Rethinking colonial histories : new and alternative approaches

242 Pages·2006·1.88 MB·English

by  Samuel Furphy

Rethinking
Colonial
Histories:
New and
Alternative
Approaches
Edited by
Penelope Edmonds
and
Samuel Furphy
Rethinking Colonial Histories:
New and Alternative Approaches
History Department
The University of Melbourne
2006
© 2006. Copyright is held by the individual contributors.
This work is provided by the University of Melbourne through the
Department of History under licence from its editors.
First published in October 2006 by RMIT Publishing on Informit Library
www.informit.com.au/library/
Print Edition published in November 2006 by
The History Department
The University of Melbourne
Melbourne, Australia
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Rethinking colonial histories: new and alternative approaches.

ISBN 0 9758392 6 8

1. Australia - History - 1788-1900 - Historiography. I.
Edmonds, Penelope. II. Furphy, Sam.
907.20994
Cover image: Fabric Samples, Board for the Protection of Aborigines.
Reproduced with the permission of the Victorian Public Records Office.
Cover design: Matt Brick - The University of Melbourne Digital Print Centre
Contents
Introduction 1
Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy
Rethinking Texts: Methodology and Interpretation
Ignorance or Deceit? Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History 7
James Boyce
Edward Micklethwaite Curr’s Recollections of Squatting: 33
Biography, History and Native Title
Samuel Furphy
Empire on Show
Displaying Whiteness: Visions of Western Femininity at the World’s Fairs 53
Jane Carey
Imperial Objects, Truths and Fictions: Reading Nineteenth-century 73
Australian Colonial Objects as Historical Sources
Penelope Edmonds
What Photographers Saw: Aboriginal Women and Australian Colonial Experience 89
Leonarda Kovacic
Reading Colonial Mission Photographs: Viewing John Bulmer’s Photographs 107
of Nineteenth Century Mission Life at Lake Tyers Aboriginal Mission Station
through an Evangelical Lens
Peter Carolane
Trans-national and Critical Race Theory
The Pocahontas Exception: Indigenous ‘Absorption’ and Racial Integrity 123
in the United States, 1880s–1920s
Katherine Ellinghaus
Law and the Construction of ‘Race’: Critical Race Theory and the Aborigines 137
Protection Act, 1886, Victoria, Australia
Clare Land
Centre and Periphery in British Child Rescue Discourse 157
Shurlee Swain
Missions: Education, Land and Time
‘A Matter of Primary Importance’: Comparing the Colonial Education 169
of Indigenous Children
Amanda Barry
Material Histories: Clothing, Control and Resistance on Missions 1910–1920 185
Clare Land
Around the Clock: The Colonisation of Time in the British World 205
(with a Focus on Lovedale, Cape Colony 1870–1905)
Giordano Nanni
‘Ohne Neid’ (‘Without Jealousy’): Moravian Missionaries’ Ideas of 219
Land Ownership in Colonial Victoria
Felicity Jensz

Introduction
Rethinking Colonial Histories: New and Alternative Approaches displays a wide
variety of approaches to the task of writing colonial history, showcasing the strength
of this field of study in the History Department at the University of Melbourne.
The chapters in this volume are principally drawn from a successful one-day symposium
involving postgraduate students and staff held on 1 October 2004. The symposium
was a stimulating day and was well received by those who attended. The conference
organisers, Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy, specifically sought to elicit papers
that explored new and alternative approaches to the theory and methodology of historical
research and the task of thinking about and writing colonial history. They requested the
speakers to be reflexive in their papers, overtly discussing their particular approach or
methodology in rethinking and writing colonial histories.
This publication also includes a flagship chapter, James Boyce’s ‘Ignorance or Deceit?
Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History’. This timely piece considers the
debates surrounding methodology and use of source material in the writing of history
provoked by Keith Windschuttle’s controversial recent work on Tasmanian inter-racial
violence. Boyce challenges Windschuttle’s blanket attack on apparently left-wing
‘orthodox’ historiography, which, as he demonstrates, is actually a diverse body of
scholarship built over 170 years. Boyce exposes the flaws inherent in Windschuttle’s
politicised approach and his chapter is sure to be a valuable contribution to the current
lively debates about Australia’s frontier past. It also raises many deeper issues pertinent
to our overarching topic: questions such as historical plausibility and the humanity that
we must continue to bring to our scholarship as we endeavour to rethink colonial history.
The majority of chapters examine British settler colonies, geographically spanning
Australia, South Africa and the United States. The symposium theme was designed
to be open and broad, and thus the chapters presented include diverse theoretical and
methodological approaches such as trans-national history, critical race theory, whiteness
theory, and material culture studies — as well as approaches to the re-reading of
traditional sources. Included are examinations of non-text-based sources such as oral
histories, photographs, clothing and objects — all potential ways of understanding and
writing about colonialism. Various topical issues addressed include assimilation policy,
child removal, native title, material culture, exhibitionary practice at the local and global
level, urban history, and missionary notions of time and education.
In the first section, along with James Boyce’s chapter, is Samuel Furphy’s rethinking of
Edward Micklethwaite Curr’s Recollections of Squatting in Victoria. Furphy considers
the various ways in which Curr’s text has been utilised as an historical source, most
notably in the Yorta Yorta native title case. Considered by the courts to be reliable
‘written evidence’, Curr’s book was privileged over the oral evidence of the Yorta Yorta
claimants. Crucially, therefore, the chapter considers the role of history and historians
in the native title process; a timely consideration given the lack of any real land rights
delivered to Victorian Aboriginal peoples by the State Government.
Rethinking Colonial Histories: New and Alternative Approaches
Exploring issues of colonialism and visuality through white women, exhibitionary
practice, material culture and photography, the next section considers ‘Empire on Show’.
Jane Carey’s ‘Promoting Whiteness: Visions of Western Femininity at the World’s
Fairs’ explores discourses of whiteness and femininity, revealing how western women’s
increasing public presence and authority rested on their ability to claim the privileges of
‘whiteness’, and the ways that the strategic construction of an elevated white womanhood
in such exhibitionary formats was dependent on the notion of the primitive savage
woman. In ‘Imperial Objects, Truths and Fictions: Reading Nineteenth-century Australian
Colonial Objects as Historical Sources’, Penelope Edmonds proposes that objects have
been overlooked as pathways to understanding the colonial past. She explores two
complex European objects that embody the asymmetry of the colonial encounter in south-
eastern Australia — the Le Souëf box and Governor Arthur’s iconic Proclamation Board
— bringing new readings to each, particularly through consideration of their display in
Melbourne’s 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition. In a chapter that is sure to challenge, Leonarda
Kovacic counters simplistic theories of the camera as merely a tool of oppression and seeks
to reinstate Aboriginal women’s agency in Australian colonial (largely male) photographic
practice, in ‘What Photographers Saw: Aboriginal Women and Australian Colonial
Experience’. Exploring a similar theme, Peter Carolane refutes the position of theorists
such as Susan Sontag, who contend that the colonial photograph is of little value and is
predatory and destructive of its colonial object. Carolane proposes that careful examination
of photographs taken by missionaries, such as John Bulmer at Lake Tyers in Victoria,
reveals evangelical meaning and is a valuable method of historical research.
The third section of this collection, ‘Trans-national and Critical Race Theory’, explores
two important approaches to rethinking scholarship and investigating new arenas of the
colonial encounter. Katherine Ellinghaus’ chapter, ‘The Pocahontas Exception: Indigenous
“Absorption” and Racial Integrity in the United States, 1880s–1920s’, brings close
comparative attention to the ‘colonial history of the intimate’, in her consideration of
absorption policy in North America and Australia. Clare Land uses critical race theory to
examine the landmark Victorian Aborigines Protection Act in ‘Law and the Construction
of “Race”’. Meanwhile, Shurlee Swain’s ‘Centre and Periphery in British Child Rescue
Discourse’ reveals the movements of ideas of savagery and civilisation between south-
eastern Australia and the London metropole; she posits child rescue discourse as a subset
of missionary enterprise which ultimately legitimated Indigenous child removal.
The final section considers missionary enterprise though various novel lenses: the
application of European time practices to Aboriginal missions in Giordano Nanni’s
‘The Colonisation of Time in the British World’; considerations of Moravian concepts
of land in south-eastern Australia by Felicity Jensz in the chapter ‘“Ohne Neid”
(“Without Jealousy”): Moravian Missionaries’ Ideas of Land Ownership in Colonial
Victoria’; a comparison of mission education policy at Ramahyuck (Victoria) and
Poonindie (South Australia) in Amanda Barry’s ‘A Matter of Primary Importance’;
and a fascinating chapter on the material connections of mission clothing in Clare Land’s
‘Material Histories: Clothing, Control and Resistance on Missions 1910–1920’.
 
Introduction
The editors wish to thank Patricia Grimshaw, Robin Harper, Michael Keating and
Elizabeth Nelson for their help in the preparation of this collection. We also thank the
contributors, anonymous reviewers and symposium chairs for all their efforts. Publication
of this work was assisted by a publication grant from the University of Melbourne, with
additional funding provided by the Faculty of Arts and the History Department.
Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy
Melbourne, July 2006