Fear, Empathy and Ambition: George Augustus Robinson’s Friendly Mission

Abstract

Abstract Fear beset the settler community of Van Diemen’s Land throughout the 1820s as Aboriginal resistance to European dispossession intensified, a period referred to as the Black War. Representative of the emerging obligation into the 1830s to treat Indigenous people across the British imperial world more kindly, George Augustus Robinson presents a contradictory figure during this tumultuous period. Decrying the depravity of his fellow settlers and their servants, Robinson adapted the conciliatory agenda of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur in forming the Friendly Mission, a roving missionary enterprise involving Aboriginal people in the task of their own pacification and exile. At once an insight to the sincere emotional connection he felt with his mission subjects, Robinson’s Friendly Mission journals also embody the deep contradictions of British humanitarian governance and its complicity in the logic of elimination it sought to challenge.