Van Diemen's Land Research Articles

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians 1772–1839. By Colin Dyer Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Capetown, 1820–1850. By Kirsten McKenzie Varieties of Vice‐Regal Life (Van Diemen's Land Section). By Sir William and Lady Denison. Edited by Richard Davis and Stefan Petrow A Nation's Imagination: Australia's Copyright Records, 1854–1968. By Merilyn Minell Australia In Focus: Photographs in the National Archives. By Peter Nagle The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe Explorer. Edited with an introduction by Peter Monteath After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940. Edited by Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald and Paul Macgregor The Gates of Memory: Australian People's Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War. By Tanja Luckins Bigger Than Gallipoli: War, History and Memory in Australia. By Liz Reed Reconsidering Gallipoli. By Jenny Macleod Pompey Elliott. By Ross McMullin John Wren: A Life Reconsidered. By James Griffin Australia and Israel: An Ambiguous Relationship. By Chanan Reich It's Time Again: Whitlam and Modern Labor. Edited by Jenny Hocking and Colleen Lewis Blackfellas Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race. By Gillian Cowlishaw The New Province for Law and Order: 100 Years of Australian Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration. Edited by Joe Isaac and Stuart Macintyre The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty. By Mark Peel Australian Cinema after Mabo. By Felicity Collins and Therese Davies Journey into Darkness. By Winton Higgins Globalisation: Australian Regional Perspectives. Edited by Martin Shanahan and Gerry Treuren God Under Howard: the Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics. By Marion Maddox The Historian's Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History. Edited by Stuart Macintyre Imagining Australia: Ideas for Our Future. By Macgregor Duncan, Andrew Leigh, David Madden and Peter Tynan Navigating Boundaries: The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait. By Anna Shnukal, Guy Ramsey and Yuriko Nagata Reluctant Saviour: Australia, Indonesia and the Independence of East Timor. By Clinton Fernandes Abdurrahman Wahid. Muslim Democrat, Indonesian President: a View From the Inside. By Greg Barton Pacific Journeys, Essays in Honour of John Dunmore. Edited by Glynnis M. Cropp et al. Pacific Places, Pacific Histories: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Kiste. Edited by Brij V. Lal The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands. By Jon Fraenkel Perceptions of Race and Nation in English and American Travel Writers, 1833–1914. By Erik S. Schmeller Europe's Pasts and Presents: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History Diplomaten und Agenten. Nachrichtendienste in der Geschichte der deutsch‐amerikanischen Beziehungen. Edited by Reinhard R. Doerries Fascists. By Michael Mann The Anatomy of Fascism. By Robert O. Paxton City: Urbanism and its End. By Douglas W. Rae World‐Systems Analysis: An Introduction. By Immanuel Wallerstein Metaphysics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. By James Connelly Action as History: The Historical Thought of R. G. Collingwood. By Stein Helgeby “How Good an Historian Shall I be?” R. G. Collingwood, the Historical Imagination and Education. By Marnie Hughes‐Warrington

CONTRACTING CONVICTS: THE CONVICT LABOUR MARKET IN VAN DIEMEN's LAND 1840-1857

The place of penal transportation in Australia's economic history has always been controversial. Convict workers were frequently denigrated as worse than useless, yet without convicts the settlements would have lacked sufficient labour for development. In Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s, convicts constituted more than half the labour supply, and if emancipists are included it was more like three-quarters. After transportation to New South Wales was halted in 1840, amidst claims that the assignment of convict labour was akin to slavery, Van Diemen's Land continued to receive transportees but adopted a new form of labour management: the so-called ‘probation system’. To distinguish the new probation system from the ‘slavery’ of assignment, wages were paid to convict workers. This study uses 17,997 convict employment contracts to explore the labour market for convict passholders at the probation period. Actions speak louder than words, and irrespective of what might have been said about convict quality, by the end of transportation in 1853 convict workers were eagerly engaged at rising wages by employers desperate for labour.

‘The victim of his own temerity'? Silence, scandal and the recall of sir john eardley‐Wilmot

Sir John Eardley-Wilmot was recalled from his position as the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land. He was officially dismissed because of his silences over the unspeakable crime or for not attending to the moral condition of the convict population.

The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788-1838 (review)

Reviewed by: The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 George Raudzens The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838. By John Connor. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002. ISBN 0-86840-756-9. Maps. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 175. $24.95. Available in the U.S. from the University of Washington Press in Seattle. John Connor sets out to create the first comprehensive military history of Australia's frontier wars, and he succeeds impressively. He surveys the combats and analyses their military features thoroughly, covering the numerous small-scale fights between specific Aboriginal groups—who also warred among themselves—and British convicts, settlers, and government troops between 1788 and 1828, in all the main regions of colonization. He does this in the middle of a much-publicized, historiographic controversy now raging among the leading writers of Aboriginal history. The more extreme followers of Henry Reynolds insist that the British invaders massacred the indigenous people horribly time and time again, perpetrating what we now call crimes against humanity. Their opponents, led presently by Keith Windshuttle, condemn this "Black Armband" interpretation as gross exaggeration, unsubstantiated by verifiable Aboriginal casualty figures. Left and right wing national politicians are participating vigorously. Indigenous politicians are publicly involved. The latest overview of this debate is the Brian Atwood and S. G. Foster edition, Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003). John Connor's title appears in one footnote, no. 17, of the introductory chapter by the editors, with no comment about it there or in their text. Connor himself discusses much of the evidence they argue about, and sometimes agrees with some of their factual conclusions. But his focus is on war and militarism rather than apportioning responsibility for massacres and genocides. Connor's frontier wars fit within the general pattern of British Empire wars against indigenous people in all the main colonies. Everywhere the British moved into the lands of indigenous people and in one way or another displaced the original owners. Everywhere the indigenous population densities were lower or much lower than those of the incoming colonists. This was not only the case in the patterns of invasion in the founding of Virginia from 1607 to 1622 and of New England from 1620 to 1676, examples which Connor might have found additionally useful to his own case. Even the foundations of Spanish Hispaniola from 1493 to 1514 and of New France from 1541 to 1665 are probably relevant to these general points. As in Australia later, fights over food (called "food fights" in Virginia), led to frontier wars. Population pressures and displacements led to competition and violence not only between colonists and indigenes but among traditional warring indigenous groups also. Indigenes raided European crops and herds and burned frontier settler houses. But some also made alliances with the colonizers. Settlers set up gangs to attack indigenes and colonial authorities sent European troops and settler militias against indigenous resistance groups but also made alliances and attempted to integrate the original landowners into colonial society. Everywhere numerous colonizing invaders displaced or destroyed [End Page 957] less numerous indigenes even after suffering serious defeats at the hands of indigenous warriors. Connor's main colonization wars in Australia follow these patterns. Up to 1828 there were five Australian foundation colonies. Sydney up to 1791 and the first British efforts in Northern and Western Australia between 1824 and 1834 he calls "beachhead frontiers" where government foundation outposts, even with unruly convict workers, did not press seriously on Aboriginal living resources. Violent British-Aboriginal encounters were small and few. Collaboration became the dominant feature. But as ex-convicts and free settlers began to move into interior river valleys with good soil for corn, wheat, and pasture, they impinged on the important Aboriginal food bases in the Hawksbury-Nepean River areas from 1795 to 1816, the Bathurst and Hunter Valley Districts from 1822 to 1826, in Van Diemen's Land from 1821 to 1831, and the Liverpool Plains and Port Philip districts up to 1838. In these foundation agricultural settlements hungry Aborigines raided settler fields and flocks, settlers shot at raiding Aborigines and formed gangs to attack Aboriginal villages, Aborigines attacked isolated farm houses and settlers...

Review Essay

Reassuring 'White Australia': A Review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land 1803—1847 by Keith Windschuttle (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002) is a review essay that assesses Keith Windschuttle's latest book in light of historical scholarship of Australian Aborigines over the last thirty years. The essay critiques both Windschuttle's methodology and his historical analysis, concluding that Windschuttle's book conforms to the prejudices of those on the right in Australian politics. In addition, an effort is made to place Australian Aboriginal history in a broader context, incorporating analyses of the impact of (settler) colonialism on Aboriginal people. In this way, the essay may have value to students and scholars of various other colonial contexts wishing to draw comparisons with their own field of expertise.

American citizens, British slaves: Yankee political prisoners in an Australian penal colony, 1839-1850

We hardly had our feet on the soil, when almost the first objects that greeted our vision were gibbets, and men toiling in the most abject misery, looking more degraded even than so many dumb beasts. Such sights, and the supposition that such might be our fate, served to sink the iron still deeper in our souls. This book tells the strange story of almost a hundred United States citizens who were transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1839-40. As members of the Patriot Army that had conducted border raids into the colony of Upper Canada in 1838, they saw themselves as courageous republican activists, impelled by a moral duty to liberate their northern neighbours from British oppression. Instead of heroic liberators, they became political prisoners of Her Majesty's government. Sent to Van Diemen's Land by Lieutenant-Governor Arthurandmdash;in the hope of deterring any more Yankees from exporting their abhorrent ideology to the Queen's domainandmdash;the Patriot exiles endured years of harsh treatment before they were eventually pardoned. Not being British subjects, their transportation was almost certainly illegal. Eleven of the Patriots wrote narratives about their time in Van Diemen's Land. From these interlocking accounts, Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart have constructed a compelling story of the Patriots' experiences as convicts, drawing also on unpublished letters, newspaper reports and government archives. This vivid and intimate story of political exile and punishment provides a window into the everyday life of the many thousands of forgotten men and women who endured the calculated cruelties of penal transportation. Virtually unknown until brought to life in this remarkable book, the story of the Patriots also considers the political and legal issues of penal transportation as a tool of political repression.

Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man*

This paper examines intellectual interchanges between European theorists in the science of man and sailors, naturalists and artists on scientific voyages in Oceania during the century after 1750. I argue that travellers' narratives and ethnographic representations were not mere reflexes of dominant metropolitan discourses, but were also personal productions generated in the tensions and ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters. I identify countersigns of indigenous agency embedded in such materials and evaluate their trajectory from the interactions which provoked them, through varied genres and media of voyagers' representations, to their contorted appropriation by European savants. My examples are drawn from British and French accounts of visits to New Holland and Van Diemen's Land between 1770 and 1802. In this paper, Aboriginal Australians, especially Tasmanians, serve as synecdoche for the indigenous inhabitants of Oceania generally, using the regional term in its extended early 19th-century sense which encompassed the present Indonesia and Australia along with Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Setting women to work: The assignment system and female convict labour in Van Diemen's land, 1820–1839

Female convict labour has long been considered of little value and female convicts, it has been argued, suffered from systematic underemployment within the colonial labour market. Parallel with this, the female convict assignment system has been depicted as a system of state‐run prostitution. This article re‐examines these claims in the light of evidence from Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s and 1830s. There, demand for female convict labour appears to have been consistently high and the job allocation of female convict workers guided by detailed knowledge about their skills and previous occupations rather than by their sexual attractiveness.

The CANZ Approach to Legal History

The first quality the reader may have noted about these two essays is that they both deal with the question of the legal rights of marriage partners to the economic fruits of one another's labor. But inasmuch as this was only one of several issues addressed by Bruce Kercher, I see it only as an interesting coincidence. Somewhat more noteworthy is the difference between their methodologies: Golder and Kirkby's engagingly crafted socio-legal analysis beautifully illustrates the “thick description” virtues of a case study of litigation, reform agitation and legislation, while Kercher gets us well beyond Alan Atkinson's pioneering study of his subject by carefully drawing evidence unavailable to Atkinson from some of the many cases that he and his research assistants have uncovered from manuscript and newspaper records over the past several years (decisions of the Supreme Courts of New South Wales and VanDieman's Land that are steadily becoming available to us all on two websites). Needless to say, both methodologies “work.”

Mutiny at Deloraine: Ganging and Convict Resistance in 1840s Van Diemen's Land

An incident of alleged animal maiming occurred in October 1845. In this article we attempt firstly to explain why and how it happened. Secondly, we try to discover the conflicting meanings that various contemporaries gave to this occurrence. We believe that the explanation of the event lies in the nature of ganged labour employed at Deloraine and the complex relationships that existed in 1845 between this ganged labour and the convict administration. Equally important to this complex social interaction are the various meanings given to this episode. The most available representations are of those of middle-class moralists. More difficult to reveal is the oppositional significance attributed to this event by the convicts themselves as they attempted to resist both the practices of the convict administration and the moral justifications for these practices.

Walter George Arthur: A Health Profile of a 19th-Century Van Diemen's Land Aboriginal Man

Walter George Arthur: A Health Profile of a 19th-Century Van Diemen's Land Aboriginal Man

"From having no Herbarium." Local Knowledge versus Metropolitan Expertise: Joseph Hooker's Australasian Correspondence with William Colenso and Ronald Gunn

"From having no Herbarium." Local Knowledge versus Metropolitan Expertise:Joseph Hooker's Australasian Correspondence with William Colenso and Ronald Gunn Jim Endersby Abstract Between 1844 and 1860, Joseph Dalton Hooker published a series of major floras of the southern oceans, including the first floras of Tasmania and New Zealand. These books were essential to establishing his scientific reputation. However, despite having visited the countries he described, Hooker relied on a large network of unpaid, colonial collectors to supply him with specimens. A study of his relationship with two of these collectors—Ronald Campbell Gunn and William Colenso—reveals warm friendships but also complex negotiations over individual authority, plant naming, and the status of local knowledge. The herbarium played a crucial role in mediating these negotiations. Although Bruno Latour's theory of cycles of accumulation proved useful for analyzing the herbarium's role, in this article some ways in which his ideas might be refined and modified are suggested. In 1854, the British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (Figure 1) criticized William Colenso (Figure 2), his chief correspondent in New Zealand, for having attempted to name some supposedly new species of ferns: "From having no Herbarium," wrote Hooker, "you have described as new, some of the best known Ferns in the world" (quoted by Colenso to J. D. Hooker, 24 August 1854: KDC 174). Hooker evidently thought that his herbarium gave him the prerogative to name plants that his colonial correspondent lacked. Colenso disagreed, arguing that "I am well aware that I know very little indeed (save from books) of the Botany of any Country except N.Z., still, I fancy, I know the specific differences of many N.Z. plants" (Colenso to J. D. Hooker, 24 August 1854: CP4). For the colonial naturalist, firsthand knowledge of his locality's living plants gave him unique insights. However, Hooker ignored this local knowledge and Colenso's names never appeared in Hooker's Flora Novae-Zelandiae (1855). At first glance, this incident encapsulates an essential aspect of the colonial scientific relationship: the metropolitan expert using his position—both physical and social—to overrule the distant colonial (Brockway 1979, MacLeod 1987, MacLeod and Rehbock 1988, Miller 1996, McCracken 1997). Although Hooker was dependent upon people like Colenso for the specimens he needed to compile the books that made his name and reputation, he was not interested in their ideas. At the heart of his ability to keep Colenso in a subordinate role was the herbarium; I want to discuss the herbarium's importance using Bruno Latour's concept that exchanges such as those between Hooker and Colenso can best be understood by looking at the "cycle of accumulation" within which they participated (Latour 1987:219-220). Hooker made his herbarium into what Latour called a "center of calculation"—a place that brought him specimens, publications, and ultimately the directorship of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In this article I shall look at the cycle of accumulation from the perspective of the periphery—by comparing and contrasting Colenso's motivations with those of Ronald Campbell [End Page 343] Gunn (Figure 3), another of Hooker's Australasian correspondents. Although this approach illustrates the usefulness of Latour's model, it also highlights ways in which it might be modified. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Joseph Dalton Hooker. Copyright Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The Reverend William Colenso. Copyright Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Ronald Campbell Gunn. Copyright Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. How to Become "Such a Person as Mr. Darwin" Hooker corresponded with Gunn for 20 years, from 1840 to about 1860, and with Colenso from 1841 until Colenso's death in 1899. Hooker met both men during his voyage to Antarctica as assistant surgeon aboard HMS Erebus (1839-1843), commanded by James Clark Ross, which, with its sister ship, the Terror, was mapping terrestrial magnetism (Cawood 1979). However, the ships could not withstand the Antarctic winters, so took shelter in various places, including New Zealand and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), and also visited the numerous tiny islands around Antarctica. These sojourns were Hooker's...

Roy Bridge’s Fictions of Van Diemen’s Land

[Extract] Had he been on their case, one can imagine F.R. Leavis intoning `We will not reckon Bryce Courtenay a writer of historical fiction to appeal to adult minds if we think of Roy Bridges'. No Australian author of such fiction had so long a career as Bridges: it spanned just over four decades. His novels, but especially those to do with Van Diemen's Land in the convict era (and more narrowly during the Lieutenant-Governorship of George Arthur from 1824-36) are intelligent, mannered, iconoclastic, obsessive. The minatory, complex figure of Arthur is a central puzzle in most of these novels, whether he appears in person, or in remembrance, as a not-too-distant threat, or as the author of a penal system that, in Bridges's interpretation, became more severe than he intended. Bridges is also exercised by the question of how and why people came to Van Diemen's Land, by religious intolerance transported there, by the moral as well as the physical damage of convict punishment. At the core of a number of the novels is a family romance, whose essential story -- cast in the mode of melodrama -- is of a woman punished for past sexual adventuring by the reappearance of a son thought lost.

Policing in a Penal Colony: Governor Arthur's Police System in Van Diemen's Land, 1826–1836

Policing in a Penal Colony: Governor Arthur's Police System in Van Diemen's Land, 1826–1836

Portrait of a lady: Mary Morton Allport's Paul and Virginia

The manner in which colonial painter Mary Morton Allport presents her life after their settlement in Van Diemen's Land in 1831as representative of a colony of genteel free-settlers in her journals is discussed. Her two miniature portraits titled 'Paul and Virginia' based on a fictional colonial role model, and placed strategically in her public document 'Book of Treasures' were aimed at creating a lady-like image for herself.

Policing in a Penal Colony: Governor Arthur's Police System in Van Diemen's Land, 1826–1836

In eighteenth-century England the rule of law was “the central legitimizing ideology, displacing the religious authority and sanctions of previous centuries.” Arising out of struggles between the monarchy, Parliament, and the courts, the rule of law sought to protect individual liberty and private property by placing constraints on arbitrary authority. The ruling class used the rule of law ideology to enhance their power, but it also acted as a check on that power. All citizens from the monarch to the poorest citizen became bound by the rule of law and could settle their disputes in the courts presided over by judges, who were independent of manipulation.

To Oz and back

Van Dieman's Land is a island about 200 miles square and part of Australia. Also known as the Apple Island, among other things, it is contiguous to the state of Victoria. Like other offshore islands, such as Ireland and Newfoundland, it has to put up with superior tones from the mainlanders. Today we call it Tasmania. At the infant schools there, children were taught a refrain to make sure that jingoism was ever present. It went something like this: “Tasmania is an island with sea all around it.

Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (review)

Joy Damousi's Depraved and Disorderly is a major landmark in the historiography of colonial Australia. Hers is a revisionist study of gender and convictism in New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land from 1820 to 1840. With a lean, dense narrative bristling with important historiographical debates, she suggests nothing less than a complete revision of tired, and by now tiring, questions about convict women that have preoccupied generations of [End Page 696] historians of the colonial period. Were the convict women criminals or skilled laborers, whores or respectable wives, victims of patriarchy or beneficiaries of opportunities unavailable in Britain? For Damousi, these questions are narrow, presentist, and context-blind.

Charles Darwin's field notes on the geology of Hobart Town- a modern appraisal

A transcription of unpublished field notes made by Charles Darwin details the observations and initial deductions he made on the geology of Hobart, Tasmania, and comments thereon place his work in a modern context. The field notes enable the routes of his excursions while in Hobart to be inferred in considerable detail and confirm earlier ideas about the site from which important fossils were collected. They also allow some appreciation of Darwin's style of geological study. Darwin's field notes reveal that he thought of the possibility of the influence of earthquakes on Tertiary beds at Sandy Bay. Several of his ideas on the geology, shown by these notes, some of them also in his publications (e.g. the origin of a Tertiary freshwater limestone, and relative movement of the land and sea in the area), remain topics for further study. His work in the Hobart area and his understanding of the geology of Van Diemen's Land were enhanced by contact with George Frankland, Surveyor-General, who had a long-term and systematic interest in the topic. The notes formed the basis ofa geological Memo on Hobart Town and, later, two publications, each work having a different purpose and emphasis. His work near Hobart did not produce enough information for the construction of a stratigraphic framework (imperfect sketches of the Geology). The imperfections, with other considerations, may have influenced him not to publish the memo which rendered subsequent publications less clear and less useful than had the memo been published. Darwin recognised the influence of glaciation on the Permian sedimentary rocks in the area but did not publish his observations and interpretation

Beer and fighting: Some aspects of male convict leisure in Van Diemen's Land

Beer and fighting: Some aspects of male convict leisure in Van Diemen's Land