The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia

Abstract

This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular stereotypes drawn from British and American abolitionist precedents. These sources included Uncle Tom's Cabin and popular newspaper commentary on Queensland frontier violence that had circulated earlier in Australia and Britain. The reception of Vogan's novel was mixed: while it reached a wide audience, it failed to prompt official action, and local and British reviewers charged him with sensationalism and ‘embellishment’. Vogan defended his work vehemently, asserting it was based on fact. Reviewers' scepticism stemmed, however, from Vogan's uneasy blend of realist narrative, grounded in eyewitness testimony, and the popular and sensational fictional and visual conventions he deployed. At the end of a period of intense frontier conflict in Queensland over the preceding three decades, Vogan's novel of protest and its ambivalent reception point to the limits of humanitarian influence within an Australian, intercolonial, and ultimately imperial framework.

Notes

¹ Cited in Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998), 25.

² Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).

³ See Alison Holland, ‘Feminism, Colonialism and Aboriginal Workers: An Anti-Slavery Crusade’, Labour History 69 (November 1995): 52–64.

⁴ Caroline Moorehead, Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998); Gary Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

⁵ Peter Walker and Daniel G. Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World (London: Routledge, 2008); Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

⁶ Raymond Evans, ‘Kings in Brass Crescents: Defining Aboriginal Labour Patterns in Colonial Queensland’, in Fighting Words: Writing about Race, ed. Raymond Evans (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 181–2. Within two years, it had sold seven thousand copies: The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 April 1892, 6.

⁷ Reynolds.

⁸ Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005).

⁹ Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 79–107.

¹⁰ Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

¹¹ David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery 1780–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 49.

¹² John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Christina Twomey, ‘Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism’, History of Photography 36, no. 3 (August 2012): 255–64.

¹³ Mackenzie; John Peffer, ‘Snap of the Whip/Crossroads of Shame: Flogging, Photography, and the Representation of Atrocity in the Congo Reform Campaign’, Visual Anthropology Review 24, no. 1 (2008): 55–77.

¹⁴ Jane Lydon, The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights (Sydney: NewSouth, 2012).

¹⁵ Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1988), 55–60.

¹⁶ Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland's Native Police (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2008).

¹⁷ Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland's Native Police (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2008). See also Reynolds, 91–107.

¹⁸ Evans, Fighting Words, 192.

¹⁹ Richards, 158.

²⁰ Evans et al., Race Relations, 55–60.

²¹ Richards, 150.

²² Richards, 125–6, 150–8.

²³ The Way We Civilise: Black and White, the Native Police. A series of articles reprinted from the Queenslander (Brisbane: G. and J. Black, 1880).

²⁴ Reynolds, 108.

²⁵ Evans, ‘Kings’, 183–204; The debate about the accuracy of terms such as ‘slavery’ to describe Islander labour practices, and related issues such as whether labourers were ‘kidnapped’, has persisted within more recent historiography, as reviewed in Clive Moore, ‘Revising the Revisionists: The Historiography of Immigrant Melanesians in Australia’, Pacific Studies 15, no. 2 (June 1992): 61–86. Against an earlier emphasis on coercion, Moore argues that Islanders had ‘considerable control over their lives and labor in the sandalwood trade and on sugar and coconut plantations’ (61–2). More recently, Tracey Banivanua-Mar has explored the perspectives of the Australian South Sea Island community and recovered the central element of physical violence in this history: Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007) 135–6.

²⁶ Evans et al., Race Relations, 155–6. Reid Mortensen, ‘Slaving in Australian Courts: Blackbirding Cases, 1869–1871’, Journal of South Pacific Law 13, no. 1 (2009), http://www.paclii.org/journals/fJSPL/vol04/7.shtml#fn12

²⁷ Royal Commission 1885. Recruiting Polynesian Labourers in New Guinea and Adjacent Islands: Report of Royal Commission (Brisbane: Queensland, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly Session of 1885, Vol. 2).

²⁸ Clive Moore, Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea, 1985).

²⁹ Banivanua-Mar, 70–80.

³⁰ As did other contemporary humanitarians: see for example Reynolds, 108–10.

³¹ Letter, 4 September 1891, ‘Australasia: G97/A, Australia’, Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth & African Studies at Rhodes House, Oxford. MSS. Brit. Emp. S22. G374. Thanks to Fiona Paisley for sharing this material with me.

³² For an excellent summary of Vogan's travels and reception drawn from the Fryer Library's archives, see Mark Cryle ‘“Australia's Shadow Side”: Arthur Vogan and the Black Police’, Fryer Folios 4, no. 3 (December 2009): 18–21.

³³ Letter, 4 September 1891, ‘Australasia: G97/A, Australia’.

³⁴ Letter, 4 September 1891, ‘Australasia: G97/A, Australia’.

³⁵ Arthur James Vogan, The Black Police: A Story of Modern Australia (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1890), 1.

³⁶ Cryle, 19.

³⁷ John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 65–70.

³⁸ Vogan, The Black Police, 40.

³⁹ Vogan, The Black Police, 40–1.

⁴⁰ Vogan, The Black Police, 42.

⁴¹ Vogan, The Black Police, 45.

⁴² Vogan, The Black Police, 100.

⁴³ Vogan, The Black Police, 107.

⁴⁴ Vogan, The Black Police, 110.

⁴⁵ Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1994). Visual depictions include Illustrated Christian Weekly, 24 December 1880; ‘MASSACRE ILLUSTRATED An engraving of the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre of Aboriginal people at the hands of settlers’, in Camden Pelham, The chronicles of crime, or, The new Newgate calendar, Volume 2 (London: T. Tegg, 1841), 473; Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 20 July 1919, 4: the Revd Mr Watson (to the Editor) stated that Vogan had written to him and told him that he had based this scene on Myall Creek.

⁴⁶ Peter Dowling, ‘Destined Not to Survive: The Illustrated Newspapers of Colonial Australia’, Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 3, nos. 1–2 (1995): 85–98.

⁴⁷ Jessie Morgan-Owens, ‘“Another Ida May”: Photography in American Abolition Campaign’, in Imagining Transatlantic Slavery, ed. Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 47–60; Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

⁴⁸ The Brisbane Courier, 15 September 1888, 6.

⁴⁹ E.g., Vogan, Black Police; an expedition to capture Aboriginal workers is termed a ‘slave-making expedition’ (96–7); see also references to them as slaves (149–50, 215, 223–4, 227–8, 257–8, 368, 385, 390).

⁵⁰ E.g., Vogan, Black Police; an expedition to capture Aboriginal workers is termed a ‘slave-making expedition’, 168.

⁵¹ E.g., Vogan, Black Police; an expedition to capture Aboriginal workers is termed a ‘slave-making expedition’, 220. Other references to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Whittier are made (184, 219, 216, 223–4). Perhaps coincidentally, two of the Aboriginal people's names, Dina and Carlo, are shared with Uncle Tom's Cabin characters.

⁵² E.g., Vogan, Black Police, 93, 97. ‘Mohocks’ are also equated with larrikins (121), and comparison is made with American reserves (222). For the history of the word ‘nigger’, see Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). Vogan, Black Police, 206.

⁵³ See especially Vogan, Black Police, 118.

⁵⁴ Wood, 229.

⁵⁵ A. J. Vogan, [Notes for speeches and letters], UQFL 2/2584, Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library.

⁵⁶ A. J. Vogan, The case for the Aborigines, UQFL 2/2579 p. 11, Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library.

⁵⁷ Cryle, 19.

⁵⁸ Vogan, Black Police, 150.

⁵⁹ Vogan, Black Police, 150.

⁶⁰ E.g., Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 145.

⁶¹ Wood, 236.

⁶² Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303–34.

⁶³ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1852).

⁶⁴ Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom's Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

⁶⁵ Turley, 100.

⁶⁶ ‘European News’, The Courier, 15 December 1852, 3. In January 1853 it was noted that it had been dramatised and was ‘very popular at our minor theatres’: ‘English News’, Bathurst Free Press and Mining News, 15 January 1853, 4.

⁶⁷ Ian Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Duckworth, 1978).

⁶⁸ Morgan, 2.

⁶⁹ Arthur Vogan, ‘Open Letter. “Attack on the Cinema”’, Western Champion, 27 January 1933, 13.

⁷⁰ Morgan observes that British pictorial accounts could be ‘outright lascivious’ compared to American prints (42–3).

⁷¹ Vogan, Black Police, 156.

⁷² Vogan, Black Police, 134–7. Henry Reynolds also notes the fear of ‘humanitarian-minded squatters’ in 1860s–1880s Queensland that community tolerance of frontier violence would debase the whole community. Reynolds, 92.

⁷³ Vogan, Black Police, 368.

⁷⁴ Evans, ‘Kings’, 181–2.

⁷⁵ The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 April 1892, 6.

⁷⁶ ‘The Recent Murder by Blacks’, The Argus, 30 May 1889, 5.

⁷⁷ Vogan, Black Police, 199.

⁷⁸ William Strutt, ‘Aboriginal Troopers, Melbourne Police, with English Corporal’, pencil and watercolour, 1850, in Victoria the Golden: Scenes, Sketches and Jottings from Nature, 1850–1862 (Melbourne: Library Committee, Parliament of Victoria, 1980), 169.

⁷⁹ Evening Post (Wellington), 28 October 1901, 6.

⁸⁰ ‘Reviews’, The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, 12 May 1892, 7. Vogan's later pamphlet The Case for the Aborigines (1913) recalled that the book was considered anathema except to the Bulletin, Brisbane Courier and Northern Miner.

⁸¹ The Brisbane Courier, 1 April 1891, 7.

⁸² The Brisbane Courier, 1 April 1891, 7.

⁸³ A. J. Vogan to the Editor, 4 September 1891, reprinted in Anti-Slavery Reporter 11, no. 5 (September 1891): 234. And see Letter, 4 September 1891, ‘Australasia: G97/A, Australia’

⁸⁴ A. J. Vogan to the Editor, 4 September 1891, reprinted in Anti-Slavery Reporter 11, no. 5 (September 1891): 234. And see Letter, 4 September 1891, ‘Australasia: G97/A, Australia’.

⁸⁵ Lydon.

⁸⁶ Vogan to the Editor, 4 September 1891, 234. Second quotation from A. J. Vogan to George Earp, 4 February 1913, Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library. Earp was a Sydney-based philanthropist, being among other things a vice-president of the Geographical Society and president of the Association for the Protection of Native Races. L. E. Fredman, ‘Earp, George Frederick (1858–1933)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/earp-george-frederick-6078/text10407 (accessed 9 August 2013).

⁸⁷ Evening Post (Wellington), 28 October 1901, 6.

⁸⁸ Vogan, Black Police, 224. He listed Carl Lumholtz's Amongst Cannibals, James Bonwick's A Lost Race (in fact, The Lost Tasmanian Race), E. J. Banfield's Beachcombers, and the ‘Rev Gribble's book on the matter’, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land.

⁸⁹ On Gribble see Reynolds, 137–74.

⁹⁰ ‘With the Black Police’, The Burrowa News, 12 December 1902, 1; The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 1902, 4.

⁹¹ Vogan to Earp, 4 February 1913, Fryer Library, University of Queensland Library.

⁹² Finding Aid. Association for the Protection of Native Races, S55. University of Sydney Archives, Sydney.

⁹³ Denis Gojak, The Secret Visitors Project, http://secretvisitors.wordpress.com/about/ (accessed 8 August 2013); Denis Gojak, email correspondence with author, 15 August 2013.

⁹⁴ Vogan, ‘Open Letter. “Attack on the Cinema”’, 13.

⁹⁵ The Brisbane Courier, 1 April 1891, 7.