Lyndall Ryan

Settler massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851

Abstract This article addresses the vexed question of settler massacres of Aboriginal Victorians on the Port Phillip frontier 1836–1851. It argues for a new approach to the question by combining the models of Aboriginal resistance and settler activism within a framework that considers colonialism as a dynamic, contested and ongoing process. It then applies the methods of massacre investigation devised by historical sociologist Jacques Semelin to analyse a range of printed sources from the period to identify the scale, pre-conditions, types, prevalence and evidence of settler massacres across the three major pastoral regions in Port Phillip. In analysing the data, the article finds that settler massacres were widespread and responsible for the deaths of more than 11 per cent of the known Aboriginal population in Port Phillip in 1836. The data also identifies three pre-conditions and four types of massacre and that most were perpetrated by settlers but that the various mounted police units also played a key role. The article concludes that settler massacres have played a more significant role in the dramatic Aboriginal population decline in Port Phillip than historians of the Aboriginal resistance school have estimated.

The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land: success or failure?

Abstract The Black Line in Tasmania in 1830 was the largest force ever assembled against Aborigines anywhere in Australia. Tasmanian historians have dismissed the Line as an aberration by Governor George Arthur and a complete fiasco by virtue of the fact that only two Tasmanian Aborigines were recorded captured and two others killed. This article contests this view by locating the Line within British imperial policy at the time, and it makes three important new findings. Far from being an aberration, the Line was a common strategy employed across the British Empire to forcibly remove indigenous peoples from their homelands. Further, there was not just one but three Lines in force over the fifteen-month period of the entire operation, and they played a decisive role in ending the Black War. The article concludes that in making George Arthur the scapegoat, historians have overlooked the Lines significance as an important instrument of British imperial power in the early nineteenth century.

Massacre in the old and new worlds, c.1780–1820

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Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania 1823–34: a case study of the Meander River Region, June 1827

The recent dispute over the use of evidence in identifying massacre in Tasmanias Black War 1823–34 has generated new research on specific incidents but left key questions unresolved. Were massacres a rare event or were they widespread? If the latter is the case, were they random incidents or part of an “organized process” to dispossess and destroy the Tasmanian Aborigines? Above all, were they sanctioned by the local authorities and by the imperial government in Britain? This article addresses these questions by drawing on the typology developed by the French historical sociologist Jacques Semelin to identify the period in which massacres were most prevalent during the Tasmanian Black War, and to investigate in detail a cluster of massacres in the Meander River region in Tasmania in June 1827 to determine whether or not they were part of an “organized process” or a series of random incidents to destroy a particular Aboriginal group, known as the Pallittorre. The article then considers whether Governor George Arthur could have authorized the massacres. The article finds that massacres were more widespread in one particular phase of the war and, in the area of the case study, were more likely to have been part of an “organized process” than a series of random incidents. It concludes that these massacres were in fact sanctioned by the local and imperial authorities, and were used as a vital strategy in the overall destruction of the Pallittorre.

Shopping malls country: reading the Central Coast of NSW

The two regional malls, Erina Fair and Tuggerah Mall, have become icons of identity in the new region of the Central Coast of New South Wales. These malls are the hubs of the Central Coast because of their similarity to other malls in Australia and not their difference and as global icons they provide the residents a sense of identity that makes them feel at home.

Reflections on genocide and settler-colonial violence

Abstract The debate about whether genocide took place on the Australian colonial frontier began more than thirty years ago and appears to have reached an intellectual impasse. How then did the debate begin in Australia, how did it gain traction and why does it appear more vigorous in Australia than in other settler societies? To explore these questions, this paper places the debate within a larger context, firstly by comparing the Australian debate with those taking place in other similar British settler societies and then considering the ways European historians have invoked genocide discourse to explore nationalist histories. In taking this approach the paper reveals the different ways genocide discourse has been used to make sense of traumatic pasts in different regions of the world and how it has become part of the discussions about national identity. Finally in an attempt to overcome the intellectual impasse about the genocide debate in Australia, the paper offers a few suggestions that may give historians of the colonial frontier a way forward. This article has been peer reviewed.

The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), 1830

The infamous Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land, as the colony of Tasmania was then known, remains one of the most notorious and yet least understood episodes in Australian history. Instigated by the colony’s Governor George Arthur in 1830, the Line comprised a human cordon of more than two thousand soldiers and civilians with the declared purpose of driving insurgent Tasmanian Aboriginal nations from their homelands in eastern Van Diemen’s Land to a specially designated reserve in Tasman Peninsula. Historians have long dismissed the Line as an expensive aberration on Arthur’s part and as an embarrassing failure in that only two Tasmanian Aborigines were captured and two others were recorded killed. The recent appearance, however, of new sources about the Line and the emergence of new approaches to colonial and imperial histories has generated new scholarly interest in the Line. The three papers published in this issue of JAS represent the first fruits of this new research. Initially presented at the Australian Historical Association Regional Conference in Launceston in July 2011, they formed part of two panels that sought to reconstruct the Line in situ, so to speak, 180 years after it took place. Eleanor Cave’s paper draws on the recently recovered copy of the diary of Robert Lawrence, a twenty-three-year-old settler participant in the Line. From his recorded experiences, Cave considers that the Line was poorly organised and resourced and that the rough terrain and inclement weather offered little hope of success. Nicholas Clements’ paper interrogates a vast array of contemporary sources to elicit new insights held by settlers, soldiers, and convicts about the Line and about their experiences as participants in the operation. He finds that fewer settlers participated than previously believed and that most of the 1,600 civilians were either convicts or ticket-of-leave men and thus should be considered as conscripts rather than volunteers. My own paper considers the Line within the context of British imperial history. It contends that far from being an aberration on Arthur’s part, the Line was a strategy widely used in other parts of the empire to forcibly remove indigenous insurgents from their homelands and that there was not just one but three lines in operation over a period of fifteen months in 1830 and 1831, which ended in the forced surrender of the Tasmanian Aborigines. The important new insights revealed in all three papers demonstrate that far from being an exhausted topic, the Black Line is ripe for further reassessment in the context of twenty-first century debates about colonialism and imperialism. For example, we need to know more about the different Aboriginal experiences of the Line, how the famous map of the Line was created and whether it is accurate, how Journal of Australian Studies, 2013 Vol. 37, No. 1, 1 2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2012.760213

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

ABSTRACT Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers. By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.

The Australian Agricultural Company, the Van Diemen’s Land Company: Labour Relations with Aboriginal Landowners, 1824–1835

When the Australian Agricultural Company and the Van Diemen’s Land Company took up their vast land grants in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land in the mid 1820s, they were confronted by the Aboriginal landowners. This chapter explores their responses to the Aboriginal people by focusing on their divergent employment policies. The chapter finds that the Australian Agricultural Company promoted Aboriginal labour to ensure their survival and the Van Diemen’s Land Company promoted their removal in the belief that they were destined to die out.

Van Diemen's Land: An Aboriginal History

family and friends in these rarely photographed cultural spaces. In chapter ten, Donna Oxenham (Yamatji) tracks the history of colonial photography inwhat becameWestern Australia, through an archive that includes the harsh realities of mission life at New Norcia and beyond. The last chapter is fascinating if somewhat offbeat. Co-authored by Lydon, Yolngu elder Laurie Baymarrawangga, and linguist Bentley James, it tracks the story behind a photo made by writer Edward Reichenbach in collaboration with Yolngu, who re-staged a murder for the camera of two visiting trepangers whose brutal behaviour provoked this act of revenge in 1917, circulating beyond the world of local Indigenous law. The book’s greatest strength—its broad range, remarkable detailed photographic histories, and analysis by/with rarely-heard Indigenous participants—may undermine its relevance for readers outside of Australian Indigenous studies. Theauthors rarelyplace theirmaterial in conversationwith other similarly engaged scholarswho are offering alternative accounts of Indigenous photography in other locations, such as the experiences of native North Americans. On the other hand, the book’s depth of field is compelling, and a reminder that Indigenous histories are always being revised as new materials and approaches unsettle taken-for-granted landscapes. Nonetheless, to have the work of both colonial as well as Aboriginal photographers considered and reinterpretedwith such care,makes the book a landmark in decolonised scholarship, and a reminder that in the case of photography, it’s important to always consider who is calling the shots.