Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism

Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism

Also by Anne O’Brien

POVERTY’S PRISON: The Poor in NSW, 1880–1918

GOD’S WILLING WORKERS: Women and Religion in Australia

Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism

Anne O’Brien

Associate Professor of History, University of New South Wales, Australia

© Anne O’Brien 2015

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First published 2015 by

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1  Governing and the Philanthropic Disposition

Kindness, mercy and the quest for colonies

‘Splendid edifices of white squared stone’: voluntarism and the penal institutions

‘A universal desire to assist’: philanthropic organisations

Respectability and the segmentation of charity

‘One Blood’: black philanthropy

2  The Democratic Moment

Fighting pauperism in the first depression

Caroline Chisholm and working-class women

The alcohol problem: moral and social reform

Fighting the devil: Nathaniel Pidgeon

Myall Creek and the limits of compensation

3  An ‘Age of Philanthropy’?

White relief: asylums

White relief: rations

Reforming the fallen

Civilising the urban poor

Missions to the heathen

Parallels and divergences

4  Prevention and Protection

Depression

Rescue

Prevention

Humanitarian protection?

5  A Hand Up: The Problems of Independence

The shadow of war

Gender tensions

Depression

A medical problem?

Fighting protection

Depression activists

Missions and independence

6  Beyond Mere Welfare

A new social order

Self-help and white rights

Advancing Indigenous rights

Assimilation, activism and practical help

Women and children: institutions in white Australia

A mission to educate

7  ‘To Hell with Charity’

Self-help and radical change

Faith in community

Social work and community work

Activism and practical help

Self-determination and community

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

The research and writing of this book has been greatly assisted by grants from the Australian Research Council (DP0772656) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. I am grateful for permission to access material and generous professional assistance from the librarians and archivists at the State Library of New South Wales, the State Library of Victoria, the State Library of Queensland, the State Library of South Australia, the State Library of Tasmania, the National Library of Australia, the UNSW Library, the Good Samaritan Archives Glebe, the Sisters of Charity Archives Potts Point, the Smith Family Sydney and the University of Sydney Archives.

Warm thanks to my colleagues in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW for maintaining a supportive and lively environment in which to teach and research. ‘The History Seminar’ and the symposia of the ‘Imperial, Colonial and Transnational Histories Research Cluster’ have provided opportunities for much stimulating discussion. I have also gained a great deal from conferences, seminars and workshops organised by the Australasian Welfare History Workshop collective, the Australian Catholic University, the Australian Historical Association, the Indigenous Policy and Dialogues Research Unit at UNSW, Macquarie University, the Menzies Centre at Kings College London, University College Dublin and the University of Melbourne. It has been a pleasure to have shared my love of history with a range of community organisations including the Uniting Church Historical Society, the Catholic Historical Society, the Religious Archivists Society, the Presbyterian Fellowship, the Movement for the Ordination of Women and the Blue Mountains Social Enquiry Centre.

My intellectual debt to the people in the footnotes is enormous. If writing is a solitary occupation, it is less so for historians who engage with researchers who have gone before. Indeed, it is deeply sustaining to encounter the work of scholars who have brought respect and endless fascination to the exploration of human beings in the past. Writing this book has given me a new appreciation of the richness of the scholarship to which it contributes.

Special thanks to Patricia Curthoys for meticulous research assistance and unfailing good humour and to Shurlee Swain, who read large chunks of the manuscript despite the multiple demands on her time, and made comments of great pertinence. Any blame is all mine, of course. I was very grateful be able to call on Charmaine Robson’s competence and enthusiasm to teach one of my courses when I took leave to complete this book, and Eureka Henrich and Carlin de Montfort were excellent tutors, freeing me up to write. To the ‘Australianists’ in history at UNSW – Ruth Balint, Lisa Ford, Grace Karskens and Zora Simic – thanks for being such good colleagues and for the hard work that went into launching Sydney’s Australian Studies Seminar. To my postgraduate research students and undergraduates in ‘Winners and Losers: Poverty, Welfare and Social Justice in Australia’, thanks for the insights, questions, arguments and conversations over many years. Thanks to Jen McCall and Holly Tyler of Palgrave Macmillan for making the journey to print so straightforward and to Rick Bouwman for careful copy-editing.

Thanks most of all to my daughters Lizzie and Katie, who have listened to innumerable stories from this book with good grace and humour and to John Ingleson, who has listened, read, commented and otherwise provided unwavering assistance.

Introduction

In the last couple of decades, philanthropy has taken off. Offering tax concessions, exposure to markets and scads of social capital, donation has been built into the business models of most large corporations. ‘Ordinary people’ also give – their most likely ‘profile’ is that of a middle-aged woman with higher than average income and education.¹ But the use of ‘philanthropy’ to refer primarily to corporate or individual benefaction is a relatively recent revival, despite the long history of giving in Australia. Indeed, the word had largely fallen out of use by the mid-20th century: ‘Like courtly manners’, it was ‘suspect’, according to the Principal of Women’s College in Brisbane in 1951.² And it would seem to have stayed that way until the mid-1990s. When Elizabeth Cham, Director of the newly enlarged umbrella organisation Philanthropy Australia started in 1996 to contact the press to raise the profile of giving, she was advised to choose a different word.³ Over the next decade ‘philanthropy’, both the term and the activity, became fashionable – an ‘innovative, growing, influential and high performing sector’ as Philanthropy Australia’s website now describes it.⁴ Its rise was an international phenomenon, both product and pillar of the revival of the market economy. Given the fulsome tradition of American giving it is not surprising that Bill and Melinda Gates are among its highest-profile global ambassadors, but Australia seeks to foster its own tradition: it seemed only natural when a Macquarie banker and philanthropist, for example, was named ‘Australian of the Year’ in 2011.⁵

If philanthropy today is mostly associated with giving away money, its meanings at the moment of Australia’s colonisation in the late 18th century were broader and richer. It is those meanings this book seeks to trace. But what did it mean then? Literally, of course, it has always referred to a ‘love of humanity’ – like today’s benefactors it sought to promote the welfare of others. But how can we trace the history of an idea at once so noble, so elusive but so inviting of scepticism? These questions are particularly pertinent for countries of the British world like Australia, for British claims on benevolence were deeply felt. Long before the First Fleet sailed benevolence had been integral to the identity of the English elite – the 16th-century Poor Laws were its statutory proof – and in the 18th century a new transatlantic sensibility that saw ‘irresistible compassion’ as natural to all humanity kindled even greater self-consciousness among the British of their own ‘humanity’. One of its manifestations was the voluntary organisation: philanthropy had long been enmeshed in the paternalist structures of manor and village with landowners responsible for those they knew, but in the 18th century it became the work of committees of volunteers coming together in the public sphere to assist strangers.⁶

It is the Australian descendants of these organisations that provide the main focus of this book. But how can we make sense of their vast and varied purposes and their shifting, uneven trajectories? A crucial starting point must be the huge disruptions of the last decade of the 18th century which transformed Britons’ understandings of how benevolence might best be expressed. It is a well known story: the revolutionary wars in France; agricultural dislocation; the turbulent onset of industrialisation; problems with poor relief – including Thomas Malthus’s dire warnings that it encouraged unsustainable population growth: all posed a challenge to the old ‘open-handed, slightly careless benevolence’ that the British elite had come to celebrate.⁷ There was an ‘explosion’ of philanthropy between the 1790s and 1830s but its impulses had changed.⁸ Material aid was increasingly seen as irresponsible – fostering habits of ‘idleness and vice, of luxury and waste, of thoughtlessness and improvidence, of servility and discontent’.⁹ To reformers, the best philanthropy was that which would improve rather than relieve. The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, founded in London in 1796 to provide practical advice and religious exhortation without secular aid, was emblematic.¹⁰ Moral reform, then, was a new and forceful component of philanthropy at the turn of the 19th century and it gained the ascendancy over the next hundred years. If it was sparked by social unrest, it was sustained by the Enlightenment belief in the human capacity for improvement and the Methodist teaching that all humanity was sinful but capable of redemption. Both underpinned initiatives for the British lower orders such as bible societies, city missions, orphan schools – and also foreign missions. The major British missionary societies were founded in the 1790s and while their views of colonised peoples were imbued with various notions of savagery, they approached them with assumptions about salvation and civilisation similar to those they brought to the British poor.

The focus on improvement in the new philanthropy extended beyond the individual to the social order. Though social reform has developed its own historiography, usually discrete from that of philanthropy, the belief that citizens should use the public sphere to campaign against harrowing injustice fell within philanthropy’s broad ambit at the turn of the 19th century. Campaigns to end slavery and later child labour drew their authority from philanthropy: the abolition of slavery, declared William Wilberforce in 1789, was not grounded upon ‘motives of policy, but founded in the principles of philanthropy’.¹¹ As it developed over the 19th century, social reform drew on new sources, including the movement for democracy and the labour movement, but philanthropic organisations remained a steady source of its support.

In addition to these new, improving elements, philanthropy continued to encompass ‘relief’. This was intrinsic to its Greek origins, carried over to the Roman idea of ‘humanitas’ with its obligation to care for others, and was fundamental to the Christian exhortation to ‘love one another’.¹² But historians have differentiated Christian charity from philanthropy, arguing that charity’s essential aim was religious, focused on the individual’s search for God, while philanthropy was a humanist project centered on the welfare of others.¹³ Traditionally, charity had supported a pre-industrial social order in which poverty was seen as inevitable and provision of residual assistance religious duty: it assumed stasis rather than improvement. But despite the rise of moral reform, the biblical conviction that the poor were ever-present survived into the post-industrial world and when it came to practical benevolence residual ‘charity’ sat easily under ‘philanthropy’s’ broad mantle: the terms were often used interchangeably in the 19th century. In the Australian colonies hundreds of benevolent societies and church aid societies flourished and remained the main form of assistance for women with children – alongside family and informal networks – until the Second World War. Early in the 19th century Aboriginal people came under its purview through the distribution of blankets and rations. Part appeasement, part compensation, part necessity, they became entrenched in the colonial moral economy.

We can think of philanthropy at the turn of the 19th century, then, as having three distinguishable but intersecting strands – ‘moral reform’, ‘social reform’ and ‘relief’. These strands provide the conceptual framework for this book: it explores the clusters of meanings they accrued and the changing relationships between them. Their intertwining can be read in the shifting ways in which 19th-century colonial statisticians categorised the institutions of benevolence. Moore’s Almanack and Hand Book for NSW of 1852 listed ‘Religious institutions’ separately from ‘Benevolent institutions’, but 10 years later Waugh’s Australian Almanac put them together.¹⁴ By 1865 ‘religious’ had disappeared – the Australian Almanac listed all relevant organisations as ‘Societies and Public Institutions’ alongside the Acclimatization Society and the Philosophical Society.¹⁵ In 1870 the Statistical Register of New South Wales put charitable institutions prominently in Part 1 under the heading ‘Population, Immigration, Vital Statistics’. By 1890, they were back with ‘Religion’ but now also with ‘Education’. By the mid-1890s they were listed with Hospitals.¹⁶ If these variations suggest there was no certainty about how philanthropy was best understood, they also suggest the multiplicity of its uses – redemptive, educative, curative, palliative – and awareness of its costs.

This book fills a considerable gap. There are histories of the voluntary sector in most major western countries but its workings in Australia have not been subject of sustained, long-range analysis.¹⁷ More important, there is no sustained comparison in the international scholarship of the workings of philanthropy in relation to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in a settler society. Studies of missions to Indigenous peoples seldom contextualise them in relation to institutions for settlers and, despite the considerable literature on the empire-wide ‘humanitarian’ movement, we know little of its relationship with other forms of philanthropy.¹⁸ Further, while there is a growing scholarship on the discursive links in ‘the civilising mission’ to the heathen overseas and within, there has been little sustained investigation of its implications; how and why interventions were shaped by this shared discourse, and their consequences for those at whom they were directed, remain unclear.¹⁹ The most recent history of Australian welfare has argued that Indigenous and white welfare developed along ‘parallel tracks’ with Indigenous people ‘excluded from the imaginary of the poor let alone of the citizenry’.²⁰ But imagined exclusion was never total: indeed it was at the margins of inclusion – in effecting policies of ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’ – that the work of philanthropy was enacted. The direct interventions made into Indigenous peoples’ lives were shaped by ideas and practices circulating around ‘problem’ white populations.

Except in one regard. A fourth strand of philanthropy was specific to Indigenous peoples. The moral obligation to make reparation for colonisation never ran deep but it recurred in reformers’ discourse. At its first high-point in the late 1830s and when it came to shape calls for land rights in the mid-20th century the idea of compensation carried at least a sense of Indigenous entitlement and it had some emphasis on Indigenous autonomy. But its meanings were mercurial. In the context of the late 19th century northern frontiers, for example, settlers deployed it to legitimise coercive policies that moved ‘fringe dwellers’ from the edges of country towns.²¹ For Indigenous people, the discourse of compensation was fundamental. They used it to reclaim their lands from the mid-19th century and it informed the activism of the 20th century.²²

A study of voluntary welfare is particularly important in Australia because the relationship between the state and voluntarism was unusually close. Government played a central role in the foundation and development of the Australian colonies but rather than weakening philanthropy I argue that this intimacy strengthened it.²³ Indeed paternalism, with its obligations and responsibilities, was an important component in the governance of the early penal colonies. From the time of Macquarie (1810–22), most of the governors subsidised philanthropy, and it remained the main provider of assistance in the nineteenth century. Even after the introduction of pensions and benefits at the turn of the 20th century philanthropy was an important buffer against primary poverty. In the small communities that developed across the continent in the 19th century leading citizens operated on both sides of the ‘moving frontier’ between the state and voluntary sector and at certain pivotal moments key individuals could exercise considerable power. In Victoria, for example, the Moravian missionary Frederick Hagenauer became Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Board in the 1880s where he was instrumental in passing a law whose draconian consequences were suffered by generations of Aborigines; in NSW during the next decade a ginger group of clergy, MPs and charity workers were influential advocates of the old age pension, which provided a degree of autonomy for aged settlers but excluded ‘Asiatics’ and ‘aboriginal natives of Australia’.²⁴

Philanthropy’s discursive powers were strong in this colonial context. Settlers’ rejection of a poor law attested to their preference for voluntarism and, as expressions of faith and civic duty, their organisations fashioned ideas about deservedness that flowed back into state action. But the absence of a poor law confronted philanthropists with an anomalous task: they had to be seen to be weeding out the undeserving and ensuring the ‘genuinely’ needy were being treated humanely, but they could not entirely abandon the desperate. Their published reports, at once seeking to prevail upon the public and demonstrate efficiency, fluctuated between displays of compassion and assertions of rigor and were often shaped by the political preoccupations of the day. It is telling, but perhaps not surprising then, that different cultures of blame developed in different colonies: in former convict colonies such as Tasmania philanthropists were rarely troubled by doubts as to the depravity of their clients, whereas in gold-rich Victoria, the legacy of ‘the pioneer’ lead to philanthropists emphasising misfortune rather than culpability in the lives of the poor. While such discursive differences did not always flow into the experience of those in their way, they sometimes did – and not just in treatment by charities but cemented in policy.

These transcontinental differences were muted in the 20th century but philanthropists continued to sway opinion on a range of fronts. Social science was a ‘poor relation’ in the world of Australian scholarship but Christian reformers carried out social surveys that influenced governments. The work of Methodist slum reformer Oswald Barnett, who went from a study group of community organisations to Vice-Chairman of the Housing Commission of Victoria, is a prime example.²⁵ Philanthropists became effective exploiters of modern media. By the 1870s the arresting phrases and startling imagery of popular journalism were infiltrating the reports of city missions and in the next decade the Salvation Army brought a new level of focused expertise to communicating with a mass audience. In the inter-war years, philanthropists used the radio to call for donations and some used film to get their message across; advertisements on television became important in the 1960s and the ‘telethon’ was a winner. Such endeavours were fraught – those promoting the welfare of others were indeed liable to objectifying and ‘othering’ those on whose behalf they acted – and from their position at the coalface of care voluntary organisations were well placed to shape opinion. If, as the British policy analyst Richard Titmuss has argued, welfare systems ‘reflect the dominant cultural and political characteristics of their society’, their voluntary elements in the Australian colonies are an under-researched gateway thereto.²⁶

A long history of philanthropy sheds new light on social policy as it developed in this settler society. There is now a well-established international literature arguing that Australia has been distinctive in constructing a welfare state focused on the white male wage-earner: the corollary of privileging his efforts to support a family was a system of welfare supported by general revenue that was means-tested, targeted and residual.²⁷ But despite the clearly gendered and raced nature of this welfare state there has been little sustained, integrated historical analysis of how race and gender ideologies specifically shaped and maintained it. Philanthropy offers the opportunity for these connections to be made. It not only provided care for those overlooked by the state; it was also central in maintaining the structures of thought and practice that perpetuated the system. In the 19th century, colonisation itself – even as it was known to dispossess the original owners – was envisaged as a philanthropic solution for Britain’s grinding poverty; and in immigrants’ flight from the Poor Law, the dependent wife became a sign of colonial success. By the late 19th century, when the alliance between labour and new liberalism was forging the mechanisms of the wage-earners’ state, the combination of reinvigorated evangelical Christianity and progressivism in old and new voluntary organisations reflected and reinforced white women’s dependence and Aboriginal people’s marginalisation. Philanthropy worked in myriad ways, mostly reinforcing these patterns but sometimes challenging them.

Defined in this threefold way and studied over a long time span, philanthropy captures a breadth of meaning conducive to fertile analysis. Even when the word ‘philanthropy’ went out of fashion the elements it had represented at the foundation of Australia’s settler history were alive and well, transformed in new environments. Fresh terminologies came to describe new problems and reflect new knowledge. A modern lexicon of ‘help’ emerged in the 20th century, seeking to distance itself from past practices. New forms, however, often belied underlying continuities: ‘service organisations’ sought to proffer ‘relief’ that would ‘improve’; ‘humanitarianism’ embraced both social reform and relief; ‘casework’ was arguably moral reform in professional guise; ‘community work’ hoped to reform individuals by encouraging collective action. These new terms were telling of important shifts but they have a place in philanthropy’s extended family. Rather than operating in opposition to philanthropy’s original tasks they suggest different understandings of how its basic projects were best achieved.

The shifts of the 20th century were driven not only by changes in knowledge but by changes in philanthropy’s constituency. The democratisation of philanthropy started in the 19th century with white women and men from across the class spectrum working for evangelical and temperance organisations. But working-class membership did not ensure a radical agenda nor was there any simple linear progression in the development of social reform: the proletarians in the 1840s temperance movement were given to greater class and gender outrage than ‘the common people’ who joined the Salvation Army half a century later. From the 1920s, however, activist and self-help groups of people on the receiving end of welfare began to organise. They too had varying politics but as foundations from ‘below’ they were more inclined to challenge authority. It is no coincidence that the first such organisation was of Aboriginal people in New South Wales. Their purposes were viscerally fundamental, seeking to extricate themselves from the government bureaucracies that removed their children, revoked rights to their land and denied them even the sustenance provided to white people. Over the next decades more groups formed organisations to help themselves and each other, diverse groups including pensioners, parents of disabled children and victims of domestic violence. Despite their differences they shared the determination to represent themselves and some sought radical social transformation.²⁸

Advocates on their own behalf, activist and self-help groups cannot be seen as philanthropic and most would probably have found the label anathema. But they demand inclusion if we seek to trace philanthropic social reform. Not only did they sometimes work with reforming philanthropists, galvanising them to action, but their activism shaped the reform agenda. Further, leaders of marginalised and oppressed groups worked for ‘others’ within their own groupings and communities and sometimes for ‘others’ outside them. In this they adapted philanthropic methods, providing immediate help and personal support as well as activist representation. But they did so separate from and usually in opposition to dominant power relations. Herein lies the essence of their difference from philanthropy and their conceptions of these differences provide telling insights into their politics.

The inclusion of social reform organisations – whether self-help or not – recasts the story of the ‘decline’ of the voluntary sector in the 20th century. This is particularly but not only true when we consider reform groups of and for Indigenous peoples. Though only ever attracting a tiny minority, they took Indigenous rights from the periphery to the centre of the political stage. A long history also reconfigures the usual periodization of social reform, which has it making its first tentative impacts during the economic crisis of the 1890s.²⁹ But small groups of reformers urged government action for more just social conditions across the 19th century. Nor did the desire to reform the individual disappear in the 20th century, though belief in ‘improvement’ was constrained by a new biological determinism. Social Darwinism and eugenics cast doubt on whether Aborigines and the ‘unfit’ were capable of change and new medical distinctions between the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ came to overlay the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. But old-style moral reform endured. Renewed by the Charity Organisation Society which, from the later 19th century, once again construed ‘careless charity’ as neglectful of the whole person, it was reinforced by the casework methods employed by the new professional social workers who, by the 1950s, were being accepted into the staffs of most large voluntary organisations.

Philanthropy as relief was inevitably shaped by the intersections of moral and social reform and by the provision of state benefits: its moment of greatest self-doubt was in the 1940s when the social security state seemed to be making it redundant. But relief has its own cultural history. It was shaped by two divergent impulses which, at their extremes, tended to either sacralise or demonise. On the one hand, provision of residual assistance as Christian charity left it open to the charge of pauperising its recipients, who could be readily labelled ‘undeserving’. On the other hand, the idea of inevitability suggested that poverty was the will of God, that those who suffered were close to God, and that the indisputably deserving might achieve a certain ‘holiness’. This was more prevalent in Catholic than Protestant forms of philanthropy, English as well as Roman – though there are tinges of it in the early Salvation Army’s heroic empathy. In practice the distribution of relief was messy and complex and the excesses of this dichotomised view were modified over time. But polarised representations of poor people have survived secularisation, survived the advent of the welfare state and they thrive in the wake of neo-liberalism. They are discernible in the different ways we represent different groups of people: ‘the homeless’ are so deserving that CEOs of major companies sleep out on their behalf; the ‘long-term unemployed’, however, and ‘parents who fail to care for their children’ conjure quite different emotional responses.³⁰ This book seeks to explain how and why such patterns developed to try to move beyond them.

A note on terminology: I have used the names of traditional language groups where applicable but when generalising about people who lived on the mainland I have used the term ‘Aboriginal people’. In broader contexts that also refer to the peoples of the Torres Strait Islands, I have used the term ‘Indigenous peoples’.

1

Governing and the Philanthropic Disposition

It almost seems unnecessary to note that English ideas of philanthropy had little meaning for the Eora, the Indigenous people on whose land the settlers built their town. After all, philanthropy was the product of a ranked society in which a small elite controlled most of the wealth and the vast majority of the population made up ‘the labouring poor’. For the Eora, kinship ties ensured the security of all; they fished, traded with neighbouring groups, used fire to manage the land’s resources and in 1788 their health was probably better than that of the average European – marine office Watkin Tench noted that though ‘not stout’ they were ‘nimble, sprightly and vigorous’.¹ This is not to romanticise: theirs was a ‘tough warrior culture’ with power differences based on age and gender – and food was more difficult to find further from the coast. But for tens of thousands of years the continent had supported a population which, by 1788, was estimated to be around 1 million. People lived in self-governing groups, their relationship with their country meant they neither seized each other’s land nor exploited the labour of other groups. They had no need of philanthropy as the British understood it.²

Yet there are deeper connections between English philanthropy and Indigenous societies that help us focus the particularities of colonisation on this very old continent. One stream of post-war social theory, employing the insights of anthropology, conceptualised philanthropy as ‘a gift relationship’. It argued that just as gift-giving created obligations of reciprocity in pre-market societies, so too did the gift-giving at the heart of philanthropy involve some sort of return, whether social approval, personal gratitude or social cohesion.³ In the context of late-18th-century empire-building these insights draw into focus connections between the newcomers and those who had lived in the land for so long – as well as the stark disconnection implicit in colonial ‘taking’.

Kindness, mercy and the quest for colonies

Gift-giving and trading in Australian Indigenous societies were surrounded by complex rituals: in a continent populated by many groups with different territories and languages they were the means of dealing with outsiders.⁴ And yet, Indigenous peoples’ ambiguous responses to the gifts and the opportunities for trade offered by those who increasingly arrived by sea from the 1760s confirmed their status as ‘savage’ – as of course did their apparent non-cultivation of the soil.⁵ The result is well known. Reports from James Cook and naturalist Joseph Banks on the voyage to the Pacific (1768–71) that mapped the east coast of Terra Australis for the first time concluded that its Indigenous people were few in number, had no social organisation and were ‘the most uncivilised savages in the world’. Following this, the British government deemed anything approaching a treaty or purchase unnecessary – despite the fact that it had acknowledged the American Indians as possessors of property rights and that it would make a treaty with the Maori in New Zealand in the 1840s.⁶

If the first colonisers could not see traditional exchange rituals, their own gift-giving played an important role in setting the course of events. Instead of providing legal entitlement they gave ‘friendship’ and ‘kindness’. Cook’s journeys were made at a time of specific imperial pressure – it seemed clear that the American colonies would be lost, the anti-slavery movement was in its first stages and the nefarious activities of the East India Company, particularly its role in the 1770 famine in West Bengal, were causing alarm.⁷ It was a context in which writers reinvigorated the literature of ‘good empire’, abhorring the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples as no less than slavery. Indeed, Cook himself was celebrated more than any other 18th-century explorer for combining scientific disinterest and Christian ‘humanity’: ‘what power inspiring his dauntless breast’, asked the radical Whig poet Anna Seward, ‘It was BENEVOLENCE’.⁸ The preference for beneficent colonisation extended to official writing. The King’s 1768 ‘secret instructions’ to Cook betray imperial design but emphasised Indigenous consent: he was to ‘take possession’ of the country but it must be done ‘with the consent of the natives’ and he was to ‘endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them’.⁹ The instructions given to the first governor, Arthur Phillip, were in the same vein. He was told to live in ‘amity and kindness’ with the natives, ‘to conciliate their affections’ and ‘open an intercourse with them’. Historian Kate Fullagar points to the ‘crack’ that Phillip’s instructions reveal in the government’s confidence in ‘res nullius’ – why seek conciliation or intercourse with people who have no social organisation?¹⁰ It is a revealing contradiction – that ‘kindness’ was assumed sufficient to smooth it over points to the high self-regard and dismissiveness on which colonisation rested.

‘Kindness’, then, acted as a passport to unhampered occupation for the officers of the garrison, and the first few years of occupation are replete with misfired attempts to bestow it. The Eora seemed uninterested. After 18 months, Phillip was so strained and so determined to demonstrate his beneficence that when tensions arose over food supplies and women he kidnapped three Eora men to clear the air and explain how beneficial British justice would prove. As events unfolded over the first two years the officers looked for opportunities to show goodwill. The cataclysm of smallpox, which probably killed between 50 and 80 per cent of the local people, was a chance to demonstrate solicitude; victims were brought into the Camp where they were tended by the surgeons – and by the kidnapped Arabanoo until he died from the disease.¹¹ Smallpox also offered a chance to rescue ‘orphaned’ children who would act as go-betweens, conveying the benefits of the newcomers’ society: chaplain Richard Johnson and his wife Mary ‘adopted’ Boorong, a 14-year-old girl, treating her with gingerly care, urging rather than forcing her to stay with them. Unlike Elizabeth Hayward, the Johnson’s convict servant girl who received 30 lashes for insolence, Boorong was spared such punishment even though at times she was ‘very angry and cannot bear to be thwarted’.¹²

The Eora avoided Phillip’s attempts to befriend them until it was clear the intruders were not going away. After that they came into the town on their own terms. They challenged Phillip’s honour, leading him to action that was morally ambiguous in the eyes of some of his officers, and perhaps his own. After the death of his huntsman in December 1790 he ordered any ten heads to be brought in to the camp to terrorise the natives and affirm his authority to the convicts. It contravened the rule of law, and was greeted with public criticism by one of his officers and silence and denial by the early chroniclers.¹³ We will return to the philanthropy directed towards Aboriginal people, but it will make more sense after we have seen some of its workings in relation to the convicts.

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If Phillip’s encounters with the Eora provide a stark entry point into the instrumentalism at the heart of colonial philanthropy, the story of convict transportation reflects it in a different light. Transportation – like medieval banishment – had long been seen as a merciful substitute for execution, one that benefited the merciful by supplying labour for colonies and despatching society’s dregs. It was practised by the Portuguese, Spanish and French as well as the English, but it expanded from England during the 18th century as changes to the penal code resulted in the proliferation of crimes punishable by death. Convicts were sent to plantations in North America and, despite settlers’ periodic complaints of their polluting influence and moralists’ fears that the system was so merciful it acted as an incentive to crime, no alternatives were preferred. ‘It would be displeasing to our humanity,’ wrote philanthropist Jonas Hanway in 1750, for felons to be made to work in chains on the dockyards in ‘this meridian of liberty’. The preference for transportation persisted through the upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s, when the post-revolutionary American states refused to accept convicts and when reformers argued that the penitentiary was a more enlightened method of dealing with crime. A report of the House of Commons of 1779 found that transportation to ‘a distant colony’ would prove agreeable to ‘the dictates of Humanity and sound policy’.¹⁴

There were a number of parallels between the old system to North America and the new one to New South Wales, including uncertainties regarding deterrence and the growing resistance of the host society. Most fundamentally, both were part of a global scheme of forced labour migration that included African slaves and European indentured servants. But there was one major difference. Whereas convicts to North America