Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  These attributes did not go unnoticed at the time. Some close observers of settler violence, such as the Aboriginal protectors, developed sophisticated understandings of it. There is a quite remarkable minute by James Stephen in 1841 where he comments on an episode of settler violence reported by the Governor of New South Wales. This was hardly the first time the Colonial Office had received such reports, so there is a note of pessimistic weariness that leaps out from Stephen’s comments on the dispatch. But his remarks also reveal a penetrating insight into the psychology of settler violence from someone who lived in a pre-Freudian world. Stephen noted how the essence of the problem of racial conflict flowed from the hatred “with which the white man regards the black”. And this hatred was driven by fear and,from the consciousness of having done them great wrong and from the desire to escape the pain of self-reproach by laying the blame on the injured party. For these and such like reasons the black man is the subject of aversion so that in the most atrocious case imaginable a Jury acquitted the white criminals and the great body of the colonists took part with them. I know not what can be done or wisely attempted for the protection of these miserable people. 22

  Stephen is here articulating how projective identification allowed denial of responsibility for acts that were contrary to the normative values of society. But this was a psychological reflex that operated extensively in empire. Thus, narratives were invented about the threats posed by the native people to the security and safety of settlers, which served to justify violence as a defensive, pre-emptive strategy. But these narratives were based as much upon rumour as upon fact—although they typically always had a factual element to them—and they actually reflected the violence that colonialists were willing to perpetrate upon the indigenous peoples rather than the reverse. As Michael Taussig has put it, a kind of colonial mirror-effect was instigated “which reflects back onto the colonists the barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savage or evil figures they wish to colonize”. 23

  This was not the only psychological impulse that we can identify as underlying colonial violence, although it may very well have been the most important. There was also what is known as blindsight where one side of the brain does not admit to what another side of the brain knows very well has happened or is true. It seems probable that something like this must have been in operation amongst “humanitarians” who were implicated in the very atrocities of empire that they condemned. Let us take the case of George Robinson the famous “protector” of the Tasmanian Aborigines whom he sought to rescue from the violent attentions of the settlers in the early 1830s. After three arduous treks into the interior, Robinson persuaded, cajoled and coerced the remaining Tasmanians to move to the settlement at Wylabenna on Flinders Island in the Bass Straits. There he watched them begin to die off, one after the other, primarily from lung infections. Yet at no point during this process did he reflect on his responsibility for their plight; he continued to hold fast to the belief that he had rescued and saved them from a fate worse than death. Blindsight is one psychological mechanism that allows those who are implicated in atrocities to continue to live without overpowering shame or guilt. Such techniques were essentially strategies of individual coping that deserve more attention than they have so far received from historians concerned to understand the imbrication of humanitarian mentalities and colonial governance. 24

  But what about the mechanisms that were used in the wider culture and society to explain colonial violence within the context of liberal values and prevent its presence from destabilizing the idea of liberal empire? This is a particularly relevant question to ask of the early nineteenth century, since it was the one moment when the claims of empire to be a liberal and liberating force reflected a genuine ideological position. It was the moment when the dominant (though, of course, not the only) discourse on empire stressed the potential reconciliation between the competing tensions and claims of Indigenous peoples and settlers. We can loosely call this a “humanitarian” policy since self-conscious humanitarians propagated it. Our hindsight that this promise was doomed to failure has led us to reduce our understanding of humanitarianism almost to caricature. Nevertheless, it deserves to be taken seriously as the animating theme of policy both in the Colonial Office and in those areas of the empire that are discussed in this chapter. It is not helpful to suggest that it was a gross hypocrisy, or that it reflected the pious obscurantism of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, or even that it was a mere strategy of governance. More interesting are the mechanisms by which colonial violence was contained and explained within the context of this ideology. What was it in the broader culture that created the moral indifference that allowed violence to thrive? 25

  Liberal Empire and Violence

  In order to understand this, the place to start is to return to the State and violence. Obviously, the imperial State had a wide armoury of policies to regulate Indigenous peoples: one was what Sir John Craddock , writing from the Eastern Cape to Lord Liverpool in 1812 called “a proper degree of terror ”. By which he meant the use of salutary violence to bring native peoples into line, or intimidate them into the necessary degree of respect for the colonial presence. Whether this was the first time such a notion had been formulated as a kind of policy statement is not clear. It would hardly be the first time that disciplinary violence was used as a strategy of rule. But it does seem to be the case that such a notion became normalized as a means of policy from this point. Undoubtedly, this was partly because the idea of salutary terror was consistent with the nineteenth-century notion that severe punishment was integral to behavioural reform, that a just measure of pain was necessary for the modification of criminal conduct. 26 It is not surprising that this perspective was part of colonial governance. This was why even the most humanitarian-minded official was prepared to admit its necessity under certain circumstances. After all, it had been similar humanitarians who had been involved in prison reform in the United Kingdom.

  Certainly salutary terror was the most common justification for State violence in the period. It was how the evangelical humanitarian Sir George Arthur justified execution of two Aborigines in 1826 when the Tasmanian Black War was heating up because, as he explained, it “would induce them to a more conciliatory line of conduct”. Sir George Grey used it as his excuse in 1846 for kidnapping and illegally shipping off several Maori chiefs to exile in the penal colony of Maria Island, Tasmania . Salutary terror was a purging violence; it was intended to induce good behaviour in the future and thus allow the business of Christianizing improvement to get on. It was also a disciplinary violence that could be held over the heads of indigenes to keep them in line. This was how George Robinson used it on his ‘friendly missions’ to the Tasmanian Aborigines when he warned them that failure to accept his prescription for their survival (of removal to the islands in the Bass Straits) would mean that they would be exposed to the uncontrolled violence of the settlers. 27

  Salutary terror was the point at which State violence legitimized settler violence. It normalized coercion as a necessary part of the pacifying, civilizing process. It cleared the way for the beneficent forces within the imperial mission. This is certainly how people like Arthur and Sir George Grey squared it with their consciences. There is an interesting little vignette in the memoirs of an Australian pastoralist writing of the 1840s where he tells the story of a disciplinary expedition against a sheep stealing tribe which resulted in several deaths and the capture of one man whom he allowed to think was to be hanged, even though it would not have been judicially proper. But the scare had its reformative effect: “ever after he and I were the best of friends, as he ascribed his release entirely to me. And his tribe also reformed regarding sheep stealing, having been intimidated by the little police exhibition!!” Thus, when the history of these years came to be invented in the later nineteenth century, the bracing effects of salutary terror on the unruly natives was recorded as a beneficent gift from a stern but caring settler community a
nd imperial regime. 28

  And this brings me to the second consideration of how violence and the norms of liberal society were reconciled: the enduring theme of silence . We know that history is full of silences and that silence is not simply a matter of emotion. It is also true that silence is not the same as forgetting. Colonial violence, for example, is not so much forgotten by its perpetrators as shrouded in a blanket of cultural denial. Thus, Dutch colonial violence in Indonesia was known and even part of public awareness at the time. But it was not admitted as part of what the Dutch Empire was all about. And the same is surely true of violence in the British Empire, where its absence from the historiography represents the separation of its presence from the main story of what the British Empire was. 29

  Silence, then, is an historical construct, and as such there are different regimes and protocols that govern its operation over time. Thus, one of the signal features of settler violence in the early nineteenth century was that it was openly admitted and talked about in the public sphere. The playwright, William Moncrieff , for example, staged a London play in 1831 about the violence against the Tasmanian Aborigines . Colonial officials and commentators were fully aware of the extent of casual settler violence. They viewed it with horror and concern because of the challenge it posed to the possibility of a humanitarian policy for empire. But if the violence of race relations on the frontier was admitted in the public discourse, in the private discourse of the frontier the practice of silence was already deeply implanted in settler culture. This silence was enough to stymie the imperial State when it did rouse itself to try and fulfil its often declared principles of extending to the Aborigines the protection deserved by all subjects of Her Majesty. So, an official policy of avoiding violence coexisted with the settler practice of arbitrary savagery. Thus, an overlander party in the spring of 1841 from New South Wales to Adelaide led by Alexander Buchanan was involved in the quite unnecessary killing of several Aborigines—after seemingly rejecting their peaceful overtures—including a well-known local chief. A few days later the party met up with Governor George Gawler and the explorer Charles Sturt, who were engaged on a mission of conciliation to the Aborigines. They asked if the overlanders had experienced any trouble with Aborigines: “we told them they had been pretty quiet except at the Darling they had annoyed us a little. Did not say we had shot any.” 30

  From studies of atrocities in the twentieth century we know well enough the phenomenon of group silence enforced by the power of collective pressure. The conditions of the frontier at this moment in time fostered a sense of informal group solidarity, which also served to protect perpetrators and to enforce silence. Memorialists admitted this to their private diaries. Thus, Henry Meyrick , writing of Victoria in the 1840s, noted how blacks were hunted down, men women and children “shot whenever they can be met with. I have protested against it at every station I have been in…in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging.” But he admitted to a growing moral indifference himself. There was a time he recorded when “my blood would run cold at the mention of these things, but now I am become so familiarized with scenes of horror from having murder made a topic of everyday conversation…If I could remedy these things, I would speak loudly though it cost me all I am worth…but as I cannot I will keep aloof and know nothing and say nothing.’ 31

  Silence and various forms of denial serve to shield moral indifference. But they were not the best protections for an empire whose ideology continued to project itself as carrying progress and development in its train. And for this, it was necessary to develop narratives that allowed the violence to be contained and explained within the discourse structures of liberal society. Such narratives involve the construction of a story that will fit the known facts, but serves to displace responsibility away from the belief system that is being challenged, in this case, the civilizing nature of the imperial process itself. An example of how this worked is provided by the development of a believable narrative to explain the racial violence against the Tasmanian Aborigines . 32

  Towards the end of the Black War against the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1830, Lt. Governor Sir George Arthur set up a committee to develop both an account of the previous six years or so of violence and to make policy recommendations. The committee was composed of liberal minded members of Hobart’s elite, chaired by the local leading cleric. The committee looked back over the previous 30 years and developed a narrative that gave full recognition to the violence of the settler community. It reported cases of women being thrown onto fires and natives being hunted like game on horseback. But it consigned such violence to the lawless past of the early settlement when free settlers had not yet displaced the convict element in the colony. “It would indeed appear that there prevailed at this period too general a forgetfulness of those rights of ordinary compassion, to which as human beings, and as original occupants of the soil, these defenceless and ignorant people were justly entitled. They were sacrificed in many instances to momentary caprice or anger.” Indeed, there was to hand an identifiable under-class of convicts and sealers who lived in the islands of the Bass Straits whom the committee could blame for the violent history of white-Aborigine relations. This version of events, however, conveniently ignored the fact that most of the violence had taken place following the arrival of large numbers of free settlers in the 1820s. 33

  And even whilst it was exposing the atrocities of the convicts and the settlers, the committee offered an historical narrative that centred evidence of the treacherous and untrustworthy nature of the Aborigines themselves. Thus, “insulated or unprotected individuals have never been perfectly secure”; they were always subject to the volatility of indigenous behaviour, which could switch from friendly to hostile without a moment’s notice. The treacherous character of the natives was accepted. Even with the most friendly interactions, there remained in the character of the natives “beyond all doubt…a lurking spirit of cruelty and mischievous craft” which led to the murder of stockkeepers whom they fell in with, in out of the way places, and who had given them no provocation. And even though the government had consistently insisted on the need to treat the Aborigines with humanity and kindness, such efforts went ill-rewarded by the Aborigines who “have lost the sense of superiority of the white man, and the dread of the effect of firearms which they formerly entertained and have of late conducted their plans of aggression with such resolution as they were not heretofore thought to possess and with a caution and artifice which renders it almost impossible to foresee or defeat their purpose.” It was at this point that martial law became necessary, and at this point also that a policy of hunting down the Aborigines by roving parties of settlers was justified. By the same token this also vindicated the “conciliatory” policy of indigenous people’s removal to islands in the Bass Sea where disease and infection rapidly shrank their numbers to a mere handful. So in the end the committee could conclude that violence came not from discrete and clear individual wrongs that were done to them by the particular individuals involved, but “from a wanton and savage spirit inherent in them and impelling them to mischief and cruelty”. Although this was a narrative that contradicted everything that such humanitarians knew and were prepared to admit, this was the narrative that was absorbed into British culture. It was the default position whenever the uncomfortable issue of the Tasmanian Aborigines was raised.

  What we see here is a very common feature in the way self-consciously “civilized” societies handle actions by their members that transgress the self-proclaimed values of that society. Blame for the situation is transferred away from the perpetrator to the prey itself. In this case the convenient presence of sealers and convicts served to carry the weight of imperial responsibilities. But ultimately it was the Tasmanians themselves who were to blame. It was the cunningly treacherous nature of the indigenous character that forced the imperial power—much against its humanitarian will—to implement policies that allowed for preci
sely the same kind of personal violence that had been identified as the original cause of racial suspicion and hostility in the first place. In a wider frame, such a narrative served as a model for the way violence could be explained as an unavoidable by-product of the colonial encounter. This was not, however, the place where humanitarians started. Their initial assumption as they confronted the colonial encounter was that violence was a product of discrete conditions that could and should be removed. Such narratives showed them that this was not necessarily the case and, therefore, allowed their consciences to be reconciled to the proximity of barbarity.

  Having made this reasoned case, the committee then slipped easily into the rhetoric of settler fear and panic. It pronounced that the “total ruin of every Establishment is but too certainly to be apprehended unless immediate measures can be devised for suppressing the system of aggression under which so many are suffering”. All other measures of forbearance led by a conciliatory government have failed and now decisive measures of military repression were regrettably necessary. It may have been true that the natives were first led to this path of action by the outrages committed on them, which were “a disgrace to our name and nation and even to human nature”. But now the natives are visiting a revenge, not on the perpetrators, but on the innocent, even women and children. 34

  The narrative that was developed here was a narrative of displacement . It was also a narrative that served the purpose of de-humanizing the Aborigines so that violence against them could be more easily reconciled with normative moral values. 35 The psychology of colonial violence was full of such strategies. Another favourite trope was the way indigenous violence showed no discrimination between innocent and guilty. Eighteen months after the Aborigines Committee made its report, news arrived of the murder of two settlers, Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker, who were known for their liberal humanitarian views of indigenous people with a record of treating them well. These men had been murdered, it seemed, because they trusted too much and were lured into a deliberate trap. One of these settlers was the brother of the Chairman of the Aborigines Committee itself. The predictable result was a fevered outcry in the organs of settler opinion. These murders were like petrol thrown onto the fire of settler fear and vulnerability. They were the final element in the construction of this narrative. If such men could be murdered, it was clear that the Aborigines were too far-gone in savagery to allow any other policy but that of repression, which now became an accepted wisdom throughout the settler society. 36