Joanna Cruickshank

Converting Mrs Crouch: women, wonders and the formation of English methodism, 1738-1741

This article examines the development of English Methodism during the formative period between 1738 and 1741, focusing upon the experiences of women, who made up the majority of Methodists both at this time and through much of the movements history. In particular, the role that women and questions of gender played in the conflict between the Wesley brothers and the Moravian leadership in London is considered. Using accounts written by the male leaders of both groups and the women who supported them, it is argued that womens choices determined the outcome of this early battle, shaping the nascent movement in crucial ways.

Race, history, and the Australian faith missions

In 1901, the parliament of the new Commonwealth of Australia passed a series of laws designed, in the words of the Prime Minister Edmund Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity”. An Act to expel the large Pacific Islander community in North Queensland was followed by a law restricting further immigration to applicants who could pass a literacy test in a European language. In 1902, under the Commonwealth Franchise Act, “all natives of Asia and Africa” as well as Aboriginal people were explicitly denied the right to vote in federal elections. The “White Australia policy”, enshrined in these laws, was almost universally supported by Australian politicians, with only two members of parliament speaking against the restriction of immigration on racial grounds.

Indigenous Land Loss, Justice and Race: Ann Bon and the Contradictions of Settler Humanitarianism

On 17 October 1881, a journalist from the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus, accompanied a group of prominent settlers on a tour of the Coranderrk Aboriginal reserve. These settlers were members of the Board appointed by the Victorian Parliament, to ‘Enquire into, and report upon, the Present Condition and Management of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station’. According to the journalist’s report, the members of the enquiry in attendance were ‘Mrs Bon of Kew, Mr Dow, MLA and Dr Embling’. ‘The appointment of the board [of inquiry]’, the report continued, ‘was chiefly due to the importunities of Mrs Bon, a staunch friend of the blacks and an enthusiastic supporter of their rights.‘1 The tour of Coranderrk represented the first activity of these inquiry members in their official capacity. According to the aggrieved reserve manager, the Reverend Frederick Strickland, Mrs Bon took the opportunity during the tour to speak at length ‘upon her favourite theme’. In ‘a martial manner’, Strickland complained, she urged the Coranderrk residents to declare that they would never leave the station.2

Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture

were ill, and to what extent did they distinguish between degrees of sickness? How far was illness a ‘socially cohesive’ event, an opportunity for communal bonding? As well as engaging with medical history, the book sheds light on a number of wider themes, such as national stereotypes, knowledge formation and transmission, religious attitudes and beliefs, gender construction, book ownership and material culture, attitudes to servants, and poor law provision. Strongly argued, and thoroughly researched, Physick and the Family will have significant implications for a range of fields within social history.

Book review: Possession: Batman's Treaty and the matter of history by Bain Attwood

As its full title suggests, Possession is concerned with the twin themes of land ownership and history in the past and present of the Australian nation. Bain Attwood notes in his introduction that ‘the principal challenge to the Australian nation’s sense of itself as morally good has lain in the knowledge that the land was, and perhaps still is, someone else’s, and that it was taken without the Aboriginal people’s consent’ (5). Through a close study of the making, unmaking and historical remembering of the so-called Batman Treaty, he then explores the ways in which settler Australians and their descendants have used history to justify their claim to ownership of this land. The first section of the book provides a detailed account of the context (both colonial and imperial) in which the Treaty was conceived and the chain of events surrounding the purported Treaty-making. Attwood convincingly dismisses common depictions of the members of the Port Phillip Association, the would-be treaty-makers, as simply land-hungry fraudsters. Land-hungry they undoubtedly were, but the Treaty makes better historical sense when understood within a framework of both imperial humanitarian concerns about the welfare of indigenous people and tensions between the Australian colonies about who had rights to colonial land and on what basis. The complicated chain of colonial and imperial responses to the Association’s claim to have successfully concluded a Treaty reveals clearly the tenuous and contradictory basis of the legal claims of both the Crown and settlers to Australian land. The ultimate rejection of the Treaty involved an insistence by colonial authorities that British sovereignty was already a matter of history. Unlike some historians, Attwood is convinced that some form of Treaty-making occurred, but is ultimately more interested in determining what the Treaty meant to colonists than in arguing about the details of what actually happened when Batman met with Kulin elders. This is a minor disappointment in an otherwise thorough account, as his depiction of the Treaty’s meanings raises some pressing questions. If, for example, a number of the Association’s members were humanitarians, driven by a psychological need to gain land by means other than blind robbery, how did their tender consciences countenance the undoubted deceit involved in the Treaty, such as their assertion that Batman had fulfilled the ancient requirements of feoffment by walking the boundaries of the land he claimed? It is also unfortunate that Attwood’s thoughtful consideration of Kulin participation in and understanding of the Treaty was presumably published too soon for him to engage with Robert Kenny’s recent discussion of Kulin ‘knowing’ in relation to the Treaty, which also considers the significance of similarities between British and Kulin forms of agreement-making (‘Tricks or Treats: A Case for Kulin Knowing in Batman’s Treaty’ History Australia 5, 2 (2008): 38.1 14). The second and third sections of the book consider how the Treaty has been remembered in both colonial and modern Australia, drawing out two narratives*one about Batman and one about the Treaty*that have been constructed to soothe the consciences of settlers and their descendants. As Attwood comments, forgetting has been as urgent a part of this task as remembering (106). A great strength of this account is that Attwood goes beyond debates among academic historians about the Treaty to consider the making of history in more popular forms and contexts, including centenary celebrations, public artwork and memorials, family history societies and newspaper accounts. From the unlikely rehabilitation of the syphilitic Batman by the