Abstract
In 1854, William Westgarth was sent by the Government of Victoria to investigate the causes of the Eureka Revolt, an armed rebellion by gold prospectors resisting governmental regulation and taxation. As he approached the goldfields along the Loddon Valley, Westgarth came across a community that he had not expected to encounter. Establishing camp one evening, he ‘met … with a man of [the Djadja Wurrung] tribe who spoke English well’. He ‘had been trained here [and] had afterwards settled in the neighbourhood … [he] had married a wife of his own people, built himself a hut… and lived somewhat like ourselves, by his daily labour’. This man demonstrated the resilience of Aboriginal people in the face of an overwhelming invasion, first of pastoralists and then of prospectors over the previous two decades. His presence surprised Westgarth, who had assumed that Aboriginal people had effectively disappeared from the landscape of the Victorian gold-fields. The Djadja Wurrung man was called Beernbarmin, and he went on to inform the commissioner
of many interesting particulars of his countrymen. He remembered when the first white man came to this part of the country, about seventeen or eighteen years ago … He was, at the time, a young boy of about eight years of age, and his tribe numbered, according to his estimate, more than 500 of all ages; they were now, he said, reduced to about sixty. He spoke of some great assemblage of black tribes that was shortly to take place in this vicinity at which he expected 600 or 700 Aborigines — the gatherings from far and wide.1
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Notes
E. Morrison (1965) A Successful Failure, a Trilogy: The Aborigines and Early Settlers (Castlemaine: Graffiti), pp. 230–1. The following quotes from Westgarth are from the same source.
For the ways in which a trans-imperial humanitarian project of governance had enabled Parker and the Djadja Wurrung to combine in the creation of this reserve, see A. Lester and F. Dussart (2014), Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 145–82.
B. Attwood (1999) My Country: A History of the Djadja Wurrung 1837–1864 (Clayton: Monash Publications in History), p. 39.
A relatively small sample of the literature on the Anglo-world and its relationship with globalization might include P. Buckner and R. D. Francis (eds) (2005), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press),
J. Belich (2009), Replenishing the Earth: the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
and G. Magee and A. Thompson (2010), Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
L. Ford and T. Rowse (eds) (2010) Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (London: Routledge).
See also R. Kenny (2010), The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World (Melbourne: Scribe).
T. Rowse (2010) ‘The Identity of Indigenous Political Thought’, in Ford and Rowse, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, p. 107.
See, for example, C. Bundy (1979), The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Berkeley: University of California Press).
See also P. Edmonds (2010), Urbanising Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press).
M. Harper (1999) ‘British Migration and the Peopling of Empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Nineteenth Century, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 75;
J. Darwin (2012), Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane), pp. 89–116;
J. C. Weaver (2003), The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press).
In addition to the sources cited in note 9, see, for example, N. Ferguson (2003), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin);
E. Wolf (2010), Europe and the People without History, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press)
and J. Darwin (2013), Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin).
For the former, see J. Carey and J. Lydon (eds) (2014), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (London: Routledge).
For the latter, see T. Banivanua Mar (2013), ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History, 37, pp. 1–28.
K. Fox (2012) ‘Globalising Indigeneity? Writing Indigenous Histories in a Transnational World’, History Compass, 10 (6), pp. 423, 429.
R. Horton (2005) ‘The Inclusion of the Non-European World in International Society, 1870s-1920s: Evidence from Global Networks’, Global Networks, 5 (3), pp. 239–59.
E. Elbourne (2005) ‘Indigenous Peoples and Imperial Networks in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Politics of Knowledge’, in Buckner and Francis Rediscovering the British World, pp. 59–85.
Similarly, the recent, and most welcome work on subaltern subjects of empire has been disproportionately oriented towards those who travelled, either physically or imaginatively, across the spaces of empire. Cassandra Pybus, Kerry Ward and Clare Anderson, for instance, have focused on subjects of penal transportation, indenture and slavery — forms of forced mobility in which subaltern individuals are relatively well documented in the archive: C. Pybus (2006), Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press);
K. Ward (2008), Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
C. Anderson (2012), Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Equally well documented and rigorously tracked by John Maynard, Fiona Paisley and Russell McGregor among others are certain reasonably prominent anticolonial activists: J. Maynard (2005), ‘“In the Interests of Our People”: the Influence of Garveyism on the Rise of Australian Aboriginal Political Activism’, Aboriginal History, 29, pp. 1–22;
F. Paisley (2012), The Lone Protestor: A. M. Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press);
R. McGregor (2007), ‘Looking across the Tasman: New Zealand Exemplars in Australian Indigenous Affairs, 1920s-1970s’, History Compass, 5 (2), pp. 406–26.
See also A. Curthoys and M. Lake (2005) ‘Introduction’, in A. Curthoys and M. Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University E Press), p. 11.
Norman Etherington’s (2001) The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa 1815–1854: Black and White Migration and the Making of South Africa (London: Longman), performed a similar reversal of perspective to see the white colonization of southern Africa from the point of view of Highveld Africans as part of a long sequence of territorial contests and displacements rather than the profoundly transformative moment that (largely white) historians had imagined.
S. Mintz (1987) ‘The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages’, in C. V. Carnegie (ed.), Afro-Caribbean Villages in Historical Perspective (Kingston: African-Caribbean Institute), p. 19,
quoted in C. Hall (1993), ‘White Visions, Black Lives: The Free Villages of Jamaica’, History Workshop, 36, p. 101.
Among a large literature, see, for example, W. Beinart, P. Delius, and S. Trapido (1986) Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa, 1850–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press)
and P. Brock (1993) Outback Ghettos: Aborigines, Institutionalisation and Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
B. Latour (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press). In Latour’s terms, an agent is ‘an actor that has been made to act by many others’, and within the new assemblages being created through colonization, agency became mediated across previously relatively discrete cultural formations, for both colonizers and colonized: p. 46.
See D. I. Salesa (2011) Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
See Robert Young’s critique of the postcolonial adoption of this biological terminology: R. Young (1994), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge).
See S. Dubow (1989), Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa (Basingstoke: Macmillan).
See D. Sibley (1995), Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge).
C. Darwin (1871/2004) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin), p. 212.
See also S. Furphy (2010), ‘“Our Civilisation Has Rolled over Thee”: Edward M. Curr and the Yorta Yorta Native Title Case’, History Australia, 7, p. 3.
N. Castree (2004) ‘Differential Geographies: Place, Indigenous Rights and “Local” Resources’, Political Geography, 23 (2), p. 158.
See B. Attwood (2003), Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen and Unwin); Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk;
R. Broome (2006), ‘“There Were Vegetables Every Year Mr Green Was Here”: Right Behaviour and the Struggle for Autonomy at Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve’, History Australia, 3, p. 2.
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© 2015 Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw
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Lester, A., Laidlaw, Z. (2015). Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century. In: Laidlaw, Z., Lester, A. (eds) Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452368_1
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