AustLit

‘The Colonial journals often reflected carefully on questions of race; at the same time, they casually reproduced the virulent kinds of racism that were pervasive right across the settler colonies. A whole range of questions and dispositions come into play here; to do with the impact of colonial settlement on Aboriginal people, the role of government policy and the law, the ‘civilising’ agendas of Christian missions, the intellectualisation of racial categories (under the growing influence of evolutionary anthropology), he prevailing opinions about importing labour from elsewhere, and the way settler colonies might manage or respond to increasingly diverse immigrant population. Some colonial journals were more progressive and humanitarian then others as far as these questions are concerned, but there is never any consistency here. Coming in the wake of the global abolition of slavery, settlement in Australia nevertheless utterly relied on the legitimation of forced labour: convict gangs, indentured workers from the Pacific Islands, and so on. And the imperative to ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people only helped to consolidate the discourses that characterised them as ‘savage’ and destined for extinction. Indeed, as Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell note, ‘the nineteenth century heralded a new era for discourses of savagery as Aboriginal Australian superseded Native Americans as exemplars of primordial man’. Patrick Brantlinger has neatly expressed the way that even progressive views on race were always enmeshed in the assumptions and biases of their times: ‘humanitarians’, he writes, ‘could be both abolitionists and racist’. The full range of these contradictions is played out right across the colonial journals and across the various genres of writing they invest in, from chronicles of frontier violence and adventure to panoramic surveys of racial diversity in the colonial metropolis.’ (Author’s introduction)