‘Equal to Children of European Origin’

Abstract

This article explores how transnational forms of history can provide valuable new insights into the way in which colonisers, government and missionaries educated and ‘civilised’ Australian Indigenous peoples in the early years of colonisation. Using early nineteenth-century British government reports and early colonial accounts, it argues that colonial strategies for dealing with non-Christian peoples had their genesis in techniques to control Britain’s poor and rapidly urbanising populations in the wake of the Industrial revolution. Transported to the Australian colonies, developing conceptions of class intersected with ideas about race, educability and the civilising mission, suggesting that early colonial Indigenous education was influenced by nascent British ideas about class as much as racial constructions of an Indigenous ‘other’. This article won the Wiley-Blackwell/Australian Historical Association Prize for 2007, awarded to the best paper presented by a postgraduate student at the New England AHA Regional Conference.