Unsettled Settlers: Fear and White Victimhood in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1788 – 1838.

Abstract

Fear of Aboriginal aggression was a reality for the early settlers of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, but it only gained imaginative currency through the trope of white victimhood. This discursive emotional frame continues today, providing a means for many contemporary settler Australians to reconcile with a colonial legacy defined by frontier violence and dispossession. In engaging this dialectic between the past and the present, this thesis seeks to understand how fear and white victimhood gained such purchase upon the Australian settler imaginary. In their response to and coverage of frontier violence, colonial newspapers and administrators did much to validate the unsettled feelings of settlers and their servants as they consolidated the dispossession of Indigenous people. Despite the language of “amity and kindness” which guided the settlement of Australia, early governors were quick to deploy “terror” as a means of arresting Aboriginal resistance to European occupation. This provided settlers an immediate means through which they could channel their emotions and expectations of frontier policy as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth. Terrorising Aboriginal people was framed as the most efficient means of consoling their anxieties over the tenuous nature of their lives and properties in this unfamiliar land. A direct relationship thus came to exist between the acknowledgment of settlers as victims and the “eliminationist logic” of settler colonialism. This thesis provides a critical commentary on the collective emotional experience of Europeans during the colonial era. It analyses the ways in which newspapers like the Sydney Gazette developed a narrative that juxtaposed the “unfeeling” disposition of Aboriginal people with the passive victimhood of settlers, facilitating the circulation of fear across geographical, although administratively porous, boundaries. It also explores how colonial elites cloaked their responsibility in this formation of settler subjectivity in the hope of maintaining a belief in their own humanity towards Indigenous people. Through a discourse of sympathy and compassion men like George Augustus Robinson increasingly sought to challenge the destructive impulses of settler colonialism, emphasising the depravity of convicts and frontiersmen. As this challenge became the central platform of humanitarian governance throughout the 1830s, however, it was less a vehicle for the representation of Indigenous rights as it was a means for colonial elites to retrieve their own sense of Britishness predicated upon the paradox of humane colonisation.