In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825-1855 In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825-1855 Jessie Mitchell THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY E PRESS E PRESS Published by ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History Monograph 23 This title is also available online at: http://epress.anu.edu.au/good_faith_citation.html National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Mitchell, Jessie. Title: In good faith? : governing Indigenous Australia through god, charity and empire, 1825-1855 / Jessie Mitchell. ISBN: 9781921862106 (pbk.) 9781921862113 (eBook) Series: Aboriginal history monograph ; 23 Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Subjects: Indigenous peoples--Government relations. Philanthropinism. Aboriginal Australians--Politics and government. Aboriginal Australians--Social conditions--19th century. Colonization--Australia. Dewey Number: 305.89915 Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History is administered by an Editorial Board which is responsible for all unsigned material. Views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily shared by Board members. The Committee of Management and the Editorial Board Kaye Price (Chair), Peter Read (Monographs Editor), Maria Nugent and Shino Konishi (Journal Editors), Robert Paton (Treasurer and Public Officer), Anne McGrath (Deputy Chair), Isabel McBryde, Niel Gunson, Luise Hercus, Harold Koch, Christine Hansen, Tikka Wilson, Geoff Gray, Jay Arthur, Dave Johnson, Ingereth Macfarlane, Brian Egloff, Lorena Kanellopoulos, Richard Baker, Peter Radoll. Contacting Aboriginal History All correspondence should be addressed to Aboriginal History, Box 2837 GPO Canberra, 2601, Australia. Sales and orders for journals and monographs, and journal subscriptions: Thelma Sims, email: Thelma.Sims@anu. edu.au, tel or fax: +61 2 6125 3269, www.aboriginalhistory.org Aboriginal History Inc. is a part of the Australian Centre for Indigenous Studies, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University and gratefully acknowledges the support of the History Program, RSSS and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University. WARNING: Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons. ANU E Press: All correspondence should be addressed to: ANU E Press, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected], http://epress.anu.edu.au Cover image: Missionary Register, September 1834, L & G Seeley, London. National Library of Australia, N266.3CHU. Cover design and layout by ANU E Press Printed by Griffin Press Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. This edition © 2011 ANU E Press and Aboriginal History Inc Contents Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 ‘This land of Barbarians’: missions and protectorates begin 13 ‘Godless political experiments’: philanthropy and governance 39 ‘All white masters belong to your King’: race, identity and empire 65 ‘Our country all gone’: rights, charity and the loss of land 87 Deserving poverty? Rationing and philanthropy 109 Keeping body and soul together: creating material ‘civilisation’ 129 ‘Can these dry bones live?’ Religious life and afterlife 151 ‘This bitter reproach’: destruction, guilt and the colonial future 173 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 199 v Illustrations Figure 1. Map showing the locations of Indigenous communities and missions in Australia. Prepared by Karina Pelling, Cartographic and GIS Services, Australian National University. Figure 2. During the 1830s, the Church Missionary Society published tales of bush life, cultural clashes and missionary work at Wellington Valley. As the picture indicates, many aspects of traditional Wiradjuri life were continuing, to the fascination and concern of the missionaries. Missionary Register, September 1834, L & G Seeley, London. National Library of Australia, N266.3CHU. Figure 3. British missionary publications were even more dismissive of pre- colonial life than were their Australian counterparts, as this juxtaposition of Indigenous people and native animals suggests. ‘An Australian Group’, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, February 1853, Wesleyan Mission House, London. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, 266.705/W. Figure 4. By the 1840s, philanthropists’ reports were becoming pessimistic. As this choice of illustration in a missionary journal shows, Indigenous Australians were increasingly portrayed as hopeless and doomed. ‘Burial of one of the natives of Australia’, Wesleyan Missionary Society, Papers Relative to the Wesleyan Missions, and to the State of Heathen Countries, no CXI, March 1848, London. National Library of Australia, Petherick NK5726. vii Acknowledgements This work began life as a doctoral thesis in history at the Australian National University, and became a book during my time as a staff member with the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, working as part of a Discovery grant funded by the Australian Research Council. I also was assisted greatly by a creative fellowship with the State Library of Victoria. Particular thanks must go to Ann Curthoys for her keen, thoughtful and generous supervision of this project, and to Peter Read and Jay Arthur of the Aboriginal History monograph series, for their encouragement and support. I am also grateful to the Australian Historical Association, who helped to promote this work through the 2006 Serle prize. Thanks must go to the manuscripts staff at the State Library of Victoria, the Mitchell Library of New South Wales, the National Library of Australia and the Public Records Office of Victoria for their assistance and permission to use images, to Geoff Hunt for his editorial work, and to Karina Pelling of the ANU’s Cartographic and GIS services for putting together such a useful map. I am grateful, too, to Lynette Russell for making me welcome during a brief stay at the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University, and to Jane Lydon, Tom Griffiths and Verity Archer for their insights and enthusiasm. Thanks, finally, to my family, for all their love and encouragement. ix Introduction Contemporary Australia has been shaped powerfully by legacies of colonialism. Disputes over national responsibility, guilt, denial and shame for Aboriginal dispossession have become especially notable in public life since the late 20th century. This has proven most striking in debates about the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families (a process which can be traced back to the philanthropic projects described in this work), and while questions of national responsibility for historical wrongs have taken on slightly different forms of late – with the federal government’s 2008 apology to the stolen generations, and ongoing debates over government ‘intervention’ into troubled Aboriginal communities – their continued relevance is clear. In this climate, tracing histories of dispossession, Indigenous rights and the mixed meanings of paternalism and state authority is a challenging and important task. Ideas about rights, in particular, have become both notable and disputed in recent Australian political life. Questions of Indigenous people’s entitlements – as colonised peoples, as Australian citizens and as human beings – continue to provoke debate. Such controversies have emerged from efforts to situate Indigenous grievances in human rights frameworks, as well as in debates over whether ‘civil’ and ‘Aboriginal’ rights are compatible, and in attacks on a rights- based discourse by those who view it as irrelevant or dangerous. Related disputes are also occurring in a wider context, where the very concept of human rights has become both highly articulate (employed by activists and governments) and under attack from different quarters. My own belief in the importance of pursuing these issues has been influenced not only by my academic research, but also by a period of time spent working in the community sector. Here, tensions between rights and charity and questions about the supposed (in) gratitude of vulnerable people towards state and benevolent agencies continue to have strong relevance. This work was prompted partly, therefore, by a belief that more attention must be paid to the evolving and problematic nature of philanthropic support for Indigenous people’s entitlements, and its shifting connections to empire, charity, religion and the state. Furthering my interest in this topic is the fact that, by the beginning of the 21st century, the historical plight of Indigenous Australians has become seen (often contentiously) as central to broader national identity. This belief is no doubt relevant to the desire which has emerged over the past couple of decades to trace histories of Australian humanitarianism, including that of certain 19th century missionaries and protectors of Aborigines. While I appreciate and support such a project, I would add nonetheless that it can be equally important to examine the complexities, paradoxes and deep cracks within these humanitarian movements; the fault lines in colonial philanthropy have, themselves, left rich and troubling 1 In Good Faith? legacies. The place