April 29.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Imperial pride
The contradictions in Protectorship
In hindsight, the entire logic of the policy of protection [of Indigenous people] seems perverse: Protectors would serve both to protect Aboriginal people from the effects of colonial settlement, and ensure its progress; imperial authorities who were sanctioning the dispossession of aboriginal people were simultaneously endeavouring to protect them from its consequences. What was being conceived was a kind of schizophrenic paternalism in which the Crown – through its proxies, the Governor and the Protectors, and its trust in the majesty of the law - held two worlds apart while imagining their assimilation. The Colonial Office’s Under Secretary James Stephen eloquently captured the dilemma when he noted that perhaps the only way of saving the Aborigines from the settlers ‘would consist in teaching them the art of war and supplying them with arms and ammunition – an act of suicidal generosity which of course can never be practiced’. [1]
Minute by James Stephen, 22 July 1839, CO 201/286, cited by A.G.L. Shaw, “British Policy towards the Australian Aborigines, 1830-1850’, Australian Historical Studies,, 25, no. 99 (1992): p. 279.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence, pp. 19-20 190 n.33.
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Nineteenth century Imperial sentiment from a Governor, but differing views...
[Governor George] Bowen praised – as he would up and down the coast – the heroic work of Queensland’s pioneers who, in six years, had added to the British Empire territory four times the size of the United Kingdom.
Gentlemen, the triumphs of the pioneers of Christianity and of civilisation in Australia are triumphs not of war but of peace. They are conquests without injustice and without cruelty. They are triumphs not over man but over nature; not for this generation only, but for all posterity; not for England only, but for all mankind. [1]
...[A different picture was painted in some British media outlets.] D’Arcy [Uhr’s] massacre of fifty-nine myalls [2] in the Gulf [in 1868] was reported all over Britain. From London to the remote Highlands and across Ireland, local papers told their readers how the Native police went about their work...”Exterminating the Natives in Australia” was the headline in London’s Weekly Review. “Australian Vengeance” in the Bradford Daily Telegraph. The Nation in Dublin took a broader view under the headline “Colonial Humanity and Civilisation”:
When a man because his skin happens to be black can with impunity be shot dead with a rifle for an offence with a few weeks’ imprisonment, when committed by a European, civilization has suddenly sunk to a very low degree in the individual guilty of such a deed. But when armed men in the Government employ surround and shoot down scores of unarmed and defenceless wretches, for the pettiest of larcenies, the crime becomes national and affects the character of the entire population. [3]
1. The Queensland Times,24 October, 1865, p. 3.
2. See entry for 13 June on the reporting of this incident in Queenslander, 13 June, 1868, p. 7e and Brisbane Courier 16 June 1868, p. 2 c-d.
3. Freeman’s Journal, 27 June 1868, p. 8 and The Nation (Dublin), 29 August 1868, p. 19.
Acknowledgment: David Marr, Killing For Country – A family story, Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, pp. 299-300, 336,443, 446. 340.