‘Soliciting sixpences from township to township’: moral dilemmas in mid-nineteenth-century Melbourne

Abstract

In the middle of the nineteenth century, as a nascent ‘public sphere’ took shape in Port Phillip and then Victoria, a set of questions emerged about the past, present and future relationship between Aboriginal people and British colonizers in the colony's imaginative and intellectual life. In the context of urban developments best considered explosive in speed and transformation, a group of Melbourne thinkers were forced to consider the relationship between dispossession, violence and the apparent historical progress of settler society itself. Unlike other settler colonial cities, where the flowering of a truly ‘urban’ political and intellectual culture was far removed from the brute violence of the frontier (in both historical and geographic terms), in Melbourne the accident of the gold rush condensed historical development in ways that threw this violence and cultural development into the same historical frame. How could a settler colonial city and its community imagine itself when the moral problems of dispossession were politically, culturally and materially present? This article traces how an emerging urban intellectual elite discursively and morally managed the problem of Aboriginal survival (and the haunting of theft and violence it always implied). In so doing, this article offers a new reading of the 1869 ‘Protection Act’ as an attempt to deflect, remove and contain the problem that a swindled and exploited Aboriginal population posed in a city understood by many as a beacon of progress and development.