by Philip Dwyer
Third, the relationship of this kind of violence to the State and to State violence was tangled. It was a violence that did not necessarily emanate from official policy or organs of the State. Even when committed by officers of the State, it frequently possessed a personal rather than an official quality. It was a category of violence that was racial, social and imperial, but which often stood outside the sphere of the State. Indeed, it was often hidden from the State for fear of legal sanction. The point is that at this historical moment of the early nineteenth century, the State did not have a monopoly on violence that was linked to imperial rule. Nor did it necessarily have clear legal guidelines or signposts to arbitrate its actions. This was one reason why the State’s use of salutary terror as a strategy of punishing recalcitrant or troublesome natives was often—if not always—accompanied by detailed explanations and exculpations that were designed to reassure the Colonial Office and others of the necessity of such violence.
It is important to remember that colonial violence was not the same over time. Certain patterns and structures characterize the different periods of imperial rule. During the early nineteenth century state structures were frail and rickety. In this context, as Julie Evans has quite brilliantly argued, the condition of lawlessness became the law and it was precisely within this zone of legal anarchy that settler sovereignty was established. Governors and others were frequently incapable of imposing the kind of order they might have wished. Indeed, in the colonies of the southern seas, a viable network of legal institutions and policing capabilities was not fully established until the mid-century. Only then was the State in a position to claim the sole right to exercise of violence. Its subsequent failure to smother the tendencies to vigilante violence did not reflect the weakness of the State, however, but rather its appropriation of this practice from an earlier time. 7
And the final quality of this violence that I wish to highlight was its sheer brutality, reflecting what Aimé Césaire referred to as the de-civilization and brutalization of the colonizer. Again there are many gruesome tales of atrocities packed into the colonial record. But let us just note briefly the popularity of decapitation as an expression of colonial rule in this period. Tattooed Maori heads were reported sold as “objects of curiosity” in Sydney in the pre-1840 period. One early settler in Van Diemen’s Land killed an indigenous man, took the wife for a sex slave, and made her wear her ex-husband’s head around her neck. Even the Colonial Office, which was by this time accustomed to receiving reports of such events, could hardly believe their eyes when they read the account of this outrage. They were even more outraged when a few years later the Xhosa chief Hintsa was not only shot down in cold blood, his ears were cut off and his head may have been, too. Even if his head remained where it belonged, there were plenty of Xhosa skulls adorning settler homes around the Eastern Cape—and plenty in museums and other places in Victorian Britain where, of course, they were the raw material for phrenology and other “scientific” speculations. 8
The question is: how are we to historicize and understand such episodes of colonial violence? Obviously, we can see them as the dark underside of empire, as reflecting its racial orderings and ideology. But the relationship of violence to the ideologies of empire is more complicated than that and deserves a deeper analysis. Thus, I think that this violence was as much prior to and constitutive of racial ideology rather than just following from it. As we shall see in the case of Indigenous Tasmanians, violence was crucial to justifying, even proving, a racial order of essential, inborn difference. Similarly, although we can argue whether colonial violence was exterminationist, even genocidal, it is still necessary to explain how the social dynamic of genocide was generated. 9
This leads me to the analytical frame I will foreground here. It revolves around two questions. First, what were the interiorities of this form of colonial violence ? What were the settler perceptions of the violence they perpetrated against indigenous peoples? How may we understand its behavioral and psychological dynamic? And secondly, to shift to a broader time frame, what do these subjectivities tell us about the problem of liberalism and empire ? How was its presence reconciled with the idea that the British Empire was a liberal empire that operated on the principles of justice and freedom? How was the violence explained in the wider narratives about empire? This is particularly pertinent since violence is a constant theme of empire and the particular violence that I highlight here occurred at what one might call the humanitarian moment of the early nineteenth century when a discourse of humanitarianism shaped and framed colonial policy. How this violence was contained, explained and normalized in value systems both at an individual level and more broadly in the culture might then have lessons for the question of how liberal societies explain the violence of imperial expansion. Indeed, as I shall suggest, I think the way colonial violence was handled in this period had an enduring impact on imperial culture in the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 10
Anxiety and Fear
Understanding the interiorities of this colonial violence has to begin with its personal character . Indeed, violence frequently flowed out of such personal intimacies, particularly because colonial intimacies in this period were often disordered and unordered. The most obvious example of this was the sexual exploitation of native women. When settlers were killed by Aborigines, it was almost always because there was a personal attachment or grievance, and frequently this was sexual. Settlers paid no attention to the indigenous ties of attachment and felt free to use violence to secure their sexual partners. Thus Truganini , the celebrated indigenous woman who became one of George Robinson’s guides on his “Friendly Missions” to bring the Tasmanian Aborigines into captivity, was first introduced to Western civilization when she was kidnapped by sealers. Her Tasmanian “husband” desperately swam out to the boat that was carrying her, managed to grab the gunwale only to have his grip released by an ax cutting through his fingers. On the same occasion, her mother and uncle were also murdered. 11
Obviously this incident (like the question of sexual exploitation more widely) reflected the arbitrary violence that the settler could exercise over the native. But did this describe the settlers’ subjective assessment of their power? Hannah Arendt’s meditation On Violence reminds us that “violence appears when power is in jeopardy”. And the twentieth-century literature on the psychology of massacre and genocides has demonstrated how a subjective sense of vulnerability and weakness on the part of the perpetrators is essential for such violence to occur. I want to suggest that there was a close association in early settler society between fear and violence. Fear might seem a counter-intuitive quality to explain colonial violence, which is typically taken to reflect the assumption of imperial arrogance. But there is considerable evidence of a fearful vulnerability pervading early colonial society. Indeed, one might say that settler consciousness was riven with fear. The sociology of settler fear was, however, split and bifurcated. At a global level settler power was infinite because in the final analysis it could call upon the boundless resources of the imperial State. But ironically Indigenous peoples almost certainly had a greater awareness of this than the settlers. For at the local level, settler power felt much more qualified and ambiguous. Early pastoralists in Australia were sometimes unable to keep employees because of their fear of indigenous attack. And this clearly reflected a deeply rooted aspect of early settler life. Henry Reynolds has remarked how Australians lived in fear of Aborigines well into the twentieth century, even in towns. 12
Those who were in intimate contact with both sides of the frontier recognized this at the time. E.J. Eyre , for example, writing of his experiences as an explorer in South Australia, reported how “cowardly most of the men are in reference to the blacks. With the exception of Baxter and one other man, I could not depend upon one of them, nor do I believe, now that the blacks have actually been seen, that any men of the party except those two would go ten miles away from the camp if offered £100.”.
Indeed, he recounted with some amusement how, on one occasion returning to his camp from a scouting trip, he found men in great alarm, loading carbines, who claimed they were being hunted by a mob of Aborigines . But what they were responding to was only “three poor frightened blacks running as hard as they could away from two men and nearly out of sight….the fact was now evident that the moment my men saw a black face, they ran as fast as they could in one direction and the blacks in the opposite one—each mutually afraid of the other.” And George Robinson , whose expeditions to the Tasmanian Aborigines took him all over that island, told similar stories. Memoirs from pastoralists and others confirm this; they frequently describe how being alone on the sheep run was dominated by fear about hostile blacks who could not be seen but who were still felt to be surrounding and watching. Indeed, the stillness only made things worse and as one pastoralist put it, “such occasional sounds as did occur made me start involuntarily. I felt my life was in danger and I remained very much on the alert, and in a very prepared state of mind for fighting.” 13
A long account of an incident in New South Wales that extended over several months in 1840 and 1841 suggests the tangled atmosphere of tension, vulnerability and violence that confronted many settlers as the new pastoral areas were opened up. In this case, the settler was ultimately named for indiscriminately shooting Aborigines possibly in conjunction with the mounted police. But prior to that there had been two attacks on his homestead and a series of harassments that included invading his kitchen, demanding food and jostling, which only ended when he waved some pistols at them. Anxiety and fear were trigger emotions at more celebrated violent encounters such as Risdon Cove in Tasmania in May 1804 where the first clash occurred between Aborigines , a small army unit and settlers. And at the Myall Creek massacre in New South Wales in 1838 (when seven convict shepherds tied up, shot and hacked to death 30 Aborigines) whites in the district felt as if they were “in an enemy’s country” and, even with firearms, continued to feel vulnerable and unsafe. 14
The idea that settler colonialism contained the qualities of fear and vulnerability has not been entered into the imperial historiography of empire. It is not surprising, however, that it is more commonly recognized at the local level. Thus, as Australian historians came to uncover the “culture of terror” that composed frontier society in this period, they also recognized that this mirrored an equal terror within settler mentality itself. Settlers were trigger happy because they saw themselves as exposed in an alien land and vulnerable to the superior power and knowledge of the aborigines. It was as if they existed in a veritable Hobbesian world surrounded by a natural wilderness whose dangers were reinforced by their exposure to human threats from people they could not understand. 15
Indeed, anxieties of this kind were a wider theme of empire than the settler world alone. It is interesting to reflect on George Orwell’s account of his feelings around shooting a rampaging elephant in Burma to realize that anxiety in one form or another was a common imperial experience. As Orwell told it, the episode pushed to the surface the subjective, psychological tensions of Empire and “gave me a better glimpse…of the real nature of imperialism”. The dominant emotion that came to his mind at being put in the position of having to shoot the elephant was anger. He was angry at the squalid dirty work he was expected to do for empire. But he was also angry at the Burmese who were carefully watching his every move to see how he behaved, and aroused his racist distaste for the “evil-spirited little beasts who tried [every day, he claimed] to make my job impossible”. And he would have felt the “greatest joy in the world…to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts”. 16
Anxiety and fear contained another subjective component that is also counter-intuitive to how we typically think of the hegemon of empire, and that is the way Indigenous peoples were endowed with enormous power in the settler imagination. Ironically, this was perhaps especially true of those who were the most helpless victims of the imperial juggernaut. At the height of the Black War against the Tasmanian Aborigines , it was generally accepted among the settlers that the very existence of the colony itself was threatened, even though the Aborigines were being killed at an alarming rate. Their seeming ability to effortlessly meld into the topography, suddenly re-appearing when their victims were at their most vulnerable generated a sense that they were endowed with a super-human cunning and guile. During the period when “roving parties” were engaged in tracking natives supposedly to bring them into protective custody, there were accounts of natives being spotted, tracked and disappearing only to re-appear out of nowhere and set upon individual members of the roving party who had returned to their homes. 17
The paranoid anxiety that was fed by real incidents of indigenous violence reflected the basic ignorance about indigenous societies that pervaded settler society. Most convicts and free settlers in Van Diemen’s Land , for example, never saw a Tasmanian Aborigine. Most had no direct knowledge about them, and what knowledge was available was largely anecdotal rumour (as was likely the case elsewhere). But of course this served only to increase their ominous power. To the settler on the ground, the silent and invisible world of the indigenes was mysterious, unknown and incipiently threatening. What was known about the local inhabitants was unstable. Systematized, classified, anthropological, historical and racial categories that would enable settlers to “understand” and explain (however incompletely) their indigenous neighbours had not yet emerged, or were in the process of formulation. And this created an emotional volatility in the way settlers looked at Indigenous people. Early settler literature is rent with the anxieties that this produced. So, for example, George Moore , an early settler in Western Australia in the 1830s, records the fluctuating rhythm of his feelings about the local natives. When their behaviour conforms to his expectations of how universal man would behave, the entry is benign and “humanitarian”. When the signals have switched and they do things that seem to come out of a moral no-man’s land, the entry is tense and hostile. 18
Ignorance not only spawned fear , it also spawned faulty readings of what certain actions or signs meant. This was particularly true when settlers and others encountered large or small groups of Aborigines. Many of the major eruptions of frontier violence suggest that confusion and inability to decode behaviour were actively present in the colonial minds. Thus, even when there were determined intentions not to get into armed conflict, clashes could still easily occur. One such incident occurred on the Rufus River in South Australia in 1841. In this case, a team of settlers and police had been put together under the command of Matthew Moorhouse , the humanitarian Protector of Aborigines, with the deliberate design of avoiding conflict—much to the grumbling discontent of settler voices in Adelaide. Nevertheless, a shooting match erupted precisely because whites interpreted certain moves by a group of Aborigines as threatening and were unable to understand what was being said by their parlaying group. 19
Ignorance and lack of understanding also acted on subjective perceptions of indigenes to drain empathy from those who might otherwise be sympathetically inclined towards native peoples. Such people—and the Western Australia settler George Moore would be an example—found their sympathies severely challenged by behaviour that contradicted everything that they thought they knew about human behaviour. Different notions of property ownership were a common cause of dissonance between what a settler might want to feel about the Aborigines and what he was led to believe. Such was the case of George Lloyd, an early Tasmanian settler who prided himself on his decent treatment of the local Aborigines. He was, for example, very liberal with his distribution of food. But then some of his potatoes were stolen. How was he to understand this? It led him to believe that they would rather steal, since had they asked he would have gladly given. And, of course, he assumed that for their part the aborigines knew this about him. 20
Ignorance also fostered another feature of the psychology of colonial culture at this point in time: its tendency to project onto the I
ndigenous peoples the motives, feelings and nature of the colonizers themselves. The colonial record of this period is full of such reversals in which the indigenes are endowed with exactly the behavioural traits that are being deployed against them. This is, of course, a well-known psychological mechanism that allows the mind to assign blame for an atrocity onto the victim itself. Yet in the case of early settler society, it reflected a subjectivity that easily cast the settler in the role of victim. Settlers saw themselves as surrounded by a hostile physical environment, beleaguered by predatory indigenes and in addition denied protection by missionary inspired humanitarian policies of government. Some argued that this was to blame for the violence against the Aborigines and for the secrecy with which it was surrounded. It is not surprising then, that settler consciousness on this issue tended towards projective identification in which the actual victim was the settler, not the massacred Aborigine. I think we can see this process operating in big and small ways in this period. The narrative that was developed in 1856–1857 by the colonial authorities in South Africa about the Xhosa cattle killing projected onto the chiefs the conspiratorial frame of mind of Sir George Grey and others who were plotting to use the supposed threat it posed to the colony to finally destroy the Xhosa polity. And the terrible atrocities at Myall Creek in NSW were justified by projecting onto the Aborigines exactly the kind of beings that were acted out by the white perpetrators. 21