Anti‐slavery in Australia: Picturing the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre

Abstract

During the 1830s, white settlers in the Australian colonies sought to consolidate their possession of Aboriginal land, prompting tension between colonists and Aboriginal people, and between settlers and British humanitarian interests. In this essay, I examine competing representations of frontier clashes, and particularly the 1838 Myall Creek massacre, and their links to larger imperial debates. At the height of their influence, British humanitarians drew upon the discursive strategies of the antislavery movement in seeking to mobilize concern for Indigenous Australians. In a context where Aboriginal people were stereotyped as primitive and non‐human, counter‐images and strategies drawn from antislavery discourse might constitute them as objects of white compassion. Focusing blame upon the convict perpetrators allowed elite humanitarians to displace responsibility from the system of colonization itself.

The sounds of silence in Australian collective memory and popular counter-narratives (Los sonidos del silencio en la memoria colectiva australiana y en los relatos alternativos populares)

“…Public debate following the Myall Creek massacre, for example, openly discussed the morality of colonization and what the Canadian historian Elizabeth Elbourne (2003) has since described as the 'sin of the settler'. Aboriginal Protectors such as George Augustus Robinson and evangelical missionaries such as Lancelot Threlkeld, who ministered in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney, exposed the terrifying precarity of Aboriginal communities in the midst of frontier conflict (Keary, 2009;Lydon, 2018;Robert, 2016;Robinson, 1998).…”

“…El debate público tras la masacre de Myall Creek, por ejemplo, discutió abiertamente la moralidad de la colonización y lo que la historiadora canadiense Elizabeth Elbourne (2003) había descrito desde entonces como 'el pecado del colono'. Protectores aborígenes como George Augustus Robinson y misioneros evangélicos como Threlkeld, que ministró en el Valle Hunter al norte de Sydney, expusieron la aterradora precariedad de las comunidades aborígenes en medio del conflicto fronterizo (Keary, 2009;Lydon, 2018;Robert, 2016;Robinson, 1998).…”

Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide

“…Nevertheless, it seems clear that military and settler violence were the dominant forms of foundational violence and that the violent acts in question were plainly criminal by the legal standards of the time. Moreover, in practice, this was state-sanctioned violence undertaken with a high level of impunity, given prosecutions were rare, defences of "mitigating circumstances" frequently successful and convictions deeply unpopular (Broome 2003;Nettelbeck 2013;Evans and Ørsted-Jensen 2014;Owen 2016;Lydon and Ryan 2018).…”