Colonial Australia Research Articles

The Impact of e-Skills on the Settlement of Iranian Refugees in Australia

Aim/Purpose: The research investigates the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on Iranian refugees’ settlement in Australia. Background: The study identifies the issues of settlement, such as language, cultural and social differences. Methodology: The Multi-Sited Ethnography (MSE), which is a qualitative methodology, has been used with a thematic analysis drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with two groups of participants (51 Iranian refugees and 55 people with a role in assisting refugees). Contribution: The research findings may enable the creation of a model for use by the Aus-tralian Government with Iranian refugees. Findings: The findings show the vital role ICT play in refugees’ ongoing day-to-day life towards settlement. Recommendations for Practitioners: The results from this paper could be generalised to other groups of refugees in Australia and also could be used for Iranian refugees in other countries. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers may use a similar study for refugees of different backgrounds in Australia and around the world. Impact on Society: ICT may assist refugees to become less isolated, less marginalized and part of mainstream society. Future Research: Future research could look into the digital divide between refugees in Australia and main stream Australians.

The Colonial Kitchen: Australia 1788–1901 by Charmaine O'Brien. Lanham

Reviewed by: The Colonial Kitchen: Australia 1788–1901 by Charmaine O'Brien. Lanham Cecilia Leong-Salobir The Colonial Kitchen: Australia 1788–1901. By Charmaine O'Brien. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. The Colonial Kitchen is a meticulously researched study on the food history of colonial Australia. Each page is a pleasure to read, rich in detail, and written in an engaging manner. The author analyses a trove of primary sources via colonial cookbooks, diaries, personal accounts, newspapers, magazines and journals. The Colonial Kitchen also draws on an impressive range of literature in food history/studies, colonial history, Australian history and cultural history. The gist of O'Brien's book is to challenge the generally accepted view that the British ate extremely bad food in the early years of settlement, sticking to mainly Anglo-Celtic insipid meals. For example, John Newton in The Oldest Foods on Earth: A history of Australian native foods states that European Australians have "hardly ever touched" the native flora and fauna of the Aboriginal peoples for over two hundred years of occupation.1 O'Brien, however, is not the first to debunk the myth that British settlers shunned local or native foods. Barbara Santich in Bold Palates: Australia's gastronomic heritage notes that from the early years, "Australian cooks improvised and substituted, invented and innovated. Sometimes from necessity, sometimes by serendipity and occasionally by using unorthodox methods, they adopted and domesticated indigenous ingredients."2 Santich's book covers the food history of Australia from the late eighteenth century to contemporary Australia, over 200 years. The Colonial Kitchen focuses on a century of British settlement in Australia through its kitchens, cooks, cookbooks, literature, gardens, producers and providers. Australia's first cookery book, The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many as Well as for the "Upper Ten Thousand,"3 had a section on cooking native game and several recipes for cooking kangaroo. The opening chapter sets the scene at the southeastern edge of Australia in the late eighteenth century where the Aboriginal people, the Eora, ate kangaroo, emu, fish, prawns, eels, oysters, mussels, crabs and whale (2). Founders of the new colony first existed on rations from the ships and these were gradually supplemented with produce from the sea and land as well as cultivated fruit and vegetables. In the second chapter, O'Brien observes that early Australians did consume native foods, that they were "foraging for wild vegetables, catching kangaroos and green turtles, broiling fish, birds, and lizards and infusing the leaves of native similax to drink" (30). However, colonists were at pains to downplay the consumption of native foods as this was seen as primitive. Euphemisms were used to describe indigenous foods: "young beef" for emu, "flying sheep" for mutton birds, "spinage" for wild greens, "apples" for native fruit and "turbot, sole or skate" for local fish. Still, O'Brien states that the settler's consumption of native foods could be seen as "eating around the edges". Any reluctance to testing the "new" flora and fauna was attributed to their potentially unpalatable and even toxic properties. Further, there was anxiety that foraging for foods further inland would subject the colonists to attack from Aboriginal people. Another view that The Colonial Kitchen challenges is that colonial Australians were not growing and eating sufficient vegetables. The author points out that kitchen gardens at pastoral stations and farms supplied fresh vegetables. As well, fresh vegetables were purchased from market gardens established on the edges of towns. Among the growers were the Chinese who arrived in the years of the gold rushes from the mid-nineteenth century. Less was recorded of the types of vegetables eaten than the highly valued meats (more available and cheaper than in Britain). Colonial Australians were keen to be upwardly mobile and to be seen as civilized and genteel. A vegetable-based cuisine would have echoes of a peasant diet while the consumption of copious amounts of meat demonstrated affluence. Much more was written about meat in personal accounts and colonial cookbooks. O'Brien also suggests that the popularly held notion of the bland and unappetizing colonial meals was due, in part, to the absence of literary and visual rhetoric in colonial...

Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession, and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia

Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession, and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia

Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession, and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia

Incarceration, Migration, Dispossession, and Discovery: Medicine in Colonial Australia

The Coolie Labour Crisis in Colonial Queensland

The question of “coolie labour” was of great importance in colonial Australia. Like the debates and conflicts over Chinese immigration and Pacific Islander labour, the outcome helped shape dominant national strategies around labour, immigration and nationalism, summed up in the idea of a White Australia. Unlike the issue of Chinese immigration, the issue of importing indentured Indian “coolie” labour drove major capitalist interests into a prolonged and bitter conflict with each other. Sugar planters in Queensland demanded the government facilitate the large-scale recruitment of indentured labourers from British India, and liberal obstruction of this led the planters and their allies to campaign for separation from Queensland. This article describes this conflict, the divisions and rival perspectives within the ruling class that shaped it and the reasons that almost the entire southern establishment, Conservative as well as Liberal, galvanised against the planters. It outlines the role played by British anti-slavery thought, and the belief that such a plantation colony in the north would develop a radically different social and political structure, one that was a threat to the free-labour economy.

Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire by Nadine Attewell

Reviewed by: Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire by Nadine Attewell Lewis MacLeod (bio) Attewell, Nadine. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. Pp xi, 324. CDN$65. Nadine Attewell’s book Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Aftermath of Empire is interesting, impressively researched, and timely. In the face of rising Islamophobia, immigrant panic, and fears of “demographic winter,” Attewell tracks how “reproductive acts have signified at particular moments of the twentieth century” (144) in order to trace the ways in which individuals and cultures envision themselves and pursue specific visions of desirable demographic continuity. The book is divided into two sections of equal length, “Beginnings” and “Endings,” the first dealing with various imperial fantasies of origin, birth, re-birth, and permanence, and the second dealing with rupture, foreclosure, death, and defeat. The uneasy intersection between the vainglorious notion of an Empire upon which the sun will never set and a nagging sense that the taint is always within us (that decline is inevitable) is clear enough in postcolonial studies, but Attewell does a nice job of demonstrating how human bodies intersect with the body politic. In Attewell’s view, “reproductive behaviours bear upon not only gender and sexual identities . . . but civic, national and racial ones as well” (4). Within the rhetoric of Empire, “national fortunes [are] taken to depend upon the reproductive behaviours of citizen-subjects” (5). The opening chapters focus on links between eugenicist visions of optimizing “suitable . . . strains of blood” (11) and “keeping out bad blood” (12) as central to totalizing utopian projects. In such a context, abortion registers not simply as an ethical issue to do with the sanctity of life but as a political one with serious demographic implications. Attewell pays particular attention to the motif of the island in utopian (and by extension imperial) projects. “The desire for utopia,” she writes, is simultaneously a “desire for the enclave, self-sufficiency, containment and totality” (39). As such, islands offer the tempting prospect of a contained, self-replicating civilization: free of taint and abounding in biological and social order. This, Attewell suggests, is true to different degrees of Imperial Britain, colonial Australia, New Zealand, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brave New World, The Tempest, Prelude to Christopher (by Eleanor Dark), and several other real and fictional utopian projects. [End Page 153] If the list above looks fine to you, you’ll probably like this book. For me, it’s problematic. Attewell sees her project in terms of an effort to disrupt the “smooth narratives of settlement, repatriation, and homemaking” (214) that inform and undergird imperial and post-imperial sensibilities, but the book suffers from its own desire to “smooth out” differences and marshal disparate signals into an ill-fitting overall design. A third of the way through the book, for example, Attewell attempts to yoke together “photographs, newspaper articles, fiction, reports, and government memoranda” (71) into a single discussion that cannot possibly account for the various contexts and iterations it invokes. As such, the diversity of Attewell’s research material ultimately serves a centralizing, unifying function. She approaches several very different texts and ideas in terms of a fundamental sameness, and the heterogeneity she champions at the level of academic and political critique is contradicted by her own argumentative practice. This desire to “smooth out” differences that present problems for her design is most apparent in the section Attewell devotes to the policies of Cecil Cook, appointed protector of Australia’s Aboriginal Peoples in the Northern Territory in 1927. Cook proposed “breeding out the colour” in the Northern Territory, a process by which “half breed” women would be married to (or, more to the point, “mated” with) white settlers in an effort to address the conundrum of settler legitimacy, namely what Terry Goldie calls the “impossible necessity of becoming indigenous” (qtd. in Attewell 15). That is, faced with aboriginal territorial precedence, the settlers could “whiten” aboriginal bloodlines and consequently dilute aboriginal claims to territorial priority. This is imperialism enacted at the level of blood, territorializing the bloodlines of indigenous peoples en route to a more persuasive claim to their literal territory...

Settlement and employment experiences of South Sudanese people from refugee backgrounds in Melbourne, Australia

This article critically examines the settlement experiences of South Sudanese people from refugee backgrounds living in Melbourne, Australia, with a particular focus on unemployment and barriers to employment. Drawing on extensive primary data collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 South Sudanese Australians, the article demonstrates how unemployment features centrally in participants' narratives and appreciation of their settlement in Australia. Participants relate unemployment to issues such as social isolation, family breakdown, and intergenerational conflict, and foreground discrimination as a key barrier to employment. We reflect on these findings by discussing suggestions for future policy and practice in the area of refugee settlement and employment.

Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration

This article analyses the temporal effects of title registration and their relationship to race. It traces the move away from the retrospection of pre-registry common law conveyancing and toward the dynamic, future-oriented Torrens title registration system. The Torrens system, developed in early colonial Australia, enabled the production of ‘clean’, fresh titles that were independent of their predecessors. Through a process praised by legal commentators for ‘curing’ titles of their pasts, this system produces indefeasible titles behind its distinctive ‘curtain’ and ‘mirror’, which function similarly to magicians’ smoke and mirrors by blocking particular realities from view. In the case of title registries, those realities are particular histories of and relationships with land, which will not be protected by property law and are thus made precarious. Building on interdisciplinary work which theorises time as a social tool, I argue that Torrens title registration produces a temporal order which enables land market coordination by rendering some relationships with land temporary and making others indefeasible. This ordering of relationships with land in turn has consequences for the human subjects who have those relationships, cutting futures short for some and guaranteeing permanence to others. Engaging with Renisa Mawani and other critical race theorists, I argue that the categories produced by Torrens title registration systems materialise as race.

Primary evidence of seton therapy at Tarban Creek, New South Wales, 1839.

We aimed to find and explore the earliest available New South Wales asylum medical records to identify any management or therapeutic data that might be of interest to the psychiatric field. The earliest known existing records of New South Wales asylum data are from Tarban Creek Asylum. After almost two centuries the preserved records allow insight into treatment used in early colonial Australia, including the scarcely remembered seton therapy. This finding highlights the importance of preserving historical records. It also demonstrates the necessity and/or evolving wish within the colony to care for patients with perceived mental health difficulties based on a shared medical culture inherited from techniques used in Britain.

Humans, water, and the colonization of Australia

The Pleistocene global dispersal of modern humans required the transit of arid and semiarid regions where the distribution of potable water provided a primary constraint on dispersal pathways. Here, we provide a spatially explicit continental-scale assessment of the opportunities for Pleistocene human occupation of Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. We establish the location and connectedness of persistent water in the landscape using the Australian Water Observations from Space dataset combined with the distribution of small permanent water bodies (springs, gnammas, native wells, waterholes, and rockholes). Results demonstrate a high degree of directed landscape connectivity during wet periods and a high density of permanent water points widely but unevenly distributed across the continental interior. A connected network representing the least-cost distance between water bodies and graded according to terrain cost shows that 84% of archaeological sites >30,000 y old are within 20 km of modern permanent water. We further show that multiple, well-watered routes into the semiarid and arid continental interior were available throughout the period of early human occupation. Depletion of high-ranked resources over time in these paleohydrological corridors potentially drove a wave of dispersal farther along well-watered routes to patches with higher foraging returns.

Histories of climate, science, and colonization in Australia and New Zealand, 1800–1945

This review article focuses on scholarship that lies at the intersection of histories of climate and British settler colonization in Australia and New Zealand. It first discusses the role of climate in their colonial histories and then developments in the field of climate history, examining similarities and differences within and between Australia and New Zealand. Next, it outlines two significant recent themes in climate history in both places: contested climate debates and perceptions, and social impacts and responses to climate. The article finishes by recommending future areas for research. Throughout, we stress the importance of local‐level approaches to climate as a means of understanding past and present, popular and scientific, interpretations of climate. We also emphasize the role that imperatives of colonization have played in shaping particular kinds of climate knowledge, including in overwriting nonelite views of climate. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:893–909. doi: 10.1002/wcc.426This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > World Historical Perspectives

Bushrangers, the Exercise of Mercy and the 'Last Penalty of the Law' in New South Wales and Tasmania 1824-1856

The death penalty in the 19th century in both colonial Australia and Great Britain was widely seen as necessary for punishment and deterrence. However, the prerogrative of mercy served a vital role during this period in mitigating the effects of capital punishment. This article examines the exercise of the death penaly and the prerogrative of mercy in colonial Australia during the period from 1824 to the grant of responsible government in 1856 with respect to bushrangers. Bushrangers despite their often celebrated and even sympathetic status in 'popular culture' were perceived (in official and 'respectable' circles at least) as more than mere colonial criminals and as posing a particular threat to the often tenous stability and even existence of early colonial society. However, even offenders 'beyond the pale' such as bushrangers were not exempted from the benefit of mercy. It is argued that the prerogrative was taken seriously in colonial Australia by the public, the press and notably the authorities to even the worst of capital offenders such as bushrangers. Different conceptions were expressed during the time, ranging from ideas of mercy as based on desert and equity, as something that was predictable and consistent, to ideas of mercy as an undeserved gft. These debates about the prerogrative of mercy articulated different conceptions of law and order, community and justice in an embryonic, self governing society.

Spirituality in Place: Capturing the Essence of North Queensland through Painting

For centuries, artists have been inspired by place. This perception and awareness of place can also involve a spiritual connection. Artists from both Aboriginal culture and white settlement in Australia have painted works which reveal a deep spiritual connection to place. One of the geographical areas that has inspired several artists is North Queensland, which offers a rich tapestry of dry and wet tropical environments. This article considers an historical overview and deconstructs the work of four contemporary painters (Firth-Smith, Silver, Watson, and Cheshire) who have been inspired by the place that is North Queensland, in order to consider the ways in which their work reveals a spiritual connection to place.

The Imperial Effect: Literary Copyright Law in Colonial Australia

This article traces the application, operation and development of copyright law regarding literary works in colonial Australia. It examines the reception of the Literary Copyright Act 1842 (UK) and the Foreign Reprints Act 1847 (UK), exploring early (unsuccessful) attempts to liberalize the Australian book trade by allowing foreign imports of UK-copyright works. It also analyzes the development of colonial copyright legislation from the 1860s, using parliamentary debates and media commentary to explore contemporary attitudes to copyright policy. These inquiries reveal that the Australian colonies were unique throughout the empire in their insistence on toeing the imperial copyright line, in ways that were frequently contrary to the interests of colonial authors and readers.

Theft on trial: Prosecution, conviction and sentencing patterns in colonial Victoria and Western Australia

From Ned Kelly to Waltzing Matilda, tales of thievery dominate Australia's colonial history. Yet while theft represents one of the most pervasive forms of criminal activity, it remains an under-researched area in Australian historical scholarship. This article draws on detailed inter-jurisdictional research from Victoria and Western Australia to elaborate trends in the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of theft in colonial Australia. In particular, we use these patterns to explore courtroom attitudes towards different forms of theft by situating such statistics within the context of contemporary commentaries. We examine the way responses to theft and the protection of property were affected by colonial conditions, and consider the influence of a variety of factors on the outcomes of theft trials.

Constructions and experiences of motherhood in the context of an early intervention for Aboriginal mothers and their children: mother and healthcare worker perspectives.

BackgroundThe colonisation of Australia has been associated with traumatic consequences for Aboriginal health and wellbeing, including the breakdown of the traditional family unit and negative consequences for the mother/child relationship. Early-intervention programs have been developed to assist families to overcome disadvantage and strengthen mother/child attachment. However, there is no research examining Aboriginal women’s subjective experiences and constructions of motherhood in the context of such programs, and no research on the perceived impact of such programs, from the perspective of Aboriginal mothers and healthcare workers (HCWs), with previous research focusing on child outcomes.MethodResearchers conducted participant observation of an early intervention program for Aboriginal mothers and young children over a 6 month period, one-to-one interviews and a focus group with 10 mothers, and interviews with nine HCWs, in order to examine their perspectives on motherhood and the intervention program.ResultsThematic analysis identified 2 major themes under which subthemes were clustered. Constructions of motherhood: ‘The resilient mother: Coping with life trauma and social stress’ and ‘The good mother: Transformation of self through motherhood’; Perspectives on the intervention: ‘“Mothers come to life”: Transformation through therapy’; and ‘“I know I’m a good mum”: The need for connections, skills and time for self’.ConclusionsThe mothers constructed themselves as being resilient ‘good mothers’, whilst also acknowledging their own traumatic life experiences, predominantly valuing the peer support and time-out aspects of the program. HCWs positioned the mothers as ‘traumatised’, yet also strong, and expressed the view that in order to improve mother/child attachment a therapeutic transformation is required. These results suggest that early interventions for Aboriginal mothers should acknowledge and strengthen constructions of the good and resilient mother. The differing perspectives of mothers and HCWs on the role and impact of the early intervention program reinforces the need for Aboriginal mothers to be involved in the design and implementation of services aimed at assisting their families.

The Space of Citizenship: Drifting and Dwelling in “Imperial” Australia

Though rarely acknowledged, cheap labour sourced through inter-colonial networks originating in British India was instrumental to the “European” exploration and development of colonial Australia in the decades that followed the initial convict-transportation era. Among others, so-called “Afghan” cameleers left their most permanent legacy in Australia’s networks of transcontinental communication and transport, which they first charted and then instrumentally assisted in building between the 1860s and 1920s. Arguably, it was these same networks that ultimately enabled the Australian nation-state to be formed. Beyond those indelible infrastructural traces, however, this paper focuses in particular on the more enigmatic built evidence of these Muslim pioneers and their attempt to establish a foothold in Australia’s burgeoning towns and cities in the early twentieth century. We consider how this humble architectural fabric – built and projected – supported their comparatively vast commercial and communal networks, and how it also asserted the cameleer’s presumed right to citizenship within the emerging Australian Commonwealth. To build was both a practical and a political statement of the intention to dwell, we argue, in a space of opportunity and potential citizenship that was – from the cameleers’ purview as subjects of the greater British world-system – truly “imperial” in scale as well as scope for cultural diversity.

Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane's experiment in press freedom: A quantitative evaluation through media system dependency

ABSTRACTThe relatively isolated circumstances of colonial Australia provide a natural laboratory for examining the establishment of press freedom there in 1824. A quantitative content analysis of newspapers from 1821 to 1825, guided by media system dependency (MSD) theory, suggests publishers were more concerned with exploiting the end of their dependence on the government as censor than with addressing their remaining dependence on the government as a well-funded advertiser. Findings also reveal considerable variation among publications and between colonies. The analysis also demonstrates the value of MSD theory in historical research.

Floods and Flood-mindedness in Early Colonial Australia

AbstractTo date, environmental histories of rivers, floods, and settlers in early colonial Australia (1788–1820) have meshed with colonial historiography rather than challenging it. Missing from th...

A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines

A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines