Benevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-Century Australia

Quaker Lives and Ideals

Eva Bischoff

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030326678
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book reconstructs the history of a group of British Quaker families and their involvement in the process of settler colonialism in early nineteenth-century Australia. Their everyday actions contributed to the multiplicity of practices that displaced and annihilated Aboriginal communities. Simultaneously, early nineteenth-century Friends were members of a translocal, transatlantic community characterized by pacifism and an involvement in transnational humanitarian efforts, such as the abolitionist and the prison reform movements as well as the Aborigines Protection Society. Considering these ideals, how did Quakers negotiate the violence of the frontier? To answer this question, the book looks at Tasmanian and South Australian Quakers' lives and experiences, their journeys and their writings. Building on recent scholarship on the entanglement between the local and the global, each chapter adopts a different historical perspective in terms of breadth and focused time period. The study combines these different takes to capture the complexities of this topic and era.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. BischoffBenevolent Colonizers in Nineteenth-Century AustraliaCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32667-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Eva Bischoff¹

(1)

Department of International History, Trier University, Trier, Germany

Eva Bischoff

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Dazed by the bright sunlight and a twenty-six-hour flight I am standing in the centre of modern-day Sydney facing a monument. Made from sandstone, it brings together three silhouettes, carved into the material, leaving three moulds behind. The stone panels lean together and form a walkable triptych, one of the most prominent forms in Christian pictorial tradition. It is called “First Impressions” and was unveiled in 1979. Commissioned from the artist Bud Dumas by the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority, and supported by the Fellowship of First Fleeters, it was erected to commemorate the first generation of immigrants to the continent. It depicts the founding mothers and fathers of white Australia: the soldiers, convicts, and settler families that lived in or close to the area the memorial is standing in today. In colonial times this area was known as “The Rocks,” the commercial hub of the city infamous for its debauchery and high crime rates. The triptych marks the end of the 1970s struggle of a group of local residents against an aggressive redevelopment scheme who proudly referred to their ancestry reaching as far back as the 1800s. It also stands at the beginning of the burgeoning interest in Australian convict history, which today celebrates tremendous successes, especially economically. The Port Arthur Historic Site, which is one of eleven UNESCO World Heritage sites across Australia, received more than 300,000 visitors in 2014/15 alone.¹

Celebrating the resilience and assertiveness of European immigrants, the monument does not depict those who already lived in the area when the British arrived in 1788: the Gadigal people, the traditional owners of this land, whose resilience and adaptability are similarly impressive, if not more so. Facing unknown diseases, confronted with strangers who aggressively transformed the ecological conditions by introducing new species and new forms of land usage, the Gadigal survived and their descendants lived and continued to live in Sydney until today. Their story, as that of many other Aboriginal people in Australia, had not been told in academic historiography until the late twentieth century and is not as easily embraced by the general Australian public as the nation’s convict past.² Colonial violence and genocide, Aboriginal dispossession and “Stolen Generations” stand at the heart of a (by now cold but still very powerful) “history war” in which scholars, activists, and politicians struggle to establish a hegemonic version of the nation’s (post)colonial memory. As such, this controversy is a deeply political one: After the end of the “White Australia Policy,” the country transformed into a multicultural society. Yet, confronted with a tenacious Aboriginal rights movement, it still struggles to come to terms with its settler past.³

As a German historian trained in the aftermath of another “Historikerstreit” which had focused on the evaluation and interpretation of genocidal Nazi policies, but one who is also interested in colonial history, the void left by the Sydney monument strikes a chord with me that is strangely familiar, or unheimlich.⁴ For many decades, the critical investigation and processing of Nazi Fascism took precedence in (West) German historiography. Colonial history, though closely intertwined with the development of Nazi extermination policies and the expansionist war in Eastern Europe, was clouded by the notion that the colonial encounter had only a negligible impact on German society as a whole.⁵ Until today, activists struggle to integrate German colonial history into public discourse.⁶

Sensitised by the cognitive dissonance resulting from these uncanny dis/similarities, an outsider’s view on current Australian historiography reveals that until very recently, soldiers, convicts, settlers, and Aboriginal Australians did not share the same disciplinary space.⁷ Instead, their histories were divided into separate areas or departments, social history on the one hand and anthropology or Aboriginal Studies on the other, mirroring the traditional colonial separation between “people without history” and “proper” history, namely the history of European men.⁸ Interestingly, both strands of scholarly research refer to the same place about 1000 kilometres southwest of Sydney: the island of Tasmania, in colonial times known as Van Diemen’s Land (VDL). Here, the encounter between settlers and Indigenous people culminated in a short, yet violent, war and the genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Their fate constituted the spectre of imperial expansion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁹ Herbert G. Wells, to name one of many examples, wrote in War of the Worlds (first published in 1898):

we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.¹⁰

The colonial war against Aboriginal Tasmanians was part of Raphaël Lemkin’s deliberations on the modern history of genocide in the 1940s.¹¹ His thoughts were, in turn, informed by a particular string of settler colonial discourse to which members of the Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, had contributed to in a decisive manner.¹² As such, local Tasmanian Aboriginal history is deeply embedded in global discourses about the interconnectedness of imperial expansion and the physical and/or cultural annihilation of Indigenous peoples. Their fate also stands at the centre of Australian national debates, namely the aforementioned “history war,” since one of its protagonists, Keith Windschuttle, attempted to disavow the genocidal impact of European settlement on Australian Indigenous peoples.¹³ His thesis has been refuted expertly and repeatedly.¹⁴ His challenge, however, stimulated an even deeper engagement with the primary material available. As a result, scholars today know more about Aboriginal-settler relations in early nineteenth-century Tasmania than ever before.¹⁵

Not far from the triptych monument on Playfair Street, on 17 November 1836, a young convict named Abraham Davy found “two New Zealanders lying without shelter in a yard, exposed to the rain, and very ill.” He acted immediately and “obtained medical assistance for them.” Alas, only one of the two Maori men lived; the other “died before morning.” The survivo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Violence and Pacifism: Writing the History of the Anglo-world from Within
• 3. A Peculiar People: Quakers and the Atlantic World Around 1800
• 4. Quakers in Early Nineteenth-Century Van Diemen’s Land
• 5. The Case of James Backhouse and George W. Walker: Quaker Ministers and Colonial Governmentality, 1834
• 6. Being at Home: Van Diemen’s Land as a Quaker Settler Space
• 7. The Case of Francis Cotton and George F. Story: Quaker Settlers and the Tasmanian Frontier, 1829–1831
• 8. Removal, Reform, Protection: Building a Humanitarian Empire
• 9. Tasmanian Lessons: Translation of Quaker Experiences and Concepts, 1836–1843
• 10. Conclusion
• Back Matter