Abstract
Using settler accounts of daily life on pastoral properties, this chapter demonstrates systemic links in the period of the 1830s–1850s between economic reliance on Aboriginal labour and ubiquitous violence. On pastoral frontiers in the non-convict colonies, settlers needed local Aborigines, yet their fundamental demand for the land allowed them to accept moral ambiguities and the use of violence. Sexual violence was woven into colonisation. Here, too, ambiguities abounded, and women’s own interactions with Aboriginal people could be fraught. Katherine Kirkland’s memoir of the years 1839–1841 on her family’s sheep station reveals the intimacy of interracial coexistence. From one particular incident when a large group of Aborigines visited, we can apprehend the tense intimacy of frontier life when violence was always possible—but did not always erupt.
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Notes
- 1.
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie, eds. The Routledge History of Western Empires (London: Routledge, 2014), chapters 6 and 8.
- 2.
On the broader historical connections between gender and warfare, see Karen Hagemann, Stefan Dudink, and Sonya O. Rose, eds. Oxford Handbook on Gender, War and the Western World since 1650 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2018).
- 3.
Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates Over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (Winter 2003).
- 4.
Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 387–409. On the importance of recognising coexistence of settlers and Indigenous people, see Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).
- 5.
Philip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Capitalism in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 123–133.
- 6.
On the variety, mixing and crossing of labour categories, see Angela Woollacott, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 3, ‘Settler Men as Masters of Labour: Convicts and Non-white Workers’.
- 7.
David Lambert, White Creole Culture: Politics and Identity During the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 126–127.
- 8.
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1991), 188.
- 9.
Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (June 2016), 212.
- 10.
Henry S. Chapman, The New Settlement of Australind (London: Harvey and Darton, 1841), esp. 95–103.
- 11.
Nettelbeck, ‘Proximate Strangers’, 211.
- 12.
On employment of and conditions for Aboriginal children in Western Australia, see Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in the Nineteenth-Century in Western Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2002); for Queensland, see Shirleene Robinson, Something like Slavery? Queensland’s Aboriginal Child Workers 1842–1945 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008).
- 13.
Phyllis Barnes, J.M.R. Cameron, and H.A. Willis with Ian Berryman and Andrew Gill, eds. The Australind Journals of Marshall Waller Clifton 1840–1861 (Perth: Hesperian Press, 2010), 26.
- 14.
E.S. Ilbery, ‘The Battle of Pinjarra, 1834: I. The Passing of the Bibulmun’, The Western Australian Historical Society: Journal and Proceedings 1, no. 1 (1927), 24–30.
- 15.
Barnes, The Australind Journals, 32.
- 16.
Barnes, The Australind Journals, 35.
- 17.
Barnes, The Australind Journals, 46–50.
- 18.
Louisa Clifton, ‘Fatigue and Bustle at Australind, 1841’, in No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush, ed. Lucy Frost (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, 1984), 74–82.
- 19.
Barnes, The Australind Journals, 71.
- 20.
Barnes, The Australind Journals, 71.
- 21.
G.B. Earp, ed. What We Did in Australia: Being the Practical Experiences of Three Clerks (London: George Routledge and Co., 1853), 81.
- 22.
H. Hussey, More than Half a Century of Colonial Life and Christian Experience (Adelaide: Hussey and Gillingham, 1897), 29.
- 23.
Memoirs of Simpson Newland CMG (Adelaide: F.W. Preece and Sons, 1926), 34–58.
- 24.
C.S. Sanders, ed. The Settlement of George Sanders and his Family at Echunga Creek from the Journal of Jane Sanders (Adelaide: Pioneers Association of South Australia, 1955; edited from an original manuscript), 9, 15–16.
- 25.
Robert Foster, Rick Hosking, and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001), 8.
- 26.
Hannah Robert, ‘Disciplining the Female Aboriginal Body: Inter-racial Sex and the Pretence of Separation’, Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001), 71–72. On this topic, also see Bobbi Sykes, ‘Black Women in Australia: A History’, in The Other Half: Women in Australian Society, ed. Jan Mercer (Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1975); Raymond Evans, ‘“Don’t You Remember Black Alice, Sam Holt?”: Aboriginal Women in Queensland History’, Hecate 7 (1982); Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans, eds. Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Sydney: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1992).
- 27.
Victoria Haskins, ‘“Down in the Gully & Just Outside the Garden Walk”: White Women and the Sexual Abuse of Aboriginal Women on a Colonial Australian Frontier’, History Australia 10, no. 1 (2013), 13.
- 28.
Barbara Dawson, In the Eye of the Beholder: What Six Nineteenth-century Women Tell Us about Indigenous Authority and Identity (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), chapter 5, ‘An Early, Short-term Settler—Katherine Kirkland: Valuable Insights Through the Silences’, 83.
- 29.
Katherine Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush: By a Lady’, Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts 1, no. 8 (Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1845), 13–14.
- 30.
Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, 14.
- 31.
Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, 19–20.
- 32.
Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, 20.
- 33.
Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, 19.
- 34.
Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, 20–21.
- 35.
Dawson, In the Eye of the Beholder, 93.
- 36.
Kirkland, ‘Life in the Bush’, 20–21.
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Woollacott, A. (2018). Ambiguity and Necessity: Settlers and Aborigines in Intimate Tension in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Australia. 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_3
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