‘Soliciting sixpences from township to township’: moral dilemmas in mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as a nascent ‘public sphere’ took shape in Port Phillip and then Victoria, a set of questions emerged about the past, present and future relationship between Aboriginal people and British colonizers in the colony's imaginative and intellectual life. In the context of urban developments best considered explosive in speed and transformation, a group of Melbourne thinkers were forced to consider the relationship between dispossession, violence and the apparent historical progress of settler society itself. Unlike other settler colonial cities, where the flowering of a truly ‘urban’ political and intellectual culture was far removed from the brute violence of the frontier (in both historical and geographic terms), in Melbourne the accident of the gold rush condensed historical development in ways that threw this violence and cultural development into the same historical frame. How could a settler colonial city and its community imagine itself when the moral problems of dispossession were politically, culturally and materially present? This article traces how an emerging urban intellectual elite discursively and morally managed the problem of Aboriginal survival (and the haunting of theft and violence it always implied). In so doing, this article offers a new reading of the 1869 ‘Protection Act’ as an attempt to deflect, remove and contain the problem that a swindled and exploited Aboriginal population posed in a city understood by many as a beacon of progress and development.

Acknowledgements

This article emerges from an ARC-funded Discovery Grant, ‘Victorian Ethnographers’ (DP 110100076). Amanda Kalafeldos and David Kershaw-Haworth have worked as research assistants on the project and the authors gratefully acknowledge their input along with the always-sage commentary of Ian McNiven. We also extend our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. The Argus (Melbourne), 13 September 1860. (Note: in the period under discussion, The Argus does not have page numbers.)

2. For a thorough review of the illegal treaty and its consequences see Bain Attwood (with Helen Doyle), Possession: Batman's Treaty and the Matter of History, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2009.

3. Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–1861 (1888), Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963, p 382. See also E Finn, The Chronicles of Early Melbourne: Vols 1–3, centennial edition, Melbourne: Heritage Publications, 1976.

4. Whilst the ‘numbers game’ is both politically and historically fraught, there is little question that the Aboriginal population plummeted in the years between 1835 and 1855. Even the most conservative estimates suggest that deaths from disease and violence reduced the Aboriginal population by at least 50 per cent in around 20 years. For a measured discussion see Richard Broome, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995, pp 121–167.

5. Victorian Hansard, Vol 4, 1858, p 678.

6. The Age (Melbourne), 15 October 1868, p 7.

7. See Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Absorbing the “Aboriginal Problem”: Controlling Interracial Marriage in Australia in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, Aboriginal History 27, 2003, pp 183–207.

8. This definition of political culture is taken from Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp 10–11.

9. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis 34, 1994, pp 94–152.

10. ‘Whisper’ from the title of Henry Reynolds's history of humanitarian practice in Australia, This Whispering in our Hearts, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994.

11. James Bonwick, Early Days of Melbourne, Melbourne: Jas Blundell and Co, 1857, p 32.

12. The Argus (Melbourne), 13 September 1860. Nearly three decades later, when a group from the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines visited Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, they encountered with somewhat astonishing continuity ‘An ancient warrior [known as] […] Pretty Boy […] [whose] principle acquaintance with the English language seemed to consist of “Gib it tickpen”, and until that coin was handed over the visitors knew no peace.’ The Age (Melbourne), 10 December 1883, p 5. It would seem that ‘begging’ as the Europeans called it was an effective strategy for securing what was wanted.

13. Lindsay J Proudfoot and M M Roche, (Dis)placing Empire, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005, p 7.

14. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

15. Jane M Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London: Routledge, 1996, p 34.

16. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2003.

17. On the explosive growth of colonial boom cities, see James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

18. Anthony King, ‘Colonial Cities: Global Pivots of Change’, in Raymond F Betts and Robert Ross (eds), Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context, The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1985, pp 7–30.

19. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, pp x–xi.

20. For a productive overview of this network in the nineteenth century, see Anna Johnson, Missionary Writing and Empire 1800–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

21. For a discussion of this committee, see Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and the British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4(3), 2003, e-journal.

22. Michael Cannon (ed), Historical Records of Victoria, Vol. 2A: The Aborigines of Port Phillip, 1835–1839, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p 64.

23. Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal 54, 2002, pp 24–48.

24. Neville Green, ‘From Princes to Paupers: The Struggle for Control of Aborigines in Western Australia’, Early Days 11(4), 1998, pp 447–462, p 449.

25. The idea of a will to forget is drawn, loosely, from Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008.

26. Broome, ‘Victoria’, p 67; Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989, p 98.

27. Michael Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–86, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979, p 177.

28. John Lancey quoted in H Anderson, Out of the Shadow: The Career of John Pascoe Fawkner, Melbourne: F W Cheshire, 1962, p 32.

29. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

30. Taken from Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to Be Rich, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, p 382.

31. R H Horne, Australian Facts and Prospects, London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1859, p 195.

32. These statistics are drawn from Joan Campbell, ‘The Settlement of Melbourne: 1851–1893, Selected Aspects of Urban Growth’, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1970, p 15.

33. Henry Butler Stoney, Victoria: with a Description of its Principal Cities, London: Elder, 1856, pp 25–26.

34. William Burrow, Reminiscences of a Mounted Trooper in the Australian Constabulary, London: Routledge, 1891, pp 156–157.

35. E Carton Booth, Another England: Life, Living, Homes and Homemakers in Victoria, London: Virtue, 1869, p 224.

36. Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, London: Chapman and Hall, 1873, p 248.

37. On this fear, see Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2002.

38. Cited in Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010, p 158.

39. Briggs, Victorian Cities, p 280. See also Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence, ‘Ethnographies of Place: A New Urban Research Agenda’, Urban History 26(3), 1999, pp 325–348.

40. Thomas McCombie, A History of the Colony of Victoria, Melbourne: Sands and Kenny, 1858, p 1.

41. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History 31(2), 2003, pp 1–15, p 2.

42. Richard Twopenny, Town Life in Australia (1883), Ringwood: Penguin, 1973, p 21.

43. Elizabeth Morrison, ‘Reading Victoria's Newspapers’, Australian Cultural History 8, 1999, pp 128–140.

44. For a discussion of Melbourne's intellectual centrality in the colonies more broadly, see Jill Roe, Marvelous Melbourne: The Emergence of an Australian City, Sydney: Hicks, Smith and Sons, 1974.

45. The Early Closing Association was a group of shop traders committed to the eight-hour day and also keen to provide educational lectures for its members.

46. David Goodman, Gold Seeking, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994, p 89.

47. Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers, p 88.

48. Lynette Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, pp 1–15, p 7. See also Ian J McNiven and Lynette Russell, ‘The Wurundjeri of Melbourne and Port Philip’, in Encyclopaedia of World's Endangered Indigenous People, New York: Greenwood, 2000, pp 220–245.

49. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005. See also Alick Jackomos and Derek Fowell (eds), Living Aboriginal History of Victoria: Stories in the Oral Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

50. The Argus (Melbourne), 6 December 1859, p 7.

51. Anne Humphreys, ‘Knowing the Victorian City: Writing and Representation’, Victorian Literature and Culture 30(2), 2002, pp 601–612, p 602.

52. Michael Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–86, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1979, p 34.

53. The Argus (Melbourne), 24 April 1858. In writing about this group of intellectual men, we are cautious that we do not anachronistically attribute contemporary political sensitivities to them. Similarly it is worth avoiding didacticism and the retrospective casting of blame on views that we now consider to be racist. See also Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, New York: Cornell University Press, 2011, p 18.

54. Bronwen Douglas, ‘Novus Orbis Australis: Oceania in the Science of Race, 1750–1850’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (eds), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940, Canberra: ANU Epress, 2008, pp 99–155, p 103. Although European colonization was undoubtedly the catalyst for this supposed extinction there was also conjectured an underlining cause for which the colonists were not responsible. Cf. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003, p 3.

55. Douglas, ‘Novus Orbis Australis’, p 134.

56. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, pp 124–130.

57. ‘Lecture from E.S. Parker, general observations’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 1854.

58. The Argus (Melbourne), 24 September 1854.

59. William Blandowski, ‘Philosophical Institute lecture’, The Argus (Melbourne), 24 September 1856.

60. The Australasian (Melbourne), 11 August 1866.

61. David Blair, ‘Extinction of Aboriginal Tribes, 24 November 1868’, The Argus (Melbourne), 5 December 1868. Emphasis added.

62. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell, 1999, p 29.

63. John O'Leary, ‘The Ethnographic Verse of Mid-Nineteenth Century Australia’, Australian Literary Studies 23(1), 2007, pp 3–17.

64. O'Leary, ‘The Ethnographic Verse’, p 10.

65. Balladeadro was printed in The Australasian (Melbourne), 2 March 1867, and Mamba on 20 July 1867.

66. O'Leary, ‘The Ethnographic Verse’, p 11.

67. O'Leary, ‘The Ethnographic Verse’, p 12; Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, Melbourne: Government of Victoria, 1878, pp 101–102, 110.

68. The Australian Journal, 6 May 1866.

69. The Australasian (Melbourne), 15 May 1869; Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals, p 2.

70. Attwood, Possession.

71. Tom Griffiths Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

72. In his recent book on the founding of Melbourne, James Boyce suggests that although there were outright instances of horrific violence, and notwithstanding the presence of compassionate settlers too, ‘individual actions were much less significant in deciding the fate of the Aborigines than was the policy decision to open Aboriginal lands to unrestricted white settlement’. James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia, Melbourne: Black Inc, 2011, p 199.

73. Quoted by Henry Reynolds, ‘Violence, the Aborigines and the Australian Historian’, Meanjin 31(4), 1972, pp 471–477. See also Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004.

74. James Bonwick, John Batman, the Founder of Victoria, 1868, Melbourne: Wren, 1973, p 5.

75. The Argus (Melbourne), 23 September 1865.

76. ‘A Legend of Port Phillip’, The Australian Journal, 15 September 1866. Courtney was confident the Aborigines would not be affected by the poison because he knew that they would only eat meat they had themselves killed. He was devastated when it was revealed that he was wrong.

77. The Australasian (Melbourne), 11 August 1866.

78. The Argus (Melbourne), 13 September 1860.

79. Jan Jindy Pettman, Living in the Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992, p 13.

80. The Argus (Melbourne), 24 July 1867.

81. The Argus (Melbourne), 13 September 1860.

82. The Australian Journal (Melbourne), 26 May 1866.

83. The Argus (Melbourne), 24 April 1855.

84. The Argus (Melbourne), 20 June 1859.

85. The Argus (Melbourne), 16 March 1856.

86. The Argus (Melbourne), 24 April 1855.

87. The Argus (Melbourne), 6 June 1865.

88. See Sharon Zukin, ‘David Harvey on Cities’, in Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (eds), David Harvey: A Critical Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006, pp 102–120.

89. Rob Nixon, ‘Environmentalism and Postcolonialism’, in Ania Loomba et al. (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.