Arms & amelioration: negotiating Quaker peace testimony and settler violence in 1830s Van Diemen's Land

Abstract

ABSTRACTMembers of the Religious Society of Friends had been among white settlers from the beginning of the colonial project in Australia. As such, voluntarily or involuntarily, their everyday actions contributed to the network of practices which slowly but continuously displaced and annihilated Indigenous communities. Simultaneously, early-nineteenth-century Quakers were members of a community characterized by pacifism and the activism of its members in transnational humanitarian efforts, namely the abolitionist and the prison reform movements. This chapter focusses on how Quaker settlers negotiated universal humanitarian ideals on the one hand and their local involvement in settlement politics on the other. In form of a case study, it investigates the daily life and experiences of one Quaker family, that of Francis Cotton and his wife Anna Maria, during the early 1830s in colonial Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land). It draws on the family's private letters and journals, as well as documents of the colonial administration to explore this particular dimension of Quaker settler life. It is the aim of this essay to find an answer to one core question: How did the Cottons, considering Quaker peace testimony and the Society's collective memory of its North American history of collaborative relationships with Indigenous peoples, negotiate the violence of the Tasmanian frontier?