Unsettled Settlers: Fear and White Victimhood in New South Wales and Van Diemen’S Land, 1788 – 1838

Unsettled Settlers: Fear and White Victimhood in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1788 – 1838. M.J. Warren A thesis submitted in fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts University of Sydney 2017. Statement of Originality This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. Signed: Mick Warren Date: 8 June 2017 ii Acknowledgments It was remiss of me not to formally acknowledge Mark McKenna at the submission of my Honours thesis in 2012. Without his support and encouragement I would not have pursued this project let alone arrive at what always seemed the unlikely moment of its completion. On account of his supervision and friendship, I owe Mark endless thanks. But I am most grateful for the confidence he provided in my ability to bring this work to fruition. Respectively, my associate supervisors Peter Read and Iain McCalman provided guidance and insight at the beginning and end of my candidature. The friendship, knowledge and craft of Billy Griffiths have otherwise been the key ingredients to the shape this thesis has taken. I also wish to thank Penny Russell, Mike McDonnell and the late John Hirst for their insights to my research and writing. John deserves full credit for the title of this work. My association with the Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions since 2015 has provided both the financial and intellectual ballast which made navigating an entirely unfamiliar field that much easier. I am particularly grateful to John Gagne for alerting me to the opportunities with the Centre in the first place. For their sincerity, insight and commitment to the history of emotions I wish to thank Craig Lyons, Jacqueline Van Gent and Katrina Tap. Tom Bristow I thank for showing an encouraging interest in my research and providing much insight to the scope of academia. In Hobart I would like to thank Deborah Thorp and Rose Wade at the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. The various teaching opportunities presented to me by Lorraine Towers, Kirsten McKenzie, Mark McKenna and Chris Hilliard have been a highlight of the last few years. I thank them along with all my students for their patience and interest in history. The company of Anoushka Somasunderam has enriched the final stages of this thesis beyond words. I am otherwise indebted to many friends and family for their support since I deserted the public service in 2008 to begin studying history: Kate and Max Warren, Bryan Warren, the Cheong family, Maggie and John Shaw, Josephine and Ken Challenor, Phil Andrews, Alifa Bandali, Enrico Gaoni, Emily Morrice and Noelene Rose. The Sydney cycling community, particularly Rapha Cycling Club, Matt La Borg (aka The Bike Doctor) and Chainsmith Bike Shop, also deserve thanks for untold hours of recreation and therapy on and off the bike. At no stage was this thesis unaccompanied by the thought or presence of my son Evelyn Cheong. It is to him that I dedicate this thesis. iii Abstract Fear of Aboriginal aggression was a reality for the early settlers of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, but it only gained imaginative currency through the trope of white victimhood. This discursive emotional frame continues today, providing a means for many contemporary settler Australians to reconcile with a colonial legacy defined by frontier violence and dispossession. In engaging this dialectic between the past and the present, this thesis seeks to understand how fear and white victimhood gained such purchase upon the Australian settler imaginary. In their response to and coverage of frontier violence, colonial newspapers and administrators did much to validate the unsettled feelings of settlers and their servants as they consolidated the dispossession of Indigenous people. Despite the language of “amity and kindness” which guided the settlement of Australia, early governors were quick to deploy “terror” as a means of arresting Aboriginal resistance to European occupation. This provided settlers an immediate means through which they could channel their emotions and expectations of frontier policy as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. Terrorising Aboriginal people was framed as the most efficient means of consoling their anxieties over the tenuous nature of their lives and properties in this unfamiliar land. A direct relationship thus came to exist between the acknowledgment of settlers as victims and the “eliminationist logic” of settler colonialism. This thesis provides a critical commentary on the collective emotional experience of Europeans during the colonial era. It analyses the ways in which newspapers like the Sydney Gazette developed a narrative that juxtaposed the “unfeeling” disposition of Aboriginal people with the passive victimhood of settlers, facilitating the circulation of fear across geographical, although administratively porous, boundaries. It also explores how colonial elites cloaked their responsibility in this formation of settler subjectivity in the hope of maintaining a belief in their own humanity towards Indigenous people. Through a discourse of sympathy and compassion men like George Augustus Robinson increasingly sought to challenge the destructive impulses of settler colonialism, emphasising the depravity of convicts and frontiersmen. As this challenge became the central platform of humanitarian governance throughout the 1830s, however, it was less a vehicle for the representation of Indigenous rights as it was a means for colonial elites to retrieve their own sense of Britishness predicated upon the paradox of humane colonisation. iv Abbreviations Colonial Secretary Papers CSP Colonial Secretary’s Office CSO Public Records Office Victoria PROV State Records of New South Wales SR NSW Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office TAHO v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. ‘When the Moon shall become as large as the Sun’: Unfeeling Enemies and the Hope of Striking Terror, Sydney 1788 – 1816 24 Chapter 2. ‘only solicit to obtain’: Martial Law and the Mounted Police, Bathurst and the Hunter 1815 – 1827 65 Chapter 3. ‘a wanton and savage spirit’: the unSettled Districts of Van Diemen’s Land, 1824 – 1831 111 Chapter 4. ‘An irresistible feeling of sympathy’: George Augustus Robinson and his Friendly Mission, Van Diemen’s Land 1824 – 1831 159 Chapter 5. ‘the song of malevolence as well as benevolence’: The Myall Creek Massacre and the Unravelling of the Sydney Humanitarian Movement, 1835 – 1838 194 Conclusion 261 Bibliography 267 vi Introduction On 17 May 1997, Prime Minister John Howard addressed a community meeting in Longreach, Queensland, regarding the potential co-existence of Native Title and pastoral leases in the wake of the 1996 Wik decision. This was an early opportunity to outline the recently elected Coalition government’s 10-point plan to amend the “administrative nightmare” created by Wik and the Native Title Act more broadly. He consoled his audience: I can understand the fear in the community that people who have no connection at all with your land can come from a distant part of Australia and say, well years and years ago my relatives, or my ancestors, or my friends, or the other members of my tribe had a connection with this property, and therefore I've got some right to come onto your property and to exercise my traditional access rights. Well under the amendments that we are framing that can't happen. Unless somebody has a current physical connection with the land, I repeat that, unless somebody has a current physical connection with the land, than access rights cannot be obtained.1 This rhetoric relayed anxieties regarding the security of European title across Australia that had been mounting since the Mabo decision in 1992. In leading the charge against Mabo in opposition, then leader of the Coalition John Hewson made the claim that Australians had “genuine concerns about their home, or their mine or their farm”.2 Even after Howard “put beyond any legal doubt” the threat Native Title posed to freehold title in 1997, which did nothing more than reiterate the Native Title Act’s provisions regarding “extinguishment”, 1‘Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon. John Howard MP Address to Participants at the Longreach Community Meeting to Discuss the Wik 10 Point Plan Longreach, QLD’, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet <https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10361.> Accessed 9 June, 2016. 2 The Guardian, 1 January 2017. 1 some members of his government continued to echo the precarity of non-Indigenous land title, alluding to Australian “backyards in peril.”3 Rivalling this heightened rhetoric was One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s 1996 maiden speech to parliament, in which she proclaimed: I am fed up with being told ‘This is our land’. Well, where the hell do I go? I was born here, and so were my parents and children...I draw the line when told I must pay and continue paying for something that happened over 200 years ago. Like most Australians, I worked for my land; no-one gave it to me4 In examining the strong hold of victimological narratives upon the Australian imaginary, from pioneer legends to battles with the natural landscape, Ann Curthoys has detected both “practical and figurative resonance” in these words. At once Hanson voiced practical concerns already evinced by other parliamentarians at the state and federal level, but also the “fear of a symbolic loss, of the legitimacy and permanency of the non-Aboriginal Australian’s sense of home.”5 This dual concern poses a threat to the myth that settler Australians achieved their ownership of land through suffering and hardship, an implicit declaration of terra nullius in defiance of the historic precedent established by the Mabo decision and the Native Title Act.

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