Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony pp 225–247Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Mrs Milson’s Wordlist: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Intimacy of Linguistic Work

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 555 Accesses

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

Early colonial linguistic collection reveals the intimate and ongoing negotiations between Indigenous people and their European interlocutors, and provides insight into colonial knowledge production as a shared, cross-cultural process. The poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop constructed a wordlist from informants in Wollombi, transcribed songs, and published poetry sympathetic to Aboriginal suffering and dispossession from her arrival in New South Wales in 1838. Dunlop’s concerns for Aboriginal people and culture were heightened by her marriage to an agent of the law (David Dunlop was a police magistrate), and the couple were keenly interested in Aboriginal culture, language, and plight on the volatile and violent colonial frontier that surrounded them. The Dunlops had an acquaintance with Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld at the nearby Lake Macquarie Mission, who had shared interests in recording Aboriginal linguistic and cultural knowledge, and in publicising and lamenting colonial violence. This chapter examines Dunlop’s linguistic and other work to reveal the imbrication of language collection, knowledge production, and humanitarian advocacy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   69.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    For a comprehensive account of the massacre, see Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1992); see also Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan, eds. Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre, 1838–2018 (Sydney: NewSouth, forthcoming 2018).

  2. 2.

    Eliza Hamilton [E.H.D.] Dunlop, ‘Original Poetry: Songs of an Exile (No. 4.) the Aboriginal Mother’, Australian, 13 December 1838, lines 41–48.

  3. 3.

    See ‘Slaughter of the Blacks’, Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 19 November 1838; ‘Supplement to the Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser’, Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 19 November 1838. For further discussion of Dunlop and her verse, see Margaret de Salis, Two Early Colonials (Sydney: n.p., 1967); Katie Hansord, ‘Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s “The Aboriginal Mother”: Romanticism, Anti Slavery and Imperial Feminism in the Nineteenth Century’, JASAL 1, no. 1 (2011); John O’Leary, ‘“Unlocking the Fountains of the Heart”: Settler Verse and the Politics of Sympathy’, Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2010); Elizabeth Webby, ‘Biographical Note’, in The Aboriginal Mother and Other Poems, ed. Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (Canberra: Mulini Press, 1981).

  4. 4.

    Dunlop, lines 12 and 73 (emphasis in original).

  5. 5.

    Dunlop, lines 10, 25–26.

  6. 6.

    See Anna Johnston, ‘The Language of Colonial Violence: Lancelot Threlkeld, Humanitarian Narratives and the NSW Law Courts’, Law & History 4, no. 2 (2017), 72–102.

  7. 7.

    Tony Ballantyne, ‘Humanitarian Narratives: Knowledge and the Politics of Mission and Empire’, Social Sciences and Missions 24 (2011); Tony Ballantyne, ‘Moving Texts and “Humane Sentiment”: Materiality, Mobility and the Emotions of Imperial Humanitarianism’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016); Roland Burke, ‘Flat Affect? Revisiting Emotion in the Historiography of Human Rights’, Journal of Human Rights (2015); Penelope Edmonds and Anna Johnston, ‘Empire, Humanitarianism and Violence in the Colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 1 (2016); Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1’, American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985); Thomas L. Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2’, American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past & Present (2016); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Lynn Hunt, ‘The Long and the Short of the History of Human Rights’, Past & Present 233, no. 1 (2016); Sam Hutchinson, ‘Humanitarian Critique and the Settler Fantasy: The Australian Press and Settler Colonial Consciousness During the Waikato War, 1863–1864’, Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014); Zoë Laidlaw, ‘“Aunt Anna’s Report”: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–37’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, no. 2 (2004); Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Breaking Britannia’s Bounds? Law, Settlers, and Space in Britain’s Imperial Historiography’, The Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (2012); Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California, 1989); Alan Lester, ‘Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars’, Geographical Research 44, no. 3 (2006); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Samuel Moyn, ‘The End of Human Rights History’, Past and Present (2016); Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Colonial Protection and the Intimacies of Indigenous Governance’, History Australia 14, no. 1 (2017); Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 no. 5 (2012).

  8. 8.

    James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  9. 9.

    Dror Wahrman, ‘The Meaning of the Nineteenth Century: Reflections on James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth’, Victorian Studies 53, no. 1 (2010), 91–99.

  10. 10.

    Notable exceptions include Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005); David Armitage et al., The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Bain Attwood and John Arnold, eds. Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992); Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire, Cambridge Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (Malden: Blackwell, 2008); C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Lorraine Daston, ‘The Sciences of the Archive’, Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1970).

  11. 11.

    Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14–15; see also Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8–9.

  12. 12.

    Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative’, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 202.

  13. 13.

    Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’.

  14. 14.

    John M. MacKenzie, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).

  15. 15.

    See John O’Leary, Savage Songs and Wild Romances: Settler Poetry and the Indigene, 1830–1880 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011).

  16. 16.

    Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830, Romantic Indians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  17. 17.

    Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism and the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 3.

  18. 18.

    George Anson, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1740 … 1744 (London: Knapton, 1748); E. and J. Bruce, An Introduction to Geography and Astronomy (Newcastle: Longman et al., 1805); the Annual Register was a year-by-year record of British and world events, published from 1758.

  19. 19.

    Despite considerable research, it has not been possible to verify either the date of divorce proceedings or Law’s death, due to the vagaries of Irish Protestant recordkeeping at this time. Eliza remarried at Portpatrick, Scotland, in 1823. Niel Gunson, ‘Dunlop, Eliza Hamilton (1796–1880)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1966), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dunlop-eliza-hamilton-2007/text2455

  20. 20.

    http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/constituencies/coleraine#footnote32_4g9e720

  21. 21.

    C.H. Currey, ‘Sir Roger Therry (1800–1874)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1966), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/therry-sir-roger-2723

  22. 22.

    See Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1992).

  23. 23.

    Duncan Wu claims that the criticism directed at Dunlop was unprecedented: Wu, ‘“A Vehicle of Private Malice”: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Sydney Herald’, The Review of English Studies 65, no. 272 (2014), 898.

  24. 24.

    Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, ‘The Aboriginal Mother’, Sydney Herald, 15 October 1841.

  25. 25.

    Dunlop, ‘The Aboriginal Mother’; ‘Concert’, Australian, 30 October 1841; ‘Nathan’s Grand Concert’, Australasian Chronicle, 28 October 1841.

  26. 26.

    ‘Mr. Nathan’s Concert’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 October 1841.

  27. 27.

    Sydney Herald, 15 October 1841, 2. On the Herald’s highly partisan reporting of the massacre and the role of newspapers in defining settler identity, see Rebecca Wood, ‘Frontier Violence and the Bush Legend: The Sydney Herald’s Response to the Myall Creek Massacre Trials and the Creation of Colonial Identity’, History Australia 6, no. 3 (2009).

  28. 28.

    For example, ‘Thorough-Bass’, ‘Original Correspondence’, Sydney Herald, 3 November 1841; ‘Mr. Nathan’s Concert’, Sydney Herald, 29 October 1841.

  29. 29.

    Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, ‘The Aboriginal Mother’, Sydney Herald, 29 November 1841.

  30. 30.

    William Romaine Govett, ‘Sketches of New South Wales’, which includes Govett’s watercolour ‘Native Women Weeping over a Grave’, Saturday Magazine, 5 November 1836, 184.

  31. 31.

    Govett, ‘Sketches of New South Wales’, 184.

  32. 32.

    Indeed, Dunlop and Isaac also collaborated on ‘The Aboriginal Father: A Native Song of the Maneroo Tribe’ (Sydney: Thomas Bluett, 1843). This used Aboriginal musical forms, albeit bowdlerised. See Graeme Skinner, ‘The Invention of Australian Music’, Musicology Australia 37, no. 2 (2015).

  33. 33.

    Helen Brayshaw, Aborigines of the Hunter Valley: A Study of Colonial Records (Scone, NSW: Upper Hunter Historical Society, 1986); Denis Mahony and Joe Whitehead, eds. The Way of the River: Environmental Perspectives on the Wollombi (Wollombi, NSW: Wollombi Valley Landcare Group in assoc. with the University of Newcastle Department of Community Programmes, 1994); W.J. Needham, Burragurra, Where the Spirit Walked: The Aboriginal Relics of the Cessnock-Wollombi Region in the Hunter Valley of NSW (Cessnock, NSW: Bill Needham, 1981).

  34. 34.

    R.H.W. Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets: The History of Some Early Attempts to Establish Relations with the Aborigines of New South Wales, 1814–1846’, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 2, no. 3 (1967), 190.

  35. 35.

    Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, 199.

  36. 36.

    Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, 200–203.

  37. 37.

    Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, qtd. 203.

  38. 38.

    Reece, ‘Feasts and Blankets’, qtd. 205.

  39. 39.

    When newspapers attacked David Dunlop’s efforts to break the stranglehold of non-stipendiary magistrates who had pastoral interests, Eliza became the target of public ridicule. Inferring that David was ruled by his wife, the Australasian Chronicle published a letter by a correspondent who claimed that while David was providing a ruling, ‘Mrs Dunlop mounted the bench, interrupted Mr. Dunlop, and said that for her part she would have “the bible, the whole bible, and nothing but the bible”’: ‘Wollombi’, Australasian Chronicle, 22 March 1842. Having a clever and outspoken wife was often a way that colonial officials could be attacked or have their careers stymied by detractors.

  40. 40.

    Sarah Threlkeld, née Arndell, had brought substantial cattle holdings to the marriage, as well as an inherited land claim to 150 acres at Caddie on the Hawkesbury River. In the 1830s, Threlkeld’s eldest son from his first marriage, Joseph Thomas, took up a station in the Gwydir district with his step-uncle James Arndell, Sarah’s younger brother. In 1840, Threlkeld defied the AAC’s monopoly and opened a coal seam at Belmont that he had discovered in 1834; the Ebenezer Coal Works continued under his son-in-law, G.A. Lloyd. Each of these enterprises at times employed Aboriginal and convict labourers, and ensured that Threlkeld’s family was thoroughly enmeshed in emergent colonial economies.

  41. 41.

    Niel Gunson, ‘Introduction’, in Australian Reminiscences and Papers of L.E. Threlkeld, Missionary to the Aborigines, 1824–1859, ed. Niel Gunson (Canberra: AIAS, 1974), 7.

  42. 42.

    See my analysis of Threlkeld’s linguistic studies in Anna Johnston, The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2011), chapter 2.

  43. 43.

    L.E. Threlkeld, ‘Reminiscences. Aborigines—The Muses—Poetry’, The Christian Herald, and Record of Missionary and Religious Intelligence, 11 November 1854: Q205/C, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (hereafter ML).

  44. 44.

    Ann Vickery, ‘“A Lonely Crossing”: Approaching Nineteenth-Century Australian Women’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 40, no. 1 (2002), 35.

  45. 45.

    Published as Roy H. Goddard, The Life and Times of James Milson (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1955). The manuscript is Mrs. David Milson [Eliza Hamilton Dunlop], ‘Mrs. David Milson Kamilaroi Vocabulary and Aboriginal Songs, 1840’, Wollombi (NSW), 1840: A1688, ML.

  46. 46.

    Rachael Gilmour, Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6.

  47. 47.

    Gilmour, Grammars of Colonialism, 2.

  48. 48.

    G.W. Stocking, Jr., ‘Colonial Situations’, in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. G.W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 5.

  49. 49.

    Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), 79.

  50. 50.

    Robert Dixon, Prosthetic Gods: Travel, Representation and Colonial Governance (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 7, 8.

  51. 51.

    See Caroline Jones, Darkinyung Grammar and Dictionary: Revitalising a Language from Historical Sources (Nambucca Heads: Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, 2008); Caroline Jones and Shawn Laffan, ‘Lexical Similarity and Endemism in Historical Wordlists of Australian Aboriginal Languages of the Greater Sydney Region’, Transactions of the Philological Society 106, no. 3 (2008).

  52. 52.

    Milson, ‘Kamilaroi Vocabulary’.

  53. 53.

    Milson, ‘Kamilaroi Vocabulary’.

  54. 54.

    Assessing the different context of this later linguistic study is the subject for further study.

  55. 55.

    AIATSIS, ‘Language Thesaurus’, accessed June 2017, http://www1.aiatsis.gov.au/

  56. 56.

    Dunlop, ‘The Vase, Comprising Songs for Music and Poems by Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’. This word (for ‘white hawk’) is also listed in Dunlop’s wordlist; as is the word Matiyan for eagle hawk, which was used in the note to the published version of ‘The Eagle-Chief’. Milson, ‘Kamilaroi Vocabulary’; Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Isaac Nathan, ‘The Eagle Chief’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 21 April 1842.

  57. 57.

    Dunlop, ‘The Vase, Comprising Songs for Music and Poems’.

  58. 58.

    ‘The Eagle Chief: An Australian Melody by I. Nathan’, Australian, 19 April 1842.

  59. 59.

    Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Gendered Substances and Objects in Ritual: An Australian Aboriginal Study’, Material Religion 3, no. 1, 2007, 37.

  60. 60.

    See ‘Domestic Intelligence: New Music’, The Sydney Herald, 18 April 1842; also Anon. ‘Aboriginal Poems Attacked: Eliza Dunlop Criticised’, Margin 42 (1997), 32–34.

  61. 61.

    For indicative readings of appropriation by Parker, see Tanya Dalziell, Settler Romances and the Australian Girl (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2004); Nancy E. Wright and Brooke Collins-Gearing, ‘The Rhetoric of Benevolence as an Impediment to the Protection of Indigenous Cultural Rights: A Study of Australian Literature and Law’, Journal of Australian Studies 85 (2005); Judith Johnston, ‘The Genesis and Commodification of Katherine Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales (1896)’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 4, no. 2 (2006).

  62. 62.

    On translation, see Talal Asad, ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986); Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

  63. 63.

    See O’Leary, Savage Songs and Wild Romances.

  64. 64.

    Jeanine Leane, ‘Tracking Our Country in Settler Literature’, JASAL: Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 14, no. 3 (2014), 1, citing Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  65. 65.

    Jan Critchett, A ‘Distant Field of Murder’: Western Districts Frontiers, 1834–1848 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 23.

  66. 66.

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

  67. 67.

    Leane, ‘Tracking Our Country in Settler Literature’, 15.

  68. 68.

    Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 26.

  69. 69.

    Tony Ballantyne, ‘Humanitarian Narratives: Knowledge and the Politics of Mission and Empire’, Social Sciences and Missions 24 (2011), 242.

  70. 70.

    See Jones, Darkinyung Grammar and Dictionary; Jones and Laffan, ‘Lexical Similarity’.

  71. 71.

    Jones, Darkinyung Grammar and Dictionary.

  72. 72.

    See Jane Simpson, ‘Brand New Day for the Darkinyung Language’, Transient Languages and Cultures, 19 December 2008, accessed 15 June 2016, http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2008/12/brand_new_day_for_the_darkinyu_1.html

  73. 73.

    Jakelin Troy, ‘The First Time I Spoke in My Own Language I Broke Down and Wept’, The Guardian, 1 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/01/the-first-time-i-spoke-in-my-own-language-i-broke-down-and-wept

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Anna Johnston

Authors
  1. Anna Johnston
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Penelope Edmonds

  2. School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Amanda Nettelbeck

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Johnston, A. (2018). Mrs Milson’s Wordlist: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and the Intimacy of Linguistic Work. In: Edmonds, P., Nettelbeck, A. (eds) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76230-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76231-9

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation