Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism

A. O'Brien

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137440501
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

This book, the first long-range history of the voluntary sector in Australia and the first internationally to compare philanthropy for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in a settler society, explores how the race and gender ideologies embedded in philanthropy contributed to the construction of Australia's welfare state.

1

Governing and the Philanthropic Disposition

It almost seems unnecessary to note that English ideas of philanthropy had little meaning for the Eora, the Indigenous people on whose land the settlers built their town. After all, philanthropy was the product of a ranked society in which a small elite controlled most of the wealth and the vast majority of the population made up ‘the labouring poor’. For the Eora, kinship ties ensured the security of all; they fished, traded with neighbouring groups, used fire to manage the land’s resources and in 1788 their health was probably better than that of the average European – marine office Watkin Tench noted that though ‘not stout’ they were ‘nimble, sprightly and vigorous’.¹ This is not to romanticise: theirs was a ‘tough warrior culture’ with power differences based on age and gender – and food was more difficult to find further from the coast. But for tens of thousands of years the continent had supported a population which, by 1788, was estimated to be around 1 million. People lived in self-governing groups, their relationship with their country meant they neither seized each other’s land nor exploited the labour of other groups. They had no need of philanthropy as the British understood it.²

Yet there are deeper connections between English philanthropy and Indigenous societies that help us focus the particularities of colonisation on this very old continent. One stream of post-war social theory, employing the insights of anthropology, conceptualised philanthropy as ‘a gift relationship’. It argued that just as gift-giving created obligations of reciprocity in pre-market societies, so too did the gift-giving at the heart of philanthropy involve some sort of return, whether social approval, personal gratitude or social cohesion.³ In the context of late-18th-century empire-building these insights draw into focus connections between the newcomers and those who had lived in the land for so long – as well as the stark disconnection implicit in colonial ‘taking’.

Kindness, mercy and the quest for colonies

Gift-giving and trading in Australian Indigenous societies were surrounded by complex rituals: in a continent populated by many groups with different territories and languages they were the means of dealing with outsiders.⁴ And yet, Indigenous peoples’ ambiguous responses to the gifts and the opportunities for trade offered by those who increasingly arrived by sea from the 1760s confirmed their status as ‘savage’ – as of course did their apparent non-cultivation of the soil.⁵ The result is well known. Reports from James Cook and naturalist Joseph Banks on the voyage to the Pacific (1768–71) that mapped the east coast of Terra Australis for the first time concluded that its Indigenous people were few in number, had no social organisation and were ‘the most uncivilised savages in the world’. Following this, the British government deemed anything approaching a treaty or purchase unnecessary – despite the fact that it had acknowledged the American Indians as possessors of property rights and that it would make a treaty with the Maori in New Zealand in the 1840s.⁶

If the first colonisers could not see traditional exchange rituals, their own gift-giving played an important role in setting the course of events. Instead of providing legal entitlement they gave ‘friendship’ and ‘kindness’. Cook’s journeys were made at a time of specific imperial pressure – it seemed clear that the American colonies would be lost, the anti-slavery movement was in its first stages and the nefarious activities of the East India Company, particularly its role in the 1770 famine in West Bengal, were causing alarm.⁷ It was a context in which writers reinvigorated the literature of ‘good empire’, abhorring the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples as no less than slavery. Indeed, Cook himself was celebrated more than any other 18th-century explorer for combining scientific disinterest and Christian ‘humanity’: ‘what power inspiring his dauntless breast’, asked the radical Whig poet Anna Seward, ‘It was BENEVOLENCE’.⁸ The preference for beneficent colonisation extended to official writing. The King’s 1768 ‘secret instructions’ to Cook betray imperial design but emphasised Indigenous consent: he was to ‘take possession’ of the country but it must be done ‘with the consent of the natives’ and he was to ‘endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them’.⁹ The instructions given to the first governor, Arthur Phillip, were in the same vein. He was told to live in ‘amity and kindness’ with the natives, ‘to conciliate their affections’ and ‘open an intercourse with them’. Historian Kate Fullagar points to the ‘crack’ that Phillip’s instructions reveal in the government’s confidence in ‘res nullius’ – why seek conciliation or intercourse with people who have no social organisation?¹⁰ It is a revealing contradiction – that ‘kindness’ was assumed sufficient to smooth it over points to the high self-regard and dismissiveness on which colonisation rested.

‘Kindness’, then, acted as a passport to unhampered occupation for the officers of the garrison, and the first few years of occupation are replete with misfired attempts to bestow it. The Eora seemed uninterested. After 18 months, Phillip was so strained and so determined to demonstrate his beneficence that when tensions arose over food supplies and women he kidnapped three Eora men to clear the air and explain how beneficial British justice would prove. As events unfolded over the first two years the officers looked for opportunities to show goodwill. The cataclysm of smallpox, which probably killed between 50 and 80 per cent of the local people, was a chance to demonstrate solicitude; victims were brought into the Camp where they were tended by the surgeons – and by the kidnapped Arabanoo until he died from the disease.¹¹ Smallpox also offered a chance to rescue ‘orphaned’ children who would act as go-betweens, conveying the benefits of the newcomers’ society: chaplain Richard Johnson and his wife Mary ‘adopted’ Boorong, a 14-year-old girl, treating her with gingerly care, urging rather than forcing her to stay with them. Unlike Elizabeth Hayward, the Johnson’s convict servant girl who received 30 lashes for insolence, Boorong was spared such punishment even though at times she was ‘very angry and cannot bear to be thwarted’.¹²

The Eora avoided Phillip’s attempts to befriend them until it was clear the intruders were not going away. After that they came into the town on their own terms. They challenged Phillip’s honour, leading him to action that was morally ambiguous in the eyes of some of his officers, and perhaps his own. After the death of his huntsman in December 1790 he ordered any ten heads to be brought in to the camp to terrorise the natives and affirm his authority to the convicts. It contravened the rule of law, and was greeted with public criticism by one of his officers and silence and denial by the early chroniclers.¹³ We will return to the philanthropy directed towards Aboriginal people, but it will make more sense after we have seen some of its workings in relation to the convicts.

∗ ∗ ∗

If Phillip’s encounters with the Eora provide a stark entry point into the instrumentalism at the heart of colonial philanthropy, the story of convict transportation reflects it in a different light. Transportation – like medieval banishment – had long been seen as a merciful substitute for execution, one that benefited the merciful by supplying labour for colonies and despatching society’s dregs. It was practised by the Portuguese, Spanish and French as well as the English, but it expanded from England during the 18th century as changes to the penal code resulted in the proliferation of crimes punishable by death. Convicts were sent to plantations in North America and, despite settlers’ periodic complaints of their polluting influence and moralists’ fears that the system was so merciful it acted as an incentive to crime, no alternatives were preferred. ‘It would be displeasing to our humanity,’ wrote philanthropist Jonas Hanway in 1750, for felons to be made to work in chains on the dockyards in ‘this meridian of liberty’. The preference for transportation persisted through the upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s, when the post-revolutionary American states refused to accept convicts and when reformers argued that the penitentiary was a more enlightened method of dealing with crime. A report of the House of Commons of 1779 found that transportation to ‘a distant colony’ would prove agreeable to ‘the dictates of Humanity and sound policy’.¹⁴

There were a number of parallels between the old system to North America and the new one to New South Wales, including uncertainties regarding deterrence and the growing resistance of the host society. Most fundamentally, both were part of a global scheme of forced labour migration that included African slaves and European indentured servants. But there was one major difference. Whereas convicts to North America had been sold to private contractors, transportation to New South Wales was organised by government. This was the result of necessity rather than choice – the loss of the American colonies also meant the loss of private-sector demand for white criminal labour: the East India Company had enough felons from Indian courts, nor would it have wished to disturb race-based labour hierarchies by dealing in white convict labour.¹⁵ The result was the foundation of a colony by government and, in the long term, a central place for government in the history of Australia – long seen as one of its defining features. Government settlements were not without precedent at the moment of this one’s birth. The historian Alan Atkinson argues that New South Wales was the last of ‘a little family of settlements’ as diverse as Georgia, a colony for the English poor settled in 1732, British Honduras, a refuge for post-revolutionary loyalists, and Sierra Leone, a colony of former slaves. As ‘planned communities’, they were forced to grapple with how an English diaspora could be governed with ‘humanity’.¹⁶

The centrality of government sharpens our focus on the aspiration to benevolent colonisation contained in Phillip’s instructions to live in ‘amity and kindness’ with the local people. It reminds us that philanthropy was a disposition permeating the structures of governance and not just the work of volunteers coming together in the public sphere. The philanthropic disposition was at the core of the paternalism by which the early governors ruled. Phillip’s decision to provide equal rations for all in the face of food shortages in April 1790 has been variously interpreted: as a sign of his natural tendency to be ‘self-sacrificing’ in a context of ‘broad humanitarianism’; as the beginning of a distinctly Australian egalitarianism driven by convicts; and as normal naval practice.¹⁷ Atkinson’s interpretation encompasses these and takes us further. In his view, the paternalist who proved his superior humanity towards those he governed could justify the ruthless suppression of insubordination on occasions deemed necessary.¹⁸ One of Phillip’s most savage displays of discipline was 600 lashes for the convict John Culleyhorne who had boasted that Major Ross said they would eat whether they worked or not. Insolence of this sort not only challenged the ‘work or starve’ rule, but challenged the honour of gentlemen.¹⁹

Prior to issues of ration distribution came a more fundamental manifestation of colonial paternalism, for the seemingly unremarkable decision to guarantee a food supply for the colony by controlling convict labour had its critics in the lead up to departure. The Secretary of State, Lord Sydney, and the naturalist Joseph Banks argued that convict colonies should be of ‘free men’ for whom exile itself was sufficient punishment. Sydney thought that even if they died abroad in large numbers when left to themselves it was better than interfering with the decision of the courts.²⁰ Theirs was a minority view: the Beauchamp committee of 1785, which recommended transportation to New South Wales, thought leaving the convicts to themselves would serve ‘no good or rational purpose’, and Phillip agreed: he thought they ‘would starve if left to themselves’.²¹ But however limited, the counter-view points to considerable divergence in understandings of the role of the state in ‘humane’ governance at the moment it oversaw Australian colonisation.

Over the first decades of the 19th century paternalist imagery abounded when praise for the governors was in order. Philip Gidley King (1801–5) was admired for combining ‘the tenderness of a parent with the authority of a chief’; David Collins (Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land 1801–11) was seen as ‘a father and a friend’ to the ‘unfortunate victims’ under his care; Lachlan Macquarie (1810–22) was toasted as ‘the Father of Australia’ at the Anniversary Dinner of 1827.²² But the history of Australia’s developing civil society is dominated by efforts to throw off the paternal hand and gentlemen entrepreneurs and convicts alike made their own lives, challenging authority when it cramped them. Despite Phillip’s attempts to organise them, the convicts used their monopoly on the supply of labour to bargain for better conditions. Though prime examples of the undeserving poor, the first arrivals mostly managed to avoid the restraints associated with their dismal status at home. In Sydney they built their own houses – there were no barracks until 1815 – and were goaded to work by incentives such as taskwork and alcohol.²³ In Van Diemen’s Land, where a second penal colony was established in 1803, convicts had even greater opportunities for independence. The grassy woodlands surrounding the settlements – ‘remarkably benevolent land’ according to historian James Boyce – provided shelter and food for convicts and escapees. Indeed, before the establishment of Governor Arthur’s iron rule in 1824, convict gangs came close to winning an undeclared civil war against the British authorities.²⁴

The first convicts also avoided institutions of beneficence if they could: the hospital was a place of last resort even after it was rebuilt with the proceeds of rum in 1811. There was no organised voluntary philanthropy until the 1810s, but ‘objects of charity’ were supported by the government. Settlers also cared for each other at times of extremity: neighbours provided alcohol and warm bricks to those who were dying;²⁵ when Mrs Wright’s house burnt down in 1803 one neighbour took in her children and another gave her lodgings;²⁶ in 1809 an old woman deserted by her husban...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Governing and the Philanthropic Disposition
• 2. The Democratic Moment
• 3. An ‘Age of Philanthropy’?
• 4. Prevention and Protection
• 5. A Hand Up: The Problems of Independence
• 6. Beyond Mere Welfare
• 7. ‘To Hell with Charity’
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index