personal contacts, from which he established relations with several intermediaries he used in his contacts with various tribal groups.18 Like other protectors, Moorhouse was fully exposed to the quotidian violence of the colonial frontier and the trauma that it inflicted upon the Aboriginal people.19 At the same time, he was fully engaged in the ambiguities of Protection as a policy, particularly as it confronted the recurring eruptions of violence. Indeed, he directly experienced the violence himself as the nominal head of a party in August  1841 that was dispatched from Adelaide to facilitate an overland party through the Rufus River area and prevent conflict with the local Aboriginal people. In a confused sequence of events, members of the overland party opened fire and killed as many as fifty Indigenous people. Moorhouse’s actions in this attack were exonerated by a commission of inquiry, and his reputation for a humanitarian remained unstained. He was able to reconcile the different demands of his role as

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magistrate and protector with a milder version of the salutary terror argument that others like Arthur had used to salve their consciences: My position as a magistrate . . . I conceived required the strictest impartiality in judging of this distressing scene and my conviction is that the natives in this were at fault, they were determined at all risk to [. . .?] every white man, to be enabled to procure the property. The contest could not have been avoided . . . and though the result to the natives was so serious when compared to that of the Europeans, there was reason to believe that more lenity would have been attended ultimately with more slaughter as they would have attacked again.20 Moorhouse affords a glimpse into the ways the humanitarian conscience reacted to exposure to violence. His daily duties as a protector-magistrate brought to his attention the everyday casual violence between stockmen and Aboriginals. He was willing to doggedly pursue cases where Aboriginal people had been subject to settler violence even though this meant cutting through the dense cloud of settler resistance to any attempt to apply the rule of law.21 But Moorhouse’s engagement with the violence of the colonial encounter is interesting because it provides an insight into how such engagement changed perspectives on the prospects for an empire of racial accommodation. Moorhouse quickly recognized that responsibility for violence lay with the white settlers, and he contextualized it within the common humanitarian trope of the class position of the stockmen who had not been “softened by education and contact with good society nor by the influence of religion to treat them with forbearance.” Unsurprisingly, too, he laid much emphasis on the sexual promiscuity between white men and Aboriginal women as the main cause of the conflict. But he also came to understand that it was more complicated than that. He came to see, for example, the way contact with Europeans was bound to change cultural practices, introduce new desires and needs among the Indigenous people which would not necessarily accord with Western ideas, and create the conditions for cultural misunderstanding.22 Moorhouse’s exposure to colonial violence, however, also led him to abandon his early hopes for racial amalgamation and convinced him that racial separation was the only way to limit conflict and ensure the chances of Aboriginal survival. Unlike many humanitarians the experience of the colonial encounter did not lead Moorhouse to a harsher view of Aboriginal life and culture. Indeed, the reverse may have been the case; his humanitarian pity for their plight grew over his years in the colony. It was, rather, his attitude toward whites that hardened. His knowledge of settler violence shrank his faith in the possibility of white humanitarianism. By the same token, he was not starry-eyed about Aboriginal virtues. Like most humanitarians, he was forced to confront the realization that his expectations about the willingness of Aboriginal culture to receive white culture had to be modified. He responded with a deeper appreciation of the hold of “tradition” on Aboriginal culture. He was disheartened, for example, by their failure to embrace

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the educational offerings that he worked on with Archdeacon Hale and others. The reluctance of parents to let their children be educated and the ease with which those children re-entered traditional tribal life were disillusioning. But these failures of humanitarian expectations did not lead him to walk through this door into the world of a harsh racial ideology. It did lead him, however, to believe that segregation was the best way forward for a humane colonial policy because it would create safe spaces free from settler violence.23 Protectors were certain to be changed by their encounter with indigeneity, and Moorhouse’s reflections and shifting position on Aboriginal policy were not unusual. Charles Sievwright, one of Arthur’s Port Phillip protectors, was appalled by the violence that he encountered, and he soon came to similar conclusions as Moorhouse about the policy of Protection. He complained to Chief Protector Robinson, about the meager resources at the disposal of the Protectorate; he presented an ambitious program of social engineering that included establishing reserves as protections from settler violence that would guarantee Indigenous land rights; schools, hospitals, and other institutions should be provided where they could learn to cope with the encroaching white deluge. Sievwright was not alone in his expansive ambitions. At about the same time Edward Parker wrote a similar report to Robinson. Like Sievwright, it was the imminence of violence that shocked him and moved him to stress the urgency of taking radical action. He wanted a police force specifically to defend the Aboriginal people. And, he, too, advocated creating reserves where they would be induced to give up their “present habit of wandering from station to station in search of food.”24 These ruminations testified to the impact of the realities of the colonial frontier on the ideals and hopes of the first generation of protectors. They also indicate how policies of Protection were dynamic and fluid, mirroring the open possibilities of the period as a whole. In the Port Phillip context, they spoke to the need for Protection to adjust to the circumstances that confronted it. In the event the protectors proved helpless to change the policy to meet the enormous challenges it faced, and they were left muddling along the best they could. But the clear recognition of the weaknesses and failures in the policy by these protectors reflected the gap between the scale of the original ambitions and the unrealized possibilities they contained. Over the longer-term perspective Protection did begin to change its form, of course. And by the early twentieth century Protection had come to represent a policy of coercive interventions whereby the state claimed to exercise a control over Aboriginal lives and culture. What was the relationship between the debate that people like Moorhouse, Parker, and Sievwright were conducting and the future shape of Protection as an instrument of colonial governance?

Protection and governance25 Protection was part of the historical baggage that the imperial state carried as it presided over the new colonies in the southern seas. It was, therefore, inseparable from structures of colonial governance. But the relationship between Protection

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and imperial governance was contingent and varied. The ideological assumptions that underlay policies named as “Protection” differed both in time and place. In the slave colonies, for example, the emphasis was not simply to protect slaves from abuse but to ensure also that they absorbed the lessons of political economy. In Australia, the economic priority was never entirely absent, but it tended to play a secondary role to the cultural elements of the “civilizing” process.26 Similarly, although Protection was not designed with coercion in mind, it was unavoidable that at some point protective policies would run into the wall of duress, and this would be true of virtually every policy involved in the process of state building. Some degree of coercion would be involved, for example, in the policy of reserves. None of this, however, should obscure the fact that the policy of Protection in the early nineteenth century was infused with a visionary design for race relations. It was this that differentiated the Protection of this era from those versions that were deployed under the same name as the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth century when Protection was defined by radically different themes of policy and intention. By the twentieth century Protection had become part of a directive social policy that aimed at an increasingly intrusive management of Aboriginal society and its people. The contrast with the early period lay in the aspiration that Protection would create a space in which cultural change would combine with a regime of racial harmony. As Amanda Nettelbeck has pointed out, through the second half of the century the “belief in compensatory Aboriginal justice as the legal and moral obligation of the state” slipped away to be replaced by the mission of social management.27 The early protectors were not divorced from governance. Indeed, since they typically served as magistrates, they could not be. Bringing Aboriginal people within the ambit of British law, even if it was to secure their safety, would obviously make them subjects of British rule. Even learning the language so they could better communicate would ideally facilitate the processes of governance. Yet such instruments of governance also had other results. They could be also seedbeds of collaboration and mutuality. I noted earlier how Lancelot Threlkald worked very closely with his Aboriginal collaborator, Biraban, to produce the first translation of the Gospel of St. Mark. They also worked together when Indigenous people were caught up in the legal process, serving as interpreters and facilitating Aboriginal witnesses. Of course, Threlkald may be seen serving the interests of the imperial state in this work. But Threlkald was also modelling contact and collaboration that was believed to be implicit in the historical process. He worked with Biraban on terms of reciprocity and mutuality, if not equality. Protectorate regimes were designed to foster such mutuality within the context of an ordered, law-based society and allow Aboriginal people to take their place as subjects of the British Empire. This is an illustration of a more subtle and complicated expression of Aboriginal “governance” than the imperial state imposing its will.28 From the 1850s as the settler colonial state assumed more direct responsibility for Aboriginal affairs, it introduced a different set of intentions and expectations. The older tradition of Protection remained alive in the settlements or reserves

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around mission stations. But by the later nineteenth century they began to lose the autonomy they had earlier possessed. In the name of assimilation, the sharp end of state intervention was used to control and regulate Aboriginal life. This was a trajectory that may be summarized as follows: Protection moved from a context in the early nineteenth century when it contained the seeds and potential for Indigenous people to engage with colonial society with a certain degree of autonomy and selfrealization to a context where they were the subjects of control and direction. The question is: was such an evolution implicit in the history of Protection? Although, different policy intentions in different periods are often recognized in the scholarship on Protection, there is also a tendency to track the policy’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century manifestations back to the Select Committee on Aborigines of 1837, so that these difference phases all become versions of the same damaging benevolent paternalism. In this way, contemporary social policies may be extended back to the original “coherent expression” of Protection as a system of imperial control first articulated in 1837 and which “has been followed for 150 years.” To treat the Select Committee on Aborigines of 1837 “as a genesis for policies of assimilation through education [for example] in settler colonies” ignores the fact that the Committee confined itself largely to the new settler colonies in the southern seas. It elides the “way these polices were implemented in Australia and Canada in the hundred years that followed varied significantly among the colonial . . . jurisdictions.”.29 A policy of Protection that saw itself as an emancipatory project from ancient cultures was a policy with fundamentally different potential than a policy that was undertaken to correct what was seen as social and cultural dysfunction or to enforce a wage labor regime. It was no less an imperial project, but it was a policy with different expectations and potential. What had been a policy designed in the early nineteenth century to mitigate the consequences of violence and expropriation and to introduce Indigenous people to the culture of the invaders became in the later nineteenth century a policy for managing and directly controlling them. There is an enormous difference in the aspirational potential of such policies, aside from the questions of ideological intent and assumption. It is important to recognize these subtleties and to avoid conflating different phases under one conceptual meta-narrative that only looks toward oppression and dispossession.30 In this respect, it is instructive to note the instructions that the Colonial Office sent to New South Wales Governor George Gipps in January 1838 for the conduct of the new Protectorate at Port Phillip. These instructions, certainly drafted by Arthur, represented an attempt to translate conventional humanitarian wisdom into the principles that should guide Aboriginal policy. Protectors were to conciliate local indigenes by befriending them as well as watching over their interests and in their magisterial capacity defending them from settler intrusions and acts of oppression as well as punishing them for infractions. Protectors were to model Western domesticity and political economy, showing Aboriginal people how to abandon their nomadic life, cultivate the soil, and build suitable habitations. They were to learn Aboriginal languages, to educate their children and to propagate the gospel.

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And, as if this were not enough, they were to supervise the distribution of rations and act as census takers and enumerate the population.31 Two things strike one immediately about this list of duties. The first is the sheer scale of the enterprise. It serves as another reminder of the utopian ambitions empire involved. Of course, it also reflected assumptions about how malleable Indigenous peoples were—although Arthur certainly had drawn the opposite conclusion earlier. Still, the social engineering implications of this project are breathtaking. It attributed to Robinson and the other protectors a kind of supernatural power that would allow them to carry out their mandate. Any one of the tasks listed in the document would have likely taken the energies of a large staff of competent and qualified people, and the Protectors did not necessarily meet either of those standards. Indeed, one of the problems with the Port Phillip Protectorate flowed precisely from this immense sanguinity. But the second theme that stands out is the tone and intention of the instructions. They rest on the assumption of mutuality: on the idea that the personal will, sincerity, and presence of the protectors would be enough to set in motion the historical process of conciliation and progress and that it would be a process which the Aboriginal people would welcome. This was why so many tasks could be ladled out to the protectors’ willing hands. If the assumptions that both sides possessed a common psychology were true, and that the Australian Aboriginals were white persons in waiting, needing only the right stimuli to awaken their potential, then that list of duties that Glenelg laid out would not have been too much to ask of these men. But mistaken though those assumptions might have been, the tone of those instructions reveals the expectation that Protection (at least from the Aboriginal side) could progress in an environment where coercion and direction would be minimal aspects of policy implementation. The experience of the Port Phillip Protectorate revealed how problematic this utopianism was, and its failure opened the way for the very different set of intentions that marked Protection as it evolved from mid-century.

The failure of Port Phillip Protectorate When the assistant protectors that Arthur had chosen for the Port Phillip Protectorate left England in late 1839, they were surely excited about the prospect of being part of the humanitarian project. But the subsequent stories of two of them—William Thomas and James Dredge (who had been recommended by Jabez Bunting)—provides a snapshot of the fate of the Protectorate.32 Although Thomas was often out of favor with the colonial bureaucracy, he remained committed to the work of Protection and continued in the work long after the original Robinson-led Protectorate had been wound up in 1850. By then he was a symbol of continuity between the earlier notions of Protection as mediators and the new arrangements that came with self-government to Victoria in 1855. And in this capacity he was instrumental in the policy of separating the Aboriginal people from the settler community into reserves—a policy that marked an

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extension of the original idea of Protection into the mid-Victorian years. Dredge, on the other hand, quickly got disillusioned by the inadequacy of government will and resources to make the policy of Protection effective. Within a few months he was writing to his patron Jabez Bunting that although the Protection was the right policy, it was doomed to fail “while the authorities slumber the natives are being destroyed.” Within a year he had resigned to become a businessman in Melbourne and a constructive critic who saw clearly enough the impossible combination of forces against the humanitarian agenda. Thus, he, too, became an advocate of removal of the Indigenous people to the safety of an island, because otherwise they would be exposed to the “contagion of moral pollution” of settler society.33 Dredge was right to point to the supineness of government policy. In addition to the lack of resources, key personnel were at best ambivalent about the Protectorate’s mission. In part this was personal. Both LaTrobe and Sir George Gipps the Governor quickly formed low opinions of Robinson. For his part, Robinson was out of his depth with the scale of difficulties he faced and surely suffered from the absence of a cadre of well-qualified Aboriginal helpers that replicated those in Van Diemen’s Land. From the beginning he chaffed against the lack of support and was overwhelmed by the expectations of Gipps and LaTrobe that he live up to his reputation as an effective manager of Aboriginal people. But he had real cause for complaint. He was quickly exposed to the gap between the grandiose social engineering aspirations of Protection and the resources available to implement them. There were many basic policy decisions that had to be taken, such as whether to gather the local indigenes in reserves, or to send the sub-protectors out to live with them, or to employ them as roving protectors rather as Moorhouse operated. Debates around these issues consumed the first year or so of the Protectorate until Robinson decided to his pull assistants out of an itinerant mode and have them reside with their tribes. LaTrobe and Gipps, however much they may have sympathized with the humanitarian agenda, wanted the protectors to both conciliate and control the local Aboriginals. In January 1840, for example, Robinson complained that His Honor thinks I should have the people [Aboriginal people] under great command. He thought this three months since, so that in five months, I who have no means for carrying out any measures, must in the brief period of five months, do what fifty years have not been able to effect in any one part of the colony. Arthur had sold Robinson to London policy makers as an expert in the management of Indigenous peoples. LaTrobe and Gipps had been expecting him to weave his spell in the Port Phillip area. When that proved impossible, they quickly lost any faith they had in the protectors. By January 1841, Gipps wrote home that his hopes for the Protectorate were diminishing. A year later both he and LaTrobe joined forces to complain that race relations were deteriorating rather than improving.34 From the outset the protectors struggled against the enormity of their tasks. Their variable quality made everything worse. Arthur had not chosen wisely. At

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least two of the sub-protectors had pasts that caught up with them. Edward Parker had been dismissed from a post in England for improper sexual conduct, and when LaTrobe discovered that in 1846, he switched to school teaching. But he continued to be active in Protectorate affairs and a spokesperson for a humanitarian policy. Sievwright brought a trail of unpaid debts with him, which were uncovered even before he arrived. A protracted discussion ensued, but in the end he took up his post. After a year or so, his disordered family relations came into view, and there were hints of adultery between Sievwright and Parker’s wife. Le Soeuf was apparently traumatized by the otherness of the environment and was frightened of the Aboriginal people.35 In fact, they were left to fend for themselves after they landed. As with the typical missionary of the period, there was no easy transition into the work. Plans were worked out on the ground. Even when they were told where they were to go—and knowledge of the geography was rudimentary—they could not count on adequate transport arrangements. Nothing matched what Arthur had portrayed to them when they left home. The accommodation they were promised was not there. Families lived in tents until they built their own huts. Wives had no servants to help them. If they were ordered into the interior, they had to pay their own way. Thomas’ wife was in poor health—who can wonder at it?—and he was reluctant to subject her to the rigors of bush life. If he left her at home he would have to find lodgings for her at his own expense. Unsurprisingly, within three months of landing, he admitted that “I am this morning dreadfully depressed in mind” and he later confessed that “had we contemplated anything like the circumstances we find here . . . none of our friends would have recommended the measure.”36 Stationed right outside Melbourne, Thomas immediately saw what empire building meant. His journal provides a catalog of the colonial horrors that were dumped at his feet: the venereal disease among Aboriginal women, the rape and the prostitution, the violence and the difficulty of applying the procedures of law to address it, the dual duties of policeman and protector, having to deal with intra-tribal conflict and respond to Robinson’s demands that he control the Aboriginal people, to look in to this or that murder, combat disease by administering medicine, and, most of all, keeping them away from Melbourne, where in the early years some ugly confrontations occurred.37 In addition to all this, Robinson faced a scandal among the Van Diemen’s Land people he had brought over from Flinders Island to serve as intermediaries with the local natives. Fourteen Aboriginals had come with him, among whom were his long-standing associates and helpers Woorraddy and his wife Truganini. At some point five members of the group, including Truganini, absconded to join a party of whalers, and in late 1841 they were charged with having murdered two of the whalers. All were found guilty and sentenced to death. Robinson managed to save three of them, including Truganini, and they were returned to Flinders Island.38 Obviously, this hardly bolstered the reputation of Robinson or the Protectorate with the settler or governmental community in Port Phillip. If Robinson could not control the people who worked with him, what did that say about the claims of humanitarians to be able to foster racial harmony and progress? But the drumbeat

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of hostility from the settler community was more a response to the protectors’ persistent and dedicated exposure of settler violence against Aboriginal people and their attempts to bring the force of law to bear against it. They failed totally in this respect: only one European was convicted of assault against an Aboriginal person in the Port Phillip district between 1835 and 1850. There is nothing unusual about that statistic. But ironically, the most significant legacy of the Protectorate was precisely the careful catalog of violence passed down to us as evidence of the savagery in this part of the British Empire. Protectors were profoundly shocked by what they encountered and immediately began to detail the ubiquity of violence, the defiant rejection of their authority when they tried to restrain it, and the refusal of the local police authority to back them up. Edward Parker wrote that “I find myself unable to afford them [Aboriginal people] that efficient protection which it is the purpose of . . . the government they should enjoy.” At the same time, Sievwright noted how Aboriginal deaths were not reported as required by government policy and bodies were burned to conceal the fact of their death.39 In spite of his reputation for slack morals in his personal life, Sievwright stubbornly reported this kind of colonial violence and tried to bring the perpetrators to justice. He was in constant conflict with the colonial authorities for his aggressive urging of legal action against the perpetrators of violence. This continued well into the early 1840s. He had some success in bringing perpetrators of violence before the magistrates, and he built a successful series of trust relationships with the local people he worked with. Indeed, it may have been these two virtues that led to his ultimate dismissal on the charge of incompetence when he proved too persistent in making public a case of the murder of Aboriginal women and children by a gang of whites.40 Sievwright’s failure to get the local authorities to act was the norm rather than the exception. William Thomas recorded exactly the same response from his local police magistrate, Captain Lonsdale. Like Sievwright, Thomas took his powers as a magistrate seriously. He successfully uncovered the details of crimes and their perpetrators. But at every stage his efforts to take decisive action were hampered by institutional obstacles. There was the legal problem that Aboriginal evidence could not be admitted because they were not eligible to swear on the oath. But Lonsdale did everything he could to prevent cases being brought against settlers and would not even send policemen to assist Thomas even when his own life was in danger.41 Captain Lonsdale was a good example of the slipperiness of officials in the face of colonial violence. He had been appointed by Governor Richard Bourke in September 1836 as part of the government’s effort to bring this freewheeling colonial enterprise into the orbit of the colonial authorities. Lonsdale was dispatched to Port Phillip to bring order as the first representative of the state. His specific instructions were to investigate the violence that had erupted in the area and to bring the white perpetrators to justice. He reported that he was unable to do this for lack of evidence and because the suspected perpetrators absconded to Van Diemen’s Land, a favorite place for suspects to flee to in these years. When he gave testimony to the wandering Quakers, Backhouse and Walker, he spoke the discourse of humanitarianism.

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He provided them with soothing assurance regarding the importance of inquests on the bodies of dead Aboriginal people to determine the cause of death. There are hints that he was capable of forming mutual relations with Aboriginal people. One Aboriginal man described Lonsdale to Thomas as “his brother,” which suggests that he may have had the kind of intimacy that was not unknown in such frontier conditions where interlocutors and intermediaries were necessary to the furtherance of the imperial project. Indeed, it may be that Lonsdale embodied the inherent ambiguity of the colonial encounter at this moment in time. The dominance of the humanitarian discourse led him to speak its language, perhaps with an ideal sincerity. But the reality of the colonial encounter pulled him in a different direction.42 In any event, Lonsdale’s ambiguity about the Protectorate was typical of the wider reservations of the local colonial authorities toward the protectors. This was not just a reflexive hostility to the mission of conciliation. Both Gipps and LaTrobe considered themselves part of the humanitarian world. Gipps had been sent out with specific instructions as to humane treatment of the Indigenous people. Yet he quickly discovered the constraints on his power. He put a lot of effort in pursuit of the Myall Creek murderers, when seven shepherds massacred a group of Aboriginal people, suggesting that he tried to live up to those standards. Reverend Joseph Orton found him “very accommodating” with money and land for his missionary effort. On at least one occasion—in a case that Sievwright investigated and tried to prosecute—he offered a hundred pounds reward, a free pardon, and return trip to England in a futile attempt to secure testimony against white murderers of some Aboriginal people.43 So, the overall story in the Port Phillip Protectorate throughout the 1840s is one of an increasingly beleaguered Protectorate, an increasingly disillusioned and depressed attitude of mind among the protectors, and the growing drift of the colonial government toward accepting the dominance of settler politics. “What good have the Government done at last for the natives?” asked Robinson as early April 1840, “they have appointed officers to afford them legal protection without means to carry into effect,” and he continued, “by giving Aborigines protection we do nothing more than protect them from the depraved of their own race, which in fact is nothing at all for until the arrival of the whites they stood not in need of protection.” However much evidence the protectors collected, juries refused to convict and judges refused to cooperate, even when it was clear that they were going against the policies of the Colonial Office. Gipps tried to get around this issue by twice presenting a bill that would allow Aboriginal evidence. But it failed both times. And soon after his departure in 1846 the Protectorate was wound up and its responsibilities transferred to the local authorities.44

Transforming protection The story of the Port Phillip Protectorate tracked the general history of Protection in Australia in this period. By 1849 it was clear that the high expectations for it had not been fulfilled in what was supposed to be the showpiece experiment of Port

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Phillip. Elsewhere, the picture was perhaps less bleak because other Protectorates were not created with such high expectations. But throughout the 1850s protection lost the objective of facilitating the transition to conciliatory and cooperative race relations and began to move in the direction of overt social control of Aboriginal life. This was coincident with the change in constitutional authority that accompanied the coming of responsible government and the end of gubernatorial power. As part of settler democracy, control over Aboriginal policy shifted from the imperial state to the local government. It was true that well into the later nineteenth century, the question of responsibility for Indigenous people was capable of sparking debate in metropolitan politics. But the issue was decided by the 1850s, when Lord Lytton, the colonial secretary in 1858, refused to create a protectorate for the new colony of British Columbia, leaving responsibility for Aboriginal policy entirely to the provincial government.45 A few years later, the decision was made by Victoria (which had grown out of the Port Philip district) to reconstitute the Protectorate department that Arthur had initiated. In 1869 it was reorganized and given extensive new legislative powers, which extended to virtually every aspect of Aboriginal life: residence, employment, wages, education. Another Act drew the distinction between full-blooded and “half-caste” Aboriginal people and forbade them to live together—installing the racial regime of the late nineteenth century and burying any dreams of racial amalgamation that may have lingered. A  similarly draconian grip over Aboriginal life was extended by the Western Australian and Queensland Protectorates where chief protectors gained control over the property and persons of Aboriginals. Women were forbidden to go within two miles of the coast during night time hours, marriages across the race lines were regulated, and any Aboriginal child could be detained and sent to an institution. In South Australia, where the older ideals had a longer life than elsewhere, the Protectorate regime presided over by Moorhouse ended in 1856. A new era opened in 1860 when a Select Committee concluded that earlier policies including reserves had been a waste of government resources. This was not the kind of uses of Protection that early nineteenth-century protagonists anticipated. And, indeed, at the time the humanitarian community protested at the nature of these intrusions.46 Although a new phase in the history of Protection had opened by the 1860s, its trajectory was more complicated than a steady move toward state-directed social regulation and control. Protection policy from the 1850s until the end of the century was drained of the aspirations of the humanitarian era. But this did not happen right away. Ideals of that period remained alive among those responsible for interacting with Aboriginal people. In spite of the wave of contempt rained down upon them by settler politics, and the critical gaze of later historians, as to their motives, as Jesse Mitchell has pointed out, “such a dismissive conclusion is problematic.” They had achievements to their credit. Aside from detailing settler violence for the historical record, the protectors were “part of a passionate conversation about colonialism” that continued to inform the culture of empire. More immediately once the policy of itinerancy had been ended, and the protectors told to establish

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what amounted to reserves, they created safe spaces that protected some Aboriginals from violence. In these spaces, they enabled the humanitarian model of race relations through mutual interchange to be realized, and more importantly, they allowed opportunities for Aboriginal self-action and autonomy.47 This was true even in the case of the benighted Port Phillip Protectorate. Take the case of Edward Parker. For all his difficulties, Parker ran an efficient and successful station. His relationships with the Indigenous people were close and good. A  highly effective intermediary, he was the most informed of all the protectors about Aboriginal culture and ethnography, and like many humanitarians of his era, he forged good relations with individual Aboriginal people, thus fulfilling the model of reciprocal, mutual contact. To establish his protectorate station, he had to negotiate with the Dja Dja Wurrung people, who insisted on defining its boundaries on their terms. Presumably this was an apprenticeship to becoming a successful intermediary in establishing a space that satisfied the needs of both local Aboriginals and the Protectorate. Parker’s experience with the Dja Dja Wurrung was a reminder that even at a time of maximal violence, Aboriginal agency was an element in shaping the course of the Protectorate. And even when his station was about to close in 1850, Parker remained optimistic that the work he had begun would continue. Indeed, after 1850 his relationship with the Dja Dja Wurrung people continued pretty much as it had been before. He set himself up as a pastoralist but continued to run an Aboriginal school until it was closed by the Victorian Board of Education in 1864.48 The Victorian Aborigines Act of 1869, however, redefined Protection from a mediator of racial harmony and purveyor of Western culture to a system of social control. The old mission stations of the first generation of Protection tended to wither and close with this shift in the direction of policy. Still, the prior model of the Protectorate did not die immediately, even if it was increasingly discredited. The new order did not become dominant until the end of the century. The legacy of the “humanitarian” system of the earlier part of the century was to be found in the reserves that it left behind and those that were created in the transition from the old arrangement to the new.49 Although Wybalenna on Flinders Island (where the Tasmanian indigenes ultimately ended up) saw a steady mortality of its Aboriginal inhabitants, it was, in fact, the exception for such safe places rather than the rule. The main features of these missions may be illustrated from the histories of two South Australia reserves, Poonindie and Raukkan. They constituted a discrete phase in the history of Protection and, together with other similar institutions such as Coranderrk in Victoria, they carried within them a transformed spirit of the earlier era. Both settlements had been formed in response to the disillusion with the idea that the races could live together I have noted earlier. The moving spirit behind Poonindie was Matthew Hale, a dynamic Church of England prelate who arrived in South Australia in the later 1840s and formed the settlement in 1850. Raukkan was established by George Taplin in 1859 as a mission to the Ngarrindjeri peoples who lived on the shores of Lake Alexandrina. Both Taplin and Hale were in the tradition of George

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Robinson and the other like-minded protectors. Taplin, like Robinson, was a typical product of early nineteenth-century evangelical enthusiasm. He was not an ordained minister and had received no religious training, but he had worked as a missionary teacher. As with Robinson, Taplin believed that Aboriginal empowerment could only come through displacing traditional culture with Western beliefs. But Taplin was also an avid collector of Aboriginal ethnography and a genuine contributor to inter-cultural understanding. He learned the local language, published tracts in it, and left behind several important works of philology and ethnography.50 The histories of Poonindie and Raukkan reveal the character of Protection in this transitional period between its programmatic expression of a humanitarian vision of racial collaboration and its evolution into a program of social control and direction. In the beginning, both institutions reflected an “idealism and compromise on the part of European founders and pragmatism and adaptation on the part of the Aborigines.” As a consequence, their early histories were marked by a lack of coercion. As a protector, for example, Matthew Moorhouse had the authority to send Aboriginal people to Poonindie. But he refused to do so without their consent because he believed that they would pine away as they seemed to have done at Wybalenna. This meant that there was a degree of self-selection in those who joined the community. It was ironic, however, that Poonindie basically followed the model of Wybalenna but without the stigma attached to that place.51 Market culture and domesticity were at the center of both Poonindie and Raukkan. And like all such institutions, both places were designed to instill in Aboriginal people a different relation to the land. Nevertheless, it would be a distortion to regard them simply as places to segregate and hide the Aboriginal “problem” from view. Poonindie quickly established a thriving farm economy, which reinforced the sinews of community. Raukkan struggled more in this respect. The security of its land tenure was always in doubt and it had to face continued suspicion and hostility from the local farmers. Their resistance blocked attempts to persuade the state government to assign enough land to put its economic activity on a sound basis. Some of the Ngarrindjeri managed to secure their own leases. But others worked as domestic servants or as seasonal workers in the surrounding farms.52 During the mid-nineteenth century, however, both places provided spheres of autonomy for the Indigenous people. Race relations tended to mirror the ideal of the humanitarian vision. Mixed-race children were welcomed at Poonindie. By the 1870s, Aboriginal deacons were administering the sacrament to both races at Raukkan. The result was at least the glimmerings of the kind of cultural exchange that humanitarian discourse had imagined, even if the form it assumed was different. Religion had a lot to do with this. Poonindie was a Christian community from the beginning. It attracted members from different groups and tribes, and in that respect, it was an interesting example of community building outside of traditional boundaries. Raukkan, however, was more clearly an example of how Christianity could be appropriated by Indigenous people for their own empowerment. Conversion to Christianity was optional. Some of Taplin’s closest associates

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never converted. A  man called Tooreetparne was such an example. One of the leaders of the community, he remained an atheist, yet he played a leading role in the governance of the place. By the same token, James Nguaitponi, another Ngarrindjeri leader, not only converted to Christianity but became celebrated throughout Australia for his expertise in arts and sciences. For his part, George Taplin became more tolerant of Aboriginal customs as he grew older, accepting, for example, the exogamous marriage system.53 This model of Protection policy suggested the continuing influence of the humanitarian agenda into the later part of the century. These reserves seem to have been quite special in the degree of autonomy that was given to Aboriginal inhabitants. But they illustrate the mixed character of the Protection regime of in middle part of the nineteenth century. In retrospect, we can track the general trend throughout these mid-century years toward a tighter regulation of Aboriginal life until it reached a decisive tipping point by the 1880s. Thus, as the scope of state control extended their range, new spheres of Aboriginal life came under its control. Regulations in Victoria relating to labor, for example, were expanded from 1871 so that the managers of the Lake Condah Reserve closed down the external labor market for its residents, forcing them to remain on the reserve. Similarly, there was also a trend toward religious indoctrination, as well as increased regulation of sexual life with the separation of unmarried men and women. Children also came under the grim grip of the state. The 1869 Act in Victoria gave the Board of Protection almost total powers over Aboriginal people if they cared to exercise them. In some cases this was done benignly; in others, it was done with force and coercion.54 Neither Raukkan and Poonindie was unique in the potential they contained. The Coranderrk reserve, for example, in Victoria had been established in 1863 as a result of agitation by local Kulin people supported by Scottish lay missionaries. It was specifically designed as compensation for lost lands. Like Poonindie and Raukkan, it provided a safe space and a site for Aboriginal economic activity—in this case selling wheat and hops to the Melbourne market. But, like the South Australian reserves, its very success drew the hostility of local whites and from the 1870s it faced an increasing harassment. The Victorian Board of Protectors tried to close it in the 1870s and move the people out. But this was met with a sophisticated campaign by the local Aboriginal people that shrewdly appealed to the local humanitarian network through newspapers and other means to successfully prevent its closure at that point. At this moment Aboriginal action demonstrated that it was capable of influencing Protection policy—they were able, for example, to prevent the imposition of a child removal policy in 1877. But in the long term it was a losing battle, and in 1886 the state government closed Coranderrk and forcibly removed most of the residents.55 These spaces, then, were increasingly beleaguered as the century progressed. From around 1860, proposals to make Protection policy—now largely controlled by the settler states—more directive and coercive were increasingly mooted. In South Australia, a Legislative Committee report of 1860 recommended that the chief protector have wide powers to administer summary justice to Aboriginal

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people (he could also in theory commit for trial settlers who abused them), to serve as a medical officer and as a collector of statistics, administer a staff of subprotectors to regulate Aboriginal behavior, and administer an educational system that would separate children from their parents. Similarly from the 1860s, laws on vagrancy began to be employed against Aboriginal people to control their movements and encourage settlement. This was a significant change in the direction of policy because it had been an original principle of the Protective regimes of the early nineteenth century that vagrancy laws should not apply to Australian Aboriginals in recognition of their different and more mobile relationship to the land.56 It was from the 1880s that this phase of Protection policy began to really bite. It was at this point that such places became the “outback ghettos” that Peggy Brock has named them. The spaces for Aboriginal autonomy that could provide a model of survival within the context of a burgeoning settler society were progressively displaced by a model that privileged coercive intervention and control of Aboriginal communities. At both Poonindie and Raukkan the style of governance represented by Moorhouse, George Taplin, and Matthew Hale certainly rested upon paternal assumptions of cultural superiority. But the reality of social relations was that they evolved into a kind of hybrid series of accommodations between whites and local indigenes with benefits for both. And this, of course, described the potential that lay within the original “humanitarian” program of Protection. From c. 1880, all this changed. Those changes reflected the mutations in the discourse of racial ideology as well as the maturing power of the settler state. At Poonindie a new superintendent appointed in 1878 “demanded complete subservience” from the inhabitants who had developed significant spheres of autonomy. This fed into the hostility of the surrounding white communities whose farmers enviously eyed the land of a successful enterprise. As with the Kat River settlement in South Africa—another humanitarian-driven project designed to showcase the possibility of modernity among the Khoi—the economic and social success of the reserve was a standing denial of the increasingly dominant racial ideology that Indigenous people were incapable of cultural or economic achievement. Thus, in 1896 the community was broken up by the state. It was a reflection of the changed racial context that the Anglican Church, which had sponsored the settlement forty years earlier, refused to oppose dispersal.57 Raukkan’s fate was similar, although its specific history was different. When George Taplin died he was succeeded by his son, Frederick, who became superintendent in 1880. In contrast to his father, Frederick Taplin mirrored the racial ideology of his time and epitomized the degeneration of the “humanitarian” mentality. Whereas his father’s style of leadership was to empower the inhabitants, Frederick Taplin wanted to dictate and order. He was also devoid of the moral authority of his father. On two occasions, he was accused of sexual relations with young Aboriginal women. It is interesting to note that the structures of Aboriginal authority that had grown under his father’s direction were strong enough to allow them to fight back. They took control of the religious life of the place, and in 1889 they secured his removal. The community continued to thrive largely under Aboriginal

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leadership until 1911 when the Aborigines Act of that year endowed the superintendents of such settlements with total power over the lives of the indigenes. Although this was met with continuing resistance, the character and culture of the community changed decisively. Economic activity was hollowed out as certain crafts, such as shearing, were deliberately closed off to Aboriginal men and reserved for whites. In 1916 it became a government-run institution and Aboriginal rights were further diminished. The boarding school for children was closed and the place was progressively run down to become by 1970 “a barren rural slum.”58

Conclusion It is hardly surprising that the policy of Protection underwent a significant change from the 1850s. By then, it was evident that the expectations for the policy that followed the 1837 Select Committee report and Arthur’s intervention had not been fulfilled. And as a settler government was installed, the political priorities of humanitarianism gave way to those of the new rulers of the colonies. The result was that the Protectorates lost their earlier commitment of facilitating the transition to conciliatory and cooperative race relations through “civilizing” the Australian Aboriginals. In its place, more overt methods of social control began to be exercised over Aboriginal life. This later phase, therefore, was in direct contrast to the logic of early nineteenth-century humanitarian governance. Each period represented different models of human behavior and racial hierarchy. The former looked forward to a society where the races worked together in collaboration, on the assumption that they shared a common humanity and on the assumption that British cultural norms would be transmitted through contact. These later methods ensured the marginalization of Aboriginal people and the degradation of their societies and culture. This was to reverse the intent and expectations of the early Protection regime. The unchecked control of settler politics and consciousness, which I will address in a later chapter, was to wreak havoc across those fragile spaces like Poonindie and Raukkan, where elements of the original vision of Protection had produced some small results.59 But there were two areas where the early era of Protection policy did have a lasting impact on the history of the British Empire and on the history of indigenous peoples which we have already alluded to, but which bear repeating. The first was colonial violence. Like much else having to do with empire in this period, the relationship of the protectors to the violence they were supposed to curb was ambiguous and complex. Even the most serious humanitarian protector was likely to be sucked into the vortex of uncontrollable colonial violence. The protectors of Port Phillip more than most, however, steered clear of this contamination. They provided grim detail and grim documentation of the failure of the effort to expel violence from the empire project. And in doing this, they achieved a perverse kind of success by laying it into the historical record. The second legacy the Protectorates could claim was more immediate. It is evident that Protection was not just one thing. It could not confine itself solely to a

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benevolent protection of Aboriginal lives. Even if that was the heart of its mandate, the realities of the colonial encounter meant that it was inevitably drawn into the functions of governance. Nevertheless, neither is it entirely to be understood as an arm of imperial governance. At every phase it contained alternative possibilities and potential that were illustrated by the relative and temporary success of places like Poonindie. As a policy it has to be judged within this context. And as Lester and Dussert conclude in their study of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, although the Protection policy of this period failed to protect Australian Aboriginal people from harm, there was one important sense in which it had more lasting impact. It inspired the creation of some safe spaces in the midst of a violent settler culture—zones where there was some varying degree of Aboriginal agency. Those spaces afforded Indigenous culture a refuge, a place where the local people could negotiate with the colonial presence and a place, too, where Aboriginal politics could grow. The humanitarians who inspired and created such spaces were not to know that within fifty years the policy of Protection that they represented would be part of a systematic policy of social management and control.60

Notes 1 ML, 2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28, Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–1837, Arthur to Sir George Grey, July 13, 1836, Robinson to Arthur, October 29, 1836. 2 Ibid. Robinson to Arthur, July 4, 1836. 3 Robinson was pressing these ideas particularly hard by October of 1836. NAUK, CO 280/55, Van Diemen’s Land Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Glenelg, January 25, 1835 ff. 56–63; ML, A 2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28, Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–37, Burnett to Arthur, October 18, 1836; Michael Cannon, ed., The Aborigines of Port Philip 1835–1839 (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982), 17; A.G.L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart., 1784–1854 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980), 132. In spite of the growing death toll, Robinson continued to present optimistic reports on their demographic prospects and attributed their illnesses to the climate and clothing. N.J.B. Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987), 90, 99, 426, 431, 432–34. 4 ML A 2188, Arthur Papers, Vol 28. Papers Relating to Aborigines, Arthur to Grey, July 22, 1836, Grey to Arthur, November 12, 1838. See also James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia (Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc., 2012); Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Chapter 3 for the origins of the Port Phillip Protectorate. 5 Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity. British Intervention in New Zealand 1830–1847 (BWB ebook, 2013), x, accessed April 10, 2019, https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1927277191. 6 See in particular the major statements by Amanda Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Dussert and Lester, Colonialization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance. For a general discussion of these themes, see also, Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missions and Overseas Expansion, 1790–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 139–49; Saliha Belmessous Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85–91, 98–101. 7 Jesse Mitchell, In Good Faith: Governing Indigenous Australians Through God, Charity and Empire 1825–1855 (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2011), 4. This transition is, of course,

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recognized by Nettelbeck in particular; see Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 168 for how protection policy shifts “from the delivery of civil rights towards programs of welfare and social management.” But I wish to emphasize its conjuncture with the distinctive nature of imperial social formations of the early nineteenth in this part of the world. 8 Christina Twomey and Katherine Ellinghaus, “Protection: Global Genealogies, Local Practices,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 2–9, doi:10.1525/phr.2018.87.1.2; Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 21–23. 9 For the Proclamation of 1763, see Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War (New York: Routledge, 2001), 568–71; Paul McHugh, Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 124–25, 131–32; Paul McHugh, “The Politics of Historiography, and the Taxonomies of the Colonial Past: Law, History and the Tribes,” Paper delivered to the British Legal History Conference, Exeter, 2009, 18–19. 10 ML1719, Orton Papers, Journals, Vol. 1–2, 232, 238. James Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo, 1836–1909 (New York: Routledge, 2011), 20–22 for the association of protection with executive power. 11 W.L. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London: Routledge, 1937); John Edward Mason, “The Slaves and Their Protectors: Reforming Resistance in a Slave Society, the Cape Colony 1826–1834,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 1 (March 1991), 103–28; Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 96, 136–37. The idea of a five-year transition phase from slavery to emancipation reflected the notion that the historical process of cultural change could be put into high gear by the application of the correct policies. Sir George Arthur was a strong advocate of slave protection as superintendent of Honduras before moving to Van Diemen’s Land. 12 On a discussion of the differences, see Alan Lester and Fae Dussert, “Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th Century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand,” New Zealand Geographer (2008): 64, 205–20. And see Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 37–38, 100–1. 13 Tiffany Shellam, “ ‘Our Natives and Wild Blacks’: Enumeration as a Statistical Dimension of Sovereignty in Colonial Western Australia,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial Studies (Winter 2012), doi:10.1353/cch.2012.0033; Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 63–64, 98–99. 14 Amanda Nettelbeck, “ ‘A Halo of Protection’: Colonial Protectors and the Principle of Aboriginal Protection Through Punishment,” Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 3 (2012): 398, 401–3, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2012.706621; Amanda Nettelbeck, “Creating the Aboriginal Vagrant Protective Governance and Indigenous Mobility in Colonial Australia,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 77–94. 15 NANZ, IA4 266, Outward Letterbook Protector of Aborigines 1841–1853, Fitzroy to Clarke, April 4, 1841. 16 Roger Evans, Truth and Obedience: The Life and Letters of George Clarke 1798–1875. (KeriKeri, NZ: Keri Print, 2004); Dussert and Lester, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, chapter  5 for a good description of the New Zealand Protectorate. See Marjan Lousberg, “Edward Shortland and the Protection of Aborigines in New Zealand, 1840–1846,” in Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies, ed. Amanda Nettelbeck and Sam Furphy (New York: Routledge, 2020), 115–32, and in the same volume for another example of imperial officers acting in this way, see Shaunnagh Dorsett, Spanning Two Worlds: Protection, Assimilation, and the Role of Edward Meurant, Government Interpreter, New Zealand, 1840–1851 (New York: Routledge, 2019), 97–114. 17 Nettelbeck, “Colonial Protection,” 2; Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 59–62, 118–21; Geoffrey Grainger, “Matthew Moorhouse and the South Australian Aborigines c. 1836–1856” (BA Honors thesis, School of Social Sciences, Flinders University, Flinders, 1980), 85–97 for his educational activities—which was one area of interest he shared with George Grey during his governorship. This is the only biography of Moorhouse.

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18 SASA, GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book May 21 1840-January 6 1857, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary 13 June, December 18, 1840, March 13, 1841. 19 Moorhouse made a visit to the Milmenrura people, who had been the tribe involved in the Maria episode a year after the event. His purpose was to make a trip of conciliation and with the hope that he would learn something of their language. But he found “the man we saw was so afraid he could scarcely be induced to speak” and the “object of our visit was not fully accomplished.” SASA, GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, December 18, 1841. 20 SASA GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book May Moorhouse to the Colonial Secretary, September 13, 184; Grainger, “Matthew Moorhouse,” 29. 21 Grainger, “Matthew Moorhouse,” 61–62, 64. South Australia State Archives, GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book May  21 1840-January  6 1857. Moorhouse to Advocate-General, October 21, 1841. The claim of false accusation is an interesting example of how settler discourse met the challenge of humanitarian morality at this period. The claim against Moorhouse went on to assert quite unbelievably that it was the government and protector who are guilty of cruelties against the natives because of their indifference to pleas from the whites for protection “yet the moment a white inflicts retributive justice, which the Government had denied, he is immediately pounced upon by a horde of distinction-seekers, dragged manacled . . . to Adelaide and confronted by” a court composed of “cannibal urchins.” 22 This extended to sexual transactions. Grainger, “Matthew Moorhouse,” 17; SASA, GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book May 21 1840–January 6 1857, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, September 13, 1841. 23 Grainger, “Matthew Moorhouse,” 34–36, 101–4. 24 Macfarlane, Public Finances, 325–26, 343–53, Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 137. But see also a report in ML A1714 Orton Papers, Journal 1832–1841, Vol. 1, 2, December 4, 1840, 128, that he had covered up the murder of an indigene. 25 My argument will relate mainly to the case of Australia, although there are surely resonances in both South Africa and New Zealand. 26 Amanda Nettelbeck, “ ‘Keep the Magistrates Straight’: Magistrates and Aboriginal ‘Management’ on Australia’s North-West Frontiers, 1883–1905,” Aboriginal History 38 (2015): 19–37. 27 Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 168. 28 Ibid., 117–28; Rachel Standfield, “Archives of Protection: Language, Dispossession and Resistance in 1840s Port Phillip District and New Zealand,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 54–78 for Protectors’ extension of colonial authority via command of language. Anna Johnston, “The Language of Colonial Violence: Lancelot Threlkeld, Humanitarian Narratives and the New South Wales Law Courts,” Law and History 72 (2017): 73–102; Helen Carey, “Launcelot Threlkeld, Biraban and the Colonial Bible in Australia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 2 (2010): 447–78. 29 Andrew Armitage, Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 18–19, 220–28, 235–37; Tatz, “Genocide in Australia,” 326–28, for a good example of the failure to distinguish between different phases of Protection policy. Although the Select Committee of 1837 is the starting point for Nettelbeck in Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, she is more measured on its relationship to later formulations of Protection policy, see 173–74, 185–93. See also Tracey Banivanua and Penny Edmonds, “Indigenous-Settler Relations,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 352–58, for the change in Protection policies. For an informed critique along these same lines, see Gillian Whitlock, “Active Remembrance: Testimony, Memoir and the Work of Reconciliation,” in Rethinking Settler Colonialism. History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, ed. Annie Coombes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 28–30. Contrast this with

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Liz Reed, “Rethinking William Thomas, ‘friend’ of the Aborigines,” Aborigine History 28 (2004): 87–99 for an analysis of Thomas as a narcissist who used the Aboriginals to self-fashion himself as a paternal dispenser of justice. 30 See Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 49, 114–16 for the change in protection policy over the century. Melissa Belanta, “ReThinking the 1890s,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 222–24. 31 Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors, 373–77. 32 The Assistant Protectors were Edward Parker, Charles Sievwright, James Dredge, William Thomas, and William Le Soeuf. 33 ML2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28 Letter from Thomas 12 December  1837; Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors, 431–33; Cannon, Who Killed the Kooris, 126–34; Lester and Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 133–35, who point out that he also may have had policy differences with the other Protectors, believing that conversion to Christianity must come before cultural change could be introduced; Dredge, A Plea on Behalf of the Aborigines. Le Soeuf turned out to be a failure, and he was dismissed during a cutback of government funds in 1842. 34 Ian D. Clark, ed., The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Philip Aboriginal Protectorate, Vol. I, 1 January 1839–30 September 1840 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), letter of 17 January 1840; Christie Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 91–92, 101–3, 108–10; Frances M. Thiele, “LaTrobe and the Bureaucrats: How the Best of Intentions Failed to Protect the Aboriginal People of Port Phillip,” 99, 102, 104–5, unpublished paper, 2017, Academia.edu., accessed October 2, 2019. 35 D. Clark, Journals of Robinson, vol. 5 (Ballarat, 2000), https://trove.nla.gov.au/­version/ 40898708, August  3, 1846; “Charles Wightman Sievwright,” Australian Dictionary of National Biography. For the Sievwright scandal, see Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, “Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Family in the Colonies: Protecting Aborigines in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Gender, Place and Culture 16 (February 2009): 63–75; Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, “Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th Century ­Australia And Aotearoa New Zealand,” New Zealand Geographer 64 (2008): 205–20. 36 Michael Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors 1838–1839 (Melbourne: Historical Records of Victoria, 1983), 428. 37 Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors. Yet in spite of all this, one of the dominant themes of Thomas’s records of this period is his insatiable curiosity about Aboriginal life. His interest in recording their culture and lives bespeaks a mind that was open to observing and receiving with something more than just an imperial eye. See Marguerita Stephens, “Infanticide at Port Phillip: Protector William Thomas and the witnessing of things unseen,” Aboriginal History 38 (2014): 109–30 for his openness in looking at the question of infanticide among the Kulin people. 38 Port Phillip Gazette, December 22, 1841, 3. 39 Boyce, 1835, 174. The sources of the Protectorate are full of these kinds of stories. For those mentioned, see Macfarlane, Public Finance, 305–16. The report from Sievwright is also interesting because it is so detailed and precise as to suggest a thorough examination. 40 Macfarlane, Public Finance, 258, 306–15; for Sievwright’s energy in bringing forward cases of violence, see Michael Christie, “The Language of Oppression: The Bolden Case, Victoria 1845,” in Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia, ed. Michael Walsh and Colin Yalop (Canberra: ANU Epress, 1993), 169; Orton, Journals 1840–41, 140, 143. 41 Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors, 575–78. 42 Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines, 172, 187, 196, 201, 212; Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors, 576; Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 505 and Extracts from Letters, 10. See Reed, “Re-Thinking William Thomas,” 94, who interprets it in a homo-erotic context. 43 Cannon, Aborigines and Protectors 1838–1839, 342–44; ML, CY 1119, Orton Papers, Journal, Vol. 1, 2, 1832–1841, May  24, 1838, 208; Ian D. Clarke, Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859 (Canberra: ANU Epress, 1995), 38–39; R.H.W. Reece, Aboriginals and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society

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in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974), 140–42. 44 Ian D. Clark, ed., The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Philip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume One: 1 January  1839–30 September  1840, entry for 21 April 1840; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 180, 193–94, 214. Christie, Aborigines in Victoria, 45, for a case where squatters won the right to remove local indigenes from their land even though their land rights had been subject to accommodating Aboriginal usage. Note this case was brought by Sievwright. 45 Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th. Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 35. The British government still retained formal control over Aboriginal policy in Western Australia until 1890, but this meant very little in terms of the nature of policy. See Anne Curthoys, “The Impossibility of Section 70: Aboriginal Protection, Amelioration and the Contradictions of Humanitarian Governance,” Studies in Western Australian History 30 (2016): 13–28. And for Queensland, see Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, 121–23, 128–31. 46 Belmousses, Assimilation and Empire, 100–101; Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 163–71, 189–90; Nettelbeck, “Protective Magistrates: Protective Governance and the Creation of Legal Order on the Colonial Frontier”; Hassell, Relations Between Aborigines and Settlers, 165–68. For the 1869 Act, see Leigh Boucher, “The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular ethnography and the governance of Aboriginal subjects,” in Settler Colonial Government in Nineteenth Century Victoria, ed. Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2015), 63–92. 47 For these points, see the important chapter in Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 114–72. Mitchell, In Good Faith, 7, 38. 48 Dussert and Lester, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 151, 153, 171; Mitchell, In Good Faith, 192. We should not be surprised that Aboriginal agency could be engaged in the Protectorate policy. Slaves had used Protection policies to find their voice and make demands; see Trevor Burnard, “A Voice for Slaves: The Office of the Fiscal in Berbice and the Beginning of Protection in the British Empire, 1819–1834” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 30–53. 49 Mitchell, In Good Faith, 173. 50 I shall focus here on the Poonindie and Raukkan reserves. For an account of the reserves in Victoria, where six were established, see Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians, (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1982), 71–86. For Hale see Hassell, Relations between Aborigines and Settlers in South Australia, 128. For a good case study of the way such reserves were used by Aboriginal people as resources to enhance their autonomy and agency, see Skye Kirchauff, “Narungga, the Townspeople and Julius Kahn: The Establishment And Origins of the Point Pearce Mission South Australia,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 37 (December 2013), 57–72. 51 The phrase relates to Poonindie, but applied also to Raukkan, Peggy Brock, Outback Ghettos: Aborigines, Institutionalisation, and Survival (New York: Routledge, 1993), 37. 52 Davidson, The Invisible State, 82–85; Brock, Outback Ghettos, 32; Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 65, 79, 110–11, 127–28. 53 Brock, Outback Ghettos, 38–39; Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 156–65. 54 See Claire McLisky (with Lynette Russell and Leigh Boucher), “Managing Mission Life, 1869–1880,” in Boucher and Russell, Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria, 118–37. 55 Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1999), 31–33; Samuel Furphy, “ ‘They Formed a Little Family, as It Were’: The Board for the Protection of Aborigines (1875–1883),” in Boucher and Russell, Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria, 105, 110. 56 Hassell, The Relations between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia 1836–1860, 172–73; Amanda Nettelbeck, “Creating the Aboriginal Vagrant: Protective Government and Indigenous Mobility in Colonial Australia,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 79–100; Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood, 166–67.

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57 Brock, Outback Ghettos, 50–55. On this general theme, see Nettelbeck, et al. Fragile Settlements, 155, 167–69. For the Kat River settlement, see Robert Ross, The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829–1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 58 Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 174–76, 145–46, 261–63, 265, 273. 59 Protection as a policy cannot be said to have had the same results in New Zealand. It was far less important as a policy of race relations. The degradation of Maori culture and the marginalization of the Maori within New Zealand society followed the disastrous wars of the 1860s and the massive dispossession that accompanied them. 60 Lester and Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, Chapter 4. See also Peggy Brock, Outback Ghettos, Chapter 10. Obviously, reserves created contradictions of their own and did not resolve questions of colonial power. They were not intended as places were an independent Aboriginal consciousness could develop. But they were one place where it could. See Chapter 9 for the role such spaces were to play in the history of Indigenous politics.

5 POLICIES Racial amalgamation in New Zealand

Introduction By the end of the 1840s the idea of a “humane policy” for the protection of Indigenous peoples of empire was coming under severe pressure both internally and externally.1 But humanitarian ambitions for colonial policy had yet to be exhausted. As Protection in the Australian colonies began to morph toward a governmentally driven policy of social control, New Zealand emerged as the showpiece for an empire of racial accommodation. Under the first governorship of Sir George Grey from 1846 to 1853, the possibility of an empire of racial reconciliation was rehabilitated from the decay it was then experiencing in Australia and South Africa, and this allowed the flame of liberal humanitarianism to keep flickering into the 1850s. Known as a policy of “racial amalgamation,” this chapter is the story of that effort. Racial amalgamation has a particular significance in the history of New Zealand. It is important to distinguish its changing meaning and context over time. Like conciliation and protection, it expressed both a policy and an aspiration that was consistent with social and political realities of imperial contact at that moment. In New Zealand, the power of the Maori demanded their accommodation by the imperial state. Ironically, it was Indigenous power that gave credence and life to the humanitarian policy of racial amalgamation. Thus, space was assigned for Maori autonomy and political presence. In this context, racial amalgamation was conceived by Sir George Grey as a social engineering experiment to be orchestrated by government action. By the later nineteenth century, however, the context and circumstances had changed. Maori defeats in the 1860s allowed their effective dispossession; racial amalgamation was appropriated by settler politics to express a policy of cultural and political submission, a loss of autonomy and forced assimilation. Like protection, racial amalgamation could be presented as a humanitarian ideal expressed through the racial politics of the “white man’s burden.”2

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Racial amalgamation was not a Victorian code word for racial integration or racial equality. It always expressed the imperial assumption that cultural progress could only occur through the interaction of superior and lesser cultures. Yet, equally, “nor was racial amalgamation a racist policy.” It was not a policy to be viewed simply as an instrument of imperial rule in the early period, nor as the prologue to a rhetorical cover for racial domination in the later part of the century. It was an ethnocentric policy that assumed the superiority of British institutions, which made room for an Indigenous presence. It was a policy that expressed the different vocabularies on race available to Victorians—a vision of Maori that assumed the possibilities of an imperial society of racial collaboration. It provided the basic logic for Grey’s first governorship as a policy designed to combine settlement with the recognition of Maori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi. Had this policy been sustained, the racial politics of New Zealand would have been very different. Viewed in this way, the policy chronicles the possibilities that were contained in this period of imperial history.3 This chapter will therefore address four themes. First, I will discuss the meaning of racial amalgamation as a serious policy option for New Zealand, which suggests how the impulse toward an empire of racial accommodation was more than just another liberal gloss on racial hierarchy and politics. Second, I will explore Grey’s policy of racial amalgamation in New Zealand. This involves portraying Grey as a more complex figure than the Machiavellian manipulator we are used to reading about.4 Third, I will illustrate the practical manifestations of Grey’s racial amalgamation policy in New Zealand, through the law and the land. And fourth, I will focus on how the footings for a policy of racial amalgamation were undermined by the land dispossession that accompanied the Maori wars of the 1860s.

Racial amalgamation in discourse and policy In 1841 Herman Merivale published his Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, a series of lectures he had delivered at Oxford University between 1839 and 1841. At the time, Merivale was professor of political economy at Oxford. But in 1848 he was to succeed the celebrated James Stephen as undersecretary at the Colonial Office, where he would preside over colonial policy until 1860. Upon his retirement, he issued a second edition of his book. Merivale’s treatise provides a clear statement of the shifting assumptions about empire in official and humanitarian culture between those two dates.5 In the first edition of his book where he discussed Indigenous peoples, racial amalgamation was placed at the center of colonial policy. Melville’s treatment was based on the assumption that the duty of colonial policy was to make reparation for the damage that had been done to the native inhabitants. He was alive to the threat that empire posed to the survival of native races, and he saw racial amalgamation as the only alternative to extermination.6 He saw it as a union “of natives with settlers in the same community . . . as fellow citizens, and, if possible connected by intermarriage.” Racial mixing, he argued, would produce stronger and

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superior races, not the degenerate races that were predicted by racial theorists. It is worth noting Merivale believed this needed to be “an immediate and an individual process . . . [that] should rather be accelerated than retarded . . . less evil is likely to be done by over haste than by delay”—a conception of imperial transformation mirroring the optimism that ran through early nineteenth-century conceptions of the new empire in the southern seas.7 Racial amalgamation was seldom spelled out in specific policy terms, and is best understood as a reflection of the unsettled nature of the imperial social formation of this moment. Its meaning was broad and unstable. It ranged from intermarried families, to different races living in close proximity, to entanglement in economic and social relationships, to some degree of absorption by indigenes into the dominant culture, and vice versa. Indeed, these elements were present in all the settler colonies. There was intermarriage in Australia, inter-racial mixing in South African missions, and, of course, the large metis groups in Canada.8 But it was in New Zealand where the social foundations for such a policy were most firmly established. A high degree of racial mixing, of both sexual and nonsexual nature, reflected a convenient conjuncture of humanitarian and imperial impulses. New Zealand was also well represented in the debate of the mid1830s around what policies and principles should govern the colonization process. Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his ideas for systematic colonization made the running in this debate, and, within that world, the most explicit proponent of racial amalgamation was Montague Hawtrey. Hawtrey was an Anglican pastor, a neighbor of Wakefield, and he published An Earnest Address to the New Zealand Colonists in 1840, in which he argued that separation of the races would mean permanent inequality which could only be overcome by racial amalgamation. New Zealand in 1840 already had the basis for this kind of social formation, which could only mean an extension of inter-racial marriages and a “new” mestizo race. Hawtrey was still advocating the same policy as late as 1860 when the conditions for this kind of structure were fast eroding and where the meaning of racial amalgamation was taking on very different forms.9 In New Zealand, however, the embrace of Western cultural, social, and economic modes by Maori made a strong case for a racially amalgamated society to be imagined. In the negotiations for land sales to the government, for example, Grey was frequently asked by Maori to send Pakeha settlers and to establish hospitals, churches, markets, and other institutions of urban development. This desire to append the appurtenances of Western civilization signified Maori power, more than their supplicant status. If Grey saw racial amalgamation as operating primarily from Pakeha to Maori, Maori saw Pakeha as sources of prosperity—a market for their products. Grey’s understanding of racial amalgamation may have assumed the eventual triumph of Western ideas and values. But that hardly guaranteed a white settler dominance and a society divided along racial lines.10 In New Zealand, then, racial amalgamation confirmed the social realities of the period. It was primarily expressed as a land strategy—and land was the heart of New Zealand politics. Systematic colonizers, for example, imagined that Maori

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settlements would be intermingled with colonists’ land and that there would be minimal separation between the two. Such an arrangement suited both sides. In the colonizers’ mind, it would facilitate the spread of civilization; in the mind of the Maori, it would give them access to the colonial market and allow the intermingling of Pakeha with Maori political and social structures to mutual benefit. Racial amalgamation was an answer to the question of how different races each of considerable power could find ways to establish bonds of mutuality and co-existence. It was imagined on the imperial side as policy of inclusion that would ultimately assimilate the Maori through intermarriage and cultural absorption. But where such an intermingling would end up could not be foreseen. A  policy of racial amalgamation that rested on the social realities of the 1840s was unlikely to evolve into the racial exclusions that came to characterize New Zealand by the 1890s. When Grey landed at Auckland in December 1845, the division between Maori and Pakeha was far less clearly defined than it had been seventy years earlier. Thus, commingling was a natural thing for Grey to encourage.11

Sir George Grey and racial amalgamation Racial amalgamation cannot be understood without making sense also of Sir George Grey. This is no mean task. Interpreting Grey has always been a challenge.12 The paucity of personal documentation that might have illuminated the complexities of his character—his personal papers were burnt on his death—combined with the way toward the end of his life he carefully constructed his own narrative for historians to follow present serious obstacles to our understanding.13 In the past, these challenges produced two broad approaches to interpreting Grey: he was treated as an example only of himself—an egocentric, manipulative, and untrustworthy liar whose policies reflected his own power interests; or he was treated as a purely political creature to be understood primarily using the official record.14 By contrast, more recent treatments of Grey have portrayed him as effectively fusing humanitarian concern with the establishment of the settler state.15 Alongside this, historians such as Susannah Grant, Bernard Cadogan, Donald Kerr, and Mark Francis have highlighted the importance of cultural agency in Grey’s policy actions. They have pointed to the fact that Grey was embedded in the culture of early Victorian evangelical seriousness and was tightly linked to a dense network of leading intellectuals. The virtue of this approach is that it allows us to go beyond one-dimensional explanations of Grey as a disordered personality or as an agent of Foucauldian power relations.16 There is much to be gained from all these approaches to Grey. I want here to highlight the context of his cultural milieu. As a policy of governance, racial amalgamation existed within a wider set of cultural predispositions, and the cultural dimensions of Grey’s actions deserve to be given full weight in understanding his policies. It is all too easy to fall into simplified unilinear interpretations, which reduce Grey’s actions to a caricature that fails to explain key aspects of his career.17 And before I enter into a discussion of Grey’s intellectual milieu, I want to recount

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an incident that I believe counters this view of Grey as a manipulative confabulator. It is an incident that also reveals the social reality that underlay the viability of a policy of racial amalgamation. Grey wrote persuasively elegant dispatches, which impressed the London authorities. They were the basis of his strong reputation in those quarters. A long dispatch to the Colonial Office in February 1847, for example, explained his Maori policy in great detail and recorded signs of progress toward racial amalgamation. He reported savings banks established for Maori, four hospitals in the colony that served all races, Maori use of the courts to resolve civil cases, and Maori employment on road building and other projects intended to introduce Western methods of production and tool usage. Like many such reports, this was received with cries of delight in the Colonial Office. Gladstone, the colonial secretary, sent the happy news to the Queen. A similar report to Earl Grey in early 1852 recounted a list of achievements around his policy of racial amalgamation, which included planned communities in which each race lived in close proximity, joint sporting events (documented by newspaper reports that he attached), school books that were used in Maori schools, and a description of the joint-race hospital at Wellington he sponsored where over the past year over 400 Maori had been treated.18 It would be easy to treat such optimistic accounting skeptically, as evidence of Grey’s skill in presenting the Colonial Office with the best possible gloss on his policy. In fact, these reports were true. Indeed, around the time he wrote the dispatch that so impressed Gladstone an independent observer provided affirmation that his policy efforts were showing the kind of results he claimed. The Reverend John Morgan wrote a memorandum in December 1849 titled “The present spiritual state of the natives, their advancement in civilization and plans for their future improvement.” This document suggests that Grey was not dissembling to the Colonial Office. He was reflecting what was seen to be the case. Morgan wrote from the village of Rangiawhea that Grey had recently visited where he had observed “the mill that was working at that time and expressed himself much pleased with the progress of the natives.” Over 300 pounds of flour had been produced from the mill, and Grey accepted two bags for the Queen, which he forwarded to London. He presented them with five horses and a plow, and since then, Morgan reported, “each little tribe are now endeavoring to procure a plough and a pair of horses and they expect next year to have at least ten ploughs at work.”19 Here was evidence of racial amalgamation before Grey’s very eyes. It conformed to what his cultural world encouraged him to look for and to see: evidence of a universal humanity that assumed a common potential among all human beings, and a world governed by divine providence, whose work could be seen even in the most material sectors of human endeavor. Grey’s worldview was well within the evangelical compass. The key intellectual influence on Grey was Richard Whately, an Anglican divine well known for his commitment to toleration and liberal social thought. It was through Whately that he entered into contact with leading thinkers such as Richard Owen and Nassau Senior and later with people as diverse and varied as Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage. These were the basis of his wide,

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eclectic intellectual interests and were part of an intellectual network that stayed with Grey all his life. Whately was archbishop of Dublin, and it was through him that Grey encountered Irish emancipationists during the time he was stationed in Ireland as a young officer in the early 1830s. He is unlikely to have imbibed the nectar of imperial rule from those contacts. More likely what he did pick up from such encounters were ideas about the divine ordering of history and the world and the need for social action. Obviously, he would have a view of history of proceeding through stages. This was a commonplace. But at the heart of this idea of historical change was the unvarying character of human nature and the idea of cultural forces as the main drivers of history. Culture operated on a human nature that was not shaped by race. His lifelong interest in ethnographic research reflected his belief that understanding the culture of Indigenous peoples would identify the keys to unlocking the obstacles their cultures presented to “progress.”20 In the context of his time, Grey was a cultural relativist. He combined monogenesism with a Christian view of stadial development. From Richard Whately— and this was key—he learned a broad tolerance of different belief systems; Whately was renowned for his tolerance of Roman Catholics and Jews in contrast to most other evangelical Christians and for a belief that human nature was the same whatever the color of the skin that covered it.21 It was a common trope for humanitarians to observe Indigenous customs and habits with reference to those they identified from the British past. Doing so reassured them of human universality, and comfortingly it enabled them to identify Indigenous customs that resembled those of early Britons. This was the gaze that Grey brought to his perceptions of Indigenous peoples. It was rooted in a sense of history that frequently referred to parallels with the British past, but which also understood the specificity of particular cultural histories. This was the point of Grey’s ethnographic studies. Of course, we can see them as techniques of imperial dominance. But it is also important to recognize that they were more than that. As a way of understanding language and metaphor, they created a common ground for conciliatory communication. And this expressed a different version of governance than simple control.22 Finally, Grey’s close association with Maori, his learning their language, and his ethnographic work in sponsoring the collection and recording of their histories and legends were part of a sophisticated and inclusive understanding of the impact of the imperial presence on Maori culture. In an address to the Ethnological Society at the end of the 1860s, Grey talked about the nature of Maori resistance to the Western influences introduced by the British presence. (This was when the final phase of the Maori wars was sputtering to their end, when the forces working for mutuality were being overshadowed by those of racial division.) This issue was a common pre-occupation of missionaries and others who were being forced to reevaluate their earlier optimism that Christianity was the key stimulus in awakening the common humanity in Aboriginal peoples. Increasingly, the issue of Indigenous resistance was framed in terms of a characterological difference: Indigenous peoples’ souls were not, after all, like ours but were closed and dark. Yet it is evident that Grey had not succumbed to this way of thinking about race. Indeed, in his address,

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Grey explained the impact of Western influences on Maori society in a neutral and distanced way. He spoke of this clash of cultures more as a twentieth-century sociologist might. He framed this conflict as the natural response of the traditional against the modern, a phenomenon that was common to all societies, and revealed the natural “revolt against innovations [that] has almost invariably taken place under circumstances such I have above stated.” He then went on to specifically deny that it reflected racial difference, or different racial capacities. Indeed, “too often such a revolt, instead of being attributed to its natural causes, has been ascribed to an absolute incapacity for civilization in the barbarous race.”23 If we put all this together with his strongly developed socio-religious creed that accepted that humankind was not divided by essential racial difference, it makes sense to see Grey harboring a vision of an empire of racial amalgamation. Indeed, when he looked at Maori through the stadial view of history and in the context of his assumptions about a universal humanity, he would have seen them as perfect candidates for racial amalgamation. The Maori were not nomads or hunters. They were agriculturalists and horticulturalists, and many were actual or incipient capitalists. Accordingly, racial amalgamation could be seen as an expression of natural law, which, derived from providence, explained and described the world. He would also have seen it as justified by the stage of cultural civilization the Maori had achieved. The importance of this is not to justify such views but to make the point that it reflected a vision for the future that was not simply the ideas-in-waiting of the imperial order of the twentieth century.24 As Grey explained to the Colonial Office in 1849, his goal for racial amalgamation policy was that “they [Maori] might have a prospect of standing on terms of equality with the European race.” Like all the “humane policies” of this period, Grey’s racial amalgamation schemes implied an activist, social engineering state. What was distinctive about Grey’s projection of the humanitarian agenda, however, was the scope of its activism. To fully implement the kind of racial amalgamation policy that Grey wanted for New Zealand would have involved a degree of control and direction that went far beyond the capacities of the Liberal state of mid-­nineteenth-century Britain. This side of Grey’s governing philosophy is captured in the famous Memo of June 1840 that captured the attention of the Colonial Office and was circulated among the other colonial governors of Britain’s southern empire.25 Grey’s Memorandum of 1840 was important for a variety of reasons. It was a contribution to the debate on how policies toward Indigenous peoples should be framed. Specifically, it was an early warning that the missionary-led humanitarian projects were failing to fulfill their promise to move the Aboriginal people along the path of cultural progress. Grey’s answer to that failure was to propose a statedriven activism. He wanted British law to be rigorously used to push Aboriginal culture into the mainstream of progress. He wanted a more active set of measures to engage them with liberal political economy. Road-building schemes and apprenticeship programs would transmit artisan skills to a new Aboriginal working class. He was insistent that white settlers be involved in this project as a way of building ties of mutual interaction between the races. It was a program that did

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not assume the consignment of the Aboriginal people to a permanent subordinate status but imagined the social mobility that would allow them to compete with and cooperate with the white settlers. In Grey’s lexicon, social contact between whites and indigenes was crucial. In his journals, he had recorded the case of Miago who was “civilized” when he was among whites who treated him properly but who reverted to his native state when he was closed out of white society. Grey ascribed this as demonstrating the importance of environment as a conditioning factor of social progress—a theme he returned to in his 1869 address to the Ethnological Society. As Susannah Grant has pointed out, the Memorandum was based on the assumption of human unity and perfectability: “the whole report,” she writes, “was premised on an implied principle of respect . . . a deep regard for Aboriginals as fellow humans and an expectation that all individuals should be treated with consideration.” The point of apprenticeship systems, for example, was that they would mitigate against the Aboriginal people being relegated to “the lowest order of manual labour.” Thus, he proposed that any indigene who had worked for three years with a white settler and had presumably been drawn into the orbit of Western civilization should be accorded a grant of land by the government and a sum of money to stock his land holding. Similarly, any Aboriginal man who chose to marry one wife and registered the birth of their children should also be monetarily rewarded.26 Grey’s 1840 memo was a utopian document, whose social engineering implications placed a heavy burden on the limited capacities of the colonial state, and it was hardly surprising that the policy of racial amalgamation in the final analysis came down to a series of individual and short-lived initiatives. Only in New Zealand under Grey is it possible to speak of racial amalgamation as a continuing policy theme. Through legislation or gubernatorial initiative, Grey planted seeds designed to germinate racial conciliation and amalgamation. One of his early acts in New Zealand, for example, was to pass ordinances that recognized cross-race marriages and imposing penalties on Europeans who abandoned their mixed-race children. And, as he had done in South Australia, but on a much larger scale, he actively promoted various educational institutions to integrate Indigenous children, and he sponsored hospitals, such as the one in Wellington run by Dr. Fitzgerald, that operated on a non-racial basis. (Even today the big hospital in King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape, which Fitzgerald also ran, bears Grey’s name.) During the Northern War in New Zealand, Grey formed a mixed-race military corps, on the model of the Cape Mounted Corps, but with equal pay and equal opportunity for promotion. And, in the words of Damen Salesa “pretty soon Grey had a racially amalgamated army.” He attempted to create communities where white and Maori would live in close proximity and where increased contact and intimacy would foster harmonious relations.27 These efforts were largely piecemeal. The aspirations of racial amalgamation, like the aspiration of humanitarian policy generally during this period, far outran the available resources available for their implementation by the colonial state. But there were two major policy areas where the idea of racial amalgamation and the

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politics of its implementation may be examined a little more closely, and those were the spheres of the law and land policy.

Racial amalgamation and the law Grey’s 1840 memo focused largely on the law as an instrument to impose British order on new settler colonies and as a means to integrate the Indigenous peoples into the new order. I will discuss the wider role of the law in this period of the empire’s history in the next chapter. My focus here is on Grey’s legal policies in New Zealand as a manifestation of racial amalgamation in practice. The legal bodies that Grey created fell on fertile and receptive ground. For Maori British law was one of the advantages of their engagement with Pakeha. Grey tailored these institutions to engage and involve the Maori, and provide a space for the imperial presence rather than simply transposing British procedures and practices onto the new colony of New Zealand.28 When Grey arrived in New Zealand at the end of 1845, government policy for Maori reflected the views of George Clarke and Governor Fitzroy that the best way to protect the Maori was to keep them as separate as possible from settlers. Separation implied preserving Maori traditional law. Fitzroy had passed a Native Exemption Ordinance in 1844, which established a virtually separate legal system for Maori. This policy of separation was precisely the reverse of what Grey had in mind, and one of his first acts as governor was to abolish the Protectorate Department and set about putting his own imprint on the legal structures of the colony. Thus, in late 1846 he issued the Resident Magistrates Courts Ordinance to replace Native Exemption Ordinance.29 On the face of it, Grey’s Ordinance reflected a move away from a policy of separation toward the assimilationist policy he had expressed in his memo of 1840. It established a court system presided over by resident magistrates, assisted where necessary by native assessors, with summary jurisdiction for civil and minor criminal complaints. Both Pakeha and Maori were subject to its jurisdiction. But, in fact, Grey’s policy retained many of the provisions of Fitzroy’s Ordinance. Indeed, in some respects, Grey’s courts allowed more latitude for Maori action. Grey provided an arbitration system that was essentially controlled by Maori assessors. As Shaunnagh Dorsett has pointed out “the office of the Native Assessor was one of the most important mechanisms through which Maori were eventually enfolded into the British legal system.” The difference between the two ordinances lay in the way in which the same kinds of policies—such as substituting fines for imprisonment in the case of theft—were put to different purposes. Fitzroy’s Ordinance had entrenched a specifically legal sphere for the Maori. Grey’s Ordinance provided a space where both Pakeha and Maori could work within the same jurisdiction and court system. It was the functional statement of Grey’s belief in the law as the fundamental agency to bring the races into intimate contact and as the place where the civilizing influence of British institutions could be modelled. It was intended to speed up racial amalgamation and the concomitant expansion of the civilizing process. Following hard on the heels of this Ordinance, and to the distress

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of many settler voices, Grey established a mixed-race constabulary—just as he had established mixed-race military units—which, over the next few years, worked closely with the courts before it succumbed to the changing power structures of the 1850s when Maori were progressively pushed out.30 The potential of Grey’s vision of racial amalgamation was suggested by the immediate success of the Resident Magistrates Courts. They were designed to provide summary judgments for both civil and minor criminal offences, and they allowed a relatively quick and cheap way of settling disputes between and within the Maori and Pakeha communities. Grey wanted their working to be “so simple . . . as for the most part to render the employment of professional men unnecessary and that every measures were taken to discourage their employment in that Court.” And they were structured so as to use Maori counsel in their proceedings.31 They were a way of adapting English law to the circumstances of the mixed-race society that was New Zealand. In a sense this was hardly surprising. The British were always conscious of the need to accommodate their law to Maori realities. Even within the settler community, there was support for adapting English legal practice to Maori preferences. And Maori had begun to use settler courts from the moment the ink was dry on the Treaty of Waitangi. Grey’s courts expanded and institutionalized this practice. They increased the involvement of Maori with British courts through the cheap and easy access for the adjudication of civil debt cases which previously had been available only through an expensive and complicated Court of Requests.32 It was not Grey’s intention to find a place in this system for Maori law. Grey’s ultimate expectation was that these new courts would make traditional Maori law, tikanga, redundant. At the same time, a space was created for Maori empowerment. In cases confined to Maori litigants, the magistrate was obliged to work with Maori assessors without whose consent no judgment could be made. In effect, therefore, tikanga was entered into the process. Indeed, one of Grey’s intentions was that the courts would provide a means for adjudicating commercial disputes. Since the early 1800s, the involvement of Maori in commercial trading activity had grown tremendously. But until the Resident Magistrates’ Courts, they had no means of redress in debt complaints against Europeans. The policy of separate legal jurisdictions did not address this issue. A closer economic integration between Maori and Pakeha was precisely the kind of racial amalgamation that Grey wanted to encourage. In the process, he rightly saw that Maori would be drawn increasingly into taking “an active part in the administration of the laws of their country.”33 Too much should not be claimed for these courts. The intent was always that history would end with the dominance of British law. But intent and application are different things. Their day-to-day function was to create another channel of conciliation, to serve as spaces for arbitration and translation between the races in the legal sphere. They were a key site of legal engagement both between and within the two communities themselves. Complaints were laid against settlers by Maoris. The Maori constabulary Grey had created hauled settlers up before the courts for such European offenses like vagrancy, or drunkenness. And Maori were

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more than willing to take up the opportunity the courts provided. This was especially true in Wanganui where by the early 1850s, they made up about 70 percent of the complainants. At least some of those cases involved Maori turning to British courts for issues, such as adultery, that they would typically have used their own customs to resolve. It is likely, then, that the most radical effect of the Resident Magistrates’ Courts was to instill the practice of using imperial law to settle Maori inter se disputes. It was at this local level that the legal integration of the Maori occurred. It was here that most cases involving Maori were resolved. Most of the cases Maori brought involved the same kind of issues that Pakeha used the courts for. The significance of this local level of justice has been easy for historians to miss. Only a few of their cases made it into the superior courts. But when Grey wanted to report to the Colonial Office the success of his racial amalgamation policies in 1851, he used them as a prime exhibit. Current research suggests that he was not exaggerating and that he had good reason to be optimistic about how the social ordering of race was proceeding in this colony.34 This hardly means that they worked smoothly and without tension. They were most effective in those parts of the North Island where advanced economic development had fostered close contact between settlers and Maori. There was the inevitable variation in the quality of the magistrates. Some leaned more toward Maori than others. Settlers increasingly complained about the weakness of the system in constraining Maori aggressiveness. But this reflected the increasingly tense political situation from the mid-1850s. And it may also have reflected settler reluctance to accept the idea of racial equality before the law. Still, Alan Ward’s judgment is that they were a success and by the end of Grey’s governorship contained “signs that it could be rapidly extended.” They continued to exist and play an important mediating role between Maori and Pakeha in the legal system for the rest of the century. But the context in which they existed changed, and after the wars of the 1860s, they were no longer part of a utopian vision that imperial society would usher in a society of racial conciliation and harmony. One consequence of those wars was a massive confiscation of land from the supporters of the King movement and a new regime of legal land title. It is to the important question of the land that we must turn now.35

Land and dispossession Land policy was at the center of Indigenous dispossession everywhere. Control of land, title, and how land was disposed were critical to the success of empire. But there was no blueprint for the creation of imperial dominance over land markets. Land policy was always entangled with local histories, local circumstances, and the contingencies of particular sites of imperial contact. The land issue in New Zealand illustrates how the process and history of dispossession differed between the settler colonies. Indeed, the two colonies that are the focus of this study provide particularly stark examples of that. In Australia, Aboriginal land was essentially grabbed by marauding groups of pastoral settlers. In New Zealand, the law of contract was

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a key instrument of its transfer; conquest was almost an afterthought. Neither was it a process in which a hegemon of empire presented itself to Indigenous culture. One key variable was the balance of power between the Indigenous forces and those of the settler and imperial presence. There was inherent tensions between the imperial authorities and the settler interest. Indeed, the preferred policy of the imperial center was to find some way of creating a co-existence between settler and Indigenous land tenures.36 New Zealand also illustrates how the process of dispossession is ambiguous and contingent. Violence is always a large part of the story of dispossession. But in the case of New Zealand dispossession was not only done to the Maori; it was also done with them. The Maori were eager to enter into the individual land market and sell or transfer in some land to British settlers. They “were themselves prime movers in many land transactions” and often “pressed for the removal of restrictions on title so that they could sell their land.” At the same time, an equally strong impulse was the protection of their ultimate rights to “exercise collective control over land alienation.”37 If the policy of racial amalgamation anticipated that traditional land tenure in New Zealand would be undermined, it did not aim to displace the Maori from their land. The purpose of the policy was rather to mediate their willingness to share the land with the growing band of settlers. But this purpose changed in two ways in the 1860s. The Wars of the 1860s provided the opportunity for settlers to decisively establish their predominance through large-scale land confiscations from Maori. And, secondly, a concomitant shift in government policy from pre-emption to a policy that made individuation of title the overriding priority with the clear intention of eroding the collective basis of Maori customary land law and land usage. But until the 1860s, it was not clear that individuation would displace traditional Maori land tenures. It was true that by 1860 large swathes of land had been alienated. But the complexities of Maori title ensured that alienation could be achieved only through negotiation. Customary Maori land rights thus retained their place in land tenures. The tendency of policy was to enhance the presence of individual ownership over collective responsibility, but “this aspiration would be discomforted and contested by the concrete practices of negotiability.” Many of the conflicts over land policy erupted because of intra-Maori disputes over who had the right to sell land. Certainly, Grey and his principle land agent Donald Maclean took advantage of the tensions within Maori iwi where they could. At base, though, the end result of policy in this period pointed toward a mixed settler-Maori ownership pattern. Had this continued, it is not at all clear that New Zealand would have qualified as a twentieth-century “settler colony.” After the 1860s, however, the supremacy of individuation was established and the idea of racial amalgamation in the sense that Sir George Grey and others had conceived of it was no longer feasible. It is only then that we may really speak of the imperial dispossession of the Maori.38 The key to imperial dispossession lay in the displacement of customary land tenure rights in favor of individual land tenure. This was a familiar problem for the British. They knew well that land rights were not limited solely to the question of

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ownership. Struggles over customary rights and tenures—access to common land, for example—were central preoccupations of British social history in the period. And the history of common lands also pointed in the opposite direction. This was also the moment when individual property rights in Britain were establishing their supremacy in the common law. Thus, as James Boyce has pointed out, it was not a baseless hypocrisy that led humanitarians to imagine that settler land use could be combined with the protection of Indigenous access to land. For policy makers and those of a “humanitarian” predisposition “the goal of co-existence was not just convenient evangelical fantasy but quite consistent with a view of the world rooted in centuries of practical experience.” Of course, this did not necessarily accord with the instincts of settlers.39 The place of land, therefore, in the British imagination should not be ignored. More particularly, for our purposes, it is important to appreciate the place of land in the social politics of Sir George Grey. At the core of his political belief was the priority nineteenth-century Liberalism gave to land ownership. His vision of society had its roots in the seventeenth-century political thinker James Harrington, whose Oceana imagined a society of small landed proprietors with a gentry but no aristocratic monopoly on land. This was a vision that was part of the ideology of domestic liberalism and one that he shared with his liberal Anglican friends and with the Wakefield group. Land policy had lasting significance for Grey. In his later career as a colonial politician in New Zealand, he opposed what he saw as the uncontrolled growth of land landownership after 1860s in New Zealand, confiding to his diary in the late 1870s that “if a single man had committed any one of the acts for the acquisition of large blocks of public land which have been perpetrated here, they would have been branded with the name of robbers” but these have attained “in the public eye the character of natural and lawful acts.” One of the measures he passed as prime minister was a land tax designed to capture the unearned benefit large landowners received from the increases in land value. He was a supporter of the famed land reformer Henry George, with whom he corresponded in the 1890s and who he tried to entice to New Zealand for a lecture tour.40 It is easy to understand why land was at the basis of Grey’s political vision. In his youth the problems associated with land—not industry—had provided the central challenges of national politics. He came of age in Bodiam a village in rural Sussex just after the Napoleonic Wars. Issues of rural poverty and access to land were central to political and social discourse of that era. An agricultural luddite movement (“Captain Swing”) stalked the countryside around Sussex at the very time that Grey was in Ireland enforcing tenant evictions. Ireland itself provided him a lesson in the ambiguities of colonial governance. His unit was charged with tenant evictions, which distressed him sufficiently to pen a letter of protest despite the objections of his commanding officer. At Cork he had listened to speeches by Daniel O’Connell, the “Great Emancipator.” Ireland and rural Sussex, then, showed him the importance of a smallholder democracy of freeholders not beholden to large landowners. Grey’s land policy in New Zealand rested upon these foundations. But it was also determined by the shadow of Waitangi and the power of the Maori.41

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Grey likely believed that in racial amalgamation he had found a policy that would square the eternal circle of the imperial enterprise. It was a strategy that could combine settlement and acknowledge Maori land rights. Grey’s conception of the ideal colonial society was one of Maori and Pakeha small landholders living in close economic and social proximity—a kind of multi-racial small holder democracy. And for the first twenty years or so of settlement, the practical effects of land policy in New Zealand were to lay the basis for a racially amalgamated society. Waitangi had recognized Maori land rights, recognition of Maori title remained official government policy, and there was no legal or political assault on Maori land ownership. Land policy was often administered hastily, and with governmental sharp practice. But under Grey government policy denied both settlers and Maori a free market in land and controlled the sale and occupation of land with the aim of securing a racially balanced society. Grey was playing his own game here, navigating between settler and Maori priorities. He was neither a pro-settler nor a pro-Maori governor. He was constructing his own vision of a colonial society. He aimed to free up as much land as possible for settlement at the cheapest price in order to get ahead of settlement and thus facilitate the peaceful integration of Maori and settlers. To this end his policy rested on the doctrine of pre-emption, meaning the assertion of the Crown’s right to determine all title.42

The period of pre-emption: before c. 186343 Under the Waitangi treaty the British had promised to respect Maori land customs. This remained a guiding theme of British policy in this period. But definitions of ownership were not simple; they were enmeshed with the genealogies, conquest rights, and usage rights assumed by previous generations. Their authority rested upon oral tradition. Contemporary and historical rights, therefore, shaded into each other and were themselves the subject of negotiation. In addition, the infrastructure hardly existed to complete the proper surveys. Early land commissions that the colonial government established to determine land title, such as that of William Spain in the early 1840s, were evidence of the commitment of the government to maintaining Maori land rights and to ensuring that land claims were properly adjudicated. But they were prolonged exercises with mixed results. The Crown’s desire to turn these rights into proprietary titles, while accepted by many Maori, was also something likely to meet with resistance and dissatisfaction.44 Until Grey established his firm grip, imperial intellectual and conceptual assumptions about Maori land rights were also shot through with ambiguity. This was illustrated by the question of waste lands. In Western thinking, waste lands would naturally be available for settlement because they were unoccupied and unused. But the Maori had merely ceded sovereignty to Britain under Waitangi. They had not given up their ownership of the land. Some among the British accepted the Maori position. The Church Missionary Society were on this side. Under Governor Fitzroy, settlers were warned that the government had pledged to uphold Maori rights “as owners of the soil” and that Waitangi “guaranteed the full

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exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands.” Others, like Sir George Gipps, the governor of New South Wales and formal superior to New Zealand Governors until the Grey era, tied sovereignty and land use. This was also the position of the Wakefield lobby and the New Zealand Company, who argued any land that was uncultivated was waste land and therefore available for settlers.45 In the mid-1840s this also became the formal position of the Colonial Office, contradicting the previous policy of recognizing Maori rights. The principle was enshrined in the new constitution that was sent to Grey in 1847. It was a constitution that had come out of a Select Committee of 1844, dominated by New Zealand Company informants and represented an early attempt to create a settler state. It proposed to undermine the respect for Maori land rights and apply the notion that “waste” land could not be regarded as under Indigenous ownership. Earl Grey, the colonial secretary, rehearsed the view that although the Maori were not traditional hunter-gatherer people, they still did not use the entirety of the land and that it was therefore impossible to deny that “civilized” men had the right to step in and take possession of that land. Governor Grey was instructed to adhere as firmly as possible to this principle and to treat all such land as belonging to the Crown. It is to Grey’s credit that he did not take this instruction seriously.46 Grey’s response demonstrated both an understanding and respect for the different basis of Indigenous usage rights. His response is worth quoting in full since it seems to me to capture the essence of his land policy regarding the Maori. I should also observe that the position I  understand to be adopted by the New Zealand Company’s Agent, that if actual tracts of land are not in actual possession and cultivation by the natives, that we have, therefore, a right to take possession of them, appears to me to require one important limitation. The natives do not support themselves solely by cultivation, but from fernroot,—from fishing,—from eel ponds,—from taking ducks,—from hunting wild pigs, for which they require extensive runs, and by such like pursuits. To deprive them of their wild lands, and to limit them to lands for the purpose of cultivation, is in fact, to cut off from them some of their most important means of subsistence, and they cannot be readily and abruptly forced into becoming a solely agricultural people.47 ‍Grey’s reaction to his instructions in 1846 have been rightly characterized by Vincent O’Malley as “brilliant.” He argued that recognizing Maori land rights was quite compatible with colonization if they were mediated by the use of preemption. The Crown could acquire large blocks of land at cheap prices to prepare for colonists to arrive. The Maori would be willing to sell cheaply in anticipation of the profits they could gain as their markets increased with the new settlers. And if this was combined with a development program such as hospitals, roads, and the like, the basis would be laid for a new racially harmonious society.48 Pre-emption was a policy that pointed in different directions. When George Grey abolished the Protectorate Department in early 1846 and brought land policy

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directly under his control, he used pre-emption to speed and facilitate Crown purchase of land. It was a policy that could be justified as an interest of both Maori and settlers because it brought order to the disorder that was a persistent aspect of land transactions in New Zealand.49 Grey made much of this, particularly the way Maori were now protected from unscrupulous land dealings. Pre-emption clearly gave the advantage to the Crown in its dealings with the Maori. There was only one buyer of land, and Maori who wanted to use their land to raise capital could not maximize their advantage by competitive bidding. It also meant that the actual process of inquiry and determination of title was important to the character of the policy. The social order that was implicit in pre-emption, however, was closer to Grey’s notion of racial amalgamation than it was to the classic image of a colony that was ruled by settler law and settler politics.50 There is an argument that Grey cleverly used pre-emption as a way to undermine the Maori, and at the same time using it to convince the Colonial Office that he was being faithful to their policy line. This is a view of Grey that fits very well with the common notion of a Machiavellian manipulator, pulling the wool over Colonial Office eyes in the interests of being a “settler’s governor.” But detailed examination of the particular cases of land purchase under the Grey regime illustrates that it is a view that fails to give enough weight to the fact that Grey did not have a free hand in land dealings. He operated within constraints, the most important of which was Maori power—which had been brought home to him from the moment that he assumed the governorship as he stepped right into a war widely believed to have been caused by previous missteps over land.51 The British quickly learned that the Maori were not naive negotiators. Very shortly after 1840, it was realized that the British had bitten off more than they might be able to chew. The power Maori could deploy had not been properly appreciated in London, nor had the complexities of Maori land tenures. Until the investigations of land title by the various Land Commissions of the 1840s, the British had no clear idea of the difficulties they would face in dealing with Maori property rights. Both settlers and government were quickly made aware, however, and the delegation of Maori affairs to the Clarke’s Protectorate Department had been a rational response to this reality. The negotiation of land deals through the Protectorate Department provided plenty of evidence of the complexities of local Maori land politics. From the very beginning, then, land negotiations were always likely to be delicate maneuvers through labyrinthine networks of Maori history and politics.52 Grey was unlikely to be intimidated by Maori power, or their ability to stymie land negotiations if they were united. But he was certainly aware of it and moved very carefully when the situation required. Maori resistance caused him to back off pursuing land purchases where he judged resistance too powerful to risk provoking. By the same token, Grey was not above using sharp practices when it suited his purpose and when he thought he could press his advantage. But such tactics hardly discounted his willingness to deal with Maori and to respect their potential military power. This continued to be the case well after the military threat of 1846

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had ended, as is illustrated by a purchase negotiation that Lieutenant Governor Eyre supervised in Wellington in 1850.53 This case involved payments that the New Zealand Company had defaulted on for Maori land it had purchased. Eyre refused to step in and endorse the bill, waiting for the issue to be resolved in London. Grey rebuked him for being so rigid about a relatively small amount of money. He pointed out to Eyre that the issue was not the money—a trifling £500—which the Provincial Government could have absorbed. Rather, the issue was the fact that the delay involved in referring the issue to London was likely to annoy the Maori even more than the company’s original default. Eyre’s action threatened to damage the “relations existing between the Government and the Natives, and the probable interruption of that feeling of confidence in any act of the Executive Government which now so happily exists.” Grey pointed out that future success of the colony depended on maintaining “our good faith untarnished by the most scrupulous observance of our engagements to the natives.” As Mark Hickford has pointed out, pre-emption may have been central to Grey’s policy but “his use of aboriginal tenure in . . . negotiations with Maori . . . was even more crucial.” And indeed, the power of pre-emption was qualified by the Maori control of land rights.54 In the period of pre-emption, then, Maori participation in land policy was a key factor in the process. This participation did not follow one political line. Within Maori society there existed an openness to dealing with the government on land purchase, a resistance or suspicion of the government, and a concern to protect their customary rights and interests whatever the outcome of the process. This complex balance was always in evidence. Resistance to land sales was not just a feature of the Kingitanga Movement from the later 1850s. It was present from the beginning. Land sales could be divisive for the Maori. But equally, they often took the lead especially in local transactions. There was an inherent tension in Maori society on the issue. There were many individual Maori, or sub-groups of iwi who were willing to sell. They often “pressed for the removal of restrictions on title so that they could sell their land.”55 This tendency within Maori society spoke to the entrepreneurial side of their culture. The prime driver leading Maori to sell was economic calculation. There was a strong desire within Maori culture to engage with modernity. In the Hawke’s Bay area, the Maori believed that “new trends [the settlers and changes in land usages related to commercial interaction] were irreversible, and that [they] . . . should move with the times and locate an organized European settlement among them.” They wanted to “leave behind or substantially curtail the traditional constraints of kinship and common property rights and develop land for themselves and their specific families or communities.” It was this, it should be noted, that led them to support Grey’s notions of racial amalgamation. Often, for example, they would allow settlers to occupy land before all the details of title and payment had been sorted out. They wanted to engage settlers for economic reasons particularly all the time that their superior local power could keep the settlers in a cooperative mood.56

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But this openness was directed toward enhancing lifestyle as well as changing it. Maori were also interested in preserving forests, rivers, and the like for traditional uses. The predisposition toward modernity was in tension with the collective sense of responsibility and culture that tended to be evoked when the issue of land was considered at the political level. This tension was at its lowest during the Grey era, due in part to Grey’s own handling of the land issue. Nevertheless, engaging with modernity was always going to be risky. The line between the sale of land and the surrender of control over its usage was not always clear. And, during this early period, the way land policy worked could serve to reinforce this confusion. When chiefs sold land, they often continued to be involved in its usage and administration as assessors, for example. “The line between ‘selling’ in the European sense and both between Maori and Pakeha and within Maori bringing in some Pakeha friends and allies in the Maori sense was still a blurry one.”57 War and conflict erupted when these tensions became unbalanced, as when Governor Fitzroy suspended pre-emption in 1844. Grey restored stability by reasserting pre-emption. Similarly, the balance of forces was disrupted from the mid1850s. Assertions of Maori land rights and control over land spilled over into the growing political unrest that would result in the Kingitanga Movement. The backdrop to this was the rapid increase in the numbers of settlers, which tilted demography against the Maori, and accentuated divisions within the Maori between those who wanted to sell and those who did not. This tension was on full display around the Waitara purchase in 1860 when the contention was over which Maori had the right to alienate the land. The individual who wanted to sell was opposed by the chief who claimed that right. The government agents ruled in favor of the individual over the chief; Governor Gore Browne chose to make it an issue of Crown sovereignty and lit the fatal spark for war.58 Throughout his administration Grey was anxious to reassure the Colonial Office that his policy produced results. And, indeed, he was not wrong. He secured all of South Island for the Crown, and about 20 percent of the North Island. Studies of the individual purchase arrangements reveal, of course, that they seldom fit the neat descriptions that he sent to London. The nature of Maori land rights, and Grey’s own impatience with their “inchoate” nature, led him to encourage blanket purchases across vast areas. But there was no one approach. There were times when he used strong arm tactics, and others when he took advantage of Maori divisions. Equally, he was willing to allow his agents such as Edward Mantell to make promises that “[I found] of great use in my endeavours to break down their strong and most justifiable opposition to my first commission and in facilitating the acquisition of my later purchases.” Mantell, it should be noted, never doubted Grey’s sincerity and remarked on his willingness to accommodate the Maori. By their very nature, however, land negotiations were often protracted and driven by contingent circumstances as by any master plan. Even the competence of individual land agents and surveyors played a role as in the case of the celebrated Ngai Tahu purchase in the South Island, where confusion as to the boundaries of particular territory lay,

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and sloppiness on the part of the agents led to discrepancies between maps and deeds that sowed the seeds for claims that persist to the present day.59 How then may we best summarize the promise and intent of Grey’s policy? Government policy was shaped by the constraints of Maori power, intellectual uncertainty as to defining Maori land rights, the commitments of Waitangi, the desire to control disorder, and the pressure to satisfy the settler demand for land. Government policy was a balancing act rather than a coherent drive to dispossession. The serious acts of omission committed during this period were the failure to reserve enough land for Maori usage, and to follow through on commitments to set aside money for schools and hospitals. Grey certainly recognized the need for very large reserves. But he was unable or unwilling to hold the line in the face of Maori letting out land to settlers for grazing and the complementary resentment that Maori should be left with large reserves. The researches of the Waitangi Tribunal and other studies have found that the Maori had and have good grounds for complaint. But how much these failures belonged to the Grey era and how much to the period that followed it is not clear.60 Grey’s policy was naturally an “imperial” policy. He expected the Maori to become more like the British over time. But it was essentially driven by the vision of a society where cooperation and co-existence defined the racial order. In the context of the power realities of the time, this was not an unreasonable assumption to envisage as the future of New Zealand. Indeed, as James Belich has noted, between 1847 and 1860 “there was not only peace but also a degree of co-­operation between Maori and Pakeha spheres, in economics in particular.” It cannot be said, therefore, of Grey’s first term as governor that he left Maori the dispossessed and marginal people they were to become. His second term as governor, however, marked the moment when the prospects for a racially mixed and balanced society turned into a society where the structures of dispossession were erected.61 It is worth emphasizing how the impact of the moment of pre-emption was long-lasting. The agreements that were made during this period, and the disagreements about them, bequeathed important legacies for the history of New Zealand, to which I shall have occasion to return. In addition, there was a sense in which the policy that Grey believed could be accomplished within the term of his governorship created a dynamic that has never ended and to which successive governments have returned in attempts to finally resolve. Individual cases went on for decades. The famous Kemp purchase in the southern part of North Island, for example, generated claims from the moment it was completed in 1848 until the end of the 1890s. The equally famous Ngai Tahu land transfers in the Auckland area generated claims from the 1840s to the Waitangi Tribunal (established in 1975) itself. By comparison, the Whanganui river claims extending from the 1920s through to 1962 seem positively newfangled. Indeed, between the 1840s and the 1960s, long before the current Waitangi Tribunal was established, the contest between individual land tenure rights and the claims based on customary Maori law was the subject of 600 law cases and ten Royal Commissions of inquiry. The Waitangi Tribunal may be seen as both the culmination of this story and a return to the attempts

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in the early nineteenth century to find ultimate resolution of the competing claims of settlers and Maori.62

Dispossession post-1860 Throughout the last half of the 1850s the balance Grey had established between Pakeha and Maori began to break down. Unsurprisingly, land was the focus of this worsening tension. Resistance to land sales increased, and Maori became progressively radicalized as manifested by the emergence of the Kingitanga Movement in 1858. Government policy after Grey left for South Africa at the end of 1853 became less adept at dealing with the Maori, in part because it was increasingly settler dominated. By 1860 war had broken out, the governor, Gore Browne, was dismissed and Grey returned in September 1861 in the hope that he could restore stability. But the end result was to begin the effective dispossession of the Maori and their increasing economic marginalization. The prime expression of this was the assertion of the primacy of individual land tenure in various acts from 1862, which ended the recognition of collective ownership and in the words of the Waitangi Tribunal National Overview the coercive and manipulative elements in the land law from 1862 on constitute one of the most serious of the breaches of Treaty principles  .  .  . more serious even than the purchase under . . . pre-emption before 1865, because . . . then the Maori . . . could combine to limit selling (and did so throughout most of the North Island by the late 1850s), after 1865 it was almost impossible to stop some individual or individuals from taking a block into the Native Land Court and, once it had gone through the court, to stop individual interests being purchased and the block being partitioned.63 Relations between Maori and Pakeha progressively declined after Grey left at the end of 1853 and as settler political power increased. Land policy became more variable and less willing to accommodate Maori concerns. The strategies of land purchase became more systematic and less patient. Some of the tactics that Grey had used to grease the wheels of sales, such as payments to chiefs, increased. Divisions within the Maori deepened. Efforts by the government to address these methods went unattended. Government policy, generally speaking, seemed to be ineptly buffeted between the desire to maintain the commitments of Waitangi and the reality of increasing settler control of government. Although the governor retained control over Indigenous policy, the settler government held the purse strings. And there was an increasing mood of impatience among the settlers at their being shut out of Maori policy—an attitude that was obviously not unrelated to their desire to gain control of land policy. Toward the end of his governorship, Gore Browne tried to re-establish the kind of relationship with the Maori that had existed under Grey. He revived some of Grey’s ideas such as encouraging mixed settlements. He called a large meeting

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of chiefs at Kohimarama in an attempt to diffuse the tension over the Taranaki purchase. But it was too late. His own ministers ignored his more progressive proposals, and the effort was a failure. Maori resistance to land sales issued forth in sporadic violence from 1858, and most seriously, in the politics of the Kingitanga Movement. The trust relationship that had marked the Grey era was eroding. This was well captured several years later by a politician who wanted to retain the older relationships when he explained that the conflict arose from the one great mistake we have made, in always trying to give them the least price they would accept for their land . . . without making provision . . . for their own improvement [and thus] you have at last brought the Natives to believe that your real object is to impoverish and degrade them.64 Still, the possibility for cooperation continued to exist. The later 1850s into the early 1860s saw competing tendencies in the settler-dominated governments. There were groups that remained committed to Grey’s principles of pushing forward with Maori self-governing institutions. Maori continued to be restrained in their actions, continued to participate in selling, and continued to meld Western methods of organizing alongside their traditional methods such as the tribal councils. So, when Grey returned, the political basis for a restoration of Grey’s earlier policy still remained. Henry Sewell, a leading politician, expert in land law, and attorney general from 1861 to 1863, watched and worked with Grey closely over those years. He was firmly in the “pro-Maori” camp and strongly opposed to the growing settler politics of racial exclusion and racial contempt. He believed that existing land policy had run its course and that it was time to allow the Maori to define their own land boundaries using their traditional tribal councils known as runungas. He even proposed a Native Council Bill in 1861 that would have done this as a prelude to handing over to the councils full power of “dealing with and disposing of native lands ad libitum.” He believed that this would both free up native waste lands for settlers and encourage Maori self-development. This line of thinking fit exactly with Grey’s, and for two years after his return to the colony in 1861, Grey endeavored to pump new life into his old policy. The main result was his proposal to incorporate Maori runungas into the governing system of the country.65 Grey launched this initiative soon after he returned to the colony and turned these ideas (that Gore Browne had also toyed with) into a sophisticated, ­well-thought-out program that would harness the runungas into an administrative system that would extend from the local level, through the regional, all the way up to inter-tribal councils. They would work with European civil commissioners implementing laws and would have salaried native magistrates and policemen. They would have wide responsibilities for road development, for example, as well as for schools. Most importantly, they would play a role in land issues, making decisions about disputed land boundaries and even correct title holders. As he explained to a meeting with Maori soon after his arrival “ ‘the principal rununga would make laws for many things . . . it would . . . provide for all questions about the boundaries and

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ownership of lands, and for all cases of cattle trespass, and would make laws about fencing. These laws when made and assented to by the government would have to be carried into execution by their own officers.” ’66 He also appointed George Clarke to head up the initiative. This was an act of genius. Grey had abolished Clarke’s job when he closed down the Protectorate Department in 1846. Clarke had reacted badly to this at the time, stirring up opinion in Auckland against Grey and even writing to the Colonial Office in complaint. In appointing Clarke, Grey was doing one of several things, or maybe all at the same time. On the one hand, in appointing someone reviled in the settler press for his pro-Maori sympathies, he was signaling an outreach that would overcome the tensions that had grown over the past few years. On the other hand, he was signifying that Clarke’s reputation was in line with Grey’s policy. Or, yet again, he was using Clarke’s reputation as pro-Maori advocate as a political ploy to diminish Maori hostility to government. In any case, he pitched his ideas to the Maori as an extensive system of local self-government, which would have considerable responsibility for infrastructure development and, most importantly, would have the right to determine land titles.67 Inevitably, there is disagreement as to how to interpret Grey’s motives in all this. Obviously, Grey intended the program as another attempt at assimilation. And if it undercut the Kingitanga so much the better. Equally obviously, it was something that Maori had responded positively to in the past, and significant sections in the Northland welcomed the new proposals with enthusiasm. As a policy it was quite consistent with Grey’s theme of racial amalgamation, and it is best read as an effort to restore the dynamic of his earlier policies. At this point, also, it was an attempt to halt the slide to war that confronted him on his arrival—just as it had in 1845. Nor was it inconsistent with other aspects of Grey’s policy at the time that could be interpreted as preparing for war against the Kingitanga Movement. It would be totally in ­character—and typical of any good politician—that Grey would keep all options open. So it is hardly surprising that there were several policies in play at the same time. As with so much else about Grey, however, what is impressive about the rununga scheme is the bold social engineering policy vision that it contained. At its best it promised to remake the political and social landscape of power in New Zealand, and had it worked, then the dynamic of subsequent events would have been very different. At the same time, the obstacles against it working were considerable. Even had all the political stars been in alignment for its success, there have to be real doubts that the political and administrative machinery were adequate to allow it to be realized.68 Nevertheless, at the time, Henry Sewell—who was by no means an uncritical observer of Grey—was impressed with his motives and seriousness and was initially optimistic for the program’s prospects. Once Grey had made the policy decision, he embarked on a tour of the Northland areas—the heart of the Kingitanga—to sell his proposal to the Maori. This was a typical Grey move; he did the same thing in the Eastern Cape when he had decided to install the Resident Magistrate system there. In a passage that captures the way Grey was capable of touching all the key political bases, Sewell noted that

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he has done admirable work on the trip to Waikato. . . . [T]his is the kind of thing . . . in which he is specially successful . . . used to the natives exactly the kind of language that was required . . . offering them institutions and provisions for welfare and at the same time being firm. And working on the [military] road to Waikato which was critical strategically. And usefully combined to instill confidence in the settlers. A few weeks later Sewell recorded how the work of “conciliating the natives” was going well thanks to commissioners like J.E. Gorst, who were working to get the new institutions working and accepted. But it was only short time before things began to fall apart.69 The ministry headed by William Fox, which included Sewell, fell, and a more pro-settler government came into office. This government had no sympathy with Grey’s rununga schemes. A land bill was proposed that for the first time was to displace native law in favor of English legal conceptions of land title, and Maori land issues were now referred to a specific jurisdiction in the Native Land Courts Act in 1863. This was a significant moment in the demise of the policies and assumptions of the prior era. Sewell was deeply opposed to the Act. He believed that it was necessary to take Maori traditional law into account and that this was best done by leaving it to the Crown and the Maori to negotiate how to put English and Maori law together—which had been the heart of Grey’s earlier policy. Other changes quickly followed. By 1863, Grey’s rununga initiative had run its course, and the bold vision dissipated into preparations for the coming war. The truth was that the times had changed. The settlers were now making the political running. They were not willing to share power over land issues with the Maori. The Maori themselves were increasingly in a hostile mood. To the extent that the rununga system had begun to work, it was because the Maori had taken it over and turned it to their own purposes. This had never been Grey’s intention, but it indicated the shrinkage of the trust relationship between Maori and government. Increasingly, therefore, Grey turned to the option of war. At a meeting with the Waikato tribes, he spoke a tough line declaring that Kingitanga sovereignty was incompatible with Crown sovereignty. But he continued to keep his options open until the last minute. At the end of April 1863, for example, just before full-scale war broke out, he attempted to broker a settlement by urging the abandonment of the Waitara purchase, which was the root cause of the conflict. This did not find favor among the ministers, and some murders of British officers on May 4, 1863, launched the final slide to war.70 In this changed reality, the power-sharing promise of the rununga was soon swamped under a very different set of measures. By 1865, the system had been wound up, the Maori salary holders were dismissed, and the idea that Maori law and custom should be recognized was categorically rejected. The main casualty of this collapse, of course, was land policy, which now moved away from a tendency to accommodate Maori law and custom on land and its replacement by a system of land regulation that revolved around individuation of title. The Native Land Acts between 1862 and 1865 were the instruments by which the Maori

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were dispossessed from much of their land. The Acts established the primacy of establishing individual title on all Maori land matters. Pre-emption was abolished in favor of the right of Maori to sell to whomever they wished. The price of individual liberty was the weakened ability of the Maori to assert their traditional and customary law on land ownership. In the earlier period, land title issues and conversion to individual title had been matters for negotiation. Grey’s rununga scheme proposed to transfer adjudication of such matters to the councils along with the participation of European commissioners. Whatever the flaws in the system of pre-emption, it did reflect the commitment to recognizing Maori land tenure customs and to protecting them from the effects of land speculation. But these latest acts changed the legal situation and the social dynamic of land development entirely. They broke through the thin tissue of protection of Maori land tenure provided by pre-emption and moved all issues of title and sale decisively into the realm of English courts and English law. Property was now an individual matter, not a matter for collective tribal rights. Legal procedures for converting customary title into individual title were created, and direct sale between settlers and Maori whose title had been confirmed was encouraged. As Keenan has summarized it: “effectively, this meant that the Native Land Court was set up to extinguish customary titles.”71 The practical working of the Native Land Court facilitated and sped dispossession. By replacing a system that worked through negotiation and discussion with a system that went only through the courts, the settling of title was more difficult and more expensive. The cost of proving title, getting surveys, and other expenses led to the mortgaging or sale of land to raise the cash to do that. The Acts also encouraged the concentration of customary rights into a few hands through the ten owners rule, which limited collective ownership to ten people irrespective of others who might have claims. Among other effects, this fed into and stimulated divisions within the iwi and encouraged the concentration of title into the hands of prominent chiefs. The administration of the Native Land Court made the point that a new social and political order of Indigenous relations was the purpose of the new institution. It was headed up by F.D. Fenton and was given carte blanche to organize and administer the court. Although in the 1850s, Fenton had been sympathetic to Maori self-governing institutions, he now represented settler power and politics and the principle of individuation of native title. He immediately set about removing all remnants of the consultative framework of the rununga from the way the Land Court had conducted its affairs, even though these had been embodied in the legislation. He removed consultation and negotiation from the process of land issues— strategies that were integral to the way the Maori dealt with debatable issues of ownership and division, and strategies that were embodied, too, in the methods of the period of pre-emption. In their place, he instituted the grandeur of the law and compulsion in the belief that “only a solemn legal tribunal would be respected by contending Maori claimants.” This was not correct. But it aptly captured the tone and ethos that was coming to govern policy toward Maori in this new era.72

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This was not the only change that moved the land issue into the sphere of dispossession. In May 1863, even before the war was fully underway, the settlerdominated government of Alfred Dommet (who in his younger days had written a poem glorifying a cross-race love affair) determined on a confiscation bill as a punishment for those in rebellion. At first it was used cautiously. But as the wars rumbled on, it became a more serious weapon of land dispossession. Large areas of tribal land were devastated by confiscation. Over three million acres were taken in the Taranaki and Waikato regions, the heart of the Kingitanga, in the 1860s. It was a reflection of the changed political calculus, that Henry Sewell reported Grey to be passive in all of this. He described him as sitting quietly at home contented to shift responsibility for what was happening off his own shoulders and onto those of the colonial politicians. The truth was that Grey’s vision for New Zealand had been defeated.73 Sewell understood exactly what was happening. Among the settlers, he noted, “there was a general determination to make a rush at native lands.” In a wider frame, this was the moment when the “humanitarian” mentality of the earlier period was finally displaced as a governing discourse in New Zealand. Sewell himself embodied the tensions and conflicts that were involved at this juncture. By August 1863, he was willing to accept confiscation as a necessary act that would be a way of avoiding future land disputes. He even saw it as facilitating a fresh start to racial amalgamation by freeing the state to do serious social engineering planning. He imagined the benefits that could come from displaced Maori being planted “if possible in peaceful villages, intermixed with settlers.” In following this reasoning, of course, Sewell was expressing the way liberalism is led to complicity in the coercion of empire. But it is interesting to note how this did not imply that Sewell succumbed to the prevailing discourse of imperial domination. This concession to the predominant forces of repression was combined in his mind with more hopeful sentiments drawn from the mentality of humanitarian discourse.74 Thus, in what he described as a “gloomy” entry to his Journal in November 1863, Sewell chronicled the shift that was in process. He wrote of the subordinate position Grey now occupied, of how he rationalized the war policy he presided over. Policies such as confiscation, he felt, presaged the destruction of the Maori race “as other uncivilized nations have been.” He recounted a conversation with the premier who told him “now is our opportunity [to remove all obstacles to the full colonization of the land] and we must not lose it.” He recorded the new primacy of “a temper . . . towards the whole Native race that is indiscriminately cruel”; how there was a “rapacity for Native lands” and of the breakdown of “native rights which have hitherto stood in the way of the progress of civilization [which] . . . is about to pour in.” In essence Sewell was recording the end of the racial order of the early nineteenth century, with its discourse of “humane” policy and its fragile protection of Maori “rights” and the emergence of the outlines of the racial order of the later nineteenth century.75 We know that this was not the end of the story. The repressions of the 1860s and the emergence of a new legal framework and discourse to govern land issues were

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not destined to resolve the issue. They created a different context, but they failed to squash the political energy among the Maori that was generated by this strategy of dispossession. Nor did it end the story of “racial amalgamation.” But it did mark an end to the particular phase of this idea associated with the period of Sir George Grey’s dominance of New Zealand politics.

Conclusion Racial amalgamation as a policy was premised on the cultural superiority of British colonialism. But it was also a project that accorded with the structures of engagement in New Zealand during this period and the relationships that sustained Pakeha presence within Maori culture. Both these forces were powerful enough to feed optimism that a new racial policy for empire could be forged. Its proponents assumed that it was a viable policy not only because of their ideology of universal humanity but also because they could see evidence of its operation with their very eyes. This was especially true in New Zealand, where Maori were thought to be moving toward the finished form of civilization epitomized by the best of British stock. Elsewhere, like Australia, the conditions for racial amalgamation would clearly take some time to develop. But it was the faith of Moorhouse, Grey, and others that those conditions could be developed, and it was this that underlay their various efforts to build regimes of trust and institutions that would spark the civilizing mechanism in the native peoples. So, racial amalgamation was the third leg of a humane policy agenda that derived from the humanitarian discourse. Grey’s policy in New Zealand was the only place where this was really tried; elsewhere, such as in the Kat River settlement, there were mere snippets of the aspiration. But Grey’s success in carrying the policy into the 1850s kept the flame of humanitarianism alive in the culture and ideology of the British Empire at a time when protection and conciliation had effectively been displaced or appropriated by emergent settler politics. This achievement was important for the local history of New Zealand. But it was also important for the continuing presence of a humanitarian discourse in the culture of British imperialism. But by the 1860s, this earlier version of racial amalgamation had run its course in New Zealand, and it was being consigned to oblivion in metropolitan policymaking circles. To illustrate this, we may return to Herman Merivale, who in 1861 issued another edition of his famous Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, in which there was a distinct change of tone to the discussion of racial amalgamation.76 Whereas in 1841 racial amalgamation had been assumed as the desired end of imperial policy, in 1861 it was treated by Merivale as an embarrassing footnote. There was a tone of tired resignation in his discussion of native peoples. He regretted that Aboriginal policy was no longer handled by the metropolitan government, and now lay within the realm of responsible government. By 1861, too, Merivale assumed the ultimate extinction of the native races, which in itself demonstrated the demise of the optimism that had pervaded earlier humanitarian culture. In a short, somewhat tortured, passage he effectively repudiated the assumptions and

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policies that had underlain the arguments of his earlier edition. It was as if the admission of the racial order that had now emerged in Empire was an uncomfortable one for Merivale to make. The idea of an essential equality of character and intellect existing across the races of humanity had gone. Merivale now argued that racial separation as it was practiced in the United States—was he aware that it was accompanied with devastating violence?—was the best policy. Within that context, missionaries and others could get to work, and only after “civilization has rendered him [sic] equal in knowledge and mental power” would it be possible to treat Aboriginal people as equals. Racial amalgamation, he argued, consigned them in effect to inferior status where they would heavily suffer from the prevailing racism of the conquering race of settlers.77 Merivale’s statement of 1861 is significant in tracking the changing trajectory of Aboriginal policy over the period from the 1840s. It reflects the way humanitarian assumptions had been displaced from the discourse on empire by the 1860s and the way humanitarian projects were now consigned to the local world of the missionary rather than being defined as belonging to imperial policy as a whole. This shift was the product of settler democracy and related currents in the political thought of the metropole. But before we address that, there are two other themes that were critical to imperial policy making in the period: the question of violence and law and sovereignty.

Notes 1 We shall return to this story in Chapter 8. 2 Mark Hickford, Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 29–30; Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–17, 171–72. For Lester and Dussart’s racial amalgamation was a way for imperial rule to achieve “penetrative hegemony,” see Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 246. 3 Alan Ward, An Unsettled History: Treaty Claims in New Zealand Today (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1997), 107; Alan Ward, A Show of Justice. Racial Amalgamation in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973) for a comprehensive account of the political history of racial amalgamation. The historical question is, therefore, how racial amalgamation changed its shape by the later nineteenth century to become a policy that expressed settler dominion. For racial amalgamation as the humanitarian version of settler colonialism’s logic of indigenous elimination, see Alan Lester, “Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2015): 1–16. 4 It will become evident that I have come to a different view of Grey than I presented in Making Empire, for which, see 233–95. For a summary of my current view, see “Culture and Policies: Sir George Grey, Protection and the Early Nineteenth-Century Empire,” in Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries, ed. Amanda Nettelbeck and Sam Furphy (London: Routledge, 2019). 5 Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, 2nd ed. (London, 1861). References are from this second edition, which was an exact reprint of the first edition but with the changes he made identified in separate sections. For Merivale, see David McNab “Herman Merivale and the Native Question, 1837–1861,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 9, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 359–384; Salesa, Racial Crossings, 94.

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6 As “the very keystone, the leading principle . . . [that Indigenous peoples] must either perish or be amalgamated with the general population.” Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, 510 and more generally pp.  487–523. The fact that there is only one chapter devoted to this matter is a reminder to historians that policy space in the empire was filled with many other issues than just the question of the Indigenous peoples. 7 Merivale, Lectures on Colonization, 511–12, 525–53. He cites the mid-century ethnologist Prichard on the vitality of mixed races. There was a debate as to the effects of racial mixing. The idea that it would result in a weak and genetically inferior racial type (an idea that was conventional by the later nineteenth century) was vigorously opposed by people like George Augustus Robinson on the basis of his own observations. It was also discussed in Alexander Walker’s, Intermarriage (London, 1841). 8 South Africa would be an interesting case for comparison with New Zealand. In the early years of the nineteenth century, for example, missionaries actively propagated cross-race relationships, even to the extent of forming families. This practice was always a minority tendency, and begins to get closed off by the 1820s. But there was a powerful reminder of its presence in the mixed-race family of the Reads, prominent members of the Cape humanitarian network until the 1850s. Unlike New Zealand, however, the power of a racially ameliorative humanitarianism was always under challenge from assertive and racially charged settler politics. See Julia Wells, “The Suppression of Mixed Marriages Amongst the LMS Missionaries in South Africa Before 1820,” South African Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (2001): 1–20. 9 Montague Hawtrey, An Earnest Address to the Colonists of New Zealand, with Reference to their Intercourse with the Native Inhabitants (London, 1840); Montague Hawtrey, Justice to New Zealand, Honor to England (London, 1861), which is a reassertion of the humanitarian agenda of the 1830s. Salesa, Racial Crossings, 144–47. Traces of racial amalgamation discourse ripple through other sources, too. Thus a plan for governance presented to the Colonial Office by Robert Torrens proposed such things as an integrated mixed-race police force and soldiery, with the chiefs serving as magistrates. NAUK, CO 209/3, New Zealand. Plan for Native Government in New Zealand. And a letter of 18 January 1838 from Alexander Machonochie to Sir Richard Bourke (governor of New South Wales) to be found in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 1004–1007. 10 Vincent O’Malley, Beyond the Frontier: The Contest for Colonial New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams EBooks, 2015), 61–64; Ballantyne, “Strategic Intimacies” Dona Alves, The Maori and the Crown. 11 Salesa, Racial Crossings, 31, 42, 88, 168–72, 242–44. 12 The single largest problem of interpretation is to explain the contrast between Grey in New Zealand and Grey in South Africa. I cannot deal with that problem here but the difference has to do with the way the Xhosa were less interested in interacting with the imperial presence and white settlers than the Maori. Grey was led, therefore, to a different policy than he had pursued with the Maori. It makes sense to speak of the two Greys, a notion introduced in the earliest scholarly biography by George Henderson, Sir George Grey: Pioneer of Empire in Southern Lands (London: Routledge, 1907), 297–98. 13 Grey carefully fed his early biographers the narrative he wanted them to relay. See Leigh Dale, “George Grey in Ireland: Narrative and Network,” in Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 160–65, 173–74. 14 The view of Grey as driven entirely by his own egocentric needs was established by Alexander H. McLintock in his otherwise very scholarly Crown Colony Government in New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1958). It was adopted by Ian Wards in The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand 1832–1851 (Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1968). It was not refuted in the more sober biography by J. Rutherford, Sir George Grey K.C.B. 1812–1898. A Study in Colonial Government (London: Routledge, 1961). It was carried over to South Africa by Jeff Peires in The Dead Will Arise. Nongquwuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: University of Johannesburg, 1969) and is to be found also in my Making Empire, 267–70.

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15 Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance. See also “George Grey in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,” in Writing, Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, ed. Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall (London: Routledge, 2007), 20–41; Bernard Cadogan, “A Terrible and Fatal Man”: Sir George Grey and the British Southern Hemisphere (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2014). 16 Susannah Grant, “God’s Governor: George Grey and Racial Amalgamation in New Zealand 1845–1853” (PhD diss., Department of History, University of Otago, Otago, 2005); Bernard Cadogan, “A  Terrible and Fatal Man”: Sir George Grey and the British Southern Hemisphere; Donald Kerr, Amassing Treasures for All Times. Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector (Otago: University of Otago, 2006); Mark Francis, “Writings on Colonial New Zealand,” in Histories, Power and Loss. Uses of the Past—A New Zealand Commentary, ed. Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 2001), 171–77. 17 McLintock was the origin of this view of Grey; see Crown Colony Government in New Zealand, 399, where, for example, his policy towards Maori is described as the “perfect reflection of an intensely ambitious and self-willed man, at once eager to win the approbation of his superiors, yet every impatient of advice,” pp. 399 and 204–7, 307, 323–24, 403–4 for other examples of the same theme. There is plenty of evidence of a softer side to Grey. As one example, his secretary (admittedly his brother-in-law) wrote in 1851: I am always surprised at the very generous feeling which George invariably shares towards those who in every possible way try to damage his character and to annoy him personally; is intentions are grossly misrepresented, the measures . . . he adopts . . . are said to be oppressive and injurious; his character is attacked and yet he never when he has had the opportunities resented the ill feeling shown towards him. See TL Ms. Papers 2428, Sir Godfrey Thomas, Papers, Letters and Journals 1844–53, folder 7, June 29, 1851. 18 NAUK, CO 209/51, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Grey to Gladstone, 4 February 1847, ff. 196–211; CO209/102, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Grey to Earl Grey, 4 February 1852, ff 16–18. 19 Rev John Morgan, Narrative. It is true that observers like Grey and Morgan were on the sharp lookout for signs that Indigenous people exhibited the same characteristics as whites, eagerly recounted evidence that they were as intelligent as whites, and were capable of the same kind of mental capacity. For two examples taken at random, AIM, Mss144, Reverend John Hobbs, Diary, Volume 5, 1838–1841, 591, where he notes a properly set table with cloth, knives and forks, and serving dishes “a sight I  had not before seen in New Zealand.” And for another example that involved Grey, see ACCL, MS 302, Journal of Reverend Richard Taylor, 26 April 1852, when he rode with Grey to the Hutt river and noticed the changes over the past five years as regards cultivations and houses. But this keenness to observe small signs of wonder is very different from deliberate invention which is almost what Grey has been accused of. 20 Kerr, Amassing the Treasures of All Time, 30–32; Ray E. McKerrow, “Human Nature and Christian Assistance,” Church History 50, no. 2 (June 1981), Grant, “God’s Governor,” 10–12. In the case of the Maori, also, what Grey saw confirmed his view about them as capable for example of settled agriculture and thus likely candidates for amalgamation. See Hickford, Lords of the Land, 452. 21 Indeed, in 1837 he published a novel under a pseudonym that described the emergence of a multi-racial society in the middle of Australia. See Cadogan, “A Terrible and Fatal Man,” 57; Lady Mary Fox [Richard Whately], ed., An Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland (London, 1837). 22 On the importance of understanding cultural language, see the Introduction to George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealanders (London: Routledge, 1906), v–ix; Edward Shortland was excited to find a parallel between South Island Maori customs and those of ancient Cornwall and the Hebrides that gave the right to kill anyone who was shipwrecked if of a different tribe because that person would bring bad luck to the person who saved him. “This is singular because a similar

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belief is said to have prevailed in the Hebrides and on the coast of Cornwall although it goes no further there than refusing to aid a drowning man.” See NANZ, Misc 17 1, Edward Shortland Letterbook 1842–1854, 21 November 1842. Grey also made the same point and provided examples in “On the Social Life of the Ancient Inhabitants of New Zealand, and on the National Character It Was Likely to Form,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London NS I (1868–69), 358–62. 23 For examples of the more common turn to essentialized racist thinking among missionaries and others, see the cases of John Brownlee and Henry Calderwood cited in Price, Making Empire, 144–45, 120. For Grey’s speech, see Grey, “On the Social Life of the Ancient Inhabitants of New Zealand,” 334. There is also tantalizing evidence that he grappled with the problem of how to see the “civilizing” process all his life. See ACCL, GMSS 118/2 Sir George Grey, Essay on Civilisation, which is copied from elsewhere but has the theme of how in some respects “savage” races have more developed sensibilities than “civilized.” 24 As Susannah Grant has argued in “God’s Governor,” 98–101. 25 NAUK, CO280/72, New Zealand. Original Correspondence, Grey to Gladstone, 9 July 1849, ff.225; Parliamentary Papers, Accounts and Papers, 311 (1841), “Report on the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia, 4 June 1840.” The memorandum was based upon his recent experiences in Western Australia, where he had spent some time observing the efforts of people like George Moore to grapple with the challenge of racial politics. But the memo also reflected ideas that were in common circulation, and other governors responded with some chagrin because of Grey’s assumption of an authority which his young years hardly warranted. See NAUK, CO18/28, Western Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Hutt to Russell, 10 October  1841, ff. 52–55, in which he remarks: “it will be seen that most essential points in Captain Grey’s proposed plan are embodied in the system of treatment pursued towards the natives in this colony—such as infliction of punishment without reference to the length of time that may have elapsed between the perpetration of the crime and the apprehension of the offender.” NAUK, CO 201/309, New South Wales. Original Correspondence Despatches, Gipps to Russell, 7 April 1841, ff. 49–58 for a long commentary by Gipps on Grey’s memo which is dismissive of most of it. 26 Grant, God’s Governor, 103–106. 27 Salesa, Racial Crossings, 109, 114–18, 125–31. 28 On the question of legal transplants and the way these institutions were shaped by local environment, see Shaunnagh Dorsett, “ ‘How Do Things Get Started? Legal Transplants and Domestication: An Example From Colonial New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of Public Interest Law 12 (2014): 112–13. 29 The following will draw primarily upon the important study of the Resident Magistrates courts by Shaunnagh Dorsett, Juridical Encounters. Maori and the British Courts 1840–1852 (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 2017). But see also Ward, A Show of Justice, 72–81. For a more critical account of the Courts and their constabulary, see Richard Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier. The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and Political Control in New Zealand (Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1986), 235–61, 265–74. It should also be noted that New Zealand had a well-­functioning Unsworn Testimony Ordinance, which had been operating since Hobson’s days and which allowed Maori testimony to be taken without the formality of the oath. These courts are a reminder of the very different contexts between colonies. In South Africa, Grey was to use Resident Magistrates in a way that fits more closely with the simple model of the law as an instrument of imperial domination. 30 Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, 117–26, 239–44, 253–54; Hill, Policing the Colonial Frontier, 334–35. Native Assessors were a very important part of Grey’s idea of how the courts should work to encourage assimilation; they had originally been championed by advocates of an exceptionalist policy. 31 NANZ, IA4 266, Outward Letterbook Protector of Aborigines 1841–1853, Grey to Acting Native Secretary, September 6, 1851.

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32 Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, 15, 146, 160. A few months after Waitangi, for example, a Maori brought a complaint of assault against a white settler. And they had also been engaged with the courts around the various Land Commissions of these years. 33 Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, 142, 148–54, 239; Ward, A Show of Justice, 74–75. 34 Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, 249–51, 264–67; Ward, A Show of Justice, 75–76. Although it is impossible to accurately assess his claims because of the absence of reliable population statistics. 35 See Ward, A Show of Justice, 79–82 and for some sense of their role from the 1860s, 202–10. 36 For processes of dispossession around the Pacific rim, see Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Stuart Banner, “Conquest by Contract: Wealth Transfer and Land Market Structure in Colonial New Zealand,” Law and Society 34, no. 1 (2000): 47–96. Henry Reynolds makes the point in “Frontier History After Mabo,” Journal of Australian Studies 20 (1996): 5 that it was the general aim of British imperial policy to provide for mutual land use. Henry Reynolds and Jamie Dalziel, “Aborigines and Pastoral Leases. Imperial and Colonial Policy 1826–1855,” University of New South Wales Law Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 315–77, for the attempt to create a pastoral lease policy that would provide some protection to Aboriginal land rights. But for an argument against this position, see Bain Attwood, “The Law of the Land or The Law of the Land?: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society,” History Compass 2 (2004): Au082, 1–30. See Patricia Burns, Fatal Success. A History of the New Zealand Company (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1989), for the continual debate in London between the Company and the Colonial Office as to how to frame land policy in the presence of Maori land tenures. 37 For a blood-chilling study of violence and dispossession in California, see Benjamin Madley, American Genocide. The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846– 1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); and also Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land. Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). In New Zealand, as Attwood has pointed out, Grey “proceeded on the basis that Maori had rights in all of the land and that their title to it was best extinguished by acquiring their consent”; see Empire and Native Title, 12. Alan Ward, National Overview. Volume I. Waitangi Tribunal Rangahaua Whanui Series (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1997), 6, 18, 47. 38 Ward, An Unsettled History, 118; Haveman, Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, 165–67. All the 34 million acres of South Island had been purchased by the Crown by 1865. But the South Island was only lightly populated with Maori, so this was not as dramatic as it seems. Some 7 million acres in North Island had been similarly purchased by the Crown by the mid-1860s. Hickford, Lords of the Land, 18, 20–22, 27. 39 Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 141–42; Reynolds, “Frontier History After Mabo,” 4–11. On common land rights in Britain, see, for example, J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For enclosure precedents guiding New Zealand settler-­dominated law, see M.P.K. Sorrenson, “Folkland to Bookland: Fenton and the Enclosure of Maori Commons,” New Zealand Journal of History 45, no. 2 (2011): 149–66. Tim Rowse, “A Short Simple Provisional Code: The Pastoralist as ‘Protector,’ ” in Furphy and Nettelbeck, Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries, 175–93. 40 Cadogan, A Terrible and Fatal Man, 8, 17, 37–38, for what Grey’s political thought owed to James Harrington and Jeffersonian democracy. Kerr, Amassing Treasures for All Times, 39–41. On Grey’s position on the land issue in New Zealand politics, see ACCL, GNZ Mss. 149, Extracts from Sir George Grey’s Diary 1874–1888, 38; GNZ Mss. 153, Sir George Grey, Land Monopoly in New Zealand; British Library, Add. Mss. 10921 m21, Copies of Correspondence between Henry George and Sir George Grey. 41 Cadogan, A Terrible and Fatal Man, 42–44. Dale, “George Grey in Ireland: narrative and network,” 160–65, 173–74.

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42 Ward, An Unsettled History, 107; O’Malley, Beyond the Imperial Frontier, ebook, 51–55. For the recognition that land issues were central to Waitangi, see NAUK, CO209/64, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Grey to Gladstone, 7 March 1848, ff. 366–70 for a notation by Stephen. 43 Pre-emption was a traditional part of British colonial policy with plenty of precedents in North America. Australia was the exception. Michael Belgrave, “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase,” New Zealand Journal of History 31, no. 1 (1997): 27–28; M.P.K. Sorrenson, “Treaties in British Colonial Policy: Precedents for Waitangi,” in Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights. The Treaty of Waitangi in International Contexts, ed. William Renwick (Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1991), 19–22. 44 Ward, National Review, 46, 54–56; Belgrave, Historical Frictions, 21–23, 228–33; Edward Shortland, Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders, 255–70. 45 NANZ, IA4 2, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Outward Letterbook, Miscellaneous 1843– 1846, Colonial Secretary to Nelson Settlers, 9 August 1843. Belgrave, “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase,” New Zealand Journal of History  31, no. 1 (1997):  23–37; Hickford, “ ‘Vague Native Rights to Land’: British Imperial Policy on Native Title and Custom in New Zealand, 1837–53,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38, no. 3 (2010): 175–206 and “Framing and Reframing the Agon. Contesting Narratives and Counternarratives on Maori Property Rights and Political Constitutionalism 1840–1861”; O’Malley, Beyond the Imperial Frontier, 48–49. Frederika Hackshaw, “Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and Their Influence on the Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Waitangi. Maori and Pakeha Interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. I.H. Kawharu (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), for recognition of Maori land rts stronger earlier in century. An early act of the New Zealand Legislative Council in June 1841 made the same claim. Harry Evison, The Long Dispute. Maori Land Rights and European Colonization in Southern New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1997), 115. 46 Parliamentary Papers, Further Papers Relative to the Affairs of New Zealand. 1846. Vol. XXX, 690, Earl Grey to Governor Grey, 23 December 1846, 64–72. Indeed, Earl Grey claimed—on what authority it was not clear—that they used only perhaps one hundredth of the available land. This episode was also an example of the way internal British politics determined unsettled attitudes towards Maori land title; see Attwood, Empire and Native Title, 226, 338, 376. 47 Cited in Cadogan, A Terrible and Fatal Man, 170. For his explanation of why he failed to implement the 1846 constitution, see NAUK, CO 209/46, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Grey to Gladstone, 28 November  1846, ff. 363–73, It is a reflection of the range of opinion on this issue, however, that Grey was later criticized by Wesleyan missionaries for taking too narrow a view of Maori land rights, see NAUK, CO 209/64, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Public Offices, ff. 339–40. 48 O’Malley, Beyond the Colonial Frontier, 51–53. 49 Instanced by the celebrated Wairwau affair when Wairau affair of 1843 where 20 settlers had been killed by Maori over land dispute was a stark reminder of that dangers of an unregulated commerce in land; see Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 121–25. 50 Ward, National Overview, 18–19. Hickford, “Decidedly the Most Interesting Savages,” 135–38, 154–55, 160; Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 121–25; Belgrave, “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase” for the argument that preemption was used to undermine Maori land rights. 51 Belgrave, “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase,” 23–37. For a close history of the land purchases, see the same author’s Historical Frictions, which presents a more complicated and nuanced picture. Ward, An Unsettled History, 103. 52 For the awareness of Maori power see Ward, National Overview, 5; Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 119–20; Hickford, Lords of the Land, 162–63, 175, 181. For just one example of this from the Protectorate Department, see a report from Shortland to Clark of such

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a negotiation in the Tauranga district, NANZ, Misc 17 1, Edward Shortland Letterbook 1842–1854, Shortland to Clark, 21 November 1842. 53 Belgrave, Historical Frictions, 295–96 for an example of non-cooperation stymieing land deals in the mid-1850s; and Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 177–79 for Grey backing off a purchase in Taranaki. See AIM, MS 464, Alexander Macdonald, Reminiscences 1840c.1910, 54–62 for criticism of Grey’s use of pre-emption to secure advantage over Maori. 54 NANZ, G31, Outward Despatches to Lt. Gov. Eyre from Gov. General Grey 1847–1853, Grey to Eyre, 13 June 1850; Hickford, Lords of the Land, 198. 55 Ward, National Overview, 18; Ward, Unsettled History, 111–12. 56 Ward, National Overview, 47–48; Ward, Unsettled History, 114. 57 Ward, National Overview, 58–59. 58 For the Waitara case and the outbreak of war in 1860, see Danny Keenan, Wars without End: The Land Wars in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Rosedale, NZ: Penguin, 2009), 167, 171–74, 185, 253. Mark Hickford. “Framing and Reframing the Agon. Contesting Narratives and Counternarratives on Maori Property Rights and Political Constitutionalism 1840–1861,” in Belmessous, ed., Native Claims. Indigenous Law Against Empire 1500–1920, 152–81; Belgrave, Historical Frictions, 233–40. For a fascinating insight into the way anxiety that this decision created for Gore Browne because of the political furor it created, see Charlotte Macdonald, “Power That Hurts. Harriet Gore Browne and the Perplexities of Living Inside Empire,” Itineario 42, no. 1 (2018): 16–32. 59 Ward, National Overview, 58, 52. Mantell cited in O’ Malley, Beyond the Colonial Frontier, 55–56. Edward Mantell later became disillusioned with the failure of the government to follow through on their promises. But this referred to the period after Grey had left. The case of the negotiations with the Ngai Tahu in the South Island is a good example of the contingent nature of the purchase process. Negotiations extended throughout the late 1840s, and the issues never fully resolved. For an account of this purchase, see Belgrave, Historical Frictions, 151–73; Evison, The Long Dispute. Maori Land Rights and European Colonisation in Southern New Zealand (Christchurch, 1997), 177–90. 60 Ward, National Overview, 21–22. 61 Belich, Making Peoples, 229. 62 Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 2005), 16–17, 31–33, 119–20, 148, 183–97. Keenan, Wars Without End, 289. 63 See Belich, Making Peoples, .232–34; Belgrave, Historical Frictions, 74, 208; Ward, National Overview, 21. See Salesa, Racial Crossings, 181–82 for the break in continuity provided by the Maori Wars of the 1860s. 64 Cited in Ward, National Overview, 28, 57. See also Ward, Unsettled History, 117–18; Belich, Making Peoples, 230–31; Ward, A Show of Justice, Chap. VII; Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 443–52. 65 AIM, MS 459, Henry Sewell, Journal, Vol. I, 24 February 1861, 230, 3 October, 305–8, 20 October 1861, 315–32; W.P. Morrell, British Colonial Policy in the Mid-Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 251–55; S.D. Carpenter, “History, Law and Land: The Languages of Native Policy in the New Zealand General Assembly 1858– 1862” (MA thesis, Massey University, Massey, 2008), 26–28, 51–52. 66 Vincent O’Malley, “English Law and the Maori Response: A  Case Study from the Runanga System in Northland 1861–65,” Journal of the Vol. 1, Polynesian Society 16, no. 1 (March 2007): 17–18 for details of the plan. 67 O’Malley, Beyond the Colonial Frontier, 81–83, 86; Sewell, Journal, Vol. I, 20 October 1861, 316–18. His appointment of Clarke also reveals that he was not necessarily the malevolent schemer he has been made out to be. 68 O’Malley, Beyond the Colonial Frontier, 83–89, 115–18 for an intelligent discussion of these issues that conclude with O’Malley confessing uncertainty about how to assess Grey’s motives. See also his “English Law and the Maori Response,” 18–30. 69 Sewell, Journal, Vol. 2, 25 December 1861, 14, 20 April 1862, 28.

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70 Ibid., 97–99 for the Native Courts Act. On the events of this period, see Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 475–83. 71 Sorrenson, “The Settlement of New Zealand from 1835,” in Havemann, ed., Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, 167; Ward, National Overview, 7; Banner, Possessing the Pacific; Keenan, Wars without End, 256–59; Belgrave, Historical Frictions, 233, 271; Ward, A Show of Justice, 182, 184–85. 72 Ward, A Show of Justice, 180–81; Salesa, Racial Crossings, 208–209. 73 For confiscations, see Richard Boast and Richard S. Hill, eds., Raupatu: The Confiscation of Maori Land (Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 2009). For a detailed study of confiscation in one area, see Judith Binney, Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820–1921 (Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 2009). Confiscations were handled by the Compensation Court, which was supposed to take customary law into account when deciding the extent of Maori displacement. But this was soon forgotten under the pressure to settle white colonists on the land. And the complexities of native tenure continued to befuddle this court as it had all previous investigations before. See Keenan, Wars without End, 292–94. Sewell, Journal, Vol. II, 8 November 1863, 216–19; Salesa, Racial Crossings, 111, 228. 74 But Sewell was in favor of individuation of tenure because he believed that it was “the most important step towards . . . saving them” but not through the process of confiscation. See Hickford, Lords of the Earth, 293. For the rush at native lands remark there is no date, see Sewell, Journal, Vol. II, 123; for the acceptance of confiscation, see 2 August 1863, 187; Ward, A Show of Justice, 118–21, for the persistent support for conciliation combined with the surrender to the warlike mood even among the missionaries. 75 Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 519–24; Keenan, Wars without End, 257; Sewell, Journal, Volume II, 17 November 1863, 229–43. Salesa, Racial Crossings, 179 for the emergence of the discourse of racial violence during the wars. 76 As noted earlier, the 1861 edition was essentially the 1841 edition with Appendices added selected chapters where his thinking had changed. Significantly, most of those were the chapters that involved issues relating to the native peoples. 77 Merivale, Colonization and Colonies, 511, 513, 518–19, 521–23. And it is telling that in 1861, Merivale was reduced to looking to master and servant relationships in South Africa, where Grey was governor, as the best hope for racial amalgamation.

6 VIOLENCE AND THE COMING OF COLONIAL ORDER

Introduction The colonial violence that pre-occupied humanitarians, and that they sought to overcome by a humane policy agenda, was not violence administered by the state. The sentiment expressed by Sir George Arthur in his reflections on policy in Tasmania that Aboriginal violence should be met with extreme restraint by the imperial power was never contemplated as a formal policy. State-controlled violence remained an unquestioned right, even if there were often disagreements as to when and at what level it was appropriately enforced. The kind of violence that preoccupied policy makers was the everyday violence that accompanied colonization and that was practiced outside of the formal channels of state-sanctioned coercion. It was an individual or group vigilante-style violence that was endemic to imperial frontiers.1 The detailed research of Australian historians has shown that this kind of violence was particularly important in the dispossession of the Australian Aboriginal people. Total estimates of the numbers killed by this kind of violence are impossible to know. When the issue first attracted the attention of Australian historians, the initial assessment was in the range of 20,000 for the whole of Australia in the nineteenth century. But individual case studies have established that such an estimate is far too low. In Queensland alone, for example, research has suggested that over 28,000 were killed by settler violence between c. 1830 and c. 1898, and another 40,000 by the Native Mounted Police in the period from 1850 to 1904. And similar kinds of figures were replicated throughout the rest of Australia.2 I shall not, therefore, detail the scale or extent of this violence in Australia. It is an established fact. My concern turns more to understanding the cultural and social dynamic of settler-led and -initiated violence because the early nineteenth century was when the fact of violence was both recognized and ultimately normalized in

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imperial culture.3 In what follows I shall discuss the main elements of colonial violence at this historical moment. After a brief consideration of the structural conditions of colonial violence and the relationship between the state and violence, I will address the main focus of my interest, the psychology of colonial violence. What were the impulses to settler violence that de-civilized the settler and brutalized the indigene? And how did imperial culture cope with the contradiction between the barbarity empire produced and the imperial power’s claim to occupy a superior rung on the scale of civilization? I am interested in understanding the historical context to the psychology that underlay the colonial violence and the various narrative and other techniques that enabled it in the public discourse.

The structures of violence From an economic perspective, colonial violence reflected the clash between the forces of capitalist development and Indigenous systems of land usage, a contest between a pastoral economy designed to supply Britain’s expanding industrial sector and the economies practiced by the Indigenous peoples. The demand for pastoral land was insatiable. Once the Blue Mountains in New South Wales were crossed in 1813, the fertile plains on the other side offered an immense grazing land for sheep and cattle. A small convict colony under constant threat from starvation suddenly became a potential space to relieve overpopulation at home and feed the endless demand of its woolen mills. Within two years Governor Macquarie had caused a road to be built over the route. The way was now open for free settlers to flood into the vast spaces of the interior. The scale and modulations in colonial violence may be tied to the pace and rhythm of the intrusions of pastoralists into Indigenous lands. Pastoral frontiers quickly filled up. In Van Diemen’s Land, the pastoral phase began in 1817 and was completed within a decade. It was during the installation of pastoral regimes that serious killings of Aboriginal peoples occurred, as they were cleared off the land. And once this had happened, large-scale killings of Aboriginal people tended to diminish as government regulation authenticated pastoralists land occupations, although individual killings continued. In southeast Australia, for example, this may be observed from the late 1840s.4 The Australian frontier was formed under particularly anarchic conditions. With the breakout from the coastal littoral after 1820, streams of pastoralists poured through, voracious for greener pastures, and rapidly moving beyond the effective reach of government. One aspect of the story of Australia was the lagging effort by government to follow the waves of squatters pushing forward the frontier. There was, therefore, a literal lawlessness to the frontier at this moment. As a settler in the Port Philip area told George Robinson, “we are on the border and can do as we like.” This sentiment was fully acted upon in the 1840s. The Port Phillip protectors encountered serious culture shock as they encountered settlers with Aboriginal skulls mounted over their doorways or used as a shaving mug. In the absence of a properly constructed system of law, an unregulated violence filled the gap. Under

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these conditions lawlessness was a substitute for the law until the real law could be installed with its panoply of hallowed procedures and precedents, and bureaucratized machinery of enforcement. But that took time. The city of Adelaide had been established two years before it organized a proper police force.5 In this context, sexual violence was rife. Sexual exploitation of Indigenous women was the main cause that triggered violence. A  good illustration of this element of colonial violence is found in reports that Matthew Moorhouse submitted to Grey in 1843. He placed frontier violence in two contexts—both of which emphasized the intimate, personal nature of the phenomenon. There was the anxious fear of shepherds alone in their isolated huts. And there was the often related, sexual relations that were common between such workers and Aboriginal women. Since these relations were usually economic, often with the complicity of Aboriginal men, the transactions were ripe for conflict, all of which Moorhouse detailed from specific events that he witnessed when accompanying the Rufus River expeditionary force in 1841. As that party returned to Adelaide, he found it impossible to control the sex trade between the shepherds and the local women, even to the extent of an episode of gang rape. Moorhouse noted that no Indigenous woman was safe. And he attributed the recent violence against the overland parties to these sexual transactions.6 It was not just sexual violence that illustrate the blurred distinction between personal violence and the law. Early urban settlements were fluid open spaces where all sorts of social configurations—including inter-racial ones—were possible. In 1839, a tent city grew up on the south bank of the Yarra in the burgeoning settlement of Melbourne which not only housed migrant indigenes from the outback but also recently arrived white immigrants who used it as a transit point. Until municipal councils began to legislate against such “nuisances,” arbitrary, personal violence was readily to hand to be the “law.” Thus, the case of Dr. Farquahar McCrea, an early Melbourne settler who had an Aboriginal man tied up in the street and flogged on the charge of robbery. The good doctor administered this punishment himself, not only because the forces of “law and order” were not yet established in Melbourne but because this was “a particular form of disciplinary violence . . . which Europeans believed it was their right to administer.”7 Away from the infant urban centers, closeness and intimacy were even more important aspects of the frontier experience. The Europeans engaged in the pastoral economy lived in close social proximity to their white compatriots and to the elusive, threatening Aboriginal people. George Charles Hawker, who owned runs in South Australia, recorded in his diary for the first six months of 1842 constant contact with local farmers and officials. Moorhouse, the protector, was a frequent visitor, and in May of that year, the governor himself, George Grey, paid a visit. In the meantime, Hawker’s attention was also focused on his uneasy relationship with the Aboriginal people. In March alone, for example, he had four encounters with indigenes, all of which involved the threat of violence. On March 3, three native people appeared at the station and threatened his hut keeper, who frightened them off when he produced his gun. On the 11th, he received a report that his shepherds

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were being threatened by local Aboriginal people, and police were called to conduct a search. A week later, an attempt was made to steal sheep and two stockmen were attacked. On the evening of March 30, shots were heard from the outstation; he and his brother went to investigate and found a large party of Aboriginal people attacking one of his huts. The same sort of catalog of incidents continued through April and May of the same year.8 Proximity, intimacy, and violence continued to characterize race relations throughout the century, particularly the vast spaces of the interior. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century in Western Australia “violence bred from crosscultural proximity was a quotidian event.” In 1891, for example, a mixed-race stockman, named James Coppin, was murdered in the presence of a party that included several people well known to him, among whom was his own Aboriginal fatherin-law. An Aboriginal man named Cooperabiddy had targeted Coppin because he had a gun and was employed by a man named Dennis Bresnahan, against whom he had a grievance. Cooperabiddy stole Coppin’s gun with the intention of using it to shoot Bresnahan. Before he could do that Bresnahan got to him first, and Cooperabiddy was captured and sentenced to be hanged for the murder of Coppin. This was not the first time that Bresnahan had violent interactions with people known to him. He had a reputation for violent behavior toward his employees. He had participated in frontier fights, resulting in deaths of five Aboriginal men all of whom were known to Bresnahan. In one of those altercations, Bresnahan came across a man named Nanamurra, whom he shot dead while running away. Bresnahan knew Nanamurra and claimed he was a cattle thief. Bresnahan had no legal authority to detain, let alone shoot, Nanamurra. But his familiarity with a supposed cattle thief sufficed to clear Bresnahan of shooting a man without being authorized as a special constable, as was required by law. Thus, the theme of lawlessness functioning as the law continued into an era when formally constructed state institutions existed. But what needs to be emphasized here is the way frontier violence was as likely to emerge from social proximity and entanglement as from a space occupied by distant strangers separated by the gulf of cultural divide.9

The state and violence The colonial state’s relationship to the kind of violence described earlier was equivocal and ambiguous. The state did not yet have the ability to exercise a monopoly over violence, and its weakness in this respect persisted fairly late into the century. Australia was heavily regulated but was equally heavily reliant on the volunteer service of settlers, and even of convicts to carry out its will. The ability of the state to enforce its policies was gravely compromised by this reality. There were times when it was convenient for the state to leave the exercise of violence to the informal actions of settlers. But there were other times when its representatives were genuinely shocked and frustrated over the vigilante violence that marked settler culture. The weakness of the colonial state was demonstrated by two elements in

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particular: the ease with which events could spiral out of its control and the ease with which perpetrators of violence impeded the will of the state. An example of the first condition is illustrated by the episode known as the Rufus River massacre that occurred at the junction between the Murray and Rufus Rivers in South Australia in the southern winter of 1841. Between April 1838 and April 1841 the numbers of livestock drives from Sydney to the burgeoning market of Adelaide skyrocketed. As the number of drives increased, so did the causes for conflict. The rituals of conciliation that had been developed in this region by explorers and overlanders were ignored. Incidents of sexual exploitation and exchange multiplied. There was growing resistance to the drives from the Maraura people, who launched a small-scale war against overland parties. They forged alliances with other groups, such as the Yorta Yorta people, and employed effective military tactics developing battle orders that maximized the advantages their mastery of spear throwing afforded over the slow-loading and inaccurate muskets of the British. Serious casualties were suffered by several overland groups. This was a delicate moment for the newly arrived governor, George Grey, who inherited a financial crisis and the scandal of a punitive expedition that had illegally hanged two Milenmura men to avenge the deaths of the survivors of the shipwrecked Maria. Grey was anxious to avoid a repeat of that debacle. He was also under pressure from the settlers to provide protection for these overlanders. Grey was reluctant to do this, asserting that overlanders risking this journey did so on their own terms. But he ultimately dispatched a party to the Rufus River in June 1841 to escort an arriving overlander party.10 Grey hedged his reluctance by issuing lengthy and explicit directions to the group in an attempt to minimize the chance of conflict. His instructions bear the seriousness of sincerity combined with an air of naive unreality. Grey wanted to auto-control the actions of O’Halloran, the police inspector, commanding the unit, dictating the tactics he was to use. He reminded O’Halloran that the purpose of the party was to prevent any conflict between the overlanders and the local Aboriginal tribes. O’Halloran was prohibited from engaging in distant pursuit of Aboriginals. The party was to establish friendly communications with them, to inquire into the causes of the conflicts, and determine “whether there is any reason to suppose that the Aborigines . . . have been maltreated by runaway convicts or persons proceeding overland.” Aboriginal people who had committed crimes were to be treated as “subjects of the Queen” and were not subject to indiscriminate reprisal. All proceedings were to follow those that the “Laws of England would authorize against persons who had been guilty of similar atrocities.”11 Grey did not prohibit all kinds of offensive action against the local people. He authorized the taking of hostages to secure information and serve as surety for the protection of overland parties. In an attempt to bolster the possibility of a conciliatory rather than a punitive response, Grey attached Protector Moorhouse to the group. Grey hoped to establish a precedent for negotiated relationships that would break the pattern of violence. He wanted to ensure that Moorhouse felt free to assert the authority that he possessed as protector. Moorhouse was charged

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with trying to establish conciliatory contacts with the local people, and Grey also prescribed the methods and strategies he should use. If it proved necessary to take hostages, Moorhouse was to instruct O’Halloran to release one or two with the intention that they themselves become interlocutors, and he was to let these men know that they owed their freedom to his influence. It was one of the functions of protectors to establish trust relationships with the Aboriginal people, and Grey imagined this would happen in this case. Moorhouse was to assure them that he was their friend and “to explain to them that if they are at any time aggrieved they can by applying to you they can [sic] attain immediate and ample redress.” Although O’Halloran felt hemmed in by Grey’s pacific instructions, the velvet glove contained a steel fist. If hostages were released, they were to carry the message that the safety of the remaining hostages depended on the behavior of the tribesmen toward the overlanders. Still, the bias of these instructions is clear. Grey was concerned to avoid a repeat of the Maria expedition the previous year, which O’Halloran had also commanded.12 In this particular case, the results were somewhat satisfactory for Grey. There was no conflict with the local tribes. But this was because the overlander group had been badly mauled a day before they met the group from Adelaide. Still, it seems to have enabled Grey to encourage a culture of restraint for these quasi-military expeditions. Shortly afterwards news was received of another party approaching the Rufus area, and an outcry again arose in Adelaide to send another escort party. Grey reluctantly agreed. This time he put Matthew Moorhouse in command to emphasize the priority of creating conciliatory relations. Moorhouse was issued the same sort of instructions that Grey had applied to the earlier party and was ordered to cede control to the police commandant only in the event of imminent danger. This was Grey’s boldest and most explicit effort to establish peaceful racial exchange on this fraught frontier. But it all went horribly wrong. Indeed, it was this group led by the Protector of Aborigines that resulted in the largest massacre in the history of South Australia. The enterprise was probably doomed from the start. Moorhouse and his party were shadowed by the Aboriginal tribes from the moment they left Adelaide—testimony to the widespread alliance that the Yorta Yorta of the Murray region had negotiated. As they moved up country, there were increasing signs of hostility. Indigenous people refused to come into camp, some of their sheep were speared, and Moorhouse was warned of impending attack. On August  26, at the Rufus River they bumped into the overland party coming from Sydney. Within an hour of the two parties meeting, they were confronted with a large group of Aboriginal people, including women and children. Moorhouse made an attempt to meet with them. But his interpreters were afraid and did not speak the same language. So this rather feeble attempt at conciliation failed before it had even begun. Moorhouse feared attack and turned over command to Inspector Shaw. Before Shaw had made any moves, however, the overlanders who were on the other side river opened fire and general fighting began. After fifteen minutes it was all over with as many as fifty Aboriginal people were dead.13

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These events illustrate how the desire to avoid conflict was quickly swamped by the willingness of the overlanders to resort to force. It was symptomatic of the weak authority of the colonial state to control and confront violence of its own subjects, let alone establish a regime where some kind of conciliatory process could be initiated. In theory, early nineteenth-century governors had despotic powers: in reality, their power, over their own agents, let alone groups of overlanders, was severely constrained, as some instances from Grey’s governorship of South Australia vividly illustrate.14 The first involved a shepherd by the name of Skelton, who admitted shooting an Aboriginal person as he climbed out of a sheepfold belonging to a Mr. Hughes. The local magistrate was George Hawker, a large sheep owner and member of a pioneer family. A  gentleman pastoralist, Hawker came from a well-established English family—his father was an admiral—and he was a graduate of Cambridge University. He arrived in the colony in 1840, and by 1844 had acquired some 5,000 sheep and leased half a million acres at what became Bungaree, now the site of a fancy resort near Wilpena Pound. After some unspecified, but no doubt bloody, conflict with local Aboriginal people, Hawker settled down to become wealthy and important. Elected to the Legislative Assembly in the 1850s and 1860s, he occupied a variety of official positions. Due to be knighted for his services to empire, he died before he could receive the accolade.15 Hughes was much less prominent person, and nothing of note remains about him. But he regarded himself as more of a victim than the dead indigene. He had written to the colonial secretary complaining about the inconvenience of following legal procedures when Aboriginal people were caught thieving: “I feel certain that in simple self defense we shall be compelled to shoot more of them as we are continually annoyed by their endeavouring to steal the sheep.” Hawker, the justice of the peace, clearly agreed with him. He took Skelton’s deposition that confessed to the death, although Skelton claimed that he thought he was shooting a dog. Hawker promptly released him on the grounds that the local people had been warned by Matthew Moorhouse about sheep stealing! Hawker evidently saw the lowly office of Justice of the Peace as a legal deus ex machina. The attorney general noted that Hawker had not followed proper procedure in taking evidence and reminded him that “no magistrate is entitled to discharge on his own impressions of the guilt or innocence of the party whereby the gravest crimes might escape judicial inquiry.” He ordered that Skelton be remanded, and he was committed for trial but was released when the key witness for the prosecution disappeared. It was assumed that he had “either perished from want or have met his death at the hands of the natives being a fellow shepherd of Skelton.” But, it was just as likely that the witness had disappeared precisely to avoid justice being served.16 The second example of the impotence of the colonial state was more shocking and more complicated. A group of shepherds attacked an Aboriginal encampment in response to the theft of sheep from a run owned by a Mr. Hallett. It was an affair that immediately gained the attention of Moorhouse and Grey in what seemed to be a blatant case of unprovoked violence. But it proved impossible to construct a

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comprehensible narrative of events partly because Hallett colluded at every step to impede the inquiry into the prime suspects, named Carter and Spratt. Hallett was himself a magistrate and his actions were a clear example of how the officials of the state at the local level could undermine the policy that the colonial authorities wanted to be implemented.17 The initial evidence had been collected by another magistrate, Henry Price, who, the records suggest, tried to do his job honestly. But it proved impossible to determine from the white witnesses the numbers of Aboriginals killed or the numbers injured. The news of the affair quickly spread throughout the Aboriginal communities, however. Moorhouse heard about it from a group of Aboriginals over fifty miles away from the site. Their knowledge seemed to be more accurate than the colonial record. From the beginning the settlers presented strange and convoluted stories that can only be interpreted as blatant bravado or designed to confuse and nullify any attempt to bring them to justice. Carter’s first story to Price so horrified the magistrate that he could hardly listen to it. Carter had detained one of the reputed thieves, and although instructed not to harm him, he had shot and killed the man in cold blood. In addition, he admitted to Price that he had also killed another man and a pregnant woman, adding the gory detail that he had set a bull dog on the woman. The dog had torn open her womb, and Carter had fed the fetus to the dog. Giving testimony under oath, however, Carter denied everything and “he now swears that he saw no dead natives.” Price could only make sense of this contradiction as an “instance of . . . [a] cowardly bravado amongst the settlers of Carter’s class” that was all too common and left him not “surprised at the . . . folly and depravity that such conduct exhibited.” And although Carter had made similarly incriminating statements to another man, he refused to make them under oath.18 By October 1844 the Adelaide authorities were trying to disentangle this affair. The attorney general ordered local magistrates to follow proper procedures and present witnesses to a Grand Jury. But the local authorities were clearly not inclined to assist the higher authorities to bring anyone to trial. George Hawker sent the attorney general three depositions (which have disappeared from the archives) from other men present at the incident, stating how the evidence fully corroborates the evidence of Carter and Spratt . . . [that the] blacks refusing to give up the sheep that they had taken and [that the actual conflict] . . . consisted of the throwing of a few spears and waddies by the natives, which was retaliated by some shots in the air by the whites who appeared to have acted with great moderation. But what of the fact that in his original account of the event, to Henry Price, Carter had boasted of the most gruesome atrocities? Hawker dealt with the gruesome original account Carter had given to Price by attributing this evidence to a report from Matthew Moorhouse, brazenly asserting that “if it rests on the testimony of the Protector of Aborigines it is at great variance with the unanimous

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opinion of the bench.” This letter was sent at exactly the same moment that Price retreated from his original declaration of Carter’s evidence as true but which he now attributed to the culture of exaggeration and bravado that ran through the lower-class settlers. It seems that Price had been squared by his colleagues to be silent about the atrocities.19 The obstruction of the law by its local representatives infuriated George Grey. Most of the records of Grey’s activities in South Australia and elsewhere that remain are limited to a notation on a memo or a short note. Typically, these jottings are unusually precise, with no corrections, suggesting it was written by a man who knew his mind and was sharply economical about expressing it. But this event produced an outpouring of anger from the governor. Three pages of manuscript were covered with angry slashes of his quill where he substituted one word or phrase for another. Unlike all other writings by Grey I have encountered, it contained grammatical errors as if he could not get the words down fast enough to express his anger. He saw right through Hawker’s evasions. His letter, Grey wrote, is not a document that should have emanated from a magistrate and it [sic] one that may require further notice. I do not think that he has acted with discretion in making at all [sic] some of the statements he has made and they certainly have not been made with the degree of cautious consideration which should characterise the . . . opinions of a magistrate. He then zeroed in on Hawker’s fatuous excuse about the conflicting evidence gathered from Carter about how he had killed the victims. “How after this,” Grey noted, “Mr. Hawker and the bench could give it as his and their opinion that Mr. Carter had not varied in his statements I am at a loss to conceive.”20 Grey’s fury must also have been stoked by his awareness of his relative impotence. The Adelaide officials continued to press for a resolution of this case. Throughout November and December of 1844 the wheels of justice were grinding in their rusty, jolting way. Grey continued to comment on the documents, noting the obfuscations of Carter and the rest, hoping that if “the proceedings at the trial are carefully matched the truth will be elicited.” Moorhouse continued to make his arduous trips into the interior trying to find viable evidence and to construct an accurate record and determine how many Aboriginal people had been killed. What the wheels of justice needed was bodies. But they were nowhere to be found. Nor were the local magistrates inclined to look very hard. When Moorhouse went up to the area on Christmas eve with the specific aim of seeking out human remains, none of the local magistrates would accompany him. The Aboriginal man charged with the original theft took him to the spot where the conflict had occurred and pointed to the place he believed the bodies were buried. No bodies were found, but nearby was evidence of a fire with bits of teeth and bones in the charcoal. It was fairly surmised that the bodies had been dug up and the evidence burned.21 This was enough to bring Carter and others in for examination. And so began the final act of resistance to the forces of the law. Hallett, Carter’s employer, refused

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to answer the examining magistrate’s questions. The police commissioner who conducted the examination noted that Hallett seemed to know more of the case than he was willing to disclose. As indeed, he clearly did. Hallett, like Hawker, a justice of the peace, refused to testify on the grounds of self-incrimination. At this point, with some accounting clearly in prospect, the main suspect and the man who presumably knew everything, Carter, the shepherd, absconded. He was reported to be in the south of the colony. Grey ordered that every effort be made to find and apprehend him. Later he was reported to be near to Port Phillip; application was made to the authorities there to arrest him. But then he slipped over to Van Diemen’s Land—a haven for those who wanted to disappear off the official radar screen. Still Grey pursued him, authorizing funds for a police constable to track him down. But evidently he failed, for at this point, Carter and the case of the affray at Mr. Hallett’s disappeared from the records, freeing George Hawker and the others to go on to live full and honorable lives.22 There are other examples that could be cited to confirm and reinforce the examples listed earlier. Both Matthew Moorhouse and Henry Price, the magistrate mentioned earlier, have left records of their attempts to give some meaning to the idea of British justice.23 But the general lesson was always the same: settler groups were able to constrain state action and nullify the law. The paralysis of state authority reflected the reality of command unreliability throughout the bureaucratic hierarchy. Sir Richard Bourke, governor of New South Wales, found it impossible to assert his authority over the adventurers from Van Diemen’s Land who had set up camp at Port Philip in 1835, negotiated a treaty with the local Kulin people, and established their sheep runs. He quickly sent a government official, Mr. Simpson, with specific instructions to install a conciliatory policy toward the local indigenes. There were fine plans to create model villages on the pattern of the Kat River settlement in the Cape. But within a few months, violence had broken out when a settler known for his hostility toward Aboriginal people seized land without compensation and was attacked. A  punitive expedition was put together and a massacre occurred. Simpson did not even bother to inquire as to the extent of the massacre, nor move against the perpetrators. When he was reprimanded for being so passive, he responded in effect that he could do nothing to control the actions of the settlers. Bourke tried again. He appointed Captain Lonsdale as magistrate with specific instructions to investigate, arrest, and send for trial those responsible. But Lonsdale did no better than Simpson. He was stymied by concocted false stories, and by evidence that was degraded by the passage of time. Although he did make some arrests, it was to no avail. The evidence had disappeared, and the witnesses fled to Van Diemen’s Land to avoid giving evidence. Lonsdale was succeeded by Foster Fyans, who had very different inclinations and defied official policy on the protection of Aboriginal hunting grounds and endorsed punitive action against those suspected of sheep theft.24 The colonial record is full of such stories that make a mockery of the stated aim of policy makers like Grey to use the law to build structures of racial equality in empire; they reveal the futility of using the law as an arbiter between settlers and

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Indigenous peoples. But it would not be quite right to conclude that those stories rip aside the mask of liberal hypocrisy. I think they suggest equally how the political agenda of people like Grey and the utopian hopes and expectations of people like Matthew Moorhouse were wrecked at the mundane level of frontier social relations; it was at this level of historical experience that the “contradictions” of liberalism were most blatantly revealed.

Salutary terror and normalization of violence When Lieutenant Governor Sir George Arthur invited comments from the community of Van Diemen’s Land on the “problem” of the Aboriginal people, a common recommendation was salutary terror. It was a popular Victorian notion—applied to spheres as widely separate as child discipline and convict punishment—that to administer a sharp dose of pain would lead to the long-term gain of reforming behavior. Under this line of reasoning, the barbarism of violence—a barbarism that formed the central critique of prior imperial policy by humanitarian actors like Arthur—was turned into its opposite. Violence was now argued to be a civilizing force, not to be shunned, but to be accepted because of the disciplinary lessons it taught. Arthur was not the first to use this notion. It entered into imperial policy discourse in 1812, when John Graham wrote to Lord Liverpool from the Eastern Cape that he had just administered to the Xhosa a dose of violence that would evoke from them “a proper degree of terror and [thus] respect.”25 The idea of salutary terror was present from the beginning in the occupation of Australia. David Collins, Philip’s second-in-command, wrote that “sanguinary punishments” would be necessary until the Indigenous people were reconciled to the “deprivation of those parts of the harbor [i.e. Sydney] that we occupy.” His remarks were more regretful than triumphalist, but it was an argument that was frequently heard from this point onward.26 When Governor James Stirling of Western Australia reported on the Pinjarra massacre in October 1834 when thirty Aboriginal people were killed, he emphasized that they had initiated the conflict and, thus, his campaign was an act of salutary terror. ‘ “My hope,” he explained, “is that it may impress them with the conviction of our power to defend ourselves, and to avenge violence and restrain them from attacks on settlement.” Stirling considered himself a humanitarian, and he certainly had a sophisticated understanding that colonial violence was rooted in the settler experience rather than the character of the Aboriginal people. But just like Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, he found himself befuddled by the indigenes and increasingly alarmed by the attitude of the settlers. So, when he set out on the journey that resulted in the massacre, he was careful to put together a civilian force, rather than a military one, in the hope that this would discourage violence. Once the violence had occurred, however, he obfuscated its extent and took care to disguise from his superiors the fact that women and children had been killed.27 By this time the idea of salutary terror had been widely deployed throughout imperial culture. It was a notion that moved into the public discourse as a familiar

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trope to explain and excuse violence. Thus in response to a settler who protested about the arbitrary punishments handed out in the Maria episode, the local colonial secretary, George Ball, explained how extraordinary evils require extraordinary remedies. No one in the colony is more anxious to protect the Aborigines from wanton cruelty or abuse than the Governor is . . . but in the case in point he felt it necessary, for the protection of the lives and property of Europeans who are about to settle in the neighbourhood of the tribe . . . to authorize the Commissioner of Police to take the extreme step of putting to death the principal culprits if he could clearly fix guilt upon them . . . Major O’Halloran has executed the painful . . . trust . . . with very great prudence and discretion as well as with decision and firmness which is likely to have a most salutary effect upon the other members of the tribe who witnessed the execution and were aware of the guilt of the sufferers . . . [and now] natives will be deterred by the example which they have lately seen from wanton aggression on Europeans.28 Throughout the nineteenth century salutary terror moved from being an excuse and a justification to a central place in the narrative of violence on the Australian frontier. It was integrated into public policy. Public execution of Aboriginal people continued in New South Wales and Queensland after it was abolished for whites and was specifically justified by its salutary effects on the Indigenous mind. Indeed, public execution of Aboriginals was re-introduced in Western Australia in 1871 as a specific expression of the virtues of salutary terror. In Western Australia offenders were to be punished on the site of their crimes. And “public” execution meant that members of the culprit’s tribe were to attend the event, as a reminder to the collectivity that white man’s justice was inescapable. These were old rituals of salutary terror. The supposed guilty parties in the Maria case, for example, were hanged at the grave site of the murdered Europeans.29 Even more pervasively, salutary terror entered into the story of how the Australian wilderness was tamed, and as part of the civilizing process itself. Henry Melville, a member of the South Australian mounted police, reminisced in the 1880s how creating the conditions for mutual understanding required that “our sable friends understand that it was more to their interest to be on good terms with us than at war, in fact make them fear us, [as] the first step necessary in humanising the savage.” It was necessary to be cruel in order to be kind. Melville claimed to have gained the confidence of the Barngarla people by “never breaking your word with them. If I promised a darkie a thrashing I gave it him, with his other earnings, always treating them fairly never cruelly.” And a similar conception of the civilizing process was to be found in a conversation Henry Sewell recorded in New Zealand in 1860, where the prevailing sentiment was that the Maori needed “one sharp lesson. Then you will be able to apply measures for ameliorating their social conditions, not before.” These asides were part of a wider integration of colonial violence into the culture of empire that had come into being by the end of the century.30

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The violence of salutary terror was also normalized by treating it as part of the sport of establishing a life on the frontier. Johnson Frederick Hayward was a respected sheep run manager who in his later years retired to a tranquil life in Bath. When he arrived in South Australia he (later) claimed he intended to follow the humanitarian playbook and deal with the Indigenous people through “fair treatment and kindness.” But persistent theft and the murder of at least one shepherd soon taught him the folly of such hopes. His solution was to embark on a systematic campaign of salutary terror. It was necessary that each local group of the Ngadjuri people “be terrified before their depredations [of sheep rustling] ceased.” From the comfort of Bath, Hayward saw this as part of the adventure of empire: these campaigns against the niggers gave a zest to the wild life I had . . . there was an excitement in this ‘nigger’ tracking that was not wholly disagreeable [which] . . . I grew to like, and in after years to deplore that no such excitement remained.31 Hayward was an apt example of how the administration of law was personalized. After capturing a sheep thief, he convened a drum head court of justice and sentenced the culprit (if such he was) to twenty-four lashes. Posterity was assured, however, that only a light whip was used and the victim hardly flinched at all until the final lashes. This action was clearly illegal and it illustrates again the ambiguous relations between the colonial state and colonial violence. Indeed, there was an implicit contrast between this kind of rough frontier “justice” and the cumbersome and ineffectual justice of the state. Hayward told the story of how even when he had captured a thief and brought him before the magistrate, he was released for lack of proof. This kind of experience—whether it was real or imagined—was grist to the mill of settler skepticism toward the state and its officers.32 Throughout the nineteenth century, the normalization of terror entered into the matrix of intimacy and personal relations between whites and Aboriginal peoples. Indeed, it came to be regarded as the foundation for healthy and positive race relations. Take the case of Edward Curr, a second-generation settler.33 At the tender age of nineteen Edward was sent off to administer a sheep farm in Victoria, where he was in constant contact with the local Aboriginals. It is clear that he was intimately connected with the violence of the early Victorian frontier. He was a member of expeditions that involved arbitrary killings by the Native Police. He had his own tense encounters that could easily have erupted into violence, although he never admitted to initiating any such event. The tensions of the frontier evoked in him a range of emotions from fear and anxiety, to fascinated interest to pity and suspicion. Edward Curr had humanitarian sentiments; indeed, he became a genuine authority on Aboriginal culture and society. Still, embedded in his belief system was the notion of salutary terror, and it is captured by a story told in his memoir. On one expedition to curb sheep theft, an Aboriginal man was captured whom Curr knew. He was taken to trial in Melbourne, and Curr let him think he was to be hanged with the object of frightening him and teaching him a lesson about theft, which would be transmitted to his tribe. Curr arranged for him to be

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released after a while since no interpreter could be found to allow the trial to go forward. But he failed to tell the man this and allowed him to believe his release was due to Curr’s benevolence. After which, Curr reported, “he and I were the best of friends,” and the man’s tribe was also reformed from sheep stealing as a result of the intimidation that Curr called “the little police exhibition.”34

The psychology of colonial violence: fear For collective violence to be integrated into the perpetrator’s belief system, it needs a structure of meaning, a framework of conviction that permits and sanctions the killing as necessary. Perpetrators must be able to bring their violent actions into conformity with the wider value system with which they identify.35 There was no fully elaborated structure of meaning for colonial violence in the early nineteenth century. It is obviously true that there was a series of racial assumptions about where colonial peoples stood on the scale of civilization that allowed them to be dehumanized. But these did not sanction violence against them in the same way that Nazi ideology enabled false reasoning to justify the “Final Solution.” Indeed, colonial violence had to overcome several hurdles if it was to be integrated into dominant value systems. It had to reckon with the presence of humanitarian discourse; it had to surmount the place of empathy as a source of social connection in the culture of the time. And it had to overcome a racial ideology that proposed Indigenous people as possessing a common humanity with the invaders. These were serious obstacles, and their presence explains the various strategies that defined the psychology of colonial violence at this particular time. Let us start at the social level. The frontier context of the early nineteenthcentury British Empire was crucial to the culture of the settler colonies. Each frontier, of course, was different, but the common element was the image of the hardy life of the borderlands. A hardy life was also a dangerous life, and beyond the small urban communities lay the vast unknown of the physical and the human environment and the threats they embodied. The unknown is always a place of fear and volatility where moral boundaries may easily be dissolved simply because the structures that normally enforce their limits are weak or nonexistent. It is a commonplace that violence arises as much from fear as from triumphalist power. Violence tends to be invoked when power is believed to be threatened. It is enough for that threat to be imagined to call up the anxiety and sense of vulnerability that are necessary conditions to trigger a violent reaction. “Fear is . . . at the root of it all . . . fear of the Other, perceived as a hostile stranger, or one’s own fellow man.” Fear “unites ‘us’ through a paranoid view of ‘them’ and the threat that they pose. Convinced of the imminent threat born of the imaginaire of fear, men are driven to seek a rational means of eradicating this threat.” Fear, Sara Ahmed has written, “responds to what is approaching rather than already here.” Its power derives from what the future may hold—of necessity, the unknown.36 The colonial frontier was a place of terror for the Indigenous peoples, and a place of dread for settlers, and the unease it generated was both real and imagined.

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The pastoral economy was an “anxiety ridden existence”; the lonely life fostered a paranoid tendency to “over-reaction to threats and rumors of danger.” In Victoria in the 1840s, the fear of being attacked by Aboriginal people “in a lonely spot . . . was great. Their fears magnified the danger to such an extent, that they [shepherds in this case] lived in a continual state of anxiety, apprehension, and alarm.” Their huts were loopholed; they always had weapons to hand; they worked in pairs.37 The young Edward Curr recorded the fear of being alone at the sheep run aware that a few miles away, hostile Aboriginal people (who had recently killed several men) lurked unseen. Feeling his life to be in danger, he was constantly “on the alert, and in a very prepared state of mind for fighting.” The moments when the pastoral economy was being established were also those when the killing sprees were likely to be at their worse, and their legacy persisted in settler society. Well into the nineteenth century—long after there was any real threat—fear of Aboriginal people was commonplace in Australian towns, as was the ownership of guns to protect against such fear.38 Unsurprisingly fear was a recognized feature in some of the most celebrated instances of settler violence. The context for the Myall Creek massacre in New South Wales in 1838 was grounded in a belief by the settlers that they were “in an enemy’s country” where, even with firearms, they felt vulnerable and unsafe, even though the local Aboriginal people had a record of peaceful and cooperative interaction with the settlers.39 Several years later, in 1841, a report to the Colonial Office about the murder of some local Aboriginal people by a settler provides a snapshot of the environment of tension, vulnerability, and violence as new pastoral areas were opened up. This particular murder was the climax to a series of incidents that included home invasion by an Aboriginal group, attempted thefts of household goods and livestock, armed confrontations when pistols and spears were flourished by each side, spearings of horses, poultry and bullocks, firing of empty huts, siege of a hut by an Aboriginal crowd, and the murder of a local shepherd in a distant hut. The account of this affray that reached the Colonial Office made it clear that the settler had indiscriminately shot Aboriginal people. Although no one had “started” this sequence of events, the context for it was the warlike environment that surrounded settler life.40 If the military power of the British Empire on a global scale was unquestioned, at the frontier, the balance of power did not necessarily lie in British hands. Indigenous people quickly learned to take advantage of their asymmetrical advantages. Gun technology was unreliable; aim was inaccurate; misfires were common; powder got wet. The slow reloading process created a space of vulnerability that gave the spear an advantage. Fear and rumor played their roles in these respects, too. Aboriginal people were believed to be endowed with physical powers that were denied settlers, such as being able to throw spears from their feet. As late as 1846 there were places on the frontier where settlers had to negotiate with local people if their lives and cattle had to be safe.41 In addition, of course, the economic uncertainty settlers faced reinforced the sense of exposure. Pastoralism was always a risky enterprise. Fiscal margins could be

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wiped out by a myriad of causes, including weather, disease, and illness. Aboriginal raids on livestock and crops were an additional cause for worry. In Queensland as late as the 1870s and 1880s it was not uncommon to lose up to 100 bushels of corn per week to Aboriginal raids. For the struggling farmers this was enough to make the difference between success and failure.42 A  depressing account of pastoralist life was left behind by Edward Arthur, who in 1843 with his brother drove a flock of 4,000 sheep 400 miles from Port Phillip to Adelaide to establish a run. They hoped to make a fortune. But after two years they gave up, virtually bankrupted, defeated by environmental difficulties and by a campaign of harassment from local Bunganditj people. Soon after their arrival, some of their shepherds deserted “from fear,” which made superintending the sheep difficult and impeded the construction of the buildings they needed. Sheep were continually lost to spearing. Edward described “feeling completely hemmed in, and unable to advance a step beyond the hut without the expectation of immediate attack.” The brothers were not passive in the face of this campaign. Arthur recounted an incident when they destroyed the camp of a thief they had captured.43 Arthur and his brother clearly faced a military campaign against their settlement. Sudden violence, or the threat of it, was always close to the surface in rural settler society. Trouble easily became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stockmen and shepherds were on the front line of the frontier, and they were particularly vulnerable as well as the group most likely to engage in the sexual relations that were always a source of tension and conflict. Although Aboriginal presence among settlers was rare in Van Diemen’s Land, it was even more frightening when it did occur. Amos Adams, as we have mentioned earlier, recorded in his diary in 1823 how just as he was about to leave to visit his nearby brother, his house was suddenly surrounded by natives who had appeared as if out of nowhere. A woman came to the door and Adams made signs for her to go away [which] she did [but] in a short time about six others made their appearance amongst the brush . . . close to my hut. I fired small shot at about fifty yards distance and they run off. I fired another piece loaded with ball over their heads to let them know I had more pieces than one.44 This sense of insecurity engendered volatile and charged emotions. Christina Smith was a young widow from a prosperous Scottish family who emigrated to Victoria with a brother and a sister in the 1840s and soon married a Congregational school teacher. But the family did not prosper and fell victim to the fragility of frontier life. The dairy farm her siblings started struggled, her husband lost his job and became a store keeper. These setbacks upended her worldview. At the beginning, her attitude toward Australian Aboriginals lay within the orbit of humanitarian discourse. She described them as “harmless . . . not greatly to be feared,” and their children capable of education. Around 1842–43 her attitude became more tentative and mixed. She records how on her arrival at Rivoli, where her husband

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was the store manager, “I hardly enjoyed a night’s sleep . . . dreading they might attack us in the night.” She regarded visiting Aboriginal males with suspicion and “took up a position in the back ground with a gun in my hand” although she realized in later years that she exaggerated the fear.45 Fear permeated all sections of settler colonial society. Even efforts at conciliation could be wracked with tension. When Governor Gawler ordered the distribution of food to the local Aboriginals of Port Lincoln in December 1841, he did so as an effort to put relations on a good footing after a series of Aboriginal attacks. The plan backfired. Most of the settlers were away fighting fires and the area was in a state of virtual insurrection. One station was visited every morning by a threatening band of local people: “the natives were beginning to make systematic attacks and threaten the lives as well as the property of the white man.” A few months later the murder of several station owners sent the outlying settlers fleeing into town, ignoring their runs and gathering their sheep near to the town. Fear was a great mobilizer of settler communities. Petitions to George Grey for more protection pointed to the way the tribes had formed a unified front against the settlers. Grey was not one to respond lightly and he refused their petition. This unsettled state continued into 1843; both the government interpreter, a man known as Utulta, and the government resident were threatened with murder. Serious consideration was given to abandoning the town.46 The pervasiveness of fear suggests the deeper psychology of colonial violence. Fear was not simply a matter of concern for one’s physical security. It signaled also the traumas that flowed from frontier violence. How was colonial violence processed at the individual level, in the wider society, and in the history of the community going forward? The trauma of social violence is not solely confined to the victim, although the deep impact on victim communities must be acknowledged and reckoned with. Settler colonialism itself was also traumatized by colonial violence: by both the persons who committed it and those who witnessed or knew about it. And even today we are reminded of long-lasting impact of such violence when many years after the event, perpetrators find it necessary to confront and confess their actions. So it is necessary to consider how violence was explained by those who participated in it or had witness to it.47

The psychology of colonial violence: blindsight and splitting How may we understand the mechanisms that allowed a reconciliation of colonial violence with the liberal values that were attached to the British Empire? The dominant racial ideology of the time emphasized the similarities between races rather than the differences. This made it difficult for humanitarians to admit responsibility for the disastrous results of their policies, for the violence that accompanied Arthur’s policies and the near extinction that accompanied Robinson’s policy of removal. The psychological task, then, was to displace responsibility for violence away from the orbit of “humanitarian” action. It was for this reason that the causes

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of violence were often attributed in the first place to degenerated elements of British society, particularly the convicts. In this conception of violence, barbarism was a consequence of two savage tribes clashing as much as a product of Indigenous savagery. But as we have noted for humanitarians like Arthur and Robinson, the problem of violence was not straightforward and they had to work hard to reconcile their responsibilities with their sense of self.48 Sir George Arthur’s continual retelling of the story of his policy in Van Diemen’s Land was evidence of the trauma his actions inflicted on his own mind. Retelling stories is a way of reconciling the horror with conscience. The same quality was to be found when George Robinson contemplated the consequences of his removal of the Tasmanian people to the various island refuges that he organized for them. On the final settlement of Flinders Island, death rates were alarming. Robinson noted the signs almost from the beginning and recognized that they were connected to the disruption of removal. Robinson struggled to understand the wasting diseases that his charges were suffering from and the consequent demise of the group. What neither he nor Arthur admitted was their own responsibility for the drama. The “mental irritation” of the people on Flinders Island suffered was brought on by unnamed “various circumstances” that aggravated the diseases that caused their deaths. As if to reinforce the notion that it was something within their constitutions that was responsible, Robinson noted that the deaths of husbands and wives followed fast on each other even when they had previously been in perfect health. In this way, he was able to distance himself from their condition, gently (and uneasily) laying responsibility for their deaths at the feet of the Aboriginal people themselves. In order to preserve his own integrity as the savior of the Aboriginal race, he toyed with ways of breaking this slide to extermination. It was at this point that he first mentioned the idea of moving them again—this time to southeastern Australia, where they could be part of a renewed Protection effort and save his conscience from watching their gradual extinction. But still, Robinson continued to insist that the policy of removal was a triumph of humanitarian action unique in human history. Indeed, he turned what was a tragedy for the Aboriginal people who followed him to Flinders Island into a centerpiece of the successful policy of conciliation and humanitarian concern that he and Arthur supported and wanted to implement: that it was, in fact, proof of the possibility of a more humane policy for Empire. And this was a sentiment he repeated as if that made it true.49 Of course, we may see this uneasy balancing act as an example of the contradictions of liberal subjectivity. But it is also a revealing instance of how terrible events may be reconciled with the liberal conscience through the psychological mechanisms of “blind sighting” and “splitting.” This is a process of filtering whereby certain things may be seen, and others need to be blocked out. One part of the mind knows what it is doing—in this case facilitating the deaths of the Aboriginal people and is even willing to contemplate the possibility of extinction. But the other part of the mind that “supposedly knows remains oblivious of this” is a “grey area[s] between consciousness and unconsciousness [and is]  .  .  . far more significant in explaining ordinary public responses to knowledge about atrocities and suffering.”

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This is what we observe when we see Robinson contemplating the fate of those removed to Flinders Island.50 In addition, removal was justified by the device of comparative vindication. Robinson had already employed this defensive technique of displacing responsibility by suggesting how the mental state of the captives led them to choose death by wasting away. Now he argued that, although their state might be pitiable, it would have been much worse without the policy of removal. He could happily acknowledge that the impact of the British imperial influence had been “vicious” and “baneful” and “that the situation of that people was far worse than when in their original state.” If history could be re-wound, all this distress could have been avoided: had proper measures been resorted to in the first instance of the formation of the colony the melancholy effects that have been witnessed and are now adverted to have been prevented and the odium which now rests on the British name and nation [would]have been obviated. Such a re-visiting was not possible. The government could offer the hand of kindness and conciliation. But the savage state of the Aboriginal people led them to reject these overtures and engage in a violent retaliation of their own. By this reasoning, the authenticity of Robinson’s and Arthur’s “humanitarian” policy and belief system preserved its innocence. The policy of conciliation had battled the results of the degradation of Aboriginal life which had brutalized their already savage state. Both they and British honor had been redeemed by the policy of removal. The consequences of demographic decline in the inhospitable environment of the Bass Straits was blind sighted by the overriding virtue of having saved the Aboriginals from one method of extinction, even if another kind loomed.51

The psychology of colonial violence: regimes of silence and denial Colonial violence required a series of public defense mechanisms that enabled the contradiction to be reconciled between the self-image of a civilizing mission and the barbaric realities in colonies like Van Diemen’s Land. Ways had to be found to deflect the recognition that colonization brutalized and de-humanized the colonizer. Silence and denial are key defense mechanisms that allow atrocities to be processed in public memory, and colonial societies are no exception to this rule. Naturally, silence and the forgetting that goes with it are never complete, and this was the case in Australia. In Aboriginal culture the stories of massacres were naturally kept alive. In settler culture, however, the memories of massacre were structured by regimes of silence that were differently constituted at different times.52 Regimes of silence are historical and political constructs. In the early nineteenth century there was no silence about violence in the British Empire in humanitarian and official policy-making circles. At the frontier, however, a shroud of silence covered the violent practices of the imperial world. In the public sphere of Australian

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settler colonialism, there was silence about the atrocities that pockmarked Australia for much of the nineteenth century, and even beyond. This forgetting was so powerful that when the veil of silence began to be lifted in the 1970s, many people refused to believe the findings. The early nineteenth-century knowledge of these events had been deleted from public discussion, confined to elliptical references or, most significantly, to the confessions in private diaries.53 The regime of silence about early nineteenth-century violence was marked by a public knowledge but a private stillness. There were two reasons for this. The first was the particular psychological circumstances within which the arbitrary and personal colonial violence of the early nineteenth century occurred. There was no structure of meaning that could readily explain, for example, the massacre of 150 Warrigul people in retaliation for the murder of one stockman. The official policy of the colonial government and the rhetoric of a humanitarian imperial discourse provided no readily available structure of meaning, compared to, say, the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, which was not hidden (at least at the local level) because a narrative of the war already existed that could normalize the event. My Lai could occur in plain sight, but the Warrigul massacre—along with hundreds of others—was in effect forgotten and had to be re-discovered over 100 years later.54 Just to focus on the psychology of the matter, and to ignore the vastly different structures of communication and knowledge, the difference surely lies in the relative weakness of a structure of meaning in the early nineteenth century. Here the equivocal nature of the state’s relationship to violence was significant. Violence could not be seen as fulfilling official state policy. Indeed, official state policy emphasized the need for conciliation, and the threat of prosecution always lurked in the background. Equally, although Arthur’s declarations of martial law, for example, could be taken as an endorsement of violent action by settlers, they were always accompanied by statements that demanded restraint. Thus, all the more reason for the atrocities that accompanied the Black Line, for example, to be kept quiet. Nor was violence easily reconciled with a racial ideology whose official expression emphasized the spiritual equality of man, if also asserting their cultural difference. Empathy and pity—that “whispering in the heart” present even in settler culture—were key qualities of the cultural aesthetic of community. Scientific racism had not yet been enshrined as the comforting lens through which the inequality of races could be viewed.55 In this context, silence was an anesthetic to the tensions that arbitrary unofficial violence created in the early Victorian mind. Silence is a powerful tool in the management of emotions. For both perpetrators and victims of violence, it helps to manage the shame. Silence allowed normal life to reassert itself; it allowed the moral fabric to remain undisturbed. It even allowed those parties on both sides of the divide, victim and perpetrator, to continue to live together as undoubtedly many settlers and indigenes did. It was a way of denying and avoiding the moral troubling that such events create. It was this that allowed Australian massacres to suffer a “cultural slippage in which information just disappears.”56

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But silence does not solve the problem of psychological unease or guilt. A range of behaviors are available to normalize atrocity. There are varieties of denial. Silence is often the mark of profound denial that protects the person from the breakdown that would occur were they to admit to themselves the outrageousness of their acts. For this reason they behave as if “their crimes did not exist or had never existed. . . . It is in this way that completely new revisionist accounts are constructed and through which the massacres of the past are denied in a political context.” Similarly, there are varieties of denial ranging from genuine ignorance to blatant deception. Genocide research has shown “a continuum between the ‘innocent’ and ‘malevolent’ denial of known genocide.” But wherever it stands on the spectrum, denial is always partial. There is always some recognition of events. Indeed, “the paradox, or doubleness—knowing and not knowing—is the heart of the concept.”57 But there is a further twist to this of particular relevance to the early nineteenth century. The denial mechanism of the early nineteenth-century mind had different capacities than that of the twentieth-century mind. The early nineteenth-century mind had no awareness of the concept of the unconscious, and this may have made denial more difficult to sustain. If there was less ability to push events into the unconscious, then keeping them suppressed could be more of an effort. It required other techniques to ward off knowledge, and in this respect, narrative accounts of violence assumed a key significance. The importance of a narrative to contain denial is illustrated by the way both Arthur and Robinson felt the need to insist on an explanatory narrative of their actions regarding the fate of the Tasmanian Aboriginals. Neither was silent about what had happened. Both revisited the tragedy many times, seeming unable to leave it alone. Even on his return to London, awaiting his next appointment to Canada, Arthur continued to ponder his own personal fallout from the time he had spent in Van Diemen’s Land. The typical device for doing this was the narrative exculpation. And a good example of this early nineteenth-century narrative of silence and denial narrative is found in a letter Arthur wrote in response to a petition thanking him for his attempt to corral Indigenous people with the Black Line. The petition noted that although it failed, the Line impressed “the Aborigines with an adequate sense of their danger.” In his reply, Arthur did not pick up this theme of salutary terror that the petitioner hinted at but penned a more tortured response that demonstrated his need to admit and deny at one and the same time responsibility for the fate of the Indigenous people: [T]here can be no individual whose mind is influenced by humanity and must view with deep sympathy the peculiar, the anxious and most difficult situation of the Executive Government with reference to the Aboriginal inhabitants whose strong feelings of revenge have led them to the commission of so many acts of plunder, of violence, and of bloodshed. . . . [A]lthough the natives of Van Diemen’s Land have always exhibited that treachery which seems inseparable from savage life and have continually made the very worst

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return for the kindness and liberality which the respectable class of settlers have for many years uniformly manifested toward them, it is still undeniable that they were lamentably neglected in the early colonization of the country and have been treated with cruelty and oppression by the stockkeepers and other convicts in the interior, and by the sealers on the coast . . . [and they have indiscriminately sought revenge on the] unoffending settlers. . . . This fact has powerfully influenced the Executive Government in resorting to measure after measure for conciliating the natives rather than destroying them—it was this feeling which originated the general assembly of the troops and inhabitants for capturing the savages and although that measure was not successful to the degree anticipated it is gratifying to all involved in it that they were a part of a transaction which was founded on the necessity of self defense combined with the most merciful intentions towards a foe who was daily inflicting the severest injuries upon the community.58 ‍Silence has a sociology, therefore, which in the early nineteenth century followed the lines of class and power.59 It was necessary for people like Arthur to explain to themselves (as well as to their peers and superiors) the relationship of violence to their worldview precisely because as the public face of British imperialism, they were steeped in its culture of liberal humanitarianism. For those who existed outside those circles, however, silence was a more rational response. The violence that was directly committed by “ordinary” people induced silence not just because of the contradiction it posed to the idea of Britain’s civilizing mission. This silence was protective, shielding its perpetrators from the arm of the law, as well as from their own shame. Indeed, the emergence of a culture of silence about informal violence in Australia can be dated precisely. It was not there at the beginning of the colony. It followed the state’s adoption of humanitarian rhetoric in the second decade of the century and when the prospects of legal prosecution of settler violence began to be flourished by the colonial authorities. But it was not until the famous Myall Creek prosecutions of 1838 (when seven Europeans were hanged for the murder of Aboriginal people) that silence in the face of official enquiry became a general feature of settler culture.60 The Myall Creek episode was traumatic for settler culture and forced settler violence into the private world of diaries or letters. Sometimes, these acts remained unknown beyond a small circle for many years. In his “Memoirs,” Henry Melville, an early settler in South Australia, told of chasing and losing a group of Aboriginal people who had attacked his party. Only forty-three years later did he learn that a close friend had caught one of the fleeing Aboriginal men and shot him dead. This act was remembered in local Aboriginal folklore but was hidden to the settler world. And hiding such events was standard practice. The early settler Alexander Buchanan was part of a conflict along the Murray River in South Australia in November 1839, which resulted in the killing of a chief and five or six others. A few days later Buchanan’s party came across Governor Gawler and the explorer Charles Sturt, who asked “if the blacks had been troublesome.” Buchanan and his party replied how “they had been pretty quiet except at the Darling they

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had annoyed us a little. Did not say we had shot any.” This was particularly significant because the murdered chief was a man familiar to the settler world. He had served as an intermediary between the various parties who travelled that route, including exploring groups led by Sturt himself. He had even donned European clothes as a signal to such groups that he was not hostile and that he was available for the business of mediation. He was the kind of person within whom the roots of a policy of conciliation were supposed to take hold.61 In the early years at least silence was also grounded in the fear of prosecution. Although few whites were ever prosecuted for Aboriginal murders and the successful prosecutions could be counted on two hands, settlers in the 1830s, for example, could not be assured that this would be the case. At the very height of the killings, extending into the 1840s, agents of the state did attempt to seek out the guilty and to prosecute guilty parties. Protectors continually pressed such efforts, and settlers had no reason to suppose that they would be actively protected by an imperial bureaucracy that was answerable to London, not to local public opinion. Certainly the determination with which the state pursued certain murders, such as Myall Creek, burned the habit of silence into settler culture. The pressure of group solidarity was then used to enforce silence even in the face of significant material rewards that were offered to those who would bear witness to the violence.62 By 1840 violence had become normalized and recognized as the price for allowing pastoral farming to proceed undisturbed, and those settlers whose consciences were disturbed also knew that their silence was a condition of their sociability within settler society. Thus, the case of a Gippsland settler, Henry Meyrick. Meyrick was a settler who was attracted to the possibility of a racially collaborative empire. He was interested in Aboriginal culture; he worked to create a peaceable and cooperative relationship with the local Aboriginal people. He claimed to have a close relationship with one of his Aboriginal workers, and his cousin was initiated into membership of the local tribe. Within the privacy of his diary he was frank about the failures of the Protectorate to defend the Aboriginal people, the devastation of the tribes, and the ruthless hunting of men, women, and children.63 Meyrick claimed to have spoken out against such violence. But it did no good because “these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging.” Equally, however, he, too, was silenced. There was a time when “my blood would run cold at the mention of these things.” But he normalized it by shunting into silence: now I am become so familiarized with scenes of horror from having murder made a topic of everyday conversation. . . . If I could remedy these things, I would speak loudly though it cost me all I am worth . . . but as I cannot I will keep aloof and know nothing and say nothing. It was impossible for Meyrick to escape from the arbitrary violence that composed colonial order on the frontier. He, too, was brutalized by the experience of life at the edge of empire. Thus, he told the story of how he and his cousin were refused

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shelter by a hut keeper. So his group acted “according to the custom of the colonies, we gave him a sound thrashing,” put the cattle to grass, and spent the night. Nor was he averse to taking the law into his hands against the local Aboriginals whom he caught spearing cattle, admitting that he would readily kill them. His moral code drew a distinction between this defense of his own property (though, of course, on Aboriginal land) and the indiscriminate killings that he recorded as commonplace.64

The psychology of colonial violence: projections and narratives Atrocities are driven by a psychology of fear that an all-powerful “other” poses a danger to one’s very existence, which makes striking at the threat an act of selfdefense. The conditions of the colonial frontier were a perfect incubation for this kind of fear. It was a world where the unknown and the unknowable ruled. In the colonial setting threats emanated from the Indigenous people whose movements, culture, and motivations could not be accurately read and that induced a fear that needed to be purged. Thus the need to destroy “them” in order to save “us.” This frame of mind led easily what we may call colonial reversals, a form of collective projective identification in which the actions of the colonizer are transposed onto the colonized, who, in turn, becomes the perpetrator of colonial violence and the settler becomes its victim.65 The idea that it was the settler who was the victim in the colonial power balance was a central argument in the writings of James Calder, the first scholar to write the history of the Tasmanian indigenes using archival sources. Calder did not ignore colonial violence, but his admission was diminished by his emphasis on the fighting power of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, which served to dissolve the pity that underlay earlier attempts to tell their story, and turned the settlers into the threatened and endangered species.66 The imagined vulnerability of the settlers of Van Diemen’s Land was a justifying procedure that drew on the human mind’s tendency to projection in times of personal stress and anxiety. As we have noted, the everyday life of the settler allowed them to imagine themselves exposed to an empowered “aboriginal otherness [with] a predatory and destructive  .  .  . power to wreak destruction and disorder because its efficacy lay in its seemingly undisciplined, unpredictable and arbitrary nature.”67 The assessment of settlers that they were unprotected from the predation of their Indigenous neighbors was also a way of transferring to the Aboriginals blame for the violence that settlers resorted to with ease. It became a common trope that settler deaths were often a result of a naive kindness and leniency. The dual murder of Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker in Van Diemen’s Land in August 1831 was an example of this. Thomas, in particular, was portrayed as a humanitarian whose “mild treatment” of the Indigenous inhabitants, and his death became emblematic of the dangers of trusting to the goodness of their nature. Similarly, writing to George Grey from Port Lincoln, South Australia, in 1842, Lieutenant Huginon

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attributed the murder of a settler to the leniency practiced toward the petty thefts of the local people. The result was that they grew increasingly bolder, committing more daring outrages culminating the murder of a settler who had been welldisposed toward them. Port Lincoln at this period was a site of considerable tension and violence, and it produced similar stories into the 1850s and the 1860s.68 The early nineteenth century, then, saw the development of a narrative about colonial violence that both admitted its presence and displaced responsibility from the settlers to the Aboriginal peoples. Language was part of this. There was a shift in the language of violence apparent from the 1820s, which began to attribute the “unrestrained passions” that were characteristic of settler violence against the Indigenous people to Aboriginal culture itself. Such narratives effected a dizzying process of reversing blame and responsibility from settlers to Aboriginals.69 Narratives of displacement became a common theme in settler culture to explain and excuse violence. One quite remarkable example of this process can be found in the memoirs of Angus Macmillan, a founding settler of Gippsland, Victoria, a leading participant in massacres in that area, and later a respected member of the state’s political elite. He had the audacity to blame the Protectorate for the violence, and his reasoning is a fine example of the reversals and projections that were ingrained in settler culture at this moment. He explained how protectors resorted to the most contemptible means to gain information against individuals, whom the trumpet-tongue of falsehood had branded as having destroyed many of these savages. This  .  .  . did much evil. People formed themselves into bands of alliances and allegiance to each other, and then it was the destruction of the natives really did take place.70 By the time Macmillan recorded his memoirs in the 1890s, however, a new account of colonial violence had emerged. This was a narrative constructed to create a founding myth of the nation that effectively erased violence from the story. And in the process it installed a new regime of silence about the place of violence in the establishment of empire in Australia. It was a narrative first articulated in the memoirs of John Waithall Bull, whose Early Experiences of Colonial Life in South Australia was published in 1878. Bull’s account was notable because it used contemporary sources and was accepted as accurate historical fact throughout the twentieth century. The documents he used, such as the diaries of T.P. O’Halloran, the early police chief of the province, are full of evidence of unrestrained, informal violence. But Bull drew a veil over such stories. He emphasized the vulnerability of the settlers and presented a view of Sir George Grey that historians would hardly recognize: a Grey who was reluctant to provide settlers protection against predatory Aboriginals. The sources were ironed out to create an image of the “history of a receding frontier and the heroic substance of its European actors.” Bull was concerned to displace the centrality of conflict and substitute the heroic role of suffering white pioneers.71 In this account, colonial violence was treated as an appropriate response to Aboriginal savagery. In sharp contrast to early nineteenth-century attempts to

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understand it sympathetically, Aboriginal culture was itself described as savage. The prevalence of infanticide, for example, was emphasized. The trope of the innocent, humanitarian-minded settler was employed to make the point that Indigenous people were incapable of responding to their outreach. The value of pity was thus shown to be naive. All these elements may be seen in a small story told of a shepherd who epitomized the humanitarian mentality, acting “on all occasions in a confiding manner with the natives, and gave every encouragement to them, allowing them to walk about with him, saying, when his mate remonstrated with him, ‘Poor creatures, we are taking their country from them!,’ but he put his trust in them once too often. He never carried arms,” and he was attacked and killed when he was suddenly attacked after refusing to give the Aboriginal people with him a sheep.72 The contrast with discourse on Indigenous people earlier in the nineteenth century is obvious. In the early nineteenth century, the issues of dispossession and violence against Aboriginal people were sources of considerable debate and anxiety. Bull’s account completely reversed this ordering. These issues of dispossession and violence were erased by being translated to threats to the property and lives of well-meaning colonizers. The savagery of Aboriginal culture served as a comparative exculpation of colonial savagery. So, even though the presence of violence was admitted by someone like Bull, who fifty years earlier would surely not have admitted it in public, it was a violence whose meaning was reversed by a series of comparative narratives.73 Such a narrative was central to the emergent sense of the national identity of Australia as resting on the pioneers who tamed the savage frontier. But it also inaugurated a new regime of silence about violence. Violence was both normalized and wiped out of the record. It was actively denied and forgotten. A neat example of how this worked is provided by the case of William Willshire, a commandant of the Native Police in what was to become the Northern Territories in the 1880s. By this time the state had secured its monopoly on social violence. As an agent of the state, however, Willshire used the same kind of salutary terror that had been refined by the informal violence of the early nineteenth century. He possessed an unenviable record for violence against local people. But he also presented himself as an expert on Aboriginal life, even publishing ethnographic studies. This was a colonial reversal with a vengeance. For a long time, Willshire’s atrocities were protected by the culture of silence. Thanks to the efforts of local missionaries, he was ultimately tried for murder. The case against him, however, repeated the pattern of the past: prosecution was half-hearted, witnesses were mocked and humiliated, the jury was biased in his favor, and the judge provided an exculpatory summing up. He was acquitted after a fifteen-minute deliberation. When he died in the 1920s, no mention was made of these events. His career was painted in heroic terms, and well into the later twentieth century, he continued to be presented as an example of the adventurous nature of the northern frontier.74 The case of James Brown presents a similar story of the erasure of violence from the public narrative. Brown ended his days as a respected prominent citizen in the Encounter Bay district of South Australia, lauded as a representative example

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of the achievements of the pioneer settlers. But as an early settler, Brown was involved in the shooting murder of several Ngarrindjeri people and the poisoning of others. There was little doubt among the local imperial officials that he was guilty of the shootings, and a prosecution was mounted. But the usual pattern of non-­cooperation by witnesses asserted itself and the case failed. The question of poisoning was more murky. But local Aboriginal folklore repeated the story, and, indeed, among the local Ngarrindjeri, the memory of Brown’s murdering sprees was fully alive as late as 1987. The official version of Brown’s engagement with Aboriginal people, however, provided a very different account. This version was embroidered over many years, so that the murders were displaced away from Brown and attached to a completely different episode. In a vivid example of the ability of colonial culture to create narrative reversals, Brown was turned into a victim of Njarrindjeri depredations, to which he had responded in self-defense. He was then persecuted by imperial officialdom, who brought an unfair prosecution. The failure of the prosecution was presented as evidence of his innocence, not a result of the usual conspiracy of silence that surrounded frontier violence. The events of story were scrambled to create a narrative that fit with the myth of a rugged hero pioneer victimized by Aboriginal aggression and persecution by a pious state.75 The story of James Brown was hardly unique. Examples may be found from all over Australia. In Queensland, Korah Wills was a local politician who made a fortune as a hotelier in the late nineteenth century. He retired to London and became a fixture in the Australian diaspora there. But he left behind a diary recording his participation in the most appalling atrocities that included corpse mutilation, dissection, even child abduction. Or, take the case of Australia’s leading poet of the period, George Essex Evans. Evans’ poems extol the idea of Australia as being a “quiet continent,” created out of a terra nullius by pioneers “not won by blood nor ringed with steel.” Evans must have known this was rubbish. His brother-in-law was in the Queensland Native Police, which had inherited the mantle of settler violence in the service of the state. Indeed, Evans had lived in the very area where his own relative had participated in killing expeditions.76 Thus, in the provincial culture of Australia, there was an accommodation between the presence of violence and the benign promise of the country’s founding, which was achieved partly through silence and partly through the projection of a particular vision of the nation’s identity. Public events such as re-enactments of Cook’s original landing at Botany Bay emphasized the peaceful promise of conciliation and collaboration that Cook represented. The presence of violence was not ignored, but it was positioned as an incidental by-product of the encounter, as abnormal and aberrant to the event. Such an emphasis was not something that would have been recognized as a satisfactory explanatory context sixty years before.77 By contrast to provincial culture, however, the regime of silence in the wider world of imperial culture mirrored the private world of the early nineteenth century. Violence was not much talked about in the public world of late nineteenthcentury imperial culture. Imperial commentators on the empire such as Charles

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Dilke or Anthony Trollop paid little attention to the violent history of settler colonies. In his Problems of Greater Britain, Dilke wrote how violence in the early history of Australia had been exaggerated. Trollope, writing on Queensland in the middle 1870s, parroted the discourse of the settler as victim of predatory indigenes and essentially excused the violence against them as a reflection of their essential savagery and of the rough culture of the place.78 The truth of the matter was that to late nineteenth-century commentators, Indigenous peoples did not figure very large in their consciousness. They represented a problem that was regarded as essentially solved or as the responsibility of Exeter Hall philanthropy. In his study of how the British Empire should be understood, in the mid-1890s, J.R. Seeley revealed a greater unease about violence than either Dilke or Trollope. Seeley could hardly ignore the role of force and conquest in the making of empire, but he was at pains to deny that they properly described how the empire had been acquired. In that sense, Seeley was engaged in the characteristic denial and sanitization of violence against indigenes that marked the late nineteenth-century regime of silence.79 The consequence of this regime of silence in imperial culture was an important legacy for the British. It meant that in the age of high imperialism a dominant image of empire prevailed in which violence played a diminished role. Wars, rebellions, and large-scale conflicts were all admitted. What was absent was the violence that has occupied us in this chapter—the informal, intimate, personal violence that stained the social relations of empire. British culture learned to treat this kind of colonial violence as aberrational, as something that was essentially out of the ordinary. And this narrative originated in the empire itself with people like Calder, Bull, and others. In the popular descriptions of the empire that began to appear about this time, stories of violence were hidden beneath narratives that claimed that the empire brought progress and improvement.80

Conclusion So, let me return to the fundamental question that opened this discussion of colonial violence: how may we understand its role in the creation of colonial order? It is obvious that violence was a necessary component to the creation of colonial order. In cases where treaties mediated the passage to imperial sovereignty, violence played a different role than it did in places like Australia, where treaties were not negotiated. Nor should we be surprised at the centrality of violence to the process of establishing imperial rule. What is important rather is the type of violence that was present at the creation of imperial order in Australia and the legacies that it left in the history of the British Empire. As we have seen, the structures of violence and the culture that surrounded the violence was peculiarly informal, personal, and arbitrary in nature. Structures and typologies of violence will be colored by the particular histories, geographies, and other conditions of each place. But violence was one of the strategies by which sovereignty claims were established and one of the forms that “the law” assumed as settler society established itself.

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Notes 1 Violence does not figure in James Bellich’s Replenishing the Earth, where the settler revolution is referred to at one point as “rollicking” p. 177. Nor was it much considered in U.S. historiography until recently, even though the treatment of the Indians hid in plain sight. See Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land. Indians and Empire in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), and Madley An American Genocide. For everyday violence in India, see Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2 Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Sydney: University of Sydney, 2006), 10–11. For the difficulties of making assessments see Richard Broome, “The Statistics of Frontier Conflict,” in Bain Attwood and Foster, Frontier Conflict, 88–98. The destruction of records has also impeded research; see Raymond Evans, “The Country Has Another Past: Queensland and the History Wars,” in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, ed. Anne Curthoys, John Docker, and Francis Peters-Little (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2010), 28–29. For local studies that reveal the extent of the killings, see Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen, “ ‘I Cannot Say the Numbers That Were Killed’: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier,” Paper Presented to the Australian Historical Association, 33rd Annual Conference, University of Queensland, July  7–11, 2015, accessed February  27, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2467836; Lyndall Ryan, “Settler Massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851,” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 3 (September 2010): 257–73; Lyndall Ryan, “Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania 1823–34: A Case Study of the Meander River Region, June 1827,” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (December 2008): 479–99; Lyndall Ryan, “Settler Massacre on the Australian Colonial Frontier 1836–1851,” in Theaters of Violence. Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity Throughout History, ed. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 94–109. Lyndall Ryan has constructed an ongoing map of massacres; see https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonial massacres/map.php. 3 Aboriginal violence against settlers was also present, of course. In the larger context it should be seen as a response to invasion, and in specific instances it was usually in response to acts of aggression—such as sexual assault—by settlers. Its impact was much less severe. In Tasmania, for example, eighty nine settlers were killed from November 1828 to January 1832 during the Black Wars. Lyndall Ryan, “Settler Massacre on the Australian Colonial Frontier 1836–1851,” 113. 4 Mohammed Adhikari, “ ‘We Are Determined to Exterminate Them’  .  .  .,” in Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Meet, ed. Mohammed Adhikari (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2014), 1–33; Lyndall Ryan, “ ‘No right to the Land’: The Role of the Wool Industry in the Destruction of Aboriginal Societies in Tasmania (1817–1832) and Victoria (1835–1851) Compared,” in Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Meet, ed. Mohammed Adhikari, 185–209. Indigenous people were also a labor pool which must have served as a restraint upon large-scale (not individual) killings once the pastoral economy was established. 5 Settler comment cited in Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th. Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 139, 146–47; Ian Macfarlane, Public Finance of Port Phillip 1836–1840: Historical Records of Victoria (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 315. 6 SRSA, GRG24/6/1843, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Sent 1843, 11 July  1843 Report of Protector of Aborigines, p. 823 and GRG 52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book, May 21 1840–January 6 1857, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 12 July 1841, and Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 13 September 1841. See also, pp. 7 Ryan, “Settler Massacres on the Port Philip Frontier, 1836–1851,” 265, for the example of sexual causes of violence. Penelope Edmonds, “The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier:

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Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces Around Earl Melbourne,” in Making Settler Colonial Space, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 133, 134–35, 138–40, 142. 8 For the frontier as a lived reality, see Jan Critchett, “Encounters in the Western District,” in Attwood and Foster, Frontier Conflict; SASL, PRG 847/2, George Charles Hawker, Diary January-June 1842. 9 These paragraphs are taken entirely from Amanda Nettelbeck; “Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016): 209–24, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2016.1153120, accessed 10/27/2017. 10 This account is drawn from Heather Burke, Amy Roberts. “The Space of Conflict: Aboriginal/ European Interactions and Frontier Violence on the Western Central Urray, South Australia, 1830–41,” Aboriginal History 40 (2016): 145–79. SRSA, GRG 18/1, Letters and Minutes from Governor to Officials, Vol. 1 1841–42, Grey to Magistrates, 23 June  1841; Foster and Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions; Steven Hemming, “Conflict Between Aborigines and Europeans Along the Murray River and the Darling to the Great South Bend 1830–1841,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 22, no. 1 (1984): 4–8. 11 SRSA, GRG 18/1, Ibid. Grey to Magistrates, 23 June 1841; also Foster and Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions, 31–33. 12 For very similar instructions for the Port Lincoln area, see SRSA, GRG 18/1, Ibid., Grey to Macdonald, September 23, 1841, and his instructions to a detachment to the same area a year later. SRSA, GRG24/6/1842, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1842, Colonial Secretary to Huginon, April 14, 1842. 13 Hemming, “Conflict Between Aborigines and Europeans Along the Murray River and the Darling to the Great South Bend 1830–1841,” 1–18; Burke, Roberts, “The Space of Conflict: Aboriginal/ European Interactions and Frontier Violence on the Western Central Urray, South Australia, 1830–41,” 145–79. For Grey’s account of these events to the Colonial Office, see NAUK, CO 13/21, South Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Grey to Lord John Russell, 21 October  1841, ff. 429–35. Grey set up a commission of inquiry which exonerated Moorhouse and, more problematically, the overlanders who commenced shooting. See NAUK, CO13/22, South Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches, ff. 455–91 for the report of the inquiry. 14 On the colonial state and the implementation of the rule of law, see Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, “Colonial Judiciaries, Aboriginal Protection and South Australia’s Policy of Punishing ‘with Exemplary Severity’,” Australian Historical Studies 41, no. 3 (2010): 319–36, accessed November 8, 2017, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2010.493947. See also Skye Kirchauff, “The Murder of Meleityappa and How Judge Mann Succeeded in Making ‘the Administration of Justice Palatable’ to South Australian Colonists in 1849,” Aboriginal History 41 (2017): 23–45 for an example of difficulty between reconciling justice for Aboriginal and settler interests, even when there was the will to do this. 15 Dictionary of Australian Biography, accessed November 8, 2017, http://adb.anu.edu. au/biography/hawker-george-charles-3734. 16 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1843, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Sent 1843, ff. 769, 804–810. This case is also discussed in, Nettelbeck and Foster, “Colonial Judiciaries, Aboriginal Protection and South Australia’s Policy of Punishing ‘with Exemplary Severity,’ ” 325–27. 17 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1844, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1844. Report by Henry Price, 25 October 1844 f. 12491–2, Police Commissioner to Colonial Secretary, 23 August 1844, f. 932, 18 September 1844, f. 1044. 18 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1844, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1844. Report from Protector to Colonial Secretary, 7 October 1844, f. 1120, Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, 9 October 1844 f .1135. Why Price seemed to draw back from his earlier position on the clear guilt of Carter is not clear. It is likely that he was pressured by his fellow magistrates with whom he had to live in the wilds of northern South Australia near present-day Hawker (named after the one in this story).

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19 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1844, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1844, 9 October 1844, Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, f. 1135; 26 October G.C. Hawker to Colonial Secretary, f. 1248. The practice of group pressure to ensure silence about atrocities was a well-established practice by this time; see 309–15. 20 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1844, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1844, Minute by Grey attached to 26 October Hawker to Colonial Secretary cited above, f. 1248, 5–7. 21 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1844, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1844, Report from Protector of Aborigines, 6 December 1844, f. 1446; Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 24 December 1844, f. 1528. 22 There was a procedural problem with the others charged in the case—an Aboriginal witness mistook the identity of one of the prisoners. And the attorney general decided not to proceed but to bind the men over for twelve months. On such procedural minutae did justice turn. SRSA, GRG 24/6/1845, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1845, Attorney General Report on Depredations at Hallett’s 5 February 1845, f. 255; AG Report of Convictions at Late Criminal Court, 18 March 1845, f. 256, 2–3; Police Commissioner to Colonial Secretary, 7 June  1845, f. 647; SRSA, GRG 24/4/1845, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Sent, Grey to Police Commissioner, 7 June 1845, f. 887. 23 Another case involving Moorhouse and his attempt to bring settlers to justice in the Guichen Bay area in 1849 is detailed in SRSA, GRG 24/6/1849, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1849, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 6 March 1849, f. 457, f.1310. Report from Attorney General, 20 July 1849 f. 1388. And for Price, see SRSA, GRG 24/6/1853, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received, 1853, Price to Attorney General, 20 May 1853, f. 1268. 24 Campbell, Batman, 168–204. 25 ML, A 2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28, Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–37, Arthur to the Sheriff of New Norfolk, 22 February 1831. Ben Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror (Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1986) cited in frontispiece. 26 Reynolds, Forgotten Wars, 54–59. Indeed, Cook used kidnapping as a strategy to force friendly relations with Maori on the assumption that taking hostages would cause a momentary pause in the cycle of violence to allow a conciliatory dialogue to begin. See Rachel Standfield, “Violence and the Intimacy of Imperial Ethnography. The Endeavour in the Pacific,” in Ballantyne and Burton, Moving Subjects, 37–39. Another humanitarian governor, Lachlan Macquarie, was the first to launch organized military campaigns against the Indigenous inhabitants and hanged prisoners from trees “to strike the survivors with the greatest terror.” Alan Atkinson, “Conquest,” in Australia’s Empire, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 48. 27 NAUK, CO 18/14, Western Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Stirling to Stanley, 1 November 1834, ff. 140–141; Glenelg to Stirling, 23 July 1835. Pamela Statham, “James Stirling and the Pinjarra,” Studies in Western Australian History 23 (2003): 167–94. This episode is the subject of much historical debate. There are those who argue that Stirling set out with the intention of punishing the tribe. He presented his actions as designed to find a conciliatory policy in the face of increasing settler- Aboriginal violence in the area and that it turned into a military operation when the Aboriginal people failed to respond to his overtures. Statham concludes that the actual violence was a matter of mischance and misunderstanding. In that respect it was, however, a typical example of how efforts at conciliation easily slipped into violence. The deterrent effects of severe punishment were argued by Moorhouse in the case of an attack on settlers because “more lenity [sic] would have been attended ultimately with more slaughter as they would have attacked again.” See, SASA, GRG52/7/1, Protector of Aborigines Letter Book, Moorhouse to Colonial Secretary, 13 September 1841. 28 SASL, PRG206/ 1–11, O’Halloran Family Papers, Letter from George Ball to George Stevenson, 4 September 1840. 29 John MacGuire, “Judicial Violence and the Civilizing Process: Race and the Transition from Public to Private Executions in Colonial Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 29 no. 111 (1998): 187–209. Foster, et al., Fatal Collisions, 15.

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30 SLSA, D6976, Henry Melville, Reminiscences of H D Melville, 29–30, where he also noted how “much of the mischief arose from the white men promising and not giving”; Sewell, Diary, April 1860, 69. 31 Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, “Reminiscences of Johnson Frederick Hayward,” Proceedings 1927–28, Adelaide, 1927–28, 89–90. Hayward was involved in serious violence against the native people which he only hints at in his late account; see Foster, Hoskins, and Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions, 90–99. 32 Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch. Proceedings 1927– 28, 99–103, 131. 33 His father, also Edward, was the head of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, and as we have seen was himself deeply acquainted with the violence meted out to the local Tarkine people. Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 203–5. 34 Edward M Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria Then Called the Port Phillip District from 1841 to 1851 (Melbourne, 1883), 198–206. 35 Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2007), 252. Most of what we know about these mechanisms comes from studies of twentieth-century atrocities and holocausts, such as Robert Lifton’s Home From War. Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims Nor Executioners (New York: Routledge, 1973); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Routledge, 1993). 36 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1969); Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 42, 46–48; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2004), 64–65. It is hardly surprising, for example, that the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War contained all the elements of colonial violence. The terrible acts of violence committed by ordinary GIs reflected “the helpless and terror the men felt” at seeking an elusive enemy who was nowhere and everywhere—even in the shape of children and old women. See, Lifton, Home From War, 45–47, 109. 37 Thomas Francis edited by C.E. Sayers Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Being a Series of Papers on the Early Occupation of the Colony, the Aborigines etc. Addressed by Victorian Pioneers to His Excellence Charles Joseph LaTrobe (London: Routledge, 1969). There are houses from this period in Van Diemen’s Land that have what might be embrasures built into basements. 38 Barry Morris, “Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror,” Journal of Australian Studies 16, no. 35 (2009): 72–87; Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror–Space of Death Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984): 467–97. See also Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, 51–54; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 23; Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86, 71–73; Reynolds, Frontier. Aborigines, Settlers and Land, 30–31. For a good example of the way fear was part of settler culture, see Mrs. Charles Meredith, My Home in Tasmania During a Residence of Nine Years, Volume 1 (London, 1852), 190–91. 39 The Risdon Cove massacre in Tasmania in May 1804 was triggered in part by the sudden arrival of a large Aboriginal group, panicking the military detachment. See Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1995), 76–77; Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 37–41. For Myall Creek see M.F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86, 46–47; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 34–40; Michael Sturmer, “Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder,” Journal of Australian Studies 9, no. 16 (1985): 62–70 which emphasizes the sense of vulnerability of the shepherds and their demonizing of the Aboriginal people. 40 NAUK, CO 209/309 New South Wales. Original Correspondence Despatches, AprilJune 1841, ff. 70–95. 41 See Bonwick, The Lost Tasmanian Race, 34 for the military disadvantage whites suffered, and Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, 197. A letter from two squatters from Lake Victoria 12 August 1846, described how “the natives have already threatened to spear cattle if we did not give them flour” SRSA, GRG 24/6/1846, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1846, names unreadable to Colonial Secretary, 12 August 1846, f. 1003.

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4 2 Adhikari in Genocide on Settler Frontiers, 8; Reynolds, Forgotten Wars, 1, 93, 105–6. 43 Edward Arthur, A Journal of Events From Melbourne, Port Phillip, to Mount Schank, in the District of Adelaide, New Holland, A  Distance of 400 Miles, Undertaken in 1843 by Messrs Edward and Fortescue Arthur, Sons of Captain Arthur R.N with a Flock of 4000 Sheep (Hobart: Fullers, 1975; reprint from 1844 edition), 38–44. George Grey visited the run a few months later along with one of the humanitarian sponsors of the colony, George Angas. Grey promised them title to the run. But they had already decided to give it up. Early settlers often found it difficult to retain white employees due to the sense of vulnerability from the local Aboriginal people. And this sometimes led the large pastoralists to disguise murders of shepherds so as not to discourage others seeking employment. See Thomas Francis edited by C.E. Sayers Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers, 219; Skye Kirchauff, “The Murder of Meleityappa and how Judge Mann Succeeded in Making ‘the Administration of Justice Palatable’ to South Australian Colonists in 1849,” Aboriginal History 41 (2017): 33. 44 TAHO. Adam Amos, Diary, 1822–25, NS323/1/1, 3 May 1823. 45 SASL, Diary of Christina Smith, Smith Family Papers, PRG 144, 10–30. 46 Fyans, Reminiscences, 469–70 for example: Hassell, Relations between the Settlers and the Aborigines in South Australia 1836–1860, 74–79. See also Adrian Mucke, “Killing the ‘Fantome Canaque’: Evoking and Invoking the Possibility of Settler Revolt in New Caledonia 1853–1915,” Journal of Pacific History 37, no. 1 (2002): 25–44 for anxiety and fear as mobilizers of settler communities. 47 On the question of perpetrator trauma, see Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma. An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a discussion of this issue in relation to the Native Mounted Police of Queensland, see Heather Burke, et al., “Betwixt and Between. Trauma, Survival and the Aboriginal Troopers of the Queensland Native Mounted Police,” Journal of Genocidal Research (March 2020): 1–16. 48 Thus, the convict presence was evidence of this. Ward, The Australian Legend, 27 citing Backhouse and Landor for the violence that was ingrained in the convict experience and was unmitigated by the absence of a gentry class. In the subsequent discussion, I have found Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue (Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i, 2007) extremely useful. 49 NAUK, CO 280/56, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Robinson to Arthur, 11 February 1835, ff. 113–118. See also Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 301–11 for a similar analysis. On the re-telling of events as a way of handling trauma, see Susan Brison, Aftermath of Violence and the Making of a Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 58–59. In each of the places to which Robinson’s captives were removed— Bruny Island, Swan Island, Gun Carriage Island, and finally Flinders Island—the pattern was the same: they began to experience alarming rates of mortality and illness. See Pybus, Community of Thieves, 59–61, 69; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 151–53. One of the reasons Robinson presented for the removal to the mainland would be that “a remnant of those interesting people will be preserved.” In 1836, he wrote how the Van Diemen’s Land experience had demonstrated that “it is possible to conciliate the most savage tribes [by a] humane and mild policy.” See ML, A2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28, Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–1837, Robinson to Colonial Secretary, 28 October 1836. 50 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6. 51 ML, A 2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28, Papers Relating to Aborigines, 1825–1837, Robinson to Colonial Secretary, 29 October 1836. 52 Césaire, Colonialism, 36–41, and Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 110–11 clearly identify this tendency. The violent colonial history of the Netherlands is an interesting example of “cultural aphasia.” At the time of the country’s exit from Indonesia in 1945–48, the fact of colonial atrocities was known and admitted. But the violence did not become integrated into the dominant identity of the Netherlands, which imagined itself as a small country untainted by the power plays of its neighbors, and averse to war

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and violence. Once the war was over, the violence of the colonial past was “forgotten,” in the public record and confined to an archival memory room whose door remained firmly shut. See Paul Bul, “Colonial Memory and Forgetting in the Netherlands and Indonesia,” in Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence. The Dutch Empire in Indonesia, ed. Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 269–70, passim. 53 P.G. Gardner, Through Foreign Eyes. European Perceptions of the Kurnai Tribes of Gippsland (Churchill, VIC: Centre for Gippsland, 1988), 105–106. For forgetting as a political process, see Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 54 P.D. Gardener, Gippsland Massacres. The Destruction of the Kurnai Tribes 1800–1860. (Warragul, VIC: Centre for Gippsland, 1983), 15; Lifton, Home from War, 57, 67 The Vietnamese had been racialized as “gooks,” the enemy had been conceptualized as everywhere and everyone, body counts had been established as a key indicator of success, and the group solidarity among the American troops that was reinforced by the fear that came from being in this unknown land facing a faceless enemy. 55 Nicholas Dean Brodie, “It Is a ‘Matter of History and Mentioned in Several Authoritative Writings’: Reminiscing the Line in Tasmania’s Black War 1830–1916,” Tasmanian Historical Studies 20 (2015): 59–61. 56 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 55, 131–34 for the way social and cultural structures create emotional regimes that allow the management of emotions; Cohen, States of Denial, 132. 57 Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 306; Cohen, States of Denial, 5–6, 21–23, 78–89. 58 ML, A2188, Arthur Papers, Vol. 28 Papers Relating to Aborigines 1825–37, Arthur to a Petition of Landowners, 22 February 1831. 59 Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference. Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire 1800–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 146, for how British perpetrators of violence in India came to be treated as a class of heathen themselves as infected with “disordered habits” that suggested how they were aberrant and not reflective of the essence of British civilization. 60 Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 105; John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838, 102–3; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 34–40, 147–58, 162–63. 61 SASL, D6976/ 1–5. Melville, Reminiscences of H D Melville, 22; Alexander Buchanan, “Diary of a Journey Overland from Sydney to Adelaide with Sheep, July-­December 1839,” Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Proceedings XXIII (1921– 22): 72–76; Burke, et. al., The Space of Conflict, 166–67. 62 As was illustrated by one case from Western Victoria when a group of convict workers massacred some Aboriginal people, intimidated the owner of the run into silence when he expressed concern about their actions and held their silence in the face of the promise of a free pardon, passage back to England, plus one hundred pounds. No one came forward to claim this reward. Clark, Scars in the Landscape. A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859, 38–39. See also Reynolds, Forgotten Wars, 87–90. What role convict culture played in the habit of silence is not clear. In the Port Phillip district between 1841 and 1850 only two people were tried for murder of Aboriginal people; see Kirchauff, “The Murder of Meleityappa,” 24, 63 Maggie MacKellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land. The Journal of Niel Black and Other Voices from the Western District (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 133, 140–41, 150–5 for a settler with a conscience. F.J. Meyrick, Life in the Bush (1840–1847). A Memoir of Henry Howard Meyrick (London: Routledge, 1939), 136, 142. This book is also an interesting account of the fragilities of life on the frontier in the 1830s and 1840s. He was continually on the edge of bankruptcy, was continually cheated on business deals, lived very rough, and was wracked with rheumatism and then left alone by the death of his cousin. Meyrick was an example of the tradition of negotiating structures of coexistence between settlers and Aboriginals that has not received the attention it deserves. See Tim Rowse, “Pastoralists and Protectors” in Furphy and Nettelbeck, Aboriginal Protection and its Intermediaries, 175–93.

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6 4 Meyrick, Life in the Bush, 142. 65 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 64–65; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 32; Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 97–100. 66 J.E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits Etc., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania (Hobart: Fullers, 1875), 7–9, 13, 44–54. And he cleverly squared the circle between the advantages their bush craft gave them and their undeniable demographic collapse by arguing that they caused their own demise their overly enthusiastic adoption of “European vices and practices”—presumably forms of sexual diseases. 67 Morris, “Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror,” 85. For examples of settler vulnerability from the Eastern Cape, see William B. Boyce, Notes on South African Affairs Form 1834–1838 (Graham’s Town, 1838, reprint 1971), 26–27, 196–215; Robert Godlonton, Memorials of the British Settlers of South Africa (Grahamstown, 1844), 26, 58. 68 For Thomas and Parker, see ML, A597, Microfilm CY1162. Calder Papers, Papers re. Aborigines, 93–100; James Fenton, Bush Life in Tasmania, 13–18; SRSA. Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Sent 1842, Report of Lt. Huginon, 28 July 1842, GRG24/1/1842, f. 240; GRG 24/6/1852, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1852, C.M. Stuart to Colonial Secretary, 1 May 1852, f. 1333; Rodney Cockburn, Pastoralist Pioneers of South Australia (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 1925), 133–34. 69 For the changes in the language of violence, see Alan Atkinson, “Historians and Moral Disgust,” in Bain and Foster, Frontier Conflict, 113–19. 70 For his involvement in the Warrigal Creek massacre of 1843, see Gardner, Gippsland Massacres, 15. For Macmillan’s memoirs see Bride, Letters from Victorian Pioneers, 202–9. 71 See Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions, 20–21, 34–36, 39–43, and Nettlebeck, “Mythologizing Frontier Violence: Narrative Versions of the Rufus River Conflict, 1841–1899,” Journal of Australian Studies 23 (1999): 75–82. 72 Bull, Early Experiences of Colonial Life in South Australia (Adelaide, 1884, reprint, 1972), 69–70. 73 The use of comparative savagery as a device to excuse violence that violates formal norms was very common in colonial situations. For an example from South Africa, see Denver A. Webb, “War, Racism and the Taking of Heads: Revisiting Military Conflict in the Cape Colony and Western Xhosaland in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 56, no. 1 (March 2015): 37–55. In this case there was an increase in decapitations of Xhosa over the wars of the nineteenth century, and this was justified by claims of Xhosa mutilations which themselves seem not to have been true. 74 Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law. William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier (Kent Town, SA: University of Kent Press, 2007). 75 Robert Foster, “The Legend of James Brown,” Australian Historical Studies  29 (1998): 210–29. 76 As Raymond Evans writes this was period when a disciplined silence ensured a “cultural amnesia . . . as a selective process of forgetting was fostered both educationally and politically.” Evans, “The Country has Another Past,” 15–20, 26–29; Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence. Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times (Crows Nest: Aleen and Unwin, 2013), 2. 77 Maria Nugent, “An Echo of That Other Cry,” in Smith and Edmonds, Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers, 194–95. 78 Charles Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain, 4th ed. (London, 1890), 488; Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, Volume 1 (Leipzig, 1873), 66–76. 79 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire. Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 46–48. Most of his discussion of course focused on India, and in this respect, Seeley offered his own version of blaming imperial violence on the Indigenous victims by arguing that Britain came to rule India as a result of failings within Indian society. Sir J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1895), 228–50. 80 There is no supplementary volume on violence in the OHBE, for example. Although there is an essay on “Empire and Violence, 1900–1939,” by Jock McCulloch in Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

7 LAW AND SOVEREIGNTY

Introduction: law and empire The purpose of the law in empire is twofold. First, law provides the processes and procedures by which imperial sovereignty is realized and represented. And, second, it is the instrument that resolves the “disorder” that preceded the establishment of imperial rule, and which empire regards as its greatest gift to “those without the law.” Law was a natural partner to the violence discussed in the previous chapter whether it was rolled in on the backs of a settler deluge, as in Australia, or followed a military style defeat of indigenes as in New Zealand. Yet the relationship between law and empire was not straightforward. The conditions that fashioned the law in empire were not of the imperial power’s own choosing. The law was never a ready-made instrument of imperial rule; its majesty did not come pre-packaged to be revealed to awe-struck natives. Indeed, the politics of the Indigenous presence were a formative influence. Law had to be constructed, sometimes with the participation of the indigenes, sometimes against their will, and sometimes through processes that fell somewhere in between. Shaunnagh Dorsett has written of early New Zealand, “regardless of whether or not Maori were formally amenable to British law, the British did not have the capacity to enforce that law.”1 Likewise, if the application of the law to the colonial setting was not straightforward, the grounds for the assertion of sovereignty claims were equally fractured. Sovereignty claims were not simply asserted by the imperial presence. They had to be squared with the local realities. Consequently, empire was compatible with local Indigenous sovereignties. The East Indian Company was notoriously slow to move toward an assertion of imperial sovereignty in India, which it had neither the intellectual capacity nor the means to make real. This only begins to change after 1813. And the same trajectory was found in Canada where imperial sovereignty only began to overwhelm tribal nationhood from the 1830s. And in New Zealand

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until the 1860s the recognition of Maori sovereignty was uppermost in the consciousness of official policy makers.2 Thus, the instabilities that marked other spheres of imperial activity in this era were also found in sovereignty claims and legal order. Contemporary international law transmitted mixed signals regarding assertions of imperial sovereignty. How the British Empire could use international law to bolster its claims for sovereignty over Indigenous polities was far from settled. It is a mistake, therefore, to see this period as marching toward a system of international law that would justify imperial sovereignty. The relationship between international law and imperial order was more qualified and tentative than it is often taken to be. Indeed, what is striking is the reticence of the British to create legal systems that would remake international norms. They were not particularly interested, for example, in establishing an international legal basis for humanitarian intervention in the slave trade. Their preference was for local states to develop the strength and will to enforce anti-slave trade legislation.3 The relation between British sovereignty claims and Indigenous politics remained indeterminate and variable across the settler colonies. And they were to remain in this suspended state until later in the nineteenth century. Aboriginal politics and tribal rights retained a status in both metropolitan and local imperial policy. Thus, what strikes one most forcibly about the moment of the early nineteenth century in terms of law and sovereignty is its transitional character. This period was “a distinctive, formative phase in the legal history of the world” which stood between the demise of natural law principles as the foundation of international law and prior to the full formation of positivist principles international law. And to understand why this was so, we must first consider the principles of the international law of sovereignty during this period.4

Uncertain sovereignty: the continued importance of natural rights It is now a commonplace to argue that international law “evolved out of the need to account for, legitimate, and ultimately administer far-flung global empire.”5 International law began to be formulated as early modern globalization created an increasingly complex world of exchange and contact. The context for the first elaborations of international law were provided by the prevailing concepts of natural law. Natural law was rooted in human rights and duties, and it emphasized how certain rights were inherent and independent of manmade systems. Within this body of thought, therefore, Indigenous rights were always a central pre-­occupation. How empire and Indigenous societies could be fitted together was a central contention from the very beginning of modern empires in sixteenth century—as in the famous debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda in 1550 at Valladolid. The central historical narrative of international law has highlighted how its original conceptual basis in natural rights was eroded and replaced by the law that rested entirely on national state sovereignty, devoid of moral principle, and

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antipathetic to sovereignty claims by Indigenous peoples. Looking back from our perspective, it may easily be assumed that the trajectory of legal reasoning moved relentlessly to the rights of European conquerors over the Indigenous peoples. But it was far from this simple. Aboriginal sovereignty continued to be recognized into the mid-nineteenth century as a reminder of the persistence of theories of natural law in international affairs. It is true that an international law that privileged western power over Indigenous rights existed, but the conception of natural rights continued to provide the dominant context. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that natural rights were decisively displaced from legal thinking on the content of international rights.6 So, whilst it is true that with the rise of early modern empires theories of international law began to move away from a the human-centered focus of natural rights into the impersonal realm of relations between organized states, at every point along the way, it encountered qualifications, doubts and reservations which provided spaces for dissent and skepticism. Thus, Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) an early progenitor of an imperial international law regarded Indians as having natural rights that could only be lost through just war, not mere imperial discovery or occupation. The seventeenth-century Dutch theorist, Hugo Grotius, too, rejected the notion that title could be attained by discovery—which was to be the basis for imperial sovereignty in Australia—and accepted that Indigenous peoples possessed natural rights and could act as a sovereign people.7 Indigenous rights were always a matter of debate for theorists of international law. It was only from the mid-eighteenth century that a distinct body of thought emerged which suggested how imperial sovereignty could be justified by denying Indigenous sovereignty. The Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel first proposed that the apparatus of a nation state was necessary to define national sovereignty and that there had to be a recognizable system of internal government and laws for sovereignty to exist. But this claim was continually belied by practical experience. Even to European eyes it was clear that most Indigenous societies met these criteria and that native peoples typically possessed some kind of home-grown law and societal structures. This recognition was reflected in the preference of British policy makers in the later eighteenth century to negotiate empire through treaties with Indigenous societies. By the mid-eighteenth century, therefore, the central elements of a positivist international law had been announced and the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights remained a major pre-occupation in theorizing the law. Even with all the qualifications that accompanied the discussion of native peoples, their rights to land and to an autonomous existence were accepted by theorists.8 If positivist legal theory of international law was to be the ultimate destination of an intellectual journey that began in the sixteenth century this was not an unfolding teleology that was evident to the people living through it. And this context needs to be recognized. More to the point, the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century was a hinge moment in this story when the theory of natural rights yet to run its course, and before a positivist theory of international law had been articulated and politically legitimated. It was the tail end of a period when

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the direction of theory played with the dismantling of natural rights, but failed to consign them entirely to the past. Although J.L. Austin is generally regarded as the first theorist of legal positivism in international law, his publications in the 1830s were not taken up. It was not until the publication of John Westlake’s Chapters of the Principles of International Law in 1894 that positivism received its full expression in the English language.9 As a transitional moment in the development of international law, the early nineteenth century was a season when the influence of natural law was still to be felt, when natural rights claims could still be found and when the Enlightenment critique of empire spoke loudly and piously through a humanitarian culture which highlighted the question of empire’s impact on Indigenous peoples and cultures. There were arguments that could be used to justify an end to Indigenous sovereignty, such as terra nullius in the case of Australia. But the hesitancy with which they were used, reveals the absence of a convincing discourse to provide guidelines as to how to fit imperial sovereignty and law into Indigenous sovereignty and law.10 Indeed, the important rulings on American sovereignty claims over Indian peoples by U.S. Chief Justice Marshall in the 1820s themselves reflected the unstable state of international law and thinking. His rulings combined a footing in a past of natural rights together with a groping toward a fully fledged positivist system of international law that confined itself only to law between nations, rather than a law above nations. Marshall’s findings ranged from endorsing European sovereignty through conquest and thus denying Indian sovereignty in one ruling— a position which Vattel, for example, had explicitly rejected. But in a different ­ruling—­reflecting a remnant of natural rights law—he accorded American Indians the characteristics of nations: a settled group with elements of civil society. Marshall’s rulings were of course contentious in the United States and notoriously were ignored by Andrew Jackson. But they were carefully noted in New Zealand where they were used to establish the case for Aboriginal sovereignty and the power of Crown pre-emption. Of course, this was not purely a matter of the power of legal persuasion. Marshall’s arguments found a welcoming reception in New Zealand because they were consistent with the existing political balance of power.11 A more immediately relevant illustration of the uncertainty around the question of Aboriginal rights is provided by the changing views of James Stephen. In 1822, as legal counsel to the Colonial Office, he delivered an opinion on a case from New South Wales that followed the assertions of Joseph Banks that Britain had taken possession of uninhabited land, and ipso facto, Aboriginal people possessed no sovereignty over the land. But, twenty years later, as permanent secretary to the Colonial Office, Stephen had changed his mind, probably because of his contacts with humanitarian activists like missionaries who were aware of the complexities of Aboriginal land tenures. He now favored recognizing Aboriginal land rights. The land policies that he favored were designed to regulate the growing wave of pastoral settlers and to find ways that would recognize those land rights. He supported Aboriginal sovereignty in other respects, too. He endorsed allowing Indigenous people to participate in British legal procedures without having to take the Oath.

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And he was willing to grant that there were some areas of Aboriginal law that should be exempt from the reach of British jurisdiction.12 By the 1840s there was confusion in the Colonial Office as to the legal status of the First People of Australia. Attention was paid to Marshall’s doctrine in the United States that American Indians were “dependent nations,” and there was debate about reading the Australian experience through that lens. The problem was that the British claim of sovereignty in 1788 did not rest on secure theoretical foundations and native title had not been extinguished in English law. The Aboriginal attachment to land was increasingly evident in humanitarian and settler culture, and it took deliberate denial to ignore that fact. This was one reason the Colonial Office was generally in favor of protecting Aboriginal land rights in the pastoral leases. But local officials did not necessarily have much interest in enforcing carefully worded statutes on that question. Attempts to insist on Aboriginal rights in the 1840s were met with indifference in New South Wales, although there was more sympathy in South and Western Australia, and attempts to protect Aboriginal land rights in the originating statute of South Australia were of limited success.13 The unsettled state of sovereignty claims was one reason why Waitangi figured so large in the policy debates in New Zealand in this period. In the early 1840s there was some doubt as to the practical extent to which British sovereignty claims could be made. Could the governor interfere between two warring tribes, particularly if they had not been signatories to Waitangi? The Colonial Office unhelpfully opined that it depended on the circumstances, a piece of advice that in effect pointed in both directions. Assertions of sovereignty should only be made in cases that contravened “universal laws of morality.” Two years later it was pointed out in the Colonial Office that the question of Indigenous land rights had not been settled in English law and the answer to this absence was to emphasize the importance of pre-emption, which at one and the same time would allow the supremacy of Crown sovereignty and treat the Maori as “independent nations competent to govern themselves under the general protection of the Crown.” But as I have suggested, the issue of land sovereignty remained contested until the Maori wars of the 1860s. Indeed, in 1861, a Colonial Office official noted wearily how relations with the Maori tribes on land issues were closer to those between foreign governments than “as a Government would behave towards its subjects.”14 The same uncertainty surrounded terra nullius, which was to become the legal claim to British sovereignty in Australia. British law had no precedent for taking possession of an uninhabited land. The justification in international law for lawful title being assumed by an imperial power outside of treaty negotiations was a “just war.” Even those theorists most sympathetic to imperial sovereignty, like Vattel, did not sanction the wholesale occupation of land as happened in Australia. Vattel’s conditions for imperial title were far more restrictive and were limited to land that was clearly unused and not needed for their survival. It was only with the disappearance of the political and cultural support for a natural rights argument that the way opened for the doctrine of terra nullius to come to prominence in the discourse on sovereignty.15

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In sum, there was contestation and uncertainty around the issue of sovereignty within the imperial policy-making machine at both local and metropolitan levels. There was an implicit understanding that Crown sovereignty was limited in nature and that its rights over Indigenous peoples had to be established. This reflected political contestation in Britain and power relations in the colonies. But it also reflected the fact that the contours of the relationship between imperial law and Indigenous law had yet to be drawn. There was no one single philosophy, or a set of legal procedures, that accompanied the imperial presence to be instituted by imperial authority. And this uncertainty and instability were mirrored in the strategies that were deployed to secure sovereignty and to bring the rule of British (or more properly English) law to the colonies. There was a widespread recognition that fitting English law and Indigenous society together would not happen as a matter of course. It was hardly a matter of bringing in the judges with their statute books and calling up the juries. The Reverend Joseph Orton articulated the problem clearly when he noted in his diary that “our laws are in most if not all respects inappropriate and inapplicable to their [i.e. the indigenes’] state.” He then went on to explain how the application of British law was, in fact, detrimental to Indigenous people: it held them accountable to laws that they did not understand and laws that hardly related to their situation. At the same time, it failed to give them protection and excluded them from giving evidence because as pagans they could not take the oath, while at the same time allowed evidence against them to be freely admitted.16 Meeting this challenge was the central question for legal policy, and four main strategies were devised: the use of lawlessness to announce the law, modifications that could be made to English law, the question of how to take Aboriginal evidence, and, finally, the question of whether English law should apply to crimes between Aboriginal peoples—inter se crimes.

When lawlessness was the law As we have seen, the colonial frontier was filled with unchecked and arbitrary violence. But even violence that took place outside of state authority was a way of establishing law and sovereignty. As Julie Evans has pointed out where there was no “law” in the formal sense, violence was the law. Furthermore, in an apt example of the way the culture of empire involves the reversals of principles that were trumpeted in the metropole as epitomizing “civilized” societies, establishing the rule of law in empire often required the abrogation of the rule of law itself. Thus, in this period when the apparatus of formal law was weak and fleeting, violence that was unchecked by formal procedures was a particularly important strategy of establishing colonial power and asserting sovereignty.17 All of these features were visited upon the Milmenura people of South Australia in their first encounter with English law and sovereignty in May of 1840, when they were the target of a punitive expedition sent by Governor Sir George Gawler to avenge a massacre of British settlers from the Maria, which had shipwrecked on

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the shores of Milenmura land. The event was interpreted by the British as an act of savage violence. In fact, it was more likely an incident that reflected the lack of cultural understanding on both sides. Gawler determined to use it to assert British sovereignty by punishing those responsible for the killings. Thus, a party led by T. O’Halloran, the police chief of the colony, was sent to punish the Milmenura under the authority of martial law. Chancing upon a group of about forty members of the tribe wearing European clothing the police assumed was from the shipwreck victims, they demanded the culprits be surrendered. Two men were offered up by the Milmenura, and they were promptly “tried” by a hastily convened court martial and hanged by the representatives of British civilization.18 This relatively small event on the far frontier of empire resonated beyond the immediate deaths of two unfortunate indigenes. It was the first punitive expedition carried out in South Australia, and its success established the precedent for others, of both an official and unofficial nature. This was state-sanctioned salutary terror as a strategy for introducing British law. It raised significant constitutional and procedural issues about applying British law to Aboriginal people. Gawler had taken this action against contrary advice from his law officers. The chief justice argued that action could not be taken against the Milmenura because they were not within the boundaries of British jurisdiction. The attorney general, on the other hand, cited Vattel to the effect that Aboriginal people who did not cultivate land could be treated like beasts of the field. He further suggested that since the crime was apparently committed by the tribe, collective punishment was justified. But he did not address how the culprits were to be selected. Gawler and the majority of the Executive Council claimed the right to take action on the grounds of martial law. But the proper procedures for declaring martial law were not followed, nor was it possible to see how they could be followed since there was no British presence among the Milmenura people.19 These issues reverberated throughout the colonial hierarchy. Within the colony, Gawler’s actions sparked a fierce debate. Particular attention was paid to the contradictions in the reasoning that was offered by the governor and the attorney general. More seriously for Gawler, the incident attracted the attention of the Colonial Office through the intervention of the Aborigines Protection Society. The Law Officers in London agreed that Gawler and O’Halloran were guilty of illegal acts and that the policeman could be charged with murder and Gawler arraigned as an accessory. In the event, no formal action was taken. But it is likely that this reinforced the unfavorable view the Colonial Office already had of the governor as a result of his bungling the finances of the colony. Certainly, he was never again entrusted with a responsible position in imperial service. And the Colonial Office turned with relief to note that his successor, George Grey, was committed “to principles more consonant with those entertained by the Government and by the law as laid down by the Law Officers of the Crown.”20 Colonel George Gawler may have been a victim of the tensions within imperial governance. But martial law was critical to the assertion of imperial sovereignty, and arbitrary punishment was part of imperial enterprise. Gawler was neither the

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first nor the last governor to be squeezed between the pressures to assert “the law,” the demands of legal propriety, and the moral imperatives of imperial culture. Governor Torrington faced the same kind of dilemma in Ceylon in 1848 when he used martial law to repress a minor uprising. Indeed, this incident shadowed the more seismic convolutions of the Eyre case in Jamaica in 1865. As well as exposing the ultimate force upon which empire rested, these incidents indicated the sensitive place that martial law occupied in English law. Martial law was an essential component of the imperial armory. But it always contained the risk of stoking moral outrage within the humanitarian communities in the colonies and the metropole. There was a strong tradition in British political culture that martial law was unknown in civil law and that its application against civilians was absolutely illegal. It could only be invoked in a state of war, and even then, it could not replace civilian law precisely because it transgressed the boundary between arbitrary military rule and the supreme authority of the civil power.21 Strictly speaking, the use of martial law was almost always illegal in the situation of the colonial frontier. This probably explains why Arthur, for example, was so careful to attempt to hedge it around with all sorts of qualifications. Still, the extent to which exercising imperial power demanded the reversal of the principles of British constitutional law and its long-held verities was constantly being tested at the colonial frontier. There were several incidents in Sir George Grey’s career when he clearly crossed that line. On one occasion he deceived the Maori leader Te Rauparaha to come to a meeting where he was promptly seized, put in irons, and held hostage on a frigate. Grey justified this by Te Rauparaha’s own deceitfulness in conspiring with other rebel chiefs. But it was clearly a deliberate move by Grey to crack the leadership of the uprising. He admitted to James Stephen that he had no evidence that would support a charge of conspiracy. But, in this case, the Colonial Office did not press the point and merely warned Grey of the constitutional dangers of such action.22

Exceptionalism or assimilation? Debate about how the law should be brought to Indigenous societies in this period revolved around two general themes. Should regimes of legal exceptionalism be erected to allow the co-existence of different legal order, or should Indigenous people be brought within the orbit of English law as quickly as possible? Although these two positions broadly described the attitude of most commentators on the question of how the law should relate to Indigenous peoples, neither position was mutually exclusive. Indeed, they could hardly be so because the general expectation was that at some point, the civilizing process would bring the different cultures into close concordance, thus erasing the need for either option. In practice, those adjudicating the question had to respond pragmatically to what the situation on the ground allowed. Actual policy toward Indigenous law was, therefore, more nuanced and ambiguous than might be expected. It would be going too far to claim that the period was characterized by a legal pluralism that accommodated

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imperial and non-imperial legal systems. But neither was it very far from such a world. On the face of it, for example, Sir George Grey belonged firmly in the camp of imposing English law as quickly as possible upon Aboriginal peoples, as he had argued in his 1840 Memorandum. But, Grey was willing to make all sorts of accommodations with Maori customary law and even instituted what could have been an embryonic legal system that catered particularly to Maori issues.23 The discussion of the need for exceptional legal regimes came out of the debate on the Select Committee on Aborigines, and it was Saxe Bannister who laid out the most thoughtful program for the creation of a space where English law and Indigenous law could coexist. Bannister proposed a series of measures that included native assessors, interpreters in every court, admission in courts of the customs and laws of traditional society, that unsworn evidence be allowed, that punishments adapt to Indigenous culture, and that juries include native peoples. Although this was very much an ideal list, it did identify the subjects that imperial policy makers at the local level grappled with and in some cases tried to accommodate. Elements of these ideas can be found in various efforts made to introduce English in the colonies of the southern empire. But it was in New Zealand that these views found fullest expression.24 Such ideas contained nineteenth-century notions of cultural relativism. They were based on an assessment of the best way to fit an imperial system into a culture that occupied a lower place on the scale of civilization. Thus, it was argued that Maori sensibilities required the modification of English law. Maori had different notions of guilt, for example, and it was unjust to erect a punishment regime that expressed values that were absent in Maori culture. Exceptionalism did not imply a philosophical acceptance of legal pluralism but a temporary accommodation to native law until the forces of assimilation had moved the Maori to a state where they matched British sensibilities. Still, this debate also reflected the fluid instabilities of the period and its opportunities for alternative structures of authority and power that existed at this moment. A different historical dynamic would have been initiated if a fully fledged system of legal exceptionalism had been installed.25 The alternative to an exceptionalist regime was described in Grey’s memorandum of 1840. Grey wrote his document in response to the perceived failures of missionary work to ignite the spark of human progress in Indigenous peoples and the need for stronger action. Grey firmly believed in imperialism as the essential force that would reignite dormant ingredients of civilization that existed within the culture of Indigenous societies. The most effective instrument to trigger this process was the law. Grey’s memo impressed the Colonial Office because it came at the moment when these issues were being ruminated in the colonies and various legislative solutions were being offered.26 What is interesting about Grey’s memo, however, is that it was more a statement of attitude than an agenda for his own policies. Some of the ideas within the memo were to be found in his policy efforts, such as the short-lived idea of apprenticing Aboriginal people to settlers. But his actual policies in Australia and New Zealand diverged considerably from the proposals of the memorandum. This was

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particularly true in respect to his attitude toward traditional law. In the memo, he was wary about allowing customary law to continue even in the short term because he believed it impeded civilizational influences from doing their work. Thus, it was necessary to interfere in internal Aboriginal disputes to break the stultifying hold of tradition. On the other hand, in both Australia and New Zealand, he was willing to advocate a series of changes to English legal procedure that facilitated the perpetuation of customary traditions and laws.27 This was a result of experience tempering ideology. John Hutt, the governor in Western Australia, had already noted in response to Grey’s memo that a sweeping application of English law was neither desirable nor practical. Hutt’s policy was to restrict English law only to the “settled areas” where the white presence could be assumed to familiarize local Aboriginal people with British mores and legal culture. It was more judicious, Hutt claimed, to leave well alone those indigenes who were far away from the nodes of civilization even though their customs were contrary to English sensibilities. James Stephen basically agreed with this. Indeed, he reinterpreted Grey’s recommendation to mean that “they [Aboriginal people] be subject to the responsibilities of it [the law] so far as they can be taught to understand before hand what those responsibilities are.” Legal cases came up against this problem on a fairly regular basis. There were instances of grand juries refusing to find Aboriginal crimes on the grounds that they did not know a certain action was unlawful in English law. The question of how to accommodate English law to the Indigenous presence resolved itself into two central problems: how to include Aboriginal people within the scope of English legal jurisdiction when they could not swear on Oath; and by what right could English courts claim to interfere in crimes within Aboriginal society, between Aboriginal people themselves? These were related problems, but I shall discuss them separately here for the sake of clarity.28

Aboriginal evidence and the oath Until the humanitarian moment of the 1830s, the inability of Indigenous peoples to give evidence in English courts had been used as a legal justification for punitive reprisals as actions of punishment. But the sensibilities of the period and the fact that, in Australia, Britain was operating in a legal terra nullius without any formal treaty framework made the problem particularly pressing. This was only increased as the colonies developed their administrative infrastructure and as contact with Aboriginal people deepened. Several celebrated cases of inter-racial conflict in the 1820s in New South Wales sharply raised the question of the status of Indigenous evidence and of the ability of the law to protect Aboriginal people from settler violence. If the law did not apply to them because they were not familiar with it, and, if they could not testify in English courts because of the Oath, neither could they be protected by the law. Grey himself had personal experience of the inequities that this situation created. He had witnessed a case in which a native was undeservedly punished because the only witnesses to his innocence were other Aboriginal people who were barred from giving evidence.29

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In July 1837 a few months after the colony of South Australia was established, its administration faced the first murder of a white man by a local Aboriginal. As was so often the case with frontier violence, the cause of the altercation was an attempt by the settler to have sex with the Aboriginal man’s wife. The Protector of Aborigines was convinced that the murder was a matter of self-defense and he was eager to secure a fair trial and acquittal for the man. But the only witnesses to the incident were the wives of the accused. Their evidence could not be considered: not being Christian, they could not be sworn on the Bible. The fledgling colonial administration spent six months debating this issue without reaching a resolution. In the meantime, the Aboriginal man took the problem off their plate by escaping from jail and disappearing into the bush.30 By this time, the implications of the question for the realities of British sovereignty were widely acknowledged. The administration of the legal process was blocked, and the dynamic of the civilizing process that imperial contact was supposed to generate was stymied. As Hutt wrote to the Colonial Office in 1839, without resolving the problem of the Oath, it was possible neither to secure justice for the Aboriginal people nor to bring the law to them. Whether the indigene was victim or perpetrator of the crime, if he or she was subject to English jurisdiction— that is, within the pale of settlement—no warrant could be issued or, if issued, no conviction could occur. This created another situation where lawlessness was the law, and violence its handmaiden. It encouraged vigilante action by settlers against Aboriginal people who stole sheep, for example, because they knew not only that “the wheels of justice grind slowly, they will also grind uncertainly and . . . ineffectively.” In one form or another these kinds of sentiments were widely shared. Eyre argued, for example, that it not only prevented the administration of equal justice, it undermined the credibility of the law as an example of the virtues of Western culture. It played a role in the law’s total failure to punish white atrocities against Aboriginal people. Too often the only witnesses to white atrocities could not give evidence because they could not swear on oath.31 Aboriginal Evidence Acts were the colonial administration’s answer to this problem of the Oath. There was a spate of such Acts across the empire in this period, although significant differences between the various colonies exist. The Australian colonies were a particular locus of these efforts—British sovereignty there was operating in a legal void. Thus began a series of efforts to address the problem of Aboriginal evidence within the context of English legal procedure. In Western Australia, John Hutt proposed an act that would allow indigenes to give unsworn testimony in court. At the other end of the continent the governor of New South Wales introduced a similar Act in October  1839 after the recent Myall Creek massacre trials had shown the difficulties of proving violence in the absence of Indigenous testimony. There was considerable variation in the scope of such Acts. In New South Wales the Act sought to limit the weight accorded to Aboriginal testimony. It could be admitted only to the extent that it was supported by corroborating testimony. In Western Australia, it was accompanied by granting magistrates summary powers to punish Aboriginal people for certain classes

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of crimes committed against settler property. These efforts were impeded by legal pedantry from the Colonial Office, whose law officers usually objected to one aspect or another of these colonial Acts. By the time this was circumvented in 1844 by an act of the imperial Parliament permitting governors to take steps to allow Aboriginal evidence, it was too late to make much difference, as the experience of New South Wales illustrated. Sir George Gipps, the governor of New South Wales, immediately redrew an Aboriginal Evidence Act only to see it flounder in his Legislative Council on the growing opposition from the settlers. He was unable to get Acts through his legislative council in both 1844 and 1849. Indeed an Aboriginal Evidence Act for New South Wales was not finally enacted until 1876, by which time the original purpose behind the effort had changed entirely.32 Under Sir George Grey’s governorship (1841–45) and his successor, Frederick Robe (1845–48), in South Australia, a significant effort was made to implement an Aboriginal evidence policy. Grey took immediate advantage of the imperial parliament’s enabling act to push an Ordinance through his Legislative Council, permitting Aboriginal people to affirm that they were telling the truth. It was further amended to allow evidence to convict in cases short of those where the sentence was death or transportation. The Act provided for interpreters in cases where English was not understood.33 But this seemingly simple provision illustrated the difficulties that accompanied the attempt to craft such policies. Interpreters of Aboriginal evidence had to be sworn. They understood English, so there was no cultural reason why the Oath should not be required for their truth-telling. But this, in turn, created its own obstacles. If an interpreter himself did not believe in the criteria for taking the Oath—a belief in God, or an understanding of divine reward or punishment—they were entitled to give their own original evidence but they could not interpret for anyone else. In cases where an interpreter could not understand a particular native language, proceedings had to be deferred until the interpreter was instructed in the language enough to give evidence in English. And discussions over these kinds of finer details continued throughout the 1840s. Accordingly, in 1847 the question was raised as to whether unsworn testimony could be admitted by an unsworn interpreter. The attorney general of the time urged it to be allowed in the interests of realizing the implementation of English law. At the same time, the quality of the interpretation could create problems. At least one interpreter reported that he learned a version of English (and fortunately acquired a knowledge of God) while languishing in a colonial jail. This was judged sufficient to make him a solid enough citizen to qualify for taking the oath. But interpreters were not always able to give a coherent narrative to British ears. The solution to this problem was to enlist the Protector of Aborigines—who presumably could be sworn—to act as an interpreter to the interpreter.34 The language issue posed ongoing challenges. Finding interpreters was always difficult, particularly as the expanding frontier brought a succession of new groups within the ambit of the law, each with its own language. And if a language could not be interpreted, courts were faced with the choice of holding the accused over

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(in one case for a year) or letting them go free. In a larceny case in 1848 an Aboriginal person was called to evidence and an interpreter asked to explain that she must make an affirmation to tell the truth. The problem was that there was no word for “truth” in her language. The protector was set to work with the interpreter to find an adequate substitute. They agreed that the witness could be instructed to tell no lies, or, as Moorhouse put it, “speak the language fairly.” But, at trial, the judge would not allow that substitution, which set off a flurry of discussion within the colonial bureaucracy as to whether the Ordinance of 1844 demanded that the exact words of affirming the truth be used. The Attorney General did not believe that it did. But even then the problem was not solved. When the case returned to trial the judge managed to fluster the interpreter to such an extent that on being asked where he would go if he did not tell the truth, he answered, “Heaven.” At which point the judge refused to allow him to be sworn and the case collapsed. In other instances judges refused to allow interpreters’ evidence on the grounds that there was no possible way of knowing the accuracy of their translation.35

Inter se What was to be done about Indigenous, traditional law in the imperial setting? This was the second major issue that imperial policy makers grappled with as they sought to adapt English law to colonial spaces. It was not a new problem for British imperialism. The British had confronted this issue from the beginning of their efforts to dominate Ireland. Even though English common law began to establish its primacy over Irish traditional law in the sixteenth century, certain aspects of Irish traditional law was recognized by the legal authorities into the nineteenth century. There were valid precedents, therefore, for English common law to coexist with Indigenous law.36 But the issue became particularly acute during this period as the settler colonial world groped toward establishing the structures of legal procedure and sovereign jurisdiction. Into the second decade of the nineteenth century in the heart of Sydney, English jurisdiction coexisted with Indigenous customary law, which was quite willing to impose its penalties in full view of the settler community. It was Governor Macquarie who first began to clean up this disorder by issuing a Proclamation asserting British authority around the settled spaces of the colony. But the formal extension of British law did not begin until the settler explosion forced the issue in the 1820s. Indeed, it was only then that a legal infrastructure began to be installed with the establishment of a Supreme Court in New South Wales in 1823. Discussions about how far jurisdiction extended over the indigenes followed immediately. But there continued to be prevarication and uncertainty how to structure the trial of Aboriginal people. The very first Indigenous person to be tried before a settler court was a murder case in 1822, nearly forty years after the First Fleet arrived on the shores of Australia. It was a case which illustrated the problems of extending jurisdiction into the Aboriginal community. Two Aboriginal people were accused of the murder of a stockman. They were discharged because their guilt could only

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be proved by the inadmissible evidence of other Aboriginals. The first Aboriginal person was charged with theft before a colonial court in 1832. And this lag reflected in part the “uncertainty on the part of the . . . magistrates and attorney general about the limits of British jurisdiction over Aborigines for all but the clearest of crimes against nature.”37 In New Zealand, as we have seen, the tendency was to create separate space for Maori law. Governor Fitzroy’s Native Exemption Ordinance expressly prohibited police magistrates from applying English law to inter se cases unless it was requested by the Maori themselves. Likewise, under Grey a sweeping imposition of English law was never really on the cards—whatever the sentiments expressed in his 1840 Memorandum. Grey himself was fully aware of the complexities of this issue, and even in South Australia, he showed no appetite for following his own recommendations to the letter. He was not as enthusiastic as George Clarke to see co-existence between English law and Maori law, yet his policy practice pointed as much in the direction of legal pluralism as it did to a unitary legal regime. And this extended even to the modification of punishment to fit the cultural resistance to imprisonment that existed in Maori culture. So here was Grey the arch-imperialist governor erecting a legal confection that took on board Maori cultural preferences! What was to stop such a system from evolving into a hybridized legal regime that combined elements of English and Maori law?38 The question of the relationship between English and traditional law involved a judgment as to where the boundary between English law and customary law should lie. On this matter there was ongoing uncertainty both in theory and in practice. The British side of the boundary was fairly clear. By the 1830s, there was a general rule in Australia that only those indigenes in close contact with English settlers should be subject to the rule of English law. (New Zealand was different because many Maori were willing to use English law in their interactions with the British.) The attorney general of South Australia in 1847 ruled that it would be improper to try natives according to English law if they had never had contact with Europeans on the grounds that they could not be expected to understand the meaning of Britain’s domination of the country. Nor, for the same reasons, could they be the subject of inter se jurisdiction until they had been properly instructed in the mores of English society. These general attitudes were never regarded as satisfactory and led to many anomalies. Thus, in South Australia in the later 1840s a Grand Jury refused to find against some Aboriginal people who had killed another man for trespassing on their lands because they did not know that such a murder would be illegal in British terms. The judge agreed and the men were pardoned.39 None of this spoke to legal adjudication of Aboriginal customs, such as marriage customs or traditional punishment for adultery. Again, the general inclination was that these were beyond the scope of imperial law. But customs that breached “universal laws of humanity”—such as cannibalism in the case of the Maori—were exempted from this prohibition. Even George Clarke wanted to extend English law to deal with these cases, although he imagined that the law would be applied in conjunction with the Maori authorities.40 The question of inter se jurisdiction

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in this period, therefore, defies simple generalization. There was considerable variation in opinion, which took some time to jell into accepted convention. Charles Cooper, the chief justice of South Australia throughout the 1840s, stood for a strong wall between English law and Aboriginal society. He had not held this view when he arrived in the colony. He had originally adopted the posture of the Grey memorandum, that Aboriginal people should be tried just like any other British subject. But firsthand encounter with the realities of imperial rule—in this instance the Maria case—changed his mind. The Milmenura were clearly not within the pale of settlement and could hardly be expected to know that what they did was contrary to British legal standards.41 Cooper was the leading representative of the view that only those local people who had in some way shown an acquiescence to British sovereignty could properly be subject to English legal procedures and penalties. For Cooper, the key criteria were contact and familiarity. And despite the hostility of the Colonial Office and contrary rulings elsewhere in the Australian colonies, he persisted with this legal position in South Australia throughout the 1840s. Indeed, he was ultimately brought into serious conflict with Governor Frederick Robe on this issue when he acquitted three Aboriginal men accused of murder because they had not met the criterion of contact with Europeans and, therefore, “cannot reasonably be deemed cognizant of our assumed dominion over their country or themselves.”42 Cooper’s position was unpopular, not least because it seemed to pass on the question of offenses to “universal humanity” and because it put the onus of “civilizing the natives squarely on the missionaries and government.” But he was not the only one who took this position. Justice John Willis in Port Phillip held the same view, as did Chief Justice Swainson in New Zealand. And throughout much of the period, case law was marked by uncertainty in this matter. As the oldest and most important colony, New South Wales was where leading decisions were made, and as the center of the settler influx from the 1820s, it was the place where the limits of the law were most frequently tested. Thus, it is interesting to note that even here until the mid-1830s there was continual uncertainty as to how British law should articulate with Aboriginal people, leading to a series of conflicting and conflicted judgments. R v Ballard in 1829, for example, pointed firmly in the direction of legal pluralism. This case involved an inter se murder within the pale of British settlement. But the ruling by Justice Forbes abstained from interfering because of an absence of jurisdiction over internal Aboriginal society. He also used the word “law” to describe Aboriginal practices and customs.43 Seven years later, however, in a similar case involving Aboriginal on Aboriginal murder, this ruling was overturned in R v Murrell. The defense counsel—who was a supporter of the Aborigines Protection Society—argued on the basis of R v Ballard that there was no jurisdiction. But this argument was rejected by Chief Justice Burton, a recent arrival from Britain who insisted on the application of English law. Going against most precedent as well as most informed opinion, Burton took the view that since the tribes did not have a government at the moment of settlement, they were not entitled to be regarded as a sovereign people with laws of their own.

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This was a groundbreaking argument. It was the argument that established the legal legitimacy of the terra nullius argument for British sovereignty. It settled the uncertainty as to the basis of sovereignty and law that heretofore had been dominant within the discourse and culture of settlement. But in a striking illustration of the volatility of legal opinion, the same justices who had formulated the R v Ballard ruling were now willing to overturn their previous judgment and follow Burton’s contrary decision. Although the case was profoundly significant historically, it is important to note how fragile this ruling was. Its implications were not immediately apparent, nor did they sweep clean the board of legal argument.44 To our eyes this was a ruling that was to be expected. It was the climax of a growing trend in New South Wales to shift the boundary between English law and customary law and establish a legal logic for territorial sovereignty. It fit exactly the intellectual framework that justified imperial rule on the grounds that Indigenous societies could not be considered sovereign nations on a par with European style states. But this is also a moment when it is useful to stand behind the evidence rather than in front of it, looking back. The argument in Murrell was not an argument that had been fully elaborated within the legal culture. Nor was it an argument that had established its dominance within the cultural and political discourse that framed the discussion of relations between Indigenous people and empire. It is not surprising, therefore, that this argument did not come easily even to Justice Burton. In order to get to his crowning judgment of terra nullius he had to convince himself of the strength of his argument and to make unsubstantiated claims for its authority. According to his private notes, in preparing his judgment he worked hard to justify his argument about sovereignty. He cited the authority of Vattel, but even this required extensive sophistry to make the argument stick, since Vattel did not provide a case for taking over Indigenous lands on the grounds that he had cited. Furthermore, he quite wrongly claimed that “in all transactions between the British settlers and the natives, the laws of the mother country have been carried into execution.”45 R v Murrell was important. But it was important more in retrospect. As Shaunnagh Dorsett has pointed out, the doctrine of “perfect settler sovereignty” that it embodied would not be realized in Australian courts for some years to come. The wide variation in the legal intervention in Indigenous culture needs to be stressed. At Port Phillip, Justice Willis in 1841 took the position that inter se cases could not be tried, even though this had been happening in New South Wales since 1836. And for a decade he clung to this position, so in the Protectorate it remained uncertain whether and how British law could apply to Aboriginal people. This doubt carried over into the new state of Victoria that was created in 1851 out of the Port Phillip Protectorate. There are cases in the 1860s that were argued as if R v Murrell had never happened, cases where it was asserted that jurisdiction could not extend to inter se cases because the Aboriginal people involved had never ceded their sovereignty.46 In South Australia, even after the clash between Governor Robe and Justice Cooper, the application of English law to Aboriginal society remained a contentious

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issue within the settler community. Cooper continued to argue that only those local people who had specifically acceded to British sovereignty should be subject to its laws. This argument resonated in the courts as in 1851 when a grand jury in Adelaide was reluctant to hear evidence in an inter se murder case because they did not feel justified in “breaking up all their [Aboriginal peoples] internal system [sic] for the punishment of offences to which all their previous traditions and habits give force and sanction.”47 Similarly, in Western Australia two years after Murrell, the attorney general recommended against interfering in criminal matters among the local indigenes. In part, this reflected the fact that Aboriginal policy continued to be the prerogative of the Governor, and the boundary between English and customary law continued to be along the lines of proximity. Thus, inter se cases were restricted to those who were assumed to have acquired sufficient familiarity with legal procedure to allow a fair trial. This continued to be the case until the later 1840s when a new governor arrived who was more willing to disregard this boundary and to assert authority over internal Indigenous communities. After a long period of restraint from intervention, then, Western Australia became the most aggressive of all the states in using criminal law to address Aboriginal inter se violence.48 The question of inter se reveals how the imposition of imperial sovereignty through the law was a qualified and incomplete process. Indeed, there is a sense in which the inter se question was never fully resolved in Australia. Even though the legal basis for nullifying Aboriginal sovereignty began to be laid in this period, and appellate courts increasingly registered that fact, there remained considerable space for Indigenous law to operate on its own terms and punish crimes according to its own codes. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, for example, settler courts have been hesitant to punish violence that resulted from sorcery disputes in Aboriginal society. And in some cases, native law entered into colonial courts even at a time (the 1890s) when settler sovereignty was virtually unchallenged. In his own time, Justice Charles Cooper of South Australia was increasingly an outlier for his preference for limiting interference in customary law. But the kinds of arguments he used continued to reverberate long after he had lost the formal legal argument. And, in more recent times the old settler colonies have continued to grapple with the place of Indigenous law. The Australian Law Reform Commission, for example, has recommended that customary law should be taken into account in sentencing if it did not offend against the “general law.”49 The attempts to navigate the relationship between English law and Aboriginal society were always inflected by power relations. Thus, the benign intentions of legal policies informed by “humane policy” considerations could not be taken for granted. Even where Aboriginal Evidence Bills enabled the prosecution of white settlers who committed violence against Indigenous people, convictions were virtually unknown. Indeed, such legislation ended up reversing its original intentions, laying the basis for discriminatory “special law” that subordinated them to settler interests.50 In New South Wales, the perverted promise of admitting Aboriginal evidence was foretold during discussions in the Legislative Council on such

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legislation in June  1849. Robert Lowe—who was later to become the leading opponent of the Second Reform Bill of 1867 in the British Parliament—stood to oppose the Aborigines Evidence Bill that Attorney General Robert Plunkett had introduced. Lowe argued that the Bill was hardly a liberating measure for Aboriginal people. It would, he suggested, expose them to greater danger from white violence. Lowe pointed out that if settlers were exposed to the dangers of prosecution for their violence, they would ensure that no trace of their acts remained to be used to convict them in the courts. (As indeed, they were already doing in their codes of silence.) This act, therefore, would serve to increase the lawlessness it was designed to prevent. Lowe was right to predict that such a bill did not necessarily mean that Aboriginal evidence would be accorded the status that might be imagined. Subsequent cases where such evidence was used show that it was more frequently used to secure convictions against Aboriginal people than to protect them from settler violence. Indeed, indigenes who were involved in legal cases against settler violence were more likely to be subject to the manipulation of the system by biased and selfinterested settlers concerned to hide their complicity in racial violence.51

Stabilization: positivist law and Aboriginal rights The legal regimes of the early nineteenth century, then, contained competing tendencies. On the one hand, reflecting the tattered remnants of natural rights law, they sought to conjoin imperial and Indigenous law. The main significance of this effort was to lie in the future, however, in the legacies it bestowed to legal initiatives that were to redeem the claims of Indigenous law in the later twentieth century. But at the time their greatest problem was the way they compromised imperial sovereignty. The ambiguities in the early colonial legal regime were not finally resolved until the formal triumph of positivist notions of legal sovereignty that proceeded through two co-dependent developments. First, theories of sovereignty were developed in international law that were premised upon the supremacy of Western state structures and the subordination of Indigenous polities and cultures. And, second, at the local level, settler political narratives were developed that resolved the question of how Aboriginal rights fit into imperial sovereignty. The natural rights tradition in international law was not finally displaced with a theory that eschewed the assertion of abstract notions of “rights” until the later nineteenth century. International law became anchored in a fact-based system with no reference to ideological morality. Britain’s John Westlake defined international law as “being a science of what a state and its subjects ought to do and may do with reference to other states and their subjects.” Thus, international law was reduced to relations between nation states. Indigenous people who existed within an imperial context could not claim the status of states and, even more significantly, were denied natural rights that had previously been claimed to exist across state structures, irrespective of their forms.52 This stage in the history of international law was embedded in empire. Its intellectual home lay in discussions between international lawyers in Europe

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centered on the International Institute of International Law in Paris. The institute had been established in 1873 after the Franco-Prussian War put issues of conquest and sovereignty on the international agenda. The scramble for Africa and the Congress of Berlin provided an immediate impetus for the 1888 meeting of the Institute to discuss the key principles of occupation, such as territorium nullius, which was now defined as territory without Western-style state structures. This meant that even inhabited land could now qualify as empty territory if there was no political community that was recognizable to western eyes. These debates afforded international validation to the empires that were currently dividing the world, and also to the tendencies within local legal regimes that were pointing in the same direction. It is important to note, however, that these pro-imperial positions were hotly contested. Liberal thought had lost none of its willingness and ability to critique empire. Indeed, it may be argued that these debates also laid the foundations for modern Indigenous rights claims. Nevertheless, what came out of them in the short term was a shift in the intellectual climate when “natural law finally gave way to positivist international law,” which was entirely Euro-centric, excluded Indigenous societies from its purview, and legitimated the rule of colonial society.53 At the local level of the settler colony, the tensions that ran through attempts to meld Aboriginal rights and imperial sovereignty in the earlier part of the century had been resolved by the 1890s. Legal narratives were developed that endowed imperial—or more correctly settler—sovereignty with legal and historical legitimacy. This was a process that rested upon legal readings that involved “forgetting” the debates that had governed the discussion of Indigenous rights and imperial sovereignty in the earlier part of the century. Consequently, by the end of the century colonial sovereignty was safely protected by the law in both New Zealand and Australia. But the processes were different in each case. To take New Zealand first. The case law that provided the context for Maori sovereignty claims had been engineered by Sir George Grey. We noted earlier how, in the mid-1840s, Grey was faced with two related challenges as far as Maori land policy was concerned. He needed to restore Crown pre-emption of land title (which his predecessor had abandoned) in order to stabilize and control the disorder of market forces over the land market. In addition, Grey received instructions to implement a new constitution that took direct aim at Maori land title. Knowing the power of the Maori commitment to their land, and believing that Aboriginal policy had to lie with the governor, Grey refused to implement the constitution. But in order to protect his position and to restore to the colonial government authority over land policy and title alienation, he engineered a legal case (R v Symonds) to test whether the previous governor’s waiving of Crown pre-exemption was legally sound. Predictably enough, it was found that pre-emption could not be abrogated; the Crown could not give up its claims to ultimately controlling title. But the case also guaranteed Maori land rights because it tied Crown sovereignty to the voluntary transfer of Maori sovereignty through Waitangi. Thus, the case established that native title could only be alienated with their consent.54

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There continued to be a school of thought in New Zealand that rejected the sovereignty rights over land that Waitangi endowed upon the Maori, and by the 1860s impatience in the settler community with the idea of reconciling Maori and English notions of land title had reached fever pitch. The New Zealand wars of the 1860s marked a new departure in the land policy of the colonial state as it sought more aggressively to alienate Maori land. But the key legal problem remained. Maori rights were rooted in the Treaty of Waitangi, which recognized the validity of Maori land title. Dispossession could not be complete until that problem was resolved. It took the seemingly mundane court case of Wi Parata v. Bishop of Wellington in 1877 to overturn the legal regime of Waitangi. Wi Parata was a leading Maori politician, an ex-Member of Parliament who, in later years, turned his attention to litigating Maori land issues. This particular case concerned lands that the Ngati Toa iwi had granted to the Anglican Church in 1848 for a school. In the event, the school was never established and in 1850 the Crown granted the land to the church. This was done without the consent of the tribe, and it was, therefore, a violation of the Treaty of Waitangi. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice James Prendergast ruled that customary title could not be recognized or enforced by the courts. His judgment also undercut the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, claiming it to be a “simple nullity” because Maori were “primitive barbarians” who were “incapable of performing the duties, and . . . rights, of a civilised community.” This ruling—a pretty radical move for Prendergast to make—signified the legal adoption of the newly dominant discourse on Indigenous peoples: that they inherently lay outside the boundaries of sovereign law.55 The WiPirata case marked the moment when natural rights law died in New Zealand legal discourse and positivist legal theory triumphed. From the 1870s, “New Zealand courts turned their backs on . . . internationally held principles [of Indigenous sovereignty and title] until they were discovered a century later.” The judgment amounted to a ruling for the legal dispossession of the Maori. It provided a foundational precedent for the next century for denying recognition to Maori title either on land or in sea fisheries. In addition, it diminished the place of the Treaty of Waitangi within the political culture and politics of New Zealand. The treaty was now repudiated as an instrument for transferring sovereignty, and Maori land claims could no longer be based on its provisions. A new legal orthodoxy was created that fit the supremacy of settler state power very well, but which was notable for the way it ignored previous decisions in New Zealand and elsewhere that had recognized Indigenous land rights. Henceforth, Crown prerogative—wielded by the colonial state—began to be used primarily as an instrument of settler power and as a singular authority over Maori affairs.56 In Australia, a similar story unfolded at the same time. But in Australia the narrative that justified British sovereignty invoked the myth of a terra nullius. As is well known, the idea of Australia as a terra nullius had been present in British thinking from the very beginning of imperial contact. It had been the initial assumption— derived from Joseph Banks—when Philip was sent out in 1788. But there turned

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out to be a larger Aboriginal population than expected. The place of terra nullius in the legal record was curiously weak until the end of the nineteenth century. Close observers of Aboriginal society clearly understood the absurdity of the central assumption of terra nullius doctrine that Indigenous peoples had no organic connection with the land. Even in the settler community, Aboriginal attachment to the land, their rituals, and land usage practices were widely understood and were known at the heart of empire also.57 Throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, there was an uneasy legal standoff around the claims of terra nullius (and by the same token Aboriginal rights). Terra Nullius only became good legal doctrine and was only moved to the center of sovereignty claims in Australia in 1889 when it received the endorsement of the Privy Council in the case of Cooper v. Stuart. This judgment found that law and political society only came to Australia with white settlement. In delivering the judgment, Lord Watson declared that before the British arrived Australia was without settled inhabitants or settled law. This judgment paralleled WiParata in its historical and sociological assumptions about Indigenous society. But, equally, it resolved the uncertainty that had previously characterized the legal treatment of Aboriginal sovereignty.58 By the 1880s, political conditions had changed sufficiently to make Cooper v. Stuart an easy and uncontroversial decision. Settler authority had established its supremacy in local Australian politics, and it needed to authenticate its sovereign legitimacy in a way that British imperial culture had been reluctant to do. Terra nullius as a legal doctrine was available to take its place at the center of settler political narrative. The imperial factor had long ago abdicated its power and responsibility over Aboriginal policy. Likewise, at the level of international theory, terra nullius received the endorsement of the Congress of Berlin to justify dispossession. And so Australian settler sovereignty came into its full legal legitimacy. Like WiParata v. The Bishop of Wellington, Cooper v. Stuart was the foundation for legal regulation of Aboriginal land issues for the next century. Both were historical legacies that would return to haunt and disrupt Antipodean politics.59

Conclusion WiParata and Cooper v. Stuart mark the end of one legal regime of empire and the beginning of another. They signal the formal termination of the aspiration for a space of mutuality between Indigenous people and British law; they announce the emergence of a legal regime that declared the dominance and supremacy of English law and sovereignty. Of course, this new regime did not resolve the enormous inequities and tensions of settler imperial rule. But it did force them into a new phase. This was a phase that required that the themes of the legal regime of the early part of the century be forgotten. They were to remain forgotten for about a century. I shall return to this later. But I  want to emphasize that the uncertainty and experimentation that characterized this earlier legal regime meant that it contained

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possibilities for a different course of history. Those involved in this effort faced the dilemma of how to manage English law in an alien environment. One way forward was to create junctures and accommodations between Indigenous cultures and the English legal presence. Even as they expected such arrangements to result in a growing acceptance of English law, they were nevertheless engaged in seeking sovereignty through accommodation as well as through force, and they were committing themselves to a process whose end results could not be foreseen. What they assuredly were not doing was moving on a pre-determined trajectory that ended in the positivist legal regime represented in WiPirata and Cooper v. Stuart. They were actors in a period of nascent possibilities for different historical ends.60 An imperial legal regime underpinned by positivist legal theory was an answer to the tensions and contradictions within the earlier regime, and it emerged primarily out of settler politics. It was settler politics that put an end to the toying efforts to fit the law to the challenges of empire. It was within settler politics that the incongruences around law and sovereignty that I have discussed in this chapter were finally resolved. And it is to the question of settler politics that we must now turn.

Notes 1 Shaunnagh Dorsett, Juridical Encounters. Maori and the British Courts 1840–1852,15. 2 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty. National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002), xiii, xxix for India. For the increasing reluctance to recognize Indian sovereignty Canada, see Paul McHugh, “A  Comporting Sovereign, Tribes and the Ordering of Imperial Authority in Colonial Upper Canada of the 1830s,” in International Law and Empire. Historical Explorations, ed. Martti Koskenniemi, Walter Rech, and Manuel Jimenez Fonseca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 230. 3 This is the key theme of Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford in Rage for Order. The British Empire and the Origins of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 121–25, 134, for examples. 4 For the continuing recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty, see Paul McHugh, Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law. A History of Sovereignty, Status and Self-Determination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 80, 106–7, 149–52. Cite from Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, 130–31. For a standard account of the tendencies and shifts in imperial law during this period, see the important work by Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty. Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Natural law is idea that law is determined by nature and flows from universal moral principles. Positivist law is law that rests on empirical reasoning and derives its authority from national state structures, divorced from questions of morality. 5 Anthony Pagden, The Burdens of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 36. 6 A good summary of this narrative may be found in Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 107–8; Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire 1500– 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 45–49, 82–84, 203–9. Attwood’s Empire and Native Title stresses immediate political pressures over ideas in the debate on indigenous title during these years. I  think this to understate the role of ideas in the culture of the time. 7 Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 46–47; James Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12–15; McHugh,

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“Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights,” in Renwick (ed.), Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, 178–79. Even the great theorist of liberalism, John Locke, was more ambivalent about empire than he has been portrayed; see David Armitage, “John Locke. Theorist of Empire?” in Muthu (ed.), Empire and Modern Political Thought, 84–111. 8 But even Vattel wanted natural rights to be included in the law of nations. Anaya, Indigenous People in International Law, 12–15; Paul McHugh, “Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights,” and M.P.K. Sorrenson, “Treaties in British Colonial Policy: Precedents for Waitangi,” in William (ed.) Renwick, Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights. The Treaty of Waitangi in International Contexts (Wellington, NZ, 1991). 9 C.H. Alexandrowicz, “Doctrinal Aspects of the Universality of the Law of Nations,” in C.H. Alexandrowicz, David Armitage and Jennifer Pitts, Law of nations in global history (Oxford: Scholarship Online, May 2017), 168–179 originally published in 1961 is an early statement of the argument for the transitional nature of the early nineteenth century in international law, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766070.003.0014. See also David Kennedy, “International Law and the Nineteenth Century: History of an Illusion,” Quinnipiac Law Review 17 (1997): 99–138; John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (London, 1832); John Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894). 10 Sankar Muthu, ed., Empire in Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5; Standish Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation for Securing Protection to All the Aboriginal Inhabitants of All Countries Colonized by Great Britain (London: John Murray, 1840), 14–15, for natural rights vocabulary. See Andrew Fitzmaurice, Liberalism and Empire for the continued importance of natural rights ideology in this period and who makes the point that there was no seamless move to positivist law. And the same author’s Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13–14 for the way “the focus on the complicity of important imperial thinkers in empire has obscured the anti-imperial currents that were conducted within . . . the Western political tradition.” See also, Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 8–9, 14–17, 24, passim. 11 Anaya, Indigenous People in International Law, 17–19; Peter H. Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title. The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 93–99. Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 190–92. See also Michael Belgrave, “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase,” New Zealand Journal of History 31, no. 1 (1997): 24; Attwood, Empire and Native Title, 149–51. 12 Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 70–72. 13 Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title, 83–84, 87, 93–99, 162; Reynolds, History After Mabo, 7; Henry Reynolds and Jamie Dalziel, “Aborigines and Pastoral Leases. Imperial and Colonial Policy 1826–1855,” University of New South Wales Law Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 315–77; Ian Hunter, “Natural Law, Historiography, and Aboriginal Sovereignty,” Legal History  11, no. 2 (2007): 137–67. For Bain Attwood’s dissent from this argument, see “Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonisation Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title,” Journal of Legal History 34, no. 1 (2013): 50–82. See also Julie Cassidy, “A Reappraisal of Aboriginal Policy in Colonial Australia: Imperial and Colonial Instruments Recognizing the Special Rights and Status of Aborigines,” Journal of Legal History 10 (1989): 365–79. 14 See, NAUK, CO 209/16, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Acting Governor Shortland, Shortland to Stanley, 31 December 1842, ff. 446–54; CO 209/32, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Miscellaneous, Standish Motte to G.W. Hope MP, 30 May 1844, ff. 283–305. Mark Hickford, “Framing and Reframing the Agon: Contesting Narratives and Counternarratives on Maori Property Rights and Political Constitutionalism 1840–1861,” in Native Claims. Indigenous Law Against Empire 1500–1920, ed. Saliha Belmessous (New York: Routledge, 2012), 154. Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Sovereignty as Governance in the Early Nineteenth Century New Zealand Crown Colony Period,”

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in Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought, ed. Ian Hunter and Shaunnagh Dorsett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). As the Maori wars were drawing to their close, Henry Sewell was reflecting on how rights of discovery was a weak argument for sovereignty although he recognized that this was now “the notion we have got and to which it now seems we are about to give practical effect.” Sewell was accurately predicting the legal and intellectual agenda of imperial sovereignty over the next thirty years; see AIM, MS 459, Sewell, Journal, Vol. III, 27 November 1863. 15 Marete Borch, “Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 117 (2001): 223–39. 16 ML 1715, Orton, Journals, 1840–41, 194. 17 Julie Evans, “Where Lawlessness Is the Law: The Settler Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 30 (2009): 3–22 and “Colonialism and the Rule of Law: The Case of South Australia,” in Empire and Crime 1840–1940, ed. Graeme Barry and Godrey Dunstall (Cullompton: Willan, 2005), 58. 18 For an account that argues for cultural misunderstanding, Hamann, “The Coorong Massacre. A Study in Early Race Relations in South Australia,” 1–9; Hassell, Relations Between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia 1836–1860, 55; Charles Bonney, “Autobiographical Notes,” Royal Geographical Society Australasia, South Australian Branch Proceedings, Volume 5, 1898–1901, Adelaide, 1901–1902, 160 for the reminiscences of a member of the police party. See also Foster et al., Fatal Collisions, 15–19; Nettelbeck, “Mythologizing Frontier Violence: Narrative Versions of the Rufus River Conflict, 1841–1899,” 75–76. It is important to note that among the members of the court martial was an Aboriginal man known as “Encounter Bay Bob” who seems to have served as an intermediary between the whites and the native peoples in the area for the previous few years and who had been granted land by Gawler. This is a neat illustration of the complexities of the encounter at this moment and how empire inevitably entangles its subjects in its rule. See Jenkin, The Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 38–39. 19 Hassell, Relations between Settlers and Aborigines, 54; Hamman, “The Coorong Massacre,” 6–7; Evans, “Colonialism and the Rule of Law,” 63. Gawler was regarded as a “humanitarian” governor committed to the good treatment of the Aboriginal peoples. Thus, he serves to illustrate how humanitarianism and the violence that it deplored intersected with a grim inevitability. 20 Hassell, Relations between Settlers and Aborigines, 57; NAUK, CO 13/23. South Australia. Original Correspondence. Offices and Individuals, 1841, Russell to Grey, 14 December 1841, ff. 43–50. 21 Julie Evans, and Tessa Fluance, “Securing the Settler Polity. Martial Law and the Aboriginal Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2013): 1–22; R.W. Kostal, “A Jurisprudence of Power: Martial Law and the Ceylon Controversy of 1848–51,” Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History 28, no. 1 (January 2000): 1–34; Frederic Harrison, Six Letters to the Daily News (London, 1867); and F.W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 266–68, 490–92, where it is denied that there is anything in English law that allows the king or his officers to bring martial law into force merely by proclamation and apply it to persons who were not soldiers. 22 NAUK, CO 209/46, New Zealand. Original Correspondence. Despatches, 1846, Grey to Gladstone, 1 December 1846, ff. 391–412; Bellich, Making Peoples, 206; NANZ, MA7 2, Governor’s Outward Letterbook to Maori, 26 February 1846–29 October 1852, for Grey’s efforts to negotiate with Te Rauparaha. There were other cases, too. Thus, Grey ordered the courts martial of five Maori prisoners and their transportation to Maria Island in Van Diemen’s land. This was a blatantly illegal act which Grey had been advised against, and which he later admitted when acceding to the prisoners return to New Zealand. See NANZ, G25 Box 3, Ordinary Outward Despatches to the Secretary of State May-June 1849. Grey to Earl Grey, 28 December 1848, 23 Damen Ward, “A Means and Measure of Civilisation: Colonial Authorities and Indigenous Law in Australasia,” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–24.

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24 Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, 42–43; and see Bannister’s British Colonization and the Coloured Races, 279–81. The recommendations of the Select Committee did not follow Bannister’s program; it was closer to those who wanted to introduce English law and then work to get the indigenes to accept it. On this, see Nettelbeck, Fragile Settlements, 29, 32–33. Standish Motte and Montague Hawtrey entered into the debate. Motte was a proponent of including Aboriginal people within the procedures of English law, admitting their evidence and including them in juries. Hawtrey went at the issue from the other direction and wanted to adapt English law to accommodate Maori traditional law. For Hawtrey’s views, see “Exceptional Laws in Favour of the Natives of New Zealand,” as an appendix to Edward Gibbon Wakefield, The British Colonization of New Zealand (London, 1837), 399–422. 25 Motte, Outline of a System of Legislation, 19 for the exceptionalist position. George Clarke was, of course, the best example of an administrator who represented the exceptionalist position. See Kennan, War without End, 64 and Wake, “George Clarke and the Government of the Maoris 1845–45,” 339–56. 26 NAUK, CO 201/309, New South Wales. Original Correspondence Despatches, Gipps to Russell 7 April 1841, ff 49–58; Ward, “A Means and Measure of Civilization,” 12–13; Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 71. 27 Ward, “A Means and Measure of Civilization,” 11–12. There were reverberations from the memo throughout his career. It was in the Eastern Cape in the 1850s that Grey had the opportunity to implement the ideas of his memo most fully. He never abandoned the notion that the greatest impediment to generating the engine of civilization among Indigenous peoples was the stultifying hold of traditional beliefs and the power structures that enabled them. 28 Ward, “A Means and Measure,” 13–14; Hassell, Relations between Aborigines and Settlers, 105. 29 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 8 (2004),: 254. 30 Hassell, Relations between Aborigines and Settlers, 53–54. 31 NAUK, CO 18/22, Original Correspondence. Despatches. Western Australia, Hutt to Glenelg, 3 May 1839, ff. 237–47. Ann Hunter, “The Origin and Debate Surrounding the Development of Aboriginal Evidence Acts in Western Australia in the Early 1840s,” Law Review 9 (2007): 122–24, 128–29. This Act would also have given magistrates sweeping powers to summarily punish Indigenous people for stock theft. SRSA, GRG 24/6/1844, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1844, Eyre to Colonial Secretary, 20 May 1844, f 523; Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, 185 passim., 199, 493. 32 Smandych, “Contemplating the Testimony of ‘Others’,” 251–52, 259; Hassell, Relations Between Settlers and Aborigines, 102–3. In the Port Phillip Protectorate interpreters were present to record the evidence of Aboriginal people. But Robinson in the one account of a particular proceeding described it as “a farce and it was got through with indecent haste. The words were not interpreted to the Aboriginal people. The bench evinced a violent feeling. They said they thought it would have a good effect on the natives.” See Clark, ed., The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Philip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume Two: 1 October 1840–31 August 1841, entry for 6 January 1841. 33 Hassell, Relations between Settlers and Aborigines, 90. Grey’s address to the Legislative Council introducing this bill was a masterly statement of the “humanitarian” case for how such an act would fulfill the ideal of an empire “unsullied by deeds of violence and crime” and would also be an “increased means of ameliorating the condition of the aborigines.” He made sure to include this address in his report to the Colonial Office announcing the act. NAUK, CO 13/38, South Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Grey to Stanley 14 August 1844, ff. 326–33; Smandych, “Contemplating the Testimony of ‘Others,’ ” 281. 34 SRSA, GRG/24/6/1847, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1847, Attorney General to Colonial Secretary, 2 February 1847, f. 82, and Charles Cooper to Lieutenant Governor, 27 March 1847, f. 382. See also GRG26/6/1846 f. 879 for earlier discussion of this issue.

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35 SRSA, GRG 24/6/1848, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1848, Smellie to Colonial Secretary, “Report on Aborigine Case at Late Criminal Sessions” [n.d.], f.464, 17–20, 46, 52. 36 Shaunnagh Dorsett, “ ‘Since Time Immemorial’: A  Story of Common Law Jurisdiction, Native Title and the Case of Tannistry,” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 33–59. 37 Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 53, 75–76, 161–63. 38 Dorsett, Juridical Encounters, 110–17 and “ ‘Since Time Immemorial,’ ” 50. Danny Keenan, Wars Without End, 64, 181. 39 For an example of the debate on this issue in New Zealand, see Dorsett, “Travelling Laws. Burton and the Draft Act for the Protection and Amelioration of the Aborigines 1838,” in Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagement and Legacy, ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren (London: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 171–85. SRSA, GRG/24/6/1847, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Letters Received 1847, Charles Cooper to Lt. Gov., 27 March 1847, f 383 1/2. This was part of an ongoing rumination on this question in South Australia; see also GRG/26/6/1846, f. 879. It proved to be impossible to formulate general principles covering all cases. Hassell, Relations between Settlers and Aborigines, 105. 40 Although inter se in New Zealand was officially governed by the policy that only the most barbarous customs should be subject to British intervention, this was applied erratically depending on the particular judge. Different judges drew the boundary between Maori and British law in different places. Shaunnagh Dorsett, “Sworn on the Dirt of Graves: Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and the Judicial Abrogation of ‘Barbarous’ Customs in New Zealand in the 1840s, “Journal of Legal History 30, no. 2 (2009): 175–97. 41 See the important article by Damen Ward, “Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court, c. 1840–60,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34, 4 (December 2006), 483–84. 42 Ibid., 494–95. 43 Kercher, “Native Title in the Shadows,” 107. Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 174–76. 44 Kercher, “Native Title in the Shadows,” 108–110. 45 Ibid., 111–12; Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 161–62, 196–201, 46 See Dorsett’s remarks on R v Murrell in Juridical Encounters, 91–93; Cannon, Who Killed the Koories?, 77; Simon Cooke, “Arguments for the Survival of Aboriginal Customary Law in Victoria: A Casenote on R v Peter (1860) and R v Jemmy (1860),” Australian Journal of Legal History 5 (1999): 201–41. 47 Ward, “Constructing British Authority in Australia,” 488, 495. 48 Hunter, “The Origin and Debate Surrounding the Development of Aboriginal Evidence Acts in Western Australia in the early 1840s,” and “The Boundaries of Colonial Criminal Law in Relation to Inter-Aboriginal Conflict (Inter-se Offenses) in Western Australia in the 1830s and 1840s,” Australian Journal of Legal History 8, no. 2 (2004): 215– 45. See also Mark Finnane, “Settler Justice and Aboriginal Homicide in Late Colonial Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (2011): 253. 49 On the continuing place of customary law within the Australian legal regime, see Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane. “Obstacles to ‘a Proper Exercise of Jurisdiction’— Sorcery and Criminal Justice in the Settler—Indigenous Encounter in Australia,” in Between Indigenous and Settler Government, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (London: Routledge, 2013), 59, 62–64. The place of customary law in settler colonial society was not limited, of course, to Australia or New Zealand. It was important in South Africa, where it was used most notably by Theophilus Shepstone in Natal. See, Jeff Guy, “Creating Customary Law.” Paper delivered to the African Studies Seminar (University of Kwa-Zulu Natal), 20 August 2008 and Thomas McClendon, White Chiefs, Black Lords. Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878 (Rochester, NY, 2010). And in both South Africa and Canada debates continue as to how to integrate traditional law into the legal codes.

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50 For this, see Hunter, “The Origin and Debate Surrounding the Development of Aboriginal Evidence Acts in Western Australia in the Early 1840s,” 133–45. 51 For the way Aboriginal evidence was manipulated by settlers concerned to hide their complicity in violence, see Libby Connors, “Witness to Frontier Violence: An Aboriginal Boy before the Supreme Court,” Australian Historical Studies (2011): 230–43. 52 Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law, 19–20; Duncan Bell, Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought,” Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 281–98; Fredericka Hackshaw, “Nineteenth-Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and their Influence on the Treaty of Waitangi,” in Waitangi. Maori and Pakeha Interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. I.H. Kawharu (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1989), 10; John Westlake’s Chapters of the Principles of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894), v. The term “positivist law” derived from John Austin, whose theory of jurisprudence derived law entirely from a “sovereign person or sovereign body of persons to a member or members of an independent political society wherein that body or person is sovereign or supreme.” See Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. A Series of Lectures on . . . the Philosophy of Positive Law, 2nd ed. (London, 1861), xlvi. 53 Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Liberalism and Empire in International Law,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 122–41; Fitzmaurice, Sovereignty, Property and Occupation, 243–52, 252; Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 110. 54 Hackshaw, “Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title,” 105–8; Rutherford, Sir George Grey, 126; Hickford, Lords of the Land, 202–3, 248; Michael Belgrave, “Pre-­ Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase,” New Zealand Journal of History 31, no. 1 (1997): 23–37 for the consensus regarding Maori land title that this judgment reflected. And Ward, An Unsettled History, 19–20 for the centrality of Waitangi to Maori land claims once they began to be made in the more hostile environment of the 1860s. Symonds was Grey’s own native secretary. 55 Entry on Predergast from Te Ara. The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 9, 2019, https://teara.govt.nz/en; Hackshaw, “Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title . . .,” 92–93. 56 Michael Belgrave, “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase,” New Zealand Journal of History 31, no. 1 (1997): 23–37. Cite from 34. See also remarks of Lisa Ford and Paul McHugh, “Settler Sovereignty and the Shape-Shifting Crown,” in Ford and Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, 30. 57 Thus, in the debates around the establishment of South Australia in 1836, the early justification that it was an empty sphere was sharply contested and forced the Colonial Office to insist on language recognizing Aboriginal land rights. Russell, Mabo, 42; Reynolds, Law of the Land, 103–5 for South Australia. 58 Unlike WiParata v The Bishop of Wellington, Cooper v Stuart had nothing to do with Aboriginal land rights. It involved government power to nullify a land grant it had earlier made. In order to rule on the case the Privy Council first had to decide whether English laws applied in the colony at the time the grant was made. In doing so they held that it was only with English settlers that the land became inhabited, even though this went against all the observed experience of the previous century. Kercher, “Native Title in the Shadows,” 103–8; Stuart Banner, “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia,” American Society for Legal History 21, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 117–23. 59 Kercher, “Native Title in the Shadows,” 115–17. For how the legal doctrine of terra nullius waxes and wanes according to the needs of changing political narratives see Gerry Simpson, “Mabo, International Law, Terra Nullius and the Stories of Settlement: An Unresolved Jurisprudence,” Melbourne University Law Review 19 (1993): 195–210. See also Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 129 (2007): 6. 60 As Bain Attwood has suggested in regard to native title, Empire and Native Title, 124.

8 SETTLER POLITICS AND THE COMING OF A NEW RACIAL ORDER

Introduction By the 1850s, a new configuration of forces was emerging in the empire of the southern seas. The fluid, unstable social formations of imperial order in the early nineteenth century were giving way to a reconfigured imperial order. New patterns, boundaries, and procedures come to govern imperial relationships from the constitutional arrangements of empire to the scope of intimate relationships between the races that were allowed. The most obvious example of this shift was changing governing protocols between the settler colonies and the colonial metropole. Beginning first in Canada, following the Durham Report of 1837, responsible government was established in the other settler colonies by the mid1850s. The most obvious feature of responsible government was the retreat of metropolitan power in the face of a growing settler political consciousness. But its implications were not limited to the constitutional ties between the mother country and Britons beyond the seas. Notably absent from the Durham Report were Indigenous peoples, and it has been aptly described as “a manifesto for effective settler colonialism.” Indigenous dispossession and changing race relations moved in tandem with responsible government. The democracies that were envisaged by responsible government did not encompass Indigenous peoples. The humane policy agenda that had endeavored to ensure that Indigenous peoples figured in the calculations of imperial policy was the first casualty of settler democracy.1 As Westminster-style democracy was constructed in the settler colonies, therefore, the place of Indigenous peoples in those polities changed. In the 1830s it had been possible to look at the settler empire and contemplate the possibility of a “non-racial” empire where Indigenous people possessed certain civic rights; by the 1850s, any possibility that this could be realized was rapidly closing down. Settler

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political rights meant an end to any consideration of Indigenous political rights. Naturally, the specifics of this process varied from place to place. The famous Cape franchise of 1853—which Sir George Grey supported—actually put in place a non-racial franchise. In New Zealand an uneasy accommodation to Maori power and the heritage of their sovereignty led to the creation of a separate Maori franchise 1867 with the reservation of four seats in Parliament—hardly a measure that looked forward to full Maori participation. Everywhere the property qualification served as a natural barrier against too much democracy, just as it did in the metropole. But, in the metropole, the trend from the 1860s was to push against the barriers of exclusion. In the settler colonies politics flowed in the opposite direction as far as Indigenous rights were concerned.2 At the center of this reconfiguration lay a new consensus on race. Boundaries that had previously been porous and uncertain were now closely defined and hardened. Racial categories become progressively less fluid and more fixed. This was particularly notable in New Zealand where mixed-race relationships had been integral to its history from the outset. But it was a pattern that was to be found in various forms across the settler empire. By the 1880s, the use of the law to manage and regulate cross-race intimacy and sexual exchange was one strategy to create a “white man’s” empire. Across the colonies, sexual segregation was increasingly enforced by various legal means, such as defining concubinage to encompass any relationship between Indigenous women and white men. State power to regulate such couplings and their offspring grew dramatically, often as part of the redefined notion of “Protection,” we discussed earlier. The mixed-race communities that had emerged from the imperial social formations of the earlier period in parts of New Zealand, or Canada, were closed down and were increasingly marginalized. Crossrace relationships that were sanctioned by customary law in Canada, for example, were increasingly denied recognition in the courts. And this served as precedent for legislation in early twentieth-century Western Australia, where an Act of 1905 gave protectors control over inter-racial marriages and made it an offence for any non-Indigenous man to cohabit or travel with an Indigenous woman.3 What these snippets of changing social relations reflected was the new imperial order that came to define the racial politics of the British Empire and that was to last until the middle of the twentieth century. The social and political structures that composed this new imperial order were underwritten by new “knowledge” about race, replacing the idea of a universal humanity, which was the basis for an empire of racial cooperation. In order for this new imperial system to emerge, however, the old one had to be dissolved and discredited. In this chapter, I  am concerned to explore the dynamics of that process. I am interested in three aspects of this story. The first is the way the humanitarian discourse about empire was supplanted as the description of how empire should interact with Indigenous peoples. By the early 1850s, the prescriptions and the aspirations of the humanitarian agenda for racial policy had been driven into a dead end. In part this was a process of internal decay in which the possibilities and expectations that were contained in a “humane policy” agenda were exhausted and

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undermined. But revanchist settler politics also served to displace humanitarian discourse. And that is the second theme of this chapter. Settler politics and consciousness emerged during these years as a reaction to the claims of the humane policy agenda and the attempts to implement it. Settler politics was directed against state policy and against the policy ends of humanitarian discourse. Settler conscious revolved around the belief that state policy, acting at the behest of the humanitarian lobby, had consigned them to vulnerable victim status in the face of Indigenous power. In response, settlers aimed to discredit the humanitarian claim of expertise in dealing with Indigenous people. They wanted to assert their own mastery of governing Aboriginal peoples. Humanitarian discourse did not disappear with the rise of settler politics, however. Rather, it was appropriated by settler politics, and its function in imperial culture changed from a utopian aspiration to a rhetorical device. Linking these developments at the frontier of empire with shifts in the political philosophy of empire in the metropolitan sphere is the third focus of this chapter. I want to highlight the way liberalism was reconciled to empire in the culture of mid-Victorian Britain. It is a commonplace that the political philosophy of race and empire was transformed after 1850. Racial difference came to be understood as a function of genes rather than of history. A new knowledge system was created, which resolved many of the questions about race that humanitarian discourse found hard to answer. The result was a reconfiguration of the relationship between liberalism and empire. The anxieties and contradictions that had run through the liberal discourse concerning empire were resolved, at least temporarily. This was particularly true for the ways in which Indigenous behavior had befuddled and puzzled humanitarians. In the process, conditions were set for a more comfortable relationship between liberalism and empire. Indeed, it was at this moment that the embrace between liberalism and empire became more tightly bound than it had ever been before.

The exhaustion of the humane policy agenda We have already identified tensions and fragilities that were embedded in the humanitarian mentality. Attempts to install its principles—such as an Aboriginal evidence policy—quickly ran up against the limits of what was politically possible or what could be contained within the mental world of liberal humanitarianism. The expectations of what was achievable and the presumptions of the results of cultural interchange between the forces of empire and Indigenous peoples all too easily turned into the reverse of what was anticipated or hoped. Thus, the spectacle of “humanitarians” like Sir George Arthur, George Robinson, and Sir George Grey becoming associated with policies of brutal coercion, if not worse. The end result was that throughout the 1840s the humane policy agenda was progressively drained of its vitality and moral and political purpose. This was a process that combined internal, subjective pressures with the practical failures of policy. As we have seen, humanitarians were engaged in a continual

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struggle to retain their empathy toward Aboriginal peoples, which easily slipped over into the related quality of pity. Empathy implied commonality and crosscultural understanding between the different races; pity is a quality that attaches more naturally to condescending superiority and to a hierarchy of authority and control. It is a quality that was more at home in the racial order of the later nineteenth century that emphasized the essential differences between races rather than the commonalities. Leading figures such as Edward Eyre and George Robinson exemplified this dynamic, so that by the end of the 1840s, neither of them retained the same faith in the humane policy agenda that they had possessed a decade earlier. Robinson, one suspects, was just tired out and disillusioned, ready to retire to Bath. Eyre, intellectually more robust, had arrived at an ideological place where he accepted the need for a policy of coercion and direction over the indigenes.4 If the quality of empathy had worn thin within the humanitarian community by the late 1840s, it was partly because there were precious little results to show in policy outcomes. Indeed, the shifting sensibilities of people like Eyre and Robinson were a confession of policy failures. The frustration of humanitarian expectations was, of course, a general feature of this period, most dramatically manifested by the aftermath of slavery in the West Indies.5 Although public debate in the colonies about policy disappointments was limited, in the privacy of their letters and diaries, individual missionaries and others expressed consternation about the collapse of expectations and debated the reasons. Some, such as James Dredge, one of the original Port Phillip protectors, quickly lost faith in the possibilities of a humane policy agenda and retired from official life. Others soldiered on, but typically retreated into individual missionary activity with a consequent acceptance that the work would be slow, small scale, and unrewarding.6 The sense that humane policy prescriptions were not working did not progress along a straight line from recognition to abandonment. Rather, there was a period extending for the most part into the 1840s when there remained a sense that a “humane policy” agenda could work and, in any case, was a moral imperative. Indeed, it was given a boost in the later 1840s by efforts to tighten control over squatter land leases and enhance protection for Aboriginal land rights in Australia. But it was impossible to ignore the contradictory signs as to the outcomes that were produced by the colonial encounter. Much of the commentary of these years reflected the dim recognition of the complexity of the encounter and the challenge of explaining that complexity within the discourses of the time. This tension produced the growing fragility in the humane policy agenda.7 There is a nice illustration of this dynamic in two reports from Sir George Grey to the Colonial Office in the last half of 1843. In the first document, Grey forwarded an account from the police commissioner on the state of Aboriginal crime. It drew a picture of Australian indigenes that neatly captured the quandary humanitarians faced as they watched and waited for the wash of civilizing influences to bleach out the habits of “savage” behavior. The Indigenous people, he claimed, “evince an increasing acquaintance with the laws of civilization” but equally, they “take advantage of every opportunity of robbing the stations whenever they imagined it

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might be done with impunity.” At the Colonial Office one of the undersecretaries marked that portion of the report as the most significant section, remarking that it “does not shew [sic] any very satisfactory advance in civilization.” But Grey’s own contribution to the Report modified that impression. He recounted Eyre’s successes at Moorunde as evidence of the growing acceptance of English norms, and he instanced a case where an Aboriginal person involved in the robbery of a sheep run was turned in by his companions.8 In a second dispatch later in the year, he transmitted details of the work of Protector Moorhouse in educating the children into the benefits of domesticity. Again, the tone of the report is a mix of both promise and concern. On the one hand, Grey detailed how the grim hold of tradition impeded efforts to educate children into the practices of Western domesticity. On the other hand, he recounted some notable successes, particularly with boys, several of whom were removed from their tribal world to join the police force, where they were particularly helpful in pacifying the Murray region!9 So from the most promising of the Australian colonies the lesson to be taken from humane policy efforts pointed both ways. On the one hand, there was disappointment at the speed and effectiveness of the transformation, and, on the other hand, there remained those small signs of wonder that continued to feed humanitarian optimism. Humanitarian culture always contained an uneasy balance between optimism and pessimism. Those who thought about empire within a humanitarian context were aware that the success of humane policy agenda was not assured. Eyre noted that all previous attempts at civilizing Indigenous peoples through empires had failed. And George Grey expressed similar sentiments but felt that making the effort was the only alternative to the disappearance of Indigenous races. Similarly, the official literature in particular is full of qualms about the fragility of this balance. One reason why people like Grey eagerly embraced the “small signs of wonder” that we have noted earlier was precisely to bolster their optimistic hopes. More frequently, however, the tone of humane policy discourse was one of wary and weary worry.10 By the second half of the century the balance had shifted decisively to the pessimistic side of the ledger. It did so in part because perceptions changed. People like Grey had seen the prospect of failure as a matter of power and will. Their fear—bolstered by a reading of history—was that Indigenous peoples would be too weak to withstand the assault settler colonialism was about to launch upon them. In addition, they were apprehensive that the will of policy makers and others would not be powerful enough to implement policies of protection. By the mid-century, the self-confidence that had kept such fears at bay had been eroded by the kind of influences that I have mentioned earlier. Once the evidence of humane policy failures mounted, reading of the capacities of the Indigenous peoples themselves tilted toward pessimism. There was an early tendency of the switch to this frequency in Van Diemen’s Land by the end of the 1820s. But by the 1850s it was a reading that was being made all over the empire, and not only in Australia. South African humanitarians were gripped with the failure to make significant conversions.

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Emancipated slaves in the West Indies showed no signs of becoming enterprising small-holders. This pessimism was the seed ground for the racial order of the later nineteenth century. And then, on top of this, was planted a newly assertive and vocal settler consciousness that possessed confident answers to the anxieties and doubts about Indigenous peoples that permeated humanitarian discourse.11

Settler consciousness From the 1830s humanitarian discourse faced a growing challenge from an organized and articulate settler politics. This was true across all the settler colonies of the southern seas, and although there were obviously important local variations, common themes stretched across Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. I shall draw on all three colonies in this discussion. Settler politics emerged as a victimized response to the various “tyrannies” that oppressed settler communities. The roots of tyranny lay in the humanitarian influence in the governance of the colonies. Settler politics were forged in opposition to the colonial state, which enabled and supported humanitarian policies that privileged Indigenous people and disadvantaged settlers. But settler claims to governmental authority rested on the assertion that settlers, not the missionaries, were the real experts when it came to knowledge about and policy toward Indigenous peoples. Policy toward Indigenous peoples, therefore, was a main incubator of settler politics. But it was not the only mobilizing issue.12 The structure of imperial governance until the 1850s remained tilted toward gubernatorial initiative, even though local consultation was always present. Governors like Grey and Arthur formally possessed virtually unlimited power, and there came a point in every colony where this aroused a “democratic” opposition. At such moments the contemporary radical cry of the freeborn Englishmen came into play. In 1808, Governor Bligh of New South Wales was forced out of office by a revolt that claimed the rights of free Englishmen against his dictatorial style. In the Cape, a similar moment came in the 1820s under the governorship of Lord Charles Somerset when a combination of personal rivalries and circumstances and principled opposition to his policies served to fuel the emergence of a lively opposition expressed particularly through the demand for a free press. Transportation was another issue that served as a focal point for settler politics as the Australian colonies began to receive larger numbers of free settlers from the 1820s and the familiar structures of a civil society began to develop and grow. Attempts to introduce transportation to the Cape in the later 1840s provoked a colony-wide agitation, which could easily have tipped into open rebellion. It forced Governor Sir Harry Smith to open up the channels of consultation even further and gave the final push to the impetus toward representative government, which came in the mid-1850s.13 The different dynamic of settler politics in New Zealand provides a useful counterpoint to the experiences of Australia and South Africa. In New Zealand, Maori power remained more organized and present until the 1860s. The violence against Australian Aboriginal people was not possible to replicate in New Zealand.

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Ironically, this did not seem to inspire the kind of fear in settlers that was present in both Australia and South Africa. Settlers in New Zealand certainly felt vulnerable to Maori, and every time there was a war scare, a flood of refugees poured into Auckland and other towns. But settlers knew it was only military power that could physically protect them. New Zealand was also distinctive because the question of sovereignty remained both the key issue of politics and the main point of contestation between settlers, imperial government, and Maori. Not until the 1860s did the opportunity arise for settler politics to directly confront the issue of Maori power and establish the primacy of a settler interpretation of Waitangi. Settler politics in New Zealand were focused more on the vocabulary and rhetoric of constitutionalism and the law. For settlers the idea that Waitangi was a power-sharing document was itself a threat to the security of tenure, not only of their particular pieces of land but of the colony as a whole. But it was not possible for Waitangi to be diminished as the defining document of British sovereignty until settler power was entrenched in government from the mid-1850s. Even then, there were powerful voices, such as Chief Justice William Martin, who continued to uphold the earlier interpretation.14 Thus, in all the colonies, settlers did not see themselves as the beneficiaries of state policy. On the contrary, they saw themselves as victims of state policies that were beholden to the prejudices of the humanitarian discourse and that failed to protect them sufficiently from what they felt was superior Indigenous power and cunning. For the settlers there were key moments when this discourse was expressed in dramatic acts of policy that were formative in the narrative of victimization. In Australia, of course, such a moment was the Myall Creek massacre and the punishment by hanging of seven shepherds in 1838. For settler culture, this was a traumatic event. As has been noted, it was followed by the descent of a regime of silence in settler culture about casual violence against Aboriginal people. The conjunction between the punishment of the culprits, the colonial state, and the dominant humanitarian discourse was unavoidable. It was missionaries like Lawrence Threlkeld who led the outcry against the murdering shepherds. The settler newspaper the Sydney Herald articulated the key element of settler conscious aroused by the issue: isolated and vulnerable settlers threatened by the lenient humanitarian-inspired government policy toward the Aboriginal people. This was the moment when settler opposition to the humanitarian policy of protection gelled. Indeed, from a settler perspective, they were truly provoked. Spokespersons for humanitarianism invoked the full moral force of anti-slavery rhetoric to condemn settler brutality in contrast to the pitiable innocence of the Indigenous people. Key parts of the colonial state—Governor Gipps and the Colonial Office in particular—saw Myall Creek as signifying the need to rein in the brutal power of settler violence in the interests of an imperial law that applied to all elements in the society. As against this, settlers highlighted the plight of their struggle over land resources in which they were beset not only by a wily and savage adversary but also by an unsympathetic government unduly influenced by missionary notions about the humanity of the natives.15

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Settler consciousness, then, was fashioned out of a combined sense of unprotected vulnerability in an unpredictable environment and victim status in the face of an unsympathetic missionary-dominated government. It was not merely genuinely fearsome opponents such as the Xhosa or Maori who could induce this sense of exposure. It was also stimulated by the weakest Indigenous groups such as the people of Van Diemen’s Land. And this was partly because settler consciousness endowed Indigenous peoples with formidable, yet mysterious powers—powers that belied the humanitarian assumption of a common, universal humanity. Take the case of James Erskine Calder. Calder was a government surveyor, whose work took him all over Tasmania. As noted before, he was one of the first scholars to take a deep interest in the early history of the colony. He established an apologetic narrative of settler violence, denying its responsibility for the demise of the original inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, arguing that intra-tribal conflicts were mainly responsible for their demographic decline. Calder’s view of the Aboriginal people of the island was a mixture of realism and imagination; he collected material on their legends; he carefully observed and respected their martial qualities, noting how they often got the better of the fighting in terms of casualties. On the other hand, he portrayed them as weak and primitive, and destined to disappear anyway. It would be a mistake to view these conflicted positions as contrivances to excuse the terrible violence that was perpetrated against the indigenes of Tasmania. Indeed, such contradictions reflected the neurosis in settler minds that saw the weak and primitive state of the Aboriginal people as fostering the deep cunning that was the source of their power to threaten the colonial establishment. In the 1870s, for example, Calder went to considerable lengths to reconstruct an authoritative narrative of the deaths of Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker in 1831 securing accounts from the nearest witnesses he could find that would show it as a classic example of Aboriginal guile and deceit.16 A letter that Calder wrote to Governor Franklin in 1847 at a moment when the remaining forty-seven Indigenous people sequestered on Flinders Island were about to be repatriated provides further evidence of his disordered thought process regarding the Palawa people. Calder warned against bringing back to the main island this sad remnant of the original 5,000 inhabitants of the island. From evidence gathered on his surveying journeys, he had long believed that significant numbers had escaped Robinson’s dragnet and remained lurking in the forests of the northwest. Releasing the inhabitants of Flinders Island, he warned, could again light the spark of violence. Once released, they would naturally gravitate to the tribes hidden in the remote part of the island, bringing them skills gained from their sojourn in the Bass Straits. They would quickly establish leadership over the others. Thus equipped, they would once again pose a threat to the stability and peace the island had enjoyed. Calder was convinced that a few years sojourn on Flinders Island was unlikely to have reformed the essential cunning and cleverness of the race. This absurd fantasy affords a significant insight into the psychosis of the settler mind as it dwelt in the body of J.E. Calder. This normally rational man, with his scholarly and considered mind, was convinced that a small group of Aboriginal

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people, hovering on the edge of extinction, were endowed with the power to again threaten the viability of the colony!17 This magical thinking—one can hardly call it reasoning—allowed the settler mind to explain Indigenous behavior that it could not understand and for which it had no framework of comprehension. We may recall the episode in 1830 when John Batman believed he was on the verge of a breakthrough in conciliating the Oyster Bay tribes, only to discover that he had been duped. He was at a loss to fathom it. Sir George Arthur used this episode in a dispatch to the Colonial Office to illustrate the challenges his policy faced: how could a primitive, weak race as the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land be so effective in confounding the colonial establishment? Like Calder, Arthur explained this in terms of their “natural timidity,” which “prevents them from openly attacking even two armed persons,” and their “quite inexhaustible patience,” which allows them to “watch a cottage or a field for days until the unsuspecting inhabitants afford some opening of which the savages instantly avail themselves and suddenly spear to death the inhabitants.” So, although two Europeans might easily drive “fifty savages before them, but still they return and watch until their unerring spear can bring some victim to the ground.” Batman and others, one assumes, would explain it in more strenuous terms.18 Events like this were the basis for settler claims that it was they, and not the humanitarians, who were best qualified to understand Indigenous peoples. It was surely in the zone of silence surrounding settler violence that I have referred to earlier that the critique of the humanitarian perspective was formulated. James Crawford (later an important local politician in South Australia) confided to his diary his contempt for the humanitarian treatment of the Australian Aboriginals with “childish kindness and petted and fondled as if they were the wildest of human beings.” But “like a wild beast an Australian native is not to be played with,” he warned, and he laid the responsibility for colonial violence on the humanitarian’s “culpable lack of firmness in checking” the initial attacks on cattle and sheep. Getting away with this, Crawford reasoned, encouraged their savagery and was “soon followed by the murder of several whites.” In this kind of reasoning we may see settler political consciousness in formation, defining itself against the failings of humanitarianism to protect settlers in favor of coddling the Aboriginal peoples. It was typical of settler colonial reasoning to employ a reverse logic, which held humanitarian softness responsible for the very violence launched against the Indigenous Australians. Crawford expressed what was to become a common settler trope—and the basis for salutary terror—that violence was the means whereby the Indigenous inhabitants would have learned to be “good and quiet subjects.” Had they been treated “firmly” from the beginning, lives would have been saved. In this version of events, the Protectorate was itself responsible for the virtual annihilation of the Aboriginal population. The Protectorate administration both tolerated and enabled Aboriginal behavior that it should have stamped out. And, following from this, humanitarian expertise was also undermined since it had demonstrated a false understanding of Indigenous psychology in contrast to settlers like Crawford, who were able, thereby, to claim their superior knowledge of how to deal with native peoples.19

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Such sentiments were at the heart of settler political consciousness. Nor were they peculiar to Australia. In the Eastern Cape of South Africa formulations of settler politics rested on the representation of the settler at the mercy of the cunning deceits of the Xhosa, and the weak-minded postures of government policy. As early as 1823—merely three years after the first settlers arrived—memorials began to flow to London from the settler community protesting the failure of the government to protect them from the depredations of the Xhosa against their property and livestock.20 But it was the sixth frontier (1834–35) that mobilized settler politics in the Eastern Cape, at the same time that Myall Creek discharged the same role in Australia. A petition to William IV in June 1835 denied that the Xhosa were victims of settler predation. The truth, the petitioners claimed, was the exact opposite. It was they who had recently been subject to a ferocious attack by Xhosa that sought to drive them into the sea. Graham’s Town itself had almost fallen to the combined forces of the Xhosa chiefs. It was the Xhosa who had thieved thousands of head of cattle. But it was the settlers who were slandered by misinformation that was “industriously propagated and greedily received in England [which] had the effect of arresting sympathy for our sufferings and seriously endamaging [sic] the Colonial character.” This was an argument that was quickly elaborated and extended by the likes of John Mitford Bowker and the Graham’s Town newspaper man Robert Godlonton. In their hands, the history of the Eastern Cape was a story of the pusillanimous colonial state that had encouraged the 1820 settlers with all sorts of promises had then failed to protect them against the continual harassment from the Xhosa and the calumny of the humanitarians.21 Settlers were consigned to this victim status because of the benign view of the Indigenous peoples in humanitarian discourse. The Xhosa were often depicted in glowing terms, their chiefs possessing a “proud self respect [and] noble bearing, and magnanimous conduct.” Equally, as we have seen, it was essential to the humanitarian discourse that the Indigenous peoples of Australasia be portrayed in positive terms, as just like whites beneath the skin. Indeed, it was often the settlers who suffered by way of contrast in these comparisons. In the reply to yet another petition from the Eastern Cape settlers in 1836, the Colonial Office exhibited little sympathy and even less patience with their claims. The petitioners laid out the full case of settler victimhood. The Xhosa had always been treated in accordance with “British views and feelings, and . . . British principles.” But they had not reciprocated and settlers were confronted by “barbarous . . . numerous warlike people . . . whose dispositions and predatory habits lead them to make continual inroads into the colony murdering and pillaging.” Settlers were driven from their homes, their cattle stolen and they were forbidden by government policy to retaliate. They felt abandoned by the government in terms of both policy and sentiment, even though they had originally come to the Eastern Cape under the sponsorship of the government. The Colonial Office was unmoved by this litany of sorrows. They retorted that it was the settlers who were responsible for the precarious state of the colony. They were to blame for the unstable peace because of “the aggressions of British

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subjects on the Aboriginal inhabitants and for their endeavours to extend their territory in this quarter for selfish and interested purposes.”22 In the Eastern Cape, policy struggles between the rival settler and humanitarian discourses focused on the administration of the border between Xhosaland and the settled area. We may observe these competing perspective in the record left behind by Charles Stretch, a resident agent in the Eastern Cape. Stretch was attached to the main body of the Gaika Xhosa at Block Drift from 1836 to the mid-1840s. He was a colonial official who believed in the humanitarian policy agenda. He favored the treaty-based frontier policy with the Xhosa that had been inaugurated in 1835 and that Andries Stockenstrom had tried to implement before his reputation was destroyed by a campaign of settler defamation. Stretch somehow survived this purge, even though he had a reputation of being too sympathetic to the Xhosa and too willing to defend their interests against those of the imperial government. In his dispatches and letters, Stretch continually presented a different image of the Xhosa from that propagated by settlers.23 In the early 1840s, for example, Stretch insisted that it was possible to enlist the Xhosa chiefs in the work of maintaining peace on the frontier. He described how Sandili, chief of the Gaika Xhosa, and other chiefs were committed to making the treaty system work and combatting cattle theft. He warned against the fake news propagated about the Xhosa in the Graham’s Town newspapers. He reported that evidence of the success of the “civilizing” influences among the Xhosa was consistently downplayed and ignored in a deliberate effort to undercut the idea that collaboration between the Xhosa and the imperial presence was possible. But Stretch was presenting a version of events that was not only in conflict with the images churned out by the Graham’s Town settler lobby. Stretch’s views were also in conflict with an account that was presented by other agents of the imperial state.24 At the same time that Stretch was projecting optimism about the possibilities of frontier peace, another resident agent also charged with administering the treaty system with the Xhosa was presenting the opposite view. John Mitford Bowker’s views differed starkly from those of Stretch, believing that the frontier policy of collaboration was leading the colony to ruin. But like Stretch, he found himself at odds with others in the administration. Indeed, from the very beginning of his tenure as a resident agent, he worked to undermine Andries Stockenstrom, his nominal superior. This did not go down too well in the milieu of the later 1830s, and he was ultimately dismissed in 1838. But this only set him free to broadcast aloud his stories that received a welcome amplification throughout the organs of settler opinion in Graham’s Town. Bowker was well placed to play this role. His family were 1820 settlers; his father, Miles, had led one of the groups. When his papers, letters, and speeches were published in 1864 they revealed the essential elements of settler consciousness. Bowker argued that the settlers had been betrayed by the British government, under whose auspices the four thousand 1820 settlers had made the long and dangerous journey to the Eastern Cape in the first place. In its turn, the government had been misled by the misrepresentations of the missionary lobby who portrayed

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the Xhosa as victims rather than as perpetrators of crime and conflict. Thus, government policy exposed the settlers to the theft and harassment of the Xhosa. The result was the alienation of the settlers from the government.25 Even under the dominant system of gubernatorial government prior to the establishment of representative government, the settler voice was capable of obstructing the humanitarian policy line. The policy of maintaining stability and conciliation on the Eastern Cape frontier by treaties that Glenelg tried to establish in the mid-1830s was stymied largely by settler hostility. Similarly, from the virtual beginning of his governorship in Western Australia, opposition within his Executive Council impeded James Stirling’s efforts to follow a restrained policing policy on the frontier. As the 1840s wore on this, kind of opposition became more vociferous and more prevalent. Even Sir George Grey had trouble with his Legislative Council in securing monies to support Eyre’s work in Moorunde.26 And a few years later Edward Eyre himself ran into the same kind of opposition during his term as lieutenant governor of New Munster province in the southern part of North Island, New Zealand. Eyre had been appointed precisely because of his reputation as a successful interlocutor with Aboriginal peoples. He expected the opportunity to use his expertise in New Zealand, and he did make efforts to establish channels of conciliatory engagement with Maori. When he married early in his tenure in Wellington, it was in a joint ceremony with a Christian Maori couple after which they all sat down to an inter-racial dinner. But from the beginning he ran into opposition within his Provincial Council, who were resistant to appropriating funds for civilizing mission projects such as education.27 Challenging the expertise of the humanitarian discourse was a central purpose of emergent settler politics and discourse everywhere. This boiled down to a debate about how to interpret the meaning of Indigenous actions—as was the case in the divergence of opinion between Stretch and Bowker.28 Those who claimed to speak for settlers were fully aware that they were struggling to determine the narrative that explained the British mission in the colonies. This was a contest for the control of knowledge, and it required a multi-faceted effort. Settler lobbies worked to get access to opinion and policy makers in London. In the mid-1840s, at the height of complaints about the government’s frontier policy in the Eastern Cape, James Mitford Bowker sought to transmit settler views to London through his relationship to Lord Redesdale and Sir Benjamin D’Urban. Neither effort seems to have been successful. D’Urban explained that he was a spent force politically, and that although “I hope I have not been altogether useless . . . Downing Street has been imperviously closed to me from my arrival in England.” Such exclusion began to change in the 1850s once the humanitarian discourse began to fall apart. Godlonton spent a couple of years in London in the 1850s working to represent settler interests, although we have no record as to what he did there or if he managed to gain access to metropolitan opinion.29 Undermining the credibility of the humanitarian lobby was a central aspect of the struggle to control the discourse on racial policy. As is well known, in our part of the British empire, the missionary interest monopolized most channels of

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communication between the colony and the metropole. In the accounts offered by Dr. John Philip, John Fairbairn, and Thomas Pringle from Cape Town, for example, the cultural image was projected of colony as a site of struggle between unregenerate settlers and high minded humanitarians. In such accounts settlers were held in low regard. They did not have to be convicts to qualify for this status. Thanks to people like Philip, settlers were known for their cruelty and harshness toward the Indigenous peoples. Settler consciousness was therefore forged in a heightened air of grievance and resentment. Belittling the authority of humanitarians was a good way to establish the dominance of their own discourse on race. Commentators like Pringle and Saxe Bannister, or missionary spokesmen, were dismissed as wellmeaning, but ill-informed, and totally ignorant of the “real character of the Kaffir” in contrast to settlers who observed at close hand their predatory raids on settler property and livestock. At a more personal level, the Quakers James Backhouse and James Walker, on their “mission of concern” to the southern empire, were taunted for their displays of social comity (their “perpetual use of ‘Friend’ and ‘Thou”) and despised for their claims to understand the Australian First Peoples.30 Challenging the humanitarian discourse of the colonial mission extended into popular culture where satires in print and theatrical forms lampooned the ignorant naivete of humanitarians, easily fooled by native cunning. In the well-known satire of 1838 “Kaatje Kekkelbek,” performed for the first time appropriately enough in Graham’s Town, the main character of the title is presented as an example of mission-educated Khoekhoe. She is represented as a half-educated fool, reveling in the assurance of humanitarians that she is the equal of any English woman, but really preferring brandy and greasy chops to anything more refined, and committed to a promiscuous life of thieving and prostitution. This portrayal of the untamed savage lurking under a veneer of respectability was a standard trope of the moment, found also in cartoons and prints. Its political purpose was to discredit the claims of the humanitarian agenda that race could be transcended. And, in this case, it was specifically designed to undercut the recent presentation to the British public of people men such as Andries Stoffels, Jan Tzatzoe, and James Read, who were displayed as successful examples of spread of Western values and the potential for racial harmony.31 Major political events were also used to discredit humanitarian claims to possess expert knowledge as to the nature of Indigenous culture and society. The sad story of the Kat River settlement was used by settlers as confirming evidence that converting the Khoe was a losing proposition. Kat River had been a showpiece of humanitarian policy in action. It was a blueprint for a humanitarian model of colonial policy. The settlement was dominated by the Khoe but contained leading representatives of the missionary elite, such as the mixed-race Read family, and it was designed to prove that the social order of colonialism need not depend upon racial hierarchy. But this required a reversal of colonial consciousness that settler consciousness could not allow. Throughout its short history the settlement was subject to assault and attack from the local white farmers often with the connivance of local state officials. The faith of the Khoe in the possibility of peaceful

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co-existence cracked under this pressure, and many joined the Xhosa attack on the Cape Colony in 1851, this confirming the predictions of their white settler enemies. The Khoe had revealed themselves to be only posing as civilized, and this humane policy experiment proved itself to be misguided.32 Godlonton used this occasion to loudly express his claims that settlers were the true experts on the “native question.” The rebellion of the Kat River Khoe had demonstrated their unreliability as imperial subjects, their deceitful, untrustworthy character, and the foolish credulity of those who had put faith in them. He used this event to upend the conventional view that settlers were responsible for the violence and disorder of the frontier and to place blame where it belonged—on the Xhosa and also upon the humanitarians. The latter had denied the reality that it was the settlers who were truly oppressed. “Cruel and unmerited odium [had been heaped] upon the really oppressed and suffering whiteman,” Godlonton claimed. By contrast the “guilty conduct of the colored man” had been ignored. Indeed, the missionaries were more to blame than the Khoe themselves. It had been the propagation among these “savage and semi-barbarous people” of the idea that they were the victims of wicked settlers that had led them to rebel. Missionaries were not only naive: their presence and teachings were positively dangerous.33 In the desire to wrest from humanitarian philanthropists the title of experts in frontier matters, the settler case rested on challenging the vision that humanity shared common values and sensibilities. And although settler consciousness was underlain by the defensive insecurities, reversals of logic, and hostilities that I have described, it was nevertheless able to present a coherent case for settler claims to possession and sovereignty, and a logic for political action. A neat example of how settler consciousness created its reasoning may be seen by returning to an example I have discussed before: the address given by Richard Windeyer in 1842, titled “On the Rights of Aborigines.” As observed earlier, this lecture may be understood as both a reflection of the dominance of the humanitarian paradigm in discussion of colonial policy and also as an attempt to undermine humanitarian claims to their understanding and knowledge of Aboriginal peoples. While Windeyer was at pains to deny arguments made by people like Matthew Moorhouse that Indigenous people possessed as strong a sense of property in land as settlers themselves, he was also concerned to recognize the legitimacy of the humanitarian mission. His purpose, however, was to take it out of the hapless hands of naive humanitarians like Moorhouse and appropriate it for representatives of settler politics such as himself.34 From the very first efforts to project a settler consciousness into the discourse on empire policy, claims were made about the “ready cooperation of a very large and influential portion of the settlers in every religious and benevolent institution” that had been established to benefit the native peoples. The fact that this was typically contrasted with the “murdering of many of the settlers and . . . the remainder reduced to destitution” only made the point that what was at stake was less a humanitarian ideal of racial cooperation and more a struggle for survival.35 The key point was that settler discourse always operated within the context of the discourse of humanitarianism. It was not only important for settlers to

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discredit the “philanthropists” of the missionary societies as the proclaimed experts on Indigenous cultures; it was also necessary to clothe themselves in the garb of the humanitarian mission. This was, of course, testimony to the power that humanitarian discourse carried in the British world of the nineteenth century. The work of appropriation was not a one-time operation. It extended throughout the century as an ongoing project that needed to be continually renewed as each new frontier was conquered. One such moment in Australia was the first inter-continental colonial exhibition held in Melbourne in 1866–67. This event announced the arrival of a maturing settler society. Its presentation of the First Peoples of Australia set the tone for subsequent displays, including those on the international scene when some of the same exhibits were sent to the Paris exhibition of 1867. The displays of Indigenous life made it clear that settler society had now assumed responsibility for the Aboriginal peoples. The presentations explicitly rejected the religious expertise—and religious assumptions of a universal humanity—of the missionaries in favor of a “scientific” study of Aboriginal culture as the basis for native policy. But the rhetoric and visual imagery of the displays made full use of the humanitarian language of duty and responsibility to conciliate and guide the original inhabitants to a higher status. The Tasmanian section, for example, displayed the famous Proclamation Boards that Arthur had scattered around the Tasmanian forests in the hope of convincing the tribal people of the protections to be offered by the State. Of course, this was not a simple reprise of the language and agenda of the early part of the century. Behind the talk of duty and responsibility lay the more explicit imperial theme of social control through a settler-controlled “Protection” policy of coercion and control. But if it represented a mutation, it was also an inheritance that the settler state now owned.36 This may be nicely illustrated by noting the settler discourse of humanitarian reparation in Queensland. Humanitarian discourse in the 1830s had included a clear recognition that Australian Aboriginal people had been the prior owners of the land and that British settlement involved an unjust dispossession. The humane policy agenda was driven by the desire to redress this wrong. The obligation of the imperial state and the settlers was to provide reparations in the form of the civilizing mission to the indigenes for their loss. Even something as ambiguous as the Batman Treaty (1835) with the Kulin people of the Port Phillip area was partly informed by this tendency. Queensland, however, was the site of the most violent dispossession in Australia. Its settlement occurred later than the other colonies, and the restraining hands of the imperial state and the humanitarian lobby were weaker than elsewhere. In the initial phase of the establishment of the settler state through the 1860s, the humanitarian agenda was derided and dismissed in the popular political culture. Missionaries found themselves laboring under continual contempt and harassment. During this period, all the significant elements of settler consciousness were on display—its presentation as the victimized and vulnerable party in the colonial encounter, its defensive assertion of rights of conquest because of its superior exploitation of natural resources, and its violent creation—through the Native

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Police—of a colonial order. But once “pacification” had been secured, a shift in the discourse and policy began. The humanitarian discourse of the early part of the century was revived, and the language of duty and responsibility toward Aboriginal inhabitants was incorporated into the political discourse of the settler state.37 This discourse, however, did not derive from a Christian humanism. Nor did it flow from an assumption of universal humanity that saw in Aboriginal people the same qualities and the same potential for civilized progress that marked Western societies. The humanitarian rhetoric of the later nineteenth century served the interests of a policy that was a “fusion of paternalism and force.” From the 1870s, a policy of ethnic cleansing in Queensland moved the Indigenous inhabitants from towns into reserves where they would provide an available labor force under the control of institutions of policing, industrial training, and education. These “reforms” were justified by reviving the rhetoric of the earlier humanitarian agenda “that Indigenous people were prior owners of the lands; that they had been unjustly dispossessed of their sources of sustenance; that they were victims of the violence and the vice of the colonizing population.” But these ideas had a far different valence and context in the later nineteenth century; they were “now read as humanitarian tropes, frozen in time, uttered curtly and impatiently to usher in harsher views” that denied the humanity of the Aboriginal peoples in favor of their lower racial capacities and status. This policy of coercive social control of the Aboriginal population culminated in the Aborigines Protection Act of 1897, which provided a legislative structure for forced removals and soon became the model for similar acts elsewhere in Australia. In arguing for this Act, however, the very language of leading humanitarians was employed: Aboriginal people were owed compensation for their dispossession and that it was a sin (in the words of Lord Glenelg) to “cast upon Heaven a destruction which is our own and say the Aborigines are doomed by Divine Providence when the guilt lies with ourselves.”38 Humanitarian discourse thus lived on in the national narratives and identities that were forged in the later nineteenth century—even in places like Queensland, which were hotbeds of the worst kind of racist oppression. But it was now employed to serve the interests of imperial power, rather than serving as its critique. In New Zealand, the language of humanitarianism was appropriated in support of settler consciousness during the wars of the 1860s. The ideal of racial amalgamation then became a defining quality of race relations in that country. But this did not mean that Grey’s early policy was finally brought to fruition. Racial amalgamation was reconfigured on the basis of the final subjugation of Maori. Its meaning shifted from the accommodative, even integrative, promise that it encompassed in the 1840s and 1850 toward one that demanded submission of Maori to a settler polity. In settler circles, it was argued that the earlier version of racial amalgamation had been too soft. It had encouraged Maori to assert themselves as equals. The result had been a Maori politics that ended in disastrous wars. Racial amalgamation of the old sort, therefore, that had allowed Maori to think of themselves as co-rulers was grounded on false foundations. The defeat of Maori made possible a sounder racial amalgamation policy. As was true elsewhere, this would require intervention

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to root out the old Maori customs that stood in the way of settler modernity. Before the Maori wars, “there were many areas of Indigenous life that were left undisturbed by colonial rule.” But this began to change after the 1860s, when a new spirit of interventionism was injected into Maori-Pakeha relations. Racial amalgamation was now tied to a new kind of colonial order in New Zealand: an order where the boundaries between Pakeha and Maori were sharply drawn and where Maori cultural and political life were subject to colonial regulation.39 Thus, as governing power for internal affairs was transmitted to settler governments, the Indigenous peoples were the main casualties. The imperial government understood this would be the case. The legacy of a special responsibility of the imperial government toward First Peoples remained. But its hold progressively weakened. In the initial phase of responsible government, control of policy for Indigenous peoples was often reserved to the governor. But, as the Grey’s second governorship in New Zealand illustrated, this did not mean very much. And it was soon progressively abandoned. Canada acquired power to legislate for Indian peoples in 1860, New Zealand in 1862. In both places, local legislatures began to erect statutory regimes for the control of their Indigenous populations. Even where Crown prerogative over Indigenous affairs remained on the books, it meant less and less. In Western Australia the policy of Protection was abandoned in 1867. But in Western Australia, as in Queensland, the language and methods of conciliation remained important even though they were increasingly mere blinds for policies of coercion and settler violence. And, as elsewhere, the language and agenda of humanitarianism was a convenient foil to this end. Thus, in 1884 the office of protector was reinstated as a sign of Western Australia’s commitment to humanitarian intervention.40

Reconciling liberalism to empire in nineteenth-century political theory Settler politics and consciousness had been motivated and driven primarily by the question of policy toward Indigenous peoples. By the end of the 1850s in the settler colonies of the southern seas, the basis was being laid for the creation of the late nineteenth-century racial order of empire, with its characteristically strict and explicit hierarchy and its coercive underpinnings. I want to turn now to the metropolitan sphere where these colonial movements were paralleled by developments in the political theory of liberalism and empire that reinforced and bolstered this racial order. The key result of these changes was the way they brought liberalism and empire into a new and (for a while) more stable configuration. Although it is common to emphasize the ways in which liberal political theory from its earliest formulations endorsed empire, the truly important feature of the relationship between liberalism and empire was (and remains) its ambiguity. As a body of political theory, Liberalism was profoundly troubled by Empire; the relationship was never easy. The corpus of liberal thought has always provided discourses of both dissent from and support for imperial order. The main critiques of

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empire in modern times have come as much from the broad body of liberal thought as from anywhere else. But if the relationship between liberalism and empire was unstable, it was also mutable. And in our period there were important shifts of emphasis in liberal thought that allowed for a more stable bond to be forged with the imperialism and empire.41 Until the mid-nineteenth century, justifications for empire were grounded in ethical reasoning. This was particularly true for the period from the later eighteenth century. Humanitarian mentality was one version of that reasoning. But, as we have also seen, the foundational principles of humanitarian reasoning were challenged by contact with Indigenous peoples and the imperatives of governance. It proved hard to sustain those principles in the face of the historical realities of empire. The optimism that empire could be made to rest upon humanitarian principles was severely destabilized by the middle part of the century. At the same time, the ethical bases of empire in political theory were also eroding. In its place, a sociological paradigm about empire was emerging, which laid “a new emphasis on the potentially insurmountable differences between peoples.” From around 1870 empire became a more self-conscious pre-occupation in British politics and more explicitly a central facet of national identity. And as this happened, a concomitant conception of racial order emerged to bolster empire’s claims. Indeed, race had to be “re-invented” from the subsidiary concern that it occupied in the worldview of humanitarians to the key category that explained difference and imperial rule.42 These moves changed the authorization of empire in important ways. Empire no longer needed to be rationalized on the basis of universal similarities between peoples. It could now be explained as a function of inherent racial difference. It was this that lay at the core of the racial order of the later nineteenth century. It was a justification that facilitated coercion and force in imperial rule more easily than had been possible with the earlier attempts to found imperial rule upon ethical reasoning. At the same time, liberalism could coexist more comfortably with empire because the basis of imperial rule could now be grounded in scientific differences between people. Of course, liberalism as a vocabulary of critique remained and was engaged particularly when imperial rule overstepped the boundaries of what were considered inviolable liberal freedoms. But it did so by individualizing the critique as, for example, against Edward Eyre in Jamaica in 1865 or General Dyer at Amritsar in 1919.43 The new accommodations between liberal thought and empire were the achievements of John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, even if neither one fully endorsed the racial order that their thought sustained. Simply put, Mill provided the logic that explicitly allowed for coercion in the interests of civilizational development. And Darwin provided the scientific justification for domination, displacing the anxiety-ridden and ambivalent religio-cultural justification for imperial hierarchy. The intellectual resources provided by both men enabled the racial order of high imperialism in the later part of the century. Until John Stuart Mill, the political theory of liberalism reflected the structural instabilities that marked the social formations of empire. It was, of course, India,

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not places like South Africa or Australia, that was at the core of thinking about empire in political theory at this moment. It was natural that this would be so. India was far more challenging and more important to Britain in the world than the empire of the southern hemisphere. Nevertheless, India shared certain common qualities with other units within the imperial sphere. The British engagement with India remained a negotiated and hybrid engagement, even as the power equation between the East India Company and Indian Indigenous polities was changing in the company’s favor. But still, the idea of combining imperial presence with Indigenous consent that, Burke had desired was consistent with the main themes of Britain’s engagement with India. As that relationship became more entangled with power and military dominance, the central focus of discussion shifted away from how to combine empire with consent to how to justify the greater direction and coercion of local politics and cultures in the interests of imperial rule. The answers to that question evolved through the thinking of the early philosophical radicals. Jeremy Bentham and James Mill were transitional figures in the move away from Burkean moralism to John Stuart Mill’s acceptance of despotism in the interests of ensuring that the civilizing force of empire did its work.44 It was impossible for liberal thinkers like the Utilitarians to escape the problem of empire. But their relationship to imperial matters was tangled, and the Utilitarians hardly occupied one conceptual space on empire. It is not surprising that this should be so. Their doubts about the moral and economic wisdom of colonies reflected the strongest lines of thinking of their time. But there was also the reality that Britain was an imperial power: a fact that could not be reversed—although in at least one place, Bentham did call for Britain to give up its colonies. So Utilitarianism was available to do different kinds of historical work. As Eric Stokes pointed out many years ago, it was to be a major tool for the development of a rule of colonial difference for India. Similarly, Edward Gibbon Wakefield consulted with Bentham when he drew up his plans for systematic colonization. Some younger Benthamites were supporters of Wakefield’s colonization plans for South Australia. And Bentham himself noted the irony that his dream of making laws was likely to be fulfilled in India, which meant, he remarked, that after his death he would be regarded as a despot in this respect.45 At the same time, Utilitarianism contained a vein of skepticism about empire. As a follower of Adam Smith, Bentham doubted the value of empire as an economic proposition. More importantly for our purposes, he was somewhat orientalist in his attitude toward Indigenous cultures. Like many eighteenth-century thinkers, he did not subscribe to the doctrine of conquest, he did not believe that imperial knowledge was necessarily superior to Indigenous knowledge. And, like Burke, he believed that rule by force would neither result in good rule nor be successful. But the ambiguities of Utilitarianism were illustrated in the different positions of its adherents. Not all philosophical radicals, for example, were supportive of Wakefield’s schemes for the Australasian colonies. J.A. Roebuck was one such case. Jeremy Bentham and James Mill differed in their views on empire, just as John Stuart Mill was different again. James Mill was a truly transitional figure between

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these early philosophical radicals and John Stuart Mill. Although James Mill wrote articles critical of empire, largely on economic grounds, he is best known to us for his famous History of India, which displaced the prevailing Orientalist tradition in British attitudes toward India and set a precedent for disparaging other cultures and denying them respect.46 John Stuart Mill continued the line of argument of his father in simplifying and reducing empire and culture contact into cruder typologies. As Jennifer Pitts has explained, Mill achieved the dubious honor of draining Utilitarianism of its more subtle complexities and putting dichotomous and essentialist notions into liberalism’s thinking about empire. The notion of developmental gradations of society was transformed into a sharp alternative between those that were “rude” and those that were “civilized.” In the process, Mill decisively resolved the doubts about empire that had run through liberal thought. Thus, he explained how despotism in empire was justified in the interests of civilizational development and by the practice of good government. Still, Mill was also a transitional figure between the early and later nineteenth-century thinking on empire. It was true that he helped resolve the anxieties within liberal thought about empire by endorsing despotism in the name of progress. In that sense he legitimated tendencies for a racial order that rested on essential differences and coercive policies. But he continued to believe that empire was an ethical enterprise, and he retained a belief in universal humanity that underlay the missionary initiatives of the earlier part of the century. But for Mill these ends were to be realized by good, assertive government, and, if necessary, by the resort to benevolent despotism.47 Mill may be seen, therefore, as appropriating Burke’s notion of duty and trusteeship but without the same recognition of Indigenous cultures. In this he helped to reshape the role of humanitarianism in empire. It is instructive to consider the implications of his thought for colonial violence. For humanitarian discourse, colonial violence was endemic to the colonial experience. But for Mill, colonial violence was a function of the breakdown of good government, rather than inherent in the imperial experience. The Indian Mutiny was a case in point. Equally, he was appalled at the behavior of Edward Eyre in Jamaica precisely because it failed the test of good, moral government, and he became a leading light in the campaign to have Eyre recalled and punished. But his reasons for this opposition also revealed a conception of colonial violence as episodic and particular to the circumstances of government rather than as inherent in imperial politics. Mill’s formulation was to become the dominant way in which colonial violence was discussed in British political culture from this point onward.48 Mill narrowed the boundaries of the debate about the relationship of liberalism and empire. But this was typical of his whole corpus of political theory. At every point, Mill narrowed and made more sterile the scope of Benthamite Utilitarianism, even though he imagined himself to be doing the opposite. He was responsible for the depreciation of the doctrine of utility to a purely material formulation. He reduced the question of liberty to the question of freedom from, not freedom to. And the same was true wherever he intervened on the question of empire. He

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succeeded in uniting the humanitarian desire for “improvement” of Indigenous societies with a justification of despotism in the interests of the indigenes themselves. He successfully wiped from political thought consideration of the legitimacy of other cultures. He resolved the confusion there had been as to where those cultures should sit on the ladder of civilization by downgrading diversity among nations to a single definition of progress. Whereas the humanitarian discourse had inspired a socially transformative purpose, Mill simplified that discourse merely to the probity of imperial rule. The justice of imperial rule was to be judged by the limited, and purely practical, criterion of the quality of colonial administration. Mill was not the only catalyst for the fading power of the humanitarian discourse within political theory. If Mill helped resolve the contradictions that humanitarian discourse had faced in empire, Charles Darwin provided an understanding of the failure of humane policies to launch Indigenous cultures into the orbit of imperial modernity, an understanding, furthermore, that rested upon scientific reasoning, not natural philosophy. He shifted the definition of race decisively from the domain of culture to the realm of biology. This was, of course, an idea that had long been lurking in the discourses of empire.49 But Darwin offered a powerful argument that endowed this position with scientific status. The theory of evolution solved many of the dilemmas and anxieties of humanitarianism. Like Mill’s social and political theory of progress, evolution allowed racial difference to be both scientifically respectable and understood by liberalism. It provided an explanation for racial difference that was rooted in the historical development of society. It retained the Enlightenment idea of social development progressing through stages, and it also maintained a place for humanitarian sentiment because it suggested the need for more empire. Thus, within the discourse of early nineteenth-century humanitarianism, missionaries had taken themselves off to distant places assured that they could trigger mechanisms in the Indigenous peoples that would rapidly move them into the streams of modernity. Evolution provided a series of convenient explanations why this had proved so problematic, but it did so without dismissing missionary efforts. Darwinism stretched the expectation of Indigenous improvement to centuries and finally resolved, therefore, the mystery of the small signs of wonder among Indigenous peoples that humanitarians continually saw but which stubbornly refused to blossom into fully matured structures of modernity. It removed the anxiety around the role of coercion in this process because it argued that Indigenous peoples were not necessarily endowed with universal humanity. And, even more, it transferred responsibility for this state to the nature of Indigenous character and life itself, which is where humanitarians had begun to suspect it lay in any case. In sum, evolution replaced Christianity as reconciling the narrative of progress with Empire. One result of this was to end the anxieties about violence and empire that had bedeviled imperial discourse in the earlier part of the century. The logical conclusion of John Stuart Mill’s reasoning about despotism—albeit benevolent—as a justified temporary measure while lesser races be brought up to their civilizational potential was to be found in the thinking of people like James Fitzjames Stephen

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and Henry Maine. These men drew mainly on their Indian experience, but they represented the key elements of social theory that underlay the imperial culture of the later nineteenth century. Both reflected the sociological and anthropological concepts that had replaced Christian and natural law assumptions in thinking about empire. Maine, for example, challenged the idea it was possible to assimilate Indigenous and Western cultures. He argued instead that societal institutions embodied an essential and historical racial difference. Traditional culture was not just a temporary obstacle to modernization, therefore—as people like Grey had believed. Rather, it should be accepted and, indeed, preserved as a bastion of imperial rule: this was the justification for indirect rule. Stephen, who was a major critic of Mill’s views on liberty, regarded coercion as a matter-of-fact necessity for empire. It was merely “a mechanism for the improvement of society native.”50 Both Stephen and Maine may be seen as responding to the failure of the liberal imperialism of the earlier period. Not only had its policies failed—instanced in India by the failure of the Ilbert Bill (1884) in India, which would have allowed mixed-race juries—but the assumptions were also faulty. The ethical argument for empire rested on a reading of common humanity that would allow Indigenous races to respond positively to cultural contact with western ideas. This had proved too utopian. It had misread the anthropology of native peoples. The lesson was that the foundations of empire were not to be sought in mutual conciliation and cooperation. Civilization was not going to progress through natural and easy contact. If empire was to be the engine of civilizational progress—as it was generally believed to be—it could only rest on the foundations of superior power and superior values. Of course, the new precepts of imperial thought were not confined to the rarefied realms of political theory. In the later nineteenth century, empire entered fully into the popular culture of Britain through such agencies as the popular press and the music halls. This is not a subject that I can enter into here. But it is important to note briefly how the empire was projected within imperial culture in the late nineteenth century. And we can best do that by following the lead of Theodore Koditschek, who has provided the most sophisticated account of how changing intellectual currents were transmitted through the way empire was discussed in history writings over the century. Writers like Sir Walter Scott reflected the historical thinking of the vision for empire of the early nineteenth century. Scott’s ideas about imperial contact paralleled those of the missionary and humanitarian pioneers in the southern seas. His portrayal of the modernization of the Scottish highlands through imperial contact projected a rapid historical change in the same way that time was foreshortened in the imaginations of the missionaries as they set out to bring Christian modernity to the Indigenous peoples of southern hemisphere. Scott’s novels are meditations on how progress would occur through the integration of Indigenous groups. But he also reflected the “orientalism” of the period in his respect for the cultural autonomy of subject peoples.51 Thomas Macaulay may be seen as epitomizing the growing contradictions of humanitarian discourse as it struggled to retain its conception of universal humanity.

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Koditschek rightly points out that Macaulay’s famous Indian Education Minute of 1833 was not simply a bald statement of imperial superiority. It also reflected an aspiration for the end of empire through an equal education that would inaugurate a process of gradualist reform. Of course, it also mirrored the fragilities and the contradictions of such ambitious programs of social engineering. It aimed to include Indians in its project and foresaw a time when the distinctions between Indians and Britons would be erased. Thus, the opposition and abuse Macaulay experienced from the settler community in India. Ultimately, however, it was not inclusive enough since it contained neither respect nor space for Indigenous cultures.52 Macaulay provides a particularly good example of the tensions within the discourse of liberal humanitarianism in his ultimate inability to create a capaciousenough version of imperial progress. These tensions were resolved by the next generation of historians through the agency of the Darwinian conception of evolution. Evolution facilitated a resolution of the anxieties that had plagued humanitarian discourse and policy. As noted earlier, the discourse and policy of humanitarianism was beleaguered by its inability to fulfill the aspiration of a humane, liberal empire that would avoid the violence of previous history. But a historical narrative that was informed by evolutionary theory was a way of reconciling this predicament. Such a narrative was first introduced by John Anthony Froude, who used evolution as a way of explaining exclusions and racial superiority as inherent in history rather than a product of human will. Empire for Froude was the engine of modernity and the historical destiny of Britain. Racial exclusion and racial superiority had nothing to do with the human spirit or Christian charity. They were the product of natural forces beyond the control of man. Such a narrative resolved the problems that humanitarian liberalism had been unable to overcome. Evolution provided a mechanism for explaining change and progress in history that had previously been lacking. It resolved many of the mysteries produced by earlier versions of how the imperial impact on Indigenous societies was supposed to work. It explained, for example, why Indigenous peoples so easily shed their contact with Western culture and happily returned to the cultural habits of their traditional societies. Similarly, the evolution narrative allowed a better understanding of the timeline for Indigenous progress to occur. Racial amelioration was not just a matter of opening hearts to a universal God. It depended on the inherent differences that would take many years to weed out. The imperial mission would extend into the unforeseeable future.53 Froude’s accounts of empire were travel narratives wrapped in history. This was the mode, too, of his contemporaries Charles Wentworth Dilke and Anthony Trollope. All three made grand tours of the empire as they prepared their popular accounts of a new, triumphal historical narrative about empire. It is very significant that most of their focus was on the white settler colonies, although they each paid some attention to the older colonies such as the West Indies. But it was settler colonies that they defined as the central element of British imperialism. For each man, the key issue was the relationship between the colonies and the mother country. As Dilke explained in the preface to the 1890 edition of his Greater Britain, it was

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“a treatise on the present position of Greater Britain, in which special attention has been given to the relations of the English-speaking countries with one another, and to the comparative politics of the countries under British government.” And this evinced the way the problems of empire had changed by 1880 from the problems associated with indigeneity to the problem of imperial federation. All three of these writers focused on the geo-politics of the Anglo-Saxon world bloc and the role that the settler empire could play in this configuration. Dilke—who was particularly concerned with this matter—spilt much ink discussing the United States in recognition of the central role that country would play in the fate of the British Empire. All three endowed the white settler empire with a visionary historical lineage. Thus, Froude’s Oceana deliberately recalled James Harrington’s seventeenthcentury utopian scheme for a republican commonwealth.54 A notable absence from these author’s writings was the place of Indigenous peoples. When Dilke wrote about “Protection,” for example, he was speaking of fiscal policy, not humane policy. The issue of how Indigenous peoples and empire could be put together had been central to the discourse on empire in the earlier part of the century. By the 1870s, that was no longer true. Naturally, this reflected the changed patterns of global politics. The place of the British Empire in a world of multi-lateral power centers was a growing cause for national debate. It was inevitable that these new configurations would impact discussions of imperial priorities. But the diminished priority that was given to the issues of Indigenous peoples also spoke to other realities. It signified that for settler politics and imperial culture, the problem of the first peoples had been largely “solved.” Although history was to prove this to be wrong, it accurately represented the realities of imperial politics at that moment, and it was true, also, for how the empire was represented in culture. The minimal place that Indigenous peoples occupied in this sort of literature on empire was a form of silencing.55 This does not mean that race was absent from these authors’ vision of empire, just as it was hardly absent from British and imperial politics. Indeed, race was a constant theme in their writings. It was the “grandeur of our race,” as Dilke put it, that was the organizing principle, and this grandeur was the “problem” to be explained—not how races could coexist within an imperial setting. His treatment of race assumed the insignificance of races other than the white ones of Western Europe. Russians, for example, were regarded as “dirty, ignorant and corrupt.” In retrospect, of course, we may see the curious void this created in their writings. In the early nineteenth century the problem of Indigenous peoples in empire had been the central problem to be addressed by commentators and policy makers alike. In the earlier literature, whether it was focused on policy issues or addressed descriptive, ethnographic accounts of the settler colonies, Indigenous people featured large in the accounts. At the center of the accounts of Froude and his contemporaries, however, lay the white settler population. The Indigenous people were relegated to the margins—where settler politics wanted them to be.56 Thus, these works were signal examples of how the settler world was brought into the metropolitan world. They were channels through which imperial culture

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endorsed settler consciousness and made it part of imperial consciousness. Froude and Trollope were particularly strong on their support for settler society. Froude admitted settler sovereignty had been established by unscrupulous means. He justified it with the simplified argument settlers themselves used about the greater efficiency of their land usage. He dismissed the policy of the imperial government to protect the Indigenous races as replicating an ignorant public opinion that knew nothing of the “practical difficulties” the settlers faced. And he confirmed settler expertise in the handling of Indigenous peoples by repeating exactly settler words on the foolish tendency of government to protect these races in an independence which they have been unable to use wisely, and are then driven ourselves into wars with them by acts which they would never have committed alone if the colonists and they had been left to arrange their mutual relations alone.57 Trollope was even more explicit in his support for settler control over the Indigenous peoples. He devoted one chapter to what he described as the “very disagreeable subject” of Australian Aboriginals. Significantly enough, he focused on Queensland and his narrative aligned precisely with settler consciousness. The violence of the frontier—the “rough justice” was how he described settler behavior— was attributed solely to the Indigenous peoples who were tagged as the initiators of violence. Contrary to the myths put about by humanitarians, it was the settlers who were the victims. Trollop alluded to the hanging of the Myall Creek murderers as if it was a typical example of a justice system used to oppress the settler community. Attempts to conciliate the Australian Aboriginal people were fruitless in the face of the intractable savagery of the Aboriginal character. Their tribal system merely reinforced this savagery, which was described as powerful and impenetrable, demonstrating how impossible it was to expect “lesser races” to be raised up—as the experience of the West Indian blacks confirmed. It was quite absurd to expect “the negro  .  .  .  [to] live on equal terms with the white man.” The narrative of humanitarianism was based upon a basic misconception that Aboriginal wildness was educable. But this was not so. Indigenous savagery was more powerful than Western civilization, as was proved by the way mixed-race children automatically reverted to their Aboriginal origins given the chance. Force and coercion were the only practical policies that could meet such social realities.58 In these authors, too, the sense of differentiation between Indigenous races was muted. Even those classified as more “civilized” than others were unable to transcend their savage origins and thus were fitted only for directive rule, and doomed to disappear. The optimistic expectations that imperial contact would bring mutual improvement and understanding were replaced by the gloomy prognostication that the indigenes were unable to benefit from what white culture had to offer. Even though Maori were recognized as possessing considerable military prowess, this was not to the credit of their culture. They were still “mere savages,” according to Dilke, destined to disappear. Froude’s narrative about Maori since first contact

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was even more abrupt and shorthanded. According to him, Maori had derived no benefit from the introduction of civilization and were destined to “pine away as in a cage, sink first into apathy and moral degradation, and then vanish.” And Trollope, regretting that he could find nothing noble to say about them, saw them as regressing into the savage habits of cannibalism under the impact of military defeat, never having really shaken “the incubus of superstition.” This stood in marked contrast to the complexities of their culture and society that had captured the attention of an earlier generation of commentators and, in the case of Sir George Grey, provided a field of study.59

Conclusion The racial order that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century rested on the dual foundations of settler power in the colonies and the intellectual formations I have traced here in the metropole. This was an imperial order with fundamentally different aspirations and possibilities to the imperial formations of the early nineteenth century. It is, however, the racial order that has come to typify British imperialism in our historical imagination. And it is the racial order that it is all too easy to assume was unfolding inexorably throughout the history of British Empire. But this was a structure that emerged from a particular historical evolution with a particular set of expectations and intellectual structures to support it. It was an imperial formation that rested on a conception of racial difference that was essential and contained little optimism for difference and change. It was an order that explicitly accepted coercion as necessary to ensuring rule, that saw no practical end to the British Empire, and that had only hazy notions of the kind of society it imagined empire creating. This was all in contrast to the assumptions that had been imagined for Indigenous policies in the early nineteenth century. But the end of this earlier and more hopeful racial future was part of a historical process as well as being a historical event. And, as such, the assumptions and presumptions of that order did not go away; rather, they morphed into new configurations. Thus, the legacies of the old order survived to trouble and ultimately challenge the seeming permanence of the new. Those legacies are the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 Responsible government is not usually contextualized within the large-scale dispossession of Indigenous people. It is notably absent for example from Belich’s Replenishing the Earth. But for a full explication of the relationship, see Ann Curthoys and Jesse Mitchell, “The Advent of Self Government, 1840s–1890,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 150–51 and more fully elaborated in Curthoys and Mitchell’s Taking Liberty. Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For the Durham Report, see Curthoys, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Durham Report, Indigenous Dispossession, and Self-Government for Britain’s Settler Colonies,” in Within and without the Nation. Canadian History as Transnational History, ed. Adele Perry, Henry Yu, and Karen Dubinsky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 24–48.

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2 See Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights. Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Herman Merivale, “The Colonial Question in 1870,” Fortnightly Review 7, no. 38 (1870): 152–75 for the silencing of the issue of Indigenous rights and the dominance of the issue of imperial federation as the central problem for Empire. Curthoys and Mitchell, Taking Liberties, 108–14, 115–16, 119–24. 3 Angela Wanhalla, “Intimate Connections: Governing Cross-Cultural Intimacy on New Zealand’s Colonial Frontier,” Law & History 4 (2017): 45–71. And Amanda Nettelbeck, “Interracial Intimacy, Indigenous Mobility and the Limits of Legal Regulation in Two Late Settler Colonial Societies,” Law & History 4 (2017): 103–24. For the way official policy treated cross race relationships within the Colonial service, see Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality. The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 157–81. 4 By the last of his journeys through the Van Diemen’s Land wilderness, Robinson was more willing to use overt methods of force and duplicity to gather the Aboriginal people and ship them off to Flinders Island. Plomley, Friendly Mission, 619, 689; Pybus, Truganini, 141. 5 Some spectacular failures of attempts to act upon the presumptions of the humanitarian agenda that sent shock waves throughout the Exeter Hall world—the Niger River expedition being the most celebrated Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Anti-Slavery Expedition to the River Niger 1840–41 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom. Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins, 1992). 6 But he remained committed to a humanitarian perspective of race relations. See James Dredge, A Plea on Behalf of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Victoria (Geelong, 1854). 7 Curthoys and Mitchell, Taking Liberty, 187–88. 8 NAUK, CO13/33, South Australia. Original Correspondence. Despatches. Grey to Stanley, 24 July 1843, ff. 353–55. 9 Ibid., December 23, 1843, ff. 447–48. 10 Price, Making Empire, 27–28, 48–52, 74–76 for this in missionary culture. Bannister, Humane Policy, vi; Eyre, Journals of Discovery, Vol. 2, 503; Grey, Journals, Vol. 2, 367. The much quoted dispatch from the Sir George Murray to Arthur about the stain on the character of the British government should conciliation fail is a good illustration of this anxiety. But there was an air of resigned disquiet in his admission that Arthur’s options were limited to doing all he could to foster “a less hostile intercourse bet natives and settlers” and to hope that settlers can be prevailed upon to exercise restraint and forbearance in their dealings with the Aboriginal people. NAUK, CO 408/7 Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Letters from the Secretary of State, Sir George Murray to Arthur 5 November 1830, ff. 78–83. For another example of the same tone, see CO 201/311, New South Wales. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Stephen minute of 7 April 1842 on a dispatch from Gipps f. 276. 11 On the different quality of pessimism after c. 1850, see Belmessous, Assimilation and Empire; Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 201–12; Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 68–69, 82; Andrew Bank, “Losing Faith in the Civilizing Mission: The Premature Decline of Humanitarian Liberalism at the Cape, 1840–1860,” in Martin Daunton and Rick Halperin, Empire and Others. British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 364–83. It is important to note, however, that the quality of pessimism was conditioned by the particular circumstances of the colony. The big exception to the mood that I have recounted here was New Zealand, where it was more difficult to place Maori culture and society in the same frame as Australian Aboriginal, for example. This was one reason why the policy of racial amalgamation continued to have more of a presence in New Zealand, albeit in a very different form. 12 Curthoys and Mitchell, Taking Liberty, 127–32, 143–48, 161 for an elaboration of these points. For networks across the settler colonies, see Alan Lester, “British Settler

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Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 25–48; and his Imperial Networks. 13 Grace Karskens, “The Early Colonial Presence, 1788–1822,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, 115; CHBE, Vol. VIII, 370–73; On the question of the despotism of gubernatorial power and the opposition it invoked see C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 (Harlow: Fullers, 1989), 193–216. Lorenzo Veracini has pointed out that settler nationalism possesses an inherent ambiguity in its relation to its metropolitan origins. On the one hand it rejects the hierarchies that the motherland represented. In that respect it is a de-colonizing project of its very own nature. On the other hand, settler nationalism represents an “acceleration of colonizing practices” particularly where Indigenous peoples are concerned. This is a pertinent observation of the nationalism that developed in settler colonies from the later nineteenth century. In our period, this ambiguity was less evident and the main element in the relationship was to wrest from the metropole authority over local affairs, particularly those relating to Indigenous peoples. See Veracini, “Isopolitics, Deep Colonizing, Settler Colonialism,” Interventions. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 2 (2011): 171–89. 14 McHugh, in Sharp et al., Histories, 192–95. And one of the first signals of a settler consciousness in New Zealand was precisely a petition to the Colonial Office by Auckland merchants in 1845 which complained about the effects of the accommodative policy towards the Maori on land and other issues. Evans, Truth and Obedience, 80–91. 15 Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, 80–85, 143–46; Johnston, “The Language of Colonial Violence,” 74; 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 6, no. 3 (December 2009); Jane Lydon, “Anti-Slavery in Australia: Picturing the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre,” History Compass 15, no. 5 (May 2017), doi:10.1111/hic3.12336. Myall Creek emphasized the need for Aboriginal Evidence Bills in the colonial state; see Smandych, “Contemplating the Testimony of Others,” 249. But at the same time, it created the conditions for the mobilization against such measures. 16 J.E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits Etc., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania (Hobart, 1875), 7–9, 56–57. He was acquainted with Truganini, even advocating to the government in 1876 that a statue should be erected in her honor. ML, A597, Microfilm CY 1162, Calder Papers, Papers re the Aborigines of Tasmania, Calder to Kennerly, May 1876, Calder to Rigby, 6 February 1877. It will be recalled that the deaths of Thomas and Parker caused a real panic in Hobart. It is interesting to note that magical powers were also attributed to Robinson to explain his success in dealing with the Indigenous people. In a letter to Buxton, Arthur noted that Robinson had an “instinct, or intuitive sagacity in dealing with” the Aboriginal people. TAHO, GO 52/6. Letterbooks of General Outward Correspondence. Outgoing letters from the Lt. Governor, Arthur to Buxton, 31 January 1835. 17 ML, A589, Microfilm CY3321, Calder Papers, Letter Book 1842–1847, Calder to Colonial Secretary, 3 August 1847. Such fears were quite widespread in the settler community in 1847. 18 NAUK, CO280/25, Van Diemen’s Land. Original Correspondence. Despatches, Arthur to Murray, 20 November 1830, ff. 385, 387–90. For this episode, see 157. 19 SASL, D4440(L), James Coutts Crawford, Diary 1838–1839, 38, 60. 20 William Shaw, The Story of My Mission in South Eastern Africa (London: Hamilton Adams, 1860), 162–66. In March 1823, for example, a petition attacking the policy of Governor Richard Bourke for its pro-Xhosa tendencies had been circulated. In this document Bourke was described as being totally ignorant of the “real character of the Kaffir.” See Godlonton, Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes, 39–44. 21 Robert Godlonton, Memorials of British Settlers of South Africa (Grahamstown, 1844), 26, 58. Godlonton, A Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes, 39, 43–44. John Mitford

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Bowker, Speeches, Letters and Selections from Important Papers of the Late John Mitford Bowker (Cape Town: South African Library, 1962), 100–6. 22 William B. Boyce, Notes on South African Affairs from 1834–1838 (Graham’s Town, 1838), 197–211. Settlers were, generally speaking, held in low regard by colonial officials of this period. Macquarie in New South Wales, for example, preferred emancipist ex-convicts to the free settlers, and he suffered politically from it. We have seen how Sir George Grey also had a low view of settler colonists precisely because of their predatory attitudes towards native peoples. 23 For frontier policy in this period, see John S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire. British Policy on the South African Frontier 1834–1854 (Berkeley: Palgrave Macmillan, 1963). See Western Cape Provincial Archives, [WCPA] LG401, Letters Received from the Diplomatic Agent of Caffraria, Stretch to Hudson 11 December 1843 for an example of Stretch’s challenge to the view of the frontier situation presented by a meeting of farmers at Fort Beaufort. National Library of South Africa, Cape Town, NLiSA, MSB 359, John Noble, Manuscript Collection, Folder 1 for Stretch’s reflections on the potential success of the Glenelg frontier policy and the way it was destroyed the Graham’s Town settler lobby. And Western Cape Provincial Archives, LG 396, Letters Received From Government Agent in Kaffraria, Hudson to Stretch, September 23, 1836, for Stretch optimism re-frontier policy in mid-1830s. In the 1870s Stretch contemplated writing a history of frontier policy which would have painted it very differently from the emergent historiography. For Stockenstrom, see Price, Making Empire, 166. 24 For a sample illustrating these themes, see WCPA, LG 399, Letters Received From Diplomatic Agent in Caffraria, Stretch to Hudson, 31 August 1840, 15 September 1840, 15 October 1840, 22 June 1840; LG 402, Letters Received from Diplomatic Agent in Caffraria, Stretch to Hare, January 14, 1844, Stretch to Hudson, May 2, 1842, May 3, May 7, 1842, December 30, 1842. 25 Bowker, Speeches and Letters, 38, 74–84, 100–6. 26 In the eastern Cape, the career of Andreas Stockenstrom was destroyed by this opposition. From Western Australia, Stirling reported that the aggressive policing policy the settlers wanted would lead to continual conflict and cause the extinction of the Aboriginal people “to the discredit of the British name.” See Pamela Statham, “James Stirling and the Pinjarra,” Studies in Western Australian History 23 (2003): 194 and CO 18/14, Western Australia, Original Correspondence, Despatches January–June 1834. Glenelg to Stirling, 23 July 1835. Eyre wanted to resign because of this opposition, but Grey talked him out of it. ACL, GL: NZ E7, Letters from E.J. Eyre, Eyre to Grey, 6 November 1843. 27 ACCL, Grey Collection, GL: NZ E7,. Letters from E.J. Eyre, Eyre to Grey, 29 May 1849. Eyre was singularly inept at handling such opposition, an early sign of his administrative shortcomings that were revealed in the West Indies. 28 For a different period, Adrian Muckle has demonstrated these tensions between settlers and officials in New Caledonia. Settlers were anxious to emphasize the dangers to social stability presented by Indigenous politics. Colonial officials tended to assign responsibility as much to settlers as to the Indigenous peoples. They were also more likely to be better informed, even though settlers claimed superior reading of the character of the natives. Ignorance—cultural misreadings—was an important factor in such situations. Settlers were apt to assume that customs or habits they did not understand possessed threatening implications. At bottom, though, settler knowledge of Aboriginal people was largely a projection of settler’s own inclinations. Muckle, “Killing the ‘Fantome Canaque,’ Evoking and Invoking the Possibility of Revolt in New Caledonia 1853– 1915,” Journal of Pacific History 37, no. 1 (2002): 25–44. 29 Bowker, Speeches and Letters, 274–75; Rhodes House Library, Africanea Collection. Letters to Robert Godlonton, Robert White, to Godlonton, 15 August  1860. The whole question of settler lobbies in London is in need of research. 30 John Philip, Researches in South Africa (London, 1828) was the authoritative account about racial politics in South Africa. Godlonton, Narrative of the Irruption, 18, 43–44, 50–59 for extended diatribes against the South African humanitarian lobby. For Philip,

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see Tim Keegan, Dr. Philip’s Empire. One Man’s Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth Century South Africa (Cape Town: South African Library, 2016); Fyans, Reminiscences 1810–1843, 315–18, 321–23. 31 These men had appeared before the Select Committee on Aborigines and gone on lecture tours around the provinces. See Elbourne, “Creation of Knowledge,” 16–17, and her “The Sin of the Settler,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial Studies 4, no. 3 (2003). See also Roger Levine, A Living Man From Africa. Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 125–57; Godlonton, Narrative of the Irruption of the Kaffir Hordes, 18. 32 For the full story of the Kat River settlement, see Robert Ross, The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa. The Kat River Settlement, 1829–1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). It is important to note, of course, that the settlement itself was on land dispossessed from Maqoma, the Xhosa chief. 33 Robert Godlonton and Edward Irving A Narrative of the Kaffir War of 1850–51 (London and Grahamstown, 1851; repr. 1961), 113–18, 180–85. Thus, the threat of violence from settlers that greeted a missionary delegation visiting Graham’s Town at the height of the frontier war. 34 Windeyer, On the Rights of Aborigines, 33–44. This last passage was where he talks about “this whispering in our hearts.” 35 Celia Sadler, comp., Never a Young Man, Extracts from the Letters and Journals of William Shaw (Cape Town: South African Library, 1967), 157–58. 36 Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th. Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 170–78. 37 For reparations, see Laidlaw, “Aunt Anna’s Report: The Buxton Women and the Select Committee on Aborigines 1835–37,” 3–4. For settler policy in Queensland see Curthoys and Mitchell, Taking Liberty, 313–34. This paragraph and the succeeding discussion of Queensland rely heavily upon Anne O’Brien, “Humanitarianism and Reparation . . .,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, no. 2 (Fall 2011), doi:10.1353/ cch.2011.0016. See also Evans, “The Country Has Another Past, 9–38. 38 Archibald Meston, Queensland Aborigines. Proposed System for Their Preservation and Protection (Brisbane 1895), 22. cited in O’Brien, “Humanitarianism and Reparation . . .” 39 Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 171–74, 181; Sam Hutchinson, “Humanitarian Critique and the Settler Fantasy: The Australian Press and Settler Colonial Consciousness During the Waikato War, 1863–1864,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. I (2014): 68–83, which also is an interesting meditation on the relation between the psychology of settler consciousness and humanitarianism. 40 Ford and Rowse, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, 24; Malcolm Allbrook, “John Scholl: Protector Pilbara Style,” Furphy and Nettelbeck, Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries, 212–227. For Aboriginal policy at the end of the century, see Amanda Nettelbeck, “ ‘Keep the Magistrates Straight’: Magistrates and Aboriginal ‘Management’ on Australia’s North-West Frontiers, 1883–1905,” Aboriginal History 38 (2015): 19–37. 41 Duncan Bell, “Empire and International Relations,” Andrew Sartori, “The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission,” Journal of Modern History 78 (September 2006): 623–42. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) treats liberal political thought as irredeemably compromised by Locke’s absences and qualifications as to who deserved the status of citizen in society which inherently excluded Indigenous peoples. 42 See Karuna Mantena, “The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order. Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 113–15; Theodore Koditshek, “Introduction: the Reinvention of Race 1830–1914,” unpublished paper, 5–6. It needs to be remembered that it was only after c. 1870 that Empire became central to the political culture and was inserted into the popular cultural identity of Britain.

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43 Bernard Semmel, Democracy versus Empire. The Jamaica Riots of 1865 and the Governor Eyre Controversy (New York: Routledge, 1969), 181–87; Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919. An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (London: Routledge, 2019), 232–36, 239–40, 251–52. 44 Bart Georgios and Varouxakis Schultz, eds., Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005) for a consideration of the complexities of Utilitarianism’s attitude to empire. Mantena, “Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” 115. But note Bell, “Empire and International Relations,” 296 for how the importance of the white settler colonies in thinking about the late nineteenth century empire has tended to be ignored. 45 Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 510–11; Pitts, Turn to Empire, 111. 46 Pitts, Turn to Empire, 103–8, 125; Karuna Mantena, “The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” 115–18. J.S. Mill, “Civilisation,” in Dissertations and Discussions (London: Routledge, 1905), 135–67. 47 Pitts, Turn to Empire, 133–36. 48 Ibid., 146–60. See also Eileen P. Sullivan, “Liberalism and Imperialism: J.S. Mill’s Defense of the British Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 4 (October 1983), 599–617. It is important to note that the Eyre case did lead Mill to think again about colonial violence and the problem of settler violence towards Indigenous peoples. For this reason, he opposed granting self-government to New Zealand. So, in this way, Mill also helped to regenerate a continued recognition of the ambiguities of empire within liberal thought. 49 As in Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question (London, 1853), first published in 1849. On Carlyle see Catherine Hall, “The nation within and without,” in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation. Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 184–85, 196–98. 50 Mantena, “The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” 129–30, 124. 51 Theodore Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination. Nineteenth Century Visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37–55. 52 Ibid., 103–50 for the detailed and full discussion of this. For a more psychological interpretation of Macaulay, see Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 53 Koditschek, Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination, 152–73, 213–14. Froude’s view of history was not unchallenged. Goldwin Smith debated with Froude on these very issues and J.R. Green and E. A. Freeman represented a continuation of the earlier tradition of questioning the value of imperialism and its threats to national culture. It is important not to overstate the extent to which social Darwinism replaced the cultural-based categories of racial difference in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain. For this see, Peter Mandler, “ ‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought,” in History, Religion and Culture. British Intellectual History 1750–1850, ed. Richard Whatmore, Stefan Collini, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 224–44. 54 My discussion addresses the following works. James Anthony Froude, Oceana or England and her Colonies (London, 1886); Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain. A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 (New York, 1869). The 1890 edition was titled The Problems of Greater Britain (London, 1890) and the cite is from p. vii. Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, Volumes 1–3 (Leipzig, 1873). Trollope also published a two-volume book on South Africa (London, 1878) which was much more tentative in its discussions of the Xhosa than his treatment of the Australian Aboriginal people and Maori. It will be recalled that Harrington was an inspiration, too, for Sir George Grey. It should be noted that Froude ended his tour of the southern empire with an extended stay with Grey on Kawau Island. Froude wrote more on Empire than

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I can deal with here, and on South Africa, for example, his attitudes were quite heterodox, being supportive of the Boers and less enthusiastic about the imperial connection. See C.A. Bodelsen, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 1968), 179–84. 55 The issue of Indigenous peoples continued to be represented in British politics by the humanitarian lobby groups such as the Aborigines Protection Society and a wing of the Liberal Party. But their diminished place in the spectrum of British politics was represented in the rise of the “Liberal Imperialists” to prominence in the Liberal Party. 56 I could find only five references to “aborigines” in Dilke’s Greater Britain although there was more extensive treatment of Maori. Out of three volumes, Trollope had one chapter on Australian indigenes and one on Maori. Froude had no treatment of the Australian First Peoples and one sketchy chapter on Maori which describes a decaying Maori village. Bodelsen, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism, 69–71. 57 Froude, Oceana, 5. 58 Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 63–76. 59 Dilke, Greater Britain, 271–75; Froude, Oceana, 299–300; Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, Vol. III, 241–59.

9 LEGACIES IN MODERN INDIGENOUS POLITICS

Introduction: the past in the present William Faulkner’s observation that “the past is never dead: it isn’t even past” is an apt remark to introduce the final chapters of this book. Across all of the old settler colonies of the British Empire, the waning years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of Indigenous rights movements whose agendas and demands quickly came to dominate politics in those countries. This was particularly true in Australia and New Zealand, but it was also true to a lesser degree in Canada and even, one could argue, it was true in a very different form in South Africa. My argument in this chapter is that these movements were reflective of deep historical continuities that expressed the unfinished work of the early nineteenth century; that they dramatically demonstrated how the past was not dead in settler societies but, in fact, had left legacies that remained to be reckoned with.1 History was not supposed to evolve in this way. By the end of the nineteenth century, settler colonialism could congratulate itself that it had disposed of the problem of indigeneity as a disruptive force to its hegemony. Until the last third of the twentieth century, it was possible to think that this was true. It was not that Indigenous people had disappeared, although they were generally thought to have done so in Tasmania. It was more that they were perceived as a suitable problem for social work and social policy, rather than a challenge to the political structures or to the foundations of settler colony sovereignty. The first issue to be discussed, therefore, must be the silences and the forgetting about Indigenous peoples and their histories within settler society that allowed it to be assumed they were a problem that had been solved. Of course, memory was different within Indigenous culture, which had not forgotten their history within settler colonialism. So, my second theme will be to briefly sketch the continuities in Indigenous politics that provided links with the past even at the height of settler domination. My third focus will be

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on how these continuities broke into full display when Indigenous rights movements emerged from the 1970s to challenge the very bases of settler society by re-opening contentious questions of sovereignty, law, and land. And finally, I will suggest how the languages and discourses of modern Indigenous rights movements also bear the imprint from the distant past of the early nineteenth century.

The silences of settler society From being a major pre-occupation of the imperial regime and its policy makers in the early nineteenth century, settler colonialism successfully removed questions of indigeneity from the socio-political formations of the settler state and progressively closed off any road to self-determination for the Indigenous peoples. By the later nineteenth century, it seemed that this work had been effectively completed and that settler dominance was secure. The basic issues of sovereignty, land rights, and land usage, kept safe by the law, had all been resolved. The ideology of the “humane policy” agenda for a conciliated and cooperative social and racial system in these societies had been appropriated in the interests of white settler supremacy. From the 1850s, a triumphalist imperial vision acquired the political and intellectual heft to overwhelm the “humanitarian” vision while mouthing its discourse as part of justifying settler rule. This historical dynamic reached fruition by the 1890s, to express the seeming inevitability of a political and racial order that showcased unalloyed imperial dominance. During the classic era of high imperialism—from c. 1860 through 1950—for both critics and supporters of the empire, the imperial orderings of race, governance, and hierarchy assumed the natural order of things. The consequence was that from the last third or so of the nineteenth century, the issues, potential, and themes of the imperial formations of the early nineteenth century were relegated to a forgotten past in the settler colonies. We may illustrate this by looking at the way certain historical events were celebrated in the public sphere of the settler colonies.2 Take the case of Proclamation Day in South Australia, which commemorates the declaration of the founding of the colony on December 28, 1836. South Australia was established at the height of the humanitarian influence in the Colonial Office. Its founding documents presented a commitment to preserving the land and other rights of the original inhabitants. Its settlers were supposedly chosen from the best that Britain had to offer who would avoid the depredations that accompanied the creation of other settler colonies. As we have seen, such high aspirations were not to be fulfilled, and South Australia had its share of the usual violence that accompanied settler colonialism. Nevertheless, the image of a peaceful and benevolent colonization became part of the self-image of the colony, and its reflection in the public memory was manifested in commemorations of Proclamation Day. With the emergence of settler political ascendency from the 1850s, it was particularly important that the founding myth of the colony as a humanitarian settlement be claimed by the settlers themselves. Thus, at the 1871 commemoration, for example, John Brown, one of the

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oldest remaining settlers, was invited to speak. His speech was a perfect declaration of how settler politics announced its claims to be the real humanitarians rather than “those ‘Saints in the House of Commons’ ” who wanted to deprive honest settlers of their rights to this terra nullius and teach them how to behave toward the First Nations of Australia.3 Indeed, Brown was a charter founder of this version of settler political discourse in South Australia. Even before he had arrived in South Australia, and as a political tussle was underway in London as to the exact wording of the charter for the colonization company, Brown spent two days visiting the Buxton home lobbying for the view that since there were to be no convicts in the colony, it was unnecessary to write into law protections for the Aboriginal peoples of the area. Forty years later, this was the version of South Australian settlement that Brown rehearsed at Commemoration Day in a presentation that combined the key elements of settler politics: hostility to “humanitarian” meddlers and to imperial government interference with the “rights” of settlers to claim land and manage natives. The story that Brown told was one that actively forgot the violence that had plagued this colony and claimed instead that “they had established relations [with the local people] without bloodshed, without injury, or without loss.” It was true that the colony did not start by shooting the Indigenous people. But what Brown’s memory did not recall, or openly admit, was that this restraint was short-lived.4 Brown did at least register that there were Indigenous people in the colony. A couple of decades later, as settler hegemony was flexing its muscles, they had disappeared from the Proclamation Day ceremonies. This was particularly notable because ethnic diversity in the colony was celebrated in the recognition that was given to the Hindu and Afghan members of the colonial community. (The Afghans had been brought to handle the camels used by explorers like Sturt.) Only the first owners of the land were forgotten. When they reappeared in this annual event later in the twentieth century, it was as the objects of a paternal, settler-defined humanitarianism, which claimed the inherited duty to serve the Indigenous peoples through the interventionist Protection policies of that era. During the interwar years this theme was highlighted to demonstrate the moral commitment of the state to the betterment of Aboriginal peoples on the road toward assimilation. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the tone and message of Proclamation Day had changed again to reflect the increasing prominence of Indigenous political and civil rights on the national and local political agenda. The key decade was the 1960s, which, in South Australia as in other places, was a time of significant political and social change. The Province was at the forefront of legislation that addressed Aboriginal empowerment and self-government. The Aboriginal Lands Trust Act of 1966 was the first legislative recognition of Indigenous land rights in Australia. Likewise, in the Proclamation Day ceremonies of the early twenty-first century, Aboriginal peoples came to occupy a central place. By 2007, an official Aboriginal welcoming party presented the governor with various symbols of reconciliation, and further ceremonies recognized Indigenous rights, particularly to the land. At these events, reference was made to the unfulfilled promises

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of the colony’s founding. And so these issues were woven again into the public narrative of a colony that had begun its life with a supposed recognition of such rights.5 The shroud of silence that cloaked the issue of Aboriginal rights in the Proclamation Day ceremonies of the twentieth century illustrated the disappearance from public notice of the themes that had pre-occupied the settler colonies of the southern empire in the early nineteenth century. In New Zealand the wars of the 1860s displaced the Treaty of Waitangi from its central place in Maori-Pakeha relations, and it was not until 1934 that Treaty was officially celebrated when Governor Bledislow purchased the Treaty signing grounds with his own funds and dedicated it to the nation. Annual ceremonies commemorating the Treaty did not begin until 1947, but with the striking exclusion of Maori participants. This changed in the mid-1950s, and since the mid-1970s, Maori have increasingly asserted their dominance over the public celebrations. Waitangi day only became an official holiday, however, in 1974. Furthermore, physical copies of the Treaty were neither highly prized nor protected until the mid-1970s, when it was finally put on public display in the National Archives. Similarly, it is astonishing to record that there were very few academic studies of Waitangi until the 1980s, for example, when Claudia Orange published the first academic book on the treaty. Although Maori continued to hold to the original view of the Treaty of Waitangi as the foundational document for the nation, it took over a century for this to return to Pakeha consciousness.6 This pattern of silencing and forgetting of matters that had been at the center of imperial discourses and policy in the early nineteenth century was not peculiar to Australia and New Zealand. It was a feature of Canadian history, too, particularly as it related to the matter of Indigenous peoples. For a long time, Canadian history was projected as a cooperative endeavor between Indian tribes and newcomer settlers. The policy of removing First Peoples children from their parental homes and placing them in residential schools to undergo a forced assimilation, for example, was a forgotten theme of Canadian history, which has only recently been acknowledged in public and political discourse.7 Similarly, in spite of the treaty tradition that governed Britain’s historical relations with the First Nations of Canada, a decision of the Privy Council in 1888 had established that Indian land tenure was a personal usufructuary right entirely dependent on the good will of the sovereign. This was not the view of the Indians, nor was it the view of those informed mediators and agents who served as the negotiators between the British and the Indigenous tribes. Still, by the 1880s, this was legal and political doctrine. But it was illustrative of this particular phase of imperial rule rather than a timeless expression of imperial hegemony.8 Silencing and forgetting, then, were essential to the ideology of settler colonialism and the era high imperialism. Whatever insecurities may have coursed through British policy makers about the geo-political standing of the British Empire, there was little doubt about the permanence of the social formations that enveloped this period. Still, in fact, the settler-Indigenous peoples’ relationship had not been secured. If those questions were effectively silenced in the dominant discourses,

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they continued to animate Indigenous politics and remained alive in their cultures. Among Indigenous peoples there was always the possibility of re-opening these issues, for they were the bedrock of political action whenever the opportunity arose. The historical significance of the resurgence of Indigenous politics at the end of the twentieth century was that it represented a rediscovery of older themes. As such they were a highly disruptive and disturbing development. From the later twentieth century, the settler colonies were obliged to grapple with the legacies of their past—the unresolved tensions that drove their early nineteenth-century imperial formations. In this respect, when we think about the power of settler colonial structures, or imperial hegemony, it is important to understand that they are always provisional and subject to revision. As Ford and Rowse have remarked, “settler state making is still a work in progress.” This is amply demonstrated by the latest phase of Indigenous politics.9

Making modern Indigenous politics If settler colonialism is a structure rather than an event, like all structures it requires continual maintenance and tending. It was always subject to challenge from Indigenous politics. Most notably, the latest phase of those politics has questioned the settler definition of sovereignty and land usage that was constructed in the late nineteenth century. From the end of the 1960s through the 1970s Indigenous peoples’ rights movements began to reshape politics in the old settler colonies of the British Empire, and elsewhere. Indeed, they were part of a demand for Indigenous rights that swept across a wide swathe of the southern globe and were particularly strong in Latin America. I will confine my attention to Australia and New Zealand, with some sidelong glances at Canada. The nature of the movements in each case was, of course, shaped by the history of their own particular national experience. But it is important to note that they arose as a consequence of the interaction between international forces and local histories. The core significance of the Indigenous rights movements was that they declared an end to the settler social formations that had been set in place through the second half of the nineteenth century. In addition, they shared common themes: their politics revolved around the issues of land, law, and definitions of sovereignty, signifying the strong historical continuities stretching back to the early nineteenth century. Each was profoundly disruptive to the social formations of their settler societies. Their presence offered alternative historical narratives to those that had been constructed out of settler politics. Finally, they opened an era in the political history of the nations that, as of the early twenty-first century, is in the process of evolution and that bore parallels to the early nineteenth century because potential outcomes remain fluid and indeterminate. Since the early days of the League of Nations, the question of Indigenous rights has been on the radar screen of international organizations. In the 1920s, the International Labor Organization was the first body to actively demonstrate an interest in the questions of Indigenous land rights and the status of customary laws. And

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although Australian Aboriginal politicians took notice of this, it remained a minor issue of international concern. At the time of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, Indigenous rights were primarily matters of domestic responsibility. UN Covenants addressed the issues of minority rights and nondiscrimination, for example, and were watched with considerable suspicion by countries like Australia. Still, the discussions in international bodies likely encouraged Australia to move in the same direction, as in its 1967 referendum, which removed the exclusionary clauses against Aboriginal people in its constitution and was a first step toward granting them civil rights. Certainly, politics in the Western world and beyond in the 1960s pushed civil rights to the fore as a central issue. And with the de-colonization of the European empires, questions of self-determination and sovereignty were pushed onto the agenda of international politics. But it was not until the 1970s, as non-Western countries began to exercise a greater voice in the UN, that the international body began to move tentatively to tackle the question of Indigenous rights.10 By the late 1970s, too, there was a growing coordination between Indigenous peoples across widely different societies. In truth, this reflected more the recognition of a theme of Indigenous history that had been present from the very beginning of imperial contact. Indigenous peoples had never been immobile actors within imperial systems; they had always moved over imperial spaces and created their own distinct networks separate from those of the imperial world. Indeed, the first World Council of Indigenous peoples held in British Columbia in 1975 was kicked off by Arctic peoples who joined together with First Nations Canadians to launch the initiative. The council was important because it ensured the permanent addition of Indigenous rights issues to the agenda of international affairs and opened a renewed debate around the status of Indigenous peoples within international law. The UN was involved, too, and issued a report on racial discrimination in 1975. It was a result of these influences that Aboriginal organizations became increasing involved in international organizations, joining the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1979. The next meeting of the council was held in 1981 in Australia.11 The most significant evidence that Indigenous rights had become an issue of international concern was the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 13, 2007. The Declaration legitimized the claims for cultural identity and autonomy that were at the heart of the existing Indigenous rights movements. It was a Declaration that in some ways represented a catching up with local politics in places as widely spaced as Australia and Latin America where Indigenous rights movements had been successfully active for thirty years before 2007. But the Declaration was important for two broad reasons. In the first place, it gave international endorsement to the range of issues and topics that had come to animate Indigenous people’s politics. Those questions ranged variously across countries from land ownership and usage, the rights of redress and compensation for land dispossession, the right to control educational systems, and the recognition of cultural knowledge, such as the uses of traditional

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medicine. In the second place, the Declaration quite consciously represented a challenge to existing international law of sovereignty by fore-grounding the claims of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. The Declaration walked a delicate line in this respect. It rightly emphasized how these movements were not necessarily challenging the territorial integrity of existing states. But it associated international law with Indigenous peoples’ demands for some type of self-determination. And this, in turn, raised the prospect of a challenge to the basis of national sovereignty. Potentially, then, the confluence of this move with internal domestic pressures for Indigenous rights was profoundly destabilizing to existing definitions of nationality. It was hardly surprising that there were only four countries that opposed the Declaration—the old settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who were joined by the United States.12 In this respect, the Declaration recognized that Indigenous peoples increasingly appealed to international law and opinion to make their cases. By placing Indigenous rights in the context of human rights, the Declaration explicitly challenged the assumption of positivist legal theory that international law was only about relations between states. In addition, by raising the question of sovereignty, the Declaration revived a persistent theme in the history of empire. We have noted that from the beginning of modern empires the question of Indigenous rights lay at the center of formulations of international law. The basic moral dilemma framed during the Salamanca debates continued to rumble through subsequent ruminations about the bases of international law. It was only in the late nineteenth century that this matter was put to rest, at least in the discourses of imperial culture and settler politics. And for a century or so, the social and political systems that had grown out of British imperialism hardly troubled themselves about such fundamental questions. For the states that had emerged from the British Empire the sovereignty of settler colonial state structure was endorsed by both domestic and international law. Indigenous claims to sovereignty, however they were to be defined, presented fundamental challenges to this resolution. They raised the question of how international law should recognize Indigenous peoples’ rights and how those rights could be accommodated within the sovereignty of settler colonial states—precisely the questions that had disquieted the imperial system of the early nineteenth century. In this way the Indigenous peoples’ rights movements in the old settler colonies of the British Empire represented a return to the unfinished business of the early nineteenth century.13 These developments on the international scene fed into and fueled the local forces that were driving Indigenous rights movements in the old settler colonies. Obviously, there were differences between the various countries, although there were strong commonalities in the role of the law and the political content of selfdetermination. In each place, the case for reconfiguring Indigenous rights was argued through competing visions of historical interpretation. In each case, too, land rights were at the heart of the legal battles that were mounted. This was often related to renewed efforts to exploit the mineral resources on Indigenous lands that had previously been untouched. In both Canada and Australia, for example,

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such moves were the occasions for a new Indigenous militancy, which, in its turn, became the object of political attention and debate. In Australia the Yolngu people of the Northern Territory brought a case in 1971 that asserted their rights to consultation in the granting of mining leases on their lands. A  similar case two years later in Canada by the Dene people forced the recognition of their title to the land. This happened to coincide with the Calder case in British Columbia, which established that Indigenous land rights were a product of their inherent historical occupation of the land. This was an important finding because it separated those claims from their previous dependence on executive (i.e., Crown) order and legislative enactment. In both instances these movements led to wider political commissions of inquiry that put the issue of land rights at the center of national politics.14 In Canada, the focus was on the interpretation and validity of treaties dating back to the eighteenth century. In Australia, the recognition of land claim rights was more halting. Since there were no treaties to appeal to, it was more difficult for legal reasoning to find a way of fitting Indigenous land rights into settler sovereignty. However, beginning in the 1960s, political and legal developments combined to push the question of Aboriginal land rights onto the national agenda. The 1967 referendum admitted Australian Aboriginal people into full citizenship, and it was hardly surprising that a year later a judge in a land rights case admitted the evidence for Aboriginal legal and political community before the First Fleets arrived. Two years later, the question was faced again in another case that directly asserted that it was conquest, not occupation, that brought British rule to Australia. It was hard to see how terra nullius could survive these admissions. But terra nullius was always known at some level to be a social fiction. After the original Cooper v. Stuart decision in 1888 the integrity of terra nuliius was maintained by manipulating definitions of key terms such as “occupation” beyond a simple presence on the land to mean a system of social organization that paralleled those of Western society. This sophistry became untenable as academic research in anthropology and history systematically demonstrated the presence of Aboriginal social, cultural, and political organization in a full sense—something early humanitarians had already established. The Gove Land Rights case in 1971 admitted the issue of Aboriginal land rights for legal consideration, but judges were not prepared to make the logical leap to overturn Cooper v. Stuart. Indeed, in one case that has been described as the “most liberal reading of terra nullius,” there was a final effort to reformulate the doctrine in a way that quite explicitly tied it to a European definition. Thus, terra nullius remained, albeit in a logical, historical and anthropological limbo. With the benefit of hindsight, it was only a matter of time before this particular straw would shatter the century-old fiction of an empty land waiting to be filled up by whoever cared to occupy it. That moment finally arrived in 1991 when the landmark Mabo case finally admitted the doctrine of terra nullius to be a legal fiction. Once that fiction was gone, the whole question of British and settler sovereignty was up for grabs.15 In addition, there was another factor operating in the 1970s that undermined the traditional props of the settler colonial state of the old British Empire. This was

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the moment when the traditional ties with the mother country were reconfigured to match Britain’s decision to join the European Common Market in 1974. This was particularly significant for New Zealand, whose national narrative rested upon being the replication of Britain in the southern seas. Although, the issue was smoothly negotiated between the three parties, it did change the meaning of New Zealand nationality, which until then had relied upon the British connection. And this, in turn, demanded a recognition that New Zealand’s identity revolved around Pakeha-Maori relations rather than the Pakeha-British relationship. The Treaty of Waitangi was, of necessity, restored to its pre-eminent place as the founding deed for modern New Zealand sovereignty. Waitangi, however, continued to be a contentious document and how it should be interpreted came to lay at the heart of the political challenges. It was fitting that a tribunal was set up in 1975 to adjudicate contemporary Maori claims, which, following its expansion in 1985, ultimately came to establish new case law around those claims.16 This pattern of the past coming back to haunt the present was true in all the settler colonies. Settler society may have slumbered for a hundred years under the comfortable illusion that the issues of land and sovereignty had been safely put to bed by the triumph of settler politics and legal findings from the 1870s. This assumption was always weakly held within Indigenous societies, but the conditions varied under which Indigenous politics re-emerged to occupy a prominent place in the national discourses of the settler colonies. It was generally the case that in the 1960s Indigenous politics saw a conjunction between contemporary concern with civil and human rights and the traditional commitment to collective rights over land and natural resources. The latter had always been at the center of Indigenous politics, even when it had been most hidden from settler view. The political openings of the 1960s presented opportunities to place traditional claims and cultural precepts of Indigenous society within a context where questions of civil rights dominated political agendas internationally.17 New Zealand offers the best example of the way modern Indigenous rights movements are rooted in these kinds of historical continuities. For Maori, Waitangi had always been a document that defined the nature and limits of British sovereignty and the Maori place within it. The Treaty was the guarantee from the British government that Maori territorial and other rights would be protected against “refractory Europeans”—in the words of George Clarke. Successful governance in Clarke’s era was a matter of navigating between the imperial and settler presence and Maori sensitivities as to their rights. Once that began to crumble by the late 1850s, the delicate balance of power was disturbed, leading to the wars of the 1860s.18 But neither the confiscations of the 1860s nor the positivist legal principles of the new Land Courts, nor Prendergast’s decision in Wi Parata to deny Waitangi’s significance in defining sovereignty, deflected Maori purpose in continuing to root their appeals in the authority of the Treaty. The Maori continued to use legal processes to press their claims, and they subtly appropriated the Land Courts—which were designed to impose settler land law—as a site where they could settle their

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own inter-tribal conflicts. In fact, over the long term, it seems to have been the case that as the balance of power moved against Maori in New Zealand, the insistence on the Treaty of Waitangi as the authority for their land claims intensified. From the 1860s, it was being cited as the basis of their claims in their frequent appeals to the Supreme Court.19 Even during the low points of Maori political and social power from the late nineteenth century when a Maori underclass was being created, their complicated pattern of both engaging with and struggling against Pakeha encroachments continued to produce results, however limited. In the 1890s, for example, a determined effort was made through the Kotahitanga movement to reassert the centrality of Waitangi as the justification for their demand for power-sharing institutions. Although this effort failed to achieve that end, it established the practice of pushing both the local and imperial government (the latter mainly through petitioning) to recognize that Waitangi was a negotiated sovereignty document, not a treaty of submission. Throughout the inter-war years, at every opportunity Maori drew the founding document to the attention of both local and imperial politicians. The latter were often bewildered by such references, although local politicians, conscious of the need for Maori votes, were more amenable to genuflecting toward these appeals especially at election times. And at certain moments, important gains were made that were to serve as important precedents for the future. Thus, a relatively friendly Labour Government in the 1920s established the principle of paying compensation for the settlement of claims, which became the basis upon which the Waitangi Tribunal of the 1970s built its compensation policies. The claim that was the occasion for this policy change went back to the celebrated Kemp purchase of the mid-1840s.20 So when the politically relatively quiescent post–Second World War years came to an end in the late 1960s, there was a long line of historical precedent to build upon. As late as 1967, legislation was passed, which made it easier for Maori to lose land. But this was the last time that Pakeha governments could follow the logic of Prendergast. Inspired in part by international trends such as the black power movement in the United States and similar movements elsewhere, Maori political militancy revived. This time it went beyond the politics of assimilation to assert the recognition of autonomous rights. This was an opportune moment for New Zealand. The eroding British tie encouraged a wider discussion of the implications of a bicultural nation, and the central continuity of Maori demands persisted: that the Crown address the past history of breaches and violations of the Treaty. The matter of how to interpret Waitangi lay at the heart of the political challenges. As a reflection of these changing political tides, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975. Initially, it was confined to contemporary claims. But thanks in part to the work of Eddie Durie, the distinguished Maori jurist, who became chair of the Tribunal in 1980, its remit was expanded greatly in 1985 and it was given authority to return to the original intent of the 1840 Treaty and to include agreements made before 1840 as well as issues that had previously been excluded, such as for shore and water rights. Once the genie of Indigenous rights was out of the bottle,

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it could not be confined to land cases. The claims process inevitably broadened into the wider realms of culture. The Maori interpretation of Waitangi had always been that it committed the Crown to protecting customary traditional rights.21 In Australia, too, historical continuity is essential to understanding the pattern of the modern Indigenous rights movement. But, as one would expect, the trajectory of political empowerment there was very different. The Maori had always been willing to engage with colonial modernity. But the highly fragmented nature of Australian Aboriginal society and the devastating impact of colonialism upon their social and cultural formations meant that they would follow a different path. In their case, the chief agents for the development of Aboriginal political consciousness were precisely those reserves created at the tail end of the humanitarian period in the 1850s; they were the link between the period of initial contact and the emergence of modern political organizations in the twentieth century. It was within those spaces that the early practices of Indigenous politics were developed, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century. And it was in these spaces, too, that we may observe the legacy of the humanitarian discourse of race relations Aboriginal interlocutors adopted as the language of negotiation with imperial and settler power.22 Ironically, humanitarian discourses and initiatives worked most productively to serve Aboriginal culture during the initial period of settler dominance from the 1860s through the First World War. This was a period when the Protection policies became the most complete coercive instruments of social control. But these moves also created significant opportunities for Aboriginal culture to survive and for its politics to begin to take shape. Reserves, of course, have acquired a bad name because of the fate of the Tasmanian people on Flinders Island and also because of their later association with the policy of Bantustans in apartheid South Africa. But it is important to balance that presumption with an understanding that the context of the mid-nineteenth century was very different. At that historical moment, such a policy contained different values, meanings, and potential. If reserves implied a more constrained relationship of the Australian Aboriginal people to the land, and if they were places where the First Nations of Australia could perhaps be trained to be Englishmen, they were also the only way of shielding Indigenous peoples from the genocidal impulses of settler society. This was the thinking behind someone like Matthew Moorhouse’s changing attitude toward racial amalgamation. In any case, reserves were not merely defensive in nature. They were also places where the prospects of racial cooperation and progress could be modelled. Such places as the Kat River settlement in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, for example, were looked to by humanitarians elsewhere as hopeful experiments in community building.23 Although reserves could, and did, become “outback ghettos” and sites for repressive social engineering, they could also provide relatively safe spaces for Aboriginal development where they offered room for a historical dynamic of their own that went beyond the intentions of colonial “humanitarians.” They could afford the opportunity for Aboriginal self-government and autonomous development

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that should not be gainsaid. Even in the Port Phillip Protectorate, some small but permanent farming communities were able to establish themselves within the wider context of the violent carnage that marked this phase of settler colonialism. And across South Australia in the same period, from the 1860s through the 1890s, there were thirty-one such reserves, which collectively demonstrated the same kind of autonomous development. Equally, they were places that generated the political skills to negotiate with the increasingly complex settler society that surrounded them.24 In this respect, the missionary culture of early nineteenth-century humanitarianism turned out to be an asset for these reserves. Humanitarian discourse provided a vocabulary for Aboriginal self-empowerment and a seedbed for strategies to mediate with settler and imperial society. The Christian ideology at Raukkan, for example, provided a training ground for rhetorical competences and leadership skills that were used to engage with white society. Indeed, they were the basis for Aboriginal resistance to attempts to impose a coercive, dictatorial regime at Raukken in the later 1870s. Similarly, in New South Wales and South Australia there were moves by the Aboriginal peoples to secure land by lease, purchase, or reservation, some of which provide spectacular examples of the Aboriginal recruitment of agents of “humanitarianism” to secure access to land. Sympathetic missionaries and others were used to raise money to secure freehold farms. In one particular case, a forty-hectare plot was secured for a group of fifty Aboriginal people who for over forty years carried on a successful farming and stock raising operation for their own subsistence and also to engage in the local economy. Indeed, in the 1880s of the thirty-one reserves in New South Wales, twenty-nine had been created by Aboriginal initiative.25 The first stirrings of a “modern” political activity and organization may also be detected in such places. From the early 1860s, there was coordination and communication among the Aboriginal peoples on the South Australian reserves; the same was true in nearby Victoria, in the Goulbourn Valley. One of the things this demonstrated was a recognition that reserves offered an opening for securing some degree of control over land. Thus, what may regarded as the first “modern” protest movement among Australian First Peoples occurred at the Coranderrk reserve in Victoria in the 1870s against the attempt of the government to close the reserve. This had been a reserve that the Aboriginal people had petitioned for and secured in the 1850s. They regarded it as a gift from Queen Victoria. And they launched a sophisticated campaign that enlisted white humanitarians, dispatched deputations to Parliament, and sent letters to the newspapers in a successful effort to stymie the provincial government. A decade later, a similar campaign at Cummeragunja against a government move to deprive the local people of land provided the political education for William Cooper, who was to be a leading Aboriginal rights advocate in the inter-war years.26 There is, however, no room for a romantic view of Australian race relations in this period. These spaces existed within a wider context of continuing official and unofficial violence against Aboriginal groups. Such places were always fragile

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and were open to the withdrawal of missionary or government protection, or the hostility of local settler farmers who hungered after their land. But even where this was the case, as in Poonindie, a legacy of struggle was laid down, which stayed in the memory of those who were dispersed and, in some instances, provided a direct continuity with the emergence of Aboriginal rights movements after the First World War. And, as is always the case with subaltern classes, there remained the possibility of employing the “weapons of the weak,” turning coercive policies inside out and revealing the presence of political sophistication and strategy even in the most repressive circumstances. Such a process may be seen in early twentieth-century Western Australia, where an elaborate network of supervision regulated all aspects of Aboriginal life and action. Movement was restricted, living spaces were controlled, and cultural behavior, such as drinking, was monitored. But provision was made for exemption from these controls if the protector considered that the Aboriginal person in question met certain standards of “civilized” behavior. The applicant for exemption had to go through a rigorous process of proving that he (and it was usually males) was, in fact, worthy of being granted the right, for example, to be outside during curfew, to wander the streets, to go into any shop, or to buy alcohol. It might be thought that those who tried to secure such exemptions were those most willing to abnegate their Aboriginal identity in return for white approval. In fact, the reverse seems to have been the case. Securing an exemption, and thus earning a “respectable” status in the eyes of the authorities, was most commonly a way of using a paternalist instrument of control to assert a degree of freedom and autonomy. It was not uncommon for Aboriginal applicants to secure barristers to argue their cases and to persist in reapplying if they were rejected. In addition, the language of British loyalism was used and an appeal was made to their rights as British subjects. There was a direct correlation between periods of political activism and an increase—almost, one might say, a campaign—for exemptions. Many of the men who applied and received them were, in fact, political activists. In this way, then, a system securing an exemption from colonial control was also an assertion of freedom and resistance.27 By the early twentieth century this kind of coercive assimilation was part of a battery of racial theories, policy practices, and political power equations that allowed Aboriginal reserves to be regarded as fostering and protecting outmoded and backward cultures and as impeding the march of civilizational progress. Thus, as I  have noted, a second phase of dispossession focused on the reserves began in the early twentieth century culminating around the years of the First World War. But this time, in Australia, it had to contend with many decades of reservation experience that had fostered at least a degree of Aboriginal self-authority and had allowed some kind of uneasy, fragile co-existence with settler society. It is not surprising that the first national Aboriginal organizations emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to the massive loss of lands that had occurred and the policies of social coercion that had accompanied it. Thus, the legacy of the early and mid-­nineteenth century to the Aboriginal land rights movement of the

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twentieth century was that it served as a significant proving ground where systems of engagement with settler society could be modelled—systems that ensured a crucial, if weak, continuing association between Aboriginal people and the land that had originally been theirs. The idea was kept alive that land was central to their independent survival in settler society, a framework for Aboriginal politics that has lasted through the present day.28 The inter-war years, therefore, saw the emergence of modern political organization among Indigenous Australians. At first, this was manifested on a provincial level in bodies such as the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association formed in New South Wales in 1937 and the Australian Aborigines League formed by William Cooper in Victoria in 1934. But almost immediately this morphed into a national movement, whose first significant event was the establishment of a day of mourning on Australia Day in 1938. The core political demands of these organizations were for civil rights for Australian First Peoples and the reversal of racist legislation. By the 1970s, this agenda was re-worked to shift attention toward the need for a newly negotiated relationship between the state and the Aboriginal peoples. This phase may be said to have opened with the establishment of the Aboriginal tent embassy on the grounds of Parliament in 1972, which remains to this day as a reminder of the demand for a satisfactory settlement of sovereignty and power-sharing claims. Unsurprisingly, land rights issues came to the fore. Previously these had been important at a local level. But, in common with New Zealand and Canada, they moved to the center stage nationally, and as they did so, issues of history, law, and sovereignty all became matters for negotiation.29 Thus, it is fair to conclude that the Indigenous peoples rights movements that emerged from the last two decades of the twentieth century represented a long continuity for the First Nations of all the settler colonies. In each case, the continuities contained reminders of elements that stretched back to the initial years of encounter. In the case of Canada this meant that the treaty years of the eighteenth century were fundamental to its Indigenous rights politics; for Australia and New Zealand it meant reference to the unresolved issues of the early nineteenth century. Likewise, in each case, these movements used a vocabulary and focused on issues that would have been familiar to observers from their historical pasts. Within Indigenous communities in Canada, conversation about the history of rights and claims that went back to the late eighteenth century is known as “treaty talk.” And as Paul McHugh has remarked of New Zealand “were Hobson, Busby et. al. to attempt today a description of the civil and political rights of Maori, they would doubtless draw on, be it unconsciously or unwittingly, the contemporary vocabulary of human rights.” In Australia, the early demand for an end to racial legislation explicitly reflected the early nineteenth-century notions of a universal humanity. It is, therefore, worth considering for a moment how the humanitarian discourse of the early nineteenth century was part of the deep origins of the contemporary movement for Indigenous rights.30 I suggested in an earlier chapter that the humanitarian discourse of the early nineteenth century was a culture that possessed multi-valent potential and possibilities.

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Its ideas and vocabularies were available to serve as sources of empowerment for Indigenous politics and self-identity. Among its capacities were those that could be made the property of Indigenous peoples and form the basis for negotiating, bargaining, and even collaborating with the imperial hegemon. It is well known, for example, that the adoption as well as adaptation of Christianity by Indigenous peoples was a common feature of the imperial engagements of this period. Indeed, it would have been surprising if this was not the case. In the British Empire, there were no competing languages to be used within the imperial presence. As a result, it became not only a language of governance but also a means of communication between indigenes and the forces of empire, and a cultural resource that could be adopted for Indigenous purposes.31 Australian Aboriginal people were quick to adopt the language of humanitarianism that missionaries and protectors brought to their communities. Tim Rowse has offered some compelling case studies of how they used Christian and Western vocabularies for the creation of their own identities. In particular, Rowse points to how notions of universal humanity and the stadial conception of civilizational progress were claimed by Indigenous peoples as ways of asserting their place in the emerging society and as ways of detaching themselves from the racist discourse that was emerging as the dominant discourse by mid-century. William Cooper, one of the earliest leaders of the Aboriginal land rights movement from the 1880s and a founder of the Australian Aborigines League, insisted “that all people should be judged according to their proven capacities, not according to their descent.” And this allowed him to claim that the category of “white” was a social construct that Australian Aboriginal people were eligible to join. For Cooper, the “key civilizational term was ‘British’ ” to which anyone could aspire. When he made the argument that “we ask the right to be fully British,” he was demanding a place in society using the very vocabulary of imperial culture itself. “Civilized Aborigines such as himself were British—that is, they were members of a civilization” and, indeed, in that respect “the Aboriginal is more British often than the white man.”32 As Tracey Banivanua Mar has put it, at each level and in their own ways “Indigenous peoples were dynamic in their adoption of the only imperial languages and traditions that colonial subjects could or would contemplate and they were creative in the methods they trialled.” Out of the exchanges of this period came the archetypal strategies and methods that First Nation peoples used to make their voices heard within the imperial system. Petitioning and letter-writing directed toward the higher authorities of Parliament and the Crown, for example, signified an astute awareness of the importance of going beyond local hierarchies to secure the adjudication of their concerns. It would be a distortion to claim that such efforts amounted to anything approaching a true balance of power. But this is not the standard by which their historical significance may be judged. They were important, rather, as describing the mechanics of how Indigenous cultures coped with the realities of imperial power, and important, too, for laying the foundations of traditions for independent Indigenous politics when they were able to emerge.33

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Disruptions The Indigenous rights movements of the late twentieth century brought an end to the formations of the settler colonial state that had been established a century earlier. Those formations closed out questions that had animated the colonial world of the early nineteenth century. Thus, when Indigenous politics again came to be placed on the agenda of the settler state politics a century later, their impact was disruptive and destabilizing. The hegemony that had been created in the late nineteenth century was disturbed. Issues of sovereignty, land rights, and the law that had been regarded as settled and fixed were thrust forward for reconsideration. The assertion of Indigenous claims to land and the inclusion of Indigenous political rights that went beyond the civil rights agenda of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century announced a new intrusion into settler politics. For the rest of the century, and beyond, politics in Australia and New Zealand were dominated by the questions raised by the Indigenous rights movements. Canada, too, was caught in this historical movement, although its politics were not remade to the same degree as the others. The challenge to the settler states posed by the Indigenous rights movements fell into three broad categories. They forced a reconsideration of the accepted historical narratives of the nation, they challenged the basis on which sovereignty rested, and they confronted the assumptions and institutions of inclusion. I shall address each one of these in turn. The distinguished Australian historian Henry Reynolds titled the story of his personal discovery of Indigenous history Why Weren’t We Told?. In this book he recounted how from the late nineteenth century, the standard account of Australian history had disparaged the history of Aboriginal peoples and had disguised the violence that had accompanied the creation of the settler state. The standard history of Australia by Ernest Scott, for example, first published in 1917, had only one passage on frontier conflict, as if the story of the Indigenous peoples was not relevant to the history of the nation. It is not surprising, then, that in each of the settler colonies History, with a capital “h,” has been integral to the reckonings of the new politics. Nor is it surprising that the process has, in one degree or another, been contentious and fraught. It was not simply academic history that was at stake but the story that history told about national identity. Thus, the deep politicization of the discipline that marked the Australian experience from the 1990s.34 Mainstream settler society had to re-visit its history as Indigenous peoples’ claims for inclusion challenged stories and mythologies about nationhood. It was also the case that the history being appealed to was itself contested and uncertain. In both Australia and Canada, this has given rise to debates about the appropriate uses of history in contemporary claims. To what extent may History be used as both a site of determining the real situation of pre-colonial society and, thus, as a means to correcting the abuses of the past? In the case of Canada, for example, Indigenous claims frequently cited the authority of the famous 1763 Proclamation that had stated the intention of the Crown to guarantee Indian land rights. This document, along with other local treaties, had long formed the “treaty talk” that Indigenous

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communities remembered in their historical accounting. But this “proclamation” did not have the same status for settler society. It was after all a “proclamation” flowing from the prerogative of the Crown. It did not derive from Parliament and lacked, therefore, the force of statutory law. Historical investigation showed that although it was intended to provide a machinery that would ensure fair treatment of Indigenous land rights by making the Crown the arbiter and the sole source of settler title (in much the same way that pre-emption worked in New Zealand under Grey), this provision was not systematically applied or used. As the settler state consolidated itself through the 1830s and 1840s, land sales typically took place without reference to the provisions of the Proclamation. Within First Nations culture, however, it was regarded as a founding document of Aboriginal rights. And this was the basis of its return to prominence and “rediscovery” in the 1970s when it became the basis for challenging the legality of such sales of Indian lands. The Calder case of 1973 brought by the Nisga people of British Columbia established the principle that Aboriginal title had not been extinguished. Their arguments rested on both the Proclamation of 1763 and a local treaty of 1854.35 Indeed, this instance is a reminder that such documents can have multiple meanings. The treaties that secured British sovereignty were not merely contracts for the expropriation of land and authority. They also described rights and could be used to assert autonomy. Although there was a long history of appealing to such documents in Canada and elsewhere, it only gained purchase from the 1960s, when Indigenous peoples in land usage rights cases began to argue that eighteenth-­ century treaty rights could not be altered by subsequent legislation that attempted, for example, to regulate hunting or fishing. Such legislation, it was maintained, could only be legitimate if it included some revision of original treaty rights through consultation and negotiation with the relevant first peoples.36 It is New Zealand where the challenge of Indigenous rights movements to narratives of history has been most fully and successfully faced. Indeed, the mandate of the Waitangi tribunal made historical investigation an inevitable part of its adjudication of the claims process. As Claudia Orange has argued there was scarcely a legal or political action involved in the tribunal that did not in some way bump into history. And this was particularly true after the 1984 extension of the Tribunal’s responsibility: Just as the Law Commission has been required to undertake intense research into the history of Maori fishing rights [following a case in 1984 that opened up this whole issue] so have other groups and individuals been spurred to activity not merely in historical research but in reassessing the historical record. New Zealand must be unique in intruding professional History making into the public discourse. Indeed, in its 1987 Report, the Tribunal explicitly referred to a dispatch from Lord Normanby of 1839 from the Colonial Office that pointed directly to the need to protect Maori from the consequences of speculative land

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ventures. Thus, the necessity to fold a Maori narrative into the story of the nation. The result was, as Paul McHugh has pointed out, that “issues that had lain at the center of Maori politics and concerns from the 1840s” were now entered into the center of New Zealand politics and history. The result of this was not just a profound shift in the center of political discourse but also a shift in the historiography itself away from Anglo-centric concerns and focus, and toward a view of Waitangi and Maori-Pakeha relations as negotiated products of history that remained open to re-negotiation.37 A new view of national history, however, cannot remain safely packed away in academic circles. The shift in focus by Indigenous rights movements from civil rights—such as universal suffrage—to human rights as represented the issues of land rights, or interpretations of treaties, meant that the question of sovereignty became a central focus of legal and political battles. Like the history of colonial violence, the basis of sovereignty in the settler colonies rested upon the suppression (and the forgetting) of the sovereignty claims of the first peoples of those nations. And just as with national histories, the sovereignty implications of the Indigenous rights movements involved returning to the past. This was explicitly laid out in the United Nations’ Declaration of Indigenous Rights of 2007, which not only listed the claims of Indigenous peoples to land use and occupation and their rights to cultural autonomy but also affirmed a broad right to self-determination under international law. This did not necessarily translate into demands for secession. In the old settler colonies of the British Empire, secession was not on the agenda of the Indigenous rights movements. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how secession could be practical politics. But the issue of self-determination did raise the question of how sovereignty could be re-conceived to reflect the fact that Indigenous peoples had to one degree or another suffered serious losses of sovereign rights through the historical process of colonization. And, furthermore, in asserting these Indigenous rights, the Declaration gave an imprimatur to the challenge to the principles of sovereignty in international law. Indigenous movements had always looked back to the tradition of natural law that was alive in the early nineteenth century. But since the triumph of positivist theories of international law, the question of Indigenous rights had lain dormant. This now was open to challenge, with the result that the whole question of the basis of international law became much more contentious than it had been in the past.38 The foundational Mabo case in Australia provides an apt illustration of many of the themes we have touched on in this chapter. It involved a rethinking of the history of the nation, it illustrated the way local histories and circumstances were echoed at the international level, it was the culmination of a legal quest of Australian Aboriginal people to assert their land rights that went back at least to the 1960s, and it undermined the fiction that terra nullius was the basis of sovereign authority in Australia. But naturally, Mabo did not mark the end of the history of this particular issue. It served to open a new set of questions for debate and contention, to move politics to a new plane. In the common law Mabo did not, for example, establish the basis for Indigenous self-determination. It followed in the tradition of

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all such cases going back to the renowned Marshall decisions in the 1820s United States that those rights existed only within the context of the law of the colonial settler state. Still, the historical (as opposed to the social and political) significance of Mabo was precisely that it allowed a re-opening of the question that formed the context for early nineteenth-century policy making of how to structure relations between indigenes and settlers. Thus, if Mabo retained the principle of Crown sovereignty, it also suggested that the Crown could extinguish native title, which, in turn, raised the question of how the common law and Indigenous law could be reconciled and combined. And this opened the possibility of a return to the legal pluralism that was implicit in the legal structures of the early nineteenth century. Like the Waitangi tribunal in New Zealand, Mabo was part of a confluence of events that forced these countries to reinvent themselves. But they could only do so by re-examining their relationship with Indigenous peoples just as they had at the beginning of their histories as settler societies.39 Indeed, those beginnings were inevitably present in the legal cases that dealt with their legacies in the late twentieth century. The realization that history was relevant to these matters was not simply found in Australia and New Zealand. In a Canadian case that preceded Mabo and laid a foundation for the more famous Calder case of 1973, the judge not only re-asserted the authority of the Proclamation of 1763 as a “charter of Indian Rights” but also restored the special authority of the Crown to protect Indigenous peoples just as “humanitarians” like Saxe Bannister had appealed to in the early nineteenth century. This was a claim by the Crown that went back to Stuart times. But it was an authority, the judge claimed, that effectively challenged the assumption of the settler state—an assumption common in Canada since the 1830s—that it had “exclusive jurisdictional authority over all the lands in its territory and did not need to consult with Indigenous people about matters of importance to them.” It is noteworthy that this claim then entered into the agenda of the Indigenous rights movements. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action of 2015 included the demand for a “Royal Proclamation of Reconciliation to be issued by the Crown. The proclamation would build on the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Niagara of 1764, and reaffirm the nation-to-nation relationship between Aboriginal peoples and Crown.”40 This particular case did not result in a revolution in the legal status of Indigenous rights in Canada. But it did add to the steady accretion of evidence that increasingly opened the portals of the law to interpretations of history that privileged Indigenous claims and memories. Likewise, the subsequent history of the legal ramifications of Mabo did not overturn a century or more of legal precedent. But they did bring to the fore the unease that this issue has caused within Australian politics. This is not the place to give full consideration to that issue. But it should be noted that Mabo was followed by legislation in the Native Titles Act of 1993, which gave some recognition to native title, although it set a very high bar for native title to supersede Crown title. Nevertheless, from the historical point of view, the consequence of Mabo was to move onto a different terrain the debate over how

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Indigenous rights should coexist with settler society. It put the question of sovereignty firmly at the center of the political agenda. The core demand of Aboriginal politics became for a recognition of joint sovereignty and for the institutions of governance to be adjusted to recognize an Aboriginal voice over parliamentary matters that affect their communities. Specifically, the demand as expressed by the Uluru Statement from the Heart was for a commission “to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.” Since this would involve diluting parliamentary sovereignty, the issue was contentious and faced strong resistance.41 As this brief sketch suggests, the implications of Indigenous rights movements throughout the old settler colonies remained profoundly radical. But its radicalism is rooted in the themes of history as those nations struggle to remake their societies into truly post-colonial societies. No clear answers or guidelines exist as to how these themes should be played out, however. What is the meaning of the Maori demand that New Zealand/Aotearoa become a bicultural nation? What is the content of substantive change as opposed to merely symbolic change? And how may meaningful structures of inclusion be created to accommodate the presence and the agendas of the Indigenous peoples? How, for example, may Indigenous law be meaningfully partnered with the common law? These kinds of questions illustrate how the challenge of the Indigenous rights movements stretches the limits of the institutions of liberal society.42 In this respect, sovereignty remains at the heart of the matter. The central challenge is the notion of sovereignty as deriving from a singular, supreme source. The logic of the Indigenous rights movements and the way their legal battles in particular have pointed to the recognition and inclusion of native title suggest that notions of sovereignty need to be expanded to a more diverse distribution of shared authority between different levels of government. Here again Mabo provides a suggestive lesson. The radical implication of Mabo was precisely its recognition that Indigenous groups had their own autonomous and continuous legal traditions. It is these that need to be incorporated in a redefined sovereignty. And that would require a rethinking of the political theory upon which Western and imperial notions of sovereignty depend. Still, as will be obvious, this reactivates an old theme in the long history of liberalism and empire. They are merely the latest example of how empire challenges and destabilizes the foundational assumptions of liberal society and its institutions.43 Thus, the legacies of history have returned to confront the social formations of the old settler colonies, particularly in the southern seas. And this recurrence extends, also, to the politics of the Indigenous rights movements. The main political tendency of the Indigenous rights movements in the old settler colonies of the British Empire has been to seek means of reconciliation. Reconciliation is the contemporary parallel to the search for a conciliatory structure to race relations that I have argued was at the heart of the “humane policy” of the early nineteenth century. And just as that policy was the object of contestation and debate, so the same is true of the place of reconciliation in twentieth- and twenty-first-century

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Indigenous politics. Reconciliation means many different things. But at its heart, perhaps, is the public recognition of past wrongs and ills. This recognition may take many forms. The most renowned example, of course, is the Truth and Reconciliation process that South Africa underwent as part of its passage to democracy. Although this exact procedure has not been replicated elsewhere, the strategy of public exposures and discussions of the injuries done to Indigenous or minority populations had become well established by the end of the twentieth century. There were at least thirty Truth and Reconciliation processes around the world in the twenty years before 2006.44 Various forms of this process may be found in the old settler colonies. In both Canada and Australia, the earlier policy of forced separation of Aboriginal children from their homes in an effort to assimilate them through education has been a major focus of such initiatives. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was established to address this specific issue, although it now seeks to encourage wider measures of reconciliation. Its 2015 Calls to Action identified over ninety specific demands of government and non-governmental institutions such as churches. In Australia, the Report of the Human Rights and Equality Commission of 1997 was met with considerable controversy. The conservative government of John Howard, which was in power at the time, shied away from the idea of an apology. This refusal was reversed by Kevin Rudd in 2007, who made a very important public acknowledgment of the wrongs done to the children stolen from their homes and removed from their cultures. But even before Rudd’s apology, the Report had made this particular issue into one of national concern and added an impetus to Indigenous politics. Several state legislatures passed resolutions of regret, and various public initiatives were launched designed to demonstrate reconciliation—such as the National Sorry Day movement, which was launched in 1998.45 It is in keeping with this general acceptance of reconciliation that there has been neither a revolutionary rupture with the settler colonial past nor a dramatic shift in the balance of power to Indigenous minorities. Instead, what has happened through the affective phrasing of reconciliation is that the authority of the settler state has been cast away from the former imperial metropole and localized in terms of more Indigenous claims of political belonging.46 My concern here is not with the complicated and interesting history of how reconciliation should work as a practical legal or political matter. I am more concerned to situate reconciliation as a strategy in the context of history. In this respect, it may be seen as a return to the aspirations for racial cooperation that informed early nineteenth-century policies but without the racial violence that accompanied them. There is a resonance between the efforts at conciliation in the early nineteenth century and the reconciliation of the later twentieth century. Reconciliation implies a relationship between settlers and indigenes that is arbitrated in large part by the law but which is based upon a recognition of historical connections

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and precedents. What makes this structuring of relationships different from those around (for instance) class markers is that history determines the present articulation of the relationship. Class relations in politics aim to transcend their prior history. Settler-Indigenous politics structured through reconciliation processes are distinctive precisely because history is the currency of the relationship and it is history that is at stake.47 This is an important point, for it is obvious that since the early nineteenth century the strategy of revolution has also been available for insurgent movements. But this has been largely evaded by mainstream Indigenous rights movements. Indeed, to the contrary, it is to the Enlightenment principles that such movements look to create an agenda that looked to the future. In that respect, these movements remain attached to the broad tradition of Western liberalism. Naturally, there is a certain tension within Indigenous politics, and this attachment to liberalism is by no means unqualified and means different things in different places. In South Africa, reconciliation was part of a potentially very radical democratizing process. And in Latin America, Indigenous movements speak of reconciliation through a Marxist rhetoric, even though their aims are not necessarily revolutionary. In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, reconciliation has been described as a useful term “for marking shifts in the terms and expressions of national affect, particularly in regard to the injustices suffered by Indigenous people in those countries’ colonial pasts and the need for acknowledgement of and reparation for those injustices in the present.”48 But if revolution has not heretofore been the language of the Indigenous rights movements, reconciliation nevertheless destabilizes existing structures—and may itself be destabilized. As Miranda Johnson has observed, reconciliation “is more a political frame than a project that identifies a specific goal.” In this respect, too, I am struck with the way the politics of reconciliation matches the period of the early nineteenth century. It is an open-ended project, marked by an instability as to how it may give birth to new structures of society. There are perhaps two aspects of reconciliation that express its inherent instability. The first is that, although a main emphasis has been on finding ways to assert Indigenous their claims on society, it allows both Indigenous and non-Indigenous to share in those claims. This is the central appeal and rationale of the public statements of reconciliation, such as Kevin Rudd’s apology for the stolen generation of children. Such statements serve to move the politics of the process beyond the technicalities of policy and establish, as it were, a new kind of national rhetoric. The promise of reconciliation strategies is that they can transcend sectional differences and express a common consensus that has gains for all. At its most optimistic, such a move serves to remove the colonial backdrop from the definition of nationhood. It promises to shift the national historical narrative away from imperial presumptions toward the relation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. And in that sense, it can be truly post-colonial.49 But, in the second place, it is precisely this appeal to a new kind of consensus that is also the source of instability within a system of reconciliation. The problem is that such initiatives do not address the continuing issues of power, class, and racial

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inequalities that are structured into these settler societies. Merely to say “sorry” for past inequities can also be another way of forgetting or whitewashing the ugly histories that gave rise to the need for the apology in the first place. Significant change does not necessarily follow from the rhetorical recognition of past wrongs. It may be argued that moves like the apology—or even Truth and Reconciliation Commissions—serve to appropriate indigeneity away from the Indigenous peoples themselves and incorporate it into settler systems of domination. Merely saying sorry is not good enough if they are not accompanied by political change that addresses the enormous iniquities in power relations that have been carried over from the period of unrestrained settler colonial power.50 As seen by some, then, reconciliation is merely another way of re-inscribing the power relations of colonialism, or as a variety of twentieth-century genocide whereby Indigenous culture is absorbed into white identity. Underlying such arguments, of course, is the way past history has been read as a succession of coercive and invasive policies cloaked in a rhetoric of the “civilizing mission.” In this context, reconciliation may be framed as yet another one of the tricks of a hypocritical liberalism. Thus, signal events like the moment of “apology” may be critiqued for what they did not do rather than for what they did. In the case of the Rudd apology it has been remarked that the apology was for the stolen children, not for the fact that Aboriginal land was also stolen. So the apology “amounts to a solipsistic act, where the settler sovereign talks to itself about itself, reconciling itself with its past.” By this line of argument, the apology is a kind of ultimatum. Reconciliation can only work if the apology is accepted. If the outstretched hand is pushed aside, the consequences will be the responsibility of the Indigenous peoples who will bear the blame for the persistent power structures of settler colonialism. (The similarities with the way in which “humanitarian” empathy was drained in the early nineteenth century are unmistakable.) Thus, whatever response is made—either the acceptance of the apology or its rejection—the result may be the same: finalizing “the process of settler colonial appropriation” and underwriting “the ultimate demise of [Indigenous] . . . autonomous collective sovereign capacity.”51 Still, in spite of such objections, the gestures of reconciliation are not meaningless because they do change the discourse and contain the potential for possible new political agendas. The appeal of reconciliation is that it provides a way of expanding structures of inclusion.52 But it is a process fraught with contradiction. Thus, the bicultural focus of the Waitangi process provides no obvious answer to the inclusion of non-Maori or Pakeha ethnic groups into the definition of the post-colonial nation. In addition, there is no necessary uniform definition of what qualifies as “justice” under the Waitangi system. It is difficult to apply “justice” to problems that go back at least to 1840 when very different standards applied, and it is also difficult to fuse the different cultural notions of justice within Maori and Pakeha traditions. And, if, as is generally the case in the work of the Tribunal, the Treaty of Waitangi itself is taken as the standard for defining justice, this serves to limit the extent of what can be achieved within the Waitangi process. This has led some to argue that it is necessary to introduce the idea of reparations to the process

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as a way of allowing a mutual accommodation of claims that would form a new basis of trust and good faith, which would allow the process to continue further.53 The constraints and limits of the strategy of reconciliation, then, are well illustrated in the Waitangi process. On the one hand, the process unsettles existing constitutional arrangements and the measures that result from its findings are intended to form the basis for more just relations between Maori and Pakeha in the future. On the other hand, the condition of the process is what Meredith Gibbs calls a “negotiated justice” because the Crown is both the final arbiter and the “historical wrongdoer” for failing to live up to the protections it promised in 1840. Thus, through the Waitangi process, compensatory rights tend to take second place to reconciliatory restoration of Maori mana. Still, as Gibbs concludes, this approach also “offers the potential for a new ‘constructive engagement’ of multiple discourses that may move the Maori-Crown relationship  .  .  . toward a new post-colonial social contract.”54 It is not surprising, then, that reconciliation is a contentious policy; its boundaries are continually being tested and pushed in more radical directions than originally intended. Thus, the major challenge to reconciliation as a strategy comes, perhaps, from the growing demands (seen in one form in the debates over Waitangi) that traditional Indigenous cultural practices and values be integrated into the reconfigured politics of the old settler colonies. This movement is most evident in Canada and the Americas, and its purpose is to assert the autonomy for Indigenous culture as the basis of its negotiation with settler colonialism. It aims to shift the grounds of reciprocity with the settler state, so that Indigenous practices meet colonial norms on an equal footing in areas like the law, language, and land usage rights. Known as the Resurgence Movement, its purpose is not to return to the pre-colonial social order but to include Indigenous frameworks within the structures of a reconciled society. The main themes of this movement are to seek degrees of autonomy for Indigenous groups and a recognition of the authenticity of traditional values. In terms of recognizing the validity of traditional law—which is, for example, formally recognized in the South African constitution—this political tendency promises a return to a more robust regime of legal pluralism that marked the early colonial system.55

Conclusion The tensions within Indigenous politics around the terms of engagement with settler colonial states are a function of the fact that a post-colonial future is being constructed rather than just charted. There are no obvious models for the shape of such a future, and there are constant reminders that the history of dispossession cannot easily be normalized. Thus in New Zealand, Waitangi Tribunal hearings have been subject to demonstrations that re-enact the original violence of dispossession. In 2007, during hearings over the Tuhoe lands on North Island, tribunal members were theatrically threatened by mounted Maori warriors whose horses were painted blood red; the destruction of property was staged in a re-enactment of

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the scorched earth policy of the government that had taken their lands. This was an explicit rejection of the Waitangi process, and the implicit threat it posed to the new political conventions of New Zealand is illustrated by the government’s response, which was to prosecute the offenders under new anti-terrorism legislation. This case illustrates the presence of opposition among Indigenous peoples to the normalization of the process of dispossession that reconciliation represents. And indeed, it did “open a new space for a renegotiation of contemporary relationships with the past and of Tuhoe with the state.” But, for our purposes, it is also of interest because it is an apt demonstration of the way history continues to frame directly the issues that inflame the present. The demonstration was a reminder that land confiscations in the 1860s are still capable of informing political action in the contemporary world and a reminder, too, that the contemporary politics of the old settler colonies are the legacies of the unresolved politics of the early nineteenth century.56

Notes 1 Only the greatest settler colony of them all—the United States—was largely exempt from this international movement. The contrast between the United States and the other settler colonies of British origin is too complicated to address here. Suffice it to say that the United States is both an archetypal and also profoundly destructive settler colonial state in which the discourse of indigeneity has been displaced by the discourses of slavery and immigration. See the helpful discussion by Mahmood Mamdani, “Settler Colonialism,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2015): 596–614. 2 Historians, too, have largely adopted the perspective that the sociopolitical formation that the Empire assumed in this period was their inevitable destiny. 3 This image of the colony was also reflected in its histories, see for example, Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1967). This account of Proclamation Day is taken from Robert Foster, ‘ “His Majesty’s Most Gracious and Benevolent Intentions’: South Australia’s Foundation, the Idea of ‘Difference,’ and Aboriginal Rights,” Journal of Australian Cultural History 15 (2013): 105–20. See also Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, “Proclamation Day and the Rise and Fall of South Australian Nationalism,” in Turning Points: Chapters in South Australian History, ed. Robert Foster and Paul Sendzuik (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2012). 4 Foster, “ ‘His Majesty’s Most Gracious and Benevolent Intentions,’ 110–14. Brown was the original emigration agent for the South Australian Company. (He was not the same John Brown mentioned earlier in the context of colonial violence.) The granting of a colonization charter was delayed when Glenelg became colonial secretary precisely because he wanted to build in protections for the Indigenous peoples. This caused considerable annoyance among the promoters who claimed to have settlers all lined up and ready to go. See, for example, SASL, PRG 1002/1, R. Thomas to J. Stephen, January 16, 1836, John Brown Papers, Vol. I, 1834–1836. 5 Foster, ‘ “His Majesty’s Most Gracious and Benevolent Intentions,” ’ 117–20. Other national ceremonies had similar kinds of historical narratives; see, for example, Maria Nugent, “ ‘An Echo of that Other Cry,’ Re-Enacting Captain Cook’s First Landing as a Conciliation Event,” in Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, ed. Darian Smith and Edmonds, 193–226. 6 Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi was published in 1987. Before that there had been only a smattering of legal and historical studies of the treaty which tended to assume that it established an unchallenged crown sovereignty, and did not deal with the

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differences in Maori and Pakeha definitions of sovereignty. For Waitangi, see Te Ara, “The Encyclopedia of New Zealand,” accessed February 20, 2019, https://teara.govt. nz/en/treaty-of-waitangi. 7 Paulette Regan, Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 5–6, passim. 8 The Proclamation of 1763 and the related Treaty of Niagara of 1764 guaranteed Indian title and made all treaties subject to the will of the sovereign and Parliament. The Privy Council’s ruling in 1888, therefore, was not illogical. But its bias reflected the changing definitions of empire. See Harmar Foster, “Canada: Indian Administration From the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to Constitutionally Entrenched Aboriginal Rights,” in Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, ed. Paul Havemann (Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1999), 354–58; John Borrows, “The Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History and Self-­Government,” in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equity and Respect for Difference, ed. Michael Asch (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 155–72. The importance of the Proclamation in the history of Indigenous politics in Canada was illustrated by opposition to Trudeau government’s desire to repatriate the constitution from Britain because it implied the loss of Crown protection. See Joel Herbert, “ ‘Sacred Trust’: Rethinking Late British Decolonization in Indigenous Canada,” Journal of British Studies 58, no. 3 (July 2019): 565–97. 9 Ford and Rowse, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, 3. 10 Peter H. Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 143–56; Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114–20. 11 On Indigenous mobilities, see Nadia Rhook and Tracey Banivanua Mar, “Counter Networks of Empire: Reading Unexpected People in Unexpected Places,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (Summer 2018), doi:10.1533/cch.2018.0009; Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title, 182. For a general history of the international dimensions of the Indigenous peoples rights’ movements, see Ken S. Coates, A Global History of Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle and Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 12 Elvira Pulitano, ed., Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8–9. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. New Zealand and Australia reversed themselves in 2009, the United States in 2010. Although the United Kingdom voted in the majority, it made it clear that it was a non-binding resolution that would not change the restriction on Indigenous peoples from the old settler colonies appealing to British courts. 13 Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 113–14. 14 Miranda Johnson, The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 35, 56, 81. 15 For the story of the legal tangle that led up to Mabo, see Gerry Simpson, “Mabo, International Law, Terra Nullius and the Stories of Settlement: An Unresolved Jurisprudence,” Melbourne University Law Review 19 (1993): 195–210. Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title, especially, 159–70, 195, 247. The Mabo decision was influenced by historical research into the “other side of the [colonial] frontier” that had been largely led by Henry Reynolds. On the relationship between changing academic findings and indigenous rights movements, see Arthur Ray, “Aboriginal Title and Treaty Research: A Comparative Look at Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States,” New Zealand Journal of History 37, no. I (2003): 5–21. For how academic research increasingly undermined the bases of doctrines such as terra nullius, see Christa Scholtz, Negotiating Claims: The Emergence of Indigenous Land Claim Negotiating Policies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 4–5, 68.

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16 Hamish McDougall, “Buttering Up: Britain, New Zealand and Negotiations for European Community’s Enlargement 1970–71,” International History Review (2020), accessed July 23, 2020, doi:10.1080/07075332.2020.1759673. 17 Nettelbeck and Smandych, Fragile Settlements, 208–11. Claims driven by the notion of collective rights have been the main thrust of court actions initiated by Australian Aboriginal groups as they have in the different context of Canadian treaty history. 18 George Clarke, Letters and Journals, March 30, 1846. Clarke described Waitangi as “the Magna Carter of these interesting people.” 19 P.G. McHugh, “Law, History and the Treaty of Waitangi,” New Zealand Journal of History 38 (1997): 38–57; Stuart Banner, “Conquest by Contract: Wealth Transfer and Land Market Structure in Colonial New Zealand,” Law and Society 34, no. 1 (2000): 66; Keenan, Wars without End, 253–59; Ward, An Unsettled History: Treaty Claims in New Zealand Today, 19–20. 20 Orange, Treaty of Waitangi, 226–34; O’Malley, Beyond the Imperial Frontier, 106; Ward, An Unsettled History, 124; Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2005), 318–19. 21 Scholtz, Negotiating Claims, 4–5, 68; Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, 244–51; Ward, An Unsettled History, 22; Andrew Sharp, Justice and the Maori: The Philosophy and Practice of Maori Claims in New Zealand Since 1970, 2nd ed. (Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7–10; Richard S. Hill and Brigitte Bonisch-Brednich, “Fitting Aotearoa into New Zealand: Politico-Cultural Change in a Modern Bicultural Nation,” in Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies Are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past, ed. Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 243–45. Meredith Gibbs, “Justice as Reconciliation and Restoring Mana in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process,” Political Science  58, no. 2 (December  2006):  15–27. Durie worked to establish new protocols that ensured traditional Maori law and culture were recognize. After 1984 at least four of the seven members of the Tribunal had to be Maori. See Johnson, The Land is Our History, 111–20. 22 For the question of the way Indigenous politics used colonial discourses to assert their own political identity in the nineteenth century, see Zoe Laidlaw, “Indigenous Interlocutors Networks of Imperial Protest and Humanitarianism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014), 114–39. 23 Lester and Dussert, Colonization and Humanitarian Governance, 98, 114–15; ML, A 1439 Microfilm CY907, Gurney Papers, Memorandum on Treatment of Aborigines, Sir Richard Bourke to Mr. George Langhorne, 9 December 1836, 36–43, for the idea of replicating the mixed, missionary-led villages of the Eastern Cape in the Port Philip area. The fact that the reserves could be subverted by Aboriginal groups for their own purposes is more important than the original intentions of colonial humanitarianism. 24 Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 121–29, 156–63; Heather Goodall, “Land in Our Own Country. The Aboriginal Land Rights Movement in South-Eastern Australia, 1860–1914,” Aboriginal History 14, no. 1 (1990): 1–24. 25 Goodall, “Land in Our Own Country,” 3–9. Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 127–29, 156–65, 176 26 Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus. The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights. A  Documentary History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1999), 31–34 and by the same authors, Thinking Black. William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2004), 3; Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy. Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1996), xxv, 89–124; Julie Evans and Giordono Nanni, “Re-imagining Settler Sovereignty: The Call to Law at the Coranderrk Aborigine Reserve, Victoria 1881,” in Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw, Indigenous Communities and Settler Land Holding. Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 25–36. Astute uses of the language and modes of paternalist hierarchy—such as the petition to the Crown—was a characteristic

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weapon of weakly situated Indigenous peoples. It was one strategy the Tasmanians used to get off Flinders Island. 27 Katherine Ellinghaus, “Exemption, Protection and Ethnographic Refusal as a Method of Resistance in Western Australia 1905–1943,” paper delivered to Workshop on Protective Governance, School of History, Australian National University, Canberra, April 15–17 2017. This system and its uses to assert indigenous independence was not confined to Australia. It was also found in the United States; see Ellinghaus, “The Moment of Release. The Ideology of Protection and the Twentieth-Century Assimilation Policies of Exemption and Competency in New South Wales and Oklahoma,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (Winter 2018), 128–49, accessed 30 April 2018. 28 Goodhall, “Land in Our Own Country,” 22–23. 29 Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 9–10, 13–14, 19–20; Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 12, 19–23; Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground. Australian Aborigines Under the British Crown (St. Leonards, 1995); Russell McGregor, “Progress and Protest: Aboriginal Activism in the 1930s,” Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 101 (1993): 555–68. The contemporary statement of Aboriginal political claims is to be found in the Uluru Statement; see First Nations National Constitutional Convention, “Uluru Statement: A Quick Guide,” in Uluru Statement: A Quick Guide, June 19, 2017, http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/library/prspub/5345708/upload_ binary/5345708.pdf. 30 Paul McHugh, “Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights,” 181; Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 13. 31 There is a huge literature on this. A place to start is Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 32 Cooper was one of the founders of the Day of Mourning commemoration in 1938. Rowse, “The political identity of indigenous thought” in Ford and Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, especially 105–107. The adoption of Christianity by Maori is well known. In South Africa, for example, the case of Tiyo Soga the first ordained Xhosa missionary in the mid-nineteenth century, a man who married a white Scottish woman. In the crucial decade of the 1860s Soga deployed the vocabulary of universal ­humanity— the vocabulary of the humanitarian discourse he had learnt in 1850s Glasgow—to protest against the developing discourse and system of racial exclusion in his church. And in doing this he moved towards a position that was recognizable as an early form of African nationalism. Vivian Bickford Smith, “African Nationalist or British Loyalist? The Complicated Case of Tiyo Soga,” History Workshop Journal 71, no. 1 (2011): 74–97. 33 Banivanua-Mar, “Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights,” 17; Lester and Dussert, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, 145–72 for the example of the constant negotiations between Edward Parker and the Dja Dja Wurrung people. 34 Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told: A Personal Search for the Truth about Our History (Camberwell, VIC: Penguin, 1999), 16, passim. This book is largely an account of the way settler history effectively silenced not only the history of the Aboriginal people but also the violence with which the settler colonial regime was established. Stuart Ward and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2nd. ed., 2004). See also, Bain Attwood, “Unsettling Pasts: reconciliation and history in settler Australia,” Postcolonial Studies, 8, no. 3 (2005): 243–59, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790500231012. 35 The issue of Crown authority was also important because it was used to prevent tribes from challenging crown grants. Significantly, this only began to change in Canada in the 1970s when the courts began to recognize that tribes could take enforceable action against the Crown. See McHugh, “The Politics of Historiography and the Taxonomies of the Past,” 6–15, 21. Peter H Russell, Recognizing Aboriginal Title, 273–74; Ray, “Aboriginal Title and Treaty Rights Research,” 11–12. In Australia, the use of the past in Aboriginal legal claims has given rise to a debate about the proper grounds for this. See, for example, Bain Attwood, “Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in Land in New South Wales,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 1 (2014): 171–92; Henry Reynolds Frontier History After Mabo, 10.

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36 For a fascinating example of this, see Miranda Johnson, “The Case of the Million Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract,” American Historical Review 124, no. I (2019): 56–85. 37 Orange, Treaty of Waitangi, 254; In New Zealand the general sense seems to be that the Waitangi process works well in this regard; see Ward, An Unsettled History, 1–4, 32. But as Belgrave points out in Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories, 1–39 the claims process is really about competing versions of history. P.G. McHugh, “Law, History and the Treaty of Waitangi,” New Zealand Journal of History 38 (1997): 38–57, cite from p.  42 and McHugh, “History of Crown Sovereignty,” in Sharp and McHugh, History, Power and Loss, 192. For the impact of these debates on white identity in New Zealand, see Jessica Terruhn, “Being Pakeha: white settler narratives of politics, identity and belonging in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” PhD Dissertation, University of Auckland, 2015. 38 Pulitano, ed., Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration, 8–9, 19. How Indigenous sovereignty was handled in international law was a question very much on the minds of Indigenous movements; see, for example, Renwick, ed., Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights, 8–9. The debate about the bases of international law is too large to be touched upon here. For a discussion, see Umut Ozsu, “An Anti-Imperialist Universalism? Jus Cogens and the Politics of International Law,” in Koskenniemi et al., International Law and Empire, 296–313. 39 Duncan Ivison, Post-Colonial Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 146–47, 149–51. 40 Johnson, “The Case of the Million Dollar Duck,” 78–79; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Calls to Action (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), 21. 41 For the limits of the Mabo decision, see Attwood, “Unsettling Pasts,” and for an argument that the legislation that followed Mabo—the Native Titles Act—has facilitated further dispossession, see Catherine Howlett and Rebecca Lawrence, “Accumulating Minerals and Dispossessing Indigenous Australians: Native Title Recognition as Settler Colonialism,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (2019), doi: 10.1111/anti.1 2156 accessed June 10, 2020. At the time of writing, the latest statement in Australia expressing Indigenous thinking on sovereignty issues is the “Uluru Statement From the Heart,” www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/ accessed 24 February 2019. 42 There is an extensive literature around this subject. But for a sampling that is of particular relevance to the themes of this book, see Richard S. Hill, and Brigitte BonischBrednich. “Fitting Aotearoa Into New Zealand: Politico-Cultural Change in a Modern Bicultural Nation,” in Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies Are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past, ed. Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer (New York: Routledge, 2009), 239–64; John T. Johnson, “Indigeneity’s Challenges to the Settler State: Decentering the ‘Imperial Binary,’ ” in Banivanua-Mar and Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space. Perspectives of Race, Place and Identity, 295–95. 43 For this large subject, see the essays in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 44 Annie E. Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism. History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 24. 45 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Calls to Action. On the politics of apology see Stephen Gray, The Protectors. A  Journey Through Whitefella Past (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2011), 258; Johnson, “Reconciliation, Indigeneity and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States,” 190. 46 Johnson, “Reconciliation, Indigeneity and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States,” 188 McHugh, “Law History and the Treaty of Waitangi,” 50. 47 Johnson, “Reconciliation, Indigeneity, and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler Societies,” 197. It is for this reason that uncovering the history of settler-Indigenous relationships

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is integral to the political process in the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. This takes different forms in the different countries. One very interesting aspect of this process in Australia is the notion of truth telling—that is the important role that Indigenous stories about their histories can play in the reconciliation process. These are stories—about massacres, for example—that have been part of oral tradition and not heard or known in the white world. The importance of truth telling is recognized in the recent “Uluru Statement From the Heart,” which came out of a constitutional convention of Aboriginal peoples in June 2017. 48 Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, 163. This heritage is also noted for Australia in DarianSmith and Edmonds, Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers, 5. Johnson, “Reconciliation, indigeneity and postcolonial nationhood in settler states,” 187. 49 Johnson, “Reconciliation, indigeneity . . .,” 193, 198. 50 A. Dirk Moses, “Official Apologies, Reconciliation, and Settler Colonialism: Australian Indigenous Alterity and Political Agency,” Citizenship Studies 15, no. 2 (2011): 141–59; Damien Short, “When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough: Official Remembrance and Reconciliation in Australia,” Memory Studies 5, no. 3 (2012): 203–304. 51 This kind of critique is most closely associated with the “settler colonial” school of colonial studies. For representative examples, see Damien Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power (Aldershot, 2008); Whitlock, “Active Remembrance: Testimony, Memoir and the Work of Reconciliation,” in Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism, 24–44. Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, “The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism,” Arena Journal 37–38 (2012): 41–62. The cites are from Lorenzo Veracini, “Isopolitics, Deep Colonizing, Settler Colonialism,” 182–83, 187. 52 For a defense of the symbolic importance of the public apology, see Hannah Chong, “Reconciliation in Settler Colonial States: A Study of the Political Apology,” Yale Review of International Studies (2018), http://yris.yira.org/essays/2597. For the apology in British politics, see Philip Harling, “Sorry Situations: The British Empire and the Politics of Official Regret, 1995 to the Present,” unpublished paper, 2019. 53 For a good discussion of this dynamic, see Meredith Gibbs, “Justice as Reconciliation and Restoring Mana in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process,” Political Science 58, no. 2 (December 2006): 15–27. There is a large literature on this issue which it is impossible and unnecessary to summarize here. But see, for example, Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions. Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories; Andrew Sharp, Justice and the Maori. The Philosophy and Practice of Maori Claims in New Zealand since the 1970s. 54 Gibbs, “Justice as Reconciliation . . .,” 26–27. 55 See, for example, Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel, “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism,” Government and Opposition 40, no. 4 (Autumn, 2005), 597–614; Michael Elliott, “Indigenous Resistance: The Drive for Renewed Engagement and Reciprocity in the Turn Away From the State,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 51, no. 1 (March/ mars, 2018), pp, 61–81; Damien Short, “Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonialism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, no. 3 (2005): 267–82. 56 Penelope Edmonds, “Tame Iti at the Confiscation Line. Contesting the Consensus Politics of the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand,” in Darian Smith and Edmonds, Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers, 172–192.

10 LEGACIES IN IMPERIAL CULTURE

Introduction Britain, as a nation, has been defined by its imperial history. The idea of Britain itself was an imperial one. The creation of “Britain” was born primarily out of an imperial context; its political entity emerged out of English imperialism as it extended its hold over the adjacent polities in the islands and then stretched its dominion over the North Atlantic and beyond. This was a process that went back at least to the twelfth century as the English monarchy enforced its rule over Wales and made its first attempts to subjugate Ireland. It was James VI of Scotland and then as James I of England who christened the composite monarchy he ruled over “Britain.” But the idea had been nascent for some time. Henry VIII referred to his kingdom as an “empire” and, in the reign of Elizabeth I, writers like Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas established the notion that creating an overseas empire was the destiny of the English kingdom. As the composition of the nation changed so did the nomenclature to describe the resulting polity. The idea of the United Kingdom itself is a relative late comer, following upon the merging of the Irish Parliament with the parliament that sat in London in 1801. It is not surprising that there has always been an easy slippage between the various terms to describe the country that composed the islands. Nor, given the way the English component has historically been dominant, is it surprising that “England” was often substituted for the rest.1 Britain was not unique in experiencing a conjunction between internal unification and external expansion. While it may not be a pre-condition for the creation of nation states, it is certainly a common historical phenomenon. One thinks of Spain, Portugal, and even France in the early modern period, and Russia in the nineteenth century. But the British connection between national identity and empire was given unusual power by the extent of its imperial reach and by its

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longevity. An imperial impulse can be detected from the moment England achieved political unity after the Norman Conquest, but Britain’s world-wide imperial reach dates from the early eighteenth century, and by the early twentieth, it ruled a quarter of the world and its populations. It is hardly surprising, then, that as the sinews of imperial power began to decay and rot in the middle of the twentieth century, attention would turn to a consideration of the legacies of this imperial history on the state of Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This reckoning has been driven primarily by a concern with the consequences of de-colonization. And it has been a pre-occupation throughout all the spheres of society from the political to the literary. Discussion about the after-effects of Britain’s long imperial history has largely focused on the political and social consequences of the end of empire and the extent to which the British have come to terms with their diminished power, or continue to wallow in the glow of a post-imperial nostalgia. As Andrew Thompson has put it these are meditations about how the imperial presence continues to be felt “under the skin” of British society. For their part, historians have been concerned to chart the economic, political, and social dimensions of this heritage of empire. And this concern has sparked sharp debates as to how exactly we may understand the influence of the British Empire on the internal history of the nation and to what extent imperial consciousness had penetrated into the everyday life of the society.2 These are important questions. However, in this concluding chapter I want to assume a slightly different angle of vision on the legacy of empire. In the course of this book, we have frequently been reminded of the ways in which the challenge of the encounter with Indigenous people in empire tested the pretensions of a liberal society, confronted the image of virtue that Britain held of itself, and how those challenges of empire were worked through in the real time of history. Yet these were not challenges that belonged solely on the frontiers of empire. They were reflected more broadly within imperial culture, particularly during the era of high imperialism from the later nineteenth century when the association between the British Empire and Britishness was tightest. So, here I will shift my focus to the wider topic of the various strategies that enabled a liberal society to reconcile the consequences of empire with the values that it purported to uphold—consequences that were demonstrated most sharply by its encounter with Indigenous peoples. More specifically, what did the early nineteenth-century “humanitarian moment” contribute to allowing liberal society to live with and reconcile the challenges and issues posed by empire? How was empire negotiated and managed in imperial culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What were some of the contrivances that operated in society to make empire an ordinary part of the landscape of British culture? These are obviously large questions, which would take another book to explore fully, and this concluding chapter will not neatly wrap up a prior argument and declare it resolved. Rather, it offers a series of suggestions as to how the presence of empire was able to operate within the context of a liberal society. Four areas seem to me to be important. First, the way humanitarian definitions of the imperial project were retained through the narratives that were woven

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into the discourse about empire. I shall trace how the anxieties that empire stirred in humanitarianism were resolved by the end of the century so that there was a more comfortable fusion between humanitarianism and empire than had previously been the case. This was particularly true of the anti-slavery version of the humanitarian discourse, which experienced a revival in the later years of the century. Second, I shall draw attention to the way narratives about empire were shaped by the strategies of silencing, forgetting, and distancing. Since I  have discussed these issues at length in a previous chapter, here I want to merely gesture toward their reverberations more widely in imperial culture. Third, and very briefly, I will point to the role of networks, and particularly missionary support networks, in the projection of the humanitarian narrative of empire into the wider culture from the mid-­nineteenth century onward. And fourthly, I consider how the complexities of empire were reduced in imperial culture to simplistic, moralistic formulations, such as the installation of heroes and villains as a way of reconciling the contradictions between the realities of empire and the image of liberal virtue. How, on the one hand, the faults of empire were resolved by personalizing them through, on the one hand, demonizing individuals such as E.J. Eyre and, on the other hand, trumpeting the moral virtues of empire as embodied in the sentimentalized caricatures of personages such as David Livingstone.

Humanitarian narratives The abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth century had seemed to give proof to the notion that it was possible to translate virtue into a defining element of public culture and political policy. This was the context within which imperial policy makers moved and operated during the period of this study. Indeed, this belief infused domestic British culture as a whole. The possibility of a virtuous politics and virtuous nation was a central characteristic of civic culture of Victorian Britain itself. It was a key component of how Victorians saw themselves, the manifestation of a self-confidence that rested on, and was reinforced by, commercial and imperial success. It formed the fabric of the public and civic movements that defined Victorian Britain and was expressed in the institutions that were designed to bring righteousness into domestic society, such as the Temperance movement; it animated campaigns such as that against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Naturally, it infused the world of politics. It informed—even if it did not completely describe— the politics of iconic figures such as William Gladstone. And it was expressed in the precedents for later human rights campaigns, such as the Bulgarian Agitation of the later 1870s, which argued for international intervention in order to correct abuses committed by nation states.3 But the humanitarian narrative of the nation had to work hard to reconcile this sense of virtue with the realities of empire. Abolitionism had accomplished its agenda by the 1830s, but its bequests on the ground were decidedly ambiguous. As we have seen, its first legacy of making the world safe for Indigenous peoples soon exhausted itself. The expectation that the cause of Indigenous peoples would

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provide a renewed impetus to the humanitarian movement quickly proved hollow. What was worse was that this particular declension coincided with the failure of the abolition of slavery to create the liberal society that had been predicted, most notably in the West Indies. This combined failure rendered it increasingly difficult for humanitarians to retain their faith that liberal political economies and liberal democratic class relations could emerge in empire. But the striking paradox of nineteenth-century imperial culture is how this massive failure—the failure of the humanitarian project—was not allowed to undermine the assurance that the imperial enterprise remained virtuous. The question hereafter was how this contradiction could be kept safe. The answer to that, of course, was multi-faceted. As I have noted, new knowledge systems and new discourses both in the metropole and the empire were obviously one, central, part of this. The apparatus of scientific and cultural reasoning that developed from the 1850s, and the way it fed the shifting discourse of missionary humanitarianism away from the idea of universal humanity to a racialized hierarchy, was perhaps the most visible and dramatic evidence that new kinds of “realities” were being drawn from the experience of empire. Such knowledge systems allowed liberal thought and culture to be reconciled with racial hierarchy in ways that had been more difficult for the earlier generation. They were a reason why narratives like Froude’s Oceana or Dilke’s Greater Britain could be written as stories of racial exclusion, as if the Indigenous peoples in the settler empire were hardly there. But the idea of a benign imperialism was also sustained by a myriad of more mundane and intellectually less elevated narratives and strategies. The mechanics of reconciliation between the realities of empire and the benevolent self-image of liberal culture were forged during the experiences of empire that I have written about in this book. They were also among the legacies that the early nineteenth century infused into the history of Britain’s empire. There was, for example, the practice of combining a humanitarian narrative with the realities of imperial violence. This was a practice whose tortured path we have traced in the narrative that was developed about the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. We have seen how the inability of Sir George Arthur to find a policy that would reflect his image of how benign relations should work between the Indigenous peoples and the imperial presence continued to trouble him long after the actual issue had been resolved. It was his troubled conscience in this regard that led him to propose policy measures such as the necessity for treaties and protectors. Both of these ideas drew upon older policy practices, but, as I have noted, they experienced a mild renewal in Australia and New Zealand. Arthur’s ruminations and recommendations were attempts to rescue the credibility of his assumption that empire and indigeneity were not incompatible. It was a key belief of the humanitarian mind that empire and Indigenous peoples were reconcilable, and this was his way of trying to create a structure that would allow that reconciliation. But none of this provided a narrative explanation for the failure. And as we have seen, that explanation was provided by a narrative developed by his Aborigines Committee: that it was the inability of the Tasmanian indigenes to accept Arthur’s humanitarian outreach that ultimately caused its failure. And this became

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a standard narrative in humanitarian discourse. It was a narrative of exculpation that allowed for pity and for a full recognition of the sorrow that attached to the fate of the Indigenous peoples. And it was a narrative that both admitted the violence and at the same time evaded responsibility for it. Indeed, it turned the demise of the First Peoples of Tasmanian into a scientific inevitability, as something that was beyond the control of men and therefore left intact the humanitarian spirit and essence of people like Arthur. This was the essential argument of James Bonwick, for example, who wrote about the Indigenous Tasmanians as a tragic story where the responsibility of the colonizers was admitted. But this admission was infused with the content of pity in a way that contextualized the process as a sentimentalized story of lament, pity, and horror. In this way Bonwick transported the older humanitarian effort to arouse empathy for the plight of the beleaguered Indigenous peoples into the new racialized world where there was nothing left to do for these people but to pity them. Thus he ends his book The Lost Tasmanians with the sentimentalized and plaintive eulogy: The woolly haired Tasmanian no longer sings blithely on the Gum tree tiers or twines the snowy Clematis blossom for a bridal garland. Our awakened interest in his condition comes too late. The bell but tolls his knell and the Aeolian music of the She-oak is now his requiem. We cover our faces while the deep and solemn voice of our common Father echoes through the soul. “Where is thy brother?”4 As Tom Lawson has pointed out in his study of the Tasmanian indigenes, The Last Man, the fate of a few thousand Indigenous people on this small, faraway island was a story that has haunted writers about the British Empire, even when they were citing them as an example of the unrelenting costs of human progress. Thus, they figure in H.G. Wells’s writings as the pitiable but inevitable casualties in the struggle between inferior and superior races. By Wells’s time, of course, this narrative had been well established when Wells penned his enormously popular histories; humanitarian discourse had been firmly fused to the meaning of empire in Britain. The anxieties that Arthur exhibited about the failure of humanitarian policy to secure the desired results had been settled and resolved, and humanitarianism had been welded onto imperial enterprise. And this was true at both local and imperial levels. Thus, as Nicholas Brodie has shown through his reconstruction of the reminiscences of a participant in the notorious Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land, accounts that were written after such events did not so much reflect the original reality as parrot recycled and repeated narratives that had been forged in constructed memories.5 It is worth recalling the significant shift that occurred in the relationship of humanitarian discourse to empire over the course of the century. As I have been at pains to demonstrate, in the early part of the century that relationship had been uneasy. On the one hand, humanitarians wanted to believe that it was possible to make a moral and benign empire. On the other hand, they were continually

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reminded both personally and generally of the threats posed by the realities of empire to virtue and morality. They saw empire as a site for the struggle between the virtuous elements of British civilization and the venality and vice that was to be found within it. By mid- century those anxieties had been resolved, and henceforth empire became less troubling to a humanitarian worldview. There were now ways of containing the ugly facts of empire within the broad discourse of humanitarianism. The crisis of confidence that had been experienced in the colonial encounter in places like Australia had been transcended and indeed was followed after mid-century by a revival of humanitarian energies. And one striking, if small scale, vignette prefigured this new configuration. During the course of the debates in the House of Commons over the fate of Edward John Eyre, the treasurer of the Aborigines Protection Society refused to vote for his censure. Although this act seems to have been motivated by a desire to honor a different Eyre, the Eyre who had stood for the protection of the Australian Aboriginal people, it was nevertheless a revealing emblem. For, by the end of the century significant parts of the humanitarian movement had resolved their doubts about empire and were strongly wedded to the expansion of British rule.6 If the earlier version of humanitarian culture had been hollowed out by a combination of its own contradictions and external political, social, and intellectual forces beyond its control, the revived humanitarianism of the later nineteenth century was fueled by a reconfigured commitment to a new kind of anti-slavery movement. It was this that allowed humanitarianism to recover from the shock to its system that had followed the disappointments and failures that had become apparent by mid-century. The cause of combatting slavery elsewhere in the world, for example, allowed a smooth fusion between imperial mission and humanitarian discourse. The revitalization of anti-slavery as a moral cause rested upon some of the same sources as the earlier phase of humanitarianism. As Richard Huzzey has observed, anti-slavery came to embody the “higher and purer” spirit of empire and to infuse it with moral purpose. The Congo Reform Association, for example, drew upon an evangelical discourse of cultural relativism that would have been familiar to such crusaders of fifty years before. So, this phase of humanitarianism sought an ethical empire, too. But its program and approach were more secular, and more muscular and less about using religion to reach the common humanity beneath differentcolored skins. And this phase of humanitarianism was much less troubled by its pact with empire than its predecessors. It was a humanitarianism that was firmly committed to the racial hierarchy—and the Indian “mutiny” undoubtedly accelerated this trend. It was far more pessimistic about racial progress than the previous version had been—at least in its initial stages. It sought change through the reforming power of free labor, free markets, and commercialism. The spirit of anti-slavery was the spirit of social improvement that empire was supposed to bring.7 In this iteration, too, humanitarianism was less disquieted by coercion than it had been in the earlier period. Indeed, the humanitarian discourse of the end of century is an illustration of how the same concepts and even words may be redefined by different political and intellectual contexts. In the early nineteenth

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century, ending slavery and providing protection were expected to end the coercion of slavery and the violence that came from the absence of protection. But this turned out to be wrong. By the end of the century, the abolition of slavery was a call for coercion. It was not enough to attack the slave trade; forcible intervention was called for in Africa and elsewhere to put an end to it. The experience of abolition in the British Empire and the failure of protection had taught that it was essential that freed slaves took the proper road to progress. Freedom was not the default setting of the human spirit; it had to be constructed. Thus, when he set off to rule the Sudan for the Khedive of Egypt in 1869, Samuel Baker, channeling John Stuart Mill, averred that he would use “ ‘despotic power’ to develop ‘people who in their ignorance must be regarded in the light of children.’ ” He promised a system of coerced labor to raise the “value of the human being upon his own soil to a rate that will render him too valuable for exportation.” As Huzzey argues, this was an “example of how imperialists would adapt anti-slavery ideas in the following twenty five years.”8 Thus, although there were different tendencies and emphases within the humanitarian movement of the later nineteenth century, the main trend was clear. Both the Anti-Slavery Society and the Aborigines Protection Society experienced the same trajectory of change. They shifted from being, at the least, suspicious of empire to supporting the use of British power to project a more humane imperialism. And they did so as a result of the failed legacies of the early nineteenthcentury humanitarian moment. Thus, their main energies were directed against the perpetuation of slavery elsewhere and for the annexation of territories to British control. It is true that the troubling anxieties of the past could still raise the murmur of doubts among these organizations. In the case of New Guinea, for example, the argument for British annexation was precisely to keep that territory out of the hands of the government of Queensland, whose settlers were notorious for their ill treatment of the Indigenous peoples. More common, however, was the case of the annexation of The Gambia, which humanitarians supported using the argument of comparative vindication that compassionate British imperialism was far preferable to the alternative of French rule. The language of humanitarianism, therefore, was kept alive over the century by changing its narrative about the relationship between empire and progress.9

Silence, forgetting, and distancing But there were also other, more complicated, devices that were employed to reconcile humanitarian ideals with empire, and were particularly necessary to explain the facts of violence and dispossession. I  have previously discussed how silence and denial were common responses to the presence of violence and were powerful instruments for preserving the integrity of the humanitarianism as a descriptor of the British Empire. They were also a legacy of the lessons of this early period. We may illustrate how these qualities worked by looking at the case of a book published in 1890 that detailed the endemic settler violence that continued to

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characterize late nineteenth century Queensland. The book was written by Alfred Vogan, a New Zealand journalist and sometime explorer. He spent several years in the 1880s in Queensland on various surveying and exploring expeditions, and it was on these journeys that he encountered the violence of the pastoral frontier. He was particularly struck by the systematic violence committed by the Native Police. But he also witnessed at close hand the arbitrary violence of the squatter-settlers. In one case, he recounted the flogging of an Aboriginal woman with fencing wire by her squatter master who was also using her sexually.10 On the basis of such observations Vogan wrote a novel, The Black Police. A Story of Modern Australia, which was published in London in 1890. The plot of the novel is formulaic and within the mold of popular Victorian literature. The hero, Claude Angland, is a New Zealander drawn to Queensland to secure his inheritance by a mysterious letter received from his dying uncle. Once there, Angland finds himself enmeshed in an elaborate plot by a nefarious squatter (who was also a leading politician) and his niece, to cheat him out of his legacy. As he struggles to untangle the web of deceit that these two plotters weave (aided by the local Inspector of Native Police), Claude Angland encounters the pattern of systematic violence that supported the social structures of colonial Queensland. Vogan clearly did not intend the novel to be a major contribution to literature. His purpose in presenting his evidence in novelistic form was the expectation that it was more likely to receive close attention. His hope was that the exposé of terrible violence would arouse a humanitarian outcry.11 This was hardly an unreasonable expectation. The book was published at a moment when humanitarianism was about to gain a second wind in the world of public opinion. The first reports about the atrocities that were being committed in the pursuit of rubber profits by King Leopold’s Force Publique in the Congo were beginning to stir serious concern among the missionary public in Britain. In spite of its recent political defeats, and the rise of the liberal imperialist wing of the Liberal Party, the moralism of Gladstonian Liberalism remained a powerful vocabulary in political discourse capable of mobilizing liberal activists. A few years later, Gladstone himself was to lead his last great moral crusade protesting the Armenian massacres. What is more, as already mentioned, Queensland was notorious in London for its ill-treatment of Indigenous peoples, having come to imperial attention with the importation of Pacific islanders under slavery-like conditions to work the sugar plantations. A couple of years before Vogan’s novel appeared, the British cabinet had debated granting Queensland authority over New Guinea. Arthur Hamilton Gordon—the most prominent “humanitarian” governor left in the Colonial Service—had led a campaign against such a policy and had thoroughly briefed Gladstone about the systematic racism that by this time was structured into Queensland’s administration.12 We should note that Vogan’s book was based on the same kind of observational traveling that had become the mode of popular presentations of Empire, of which Froude’s Oceana and Trollope’s South Africa were prime examples. None of these works featured the kind of narrative detail that Vogan chose to forefront, however.

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And it was significant that the reviews of the book were at best divided. As one might expect, it was well received in New Zealand, which was already distinguishing itself in a positive way from its neighbor in the Tasman Sea. In Queensland itself, however, the reviews were essentially cynically indifferent. Vogan himself claimed that he was ostracized as a result of the book, and after its publication, he was unable to get work as a journalist. There was even a report that a price had been put on his head. Given the tradition within the settler community of group enforced silence about atrocities, this response to the book was quite believable. But if Vogan expected to rouse the indignation of the humanitarian public in Britain, he was to be disappointed. The fragmentary responses from Britain that remain were apt illustrations of silencing and denying. In spite of the renewed interest in the cause of colonial violence in late Victorian Britain, the response to Vogan was modulated. Thus, although he had previously written articles on Australia for the Illustrated London News, they rejected at least one piece exposing atrocities against the Australian Aboriginal people that he had submitted as being not suitable for the readers of the journal. Indeed, it was this rejection that determined him to publish his book. But even more revealing was the response of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Although the posture of the humanitarian interest group toward the British Empire had moved away from the sensibility toward the violence that had marked the founding members of the society, when the book came to the attention of the Anti-Slavery Reporter, the leading anti-slavery journal, Vogan must have been surprised that it elicited a skeptical and questioning response.13 It was a response that suggests how Vogan’s book threatened to disturb the complacent world of British humanitarianism. Reading the review, one can almost feel the writer squirming to navigate around the dangers that Vogan’s data posed to the idea that British imperialism was a civilized as well as a civilizing force. So, on the one hand, the tone of the review continually threw doubt on the nature of his accusations. If it did not accuse him outright of exaggeration, it clearly signaled its doubt that the picture he painted was thoroughly accurate. It set the tone at the beginning, noting that the book “was full of the most startling assertions.” And it then went on to undermine the book’s credibility by critiquing its genre as a novel, “with a most improbably plot,” which meant “we can say nothing as to the bona fides of the accusations made.” The review sought to challenge the book’s claims by characterizing them as stigmatizing “most if not all of the squatters in Northern Queensland, and some of their wives . . . murderers.” It then expanded on one of Vogan’s descriptions of a flogging—that was based on an incident that he had ­witnessed—by asserting that “he also accuses them of buying the natives as slaves and flogging them . . . often resulting in death.” That was on the one hand. On the other hand, the review admitted that nasty rumors had long circulated about the behavior of the Native Police, which, if true, needed to be thoroughly investigated by the government. But it then proceeded to undermine that admission by various qualifications and denials. Thus, it was asserted that such events took place in remote districts—implying that they were

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in the uncivilized parts of the Colony. By contrast, the reviewer claimed from his own observations and knowledge that, in the vicinity of towns, he had witnessed Indigenous people who were well treated and cared for by squatters. Likewise, it dismissed the reports of the shooting of women and children and the sexual slavery of young girls as beyond the bounds of believability. At the same time, it quoted at length reports from local papers that Vogan himself submitted that testified to the violence. But it was careful to point out in each case that none could be verified, sometimes because there was no date on the newspaper report submitted or, in other cases, because the Anti Slavery Reporter, “having no means to investigate the truth of the allegations,” ultimately threw doubt on Vogan’s reliability by “the form adopted by the author of sensational novel writing.”14 There was an air of surprise in the next issue of the Anti-Slavery Reporter when it was noted that a copy of that review had “accidentally come into the hands” of Vogan. The Reporter admitted that it had felt “doubtful as to how far it was possible to give credence to incidents of outrage and murder reported under the guise of fiction.” And so it felt obliged to publish Vogan’s response in full. In his letter, he denied the suspicion that “I have overdrawn my pictures of the dreadful scenes I  have endeavoured to depict” and that, to the contrary, he had withheld more graphic descriptions for fear of alienating his audience. His letter was largely concerned to establish his credibility by describing his credentials—the several years spent exploring northern Australia—and his prior work as a journalist. And he ended by making quite a remarkable offer: that he would undertake a photographic journey through the region to establish the truth of his assertions. It is, perhaps, telling that there is no evidence that this offer was taken up. There was not much interest in any systematic exposure of the dark underside of the British Empire. The practices of silencing and denial about the kind of colonial violence that Vogan described had been deeply implanted in imperial culture.15 Early nineteenth-century humanitarians recognized that some form of distancing was necessary for violence in empire to occur. They tended to write about it as a function of the displacement that empire involved for settlers moving from societies with well-regulated moral strictures to societies that were open and closer to a true state of nature. But, by the late nineteenth century, the idea of an indelible stain had come to be applied more to the flip side of violence. It was attached now to those who did not take up the “white man’s burden” (as Kipling put it) of imperial rule and, infused by the spirit of humanitarian duty, actively fill the “empty spaces” of the world with the benefits of the empire. In this context, violence was not something that would disturb the self-confidence of the imperial mind. It is for this reason that the regime of silence at the end of the century tended to be the inverse of what it had been in the early part of the century. In the earlier period, the imperial factor had admitted the reality of colonial violence that was denied in the local culture. By the end of the century, the roles had been reversed, and violence was more readily rationalized and admitted in the local colony than in the metropole.16 But sometimes silence was not enough. It was necessary to actually invent and create narratives that affirmed and reinforced the humanitarianism of settlers within

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imperial culture. A particularly dramatic example of this is illustrated by a story that Nicholas Brodie has uncovered about two Quaker families—the Story’s and the Cotton’s—in Tasmania. It was long established in their family histories that they had protected a group of Tasmanian Aboriginal people from the Black War and had harbored them for many years in secret while their fellows were dying of consumption and other diseases on Flinders Island. This was a story that was passed down over the century, and it was embellished by reports of an archive of Aboriginal lore and customs that the family had supposedly compiled. Although this archive was reputedly destroyed in a fire, a descendent reconstructed it from memory and it was published in 2013, not only as an anthropological study but as an authentication of Quaker humanitarianism in an age of colonial violence. Yet the reality was the exact reverse of what was narrated in these stories. The contact these Quakers had with the local people was anything but gentle and benign. Both families were engaged in violent conflict with the local Indigenous people, and in this, they were only following the normal settler pattern of the time. In 1829, for example, a hut belonging to the Story family was attacked, and one of the Cotton family raised a party to go in pursuit of the attackers. Later Story records recount how the initial years of settlement were full of hardships because the remote district was “infested with a hostile tribe of aborigines” and travel was difficult without a military escort. When the Black Line operation was launched, these families were again involved. They contributed to the logistical provisioning of the line and enrolled in its military operations. This engagement continued after the official Black Line had been abandoned when a smaller line was deployed in their area of Freycinet in late 1831. Indeed, they were clearly part of the governing structure. They were extensive landowners, possessed convict labor, and one was a Justice of the Peace. In addition, in later years, they were sources for the construction of the more general history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Story was a correspondent for the Royal Society of Tasmania and an informant for James Bonwick as he wrote his accounts of the last days of the Indigenous Tasmanians. So, he was both a participant in dispossession and violence and a source of later stories and narratives about the fate of the Palawa people of Tasmania. Other members of the families contributed artifacts to museums, including bones and skulls that were found on their property—more likely evidence of history of their involvement in violence. Indeed, the data collected by their late nineteenth-century descendants was fed directly into the emerging formative anthropological studies of the Aboriginal people that were being summarized at this time by people like H. Ling Roth.17 How do we make sense of such a story? Surely, it represents a micro-example of how narratives are constructed about the nature of the British Empire. It was stories like this that formed the foundations for wider narratives in the general culture about the empire and its treatment of Indigenous peoples. And like those stories, it was a redemption story that preserved the stability of the Quaker tradition of humanity and maintained the authenticity of the discourse of humanitarianism. Both were thus protected from close involvement in dispossession and violence. It is an example of what I have called before a colonial reversal, another example of

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how imperial culture fosters turning reality inside out in order to protect the integrity of its ideology that the empire is a source of civilized values as opposed to a site of dispossession and oppression. In this specific case, these Quakers needed a family story that would counter the reality of their involvement in violent dispossession and turn it into a story that allowed their humanitarianism to drive the narrative and shape the reality. It was this, after all, that qualified them as Quakers.

Networks For the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, imperial culture was projected into domestic society by the extensive and influential missionary support societies that had emerged by the 1840s to form a dense network across the nation. These networks grew very quickly. In the case of the Congregationalists, the first auxiliary committee was formed in 1807, and by 1820 there was a nation-wide network. Such groupings were part of a series of intersected and overlapping networks of religious, philanthropic, and social reforming concern, which served as the key manifestations of middle-class political and social identity. The prominence of women in the staffing of these organizations made them important sites for the development of gender identity. Missionary support networks were closely linked to particular mission societies; they received reports from missionaries in the field, they raised money, and, until the later part of the century, they sponsored much of the publicity for empire. The network of missionary support societies provided the public, for example, the lecture tours of people like Jan Tzatoe in the later 1830s and the missionary explorer David Livingstone in the 1850s and 1860s, which were organized precisely to project the missionary and humanitarian image of empire.18 Catherine Hall and Alison Twells have closely tracked the emergence of these networks in Birmingham and Sheffield. The key emphasis in the missionary narrative about empire was its faith in the civilizing mission and the national virtue that was to be gained by missionary work. The brief, but potent, dominance of a humanitarian discourse coincided with the emergence of self-conscious middleclass identity, which spoke through the proliferating voluntarist civic organizations at whose center missionary networks were located. Missionary culture within Britain was important because it propagated the humanitarian narrative of the early part of the century that emphasized the liberating work of imperial activity through Christian religion. Indeed, until the 1860s or so, within the culture of these missionary support societies, it was the liberation of souls that was prioritized rather than the fact of empire. After 1860, however, domestic missionary culture began to share in the wider move of late nineteenth-century humanitarianism toward an endorsement of imperial expansion.19 The relationship between missionary culture in the domestic setting and the realities of missionary work on the frontiers of empire was a source of continual tension. For example, the pessimism about the idea of progress through the notion of universal humanity that I have suggested permeated missionary culture in the empire posed a threat to the stability of missionary culture at home. It responded

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to that threat by downplaying the challenges that missionaries found in the conversion of souls and by modifying the narrative about progress to stretch it out much further into the future than originally had been believed. Until the 1850s this viewpoint in domestic culture was bolstered by the ethnography of people like James Prichard, who emphasized the monogenesis view of humanity. But from the 1850s, this view faced a rapidly growing challenge from a revived racialist discourse, which had always hovered over discussions of empire. Robert Knox published The Races of Men in 1850, which made an important argument against the cultural interpretation of racial difference and the idea of fixed, essential distinctions. Knox had first learned his racial theory in military service in the Cape Colony in the 1820s, where he collected skulls and subjected them to phrenological analysis. And his publication—following hard on the heels of Thomas Carlyle’s anti-missionary diatribe in The Negro Question—presaged the new data that would be received from “science” later in the decade and would undermine the idea of universal humanity by predicting racial extinction. This tension was echoed within domestic missionary culture just as it was in the debates over racial equality in the colonies. In the colonies, South Africa provided the clearest example of that tension where the missionary world was split from the mid-1830s on the question of racial inclusion in congregations and in ministering. There was much less tension over this matter in both Australia and New Zealand. But it is clear that from c. 1850 to c. 1890 domestic missionary discourse was increasingly falling into line with the growing doctrine of racial exclusion as missionary culture as a whole moved toward its active support for the late nineteenth-century empire.20 Yet, the discourse of racial progress that derived from the early nineteenth century continued to possess considerable power. Within the culture of the domestic missionary network, the belief in the capacities of Indigenous people to hear and receive the gospel of civilizing conversion retained an important voice. This was possible in part because even those, like Darwin, who laid the conceptual basis for scientific racism were themselves opposed to drawing the conclusion that racial difference innately confined certain people to a state of natural inferiority. Thomas Huxley was a good example of someone who tried to balance a belief in Darwinism without becoming a racialist social Darwinist. His attempt to maintain this balance ultimately failed. But the example of Huxley serves to remind us that the concepts of an earlier humanitarianism continued to remain credible and continued to shape the discourse and language about empire at home. Thus, the image of missionaries in the national culture had also shifted. They were no longer regarded as Exeter Hall zealots. In the new racial order of the later part of the century, they attained a new respectability for self-sacrifice and service in the interests of Christianity and empire. From being somewhat eccentric purveyors of evangelical enthusiasm, they became icons of Victorian virtue and values.21 By the 1870s, however, the missionary network was no longer the only voice through which the missions of empire was broadcast into the wider domestic culture. It is well understood that, from the 1870s, themes of empire were employed throughout the political and civic culture to define British national identity. They

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were to be found in music hall songs, in popular art, in juvenile fiction, in popular magazines, in youth organizations, in advertising, in radio, and in cinema, and they were woven into the political discourse in complicated ways. We can imagine this as constituting a series of inter-related social formations that thickened as the century progressed and as new means of communication and information exchange developed. Its essence may be captured by the way the lecture tour was replaced by the cinema newsreel and radio news programs as principle means by which political information was conveyed. These outlets for representing the British Empire in the civic culture lasted into the middle of the twentieth century. It is interesting to note that until fairly late in this process, the state was largely absent. It was not until after the First World War that state-sponsored systems of projecting the empire become a concerted policy through things like Empire day and the Empire Marketing Board.22 Thus, the networks that conveyed information and meaning about empire were fundamentally transformed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. They allowed the empire to be propagated in ways that had not been possible before. For example, empire could be easily incorporated into the organizational structure of the women’s movement as it could be propagated through the songs of the music hall. But the propagation of imperial themes and norms is not what I  am concerned with here. I am interested in the ways that the moral dilemmas of empire were handled within the changed structural context. By the mid-nineteenth century the belief in the possibility of a moral empire had been cemented into the national culture. This was one of the lasting legacies of the humanitarian discourse of the early nineteenth century. Something that Edmund Burke had regarded as an end to be struggled for, as a work in progress that may or may not succeed, had become a conventional wisdom. John Stuart Mill had closed that book; he was not plagued by the same doubts about empire as a previous generation of Utilitarians. It was an article of faith for him that the British Empire contained a moral duty. For Mill, the empire was not maintained for the benefit of Britain. It was run for the good of the colonies themselves. Empire was a moral enterprise and had to be governed with moral sensibility. Although this notion was to be questioned by people like Maine later in the century, it was at the heart of the conception of British imperialism in the popular and political culture. In this context, violence might be necessary. So how should violence of the sort that betrayed the values of liberal society be treated? One answer lay in the personalization of empire into heroes and villains.23

Heroes and villains The most lasting and the most contradictory legacy of the humanitarian discourse that came out of the early nineteenth century was that it allowed the notion of empire to be married to the discourse of racial exclusion and genetic racial hierarchy. But how did this work? By what means did the imperial humanitarian narrative continue to survive in the way empire was viewed and seen in Britain? To the

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early nineteenth-century humanitarians, and to policy makers like James Stephen and Sir George Murray, colonial violence was understood as systemic to colonialism. But once the humanitarian discourse had failed to remake the character of empire, different conceptions of responsibility for imperial violence had to be proposed. And it was for this reason that the imperial scapegoat became a center of responsibility for colonial violence that overtly transgressed the limits of liberal tolerance. The conditions under which this was articulated, of course, were contingent and variable. There were no general rules that would trigger a national scandal about colonial violence. Anyone who cared to look—as Arthur Vogan looked, for example—would find plenty of evidence. But that evidence would have threatened to destabilize the humanitarian belief system that composed the national discourse of empire. The inbuilt violence, for example, that characterized Queensland’s government in the period never rose to the level of a national scandal. Indeed, those involved in the atrocities often evolved to become prominent imperial citizens; one of them, in fact, was the architect of legislation for the supposed protection of the Aboriginal people of Queensland, and another was a leading member of the Australian diaspora in London in the 1890s. These men and the violent practices of Queensland colonial authorities were protected by the silences that, by this time, covered large swathes of the imperial experience.24 With the political and intellectual shifts that occurred both in the Empire and in metropolitan culture by the mid-century, scandals of empire could no longer be seen as systemic. There were no longer moral dilemmas of empire as a system—this notion had been philosophically resolved by John Stuart Mill among others and had been politically ruled out of court by the triumph of settler politics. Still, there had to be some way of understanding and apportioning blame when things did go wrong. And it was of necessity affixed to the person most prominently involved in events that became scandals. Thus, when circumstances in the nineteenth century demanded that the civic and political culture address the question of violence perpetrated by the colonial authorities, it was individual responsibility that was held to be the cause. Of course, there were precedents for attributing the moral distortions of the imperial system to the moral failings of individuals. There were imperial scandals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The cases of Elijah Impey and Warren Hastings in India are celebrated examples of this kind of imperial scapegoating. Both were regarded as having degraded the moral authority of British rule by allowing various forms of corrupt practices to thrive—although in each case there were genuine arguments to be made by both sides. Closer to our typology was the notorious behavior of Sir Thomas Picton described by James Epstein, who presided over the torture of Lousia Calderon in 1803. This was a case that was played out within the context of imperial morality. His actions called into question “Britain’s own image as an imperial nation bound by law.” Indeed, he was called to trial in 1806 and actually found guilty but, in an imperial mirror of the failure of justice to deal with frontier violence, he was ultimately freed. Such cases, however, were typically a matter of consequence for the relatively small world of elite politics where accountability was limited to small, self-interested cliques. It

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was possible for Picton to be restored to respectability, resume his career, receive a knighthood, and go on to serve in Parliament before being cut down, leading a charge at Waterloo.25 Picton was thus both a villain and a hero. But by the mid-century such abuses were impossible to keep safe from public discussion; they inevitably became part of a popular political process that made it more difficult for perpetrators to escape some consequences for their actions. Thus, different fates awaited Governors Torrington of Ceylon in 1848 and Edward John Eyre of Jamaica in 1865. Eyre, of course, is the more celebrated for his harsh repression of the Morant Bay “rebellion.” But both men ran into trouble because they could be seen to have violated the liberal injunction that good imperial government did not use excessive force. Like Eyre, Torrington declared martial law to repress what was judged to be a relatively minor rebellion. At what point should the rule of law give way to the very contentious employment of martial law was the question raised by their actions. Both Torrington and Eyre were judged to have failed to exercise sufficient restraint and to have tumbled over the line that divided liberal governance from the despotic exercise of power. More importantly, of course, both had demonstrated how misrule put empire at risk by undermining its moral authority. Obviously both these cases reflected the way empire ultimately relied upon force. And in both instances, also, their defenders were willing to make this point. To this extent, the debate around these cases was a debate about different visions of empire. Those who wanted Eyre to be punished had a vision of empire that had been carried over from the early nineteenth century—an empire whose humanitarianism was encased in the rule of law. Carlyle and the mainly literary cohort that composed Eyre’s supporters represented an emerging vision of empire realism that overtly accepted force, justified in part by the newly formulated doctrine of “scientific” racism. By the time the Eyre scandal broke, the balance of these perspectives was fairly evenly matched. But it was difficult to imagine mid-Victorian Britain overtly committing to the latter view. And so, if the image of a basically benign empire was to be sustained, it required that individual responsibility needed to be laid where it belonged. Thus, each man had to bear responsibility and pay the price.26 If the problems of empire could be reduced to the failings of the individuals who were endowed with the heavy responsibility of carrying the burdens of empire, then, equally, the virtues of empire were embodied in those who epitomized the humanitarian mission of the empire. Missionaries generally possessed this status within imperial culture as a whole. The image of the missionary as hero, accompanied by an equally heroic helpmeet wife, became a standard trope in Victorian culture propagated, for example, through the Sunday School movement. Largescale heroes, though, were not easy to find. And some of them, who were candidates for casting in the role, such as General Charles Gordon, or, more tentatively, Lawrence of Arabia, had too many character defects to be successfully elevated into the select pantheon of national heroes. Thus, their moments of fame were relatively short-lived. The major exception to the fleeting tides of celebrity in this respect was David Livingstone.

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Livingstone turned out to be the perfect candidate to personify the idea that the British Empire was both a humanitarian project and a liberating enterprise. And his story serves to illustrate the way that empire was made consonant with the ideals of a liberal society in the circumstances of the late nineteenth century. He was both an agent in that process and a case study of how empire was projected and received in the public culture of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. We know that Livingstone was a man whose image as a saintly figure was carefully constructed out of a very mixed reality. He was a man of enormous courage and achieved quite remarkable feats of endurance. But he could equally be seen as a failed explorer, a flawed leader, and a man whose family relations were hardly a model for Victorian domesticity. All of this was of little account against the uses to which he could be put in the service of empire. He was said to shine the patina of “a holy crusade” on the Scramble for Africa, even though it is likely he would not have endorsed the enterprise. His great virtue for the service of empire was that he embodied the world of early nineteenth-century humanitarianism. This was the world into which he had been born. It was the world which he epitomized and which his image and reputation defined to project the righteous essence of the British Empire.27 He had gone to South Africa in the mid-1840s, as a member of that last generation of missionaries who still optimistically expected that Christianity would awaken the spirit of enlightenment and progress among Indigenous peoples. He continued to hold to a belief in universal humanity throughout his life, even though it had long gone out of fashion. And, although Livingstone was later identified with the idea that commercial expansion would aid the spread of humanitarian virtue, he came out of a tradition that was deeply critical of the consequences of empire. Indeed, Livingstone was not a proponent of formal empire. He wanted to preserve African freedom. It was not so much the material gains from commerce that engaged Livingstone’s attention. It was commerce as a way of creating ties of engagement between the different races that interested him—a form of racial amalgamation, in other words. Elizabeth Elbourne has astutely noted that Livingstone shared the same set of beliefs on issues of racial equality and inclusion as James Read, the most radical of all the South African missionaries. In contrast to Livingstone, though, Read ended his days in disgrace and marginalized, partly because of his public stands on mixed-race congregations and cross-race marriages and his association with the Kat River settlement. Livingstone, by contrast, acquired a different public persona and, as a result, the radicalism of his religious roots was never on full display. But in the mid-1840s he was known to have despised the South African missionary-turned-imperial-official Henry Calderwood as little better than a police informer. Most notable of all, just as he was about to be feted as the most famous explorer of Africa in the nineteenth century, he was on record as opposing the Xhosa war of 1850–53 and of supporting the Kat River rebels. He wrote a pamphlet against the war and in support of the Xhosa, which he was unable to get published. This was not a man who was an unqualified proponent of British rule, nor someone who might be expected to become a spokesperson for the moral

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purpose of the era of high imperialism. But neither was Livingstone an innocent. When he came to publish his Missionary Travels in 1858, he carefully refrained from commenting on the war of 1850–53, for example, confining himself to the pointed, but restrained, report that he had travelled safely through the Xhosa war zone on his way home.28 The type of missionary that Livingstone represented was precisely the type that had been thoroughly vilified in settler and imperial politics. Still, in spite of his association with the Exeter Hall brand of missionary endeavor, his long, arduous, and self-sacrificing journeys through central Africa beginning in 1849 made him a suitable candidate for imperial hero status. This was an image that was constructed both in his lifetime and after his death. It was a process that was fed by the appetite of the missionary network public in Britain for validation of their efforts, which Livingstone provided in his lecture tours beginning in 1858. But it was also a process that resulted most directly from the presentation of Livingstone to the public that was carefully crafted by Henry Waller, who in later years solidified Livingstone’s image as an imperial hero by his discrete editing of the journals.29 In Livingstone’s case, Waller prudently edited out the bits of his journal that would show him to be anything less than the ideal of a virtuous representative of humanitarian values. We would not expect Waller to attend to the unfortunate consequences for his family of Livingstone’s obsessions with exploring Africa and converting Africans. More significant were other absences from Waller’s editions, such as the occasional rebellions against his harsh discipline that Livingstone faced from the young mission recruits from India. Nor did Waller allow the public to know of the reports of flogging, beatings, or the threats to shoot those who resisted Livingstone’s authority. Gone, too, were the reports of unrest and unhappiness of his bearers who were presented throughout as faithful servants, and missing, also, were the ungenerous comments and criticisms of other missionaries and explorers. H.M. Stanley also contributed his bit to this version of the Livingstone story by describing his “Christ-like” character, even though he had observed Livingstone’s other sides up-close.30 And this careful cultivation of a saintly image was ramped up by the stories that were constructed around the circumstances of Livingstone’s death and the subsequent transportation of the body out of deepest Africa by his African bearers. This was a story that initiated his virtual beatification as the representative icon of the British Empire’s purpose to serve humanity. Much of this, too, was a tissue of inventions. As Joanna Lewis has remarked, Horace Waller “transformed a sad, pathetic death into a holy martyrdom,” in which an “arresting vision [was created] of a dying man giving his last breath to pray for Africa.” The invention of the episode of his death captures the wider process of the construction of the Livingstone legend. It was a story that combined noble self-sacrifice on the part of this white man for Africa, which was reciprocated by the loyal devotion of faithful African servants and helpers. Around this core message was a dense network of material objects, official and unofficial organization of public events that kept the story in the public eye. Artifacts circulated around the consumer economy such

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as the ubiquitous pottery items that were a favorite commemorative device of the Victorians. In addition, there were church services, the memorial funds, and even a Livingstone Cantata written in 1913 to commemorate his death and performed at the Albert Hall on its anniversary. The point was to personalize the nobility of the imperial interaction with Africa and to propose a model of race relations as respectful subordination, which was the aspiration of imperial rule. It was an image that was reinforced by a virtual industry of media productions about Livingstone that lasted until the end of the Empire itself. Indeed, even into the age of overseas development, the Livingstone story was trundled out to demonstrate the humanitarian strain in Britain’s relations with the rest of the world.31 A key quality of the Livingstone legend was that it rested on and appealed to the strong strain of sentimentalism that ran through Victorian culture. Sentimentalism as a mobilizing political force first came to prominence during the anti-slavery movement when, as Thomas Laqueur has observed, it had demonstrated a powerful ability to move public politics. And it continued to play a role throughout the nineteenth century. It was a prominent feature of the Bulgarian Agitation of the later 1870s, for example. And its role in the anti-slavery campaigns of the end of the century suggests its importance in the regeneration of humanitarian activity in that period. The Livingstone legend employed a full-blown sentimentalism in conveying its imperial message. As Joanna Lewis has remarked, “an emotional conversation about Livingstone kept the belief alive that the British Empire in Africa was fundamentally humanitarian, built on good race relations and non-violent.” This was why his death attracted so much attention. It could be used to arouse pity and pride for the way he died. The long trek of African servants, Susi and Chuma, to carry the body from the interior to the coast represented the depth of attachment between Livingstone and Africans. It was an attachment that validated the white man’s mission in Africa and the degree of self-sacrifice that it could involve.32 Thus, in these kinds of way, the Livingstone legend provided an emotional content to an imperial humanitarianism that had been in crisis since the middle part of the century. It allowed a revival of the empathy that had underlain the humanitarian discourse of the earlier part of the century, but which had been in crisis since then. Empathy had failed to carry through the follow-on mission to abolition, the protection of the Indigenous peoples. It had failed also to confront the confluence of violence to empire; indeed, it had been complicit in that conjunction. It had seen its emotional and conceptual foundations eaten away by the internal failure and doubt that followed from the collapse of its policy initiatives. And, then, its theology, upon which its psychology of human behavior rested, had been challenged by the growing convergence of race and science. But empathy could now be rescued and re-engaged in the service of empire by associating Livingstone’s sacrifice as an empathetic display of what the British Empire was really all about. Livingstone’s greatest service to the British Empire was to die.33 It provided the opportunity to regenerate the humanitarian ethos of the early nineteenth century, an ethos that since the mid-century had been under siege by a growing racial essentialism. It facilitated a restoration of the link between humanitarianism and

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imperialism. Indeed, this was a stronger link than had been possible in the early nineteenth century when the consciousness of the violence and destructiveness of empire had deeply troubled the humanitarian conscience. Livingstone’s identification with anti-slavery, for example, not only encouraged a renewed enthusiasm about that cause, it also allowed the imperial mission to be re-moralized. Indeed, it is hard to think of another influence in British culture in the late nineteenth century that was as powerful as the Livingstone legend in affording a renewed belief in the potential morality of the British Empire. If a belief in universal humanity could no longer be the basis for humanitarian imperial action, then it was possible to believe that men of character like Livingstone could infuse virtue into the British Empire. This combined with, and enabled, the concurrent emergence of a harsher racial politics. It did not challenge them, as had been the tendency in the earlier version of humanitarianism. But, rather, it could coexist with them because it spoke the language of service, duty, and responsibility from a superior racial caste toward those at a lower rung on the ladder of civilization—even though this did not reflect exactly where Livingstone himself stood. This subjective role of the Livingstone legend was facilitated, of course, by structural changes in society, such as the growing democratization of mass communication and the continuing expansion of the political public. In that sense the Livingstone industry that spun off from his death was a form of moralizing show business that was congruent with the ethos of late-Victorian culture and the changing structures of mass entertainment. The stories of his death, and of the devotion of his servants to his memory, created a portrait of his life that infused an emotional power into the popular culture of imperialism that projected it as a supremely liberating moral project. This represented a new form of the emotional constructs and drives of the “humane policy” era of the early nineteenth century, and as an extension and development of “humanitarian” politics into the era of democratic politics. Yet, there was more to this than mere imperial propaganda. It was not only in imperial culture that the Livingstone legend did its historical work. And it was not in the imperial metropolis alone that Livingstone’s memory was kept alive and respected. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of the Livingstone legend was its cross-race appeal. In Africa, too, his name continued to gain a wide attention, where he was commemorated by memorials many of which still remain even in the age of independent African states. The legacy of Livingstone was embedded in independent African politics. When John Chilembwe, the leader of the first revolt against British rule in Malawi (then Nyasaland)—the colony most closely associated with Livingstone—was captured, a copy of the biography of Livingstone was found in his possessions. When later missionaries moved in to the areas where Livingstone had wandered, they encountered many who offered their “affectionate tributes from elderly chiefs and headmen who had known Livingstone.” And this respect extended into the days of African nationalist politics. Kenneth Kaunda appealed to the legend of Livingstone in the 1970s as he sought a moral framework both for his own moves toward a one-party state and as justification for opposition to apartheid South Africa. Livingstone was used as an example of Christian humanism and was

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regarded by Kaunda himself as “one of us.” Indeed, Kaunda had a personal association with the Livingstone legacy. His father had been one of the first teachers trained at the school established by the Scottish Livingstonia Mission.34 The appeal of Livingstone in this part of Africa, then, was in the memory of what he represented. The legend as it was constructed in imperial culture served the very functional purpose of restoring the moral validity of empire, of demonstrating that empire possessed a moral cause and duty. In British culture, the image of the man was transposed to describe the business of empire itself. And, as we have seen, there was sufficient basis to argue that Livingstone did represent the vision of an empire that moved beyond the hard lines of racial boundaries. It was precisely this aspect of David Livingstone that appealed to Africans. Livingstone represented that ideal of a universal humanity. He represented a return to the mentality and ideals of the “humane agenda” of imperial politics of the early nineteenth century. For imperial culture, therefore, his memory could validate the humanitarian mission of empire, and for imperial subalterns, his memory pointed in the direction of a universal humanity that transcended racial categories. Indeed, the memory of Livingstone could work as an agent of historical change and continuity in unexpected ways and in distant places. And in doing so, it reflected deeper currents of historical continuity in imperial culture that linked the early nineteenth century to the era of the modern Indigenous rights movements. Thus, in the spring of 1962 Michael Sikyea was arrested in the northwest territory of Canada for shooting a mallard duck out of season in contravention of the Migratory Birds Act of 1917. Sikyea belonged to the Dene people, one of the First Nations of Canada. At his trial, he argued that as a “Treaty person,” he was entitled to hunt ducks whenever he liked. In arguing this, Sikyea was referencing a tradition within the Dene people that went back to the negotiations between the British and the Indian nations in 1763–64, which had laid out the original rights that Indian peoples had secured by acceding to Crown sovereignty but which over the years had been displaced by settler rule. These treaties, Sikyea argued, could not be changed simply by settler legislation, only by a re-negotiation of their terms. Michael Sikyea could not have known it, but he was initiating a case that was to be pivotal in the reconsideration of the basis of Indigenous sovereignty in Canada that was underway at the same time. His case travelled all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, where it fed into the stream of cases that climaxed in the 1973 Calder case, which was the equivalent of the Mabo case in Australia and restored the principle of Aboriginal land title in Canada. But—and this is the key point here— Sikyea’s case would not have gone this far had it not been for another participant in the story: John Sissons, a judge on the Northwest Territories Territorial Court. Sissons was the original judge who ruled in Sikyea’s favor. Arguing contrary to much contemporary legal opinion, Sissons found that the Indian’s hunting rights were indeed protected under the 1763 Proclamation, that they existed apart from the legislation of the settler state and could not be abrogated by it. The legal history of this case need not concern us here. What is important are the origins of Sissons’ reasoning and belief. The judge was not a settler colonist in advance of his time;

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he was not a premature Indigenous rights radical. To the contrary, he was an oldfashioned paternalist whose “humanitarian principles” led him to oppose what he saw as a “colonial autocratic government.” The origins of his humanitarianism he traced to the idealized hero of his youth, David Livingstone, from whom he also claimed to be descended. Indeed, in his memoirs he explained that he felt the same affection for Canadian Indians as Livingstone had for Africans. In this respect Sissons was returning to the assumptions and context of the early nineteenth-­century humanitarian mentality. He revived arguments that would have been familiar to Saxe Bannister, Sir George Grey, and other proponents of a “humane policy,” including the notion that there was a special responsibility of the Crown to protect Indigenous peoples that overrode the claims of the settler state to a singular jurisdictional authority over both the lands and rights of the Indigenous peoples.35

Conclusion If the Livingstone legend played an instrumental role in solidifying a new moral consensus about the British Empire, and if it suggested the ways that the British were able to justify possessing and running their empire, it is important to stress that humanitarian reasoning is always multi-faceted. The humanitarian consensus that settled into imperial culture at the end of the nineteenth century was able to make its accommodation with the racial order that had emerged in both the new southern colonies and in the wider imperial culture. But, as has been noted in other parts of this book, history does not run in one direction only. The ambiguities, divergences, and contradictions that are embedded in historical processes conceal the possibilities of alternative outcomes. In the early nineteenth century, humanitarian politics were inevitably drawn into the seamy side of empire that they were originally designed to rebut. They had to devise means of reconciling those tensions. By the late nineteenth century, the moral equation had been reversed. The humanitarian mission in the imperial project had been reconciled with racial politics and the need for imperial coercion, and at the same time, it allowed Britain to project the ideal of a liberal empire to itself and to the world. But at the moment this conjuncture was forged, the humanitarian discourse had also produced a vocabulary for the critics of empire. It was not the only discourse to do this, of course—the economic critique of J.A. Hobson was to be very important in the twentieth-century balance sheet of empire. But the humanitarian discourse was the one whose moral vocabulary could be turned into a language of interrogation and criticism. Thus, its adoption by the language of socialism.36 It complemented the politics of imperial racial hierarchy in its moral endorsement of civilizational hierarchy. But its rhetoric of equality and freedom also contradicted the language of command. These two contradictory tendencies fit well together. Internal critics of empire could call upon the language of morality when imperial scandals arose. And equally, imperial subjects could use that same language of liberty to turn it against imperial rule. In these ways as in others, we may see the dynamic role of empire continuing to shape the history of Britain in the world.

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But there are other ways too that demonstrate how the past continues to reverberate in the present. The focus of this book has been on the way the British Empire in the southern seas responded to the fact of indigeneity and on the consequences of that encounter in the early nineteenth century for the settler colonies and imperial culture in Britain itself. For both Australia and New Zealand, the contemporary consequences of indigeneity are inescapable. However one judges the response of those colonies to the challenges of Maori and Australian Aboriginal politics and militancy, the issues around indigeneity lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of those states, as they do in different ways in the other ex-settler colonies of South Africa and Canada. They have no choice but to face up to the challenges of constructing a politics that recognizes the facts of a settler colonial entity and an Indigenous presence. Contemporary Britain is faced with a very different set of consequences for its past involvement with Indigenous societies. At one level, of course, it is far removed from the contemporary expressions of indigeneity in its old settler colonies. And it stands in a completely different relationship to its ex-subject Indigenous peoples. It is true that the old tradition among Indigenous peoples of appealing over the heads of settler government to the Crown for the redress of grievances died hard. But once responsibility for Indigenous affairs had been handed to the settler colonies in the mid- to late nineteenth century, Britain could relatively easily distance itself from the problems that involved. Still, in a way, Britain was not to escape the problem of indigeneity even as it shed its formal imperial power. Indeed, it is possible to see that issue returning from the empire to Britain in the post–Second World War era. A curious reversal has occurred regarding the place of indigeneity in British history. In the past, it was Britain through its empire that generated the “problem” of indigeneity thanks to its intrusions into first peoples’ societies. In addition, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, British national identity has historically been inseparable from the presence of the British Empire. Without the empire there would have been no Britain in the first place, or, at the very least, it would have been a very different place, perhaps a collection of three or four cold and windswept polities on the edge of Europe—which is more or less what Britain was before the Tudors. Recent events suggest that this could still be its future shape. This is not because the British were obliged to dissolve their formal empire in the 1960s and 1970s. It was more a result of an internal dynamic that was triggered by the physical intrusion into Britain by people from the old, decaying empire itself. The famed arrival of Windrush at Southampton dock in 1948 set in motion the new social formation within Britain of a multicultural society. This was to initiate the empire striking back against the metropole, even though those first generation of immigrants from the West Indies had been both invited and harbored the belief that they were going “home.” However, they did not always receive a neighborly welcome from the resident English, who increasingly experienced the growing immigration of different peoples as an intrusion upon British or, more accurately, English identity. Indeed, it might be said that this intrusion created a sense of English indigeneity, for as the county became a truly multi-racial nation, so the forces

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of nationalist populism were stoked especially among the English. (In Scotland, nationalist sentiment could be directed against the English.) The first time this played itself out on a public arena was the Notting Hill riots of 1958, which injected the question of race into British politics. The fear of British identity being swamped was given eloquent expression by Enoch Powell, whose “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 introduced into the political discourse a race-based expression of British identity that has become a constant, if at times subterranean, theme in British politics ever since. The phrase “Enoch was right” is one that is almost instinctively voiced when social tensions spill over as they did in the summer riots of 2011.37 But if the new arrivals of what had once been the colonies of the British Empire were increasingly available as an “other” to be blamed for various forces of disruptive social change that were experienced with increasing hostility as the twentieth century drew to its close, they were not the only ones who were besieging a heightened consciousness of English identity. The European Union was the other object of blame and resentment that, like racial hostility, had bubbled close to the surface of British society since the early 1990s and from 2016 burst the surface to wreak havoc in the political world. The final results of that story remain to be told. But both the racial politics and the anti-European Union sentiments that ripple through British society are fueled by the assertion of an English indigeneity that in previous times was expressed through the presence of the Empire. With the end of the British Empire, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the “problem” of indigeneity was ultimately brought home to the imperial metropole itself. As this book has argued, the legacies of the past have a curious way of translating themselves into the quandaries of the present.38

Notes 1 Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Nicholas Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I: The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2–3. 2 For some discussions of the legacy of empire in contemporary Britain, see Philip Murphy, “Britain as a Global Power in the Twentieth Century,” in Oxford History of the British Empire: Companion Series. Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, ed. Andrew Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Krishnan Kumar, “Empire, Nation and National Identities,” in Oxford History of the British Empire: Companion Series. Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, ed. Andrew Thompson; Andrew Thompson, “Afterword: The Imprint of Empire,” in Oxford History of the British Empire: Companion Series. Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century, ed. Andrew Thompson, 338, passim; Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). And for a mere sampling of treatments of the presence of empire was in the consciousness of British society, see Bernard Porter, The Absent Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Catherine Hall, “Culture and Identity in Imperial Britain,” in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Richard Price “One Big Thing: Britain and its Empire,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2006). For the

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complexities of how Empire shaped identities, see Simon J. Potter, “Empire, Cultures and Identities in ­Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Britain,” History Compass 5, no. 1 (2007): 51–71. 3 For the eighteenth-century origins of the political culture of virtue through Protestantism, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. And for general statements of the power of this discourse from earlier generations of historians, see Asa Briggs, Age of Improvement (London: Routledge, 1958); G.M. Young, Portrait of An Age (London: Routledge, 1953). For specific studies, see Richard N. Price, “The Working Men’s Club Movement and Victorian Social Reform Ideology,” Victorian Studies XV, no. 2 (Autumn 1971); Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Simms and Trim, eds., Humanitarian Intervention, 8–10. For an old, but still valuable history of the Bulgarian Agitation that pays due attention to this context, see Richard Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876 (London: Routledge, 1963), 23–36. It is not surprising to learn that groups like the Aborigines Protection Society were active in movements like the Bulgarian Agitation. 4 James Bonwick, The Lost Tasmanian Race (London: Routledge, 1884), 216. For another example of the same tone of sentimentalized narrative, see the chapter on the Tasmanian Indigenous peoples in the popular book by Mrs. Charles Meredith, My Home in Tasmania During a Residence of Nine Years, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1852), 189–90. 5 Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, 173–202, for the way the history of the First Tasmanians has been constantly returned to in discussions of the Empire in British culture. For how these kinds of narratives worked at a more quotidian level of the ordinary settler, see the article by Nicholas Dean Brodie, “It Is a ‘Matter of History and Mentioned in Several Authoritative Writings’: Reminiscing the Line in Tasmania’s Black War 1830–1916,” Tasmanian Historical Studies 20 (2015): 41–63. 6 Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 57. The Indian uprising of 1857 was, of course, an important part of this story, particularly in the domestic culture of Britain itself. The revolt presented a serious challenge to the unthinking assumption within domestic culture about the humanitarian impulses of empire. It also encouraged the view of empire as dominated by heroes and villains that I will address later. See Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 7 Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 166, 173, 177–78, 201. For the late-century revival of humanitarianism, see Andrew Porter, “An Overview, 1700–1914,” in Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington, 40–63; Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (London: Routledge, 2005), 3–5, 34–36, 40–42, 168. It is important to note, however, that this new phase of humanitarianism contained elements of what was to compose the human rights vocabulary of the twentieth century. 8 Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 142–45, 196–97, 200. This was fundamentally different from those like James Stephen, who believed that the stimulus of free labor—of having to work in order to eat—would obviate the need for physical coercion. 9 Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 44–48; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 168–69. 10 For Vogan I  have relied heavily upon “ ‘Australia’s Shadow Side’: Arthur Vogan and the Black Police,” accessed May  5, 2018, https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/ UQ  .  .  .  /ff4_3_2009_p18_21.pdf/; Jane Lydon, “The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (February 2014): 46–70. 11 A.J. Vogan, The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia (London: Routledge, 1890). 12 Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, 128–31; Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 51. Gordon had served as governor in New Brunswick, Trinidad,

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Mauritius, Fiji, and New Zealand. At the time of Vogan’s book he was finishing up a term in Ceylon. 13 Lydon, “The Bloody Skirt of Settlement . . .,” 67; “Australia’s Shadow Side . . .,” 20; Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 46–48; Anti-Slavery Reporter, September– October 1891, 234. 14 Lydon, “The Bloody Skirt of Settlement  .  .  .,” 67–68; Anti-Slavery Reporter, May– June 1890, 109–12. 15 Anti-Slavery Reporter, September–October 1891, 233–35. 16 Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, 112–13 a campaign in 1880 in the pages of Queenslander for the good treatment of Aboriginal people accepted the natural presence of violence and murder as regrettable but unavoidable accompaniment to colonization. 17 I have drawn this material entirely from the article by Nicholas Dean Brodie, “Quaker Dreaming: The ‘Lost’ Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land,” Journal of Religious History (2015): 1–23, accessed February  5, 2018, doi:10.1111/14679809.12305. The involvement of Quakers in such acts of dispossession and violence might be worth looking at more closely. One of the most notorious killers of California Indians in the 1840s was a Quaker-turned-Indian killer by the name of Ben Wright, who in the 1880s organized a group of vigilante volunteers to participate in the massacre of the Modoc Indians. See Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), Kindle ebook, Chapter 6, location 4041. Henry Ling Roth was an ethnographer who published The Tasmanian Aborigines in 1890, which became the standard work until the 1960s. 18 See Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of An Imperial Culture in ­Nineteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 63–78; Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise Since 1700 (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 94–96; Roger Levine, A Living Man From Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 142–57 for the tours to Tzatoe and others around the release of the Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines in 1837. 19 Alison Twells, The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850 (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5–7, 12–16, 23–24, 81–82, 218–19. This important study is focused on Sheffield. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 293–301, for a good description of the precepts of missionary public and its culture and the tensions within it. 20 Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Fragment (London: Routledge, 1850); Thorne, Congregational Missions, 155–58. For Prichard, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982), 2–10. 21 Twells, The Civilising Mission, 192–210; Peter Mandler, “ ‘Race’ and ‘nation’ in midVictorian thought,” 224–44; for the persistence of this older discourse well into the mid-nineteenth century, see Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, 45, 65–66, 75–78; Neil Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Mission in the South Seas 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), 335. 22 The literature on this is, of course, enormous. But a good starting point is one of the first books to address this issue: John M. Mackenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). From a different angle, Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland, eds., Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories 1750 to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). For a good study of how empire infused local politics, see Brad Beaven, Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Empire day was first celebrated in 1902. But it was not officially taken up until 1916. The Empire Marketing Board was created in 1926. See Stephen Constantine, “ ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’: The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926–33,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. Mackenzie; Felicity Barnes, “Bringing Another Empire Alive? The Empire Marketing Board and the Construction of

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Dominion Identity, 1926–33,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 1 (2014): 61–85. 23 Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Routledge, 2007), 339–40. 24 See the important article by Raymond Evans, “The Country Has Another Past,” 9–38. 25 Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); James Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), cite from p. 271. 26 Torrington escaped the kind of censure attached to Eyre. But he was quickly recalled and never served again. Both men also probably were disadvantaged in that neither was particularly highly regarded by the Colonial Office. R.W. Kostal, “A Jurisprudence of Power: Martial Law and the Ceylon Controversy of 1848–51,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, no. 1 (January 2000): 1–34; W.P. Morrell, Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1930), 528–32; Bernard Semmel, Democracy Versus Empire: The Jamaica Riots and the Governor Eyre Controversy (New York: Doubleday, 1969); Hall, Civilising Subjects, 64–65; Catherine Hall, “Competing Masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre,” in White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in History and Feminism, ed. Catherine Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 278–78; Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society, 45. The massacre at Amritsar is another example of an imperial scandal that found its scapegoat in Lieutenant-General Reginald Dyer. See Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 27 Tim Jeal, Livingstone (London: Routledge, 1973) was the first biography to dent the image of Livingstone as a saint and present him as a “contradictory hero.” It is significant, of course, that it was published just when the formal structures of the British Empire were being wound up. Only once the British Empire ceased to exist could a realistic appraisal of Livingstone be made. See also Stephanie L. Barczewski, Heroic Failure and the British (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 114–30; the cite is from p. 129. 28 Andrew Ross, “Christian Missions and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Change in Attitudes to Race: The African Experience,” in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions 1880–1914, ed. Andrew Porter (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 87; Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 311–14; Andrew Ross, John Philip 1775–1851. Missions, Race and Politics in South Africa (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), 227; David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (New York: Harper and Bros., 1858), 37, 106–7; John Mackenzie, “David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life: Imperialism and Nationalism in Africa,” in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), 214, 223 fn.25. 29 Mackenzie, “David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life,” 206–8. Waller deserves a lot of credit as an image maker for imperial heroes. He was also involved in the creation of the General Gordon legend, carefully negotiating with Gordon to create the image that he felt most appropriate. 30 Tim Jeal, Livingstone; Dorothy O. Helly, Livingstone’s Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian Mythmaking (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987), 168–74, 261–62; 274–77; Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Story of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Routledge, 2007), 122–25; Mackenzie, “David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life,” 206. The ideal of the loyal servant and the paternally kind imperial master was a common representation of authority relations in imperial culture and was itself a kind of sentimentalization. 31 Joanna Lewis, Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xix, 160–21, 219, 220–21, 226–27, Chapter 7, for the way the industry of the Livingstone legend lasted through to the end of Empire.

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32 Thomas W. Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity and the Work of Narrative in the Making of ‘Humanity’,” in Humanitarian Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard Brown (New York: Penguin, 2009), 32, 34–35; Lewis, Empire of Sentiment, 212; Shannon, The Bulgarian Agitation. 33 The same was true of the death of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum. This death, too, was largely invented out of various and conflicting eye witnesses in this case by J.R. Wingate. But Gordon’s death came to embody the militant Christianity of the later nineteenth century which placed conquest as a necessary part of the imperial mission to civilize. See Douglas H. Johnson, “The Death of Gordon: A Victorian Myth,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 10, no. 3 (1982): 285–310. 34 Mackenzie, “David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life,” 203–4, 216; Lewis, Empire of Sentiment, 202–3, 208–9. 35 This account draws entirely upon Miranda Johnson, “The Case of the Million Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract,” American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (February 2019), esp. 56–57, 76, 79. 36 See Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); P.J. Cain, Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism and Finance 1887–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 37 Selina Todd, The People (London: Routledge, 2014), 188–90, 321; Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 319–20, 325–27. The Powell speech has become a key reference point for the right-wing populism that emerged out of the Brexit debate in the UK and Trump’s election in the United States. See Camilla Scholfield, “Brexit and the Other Special Relationship,” in Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain, ed. Stuart Ward and Astrid Rasch (London: Routledge, 2019), 88–89. For a very good account of social politics of postwar immigration, see Clair Wills, Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017), 162–69, 173–74, 290, Jonathan Coe, Middle England (New York: The New York Times Book Review, 2019) for a novelistic account of the assertion of English identity against the intrusions represented by the European Union. There was, of course, a prior history to the Windrush generation; see John Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in Twentieth-Century Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014). 38 See the essays in Ward and Rasch, eds., Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain; Robert Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Support for Brexit, of course, should not simply be reduced to a nostalgia for Empire. But it does reflect the long-standing hostility to Europe as a constraint upon Britain’s freedom to play on the world stage. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1010–58, for an extended discussion of the crisis facing British identity in part driven by membership in the European Union. Davies predicted at this early date the likely break-up of the United Kingdom because of this crisis.

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General and introduction Ballantyne, Tony. Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Banivanua Mar, Tracey. “Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse.” Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 1–38. Bayly, C.A. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830. London: Longman, 1988. Bell, Duncan. The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. ———. “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715. ———. Reordering the World Essays on Liberalism and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Bellich, James. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1789–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bodelson, C.A. Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism. New York: Howard Fertig, 1968. Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800–1930. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Burton, Antoinette. The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Carey, Helen M. God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000. Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hall, Catherine. “The Nation within and without.” In Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, edited by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, 179–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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———. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Oxford: Polity, 2002. Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain 1832– 1938. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Kauanui, J. Kehaulani. “ ‘A Structure, Not an Event,’ Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.” Lateral 5, no. 1 (2016). Kennedy, Dane. The Last Blank Spaces. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Macoun, Alyssa, and Elizabeth Strakosch. “The Ethical Demands of Settler Colonial Theory.” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 426–43. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2013.810695. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now.” Critical Inquiry  41 (2015): 596–614. Mannoni, O. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A  Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. London: Earthscan, 2003. Moses, Dirk, ed. Colony and Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghan, 2008. Nandy, Ashis. “The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India.” Psychiatry 45 (August 1982): 197–218. ———. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Pagden, Anthony. The Burdens of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Porter, Andrew. “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism.” In Oxford History of the British Empire, the Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter, 198–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion 1700– 1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Price, Richard. Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in ­Nineteenth-Century Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Reynolds, Henry. A History of Tasmania. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rowse, Tim. “Indigenous Heterogeneity.” Australian Historical Studies  45, no. 3 (2014): 297–310. Strakosch, Elizabeth. “The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism.” Arena Journal 37–38 (2012): 41–62. ———. “The Politics of Indigenous Development.” In The Politics of Development: A Survey, edited by Heloise Weber. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Thomas, Nicholas. Colonialism’s Culture. Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook. Toronto: Viking, 2003. Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. “Isopolitics, Deep Colonizing, Settler Colonialism.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 2 (2011): 171–89. ———. “Defending Settler Colonial Studies.” Australian Historical Review  45, no. 3 (2014): 311–16. Vimalassery, Manu, and Hu Pegues. “Introduction: On Colonial Knowing.” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016). www.muse.jhu.edu/article/633283. White, Richard. The Middle Ground. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London: Cassell, 1999.

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———. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. ———. “Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4 (2013): 257–59. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2013.830587. Wright, Judith. Generations of Men, revised ed. Sydney: Imprint, 1995.

Chapter 1 Engagements Ballantyne, Tony. Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori, and the Question of the Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. ———. “Strategic Intimacies: Knowledge and Colonization in Southern New Zealand.” Journal of New Zealand Studies NS 14 (2014): 4–18. Banivanua, Tracey, and Penelope Edmonds. “Indigenous Settler Relations.” In The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume I: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, 342–66. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Banivanua Mar, Tracey. “Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse.” Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 1–38. Binney, Judith. The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall. Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1968. Brodie, Nicholas Dean. “ ‘He Had Been a Faithful Servant’.” Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2017): 45–64. Byrnes, Giselle. “The Imperfect Authority of the Eye: Edward Shortland’s Southern Journey and the Calligraphy of Colonization.” History and Anthropology 8, no. 1–4 (1994): 207–35. Cameron, Patsy. Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier. Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 2011. Carey, Helen. “Lancelot Threlkeld, Biraban, and the Colonial Bible in Australia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 2 (2010): 447–78. Clendinnen, Inga. Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Dening, Greg. Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land. Marquesas 1774–1880. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980. Dieffenbach, Ernst. New Zealand and Its Native Population. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1841. Evans, Julie. “Beyond the Frontier: Possibilities and Precariousness Along Australia’s Southern Coast.” In Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, edited by Lynette Russell, 151–72. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Eyre, Edward John. Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1; Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and Their State of Relations with Europeans . . . in Two Volumes. London: T and W Boone, 1845. ———. Autobiographical Narrative of Residence and Exploration in Australia 1832–1839. Edited and Introduction by Jill Waterhouse. London: Caliban Books, 1984. Fels, Marie. “Culture Contact in the County of Buckinghamshire, Van Diemen’s Land 1801–11.” Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings  29, no. 2 (1982): 47–79. Ford, Lisa, and Tim Rowse. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance. London: Routledge, 2013. Gibson, Ross. “Patyegarang and William Dawes: The Space of Imagination.” In Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity, edited by Tracey Banivanua and Penelope Edmonds, 242–54. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hamann, Judy. “The Coorong Massacre. A Study in Early Race Relations in South Australia.” Flinders Journal of History and Politics III (1973): 1–9.

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Kirchauff, Skye. “The Narungga and European: Cross-Cultural Relations on Yorke Peninsula in the Nineteenth Century.” MA thesis, School of Politics and History, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 2008. ———. “Narungga, the Townspeople and Julius Kuhn: The Establishment and Origins of the Point Pearce Mission, South Australia.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 37 (December 2013): 57–72. Konoshi, Shino, Maria Nugent Maria, and Tiffany Shellam, eds. Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2015. Merry, Kay. “The Cross-Cultural Relationships Between the Sealers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Women at Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Counterpoints 3, no. 1 (2003): 80–88. Moore, George Fletcher. Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia. London: Walbrook, 1884. Mulvaney, John, and Neville Green, eds. Commandant of Solitude: The Journals of Captain Collett Barker, 1828–1831. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992. Mundy, Godfrey Charles. Our Antipodes. Edited and Introduction by D.W. Baker. Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006. Nettelbeck, Amanda. “Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier.” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016): 209–24. doi:10.1080/1031 461X.2016.1153120. ———. “Interracial Intimacy, Indigenous Mobility and the Limits of Legal Regulation in Two Late Settler Colonial Societies.” Law and History (2017): 103–24. Parker, Edward Stone. The Aborigines of Australia. Melbourne: Hugh McColl, 1854. Pybus, Cassandra. Community of Thieves. Port Melbourne: Minerva, 1991. Reid, Kirsty. Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Roberts, Amy, and Daryl Wesley. “Culture Contact in Indigenous Australia.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 42 (December 2018). Salmond, Anne. Between Two Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773– 1815. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 1997. Shellam, Tiffany. “Making Sense of Law and Disorder.” Anthropology and History 18, no. 1 (March 2007): 75–88. ———. Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George’s Sound. Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia, 2009. Shortland, Edward. The Southern Districts of New Zealand; a Journal, with Passing Notices of the Customs of the Aborigines. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1851. ———. Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders. London: Longmans, Brown, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1856. Statham, Pamela. “James Stirling and the Pinjarra.” Studies in Western Australian History 23 (2003): 167–94. Stevens, Kate. “ ‘Every Comfort of a Civilized Life’: Interracial Marriage and Mixed Race Respectability in Southern New Zealand.” Journal of New Zealand Studies  14 (2015): 87–105. Wanhalla, Angela. “Intimate Connections: Governing Cross-Cultural Intimacy on New Zealand’s Colonial Frontier.” Law and History (2017): 45–47. ———. Matters of the Heart: Intermarriage in New Zealand. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2014. Wills-Johnson, Brian. “ ‘A Most Dangerous Character’: The Remarkable Life of Yonki Yonka.” M.Phil. thesis, University of Western Australia, School of Humanities, History Discipline Group, Crawley, WA, 2017.

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Chapter 2 Mentalities Aborigines Protection Society. Report of the Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes. London: William Ball, 1837. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. New York: Routledge, 2004. Backhouse, James. Extracts from the Letters of James Backhouse, Now Engaged in a Religious Visit to Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales. London: Harvey and Darton, 1838. ———. A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies. London: Hamilton, Adams, 1893. Bannister, Saxe. Remarks on the Indians of North America in a Letter to an Edinburgh Reviewer. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1822. ———. Humane Policy; or Justice to the Aborigines or New Settlements. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830. ———. Appel En Faveur D’Alger et de L’Afrique Du Nord, Par Un Anglais. Paris: DondeyDupré Père Et Fils, 1833. ———. British Colonization and the Coloured Races. London: William Ball, 1838. ———. Memoir Respecting the Colonization of Natal, in South-Eastern Africa; Presented by the Cape of Good Hope Trade Society to the Secretary of State for the Colonies: and Prepared by S. Bannister, Esq. London: John Parker, 1839. ———. The Controul of the Privy Council Over the Administration of Affairs at Home; in the Colonies; and in India. London: James Ridgway, William Benning & Co, 1844. ———. Records of British Enterprise Beyond the Sea from the Earliest Original Sources to the Present Times, vol. I. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1849. Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Belmessous, Saliha. Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541– 1954. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Burn, W.L. Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies. London: J. Cape, 1937. Edmonds, Penelope. “Collecting Looerryminer’s ‘Testimony’: Aboriginal Women, Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands.” Australian Historical Studies (February 24, 2014): 13–33. ———. “Activism in the Antipodes: Transnational Quaker Humanitarianism and the Troubled Politics of Compassion in the Early Nineteenth Century.” In The Transnational Activist, edited by Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ———. “Emancipation Acts on the Oceanic Frontier: Intimacy, Diplomacy, Colonial Invasion and the Legal Traces of Protection in the Bass Strait World.” Law & History (2017): 21–44. Edmonds, Penelope, and Anna Johnston. “Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History  17, no. 1 (Spring 2016). http:// muse.jhu.edu.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/article/613279. Elbourne, Elizabeth. “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 Studies 4, no. 3 (2003). Evans, Julie. Edward Eyre, Race and Colonial Governance. Otago, NZ: Otago University Press, 2005. Eyre, Edward John. Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1; Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and Their State of Relations with Europeans . . . in Two Volumes. London: T and W Boone, 1845.

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Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Green, Abigail. “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth Century Context: Religion, Gendered and National.” Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (2014): 1157–75. Grey, George. Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, During the Years 1837,38 and 1839. . . ., vol. II. London: T and W Boone, 1841. Hassell, Kathleen. The Relations between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia 1836– 1860. Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1966 [reprint 1921 thesis, University of Adelaide]. Howitt, William. Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Native by the Europeans in All Their Colonies. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838. Keegan, Tim. Dr. Philip’s Empire: One Man’s Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth Century South Africa. Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2016. Laidlaw, Zoe. “Aunt Anna’s Report: The Buxton Women and the Select Committee on Aborigines 1835–37.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History  32, no. 4 (May  2004): 1–28. doi:www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/ 03086530410001700381. ———. “Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 749–68. Laqueur, Thomas. “Bodies, Detail and the Humanitarian Narrative.” In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Lester, Alan. “The Margins of Order: Strategies of Segregation on the Eastern Cape Frontier 1806–1850.” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 4 (December 1997): 635–53. ———. “British Settler Discourses and the Circuits of Empire.” History Workshop Journal no. 54 (2002): 25–48. ———. “Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2015): 1–16. doi:10.1177/0263775815618402. Lester, Alan, and Fae Dussart. “Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th Century Australia And Aoteroa New Zealand.” New Zealand Geographer 64 (2008): 205–20. ———. “Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Family in the Colonies: Protecting Aborigines in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Gender, Place and Culture 16, no. 1 (February 2009): 63–75. ———. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lydon, Jane. Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy Across the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Martini, Elspeth. “The Tides of Morality: Anglo-American Colonial Authority and Indigenous Removal, 1820–1848.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, Michigan, 2013. McNab, David. “Herman Merivale and the Native Question.” Albion  9, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 359–84. ______. “Herman Merivale and Colonial Office Indian Policy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies I, no. 2 (1981): 277–302. Motte, Standish. Outline of a System of Legislation for Securing Protection to All the Aboriginal Inhabitants of All Countries Colonized by Great Britain. London: John Murray, 1840. Moyn, Samuel. “Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity.” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (October 2006): 697–415. O’Brien, Anne. “Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, no. 2 (2011). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_ colonialism_and_colonial_history/v012/12.2.o-brien.html.

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Parker, Edward Stone. The Aborigines of Australia. Melbourne: Hugh McColl, 1854. Reddy, William. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Reynolds, Henry. This Whispering in Our Hearts. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1998. Simms, Brendan, and D.J.B. Trim, eds. Humanitarian Intervention: A  History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Skinner, Rob, and Alan Lester. “Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 729–47. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Wheeler, Roxanne. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000. Wilson, Richard Ashby, and Richard Brown. Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Windeyer, Richard. “On the Rights of Aborigines in Australia.” MSS of a lecture, A 1400, Mitchell Library, 1842.

Chapter 3 Policies—conciliation and coercion Beard, Jillian. “Conciliation in New South Wales 1788–1815: A  Colonial Governance Policy.” In Aboriginal Australians and Others, edited by Joëlle Bonnevin. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2015. Bonwick, James. The Bushrangers; Illustrating the Early History of Van Diemen’s Land, facsimile 1857 ed. Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 1967. Borch, Marete Falck. Conciliation—Compulsion—Conversion: British Attitudes towards Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004. Boyce, James. 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc., 2012. ———. Van Diemen’s Land. Melbourne, VIC: Black Inc., 2008. Brock, Daniel George. To the Desert with Sturt: A Diary of the 1844 Expedition. Edited by Kenneth Peake-Jones. Adelaide: Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Inc., 1975. Brodie, Nicholas Dean. “He Had Been a Faithful Servant.” Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2017): 45–64. ———. “It Is a ‘Matter of History and Mentioned in Several Authoritative Writings’: Reminiscing the Line in Tasmania’s Black War 1830–1916.” Tasmanian Historical Studies 20 (2015): 41–63. ———. “ ‘The Last Man Left to Tell the Tale’: Challenging the Conciliation Master Narrative in Van Diemen’s Land.” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (2017): 86–102. ———. “The Vandemonian War.” In The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion. Richmond, VIC: Hardie Grant Books, 2017. Campbell, Alastair. John Batman and the Aborigines. Malmsbury: Kibble, 1987. Clendinnen, Inga. Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. Tiger’s Eye. New York: Scribner’s, 2000. Condos, Mark, and Gavin Rand. “Coercion and Conciliation at the Edge of Empire: StateBuilding and Its Limits in Waziristan.” The Historical Journal 61, no. 3 (2018): 695–718. Curr, Edward M. Recollections of Squatting in Victoria Then Called the Port Phillip District from 1841 to 1851. Melbourne: George Robertson, 1883.

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Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds, eds. Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. Edmonds, Penelope. “Collecting Looerryminer’s ‘Testimony’: Aboriginal Women, Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands.” Australian Historical Studies (February 24, 2014): 13–33. ———. “ ‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35, no. 2 (June 2011): 201–18. Johnston, Anna. “George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’: Colonial Celebrity and Its Postcolonial Aftermath.” PostColonial Studies 12, no. 2 (2009): 153–72. Lawson, Tom. The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. McNab, David. “Herman Merivale and the Native Question.” Albion  9, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 359–84. Madley, Benjamin. “From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars.” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (January 2008): 77–106. McFarlane, Ian. Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania. A History. Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 2008. Melville, Henry. The History of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to 1835. London: Smith and Elder, 1835. Mitchell, Jesse. In Good Faith: Governing Indigenous Australians Through God, Charity and Empire 1825–1855. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2011. Mulvaney, John, and Neville Green, eds. Commandant of Solitude: The Journals of Captain Collett Barker, 1828–1831. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992. Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 2nd ed. Hobart: Quintus, 2008. Plomley, N.J.B., ed. Weep in Silence: A  History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement. Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987. Plomley, N.J.B., ed. and commentator. Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land. Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1991. Pybus, Cassandra. “The Colourful Life of Gilbert Robertson.” Launceston Historical Society (2011): 1–8. ———. Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2020. Reynolds, Henry. A History of Tasmania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. Fate of a Free People. Melbourne: Penguin, 1995. ———. “George Augustus Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land: Race, Status and Religion.” In Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission, edited by Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls. Hobart: Quintus, 2008. Ryan, Lyndall. Tasmanian Aborigines: A  History Since 1803. Crows News, NSW: Allen  & Unwin, 2012. Shaw, A.G.L. Sir George Arthur, Bart. 1784–1854. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980.

Chapter 4 Policies—protection Armitage, Andrew. Comparing the Policy of Aboriginal Assimilation: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995. Belmessous, Saliha. Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541– 1954. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Boyce, James. 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. Collingwood, VIC: Black Inc., 2012. Brock, Peggy. Outback Ghettos: Aborigines, Institutionalisation, and Survival. Studies in Australian History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cannon, Michael, ed. in chief. Aborigines and Protectors 1838–1839. Historical Records of Victoria. Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1983. ———. The Aborigines of Port Phillip 1835–1839. Historical Records of Victoria. Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982. Christie, M.F. Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979. Clark, Ian D. “In Quest of the Tribes: G.A. Robinson’s Unabridged Report of His 1841 Expedition Among Western Victorian Aboriginal Tribes; Kenyon’s Condensation Reconsidered.” Memoirs of the Museum of Victoria 1, no. 1 (1990): 97–130. ———, ed. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume One: 1 January 1839–30 September 1840. Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998. ———. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Volume Two: 1 October 1840–31 August 1841. Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 2000. ———. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Vol. Three: 1 September 1841–31 December 1843. Ballarat, VIC: Heritage Matters, 2000. ———. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate. Volume Five: 25 October 1845–June 1849. Ballarat, VIC: Heritage Matters, 2000. ———. The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate. Volume Six: 10 June 1849–30 September 1852. Ballarat, VIC: Heritage Matters, 2000. Dorsett, Shaunnagh. “Travelling Laws: Burton and the Draft Act for the Protection and Amelioration of the Aborigines 1838 (NSW).” In Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagement and Legacy, edited by Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren. London: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Dredge, James. A Plea on Behalf of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Victoria. Geelong, 1854. Edmonds, Penelope. Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th Century Pacific Rim Cities. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2010. Evans, Roger. Truth and Obedience: The Life and Letters of George Clarke 1798–1875. KeriKeri, NZ: Keri Print, 2004. Eyre, Edward John. Reports and Letters to Governor Grey from E.J. Eyre at Morrunde. Adelaide: Sullivans Cove, 1985. Fels, Marie Hansen. ‘I Succeeded Once’: The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula, 1839–1840. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2011. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24h9d5. Ford, Lisa, and Tim Rowse. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance. London: Routledge, 2013. Furphy, Samuel. “Philanthropy or Patronage?: Aboriginal Protectors in the Port Phillip District and Western Australia.” In Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies, edited by Samuel Furphy and Amanda Nettelbeck. New York: Routledge, 2020. Furphy, Samuel, and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds. Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies. New York: Routledge, 2020. Grainger, Geoffrey. “Matthew Moorhouse and the South Australian Aborigines, c. 1836– 1856.” Honors Thesis, School of Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide, 1980. Gray, Stephen. The Protectors: A Journey Through Whitefella Past. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.

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Hassell, Kathleen. The Relations Between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia 1836– 1860. Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1966 [reprint 1921 thesis, University of Adelaide]. Heartfield, James. The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo, 1836–1909. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Lester, Alan, and Fae Dussart. “Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Family in the Colonies: Protecting Aborigines in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Gender, Place and Culture  16, no. 1 (February 2009): 63–75. ———. “Trajectories of Protection: Protectorates of Aborigines in Early 19th Century Australia and Aoteroa New Zealand.” New Zealand Geographer 64 (2008): 205–20. ———. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Nettelbeck, Amanda. “Colonial Protection and the Intimacies of Indigenous Governance.” History Australia 43, no. 3 (2012): 396–411. doi:10.1080/1031461X.2012.706621. ———. “ ‘A Halo of Protection’: Colonial Protectors and the Principle of Aboriginal Protection Through Punishment.” Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 3 (2012): 396–411. doi :10.1080/1031461X.2012.706621. ———. “ ‘Keep the Magistrates Straight’: Magistrates and Aboriginal ‘Management’ on Australia’s North-West Frontiers, 1883–1905.” Aboriginal History 38 (2015): 19–37. ———. “Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier.” Australian Historical Studies  47, no. 2 (2016):  209–24. doi:10.1080/10314 61X.2016.1153120. ———. “ ‘We Are Sure of Your Sympathy’: Indigenous Uses of the Politics of Protection in Nineteenth-Century Australia and Canada.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (Spring 2016). http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/ article/613284. ———. “Creating the Aboriginal Vagrant Protective Governance and Indigenous Mobility in Colonial Australia.” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 1 (2018): 79–100. ———. Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the NineteenthCentury British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Parker, Edward Stone. The Aborigines of Australia. Melbourne: McColl, 1854. Price, Richard. “Culture and Politics: Sir George Grey, Protection and the Early NineteenthCentury Empire.” In Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies, edited by Samuel Furphy and Amanda Nettelbeck. New York: Routledge, 2020. Reece, R.H.W. Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974. Reed, Liz. “Rethinking William Thomas, ‘Friend’ of the Aborigines.” Aboriginal History 28 (2004): 87–99. Rowse, Tim. “A Short and Simple Provisional Code: The Pastoralist as Protector.” In Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies, edited by Samuel Furphy and Amanda Nettelbeck. New York: Routledge, 2020. Standfield, Rachel. “ ‘The Vacillating Manners and Sentiments of These People’: Mobility, Civilisation and Dispossession in the Work of William Thomas with the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate.” Law Text Culture 15 (2011): 162–84. http://ro.uow.edu.au/ ltc/vol15/iss1/9. ———. “Protection, Settler Politics and Indigenous Politics in the Work of William Thomas.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2012). http://muse. jhu.edu.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/article/475171.

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Chapter 5 Policies—racial amalgamation Alves, Dona. The Maori and the Crown. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Attwood, Bain. Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Banner, Stuart. “Conquest by Contract: Wealth Transfer and Land Market Structure in Colonial New Zealand.” Law and Society  34, no. 1 (2000):  47–96. www.jstor.org/ stable/3115116?origin=JSTOR-pdf. ———. Possessing the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Belgrave, Michael. “Pre-Emption, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Politics of Crown Purchase.” New Zealand Journal of History 31, no. 1 (1997): 23–37. ———. Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2005. Belich, James. Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996. Binney, Judith. Encircled Lands: Te Urewera, 1820–1921. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 2009. Burns, Patricia. Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. Auckland, NZ: Heinemann Reed, 1989. Cadogan, Bernard. ‘A Terrible and Fatal Man’: Sir George Grey and the British Southern Hemisphere. Treaty Research Series, E-book. Auckland, NZ: Treaty of Waitangi Research Unit, 2014. Cooper, G.S. Journal of an Expedition Overland from Auckland to Taranaki by Way of Roorua, Taupo, and the West Coast: Undertaken in the Summer of 1849–50 by His Excellence the Governor in Chief of New Zealand. Auckland, 1851. Dale, Leigh. “George Grey in Ireland: Narrative and Network.” In Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Alan Lester and David Lambert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. “George Grey in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.” In Travel and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology, edited by Peter Hulme and Russell McDougall. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Dorsett, Shaunnagh. “ ‘Since Time Immemorial’: A Story of Common Law Jurisdiction, Native Title and the Case of Tanistry.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 33–59. ———. “Sworn on the Dirt of Graves: Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and the Judicial Abrogation of ‘Barbarous’ Customs in New Zealand in the 1840s.” Journal of Legal History 30, no. 2 (2009): 175–97. doi:10.1080/01440360903069775. ———. “Sovereignty as Governance in the Early Nineteenth Century New Zealand Crown Colony Period.” In Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought, edited by Ian Hunter and Shaunnagh Dorsett. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. “How Do Things Get Started? Legal Transplants and Domestication: An Example from Colonial New Zealand.” New Zealand Journal of Public Interest Law 12 (2014): 103–22. ———. “Metropolitan Theorising: Legal Frameworks, Protectorates and Models for Maori Governance 1837–1838.” Sydney Law Research Series 37 (2016). ———. Juridical Encounters: Maori and the British Courts, 1840–1852. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2017.

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Fox, Lady Mary, ed. An Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland. London: Richard Bentley, 1837. Frame, Alex. Grey and Iwikau. A Journey into Custom. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2002. Grant, Susannah. “God’s Governor: George Grey and Racial Amalgamation in New Zealand.” PhD diss., Department of History, University of Otago, Otago, NZ, 2005. Grey, George. “On the Social Life of the Ancient Inhabitants of New Zealand, and on the National Character It Was Likely to Form.” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London NS I (1868–69): 333–64. ———. The Irish Land Question. Being a Reprint of Letters to the London Daily News in 1869. Auckland, 1889 [Orig. pub 1869]. ———. Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealanders. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1906. ———. Nga Mahi a Nga Tupuna, 3rd ed. New Plymouth, NZ: Board of Maori Ethnological Research, 1928. Gump, James. “The Imperialism of Cultural Assimilation: Sir George Grey’s Encounter with the Maori and the Xhosa, 1845–1868.” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 89–106. Hawtrey, Montague, and J.G. Reverend. Justice to New Zealand, Honor to England. London: Rivingtons, 1861. Hickford, Mark. “ ‘Vague Native Rights to Land’: British Imperial Policy on Native Title and Custom in New Zealand, 1837–53.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38, no. 3 (2010): 175–206. ———. Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. “Framing and Reframing the ‘Agon’: Contesting Narratives and Counternarratives on Maori Property Rights and Political Constitutionalism 1840–1861.” In Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire 1500–1920, edited by Saliha Belmessous, 152–81. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hill, Richard S. Policing the Colonial Frontier: The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and Racial Control in New Zealand, 1767–1867. Wellington, NZ: V.R. Ward, Government Printer, 1986. Keenan, Danny. Wars without End: The Land Wars in Nineteenth Century New Zealand. Rosedale, NZ: Penguin, 2009. Kerr, Donald Jackson. Amassing Treasures for All Times: Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector. Otago, NZ: Otago University Press, 2006. Lester, Alan and Fae Dussart. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. McLintock, Alexander H. Crown Colony Government in New Zealand. Wellington, NZ: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1958. Merivale, Herman. Lectures on Colonization. New York: Augustus Kelley, 1861 [reprint 1968]. O’Malley, Vincent. “English Law and the Maori Response: A  Case Study from the Runanga System in Northland 1861–65.” Journal of the Polynesian Society  16, no. 1 (March 2007): 7–33. ———. Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The Contest for Colonial New Zealand. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams EBooks, 2015. ———. The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642–1840. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2012. Orange, Claudia. The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington: Bridget Williams, 1987. Rees, William Lee. The Life and Times of Sir George Grey. London: Hutchinson, 1892.

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Rutherford, James. Sir George Grey K.C.B., 1812–1898: A Study in Colonial Government. London: Cassell, 1961. Sharp, Andrew. Justice and the Maori: The Philosophy and Practice of Maori Claims in New Zealand Since 1970, 2nd ed. Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1997. Swainson, William. Lectures on the Colonization of New Zealand. London: Smith, Elder, 1856. Ward, Alan. A Show of Justice: Racial Amalgamation in Nineteenth Century New Zealand. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Wards, Ian. The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand 1832–1851. Wellington, NZ: Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, New Zealand Government, 1968. Whately, Richard. Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews. London: Parker, Son and Bourn, 1831.

Chapter 6 Violence and the coming of colonial order Adhikari, Mohamed, ed. Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Meet. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2014. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, 1969. Asad, Talal. “Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 (2015): 390–427. Atkinson, Alan. “Historians and Moral Disgust.” In Frontier Conflict, edited by Attwood Bain and S.G. Foster, 113–19. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003. Banivanua-Mar, Tracey. Violence and Colonial Dialogue. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. Barta, Tony. “ ‘They Appear Actually to Vanish from the Face of the Earth’: Aborigines and the European Project in Australia Felix.” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (December 2008): 519–39. Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bride, Thomas Francis. Letters from Victorian Pioneers: Being a Series of Papers on the Early Occupation of the Colony, the Aborigines Etc. Addressed by Victorian Pioneers to His Excellence Charles Joseph LaTrobe. Edited by C.E. Sayers. London: Heinemann, 1969. Brodie, Nicholas. The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion. Richmond, VIC: Hardie Grant Books, 2017. Buchanan, Alexander. “Diary of a Journey Overland from Sydney to Adelaide with Sheep, July–December  1839.” Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Proceedings XXIII (1921–22). Bul, Paul. “Colonial Memory and Forgetting in the Netherlands and Indonesia.” In Colonial Counter Insurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia, edited by Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Burke, Heather, Bryce Barker, and Lynley Wallis. “Betwixt and Between: Trauma, Survival and the Aboriginal Troopers of the Queensland Native Mounted Police.” Journal of Genocide Research (March 2016): 1–16. doi:10.1080/14623528.2020.1735147. Burke, Heather, and Amy Roberts. “The Space of Conflict: Aboriginal/ European Interactions and Frontier Violence on the Western Central Urray, South Australia, 1830–41.” Aboriginal History 40 (2016): 145–79. www.jstor.org/stable/90000794. Cannon, Michael. Who Killed the Kooris? Port Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1990. Clark, Ian D. Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859. Canberra, NZ: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies, 1995.

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Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2014. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity, 2001. Connor, John. The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002. Curr, Edward M. Recollections of Squatting in Victoria Then Called the Port Phillip District from 1841 to 1851. Melbourne: George Robertson, 1883. Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Edmonds, Penelope. “The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier: Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces Around Earl Melbourne.” In Making Settler Colonial Space, edited by Tracey Banivanua and Penelope Edmonds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Edmonds, Penelope, and Anna Johnston. “Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History  17, no. 1 (Spring 2016). http:// muse.jhu.edu.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/article/613279. Edmonds, Penelope, and Amanda Nettelbeck. Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economics of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Evans, Julie. “Where Lawlessness Is Law: The Settler Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 30 (2009): 3–22. Evans, Raymond. “The Country Has Another Past: Queensland and the History Wars.” In Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, edited by Ann Curthoys, John Docker, and Francis Peters-Little, 9–38. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2010. Evans, Raymond, and Peter Orsted Jensen. ‘I Cannot Say the Numbers That Were Killed’: Assessing Violence Mortality on the Queensland Frontier. The Australian Historical Association, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Fenton, James. Bush Life in Tasmania Fifty Years Ago. London: Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1964 [reprint]. Foster, Robert, Rick Hosking, and Amanda Nettelbeck. Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2001. Foster, Robert, and Amanda Nettelbeck. Out of the Silence. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2012. Gardener, P.D. Gippsland Massacres: The Destruction of the Kurnai Tribes 1800–1860. Warragul, VIC: Warrigal Education Centre, 1983. Hawdon, Joseph. The Journal of a Journey from New South Wales to Adelaide Performed in 1838. Melbourne: Georgian House, 1952. Hayward, Frederick Johnson. “Reminiscences.” Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch, Journal XXIX (1927–28). Hemming, Steven. “Conflict Between Aborigines and Europeans Along the Murray River and the Darling to the Great South Bend 1830–1841.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of South Australia 22, no. 1 (1984): 1–18. Johnston, Anna. “The Language of Colonial Violence: Lancelot Threlkeld, Humanitarian Narratives and the New South Wales Law Courts.” Law and History, no. 72 (2017): 73–102. Lifton, Robert J. Home from War. Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims Nor Executioners. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Lydon, Jane. “The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (24 February 2014): 46–70. doi:www. tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/1031461X.2013.877503.

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MacGuire, John. “Judicial Violence and the Civilizing Process: Race and the Transition from Public to Private Executions in Colonial Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 29, no. 111 (1998): 187–209. Meyrick, F.J. Life in the Bush (1840–1847): A  Memoir of Henry Howard Meyrick. London: Nelson, 1939. Morris, Barry. “Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror.” Journal of Australian Studies 16, no. 35 (2009): 72–87. Moses, Dirk, ed. Colony and Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghan, 2008. ———. “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History.” In Genocide. Critical Studies in Historical Concepts. Volume III: Colonial and Imperial Genocides, edited by A. Dirk Moses. London: Routledge, 2012. Muckle, Adrian. “Killing the ‘Fantome Canaque’: Evoking and Invoking the Possibility of Settler Revolt in New Caledonia 1853–1915.” Journal of Pacific History 37, no. 1 (2002): 25–44. doi:10.1080/00223340220139252. Nettelbeck, Amanda. “Mythologizing Frontier Violence: Narrative Versions of the Rufus River Conflict, 1841–1899.” Journal of Australian Studies 23, no. 61 (1999): 75–82. ———. “Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier.” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016): 209–24. doi:10.1080/1031461X.2016. 1153120. Nettelbeck, Amanda, and Robert Foster. In the Name of the Law: William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2007. Price, Richard. “The Psychology of Colonial Violence.” In Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World, edited by Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Reynolds, Henry. Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987. ———. Forgotten Wars. Sydney: New South, 2013. Ryan, Lyndall. “Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania 1823–34: A Case Study of the Meander River Region, June 1827.” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (December 2008): 479–99. ———. “ ‘Hard Evidence’: The Debate about Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania.” In Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, edited by Ann Curthoys, Francis Peters-Little, and John Docker, 39–50. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2010. ———. “Settler Massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851.” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 3 (September 2010): 257–73. ———. “Settler Massacre on the Australian Colonial Frontier 1836–1851.” In Theaters of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity Throughout History, edited by Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan. New York: Berghahn, 2012. ———. “List of Multiple Killings of Aborigines in Tasmania 1804–1835.” www.mass violence.org. Semelin, Jacques. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Shellam, Tiffany. “Making Sense of Law and Disorder.” Anthropology and History 18, no. 1 (March 2007): 75–88. Sturma, Michael. “Myall Creek and the Psychology of Mass Murder.” Journal of Australian Studies 9, no. 16 (1985): 62–70. Taussig, Michael. “Culture of Terror—Space of Death Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History  26 (1984): 467–97. Taylor, Rebe. “Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self-Determination In Tasmanian Historiography.” History Compass 11, no. 6 (2013): 405–18.

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Vogan, A.J. The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1890. Wood, Rebecca. “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 6, no. 3 (December 2009). doi:10.2104/ha090067.

Chapter 7 Law and sovereignty Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Attwood, Bain. “The Law of the Land, or the Law of the Land: History, Law and Narrative in a Settler Society.” History Compass 2 (2004): 1–30. ———. “Returning to the Past: The South Australian Colonising Commission, the Colonial Office and Aboriginal Title.” Journal of Legal History 34, no. 1 (2013): 50–82. ———. “Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in Land in New South Wales.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 1 (2014): 171– 92. doi:www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/03086534.2013. 868215. ———. Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Studies in Comparative World History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Benton, Lauren, and Lisa Ford. Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Borch, Marete. “Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius.” Australian Historical Studies, no. 117 (2001): 223–39. Cassidy, Julie. “A Reappraisal of Aboriginal Policy in Colonial Australia: Imperial and Colonial Instruments and Leglislation Recognizing the Special Rights and Status of Australian Aboriginals.” Journal of Legal History 10 (1989): 365–79. Cooke, Simon. “Arguments for the Survival of Aboriginal Customary Law in Victoria: A Casenote on R v Peter (1860) and R v Jemmy (1860).” Australian Journal of Legal History 5 (1999): 201–41. Davis, Susanne. “Aborigines, Murder and the Criminal Law in Early Port Phillip 1841– 1851.” Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand 22 (1987): 313–34. Dorsett, Shaunnagh. “Travelling Laws: Burton and the Draft Act for the Protection and Amelioration of the Aborigines 1838 (NSW).” In Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagement and Legacy, edited by Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren. London: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Douglas, Heather, and Mark Finnane. “Obstacles to ‘a Proper Exercise of Jurisdiction’— Sorcery and Criminal Justice in the Settler—Indigenous Encounter in Australia.” In Between Indigenous and Settler Government, edited by Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse. London: Routledge, 2013. Edmonds, Penelope. “Sovereignty Performances, Sovereignty Testings: The Queen’s Currency and Imperial Pedagogies on Australia’s South-Eastern Settler Frontiers.” In Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, edited by Sara Carter and Maria Nugent. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Evans, Julie. “Colonialism and the Rule of Law: The Case of South Australia.” In Empire and Crime 1840–1940, edited by Barry Dunstall and Godfrey Graeme, 57–77. Cullompton, Devon: Willan, 2005.

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———. “Where Lawlessness Is Law: The Settler Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 30 (2009): 3–22. Evans, Julie, and Tessa Fluance. “Securing the Settler Polity: Martial Law and the Aboriginal Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land.” Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2013): 1–22. Finnane, Mark. “The Tides of Customary Law.” Australia and New Zealand Law and History E-Journal (2006). www.anzlhsejournal.auckland.ac.nz/pdfs_2006/Keynote_1_Finnane.pdf. ———. “Settler Justice and Aboriginal Homicide in Late Colonial Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (2011): 244–59. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. “Liberalism and Empire in International Law.” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 122–41. ———. Sovereignty, Property and Empire, 1500–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ford, Lisa. Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia 1788– 1836. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Ford, Lisa, and Tim Rowse. Between Indigenous and Settler Governance. London: Routledge, 2013. Hackshaw, Frederika. “Nineteenth Century Notions of Aboriginal Title and Their Influence on the Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.” In Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, edited by I.H. Kawharu. Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hickford, Mark. “ ‘Decidedly the Most Interesting Savages on the Globe’: An Approach to the Intellectual History of Maori Property Rights, 1837–53.” History of Political Thought XXVII, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 122–67. ———. Lords of the Land: Indigenous Property Rights and the Jurisprudence of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. “ ‘Settling Some Very Important Principles of Colonial Law’: Three ‘Forgotten’ Cases of the 1840s.” Victoria University Wellington Law Review 35, no. 1 (2004): 1–30. Hunter, Ann. “The Boundaries of Colonial Criminal Law in Relation to Inter-Aboriginal Conflict (Inter-Se Offenses) in Western Australia in the 1830s and 1840s.” Australian Journal of Legal History 8, no. 2 (2004): 215–45. ———. “The Origin and Debate Surrounding the Development of Aboriginal Evidence Acts in Western Australia in the Early 1840s.” Law Review 9 (2007): 115–45. Hunter, Ian. “Natural Law, Historiography, and Aboriginal Sovereignty.” Legal History 11, no. 2 (2007): 137–67. Keal, Paul. European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kercher, Bruce. “Native Title in the Shadows: The Origins of the Myth of Terra Nullius in Early New South Wales Courts.” In Colonialism in the Modern World, edited by Gregory Blue and Martin Bunton. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civiliser of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kostal, R.W. “A  Jurisprudence of Power: Martial Law and the Ceylon Controversy of 1848–51.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 28, no. 1 (January 2000): 1–34. McClendon, Thomas. White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010. McGrath, Ann, ed. Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995. McHugh, P.G. “Law, History and the Treaty of Waitangi.” New Zealand Journal of History 38 (1997): 38–57.

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———. Aboriginal Societies and the Common Law: A  History of Sovereignty, Status and SelfDetermination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “The Politics of Historiography and the Taxonomies of the Colonial Past: Law, History and the Tribes.” British Legal History Conference, Exeter, 2009. Merry, Sally. “Legal Pluralism.” Law and Society 22, no. 5 (1988): 869–96. Nettelbeck, Amanda, and Russell Smandych. Fragile Settlements: Aboriginal Peoples, Law, and Resistance in South-West Australia and Canada. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2016. Pitts, Jennifer. Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Ray, Arthur. “Aboriginal Title and Treaty Rights Research.” New Zealand Journal of History 37, no. 1 (2003): 5–21. Renwick, William, ed. Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights: The Treaty of Waitangi in International Contexts. Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, 1991. Reynolds, Henry. The Law of the Land. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1987. Reynolds, Henry, and Jamie Dalziel. “Aborigines and Pastoral Leases: Imperial and Colonial Policy 1826–1855.” University of New South Wales Law Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 315–77. Shellam, Tiffany. “Our Natives’ and ‘Wild Blacks’: Enumeration as a Statistical Dimension of Sovereignty in Colonial Western Australia.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (2012). doi:10.1353/cch.2012.0033. Smandych, Russell. “Contemplating the Testimony of ‘Others’: James Stephen and the Fate of Australian Aboriginal Evidence Acts, Circa 1839–1849.” Australian Journal of Legal History 8 (2004): 237–83. Walters, Mark D. “The Extension of Colonial Criminal Jurisdiction Over the Aboriginal Peoples of Upper Canada: Reconsidering the Shawanakiski Case (1822–26).” University of Toronto Law Journal 46, no. 2 (1996): 273–310. Ward, Damen. “A Means and Measure of Civilisation: Colonial Authorities and Indigenous Law in Australasia.” History Compass (Australia) 1 (2003): 1–24. ———. “Constructing British Authority in Australasia: Charles Cooper and the Legal Status of Aborigines in the South Australian Supreme Court, c. 1840–60.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34, no. 4 (December 2006): 483–504. ———. “Civil Jurisdiction, Settler Politics, and the Colonial Constitution, c. 1840–1858.” Victoria University Wellington Law Review 39 (2008–9): 497–531.

Chapter 8 Settler politics and the coming of a new racial order Armitage, David. “John Locke: Theorist of Empire?” In Empire and Modern Political Thought, edited by Sankar Muthu, 84–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Banner, Stuart. “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia.” American Society for Legal History 21, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 95–131. Bell, Duncan. “Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought.” Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 281–98. Borch, Marete. “Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius.” Australian Historical Studies, no. 117 (2001): 223–39. Boucher, Leigh, and Lynette Russell, eds. Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth Century Victoria. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2015. Calder, J.E. Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits etc., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania. Hobart: Henn, 1875.

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Curthoys, Ann. “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Durham Report, Indigenous Dispossession, and Self-Government for Britain’s Settler Colonies.” In With and without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History, edited by Adele Perry, Karen Dubinsky, and Henry Yu. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Curthoys, Ann, and Jesse Mitchell. Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-­Government in Colonial Australia, 1830–1890. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Dilke, Charles Wentworth. Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869. Edmonds, Penelope. ‘We Think That This Subject of the Native Races Should Be Thoroughly Gone into at the Forthcoming Exhibition,’ the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition. Melbourne: Monash University Epress, 2006. Evans, Julie, and Patricia Grimshaw. Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius.” Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (April 2007): 1–15. ———. “Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide. Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by A. Dirk Moses, 55–80. New York: Berghahn, 2008. ———. “Liberalism and Empire in International Law.” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 122–41. Froude, James Anthony. Oceana or England and Her Colonies. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1886. Hall, Catherine. “The Nation Within and Without.” In Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, edited by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, 179–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Oxford: Polity, 2002. Howitt, William. Land, Labour and Gold or, Two Years in Victoria with Visits to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land, vol. I–II. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1972 [reprint]. Hutchinson, Sam. “Humanitarian Critique and the Settler Fantasy: The Australian Press Settler Colonial Consciousness During the Waikato War, 1863–1864.” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 68–83. Koditschek, Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Mandler, Peter. “ ‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought.” In History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1850, edited by Richard Whatmore, Stefan Collini, and Brian Young, 224–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mantena, Karuna. Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Mill, John Stuart. “Civilization.” In Dissertations and Discussions, edited by John Stuart Mill. London: Routledge, 1905. Mitchell, Jesse. In Good Faith: Governing Indigenous Australians through God, Charity and Empire 1825–1855. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2011. Muthu, Sankar. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———, ed. Empire in Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Sartori, Andrew. “The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission.” Journal of Modern History 78 (September 2006): 623–42. Schultz, Bart, and Georgios Varouxakis. Utilitarianism and Empire. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.

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Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982. Trollope, Anthony. Australia and New Zealand, vol. 1–3. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1873. ———. South Africa, vol. I–II. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Woollacott, Angela. Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self Government and Imperial Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Chapter 9 Legacies in modern indigenous politics Alfred, Taiaiake, and Jeff Corntassel. “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism.” Government and Opposition 40, no. 4 (2005): 597–614. Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Attwood, Bain. “The Paradox of Aboriginal History.” Thesis Eleven 38 (1994): 118–37. ———, ed. In the Age of Mabo. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996. ———. Thinking Black William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004. ———. “Settling Histories, Unsettling Pasts: Reconciliation and Justice in a Settler Society.” In Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies Are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past, edited by Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer, 217–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Attwood, Bain, and Andrew Markus. The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999. Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Belchem, John. Before the Windrush: Race Relations in Twentieth-Century Liverpool. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. Belgrave, Michael. Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2005. Borrows, John. “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government.” In Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada: Essays on Law, Equity and Respect for Difference, edited by Michael Asch. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1997. Brock, Peggy. Outback Ghettos: Aborigines, Institutionalisation, and Survival. Studies in Australian History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Brodie, Nicholas Dean. “Quaker Dreaming: The ‘Lost’ Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land.” Journal of Religious History (2015). doi:10.111/1467.9809.12305. Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1982. Chong, Hannah. “Reconciliation in Settler Colonial States: A Study of the Political Apology.” Yale Review of International Studies (September 2018). http://yris.yira.org/essays/2597. Coombes, Annie E., ed. Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Edmonds, Penelope. “Tame Iti at the Confiscation Line: Contesting the Consensus Politics of the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa New Zealand.” In Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, edited by Kate Darian Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. Foster, Robert. “ ‘His Majesty’s Most Gracious and Benevolent Intentions’: South Australia’s Foundation, the Idea of ‘Difference’, and Aboriginal Rights.” Journal of Australian Cultural History (1998): 105–20.

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———. “The Legend of James Brown.” Australian Historical Studies 29 (1998): 210–29. Gibbs, Meredith. “Justice as Reconciliation and Restoring Mana in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process.” Political Science 58, no. 2 (December 2006): 15–27. Goodall, Heather. “ ‘Land in Our Own Country’: The Aboriginal Land Rights Movement in South-Eastern Australia, 1860–1914.” Aboriginal History 14, no. 1 (1990): 2–24. ———. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996. Havemann, Paul. Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hill, Richard S., and Brigitte Bonisch-Brednich. “Fitting Aotearoa into New Zealand: Politico-Cultural Change in a Modern Bicultural Nation.” In Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies Are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past, edited by Manfred Berg and Bernd Schaefer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ivison, Duncan, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders, eds. Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Johnson, John T. “Indigeneity’s Challenges to the Settler State: Decentering the ‘Imperial Binary’.” In Making Settler Colonial Space. Perspectives of Race, Place and Identity, edited by Tracey Banivanua and Penelope Edmonds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Johnson, Miranda. “Reconciliation, Indigeneity and Postcolonial Nationhood in Settler States.” Journal of Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 187–201. ———. The Land Is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ———. “The Case of the Million Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract.” American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (February 2019): 56–85. Keal, Paul. European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Laidlaw, Zoe, and Alan Lester, eds. Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. McGregor, Russell. “Progress and Protest: Aboriginal Activism in the 1930s.” Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 101 (1993): 555–68. Nettelbeck, Amanda. “ ‘We Are Sure of Your Sympathy’: Indigenous Uses of the Politics of Protection in Nineteenth-Century Australia and Canada.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History  17, no. 1 (Spring 2016). http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy-um.researchport. umd.edu/article/613284. Pulitano, Elvira, ed. Indigenous Rights in the Age of the UN Declaration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Reynolds, Henry. “Frontier History After Mabo.” Journal of Australian Studies 20 (1996): 4–11. doi:10.1080/14443059609391737. Rhook, Nadia, and Tracey Banivanua Mar. “Counter Networks of Empire.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (Summer 2018). doi:10.1353/cch.2018.0009. Russell, Peter H. Recognizing Aboriginal Title: The Mabo Case and Indigenous Resistance to English-Settler Colonialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Scholtz, Christa. Negotiating Claims: The Emergence of Indigenous Land Claim Negotiating Policies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Sharp, Andrew. Justice and the Maori: The Philosophy and Practice of Maori Claims in New Zealand Since 1970, 2nd ed. Auckland, NZ: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sharp, Andrew, and Paul McHugh, eds. Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past—a New Zealand Commentary. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 2001. Short, Damien. Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

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Simpson, Gerry. “Mabo, International Law, Terra Nullius and the Stories of Settlement: An Unresolved Jurisprudence.” Melbourne University Law Review 19 (1993): 195–210. Ward, Alan. National Overview. Volume I: Waitangi Tribunal Rangahaua Whanui Series. Auckland: Waitangi Tribunal, 1997. ———. An Unsettled History: Treaty Claims in New Zealand Today. Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 1999. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N., and Lynn Hunt. Human Rights and Revolutions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Whitlock, Gillian. “Active Remembrance: Testimony, Memoir and the Work of Reconciliation.” In Rethinking Settler Colonialism, edited by Annie E. Coombes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.

Chapter 10 Legacies in imperial culture Canny, Nicholas, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I: The Origins of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Epstein, James. Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Evans, Raymond. “The Country Has Another Past: Queensland and the History Wars.” In Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, edited by Ann Curthoys, John Docker, and Francis Peters-Little, 9–38. Canberra: ANU Epress, 2010. Gildea, Robert. Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Grant, Kevin. A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Hall, Catherine. “The Nation Within and Without.” In Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, edited by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Heartfield, James. The Aborigines’ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo, 1836–1909. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Helly, Dorothy O. Livingstone’s Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian Mythmaking. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987. Huzzey, Richard. Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Jeal, Tim. Livingstone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. ———. Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Johnson, Miranda. “The Case of the Million Dollar Duck: A  Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract.” American Historical Review  124, no. 1 (February 2019): 56–85. Lewis, Joanna. Empire of Sentiment: The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Livingstone, David. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. New York: Harper and Bros., 1858. Lydon, Jane. “The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia.” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (24 February 2014): 46–70. doi:www. tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/1031461X.2013.877503.

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Mackenzie, John M., ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. ———. David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996. O’Brien, Anne. “Humanitarianism and Reparation in Colonial Australia.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, no. 2 (2011). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_ colonialism_and_colonial_history/v012/12.2.o-brien.html. Porter, Bernard. The Absent Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Schofield, Camilla. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Schwarz, Bill. Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Semmel, Bernard. Democracy versus Empire: The Jamaica Riots and the Governor Eyre Controversy. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Thompson, Andrew, ed. Oxford History of the British Empire: Companion Series. Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Thorne, Susan. Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in NineteenthCentury England. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999. Todd, Selina. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010. London: John Murray, 2014. Twells, Alison. The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Vogan, A.J. The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1890. Ward, Stuart, and Astrid Rasch, eds. Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Wills, Clair. Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017.

INDEX

Aboriginal Evidence Acts 218 – 20 Aboriginal Rights Movements: Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Movements Aborigines Committee: Committee for the Care of the Aborigines Aborigines Protection Society 53, 57, 214, 222, 266fn.55 Amos, Adam 84 anti-slavery 57, 66, 241, 299, 302, 303, 305, 315, 316 Anstey, Thomas 86, 90, 93 anxiety: in empire, 24, 31, 94 – 95, 96, 99, 100, 113, 171fn.58, 185, 187, 196, 205fn.46, 261fn.10; and volatility 37, 41, 42, 60, 169fn36, 186; and violence 185, 186 Arthur, Sir George 28 – 30, 34, 68, 84, 85, 87, 100, 101, 106fn.15, 183, 190; and Aboriginal people 85, 86, 89 – 92, 96 – 97, 102 – 104, 173, 193; and genocide 80, 85; and Protection 112 – 13, 123; and Robinson 97 – 98; search for policy 85, 86 – 88, 90 – 92, 97 – 98, 300 – 301; trauma 101 – 102, 104, 190, 205fn.49; see also conciliation assimilation 10, 35, 121, 147, 160, 215 – 16, 269, 270, 279 Australian Aboriginal land rights 103, 137fn. 44, 169fn.36, 211 – 12, 227, 234fn.57, 234fn.58, 238, 274, 280, 281, 284; see also Indigenous land rights; Law; Maori land rights Australian Aboriginal people 24, 55, 59, 63, 112, 133, 188, 243, 249, 259, 274,

302, 305,319; and cultural contact 18 – 22, 31, 35, 36 – 37, 42, 51, 55, 64, 67, 68, 93; and conciliation 88 – 82, 86 – 87, 91, 93, 97, 122; and cooperation 21, 35, 109fr.36, 195; genocide 80, 193, 289; and elimination 9 – 10, 165fn.3, 102; and empire 2 – 4, 7 – 11, 15, 16 – 20, 22 – 26, 32; and English law 214, 216 – 25, 232fn.24, 32; fear of 187, 196, 205fn.43; and explorers 23 – 24; and humanitarianism 51,53 – 54, 59, 67, 79, 91, 94, 102, 128, 281; negotiations with 22 – 23, 89, 99 – 100; policy towards 53, 67 – 68, 808, 84, 96, 94, 96 – 97, 104, 112, 113, 119, 121, 127, 137fn.45, 164 – 65, 224, 226, 228; and politics 133, 209, 272, 280, 286, 294 – 90, 295fn.47, 319; racial views of 35, 41 – 42, 56, 59, 63, 83, 94, 95 – 97, 144, 190 – 91, 198, 242, 259; and settler politics 237 – 78, 243, 248 – 50, 263fn.28, 269; and sovereignty 211; and violence 20, 64, 69, 72, 80, 85, 87, 93, 103, 125, 126, 173, 185, 194 – 95, 197; see also Arthur, Sir George; conciliation; Indigenous peoples; Maori, violence Australian Aboriginal reserves 119 – 20, 122 – 23, 127 – 128, 130, 137fn.50, 138fn.60, 278, 293fn.22; Grey, Sir George and 157; humanitarianism and 250, 277; see also; Coranderrk; Poonindie; Raukkan; Protection Austin, J.L. 211

Index  353

Backhouse, James 55, 93, 125, 247 Bannister, Saxe 53, 73fn.8, 81, 113, 216, 285, 318 Bass Straits 20, 31 – 32, 33, 35, 52, 68, 92, 242 Batman, John 94, 10, 243, 249; and aborigines 93 – 96, 109fn.42 Belich, James 157 Bentham, Jeremy 60, 253, 254 Bigge, John 28, 29 Bigge Commission 29 Biraban 35, 120 Black Line 85 – 86, 92 – 93, 95, 102, 102frn.21, 192, 193, 201, 207 Black Tom see Kickerterpoller Black War 29, 80, 85, 93, 97, 101, 307 blindsight 190 Bonwick, James 93, 301, 307 Boyd Affair 41, 49fn.60 Brodie, Nicholas 35, 301, 307 British national identity 252, 257, 309, 319 Bromley, Captain 67 Brown, Governor Thomas Gore 156, 158, 159 Brown, James 198 – 99 Brown, John 268 Bourke, Sir Richard 33, 55, 125, 182 Bull, John Wrathall 157, 198, 200 Burke, Edmund 60, 253, 254, 310 Burton, William 222, 223 Bushrangers 20, 29 – 30, 84 – 85, 93 Crawford, James 243 Calder Case (British Columbia, 1973) 274, 283, 285, 317 Calder, James Erskine 196, 200, 242 – 43, 262fn.16 Carlyle, Thomas 309 Césaire, Aimé 8 christianity 61, 69, 71, 73fn.9, 144, 155; and Indigenous people 24, 59, 69, 116, 129 – 30, 281, 313 civilizing process 16, 64, 69, 115, 120, 147, 184, 215, 218; see also humanitarianism Clarke, George 116, 147, 160, 221, 275 coercion 32, 65, 69, 89, 120, 237, 238, 303 – 303; see also conciliation, Protection, violence Collins, David 28, 88 colonial knowledge 38 – 39, 116 colonial state, 120, 176, 185, 227, 240, 241, 244; weakness of 43, 115, 146, 176, 179, 202fn.14; see also settler politics; settler state; violence Committee for the Care of the Aborigines 97, 102, 300

conciliation 16, 24, 37, 43, 94, 97, 102 – 103, 116 – 17; and coercion 81, 83, 85 – 89, 93, 203fn.27; and indigenous people 10, 177, 189, 195; policy of 80 – 84, 90, 92 – 93, 96 – 97, 98 – 100, 191 constitution of 1846 (New Zealand) 26, 153 Coranderrk 128, 130, 278 convicts 20, 28 – 29, 30, 79, 84, 90, 176, 190, 206fn.62; and Aboriginal people 20, 35, 36, 97, 103 Cook, Captain James 18, 22 Cooper, Charles 222, 224 Cooper, William 278, 280, 281 Cooper v. Stuart 228, 229, 234fn.58, 274; see also Terra Nullius compassion fatigue 66, 67, 69, 77fn.42 cultural relativism 39, 40, 59, 63, 66, 216, 302 Curr, Edward Jr. 185, 187 customary law 71, 213, 215, 216, 220, 224 – 25, 285, 286; see also law; Maori Dawes, William 33 Dene people 274, 317 Dilke, Charles 200, 257, 258, 259, 300 disorder 27 – 28, 30 – 31, 33, 37, 81, 152, 208, 220, 248; and New Zealand land market 154, 157, 226 dispossession 235, 260fn1; and Australian Aboriginal people 198, 249, 250, 279, 307, 308; and law 227 – 28; and Maori 70, 138fn.59, 139, 149 – 58, 162 – 64, 290; and violence 173 distancing see violence Dorsett, Shaunnagh 147, 208, 223 Dredge, John 113, 122, 123, 238 Durham Report 107fn.15, 235 Elbourne, Elizabeth 74fn.18, 313 emotions 60, 62 – 63, 64, 66, 192, 204fn36, 206fn.56; and Aboriginal people 36, 37, 51, 66, 185, 188; and humanitarianism 67, 96 empathy 58, 69, 77fn42,43, 186, 192, 289, 315; and Aboriginal people 57, 63, 66 – 71, 102, 238, 289, 301; in eighteenth century thought 61 – 64; see also humanitarianism encounters: imperial encounters Enlightenment 14, 59 – 60, 71, 211, 255, 288, 311 Eumarrah 90, 92 – 93, 97, 99 evangelicalism 59 explorers 22 – 23, 24, 40, 177, 314 Eyre, Edward John 6, 215, 252, 254, 299, 302, 312; and Aboriginal people 34 – 35, 64, 69, 82, 106fn.10, 213; as explorer

354 Index

23, 24, 39, 69; at Moorunde 34, 64, 69; and humanitarianism 51, 63, 64, 91, 218, 238 – 39; in New Zealand 155, 246, 263fn.27 Fanon, Frantz 8 fear see violence Fenton, Francis D. 162 Fitzroy, Governor Robert 116, 147, 152, 156, 221 Flinders Island 21, 87, 92 – 93, 110fn.58, 112 – 13, 124, 128, 242; and Aboriginal death 113, 190, 307; and removal 52, 101, 1919, 261fn.4 food distribution 70, 82 – 83, 88, 106fn.12, 119; and conciliation 67, 92, 189; and governance 82 – 83 forgetting 191, 192, 206fn.52, 226, 227, 270, 289; see also silence Foucault, Michel 7 Franklin, Sir John 30, 103, 104, 242 frontier, idea of 2 – 3, 15 Fyans, Foster 55, 182 Gawler, Sir George 30, 82, 194, 213 – 14 genocide 9, 80, 193, 289 George, Henry 151 Gipps, Sir George 113, 121, 123, 126, 153, 241 Gladstone, William 143, 299, 304 Glenelg, Lord (Charles Grant) 102, 103, 104, 113, 116, 122, 246, 250 Godlonton, Robert 244, 246, 248 Gove land rights case 274 governmentality 7 – 8 Grant, Susannah 142, 146, 168fn.24 Grey, Henry George, 3rd. Earl 143, 153, 170fn.46 Grey, Sir George 6, 11 – 12, 30, 34, 34, 43, 65, 70, 82, 175, 189, 214, 236, 246, 260, 318; and 1846 constitution 153 – 54, 256; and 1840 memorandum 145 – 47, 168fn.25, 216 – 17, 221, 232fn.36; and Aboriginal culture 18, 22, 33, 38, 40, 59, 63, 83, 144 – 45, 219, 238 – 39, 256; character 2, 142 – 43; and conciliation 177 – 78; as cultural relativist 143 – 44, 216; as explorer 23, 39; as Governor of New Zealand 147 – 49, 152 – 57, 159 – 64; as Governor of South Australia 30, 82, 177 – 82, 219; and humanitarianism 51, 83, 91, 145, 232fn.33, 237, 239; intellectual formation 143 – 44, 151; interpretations of 6, 11, 142 – 43, 154, 165fn.4, 166fn.12, 166fn.14, 176fn.17, 197; land policy 149 – 57; and law

147 – 49, 168fn.29, 216, 221, 226; and Maori 25 – 26, 40, 140, 144, 152 – 62, 221; policies 82, 134fn.17, 140, 147 – 49, 159 – 61; and race 39, 59, 63 – 64, 144 – 45; and racial amalgamation 52, 139 – 47, 160, 164; and violence 178, 181 – 82, 215 Grey Memorandum see Grey, Sir George Grotius, Hugo 210 Guha, Ranajit 15 Hadfield, Reverend Octavius 40, 43 Hale, Bishop Matthew 128, 131 Hastings, Warren 60, 311 Hawker, George 175, 179 – 82 Hawtrey, Montague 73fn.8, 141, 232fn.24 heroes 29, 299, 310, 312 Hobart 28, 29, 84, 99, 102, 262fn.16 Howe, Michael 28 humane policy 16, 50, 53, 54, 79 – 80, 51, 104, 164, 224, 237 – 39, 268, 318 humanitarianism 6, 8, 66, 105fn.2, 118, 139, 164, 237, 254, 241, 278, 281, 299; and Aboriginal politics 278, 281; anxiety 66 – 70, 71, 255; discourse of 4 – 5, 11, 50 – 51, 52 – 54, 55 – 57, 237, 252, 254 – 55, 257, 300, 302, 304 – 305; and empathy 64, 67 – 69; and Enlightenment 60 – 62; and evangelicalism 58 – 60; and governance 51 – 58; and imperial culture 300 – 307; late nineteenth century 308 – 18; narratives of 93, 102, 299, 300, 301, 310; and optimism 65, 67, 71, 141, 144, 164, 239, 252; psychology of 58 – 66; settlers and 243, 248, 250, 269, 307; utopianism 52, 72fn5, 91; see also cultural relativism; Livingstone, David; Protectors of Aborigines; universal humanity Hutt, John 67, 76fn.12, 116, 217, 218 imperial culture 1, 2, 215, 228, 256, 312; and humanitarianism 50, 52, 63, 237, 300, 316 – 17, 318; and Indigenous people 5, 10, 43, 258, 281; and narratives of empire 298, 299 – 300; and networks 308 – 10; and settler culture 259, 273; and violence 174, 183, 199 – 200, 306; see also humanitarianism; Livingstone, David; silence imperial encounters 2, 10, 24, 26, 43, 69, 79, 126; agency of indigenous people 8, 10, 17, 35, 38; character of 3, 10, 16, 19, 22, 41, 43, 81, 84, 238; humanitarianism and 51, 52, 55, 60, 62, 66 – 67, 71, 118,119; indigenous people

Index  355

and 15, 17 – 18, 22 – 23, 24, 36 – 37; 42, 231fn.18, 298; rituals of 22 – 23 see also intermediaries; anxiety; violence imperial gaze 38 – 41 imperial narratives 6, 9, 10, 12, 39, 50, 54, 241, 257; of Aboriginal people 68, 242,259,284; of displacement 197; humanitarian 93, 97, 99, 102, 246, 255, 299 – 303, 310; missionary 308 – 309; and national identity 197 – 98, 227, 270, 275, 288; of silence 193; of violence 180, 184, 192 – 93, 197, 198 – 99, 200, 242, 307 imperial violence: violence Indigenous land rights 70, 119, 212, 227, 269, 271, 274, 283, 317; see also Aboriginal land rights; Maori land rights Indigenous law see customary law Indigenous peoples: Australian Aboriginal people; Maori; Tasmanian Aboriginal people Indigenous peoples rights movements 271 – 80 intermediaries 21, 24, 34 – 35, 80, 86, 92, 112 intermarriage 25, 140 – 42 international law 2, 5, 209; and empire 209 – 10, 212, 225 – 26; and indigenous rights 210, 272 – 73, 284; natural rights 211 – 12, 225, 227; positivist law 210 – 11, 226 intimacy 35, 64, 65, 67, 126, 175, 185; and humanitarianism 62; and violence 176 Jorgenson, Jorgen 90 – 91, 108fn.35 Kangaroo island 19, Kaunda, Kenneth 316 – 17 Kendall, Thomas 28 Kickerterpoller 34, 70, 71, 78fn.54, 88, 90, 98, 100 King George’s Sound 18, 19, 41, 44fn.8 Kingitangi 155, 156, 158, 159, 160 – 61 Knox, Robert 309 Koditschek, Theodore 254, 257 Las Casas, Bartolomé 114, 209 La Trobe, Charles Joseph 31 land policy 40, 53, 147, 149 – 64; 169fn.36, 226, 227, 211 – 12; see also Grey, Sir George; Indigenous land rights law: and Aboriginal evidence 125 – 28, 213, 217 – 20, 224 – 25, 237; and colonial state 181 – 82, 185, 202fn14, 213and customary law 148, 157, 161 – 62, 172fn.73, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224, 215, 220 – 25, 233fn.48,

233fn.49, 236, 271, 286, 290, 293fn.21; and empire 4,5, 7, 168fn.29, 208, 213 – 15, 229; and Sir George Grey 145 – 49, 216, 219,226; indigenous people and 53, 71, 73fn.8, 83, 86, 116, 120, 131, 148, 210, 213, 214, 217 – 20, 227 – 28, 232fn24, 233fn.40, 236, 275; and Indigenous peoples rights movement 280, 282 – 86, 290; and inter se 149, 220 – 25, 233fn.40; and land 149 – 50, 158, 161, 212; and lawlessness 53, 174, 175, 176, 213, 218, 225; and Protection 120, 125; and racial amalgamation 147 – 49; and settler violence 124, 125; see also international law; land dispossession; martial law; pre-emption; resident magistrates; violence legal exceptionalism 215, 216 Lenin, Vladimir 8 Lester, Alan 113, 133 Lewis, Joanna 314, 315 liberalism 61, 183, 230fn.7, 255, 257, 304; and empire 2, 163, 237, 251 – 52, 254, 286; and Sir George Grey 151; and Indigenous politics 288, 289; see also Mill, John Stuart Livingstone, David 308, 312 – 18 Lockyer, Captain Edmund 18, 41 – 42 Lonsdale, Captain William 125 – 26, 182 Lowe, Robert 225 Mabo case 274, 284 – 86, 292fn.15, 317 Macaulay, Thomas 256 – 57 Macquarie, Governor Lachlan 81, 174, 203fn.26, 220 Mannalargenna 28, 32 Maori 18, 22, 25, 26,31, 43, 145, 216, 251, 259; and Christianity 21, 24, 116; and cultural exchange 24, 27, 32 – 33, 38 – 39, 69, 141, 142, 143, 155; and customary law 148, 157, 161, 221, 293fn.21 and economics 26, 27; and English law 147 – 49, 221, 226; and imperial power 26 – 28, 39 – 40, 43, 116, 139, 154, 155, 158 – 61; 208, 240 – 41; and land 150 – 53, 155, 156, 157, 161 – 62, 170fn.50, 212, 226; and politics 275 – 77, 280 – 84, 286; 289 – 91 Mar, Tracey Banivanua 281 Maria affair 75fn.18, 82, 177, 178, 184, 213, 222 Marsden, Samuel 45fn.12 Marshall, Chief Justice John 211, 212, 285 martial law 26, 29, 84, 87, 214, 215, 312; and Sir George Arthur 80, 85, 89, 192

356 Index

massacres 90, 107fn.19, 191, 192, 193, 197, 201fn. 2; see also Cape Grim; Myall Creek; Rufus river; violence Memmi, Albert 8 Merivale, Herman 140 – 41, 164 – 65 Meyrick, Henry 195, 206fn.63 Miago 34, 146 middle ground 27 Milenmura people 177, 214 Mill, James 253 – 54 Mill, John Stuart 252 – 54, 255, 303, 310, 311 missionaries 27, 52,58,144,198,212, 241, 248 – 49, 255; culture 46fn.288, 54, 74fn.12, 278, 308 – 309; and Indigenous peoples 21, 23, 40 – 41, 48fn.53, 71, 166fn.8, 211, 256, 278; networks 54, 308 – 10 and racial theories 168fn.3, 249; see also humanitarianism; universal humanity Moore, George 19, 21, 36 – 38, 41 – 42 Moorhouse, Matthew 34, 46, 64, 82, 117, 129, 175, 179, 180,182, 277; and Rufus river massacre 178 Moorunde 23, 34, 39, 64, 69, 81 – 83, 239, 246 Murray, Sir George 54, 87, 92, 96 music 22 – 23, 45fn.15 Myall Creek 126, 187, 194, 195, 218, 248, 244, 245 Nandy, Ashis 8 natural rights see international law Native Councils Bill (1841) 159 Native Exemption Ordinance (1844) 147, 221 Native Land Acts (1863–65) 161 Native Titles Act (1993) 285, 295fn.41 Nettelbeck, Amanda 113, 120, 133fn.7 networks 2, 24, 29, 31, 72, 116; Aboriginal people 35, 272; missionaries 116, 299, 308 – 308 New South Wales 59, 174, 182, 184, 211, 212, 217 – 20, 222, 223, 278, 280 New Zealand 24, 27, 31, 33, 43, 109fn.36, 113, 139 – 40, 141 – 42, 150 – 51, 163 – 64, 211, 221, 226 – 27, 240 – 41, 270, 275; Indigenous politics 275 – 90; see also Grey, Sir George; Maori; racial amalgamation New Zealand Company 21 153, 155 New Zealand Protectorate 116 – 17, 147, 153, 154, 160 170fn.52 Ngarrindgeri 65, 128 – 29, 130, 199 O’Halloran, Thomas 177 – 78, 184, 197, 214 optimism: see humanitarianism

Orton, Reverend Joseph 58, 65, 66, 74fn.12, 75fn.19, 115, 126, 213 Owen, Robert 52 Palawa 242, 307 pastoralism 179,188, 201fn.4, 206fn.43, 211, 212; and Aboriginal land 149, 169fn.36, 211, 212; and violence 84, 174 – 75, 187, 195, 205fn.43, 304 Parker, Edward Stone 113, 119, 124, 125, 128 Penny Richard 65, 74fn.13 Peteygarang 33 Philip, John 53, 72fn.1, 247, 269fn.30 Picton, Sir Thomas 311 – 12 Pinjarra massacre 34, 183, 203fn.27 Pirikawau 25 Poonindie 117, 128, 129 – 31, 133, 279 Port Phillip 30, 33,59, 119, 222 – 23, 238; protectorate 113, 115, 121 – 126, 128, 134, 174 positivist legal theory see international law Powell, Enoch 320, 324fn.37 power: in empire 2 – 4, 7 – 8, 9, 15 – 17, 20,21 – 24, 25, 26 – 27, 32, 43 pre-emption 150, 152, 153, 154 – 57, 158, 162, 211, 212, 226, 283; see also land policy Price, Henry 180, 182 proclamation boards 81, 91, 249 Proclamation Day 268 – 270 Proclamation of 1763 114, 283, 285, 292fn.8 Protection 53, 104, 113 – 14, 119, 131, 132, 139; coercion and 238, 249; and governance 119 – 21, 133; history 114 – 15, 118 – 19; at Port Phillip 119, 122 – 26; and social control 127 – 28, 130 – 31, 250 – 51, 277; types of 115 – 17, 121 – 22, 127 – 29; see also Port Phillip; New Zealand Protectorate Protectors of Aborigines 24, 31, 53, 113, 115, 117, 119, 122, 123, 197, 236, 300; and Aboriginal people 34 – 35, 59, 116, 128 – 29, 178; at Port Phillip 122 – 26; and social control 127, 131, 236; and violence 117, 119, 126, 132, 195 Pulkanta 34 – 35 race: early nineteenth century 4, 53, 54, 59, 60, 65, 76fn28, 127, 140, 145, 243; ideas of difference 53, 54, 59, 63 – 65, 97, 140, 144, 189, 192, 236 – 38, 252, 301; late nineteenth century 132, 163, 164 – 65, 235 – 37, 242, 252, 255, 258 – 59, 309; and settlers 247; see also universal humanity

Index  357

race relations 19. 20, 28. 32, 120, 128, 129, 138fn.59, 176, 185, 277, 278, 286, 315; cross race relations 24, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 48fn.49, 64, 93, 94, 127, 141 – 42, 143, 146, 148, 163, 166fn.7, 164fn.8, 166fn.9, 261fn3, 313; see also racial amalgamation racial amalgamation 52, 118, 139 – 40, 145, 146, 154, 163, 165fn.3, 313; idea of 140 – 42, 148, 152, 164, 250; policy of 143, 145 – 46, 147 – 49, 150; see also Grey, Sir George Raukkan 128 – 32, 278 reconciliation 14fn.13, 269, 285 – 91, 296fn.47, 300; see also Indigenous peoples rights movements resident magistrates 148, 149, 168fn.29 responsible government 57, 127, 164, 235, 251, 260fn.1 resurgence movement 290 R v Ballard 222 – 23 R v Murrell 222 – 2 R v Symonds 226 Reynolds, Henry 55, 282, 292fn.15 Risdon massacre 20, 204fn.39 Robe, Frederick 82, 219, 222 Robertson, Gilbert 34, 89, 92 Robinson, George Augustus 34, 38, 59, 71, 80, 89, 92, 110fn.58, 117,129, 178, 237; and Aboriginal culture 59, 63, 68, 72fn.5, 110fn.58, 123, 129, 166fn.7; and Aboriginal intermediaries 34 – 36, 70, 71, 98 – 100, 111fn.62, 124; and capture Tasmanian Aboriginal people 34, 58, 68, 89, 97 – 98, 101 – 102, 133fn.3, 190 – 91, 193, 205fn.49, 261fn.4; and empathy 70, 71, 238; and genocide 80, 190, 237; as humanitarian 38, 52, 63, 70 – 71, 80, 101 – 102, 129; and protection 111 – 13, 119, 122 – 23, 126, 232fn.32; Protector of Port Phillip 112 – 13, 119 – 24; psychology of 189 – 90, 193; and sealers 32, 47,fn.40 roving parties 29, 84 – 90, 93 Rufus river 23, 34, 64, 117, 175; massacre 177 – 78 Rununga councils 159, 160, 161, 162 salutary terror 118, 183 – 85, 193, 198, 214, 243; and humanitarians 73fn.4, 81, 87, 103 sealers 19 – 20, 32, 41, 68, 92 Seeley, J. R 300 Select Committee on Aborigines (1835–37) 113, 121,216 Select Committee on New Zealand (1844) 153

sentimentalism 315 Sepulveda, Juan Ginés de 114, 209 settler colonialism 5, 9, 189, 235, 267 – 68, 270, 289; settler colonial studies 7 – 11 settler state 52, 130, 131, 142, 153, 227, 247, 249, 268, 283; and Indigenous politics 282, 285, 287, 290, 317 settlers: and Aboriginal people 235, 240, 244 – 48, 249, 251, 258; and colonial state 237 – 41; consciousness 37, 41, 42, 60, 169fn.36, 186; and humanitarianism 237, 243, 245, 249, 269; politics 12, 50, 52, 139, 240, 282, 235, 243 – 44; see also violence sex 27 – 28, 118, 124, 131, 175, 177, 188,236; regulation 180; see also violence Sewell, Henry 159, 160, 163, 184, 231fn.14 shepherds 55, 91, 176, 187, 188, 205fn.43; and violence 126, 179, 241 Shortland, Edward 38, 40, 64 Sievwright, Charles 113, 119, 124 – 26 Sikyea, Michael 317 silence: see violence Smith, Adam 51, 58, 60, 65, 91; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 60 – 61 social engineering 52, 53, 91, 163, 257, 277; and Protection 115, 119, 122 – 23; and Sir George Grey 139, 145, 146, 160 social relations 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 15, 27, 32, 35, 71, 114, 131, 183, 200, 276; and exchange 19, 20, 21, 22 – 24, 26, 31, 32, 35, 45fn.12, 71, 103, 281; and humanitarianism 62; and intimacy 35, 38, 62, 64, 65, 67, 126, 146, 175, 185, 236; and mutuality 3, 18, 32, 54, 60, 61, 62, 67, 82, 91, 94, 97 – 98, 120, 122, 142, 228; and reciprocity 18, 32, 61 – 62, 66 – 67, 82, 92, 97, 120, 290; and violence 176 Sorell, William 28 – 29 sovereignty 153, 156, 200, 212 – 213, 246, 248, 273, 282 – 84; imperial 4, 161, 200, 208, 209, 212, 214, 218, 222 – 28, 268, 285; Indigenous 17, 114, 152, 210 – 11, 224, 226 – 27, 236, 317; and Indigenous politics 271 – 72, 274, 275 – 76, 280, 285 – 86; and international law 209 – 11, 226, 273 Stephen, James 106fn.15, 140, 211, 215, 217, 311 Stirling, James 34, 81, 183, 203fn.27, 246 Stretch, Charles 245 Sturt, Charles 23, 24, 63, 194 – 95 sympathy 60 – 62, 65, 66, 69, 71 see also empathy

358 Index

Taplin, George 128 – 29, 130, 131 Tarkine people 100 Tasmania: see Van Diemen’s Land Tasmanian Aboriginal People 20, 22, 32, 34, 87, 89, 91, 93, 101, 196, 201fn.3, 300; violence against 20, 29, 54, 68, 85, 193, 307; see also Kickerterpoller, Palawa, Robinson, George Augustus, Truganini, Woorrady Tatzoe, Jan 247, 308 terra nullius 56, 199, 211, 212, 217, 223, 227 – 28, 274, 284 Thomas, William 113, 122, 125, 136fn.57 Thelkald, Lancelot 35 Treaty talk 280, 282 Trollop, Anthony 200, 257, 259, 260, 265fn.54, 266fn.56, 304 Truganini 35 – 36, 98, 100, 124, 262fn.16 truth and reconciliation 285, 287, 289 Uluru Statement from the Heart 286, 296fn.47 United Nations 84, 277, 284 universal humanity 74fn.12, 92, 164, 222, 236, 250, 280 – 81, 294fn.32, 300, 308 – 309; and evangelicalism 38, 59, 66, 92, 242; and humanitarianism 64, 66, 69, 249, 300; and David Livingstone 313 – 17; and John Stuart Mill, 254 – 56; and racial amalgamation 143 – 45; and Adam Smith 60 – 62, 66, 76fn.32 utilitarians 253, 254, 310 utopianism 122, 146, 149, 237, 256, 258; see also humanitarianism Van Diemen’s Land 6, 20, 31, 52, 54, 68, 79, 125, 188, 196, 242, 243; and Sir George Arthur 84 – 96, 102 – 104; and bush rangers 29 – 30; and disorder 28 – 29 Vattel, Emmerich de 210, 211, 212, 214, 223, 230fn.8 Victoria 122, 127, 128, 130, 187, 223, 278 villains 310 – 12 violence 4, 16 – 18, 36 – 37, 68 – 69, 81, 93, 245 – 55; and denial 105fn.2, 1919, 193, 200, 303, 305, 306; and economy 174; and explorers 23 – 24; and fear 186 – 89; and humanitarianism 50 – 54, 63 – 65, 189 – 91, 307; and imperial culture 199 – 200, 259, 306, 311; by Indigenous

people 18, 63, 86, 173, 201fn.3, 203fn. 27; and intimacy 175 – 76; narratives of 196 – 99, 282m 300 – 301; and Protectors 117 – 19, 125, 128, 132; psychology of 189 – 91, 196, 299, 306; and sealers 19, 32; and settlers 173 – 74, 196 – 97, 201fn.3, 225, 241 – 43, 307; sexual 35, 41, 174 – 75, 201fn.3, 201fn.7; and silence 188 – 89, 200, 206fn.62, 207fn.76, 243, 267, 270, 294fn.34; 303 – 306; and state 173, 176 – 86, 192, 203fn.26, 203 fn.27, 213; and Tasmania 20, 85 – 90, 225; and trauma 189, 194, 205fn.49, 241 Vitoria, Francisco de 210 Vogan, Alfred 304 – 306, 311 Wairau affair 170fn.49 Waitara purchase 156, 161 Waitangi Day 270 Waitangi, Treaty of 54, 140, 148, 157, 241, 270, 283 – 84; and Maori rights 152, 212, 226 – 27, 275 – 77 Waitangi Tribunal 157 – 58, 276, 283, 285, 290 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 141, 253 Waller, Horace 314, 323fn.29 Wayler 68 Weeip 21 Wells, H.G. 301 Western Australia 27, 34, 103, 176, 246; and Aboriginal people 67, 81, 137fn.45, 183 – 84, 217 – 18, 224, 236; Grey expedition 18, 23; protection legislation 115 – 16, 127, 236, 251, 279 Westlake, John 211, 225 whalers 124 Whatley, Bishop Richard 143 – 44 Wi Pirata v. Bishop of Wellington 227, 228 Willshire, William 198 Windeyer, Richard 56 – 57, 248 Wolfe, Patrick 9, 11 Woorrady 98, 124 World Council of Indigenous Peoples 272 Wybalenna 127, 128 – 29 Xhosa 2, 64, 166fn.12, 183, 244 – 46, 248, 294fn.32, 313 – 14 Ya-gan 36 – 37, 42 Yorta Yorta People 177, 178