Colonial Australia Research Articles

Posting the nation: Australia’s apprenticeship in letter writing

A national postal service is an essential nation-building institution; it integrates distant regions into a national community and fosters the extension of the public sphere. But in the first decades of colonial Australia, the material conditions of sending letters were precarious and uncertain, the rhythm of exchange was slow and the cost expensive. Australia had to learn how to write letters and how to send them; by the 1890s, it had completed its apprenticeship. Using postmaster-generals’ reports on one hand, and autobiographical sources on the other, I explore the experience and difficulties of epistolary exchanges in the nineteenth century.

Designing the New World: Reconsidering Architectural Education and National Identity in Colonial Australia

ABSTRACT Understandings of architectural education in nineteenth century colonial Australia have generally focused on either formal articles or tertiary institutions. Presented as the official pathways into the profession, this framework has provided a limited viewpoint of the architectural community, concealing the diverse formative experiences of architects. Without a legal mechanism to define who could practice as an architect, the architectural community remained open and porous, with individuals having obtained different levels of education. This professional fluidity created a ready market for architectural education. From the earliest years of European colonisation until the end of the nineteenth century, private and public institutions offered classes in architecture, which provided an alternative pathway into the profession and undermined the apparent dominance of undertaking articles. This process was particularly pronounced in the colony of Victoria, home to Australia’s largest nineteenth century architectural community. This paper argues that examining these alternative avenues for education is critical to understanding the nineteenth century architectural community, the lives of individual architects, as well as the broader aims of colonial society. Ultimately, the localised nature of this education helped promote an Australian design aesthetic and encouraged a divergence from British precedent.

"It's Everybody's and It's Nobody's Responsibility": Stakeholder Perspectives on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Equity at the Nexus of Chronic Kidney Disease and Oral Health.

The effects of racism, oppression, and colonization in Australia are reflected in the inequitable experience of chronic kidney disease (CKD) among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Despite having the highest incidence of CKD, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have the lowest rate of kidney transplant, with poor oral health commonly being an obstacle to receiving a transplant. This research reflects the exploratory phase of a larger project aimed at maximizing oral health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living with CKD in Australia through the provision of culturally secure dental care. The present research uses reflexive thematic analysis to analyze qualitative data from yarns, interviews, and focus groups with dental, renal, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders to generate a conceptual understanding of equity at the nexus of oral health and kidney health. NVivo software was used for organizing data and an inductive line-by-line coding approach. Twenty-eight stakeholders participated; 12 of the stakeholders identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and most were female. Factors at the nexus of oral health and CKD included the continuous effects of colonization, the centrality of cultural security for improved care, as well as several challenges and opportunities at a system level. Challenges included the luxury of oral health access, limited health care team involvement in oral health pathways, high-intensity engagement with medical systems, and no communication between dental and renal teams. Opportunities identified included the role of integrated care, cross-discipline knowledge sharing, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, clear referral pathways, prevention, and assistance with navigating the oral health system. We argue that collective responsibility for the oral health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living with CKD is required for improved health and eligibility for kidney transplant. Cross-discipline collaboration is required to overcome the rigidness of the current colonial and biomedical model that silos oral health and CKD. The siloed approach to management of oral health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with chronic kidney disease results in low knowledge sharing and communication across chronic disease management teams and can prevent kidney transplantation. Collective responsibility for oral health within this context is required to ensure that just and equitable access to kidney transplant can be achieved.

Beyond Compensation: Reparations and the Ongoing Colonization of Australia

ABSTRACTThis article examines the relationship between reparations as compensation and reparations as transformation in settler colonial Australia. Much of the global reparations debate on colonization and slavery has focused on important demands confronting the historic damages and ongoing accumulation of disadvantage from colonization in ex‐colonies or from plantation slavery. Much less has been said about reparations for settler colonialism which is a specific form of ongoing colonization in the here and now. Drawing on long‐standing work around reparations for colonization by Indigenous peoples in Australia, and the woeful compensatory responses the state and judiciary have offered, this article argues that reparations for ongoing colonization could consider options beyond monetary compensation. This includes the critical domain of reparations as transformation that aim less to offset damage and reconcile suffering, but rather to comprehensively transform colonial relations.

The 1847 de Salis Experiment and Chinese Indentured Labour in Colonial Australia

In 1847 a pastoralist in southern New South Wales experimented with the use of indentured Chinese labourers. This article reveals the identity of this pastoralist to be Leopold Fane de Salis and examines his use of indentured Chinese labourers in his employ in the late 1840s and early 1850s. We argue that de Salis’ initial sourcing of Chinese labour illuminates the importance of local experimentation and transnational colonial trading networks in the iterative development of those larger indentured migration schemes which soon followed. Further, we interrogate the public representation of this experiment by analysing the experience of Chinese labourers as revealed through de Salis’ station ledgers.

Following the yellowcake road: exploring the colonial roots and routes of Australian radioactive minerals, 1900s–1950s

ABSTRACT Over the past 40 years, environmental justice activists and scholars have drawn greater attention to the disproportionate environmental burdens borne by marginalised communities. This includes the consequences of ‘nuclear colonialism’, a phenomenon defined as constituting ‘a system of domination through which governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process’. In this article, I seek to complicate this definition of nuclear colonialism by exploring the role of uranium mining in consolidating both British and Australian settler colonial power during the first half of the twentieth century. I will do so through an examination of Australian uranium’s roots and routes as both a manifestation and facilitator of settler colonialism in Australia between 1900 and 1955. Combining sources from both British and Australian archives, this article seeks to contribute to emergent scholarship on the colonial dimensions of mineral extraction in two ways. Firstly, by explicating the role uranium played in fuelling the extractive mentalities of settler colonial Australia. And secondly, by exploring uranium extraction’s contribution to the consolidation of the British Empire’s waning power in the mid-twentieth century.

Solid Mass And Plain Exterior: The Ecclesiastical Architecture Of William Wardell In Victoria

ABSTRACT William Wilkinson Wardell was one of the most important architects of colonial Australia. A Catholic convert who had already extensive experience in working for the Catholic Church in England, Wardell relocated to Melbourne in 1858 with a large number of architectural drawings for ecclesiastical structures proving he was a distinguished Gothic revivalist. In Victoria, he established an extraordinary partnership with the first Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, James Goold, and despite being busily engaged at the Public Works Department, for over ten years he also maintained a successful private practice working on more than a dozen church commissions in the Gothic Revival style. Drawing on archival research including surviving architectural drawings, diocesan correspondence, and nineteenth century newspapers, the article reveals Wardell’s ability in blending English, Irish and French medieval Gothic elements that appealed to the local congregations for his Australian church designs. Furthermore, it demonstrates that his substantial parish churches manifested the strength and permanence of Catholic religious tradition, ultimately helping Bishop James Goold to lay strong foundations in the establishment of the Catholic Church in Victoria.

Competing claims on land in the solar age: Valorising capital or Country in Australia?

The colonisation of Australia was predicated on the premise of terra nullius, a contention that was successfully challenged two centuries later, confirmed with the legislation of land rights in the Native Title Act 1993. In a classic case of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, while formal land rights and the right to contract the use of native title land were legislated, in the Pilbara in Western Australia the reality was otherwise. Iron ore mining companies disregarded heritage safeguard agreements, a contractual violation which damaged their reputation which was being scrutinised as major CO2 emitters. Confronting a coincidental energy cost crisis, companies turned to acquire more land to establish renewable energy generating capacity and a new model of accumulation. Drawing on Peck and Polanyi, we posit the notion of socioecological orders, and distinguish between the instrumental approach to land as a key frame in the accumulation of capital, and First Nations peoples' concept of belonging to Country and stewardship. This provides a method for considering the interaction of two distinct socioecological orders and the evolving tensions or contradictions that are generated. The restoration of the colonisation project calls native title land into the service of capital to provide the foundations for a renewable energy generation industry. This not only results in dispossession, it can also result in estrangement and alienation that compromises the integrity and reproduction of First Nations' communities and impels new modes of socioecological organisation.

Correction to: History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia

Correction to: History Education for Transitional Justice? Challenges, Limitations and Possibilities for Settler Colonial Australia

‘A Great First Cause in Colonisation’: Early Radio, ‘Transceiver-Listening’, Gender and Settlement in Australia

Historical acoustemology allows us to contemplate practices and meanings of non-Indigenous listening in Central Australia and determine how they aligned with processes of settlement. In the 1930s, a new form of listening emerged among remote non-Indigenous women. Modern communities of female transceiver-listeners used radio for two-way communication and networking, and feminist broadcasters quickly picked up the model, undermining pessimistic analyses of early Australian radio and female listeners as passive consumers. But writers integrated transceiver-listening into a narrative of nation that sought to colonise remote Australia with and through white women listeners, and linked transceiver listening to a pervasive metaphor of ‘inland silence’ that was conceptually deaf to Indigenous presence. Transceiver-listening also usurped forms of communication involving Indigenous people, putting up barriers towards them just as it lowered others. Transceiver-listening had powerful yet complex impacts on modernising remote life, feminist broadcasting, and the settlement of the Australian interior.

‘An atrocious crime’: perjury on trial in colonial Australia

Sentencing an aged pensioner to nearly six years imprisonment for perjury in 1910, the Victorian Chief Justice denounced a man ‘as dangerous … as the law could contemplate’. The prisoner had procured a number of others to give false evidence in a civil suit for libel launched by an ex-politician against another still serving in the Commonwealth Parliament. The denunciation expressed judicial abhorrence of what judges regarded as a detestable crime, undermining the administration of justice. This first study of the historical prosecution and sentencing of perjury in Australia explores the characteristics of cases that were committed for trial in the Supreme Court in colonial Victoria. Those prosecuted, and sometimes convicted, included witnesses swearing to alibis in the course of trials for murder, women alleging sexual assault or suing for maintenance of a child, men and women seeking damages or redress in the civil courts over unpaid debts or angry words, and police frustrated by the failure to obtain convictions in sly grog cases. In addressing the prosecution of perjury in Australian colonial courts this article examines what was at stake when private citizens as well as public officials sought to punish those perceived as failing to tell the truth under oath.

Human rights in Australia’s early international relations: unity, prosperity, and the abolition of slavery

ABSTRACT For the most part, histories of Australia’s international relations locate the origins of its engagement with the international human rights regime in the 1940s. By then, however, debates about human rights had been appearing in the Australian newspapers for more than a century, focused, among other things, on the application of universal rights to the foreign peoples with which the colonies were engaged in their international affairs. Drawing on archival materials and newspaper articles from 1803 to 1901, this article examines the place of human rights in the international relations of nineteenth century colonial Australia. Focusing on debates over the use of Indian and South Sea Islander indentured labour, it demonstrates how ideas developed in the context of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shaped debates about the universal applicability of human rights in the Australian colonies’ engagements with others. In doing so, it provides an account of the early development of human rights ideas in the Australian colonies and demonstrates how they sought to resist human rights claims in their international affairs, choosing instead to prioritise the pursuit of national (racial) unity and prosperity over the rights of others.

“A shot reputation:” rape in colonial Australia and why it matters today

emotion that is a learned response and its effect on society. The roots of the framing of rape and sexual assault as we see it today in Australia go back to colonial times and the narratives of sexual crime executed in racy language that were freely circulated in Australian colonial press. The reports of Mount Rennie rape case by the frequency and “cross-cultural references invoked in discussing the crime achieved a singular level of cultural production which has far wider references than legal history” (Peers 1998). They gave birth to the debate of the “real rape” vs. “simple rape” as defined by Susan Estrich (1987) and marked Australian public discourse and public attitude toward rape until the present day. Thus, in November 2015 Michaelia Cash, Minister for Employment and Minister for Women claimed “We have a national crisis when it comes to violence against women in Australia” to which testify reports of the Australian Bureau of Statistics on women’s safety, National Student Safety report, all the way to Brittany Higgins’ story and the way it was dealt with in the media and within the legal system. As long as “One in seven young Australians say rape is justified if women change their mind” according to National Community Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women Survey (NCAS) there is still a lot to be done to change the cultural narrative of “real rape” so that rape does not go underreported and unpunished as women fear shot reputation.

Embedding speech pathology in an Aboriginal community-controlled playgroup: Perceptions from the community

Colonisation in Australia has had long-term, pervasive, detrimental impacts on Indigenous Australians. When measured by national benchmarks, Indigenous children in Australia are currently at increased risk of developmental difficulties in comparison to their non-Indigenous peers. Community-led initiatives, such as playgroups, can provide safe and developmentally stimulating environments for Indigenous infants and young children, and deliver lasting benefits. These contexts also provide opportunities for collaborative approaches to develop children’s early communication skills. A participatory action research approach was applied to explore parent/carer perspectives about incorporating speech pathology into an existing community-led Aboriginal playgroup in an urban context. The speech pathology service took the form of information sharing sessions between the speech pathologist and the playgroup members. Collaborative planning and implementation of the project was followed by discussion among the participants and co-researchers about the cultural safety and helpfulness of the speech pathology service. The complexity of incorporating services delivered by non-Indigenous people in an Aboriginal community-controlled playgroup was acknowledged. The information sharing sessions were regarded as helpful and acceptable by the community. However, in the planning and implementation of the service, cultural and community needs must be considered as a precedent and priority to ensure a culturally safe and strong environment.

Framing Colonial Australia: A Socio-historical Articulation of the Display of Art

Framing Colonial Australia: A Socio-historical Articulation of the Display of Art

Professional identity, prestige and the side hustles of lunacy doctors in New South Wales, 1879–1898

This article uses the New South Wales Lunacy Department between 1879 and 1898 as a case study to analyse the professional identity of doctors in colonial Australia. Various scholars have suggested that British and American lunacy doctors were secretive, anti-social, and out of step with the latest ideas in medical treatment. I argue that in NSW between 1879 and 1898 asylum physicians willingly engaged in the performance of masculine, middle-class roles, outside the asylum walls, to maintain their medical authority and social status in colonial Sydney.

Collections from Colonial Australia in Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde and the Challenges of Data Accessibility

German-speaking naturalists working in southeastern Australia in the mid-19th century relied heavily on the expertise of First Nations intermediaries who acted as guides, collectors, traders and translators (Clarke 2008, Olsen and Russell 2019). Many of these naturalists went to Australia because of the research opportunities offered by the British Empire at a time when the German nation states did not have colonies of their own. Others sought to escape political upheaval at home. They were welcome employees for colonial government agencies due to their training in the emerging research-oriented natural sciences that the reformed German universities offered at a time when British universities were still providing a broad general education (Home 1995, Kirchberger 2000). Wilhelm von Blandowski (1822–1878 ) and Gerard Krefft (1830–1881 ), who both worked in colonial Victoria and New South Wales, are among this group. Throughout their work, they corresponded extensively with naturalists in Berlin, exchanging specimens and ideas. But the preserved Australian animals, plants and rock samples, as well as the written and drawn records of animals and landscapes now held at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), are much more than objects of scientific interest. They also contain information about Australia's First Nations. The collections provide evidence of their role in collecting as well as their knowledge of the natural world, which has long been overlooked and, at least in part deliberately, made invisible by Western knowledge systems (e.g., Das and Lowe 2018, Ashby 2020). People data have been recognised as crucial for linking such collection objects with expeditions, publications, archival material and correspondence (Groom et al. 2020, Groom et al. 2022). It can thus potentially help reconstruct invisibilized Indigenous histories and knowledge. However, while the MfN keeps information about European collectors and other non-indigenous agents associated with their specimens in internal catalogues, databases and wikis, Indigenous actors remain largely absent from these repositories, which reproduce the colonial archive 'along the archival grain' (Stoler 2009). With this in mind, we discuss in our presentation the complexities of using persistent identifiers and tools, such as Wikidata, to improve the integration and linkage of people data in the work currently being undertaken by the MfN and the Berlin's Australian Archive project to digitise and make accessible the museum’s collections. Drawing upon the guidance provided by the FAIR*1 and CARE*2 principles for data (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Carroll et al. 2020), and learning from the 2012 ATSILIRN Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services*3, the 2019 Tandanya Adelaide Declaration and the 2020 AIATSIS Code of Ethics*4, we address the potential of these efforts in terms of collection accessibility, and also highlight the challenges and limitations of this approach in the context of colonial collections.

Clade-specific forebrain cytoarchitectures of the extinct Tasmanian tiger

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, is the largest of modern-day carnivorous marsupials and was hunted to extinction by European settlers in Australia. Its physical resemblance to eutherian wolves is a striking example of evolutionary convergence to similar ecological niches. However, whether the neuroanatomical organization of the thylacine brain resembles that of canids and how it compares with other mammals remain unknown due to the scarcity of available samples. Here, we gained access to a century-old hematoxylin-stained histological series of a thylacine brain, digitalized it at high resolution, and compared its forebrain cellular architecture with 34 extant species of monotremes, marsupials, and eutherians. Phylogenetically informed comparisons of cortical folding, regional volumes, and cell sizes and densities across cortical areas and layers provide evidence against brain convergences with canids, instead demonstrating features typical of marsupials, and more specifically Dasyuridae, along with traits that scale similarly with brain size across mammals. Enlarged olfactory, limbic, and neocortical areas suggest a small-prey predator and/or scavenging lifestyle, similar to extant quolls and Tasmanian devils. These findings are consistent with a nonuniformity of trait convergences, with brain traits clustering more with phylogeny and head/body traits with lifestyle. By making this resource publicly available as rapid web-accessible, hierarchically organized, multiresolution images for perpetuity, we anticipate that additional comparative insights might arise from detailed studies of the thylacine brain and encourage researchers and curators to share, annotate, and preserve understudied material of outstanding biological relevance.

Path dependence and jumping tracks: Investigating institutional continuity and change across the Tasmanian convict and pauper systems

AbstractThis article uses a historical case study to significantly advance theoretical debates on path dependence in institutional change and continuity. In particular, it argues that the heuristic of ‘jumping tracks’ can be productively developed to explain how institutional arrangements can shift into different policy arenas. The historical criminological case study examines welfare provision and penalties in colonial Australia. Substantively, the case study provides historical support to current claims that the boundaries between crime, poverty and welfare are fluid. Just as the shadow of the contemporary carceral state is enlarging non‐criminal pathways to punishment, it will be shown that in 19th‐century Tasmania the shadow of the penal colony acted to control paupers. When the Tasmanian penal system began to be dismantled, the institutional arrangements that had developed within it jumped tracks to the pauper system. Fundamentally, the key theoretical proposition is that path dependence can work across institutions by jumping tracks.

Navigating Challenging Digital Literacy Practices: The Settlement Experiences of Adults from Migrant and Refugee Backgrounds

Digital literacies are critical for adults from migrant and refugee backgrounds as they settle in a new country. However, institutions, leaders, and teachers often feel uncertain about how to teach digital literacies. Using the notions of digital literacy practices and assemblages, this article reports on a qualitative case study and explores how 30 adults from migrant and refugee backgrounds navigated challenging digital literacy practices related to settlement in Australia. This research found that to deal with challenges, the participants brought together different personal, social, material, symbolic, temporal, and spatial resources. However, sometimes the required resources were not available, which constrained the participants’ practices. Some participants were aware of the need to find new solutions but they often did not know how this might be done. In contrast, some participants were reluctant to take a risk. The article concludes with implications for EAL practice by suggesting strengths-based pedagogies for digital literacies.