Penelope Edmonds

Introduction: Making Space in Settler Colonies

Colonialism, between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, has produced a profound and extensive rearrangement of physical spaces and peoples. Moved by force of circumstance or necessity as migrants, slaves, indentured labourers, convicts, refugees or seekers of wealth, millions of people, entire societies in some cases, were reorganised during the colonial era. This has left an enduring and unresolved legacy in the socalled postcolonial present, for in most cases, Indigenous societies and First Peoples were already present in the places to which people moved. As a result new meaning and social demography had to be carved and asserted over existing and enduring Indigenous spaces. It is this historical process of remaking space, and the intricacies of interaction — violent, ideological and cultural — between colonising and colonised peoples that is explored by the essays, poems and narratives in this collection. Centring around the Pacific Ocean, with its proliferation of settler colonies, contributors take us through an expanse of time, place and region to piece together interwoven but discrete case-studies that illuminate the transnational threads and local experiences that produced, or made colonial space.

Collecting Looerryminer's 'Testimony': Aboriginal Women, Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands

In 1832 British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ to the antipodean colonies on a mission sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends. This article examines Backhouse and Walkers mission to witness the ‘testimony’ of Looerryminer and other Aboriginal women who had lived with sealers in the Bass Strait Islands. It argues that this investigative journey is best comprehended in the context of the long tradition of Quaker transimperial travel ‘under concern’ and particularly their abolitionist witnessing undertaken from the late eighteenth century and its associated texts with their distinctive form, language and repertoire. Urging that we read ‘along the grain’ of the archive in line with Ann Stoler, the article explores the travel and curious translation of humanitarian abolitionist sentiment, text, and action across and between colonies of settlement, and the various ‘species of slavery’ that were imagined, constructed and examined by Quaker humanitarians in this Age of Reform.

A new beginning for Settler Colonial Studies

This issue of Settler Colonial Studies represents a major turning point for our relatively new journal. First published in 2011 in an open access format (entirely run on volunteer labour), the founding editorial team of Settler Colonial Studies sought to respond to a growing demand for reflection and critical scholarship on settler colonialism as a distinct social, cultural and historical formation with ongoing political effects. Our exciting move to Taylor & Francis is representative of the robust and dynamic development of this comparatively new field. The establishment of the journal emerged out of a desire for a central forum which would draw together the extraordinarily diverse critical scholarship and scholars engaging with settler colonialism, and to consolidate settler colonial studies as a distinct area of enquiry. Work on settler colonialism has expanded exponentially since the 1990s, when a range of scholars began to view the singular category of ‘colonialism’ as too blunt a tool. They argued that colonies where ‘the settlers had come to stay’ presented particularly contested and often violent material and cultural dynamics which required specific scholarly as well as activist interrogation. This surge of new work has been particularly apparent in studies not only of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, but also in Canada, South Africa, the USA, a variety of other European imperial sites, and perhaps most provocatively, Israel. Initially viewed in terms of British, and to some extent European, settler endeavour, some of the field’s most innovative new directions have provincialised and looked well beyond Europe to draw connections between diverse geographic and temporal locations which otherwise would not have been seen as related. The result has been a consolidation or integration of debates over Indigenous dispossession and sovereignty that were otherwise fragmented and disconnected. In turn, this has provided a challenge to create new forms of enquiry and political action. In our attention to the operation of settler colonial polities past and present we do not seek to foreclose on other colonial forms, with which, of course, settler colonial manifestations were mixed. Rather, we argue that the settler colonial phenomenon, which has shaped global orders and individual lives in profound and often violent ways, demands particular analytical attention. The recent ‘Idle No More’ protests attended by thousands across Canada over breaches of treaty rights by the government, inspired in part by the hunger strike of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, ongoing debates about the Northern Territory ‘intervention’ and the push for Aboriginal peoples to be recognised in the Constitution in Australia and the overwhelming UN approval for the de facto recognition of Palestinian as a sovereign state in November 2011, all point to the urgent political relevance of interrogating multiple settler colonial forms. Their pervasive and ongoing ramifications shape the lives of Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in seemingly diverse and disconnected societies across the globe. The journal’s geographical origins were in Melbourne, where there was an unusual concentration of leading and emerging scholars working in this field. Our first issue included a major new article by Patrick Wolfe, who has been instrumental in the foundation of this field. The journal owes its existence to a very large extent to the vision and dedication of Lorenzo Veracini,

“Failing in every endeavour to conciliate”: Governor Arthur's Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian conciliation narratives and their transnational connections

Abstract In 1829 Lieutenant Governor George Arthur issued a series of Proclamation Boards illustrated with images of friendship, equality before the law and mutual punishment for Aborigines and Europeans alike, in an attempt to conciliate Aboriginal people in Van Diemens Land (Tasmania). These striking images have been reworked over time, and have come to shape understandings of Australian history at national and international levels. Yet for images so regularly cited in history books they have been under researched and frequently detached from the interconnected global and imperial histories that produced them. In line with new work that seeks to trace the political and cultural networks of empire, this paper considers the boards in transnational context. Proposing that the boards be considered objects of diplomacy, the paper examines the transference of iconography, including the humanitarian handshake, found on treaty medals and British anti-slavery tokens between networked British colonies. Reflecting on the visual lexicon of imperialism and broader discourses of the management of Indigenous peoples and slaves in British colonies and former colonies, the paper reveals how these political objects promoting peace and conciliation were often distributed in ritual gesture within a climate of Indigenous dispossession of their lands, frontier conflict and war.

Travelling ‘Under Concern’: Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1832–41

In 1832, British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ on a trans-imperial journey that took nine years and spanned the Australian colonies of Van Diemens Land, New South Wales and Swan River in Western Australia, Mauritius and South Africas Cape Colony. Backhouse and Walker were fundamental to the creation and expansion of humanitarian networks in the antipodes, where they made major humanitarian interventions in matters concerning Aboriginal peoples, penal reform, slavery and education. This paper first traces the genesis and historical dimensions of their journey to contextualise it within a long transnational tradition of Quakers travelling ‘under concern’. The paper considers the tour through diverse interpretative approaches such as transnationalism and new work on transnational social movements, humanitarian travel writing and textuality, and argues that Backhouse and Walker were not imperial agents, nor were they agitators operating outside empire, but rather occupied a complex position as ‘institutional opponents’ working within imperial political circuits to broker various humanitarian reforms at multiple levels in the furtherance of their particular moral empire.

Unofficial apartheid, convention and country towns: reflections on Australian history and the New South Wales Freedom Rides of 1965

Abstract Many scholars have not only ignored or disavowed the long history of segregation of towns in country Australia, they have also failed to ask germane questions regarding the distinct terms of the production of racialized and gendered bodies and spaces in settler towns and cities, and how such deep genealogies of segregation continue to shape nominally postcolonial urban spaces. This article explores the history of segregation in New South Wales country towns, such as Walgett, and the partial success of the New South Wales Freedom Rides of 1965 that sought to direct national attention to spatial and social partitions in them. While some scholars have referred to segregation in Australia as ‘convention’, this article argues that claims of a more benign Australian convention or ‘unofficial apartheid’ may be exposed to reveal a concomitant range of strategic racialized manoeuvres, everyday yet official adjudications enacted by municipal and other authorities to create violent geographies of exclusion. Interrogation of convention at the street, town, and everyday level reveals the devastating biopolitics of the Australian settler-colonial urban, which while structurally different was no less devastating and thoroughgoing than those of the American South.

The Le Souëf box: Reflections on imperial nostalgia, material culture and exhibitionary practice in colonial Victoria

The Le Souëf box, a decorated chest containing a set of miniaturised Aboriginal weapons, was made by Albert and Caroline Le Souëf a decade after the frontier period in the colonial state of Victoria, Australia. Invested with many key concerns of the nineteenth centurys apprehension and representation of Australian Aboriginal peoples, this complex composite object of images, text and diminutive objects is animated by many cultural and scientific narratives of the era, including ethnography, typology, museology, miniaturisation and the fetishisation of indigenous weaponry. The Le Souëf box is a transitional object, reflecting the shifting colonial ideologies of the 1860s and the gradual move from ethnology to the harder and more formalised racial sciences. Yet the box also reveals the personal and psychological desires of it makers, showing a genuine interest in Aboriginal people as well as an imperial nostalgia for an untainted past and an idealised pre‐contact Aboriginal life. This paper seeks to bring an explorative postcolonial attention to the study of the Le Souëf box, and considers the potential of reading European nineteenth‐century objects of material culture that represent Aboriginal people as sources, and queries their historical reliability. The paper reflects on the implicit relationships between nineteenth‐century European exhibitionary practices, memory work and Australian history, with material representations of Australian Aboriginal culture in a settler‐colonial period that was marked by violent dispossession of Aboriginal people.

Eliza Batman’s house: unhomely frontiers and intimate Overstraiters in Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip

This chapter examines the overstraiter household and large enterprise of Eliza and John Batman, and the intimate and violent entanglements with Aboriginal people across two colonial frontiers in Southeastern Australia—Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip. It considers the cross-cultural affective economy of the Batman household amid the daily economic workings of pastoralism and labour on the frontier. Mobilising ideas of the domestic and the ‘unhomely’ the chapter argues that intimate affective economies recast acts of aggression as acts of kindness, and dispersal of Aboriginal families as care. On these gendered and uncertain domestic borderlands extreme violence and forced intimacy forged new vectors of imperial power. Here, land, homes, and children were taken from Aboriginal people and prosaic, proximate, and often unhomely relationships were made through the affective redescriptions of family.

Precarious intimacies: cross-cultural violence and proximity in settler colonial economies of the Pacific Rim

The development of settler colonial cultures was deeply dependent upon the everyday proximity of Indigenous and settler workers; yet we know surprisingly little of how the precarious intimacies arising from that proximity were intrinsically connected to forms of colonial violence. This chapter examines recent trends in colonial, postcolonial, and feminist scholarship to unpack how violence and intimacy were intertwined in the settler colonial encounter, and how this connection was embedded in the formation of settler colonial economies around the Pacific Rim. Considering a wider range of colonial dynamics beyond formal labour relations, it considers the role of ideological, moral, and emotional economies in shaping the complex colonial relationships that formed the building blocks of modern settler states.

Activism in the Antipodes: Transnational Quaker Humanitarianism and the Troubled Politics of Compassion in the Early Nineteenth Century

British Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, have been described as the world’s first ‘transnational human rights movement’ because of their long involvement from the late-sixteenth century in European and trans-Atlantic international mediation and their foundational role in the anti-slavery movement. Despite this prominence, critical scholarship concerning Quakers as particular networked and highly travelled ‘global activists’ and their humanitarian and antecedent ‘human rights’ advocacy in the Australian and other antipodean colonies is a neglected sphere. This chapter examines the nine-year multi-colony tour of Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker (1832–1841) in the furtherance of their particular moral empire across Australia, Mauritius, and South Africa. Broadening historical consideration of what constitutes transnational human rights activism and the INGO or international nongovernmental transnational activist, it considers the witnessing practices of Quakers as a significant precursor of modern transnational humanitarian activism, in an era when global governance was driven by empire and its close engagement with dispossessed and colonised peoples. Taking insights from sociology, the article argues that the Quakers’ relationship with the state, similar to that of contemporary INGOs, was as ‘institutional opponents,’ both fraught and symbiotic, and reveals the ambiguities of humanitarian sentiment and the troubled moral economy of compassion as entwined vectors of humanitarian governance and imperial power.