‘Such Spiritual Acres’ Protestantism, the land and the colonisation of Australia, 1788‐1850 Meredith Lake Doctor of Philosophy thesis University of Sydney July 2008 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the transmission of Protestantism to Australia by the early British colonists and its consequences for their engagement with the land between 1788 and 1850. It explores the ways in which colonists gave religious meaning to their surrounds, particularly their use of exile and exodus narratives to describe journeying to the colony and their sense of their destination as a site of banishment, a wilderness or a Promised Land. The potency of these scriptural images for colonising Europeans has been recognised in North America and elsewhere: this study establishes and details their significance in early colonial Australia. This thesis also considers the ways in which colonists’ Protestant values mediated their engagement with their surrounds and informed their behaviour towards the land and its indigenous inhabitants. It demonstrates that leading Protestants asserted and acted upon their particular values for industry, order, mission and biblicism in ways that contributed to the transformation of Aboriginal land. From the physical changes wrought by industrious agricultural labour through to the spiritual transformations achieved by rites of consecration, their specifically Protestant values enabled Britons to inhabit the land on familiar material and cultural terms. The structural basis for this study is provided by thematic biographies of five prominent colonial Protestants: Richard Johnson, Samuel Marsden, William Grant Broughton, John Wollaston and John Dunmore Lang. The private and public writings of these men are examined in light of the wider literature on religion and colonialism and environmental history. By delineating the significance of Protestantism to individual colonists’ responses to the land, this thesis confirms the trend of much recent British and Australian historiography towards a more religious understanding of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its overarching argument is that Protestantism helped lay the foundation for colonial society by encouraging the transformation of the environment according to the colonists’ values and needs, and by providing ideological support for the British use and occupation of the territory. Prominent Protestants applied their religious ideas to Australia in ways that tended to assist, legitimate or even necessitate the colonisation of the land. 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It has been a great pleasure to know and learn from my supervisor, Richard White. I thank him for all the ways he contributed to this project, especially for his suggestions and criticisms, his advice and unfailing encouragement. Several people discussed ideas, read drafts and gave feedback which considerably enriched this thesis: Joanna Cruickshank, Rhiannon Davis, Andrew Errington, John Hirst, Julia Horne, Denise Lake, Cath Lamb, Joel Morrison, Rory O’Malley, Paul Pickering and Mike Thompson. I am deeply grateful to each of them. Thank you to my friends, my families and my brothers and sisters at St Stephen’s Newtown for such patient love and support. To my husband Joel, who encouraged and supported me in every way, thank you for every day. 2 CONTENTS Abstract 1 Introduction: Another Noah’s Ark 4 One: British Origins 26 Religion and society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Two: Exile and Colonisation 44 Richard Johnson and the first British colonists of New South Wales Three: Salvation and Conciliation 85 First missionary encounters at Sydney Cove Four: An Agricultural Imagination 121 Samuel Marsden’s cultivation of soils and souls Five: Inducing Industrious Habits 157 Samuel Marsden’s attitudes to convicts and Aborigines Six: Church and Country 191 William Grant Broughton’s travels in eastern Australia Seven: A Way in the Wilderness 233 John Wollaston in Western Australia Eight: Populating the Promised Land 264 John Dunmore Lang’s promotion of Protestant migration to eastern Australia Conclusion: ‘Such Spiritual Acres’ 297 Bibliography 318 3 INTRODUCTION Another Noah’s Ark Sailing towards ‘Spiritual Acres’ George Worgan’s sense of humour came in handy during early 1788. ‘I think I hear you saying ‘Where the D--ce is Sydney Cove Port Jackson?’’ the junior surgeon joked in his first letter home to England after an eight-month journey to a ‘wild and uncultivated’ place on the opposite side of the world.1 The answer, he explained, was a good ten weeks’ voyage beyond ‘the last civilised country we should touch at,’ the Cape of Good Hope.2 It is impossible to know whether, upon reading this, his brother Richard laughed. It is unlikely that many of his immediate companions found their situation funny, though. They had left behind everything they found familiar and ventured beyond the limits of what they considered the civilised world. It was some comfort, perhaps, that in a very material sense they had packed their civilisation into the ships’ holds and carried it with them to New South Wales. As one newspaper had explained shortly before they set sail, ‘by the number of Cattle now sending over of various sorts, and all the different Seeds for Vegetation, a capital Improvement will be made in the Southern part of the New World.’3 And at the Cape, as Worgan told his ‘dear good brother’, they had supplemented their British supplies by purchasing ‘Bulls, Cows, Horses, Mares, Colts, Sheep, Hogs, Goats, Fowls and other living Creatures by Pairs,’ as well as ‘a vast Number of Plants, Seeds and other Garden articles such as Orange, Lime, Lemon, Quince Apple, Pear Trees.’ Each ship had sailed on towards Botany Bay equipped with ‘every Article necessary for forming a civilised Colony’, ‘like another Noah’s Ark.’4 1 George Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, Library Council of New South Wales & Library of Australian History, Sydney, 1978, p. 1. The ‘wild and uncultivated’ phrase is Richard Johnson’s. See Johnson, 16 April 1794, in John Moore – Papers of Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden, ARCH/P/Moore22, Lambeth Palace Library, London, p.2; copy at MAV/FM3/476, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 2 Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, p. 1. 3 St James Chronicle, 16-18 January 1787, cited in Alan Frost, “As it Were Another America’: English Ideas of the First Settlement in New South Wales at the end of the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth Century Studies vol.7 no.3 (1974) p. 271 4 Worgan, Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, p. 1. 4 Worgan’s description of the British ships sailing towards Sydney like heavily laden Noah’s Arks gestures towards the three major themes of this thesis. In the first place it is richly suggestive of the particular ways in which the colonists expected to engage with their new environment: at the very least they would break up the soil, fertilise it with animal manure, plant a great variety of seeds and reap a harvest for their own sustenance. Second, it discloses their larger goal: to establish a colony and extend civilisation, as they understood it, to a new region of the world. Third, his use of ark imagery indicates the ease with which early colonists employed familiar Christian ideas and biblical narratives to make sense of their experiences of travelling and settling a new place. This thesis considers the new arrivals’ engagement with the land and the process of colonisation through the lens of the religious stories and ideas that informed their outlook and action between 1788 and the mid nineteenth century. It takes up the suggestion, implicit in Worgan’s account, that these themes were related in the early history of the Australian colonies and explores the connections between land, colonisation and religion in a particularly Protestant form. During the last third of the twentieth century, it seemed obvious to some writers that religion barely mattered in modern Australia. It was a post-Christian society dominated by whitefellas ‘who got no dreaming.’5 It was society, more particularly, that had grown up in a place which was itself ‘the most godless under heaven.’6 Manning Clark vividly described how the early British settlers ‘sang songs about a God who cared for mankind’ until ‘nature’s vast indifference’ gradually undermined their belief in divine goodness and led them to conclude that ‘there was no God in the outback.’7 Peter Carey told popular tales about flawed and lonely clerics who struggled to replant Christianity in a country where the stories of the gospels seemed to lie across the harsh landscape like sheets of newspaper on a polished floor. ‘They slid, slipped, did not connect with anything beneath them.’8 Weighed down by what Hugh Jackson imagined as ‘a deep sense of alienation from nature’, immigrant Australians no longer felt the stir of religious 5 Hugh Jackson, ‘White Man Got no Dreaming: Religious Feeling in Australian History,’ The Journal of Religious History, vol. 15 no. 1, 1988, pp. 1-11. 6 The phrase is originally the Reverend Richard Denney’s (1825), and more recently employed by Ian Breward in Australia: the most godless place under heaven?, Beacon Hill Books, Melbourne, 1988. 7 Manning Clark, A History of Australia, 6 vols., Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962-1987, vol.3 pp. 260, 356 and vol.4 p. 346. 8 Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda (1988), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2001, p. 300. 5 feeling in their hearts or lifted their eyes to the once familiar Christian God.9 Such writers doubted that the faiths the colonists brought with