Charity begins at home? Philanthropy, compassion, and magic lantern slide performances in Australasia, 1891–1892

Abstract

The biblical maxim ‘charity begins at home’ was given very different meanings by magic lantern slide performances touring the Australasian colonies during the early 1890s. The London-based Barnardo’s orphanages competed with the Australian missionary John Brown Gribble, in aiming to divert public sympathy towards their very different social causes: Barnardo worked to relieve the metropolitan white waif, while Gribble sought funds to ameliorate the impact of invasion upon Indigenous Australians on the remote Queensland frontier. Central to both Barnardo’s and Gribble’s magic lantern slide campaigns was a visual and emotional ‘before and after’ narrative of uplift and transformation. These performances defined ideas and social categories that circulated across the empire, seeking to arouse concern for different, and competing, objects of compassion. This mirroring point towards a process of defining cultural categories of class, race and gender across empire, shaping both British and colonial identities. Where Barnardo’s campaign was tremendously successful in raising funds and attracting support across Australia and New Zealand, the missionary Gribble was challenged by white colonists who denigrated Aboriginal people and ridiculed humanitarianism. These responses reveal how compassion was deployed in the colonies to affirm racial solidarity with the distant white child, and to exclude Indigenous people. This dynamic shows the diverse and politicised effects of these emotive performances, and how emotional narratives worked to construct imperial hierarchies.

Keywords:

• Victorian philanthropy
• magic lantern slides
• Barnardo’s Homes
• John Brown Gribble
• Australian Aboriginal history
• Australian missionaries
• slum genre

Acknowledgements

‘Heritage in the limelight: the magic lantern in Australia and the world’. I am grateful to Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy for their interest and advice regarding this project.