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Re‐reading Edward Eyre Race, resistance andrepression in Australia and The CaribbeanJulie Evans aa University of MelbournePublished online: 29 Sep 2008.

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Re-reading Edward Eyre

Race, Resistance and Repression in Australiaand the Caribbean

JULIE EVANS

The subject of this article is mid-nineteenth-century explorer and colonial officialEdward Eyre. In supplementing existing biographical accounts, it investigates theinterplay between Eyre the individual and the different colonial formations that

framed his administrations at the beginning and the end of his career. In so doing,the paper brings to bear on discussions of Eyre's Australian and Caribbean writings

certain comparative perspectives arising from his interventions in very differentparts of the British Empire. The analysis suggests that with due attention to local

circumstances, understandings of colonial governmentality can be extended byviewing colonial histories within comparative frameworks.

In highlighting the contingency of race, and grounding its different discursiveformulations in distinctive colonial contexts, this also contributes to that body of work

that retrieves the historical correlation between race, resistance and repression.Accordingly, in the settler colony of Australia, Eyre's understandings of Aboriginal

peoples came to be characterised by a preoccupation with establishing theirauthenticity, a discursive construction that authorised the containment of Aboriginalpeople together with their rival claims to the land that he had once proclaimed. In the

former slave colony of Jamaica, the massive outnumbering of Europeans, and theurgency of their need to control a newly freed population, precipitated Eyre's concern toallege the immutability of freedpeoples' inferiority, thereby denying comprehensively

their participation as equal citizens post emancipation.

THE MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY explorer and colonial official Edward Eyre hasbeen known variously as the enlightened defender of Aborigines and as thenotorious 'butcher of Jamaica'. How satisfactorily does the historiography explainthe apparent paradox that characterises his life? With their parochial focus,nationally bound accounts of mid-nineteenth-century Australian, New Zealand,British or Caribbean history rarely address Eyre's long and varied colonialexperience. Consequently, such texts draw portraits of Eyre so radically opposedthat they could represent two different people.

The portrait that appears within Australian historiography presents Eyreas a humane and brave, if somewhat foolhardy explorer, most famous for hisextraordinarily difficult journey across the Nullarbor from Adelaide to KingGeorge's Sound, near Albany in Western Australia, in 1840-41.1 He is notedfor his vehement criticisms of the impact of settlement on Aborigines, particularly

1 See among others: A.F. Calvert, The Exploration of Australia (London: George Philip & Son, 1895);Malcolm Uren and Robert Stephens, Waterless Horizons (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens,1945); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Australian Explorers: A Selection from their Writings (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1958), 171-209; Ross Gibson, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Percep-tions of Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1984); Edward Stokes, The Desert Coast: Edward Eyre's

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176 Australian Historical Studies, 118,2002

condemning settler violence towards them. Eyre emerges within Caribbeanhistoriography, however, as a brutally authoritarian and racist governor whopresided over the prolonged retribution precipitated by his declaration of martiallaw following what became known as the Morant Bay rebellion by freedpeoplein 1865.2 Eyre's repression had been extensive and brutal, resulting in 439deaths, over 600 men and women flogged and more than 1,000 homes burnt.Those historians of mid-nineteenth-century Britain who refer to Eyre generallyignore his Australian experiences, focusing on his notorious role in Morant Bayand the broader meanings of the protracted public debates and legal actions thattook place in Britain following his declaration of martial law in Jamaica. Eyre hadbeen recalled following a Royal Commission into the rebellion and its suppres-sion and faced a community divided over the morality of his actions. Under theleadership of prominent intellectuals, the controversy was played out betweenthe Jamaica Committee, which, under the guidance of John Stuart Mill,attempted unsuccessfully to prosecute Eyre for murder, and the Eyre DefenceCommittee, whose most notable supporter was Thomas Carlyle. The courtsdecided on three separate occasions that Eyre had no charges to answer.Although not formally indicted by the British government. Eyre's career was atan end. He retired to the country where he died in 1901.

The apparent contrast in Eyre's responses to the subject populations ofAustralia in the 1840s and Jamaica in the 1860s has encouraged some scholars,though, to look at Eyre's career in its entirety. This work includes GeoffreyDutton's accounts of Eyre as an individual whose actions need to be judgedagainst his overwhelming sense of duty.3 More recently, Catherine Hall has

----Expedition 1840-41 (Melbourne: Five Mile Press, 1993). See also Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay:An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), chapter 3 and passim, for his view ofexplorers' journals as constituting spatial history rather than as simple self-seeking narratives.

2 The term 'freedpeople' will be used throughout to describe those who had been slaves and hadbeen freed either by emancipation in 1833 or by manumission earlier, and their descendants.Debate continues about whether events at Morant Bay constituted a local uprising or a broaderrebellion. See among others: Hamilton Hume, The Life of Edward John Eyre, Late Governor of Jamaica(London: Richard Bentley, 1867); Sydney Olivier, The Myth of Governor Eyre (London: Leonard andVirginia Woolf, 1933); William Mathieson, The Sugar Colonies and Governor Eyre, 1849-1866(London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd., 1936); D. Hall, Free Jamaica, 1836-65: An Economic History(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy(London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1962); B.A. Knox, 'The British Government and the GovernorEyre Controversy, 1865-1875', The Historical Journal, 19, 4, (1976): 877-900; Gad Heuman,Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792-1865 (Westport: Green-wood Press, 1981); A. Bakan, Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion (Montreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990); Catherine Hall, 'Competing Masculinities: ThomasCarlyle, John Stuart Mill and the Case of Governor Eyre', in her White, Male and Middle Class: Explo-rations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 255-95; Thomas Holt, The Problem ofFreedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1992), 263-309; Gad Heuman, 'The Killing Time': The Morant Bay Rebellion inJamaica (London: Macmillan, 1994).

3 See Geoffrey Dutton, Edward John Eyre: The Hero as Murderer (Melbourne: Penguin, 1977), firstpublished as The Hero as Murderer: The Life of Edward John Eyre, Australian Explorer and Governorof Jamaica, 1815-1901 (Sydney: Collins, 1967) and In Search of Edward John Eyre (Melbourne:Macmillan, 1982). See also Hume; Olivier; Mathieson; and Semmel.

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regarded Eyre's varying discursive practices as exemplifying the gradual harden-ing of attitudes to race in the metropole and their intersection with issues of classand gender in the multifaceted battle over English identity in the mid nineteenthcentury.4 In this corpus of work on English identity. Hall discusses Eyre's earlierexperiences in colonies other than Jamaica, arguing for the need to recognise theimportance of 'place' in the articulation of individual identities throughoutempire, observing, too, that Eyre's solution to the 'Aboriginal problem' must beunderstood as firmly contained within contemporary humanitarian philan-thropic discourses of the 1830s and 1840s.5

Despite the scope of their varying concerns, scholars have tended either tovindicate or to demonise Eyre, replicating the ideological divide that charac-terised the nineteenth-century debate over Eyre's actions in Jamaica. Certainly,at the time, it was Eyre the individual who became the primary focus of thereport of the Royal Commission, who was recalled to London, denied anothercolonial appointment and subjected to three years of attempted civil prose-cutions for murder. In other words, both the contemporary responses to Eyre'sadministration in Jamaica and the subsequent historiography have tended tounderstand Eyre's use of state force in the suppression of the Morant Bayrebellion in terms of the extraordinary actions of a specific individual.

But there is another approach to understanding Eyre's apparently para-doxical attitudes in Australia and Jamaica. In far-flung colonies, the individualadministrator could undeniably act with considerable autonomy.6 The way Eyreread particular colonial encounters, however, reflected not only his personalpropensities but also laid bare some of the central issues at stake in colonialgovernment. Approached in this light, analysis of Eyre's colonial career can movebeyond a biographical focus to inform understandings of the broader operationsof colonial rule in different parts of the British Empire in the mid nineteenthcentury.

In adopting this approach, I argue, firstly, that a more detailed reading ofEyre's Australian writings suggests the need to reassess Eyre's reputation as astaunch defender of Aborigines and of their rights to resist invasion of theirsovereign lands. For by the time he left South Australia, Eyre had suppressed theradical implications of the critique that had clearly challenged the basis of rela-tions between settlers and Aborigines. In the same publication that recorded thispowerful articulation of an Aboriginal standpoint, and framed within a veryspecific discourse of race, Eyre advocated the confinement of Aboriginal people

4 See Catherine Hall, 'Competing Masculinities'; 'Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia andthe West Indies, 1833-66', in The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, ed. BillSchwarz (London: Routledge, 1996), 130-70; and her 'Histories, Empires and the Post-ColonialMoment', in The Post-Colonial Question, eds Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge,1996), 65-77. See also Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians: English Attitudes to theNegro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978).

5 C. Hall, 'Histories', 72-4 and 'Imperial Man', 144.6 See George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 81-7 and John

Benyon, 'Overlords of Empire? British "Proconsular Imperialism" in Comparative Perspective',Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. xix, no. 2 (May 1991): 164-202.

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178 Australian Historical Studies, 118,2002

on reserves, the separation of children from their parents and the restriction ofsovereignty to 'pre-colonial' elders who would take with them when they diedtheir rival claims to the land. From this perspective, it emerges that Eyre'sconcern to uphold colonial interests in the face of resistance, including, at times,with the use of state coercion, was clearly apparent in Australia and should notbe located uniquely within his Caribbean administrations.

Secondly, in analysing Eyre's attitudes and actions across the broader scopeof his colonial appointments, I question the extent to which it is instructive tofocus on him as an individual subject whose humanitarian credentials wereunquestioned in Australia but whose 'racist and bourgeois convictions'7

were undeniably evident in Jamaica. Privileging this subject-centred view offersan insufficient explanation for Eyre's varying responses to colonised populationsin both colonial contexts, not only diverting attention from analysing thedynamic interplay between resistance and repression in colonial communities,but inhibiting, too, important understandings of the historical and geographicalspecificity of discourses of race. Simply condemning Eyre's actions in Jamaica asthose of a reprehensible and racist individual, for example, can unwittinglycontribute to divorcing the ideology of race from its material foundations, asthough it exists independently of the specific relations of power in which it arisesand that colonial administrations were designed to uphold.8

In drawing on such ideas I engage with Eyre's individual subjectivity as it wasimbricated in the power relations of different colonial formations at specifichistorical moments.9 By tracing the correlation between race, resistance andrepression in Eyre's Australian and Caribbean administrations, it is possible to seeEyre not only as an idiosyncratic individual who exercised a particularly rigidform of colonial authority at the very end of his career, but as an individualwhose personal perceptions and interventions tended to expose rather thanobscure the coercive nature of colonial rule. With due attention to local circum-stances, understandings of colonial governmentality, including 'how techniquesof coercion existed as preserved possibilities,'10 can be further enriched byviewing colonial histories within comparative frameworks.

7 Holt, 271.8 For elaboration of the operation of race as ideology see, among others, Kenan Malik, The Meaning

of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (London: Macmillan, 1996), 1-8 and passim; B.J. Fields, 'Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States', New Left Review, no. 181 (1990):95-118, and C. Guillaumin, 'Race and Nature: The System of Marks: The Idea of a Natural Groupand Social Relationships', Feminist Issues, 8, no. 2 (1988): 25-43. '

9 David T. Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America, (New York: Routledge, 1997), 23,advocates understanding racism as reflecting relations of power rather than as individual expres-sions of hatred--'By contrast, understanding racisms as relations of power leads us to acknowl-edge their diffusion throughout our culture and the history of their production. It underlies suchexpressions not as the idiosyncratic excesses of pathological individuals, groups, or societies, butas the (much more disturbing) normal manifestation of modern rationality'. See also Ann LauraStoler, '"In Cold Blood": Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives', Repre-sentations, (Winter, 1992): 151-89. Stoler, 154, engages with the question of how 'individualpsyches . . . interact with collective strategies of domination on the ground'.

10 Ann Laura Stoler, and Frederick Cooper, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a BourgeoisWorld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 31.

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Part One: The Australian colonies

In the early 1830s, plans for the 'systematic' settlement of South Australiaredressed what many had seen as the harsh and haphazard colonising ways of thepast. With the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, South Australiawas to be settled according to new, notionally humane guidelines that wereintended to attract investment capital, provide for the interests of free settlers andensure that indigenous peoples' lands and laws would be respected.

The Foundation Act established South Australia as a province in 1834 andthe new colony soon became the focus of humanitarian hopes in both Australiaand Britain for a more benign form of settler-colonisation. A colony born of freesettlers presented the opportunity to break with the past, particularly with thebitter and openly regretted experiences of the penal settlement of Van Diemen'sLand, where those native peoples who had survived years of brutal incursionsonto their lands had recently been exiled to Flinders Island. Lieutenant-GovernorGeorge Arthur of Van Diemen's Land implored that the lessons of the past be.learned in the new colony and that negotiations with local Aborigines shouldtake place before the settlers were allowed to arrive."

In the light of this growing concern for the rights of native peoples, theColonisation Commissioners who were responsible for the privately-fundedsettlement of South Australia were required to assure Secretary of State CharlesLord Glenelg that these fundamental principles would be observed in the newsettlement.12 Indeed, Glenelg had delayed the departure of the colonists for somemonths in an attempt to ensure that the interests of Aborigines would beprotected. The Letters Patent included Aboriginal rights to the occupation andenjoyment of their lands and recommended the appointment of a Protector ofAborigines.13 On Governor Hindmarsh's arrival in South Australia in December1836, half of his Proclamation concerned Aborigines and the need for theirprotection.14

But the high hopes that various colonial officials and humanitarians held forthe venture had already been dealt a fatal blow. The Foundation Act of 1834 hadmade no mention of Aborigines or of their rights—all land in South Australiahad been declared 'waste and unoccupied'. Despite the subsequent appoint-ment of Protectors to oversee land transactions and intermittent statementsabout the need to provide for Aboriginal interests, the 1834 Act had made explicit

11 See Van Diemen's land: Copies of all Correspondence between Lieutenant Governor Arthur and HisMajesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies, On the Subject of the Military Operations Lately Carried OnAgainst the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land, intro. A.G.L. Shaw (Hobart: TasmanianHistorical Research Association, 1971).

12 Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Melbourne: Penguin, 1992), 99-101, 105-6. See alsoKathleen Hassell, 'The Relations between the Settlers and Aborigines in South Australia,1836-60' (MA thesis, University of Adelaide, 1921), 6.

13 Graham Jenkin, The Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri (Adelaide: Rigby, 1979), 35.14 Reynolds, The Law of the Land, 110; Hassell, 8-9.

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the primary structural framework within which colonisation would proceedin South Australia.15 As in the other Australian colonies, settler demands forexclusive possession of the land would prevail over any other concerns.

Edward Eyre was one of those most noted for his emphatic criticisms of theways in which indigenous peoples had been treated in South Australia, publiclyproclaiming their prior ownership of the land and condemning overt discrep-ancies between the rights of settlers and Aborigines. Eyre had arrived in Adelaidein the late 1830s, when hopes for the success of the colony were still high. Theson of a Yorkshire vicar, he had travelled to Australia in 1833, at the age of seven-teen, keen to establish the independence and freedom that his lack of inheritedwealth and title had denied him in England.16 Having rejected a career in thearmy. Eyre set about making his own way in the colonies, 'alone andunfriended'17 but determined to return to England having earned the respect ofmen of position.18

Eyre spent the first few years following his arrival in Sydney developing thepastoral property he had purchased on the Molonglo plains, near what is nowCanberra, in New South Wales. He gained early experience as an explorer whensearching for new stock routes to the more distant markets. After demonstratingthat sheep and cattle could be successfully overlanded from New South Wales toSouth Australia by following the river-courses, Eyre began to establish himself inAdelaide, building a small house and acquiring land in the new settlement andalong the Murray River.19 In June 1840 Governor Gawler appointed Eyre to leadan expedition in search of fertile pasturelands to the north of Adelaide. Havingfound the Flinders Ranges surrounded by seemingly impenetrable salt lakes, byearly 1841 Eyre had decided to lead a reduced party to the west. Rather thanreturn unsuccessful, he intended to explore the feasibility of an earlier proposalto establish a stock route between Adelaide and the remote Swan River settle-ment, at present day Perth.

The rapid development of pastoralism had prompted such 'expeditions of dis-covery' all over the Australian continent. Unlike many of his fellow Europeans,however. Eyre was beginning to build a substantial reputation for studiouslyavoiding antagonising the native peoples through whose land he was passing.20

15 See Reynolds, The Law of the land, 123, on the deep contradictions between the Letters Patentand the Foundation Act.

16 See also C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, and 'Competing Masculinities'.17 E.J. Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative of Residence and Exploration in Australia, 1832-39, ed. Jill Water-

house (London: Caliban Books, 1984), 215, orig. ms. 1859, St Vincent.1 8 See, for example, Eyre to Miss Isabella Legard, n.d., E. J. Eyre, Letters and Photographs, 1835-98,

ML Ae 9/1a-11, Mitchell Library, Sydney.19 See Tapers of and concerning E.J. Eyre explorer, Protector of Aborigines and later Governor of

Jamaica', Series list. Prelim. D. Reg. 2/106, PRG1 177, Mortlock Library, Adelaide.2 0 Eyre promoted this reputation, recommending to others the approach he pursued when encoun-

tering Aborigines. See, for example, the extract from Eyre's report of his overlanding expeditionspublished in the South Australian Gazette in February 1839, in Narrative of Mr. John Eyre's Journeysand Discoveries in Australia, Anon. ZB748, 1832-41. Mitchell Library, Sydney. See also E. J. Eyre,'Expeditions of Discovery in South Australia', Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London,13, 1843, 161-81.

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The Nullarbor crossing, too, would only be completed after extraordinaryhardship that was alleviated considerably by the assistance of Eyre's Aboriginalcompanions Wylie, Neramberein and Cootachah together with the expert adviceof other Aboriginal people they met on the way.21 Unlike many other Australianexplorers,22 Eyre acknowledged and commented extensively upon these encoun-ters when he subsequently published the journals of his expedition. Whilegrateful for Aboriginal assistance with finding water and procuring food, he wasalso respectful of what he viewed as their right to counter unmediated excursionsonto their lands. His willingness to engage with Aboriginal people and to imaginesettlement from their perspective underscored his powerful critique of the coloni-sation process in South Australia that is apparent throughout his 1845 publica-tion, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland fromAdelaide to King George's Sound, in the years 1840-1.2i

Eyre placed his most noted defence of Aboriginal retaliation in the context ofan allegedly unprovoked murder of a settler's child by local Aborigines.24 Eyreheard about the incident while he was at Port Lincoln awaiting the arrival offresh supplies to enable him to resume his journey to the west. Given the settleroutrage that usually greeted such events,25 Eyre took the opportunity to reflecton the overall impact of settlement on Aboriginal people, intending to explainwhy Aborigines might regard their interests as antagonistic to those of thesettlers. Misunderstandings were inevitable, he claimed, where small groups ofsettlers moved into distant parts of the country where 'they are in some measurebeyond the protection of the laws, [and] are also free from their restraints'.26

Consequently, Aborigines may well have viewed individual acts of aggression andreprisal as acts of war between nations.27

2 1 Eyre engaged several Aboriginal 'boys' during his journeys including Wylie, Cootachah, Neram-berein, Joshuing, Unmallie, Kour and Warrulan. Eyre took Kour and Warrulan back to Englandwith him at the end of 1844 'to be educated'. Little is recorded of Eyre's relationships with these'boys', or of their attitudes or those of their families, to travelling on his expeditions or ofaccompanying him to England. See Stokes, 127, Dutton, The Hero, 38, 163-4, and E.J. Eyre, Auto-biographical Narrative, introduction by Jill Waterhouse, xxv. Aboriginal people played a funda-mental but often unacknowledged role in many of the journeys of exploration in Australia actingas guides, interpreters and emissaries. See Henry Reynolds, With the White People: The Crucial Roleof Aborigines in the Exploration and Development of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1990).

2 2 See Paul Carter, 'Plotting: Australia's Explorer Narratives as "Spatial History"' The Yale Journal ofCriticism: Interpretation in the Humanities, 3, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 91-107, 93.

2 3 E.J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to KingGeorge's Sound, in the years 1840-1; Sent by the Colonists of South Australia, with the Sanction andSupport of the Government: Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines andthe State of their Relations with Europeans (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1964,facsimile edition, orig. London: T. and W. Boone, 2 vols, 1845). Hereafter Journals.

2 4 According to Eyre, the twelve-year old son of a Mr Hawson was left alone at a station and wasspeared by Aborigines on 5 October 1840, and subsequently died. His family denied that theboy's brother had fired on the Aborigines some time before the attack. See Eyre, Journals, vol. i,163-4.

2 5 Eyre met few Aborigines in the wake of the Hawson boy's death and attributed this to 'the . . .scouring of the country by police, [which] had driven them away from the occupied parts, andforced them to the fastnesses of the hills, or to the scrubs', Eyre, Journals, vol. i, 181.

2 6 Ibid., 169, 170-5.2 7 Ibid., 173. Retribution may be taken on any individual--'he does not look upon it as an offence

of an individual, but as an act of war on the part of the nation'.

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Eyre was primarily concerned to extend European understandings of provo-cation beyond any immediate or easily recognisable transgression, stating thatAborigines had seldom been guilty of unprovoked violence. Such violence hadhad 'some strongly exciting cause', or was committed 'under the influence offeelings that would have weighed in the same degree with Europeans in similarcircumstances.'28 Eyre was careful to specify those circumstances from theAboriginal viewpoint:

First, That our being in their country at all is, so far as their ideas of right and wrong areconcerned, altogether an act of intrusion and aggression.Secondly, That for a very long time they cannot comprehend our motives for comingamongst them, or our object in remaining, and may very naturally imagine that it can onlybe for the purpose of dispossessing them.Thirdly, That our presence and settlement, in any particular locality, do, in point of fact,actually dispossess the aboriginal inhabitants.Fourthly, ... The injustice ... of the white man's intrusion upon the territory of the aborig-inal inhabitant, is aggravated greatly by his always occupying the best and most valuableportion of it.Fifthly, That as we ourselves have laws, customs, or prejudices, to which we attach consid-erable importance, and the infringement of which we consider either criminal or offensive,so have the natives theirs, equally, perhaps, dear to them, but which, from our ignoranceor heedlessness, we may be continually violating, and can we wonder that they shouldsometimes exact the penalty of infraction? do we not do the same? or is ignorance a morevalid excuse for civilized man than the savage?29

Rather than demonstrating what many Europeans regarded as inherentbrutality by retaliating. Aborigines were acting as Europeans would have doneunder similar circumstances.30 Indeed, 'what they daily do under the sanction ofthe law of nations':

a law that provides not for the safety, privileges, and protection of the Aborigines, andowners of the soil, but which merely lays down the rules for the direction of the privilegedrobber in the distribution of the booty of any newly discovered country.31

Eyre argued that Aboriginal ownership of the land justified their feelings thatthey had been invaded and dispossessed.32 Just as Europeans regardedcertain areas 'as sacred to ourselves'," land was not simply a source of food for

2 8 Ibid., 166-7.2 9 Ibid., 167-8.3 0 'With the same dispositions and tempers as ourselves, they are subject to the same impulses and

infirmities', Eyre, Journals, vol. i, 173.3 1 Ibid., 174-5.3 2 Eyre elaborated later: 'It has generally been imagined, but with great injustice, as well as incor-

rectness, that the natives have no idea of property in land, or proprietary rights connected withit. Nothing can be further from the truth than this assumption, although men of high characterand standing, and who are otherwise benevolently disposed towards the natives, have distinctlydenied this right'. Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 296.

3 3 Eyre, Journals, vol. i, 165-6.

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Aborigines, but sustained them in a much broader sense—their attachments totheir land transcended the mere provision of essential nutritional requirements.In describing the impact of settlement on Aborigines in terms that were so dear,and so disconcertingly familiar, to Europeans, Eyre's critique challenged theaccepted framework whereby assumptions of a primitive inferiority had shapedrelations in the Australian colonies:

Compelled at last, it may be by enemies without, by the want of water in the remoterdistricts, by the desire to procure certain kinds of food, which are peculiar to certain local-ities, and at particular seasons of the year, or perhaps by a wish to revisit their country andtheir homes, they return once more, cautiously and fearfully approaching what is theirown—the spot perhaps where they were born, the patrimony that has descended to themthrough many generations;—and what is the reception that is given them upon their ownlands? often they are met by repulsion, and sometimes by violence, and are compelled toretire again to strange and unsuitable localities.34

Eyre took great pains to impress on his readers the overwhelming nature ofthe loss that Aborigines had suffered with the coming of the settlers. Significantly,any attempt to confine the scope of the loss was implicitly resisted—indeed, itwas something that the settler, no matter how kind or unselfish, 'neither doesnor can replace'.35 As the expedition left from Port Lincoln to resume its pathacross the Nullarbor, Eyre's Journals continued to demonstrate his openness tonew ways of knowing as he sought Aboriginal support in finding food and waterand in negotiating the desert landscape. This 'intersubjectivity'36 fortified hiscapacity to articulate for a European audience his powerful critique of settlercolonisation, highlighting, in particular, the justice of an Aboriginal standpointantagonistic to that of the settler.,

Viewed in isolation from the broader context in which they appeared, thepassages discussed above clearly support Eyre's reputation as an enlightenedadvocate for Aborigines in Australia. A more detailed reading of Eyre's 1845publication, however, reveals that his later pronouncements clearly privilegedsettler over Aboriginal concerns. Eyre became increasingly convinced, especiallyafter he entered colonial administration and came to serve more overtly theinterests of the settlers, of the need to secure British sovereignty and authority bycontrolling Aboriginal people and restricting the number of legitimate claimantsto the land. The potentially subversive notion that Aborigines owned discrete andidentifiable sections of land that they, like Europeans, had a legitimate right todefend must be viewed, therefore, against the coercive import of Eyre's proposedsolution to 'the Aboriginal problem', a solution intended to ameliorate relations

34 Ibid., 169.35 'suppose that [the settler] treats them with kindness and consideration (and there are happily

many such settlers in Australia), what recompense can he make them for the injury he has done,by dispossessing them of their lands, by occupying their waters, and by depriving them of theirsupply of food? He neither does nor can replace the loss'. Eyre, Journals, vol. i, 171.

36 See Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Aboriginal Australian Culture(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 191.

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in Australia. These proposals were outlined in the second volume of the Journalsunder the subtitle an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and theState of their Relations with Europeans, also published in 1845.37

Governor George Grey had appointed Eyre as Resident Magistrate andProtector of Aborigines at Moorunde in South Australia soon after his returnfrom King George's Sound in 1841. Conflict between Aborigines and settlers hadmade travelling the Murray River route increasingly dangerous for prospectivesettlers. In recognition of his recent exploratory expedition and his reputation forpeaceful interactions with Aborigines, Eyre's task was to restore order to the areabetween the Murray River at Moorunde, eighty-five miles north of Adelaide, andthe Rufus River district, by 'conciliating' the various Aboriginal inhabitants andestablishing the good'intentions of the government.38 Clearly, with the prospectof 'pacification', more settlers could be persuaded to develop the area.

Moorunde was chosen as the site for the regular distribution of food andblankets to Aboriginal people, both as a reward for peaceful, compliant behaviourand as an enticement for Aborigines to congregate in one area. As ResidentMagistrate, Eyre extended the judicial operations of the colony and was involvedin the arbitration of disputes between settlers and Aborigines as well as betweenAborigines themselves. Apparently, no serious conflicts took place in the threeyears of his tenure. Eyre departed the colony in December 1844 in the hope offurthering his promising administrative career in other parts of the BritishEmpire. Writing up his journals for publication as he travelled to England, Eyreproudly recorded the success of his 'experiment' at Moorunde. He also putforward for the consideration of the British public and government, a substantialethnography of the Aborigines and a detailed plan for amelioration based on the'mutual interest' of Aborigines and settlers.

Although the Journals and Manners and Customs were published contemp-oraneously, they recall quite different aspects of Eyre's experience in SouthAustralia.3' Particular spatial and temporal circumstances underscoredEyre's desert writings and his articulation of an Aboriginal perspective had yetto be fully contained within colonial discourse. Generally remaining beyonddiscrete analysis,40 the text of Manners and Customs presents significantly different

3 7 Hereafter Manners and Customs3 8 See Governor George Grey to Secretary of State, 30 October 1841, in Reports and Letters to Governor

Grey from E.J. Eyre at Moorunde (Adelaide: Sullivan's Cove, 1985). The explorer Charles Sturt alsonoted that Eyre 'was regarded as guardian hero by the natives' in the areas Sturt visited in the1840s. Cited in Hassell, 89.

3 9 I have argued this in more detail in 'Beyond the Frontier: Possibilities and Precariousness alongAustralia's Southern Coast' in Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies,ed. Lynette Russell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 151-172. Archives inEngland and Australia do not record the whereabouts of the original field notes. A proof copy ofManners and Customs is held at PRG/10, Mortlock Library, Adelaide.

4 0 See, however, Dutton, The Hero, 102-13, 153-6. Dutton, 156, observes: 'Eyre winds up hisdiscussion [of Manners and Customs] with ten pages of suggestions for the improvement of the lotof the Aborigines, and for their education, which are as relevant today as in the 1840s. They areboth intelligent and enthusiastic, practical and visionary.' The analysis in Dutton, In Search,49-51, is somewhat more critical.

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understandings of Aboriginal peoples that reflect not only Eyre's altered statusbut the changing circumstances in the colony more generally.

The early hopes that South Australia would avoid the violence that ever-expanding settlement had engendered elsewhere had already been shattered,particularly near Encounter Bay and Port Lincoln with increasing Aboriginal andsettler deaths, retaliatory expeditions, and officially-sanctioned summary execu-tions.41 By 1845, significant dispossession of Aboriginal peoples had taken placearound Adelaide and was beginning to extend into the more distant areas. Inaddition to continuing discussions about Aboriginal rights to land, other crucialissues in relation to indigenous peoples were being debated in the colony duringthis decade. The extent to which Aboriginal people were accountable to Britishlaws, for example, was still indeterminate in colonial discourse. Britain had notclaimed sovereignty by right of conquest or cession, nor had Britain legislatedspecifically to abolish Aboriginal customary rights and interests when Britishcustomary law had been established in the Australian colonies. While these werematters for legal debate in the courts, the more mundane discrepancy betweenthe undisputed status of Aborigines as equal British subjects and the brutality towhich they were being exposed was increasingly difficult to reconcile. With thebreakdown of Aboriginal society clearly apparent, disquiet about these funda-mental principles of justice was expressed in contemporary discussions aboutthe need to compensate Aborigines for the loss of their land and to remove thedisparities between settler and Aboriginal rights as British subjects.42

Such troubling individual perceptions held the potential to undermine thesettlement as a whole, particularly insofar as they challenged settler rights tounimpeded access to the land. At certain points in colonial governance, then, itis possible to observe the discursive containment of the challenge to settlerinterests that inhered in such criticisms. As John Noyes has observed in relationto German South-West Africa, colonising discourses, in effect, served to 'orderthe chaos' of personal experience.43 In the present case, reading Eyre's 1845

4 1 For accounts of violence in this area see Hassell, 125-7. See also S.D. Lendrum, "The CoorongMassacre": Martial Law and the Aborigines at First Settlement', Adelaide Law Review 6 (1977):26-43.

4 2 See J. Hookey, 'Settlement and Sovereignty' in Aborigines and the Law: Essays in Memory of Eliza-beth Eggleston, eds P. Hanks and B. Keon-Cohen (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 1-18. See alsoCD. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Melbourne: Penguin. 1972), 23; Jenkin, Conquestof the Ngarrindjeri, 34-7; Reynolds, The Law of the Land; J. Summers, 'Colonial Race Relations', inThe Flinders History of South Australia: Social History, ed. Eric Richards (Adelaide: Wakefield Press,1986), 283-311. Crucially, too, despite continuing debate over the manner in which Britishsovereignty was originally acquired, it was the accompanying discursive construction of Australiaas terra nullius that would sanction the various means by which Aboriginal people were dis-possessed. The Privy Council confirmed this in 1889, in Cooper v. Stuart, arguing that New SouthWales was a settled colony and that 'there was no land law or tenure existing in the Colony atthe time of its annexation', cited in P. Mathew, R. Hunter and R. Ingleby, 'Law and History inBlack and White' in Thinking About Law: Perspective on the, History, Philosophy and Sociology of Law,eds Rosemary Hunter, Richard Ingleby & Richard Johnstone, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995),3-40, 14.

4 3 See John Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915(Chun Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992).

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publications in their entirety demonstrates quite specifically how apparentlyenlightened understandings of Aboriginal people that subverted rather thanconduced to the functioning of the colony were discursively contained in theinterests of the broader social domain.

Eyre opened Manners and Customs by speaking of Aborigines as 'deserving ofour sympathy and benevolence', endeavouring to persuade his readers that hisproposed solution to 'the Aboriginal problem' would counter 'the impedimentsin the way of their rising in the scale of civilization'.44 Despite his continuingcommitment to condemning discriminatory colonial laws and settler violence,Eyre's earlier understandings of an equality despite difference receded in favourof his expression of the superiority of Europeans who needed to be aware of theirresponsibility for compassion. 'Savages always have many vices,' he claimed, butI do not think that these are worse in the New Hollanders, than in many otheraboriginal races.'45

This familiar humanitarian framework enabled Eyre to launch a vehementand comprehensive critique of the behaviour of Europeans,46 but nevertheless topropose a system of 'management' that justified and entrenched state control ofAboriginal peoples.47 Strongly impressed 'with the advantages, and the necessityof colonization' Eyre was 'only anxious to mitigate its concomitant evils'.48 Inasserting the 'mutual interest' of his proposals—whereby in redressing Aborig-inal grievances settlers would be protected from the effects of retaliation—Eyrewas keen to assure colonists that indigenous presence could be rendered'harmless, and to a certain extent, even useful and desirable'.49 The most impor-tant element of his solution, however, 'in fact almost the only essential one',50

was the establishment of influence or authority over the Aborigines so that theycould be induced 'to adopt, or submit to any regulations that we make for theirimprovement'.51

The coercive intent of these regulations soon became apparent. Eyre wasconvinced 'that ... an almost unlimited influence might be acquired over thenative population' and that the longer Aboriginal people were made dependentupon Europeans for resources 'the more binding our authority would be':

4 4 Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 155.4 5 Ibid., 153.4 6 Eyre was forthright: 'Without laying claim to this country by right of conquest, without pleading

even the mockery of cession, or the cheatery of sale, we have unhesitatingly entered upon,occupied, and disposed of its lands, spreading forth a new population over its surface, and drivingbefore us the original inhabitants.

To sanction this aggression, we have not, in the abstract, the slightest shadow of either right orjustice--we have not even the extenuation of endeavouring to compensate those we haveinjured, or the merit of attempting to mitigate the sufferings our presence inflicts'. Eyre, Journals,v.ii, 158-9.

4 7 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992),7, refers to such types of 'anti-conquests' narratives as 'strategies of representation wherebyEuropean bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assertEuropean hegemony'.

4 8 Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 449.4 9 Ibid., 457.5 0 Ibid., 480.51 Ibid.

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by supplying the wants of the natives, and taking away all inducements to crime, a securityand protection would be afforded to the settlers which do not now exist, and which, underthe present system, can never be expected, until the former have almost disappearedbefore their oppressors.52

The distribution of food from centres like Moorunde, for example, would notonly provide nourishment for local and refugee Aboriginal populations butwould also serve the purpose of encouraging them to 'restrain their wanderinghabits', to 'locate permanently in one place', and to be 'weaned' from Europeansettlements. Even more significantly, though, the provision of food would nowfully compensate Aboriginal people for the losses they had incurred with thecoming of the settlers.53

Under Eyre's proposal. Aborigines' 'willing compliance' could be gainedprimarily through such compensation. Clearly, exactly what it was that Aborig-ines had lost would become crucial to determining future relations betweenAborigines and settlers. Significantly, far from being indefinable, as Eyre hadformerly considered,54 exactly what it was that Aborigines had lost was now seento fall firmly within the capacity, and the interests, of the settlers to compensate.

Eyre now argued that a proportion of the money obtained from the sales ofland should be appropriated towards 'alleviating the miseries our occupation oftheir country has occasioned to the original owners' in order to 'afford them thatsubsistence which we have deprived them of the power of providing for them-selves'.55 While reservations of land (for which there would be no Aboriginaltitle)56 should be chosen for Aboriginal people out of their own possessions andin their respective districts,57 food alone would now repay Aborigines for the lossof their land. Europeans were 'injustice bound', Eyre claimed, to supply Aborig-ines with what they had been accustomed to, 'but of which we have deprived him—food.'™ in defining their loss in terms of subsistence only. Eyre effectivelycontained the subversive implications of his acknowledgement that Aborigineshad indeed once owned the land. By supporting the principle of compensationbut controlling the form it would take, Aboriginal sovereignty was brought firmlywithin the realms of colonial discourse.

Eyre's damning critique of the law of evidence would further demonstratehow humanitarian concern could appear to redress an obvious injustice while

5 2 Ibid., 484.5 3 Ibid., 483-4.5 4 'what recompense can he make them for the injury he has done, by dispossessing them of their

lands, by occupying their waters, and by depriving them of their supply of food? He neither doesnor can replace the loss'. Eyre, Journals, vol. i, 171.

5 5 Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 164-5, my italics. See also 168-9.5 6 Such lands were designated Crown Lands, destined, according to Protector Moorhouse at least,

to be returned to the government upon the inevitable extinction of the Aboriginal people. SeeHassell, 164-7.

5 7 Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 296. Note Noyes' contention, 267-8, that reserves accorded native peoplesa 'mythical' sovereignty, 'granted on condition of a re-definition of native subjectivity in termsof the colonizer's social order'.

5 8 Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 479. Italics in original.

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also supporting the primary interests of the settler population to maximise accessto the land. Framed against his own experience as Resident Magistrate and theconcerns of other observers in the colony,59 Eyre explained how disallowingAboriginal testimony had inhibited the prosecution of European assailants.60 Heregarded reform of such provisions to be crucial for stemming the terrible recordof settler violence he had carefully outlined.61 Eyre's advocacy of the need toaccept Aboriginal testimony as a point of justice, however, would also become acrucial element in his solution to 'the Aboriginal problem'. For the admissibilityof Aboriginal testimony would facilitate, too, the prosecution of Aborigines whocommitted 'crimes' in the eyes of British law, against other Aborigines, therebyhelping sever what Eyre saw as the elders' brutal hold over the young throughthe practice of oppressive traditional customs.62 Eyre cited the ethnographicevidence he had collated with the assistance of Chief Protector of Aboriginesin Adelaide, Matthew Moorhouse, to support his proposals. Superstitions andceremonies were described therein as obscure, perhaps not even understood bythe people themselves.63 Religious belief was 'indistinct and indefinite, as theyare not naturally a reasoning people.' Eyre stressed that by isolating the youngfrom the influence of oppressive practices, Aboriginal culture would be confinedto the elders thereby diminishing 'the attractions of a savage life.'64

Eyre stressed throughout Manners and Customs the inevitability of depop-ulation, lamenting the 'fatal and melancholy effect which contact with civiliz-ation seems ever to produce upon a savage people',65 recalling the experiences of

5 9 Eyre's personal engagement with the law of evidence was demonstrated in his correspondencewith Governor Grey while at Moorunde. See Eyre's reports to the Colonial Secretary, 28 May1842; 1 February 1843; 5 June 1843; 20 January 1844 in Reports and Letters. On 1 February 1843Eyre noted: 'It is impossible to explain to the Natives the reason for their being unable to giveevidence;--they only see that their own people are always punished for offences--that the Euro-peans almost always escape'. At that time the law denied the reception of the sworn testimony'of any individual ignorant of the Supreme Being', in addition to the general stipulation thataccused persons could not give evidence in their own defence, in order to protect them from self--incrimination. The law in relation to evidence was relaxed by an Act of the British Parliament in1843 and enacted in the South Australian Legislature as the 'Aboriginal Evidence Ordinance'under which Aborigines could give their testimony under affirmation if not oath. The presidingjudge retained discretion in each case. Initially, an accused could still not be convicted on thesole testimony of an Aborigine. Eyre also condemned this provision which was removed in 1849(Jenkin, Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri, 62).

See also S. Davies, 'Aborigines, Murder and the Criminal Law in Early Port Phillip, 1841-1851',Historical Studies 22, no. 88 (April 1987), 313-35; Hookey, 'Settlement and Sovereignty'; HenryReynolds, The Law of the Land; Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1989) and Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation, (Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1996).

6 0 Eyre, Journals, vol. ii, 493.6 1 Ibid., 170-203, 185.6 2 Ibid., 384, 500-2.6 3 Ibid., 332.6 4 Ibid., 481 . Within Eyre's account of Aboriginal social and cultural life, polygamy and infanticide

were nominated as examples of oppressive practices.6 5 Ibid., 412.

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his journeys to illustrate 'the blighting and annihilating effects of colonization'.66

In a critical chronological displacement. Eyre observed that Aborigines 'in theirnatural state' represented the time and space before the relentlessly advancingfrontier, where Aborigines momentarily retained all that essentially definedthem, and entitled them (as with any sovereign people), to respect:

It is here that the native should be seen to be appreciated, in his native wilds, where healone is lord of all around him. To those who have thus come into communication withthe Aborigines, and have witnessed the fearless courage and proud demeanour whicha life of independence and freedom always inspires, it cannot but be a matter of deepregret to see them gradually dwindling away and disappearing before the presence ofEuropeans.67

In regarding Aboriginal people as necessarily vanquished and diminished byEuropean presence, Eyre was able to represent Aborigines of the more remoteregions as currently 'unblighted' but soon to be contaminated by colonisation.The inevitability of this process ensured the eventual passing of this 'authentic'Aboriginality, together with any claim to sovereignty over the land, which was soindelibly, and poignantly, expressed in 'a life of independence and freedom'. The'evil effects of colonization' condemned but justified as unavoidable the devasta-tion of Aboriginal people, who would never again be what they once were.Within this framework. Eyre's proposals were presented both as encouragingEuropeans to accept their moral responsibilities towards the vanquished and asfacilitating the 'civilisation' process by isolating all that remained of an inde-pendent culture, discursively constructed and historically sited as irredeemablypre-contact. Defined now as the only authentic indigenous presence remaining,the elders would take with them when they died their cultural integrity as wellas any residual sovereign claim to the land. Furthermore, through education andsegregation from the oppressive traditions of their parents,68 the young were tobe made like Europeans for whom any other form of sovereignty was, of course,superfluous.

Eyre now made explicit the underlying premise of his solution, the need todestroy an identifiably sovereign traditional culture:

I cannot persuade myself, that any real or permanent good will ever be effected, until theinfluence exercised over the young by the adults be destroyed, and they are freed fromthe contagious effects of their example, and until means are afforded them of supportingthemselves in a new condition, and of forming those social ties and connections in animproved state, which they must otherwise be driven to seek for among the savage hordes,from which it is attempted to reclaim them.69

6 6 Ibid., 415.67 Ibid.6 8 Ibid., 427, 489.6 9 Ibid., 430.

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Eyre proposed that reserves of land, 'a section or two', 'should be chosen forthe Aborigines' within their own tribal boundaries.70 Police should reinforcethe project, 'until the natives get well acquainted with Europeans and theircustoms',71 while all reserves should be headed by an appropriate European.Registers of local Aboriginal people should be compiled and restrictions placed onthe movement of Aboriginal people between their own districts and the towns.Indeed, if found in Adelaide without passes. Eyre suggested that Aborigines'should be taken up by the police and slightly punished'. Rewards ('an occasionalpresent, of a blanket for instance') should be given for compliant behaviour,including sending children to school, delivering up offenders, for giving up 'theperformance of any of their savage or barbarous ceremonies upon their children',or 'for rendering any'other service to the Government.'72

Clearly, Eyre knew, at heart, that convincing Aboriginal people of the mutualinterest of his proposals would not be straightforward. The colony's police forcewould be called upon to 'reinforce the project', state officials would providecomprehensive surveillance of Aboriginal peoples' daily lives while the destruc-tion of relationships between children and their elders, through the office ofprotectors, would be sanctioned by the law:

I believe that a sufficient degree of influence would be acquired over the parents by thesystem of supplying them with food, which I have recommended to induce a cheerfulconsent, but it would be only prudent to have a legislative enactment on the subject, thatby placing the school-children under the guardianship of the protectors, they might beprotected from the influence or power of their relatives; after these had once fullyconsented to their being sent to school to be educated.73

Eyre's 'prudent' qualification reveals most poignantly, perhaps, the correlationmore broadly apparent across the British Empire between the development oflocalised discourses of race and the repression of colonised populations who, indifferent ways in different contexts, challenged and resisted the conditions ofcolonial rule. In this case, the fate of individual Aborigines and their rival claimsto the land, together with the future personal and economic security of thesettlers, would depend on Eyre's definitions of an authentic Aboriginality.74 Byacknowledging Aboriginal ownership of the land but confining it to the elders.Eyre effectively confined Aboriginal sovereignty to the past, temporally displac-ing it from those who would live on in the present and future. Irretrievablyaltered by their colonial status and denied a sovereign presence, the descendantswould be 'saved' from the oppressive traditions of their cultural heritage, adiscursive strategy that authorised their confinement within the settlement and

7 0 Ibid., 486.7 1 Ibid., 486.7 2 Ibid., 488-9.7 3 Ibid., 492.7 4 For discussion on how the concept of an authentic culture relates to conceptualising social

change see Talal Asad, 'Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology', Man: The Journal of the RoyalAnthropological Institute, 14 (1979): 607-27.

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their subjection to the management of the state and the force of the law.As already observed, the fuller scope of Eyre's Australian writings suggest the

need for a more complex analysis of his interventions in the exploration andcolonisation of South Australia. For while certainly written from the perspectiveof an individual agent. Eyre's proposals can be seen to reflect and prepare theideological foundation for colonial policies and practices towards Aboriginalpeoples that unfolded, albeit transformed, throughout the second half of thenineteenth century and beyond. Significantly, too, late twentieth-century legisla-tion that considers only those Aborigines who can demonstrate a continuingrelationship with the land, despite the effects of invasion and dispossession, asbeing eligible for native title rights, reflects the tenacity of such mid-nineteenth-century understandings of 'repressive authenticity' in continuing to restrict theentitlements of indigenous peoples in the present.75

Part Two: The Caribbean

Having secured the publication in London of his Journals and Manners andCustoms, Eyre turned his attention to furthering his career in colonial administra-tion. He was duly appointed to New Zealand in 1847, serving as Lieutenant-Governor to George Grey, under whom he had already served in South Australia.Eyre's concern to contain potential threats to British sovereignty over the land,already apparent in Australia, could also be observed in the new settler colonyof New Zealand. Eyre and Grey oversaw the government's acquisition of Maorilands in order to fund further immigration and to secure property for sale tosettlers.76 Given the different meanings of sovereignty refleaed in the Treatyof Waitangi, land acquisition was often contested and Eyre became committed todeploying highly mobile paramilitary-style police as the most effective means ofcountering localised Maori resistance to the expansion of settlement.77 WhileEyre's administration in the New Munster province cannot be considered here inmore detail, it is the personal characteristics that Eyre brought to his role as anadministrator that emerge quite clearly in New Zealand that demand our atten-tion. His uncompromising manner, sensitivity to public criticism and hypersens-itivity to resistance were traits that were by no means unaffected by the colonialcontexts in which they were both practised and observed. While insufficient in

7 5 See Patrick Wolfe, 'Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era',Social Analysis, no. 36 (October, 1994): 93-152, and Settler Colonialism and the Transformation ofAnthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), chapter 6,'Repressive Authenticity', 163-214.

7 6 Between 1846 and 1853, 32.6 million acres of land, just under one half of New Zealand, wereacquired. See James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders From Polynesian Settle-ment to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane, 1996), 225.

7 7 See Richard Hill, The History of Policing in New Zealand, (Wellington: V. R. Ward, 1986) twovolumes, vol. 1, Policing the Colonial Frontier: The Theory and Practice of Coercive Social and RacialControl in New Zealand, 1767-1867, chapter 4, 297-331.

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themselves in explaining his recourse to maximal repression in Jamaica, thesetraits became increasingly relevant to understanding Eyre's perceptions of thechallenge that subject populations could present to colonial authority.

Eyre's relatively modest beginnings and alleged awkwardness in social situ-ations quickly became a matter for derision by some New Zealand colonists,resentful that a mere 'cattle drover' had been accorded such authority.78 Eyre'sown accounts of his services to the Empire were characterised by a concern topromote himself and his achievements while he ingratiated himself with metro-politan patrons.79 To some extent, Eyre's personal commitment to provinghimself to his superiors, or his 'sense of duty'80 helps explain his developingpreoccupation with the use of repression to uphold colonial authority. Theseconcerns were already apparent in Australia and New Zealand, but became muchmore compelling in the Caribbean colonies. But as Dane Kennedy has observedof small settler communities elsewhere, and of colonial societies more generally,the characteristics of individual agents (and of the European elite as a whole)were not simply a reflection of their personal social, psychological or nationaltraits but were framed in quite profound ways by the conditions prevailing incolonial cultures themselves.81

It can be suggested, then, that a conventional biographical approach inhibitsunderstandings of how Eyre's Caribbean administrations made manifest unden-iably intensified personal anxieties that were, nevertheless, distinctively (andcharacteristically) colonial. Moreover, his outspokenness about the 'spectre' ofresistance that haunted such communities82 has more to reveal than allegationsthat he was simply unsuited for the positions he held, enabling us to delve evenfurther into the identifiably colonial context in which his fears were played out.For his lack of circumspection about concealing the Carribean colonies' vulnera-bility to resistance had very particular effects, exposing the inherent instability ofcolonial rule, especially where Europeans were outnumbered, and its depend-ence, in the last instance, on the preserved use of force. His deep misgivings wereexpressed publicly and frequently instead of being clothed in silence and hiddenaway, safely out of sight but festering nevertheless. This public disclosure under-

7 8 Dutton, In Search, vli, 54-7, 68, 75, 80.7 9 See Eyre, Autobiographical Narrative, 221-3. Given the system of patronage that prevailed, the

obsequious tone of Eyre's letters to the Colonial Office requesting promotion, recognition of hisachievements, or explaining his breaches of protocol was hardly surprising.

8 0 Eyre later observed, in Eyre to Newcastle, Separate, 28 March 1864, CO 137/380, Public RecordOffice (hereafter PRO), London: 'the only rewards a Governor can look forward to are theconsciousness of having done his duty and a hope that he may receive the approbation of theSecretary of State'.

8 1 See Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia,1890-1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 100-5, 186-92. Kennedy, 191, 'challengesthose theories that seek to explain the attitudes and actions of colonists, the very worlds theyconstruct for themselves, as a simple, unambiguous, and unimpeded transfer and replication ofcertain social, or psychological or national traits.'

8 2 See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1983), 14. The geographical proximity of Haiti and the recent rebellion in Indiaintensified such fears in Jamaica in the 1860s.

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mined the facade of inviolability that was so crucial to successful colonial govern-ment and presented for public display, both locally and abroad, the extent towhich that authority relied on coercion and repression.

Eyre was appointed Lieutenant-Governor in St Vincent in 1854. This begana decade of administration in different colonial situations than those he hadexperienced in Australia and New Zealand, where, as colonies of settlement, theobject of British sovereignty had been the land of the indigenous inhabitants.In the Caribbean, the object of British sovereignty was quite different, as wouldbefit a colonial setting which was structurally distinct as a slave formation andwhere, accordingly, the problem of indigenous sovereignty did not arise.Few natives had survived the earlier period of Spanish rule, while any claim toindigenous sovereignty by the introduced slaves obtained only in their nativeAfrica, and, even then, this lay in the past. Though the object of British sover-eignty in the Caribbean was also concerned with controlling property, it wasconcerned with property in bodies rather than with property in land—that is,with the exclusive control of the bodies of the subject population as labour, ratherthan with the exclusive possession of their territory.

Wherever they were seriously outnumbered in the Caribbean, Britishcolonisers could never be sure of their authority over those they presumed to ruleand the control of resistance had long been a central concern.83 The emancipationof slaves in the Caribbean in the 1830s, however, had profoundly transformedtheir status as property, propelling them into modernity as newly-created sover-eign individuals whose labour and compliance could no longer technically beenforced and who were, therefore, considerably harder to control. In suchan environment, the security of British authority was at once more crucial toespouse but, accordingly, much more difficult to sustain. British governors inJamaica had long tried desperately to contain even the slightest indication ofresistance for fear of it sparking a more generalised rebellion. As the Governorof Barbados had once remarked to the Colonial Office, Europeans in the WestIndies were 'ever tremblingly alive to the dangers of insurrection'84 whileWest Indian planters, according to historian Winthrop Jordan, 'were not so muchlost in the Caribbean as in a sea of blacks'.85 By the middle of the nineteenthcentury when Eyre arrived in the Caribbean, the mass of the population was stillexcluded from political rights and privileges as the European elite clung tena-ciously to their privilege. Eyre became increasingly convinced that if colonialauthority was not insisted upon at every sign of resistance, those vast numbers offreedpeople presented a very immediate threat to British rule.

8 3 See Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1982). Craton, 13, notes that 'West Indian slaves inherited and melded tradi-tions of resistance both from the Amerindians, whom they largely replaced, and from their ownAfrican forebears. They also bequeathed a tradition to their Afro-Caribbean descendants, whoformed a downtrodden black majority even after formal slavery had ended'.

8 4 Combermere to Bathurst, 15 January 1819, CO 28/88, cited in Eric Williams, Capitalism andSlavery (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), n. 38, 202.

8 5 W. Jordan, 'American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the BritishColonies', William and Mary Quarterly xix, (April 1962): 183-200, 196.

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194 Australian Historical Studies, 118,2002

From the early days of his administration in St Vincent, where a developingpeasantry was gradually emerging from the former slave-based plantationeconomy. Eyre perceived the difficulties of governing an emancipated but stillsubject population whose numerical strength was twenty times greater than thatof Europeans. His correspondence with local and metropolitan officials wascharacterised by calls for even minor infringements against the law to bepunished severely. He rejected advice from Governors Colebrook and Hincks, hissuperiors in nearby Barbados, who counselled him against rigid enforcement oflaw and order for relatively trivial offences such as disputes between neighboursand public protests against taxes, arguing that insisting on the state's authoritycould only increase disaffection amongst the peasantry.86 But when Eyre sawprisoners rescued from lawful punishment by 'the mob',87 he became convincedthat the former slave population was 'bonded together for the purpose ofpreventing the awards of law being carried out in cases where they disapprovedof the decisions'.88 In the absence of a trustworthy (that was to say, European)police force,89 Eyre considered that only a permanent European military presencewould be able to 'keep within proper bounds that innate convictionof their own power which is so often apt to mislead a population such as that ofSt. Vincent'.90

Eyre's acute awareness of the dangers of resistance continued to mould hisperceptions of the colonial encounter in the Caribbean. Following a brief periodadministering Antigua in 1859, Eyre arrived as Acting Governor in Jamaica in1862. From the very beginning of his administration. Eyre was faced with thepublic display of resistance that he found so alarming. He was soon embroiled incontroversy in both the public and political arena over his rigid enforcement ofcolonial authority and his determination to silence any criticism of his govern-ment. Like the populations of St Vincent and Antigua, the majority of freed-people in Jamaica had experienced thirty years of emancipation with littleevidence that their new status had ensured significant alteration in the discrim-ination they suffered. By 1864, when Eyre was appointed permanently followingGovernor Darling's acceptance of the governorship of Victoria, Eyre presided overan increasingly restless colonial community as it continued to grapple with aworsening economic situation exacerbated by localised floods and droughts.91

8 6 See Colebrooke to Grey, no. 66, 10 December 1855 and Colebrooke to Eyre, confidential,13 December 1855, CO 260/84, PRO, London. See also Hincks to Labouchere, confidential,27 October 1856, Hincks to Labouchere, no. 67, 1 November 1856, Hincks to Labouchere,no. 68, 1 November 1856, Hincks to Labouchere, no. 70, 10 November 1856, Hincks to Eyre, no.87, 5 November 1856, CO 260/87; and Hincks to Labouchere, no. 72, 11 December 1856, Hincksto Labouchere, no. 76, 11 December 1856, CO 260/88, PRO, London.

8 7 See Eyre to Colebrooke, confidential, 3 December 1855, CO 260/84, and Hincks to Labouchere,no. 72, 11 December 1856, CO 260/88, PRO, London.

8 8 Eyre to Colebrooke, confidential, 3 December 1855, CO 260/84, PRO, London.8 9 Eyre to Colebrooke, confidential, 10 December 1855, CO 260/84, PRO, London.9 0 Eyre to Colebrooke, confidential, 3 December 1855, CO 260/84, PRO, London.9 1 Mathieson, 113, claims that Jamaica was in a worse economic position than other Caribbean

colonies having failed to prepare for emancipation and free trade as effectively as other colonies.

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It was also a community where Europeans were outnumbered by freedpeopleby approximately thirty to one.

During this volatile period of economic depression, reports of increasedpoverty and theft appeared in the press, bringing structural discrimination moredearly into the public realm. Laws were passed to fortify the capacity of the stateto contain resistance92 while volunteer militias were established 'in every districtof the colony, which could at any time be called out in aid of the civil power tosuppress any riot or disturbance'.93 By November 1864, the problem of thefthad shown no signs of abating. The gaols had more than twice the numberof inmates than they had accommodated in 1861. In his opening address tothe legislature, Eyre asserted his belief that a resort to whipping and the re-establishment of'the treadmill were 'absolutely essential to put a stop to a classof crime ... so detrimental to the best interests of the colony'.94

In addition to targeting the problem of theft. Eyre supported further coerciveaction in response to other behaviours deemed to be inimical to what was viewedas the general welfare. Gaol sentences for 'idle and disorderly persons, roguesand vagabonds',95 for example, were extended, while cultural practices such asstreet dancing were prohibited. Similar legislative solutions to social andeconomic problems were proposed throughout 1864 and 1865 having the prac-tical consequence of criminalising poverty.96 The crisis deepened in the face ofintensified public discussion of the colony's social, economic and politicalinstability both locally and abroad. The need to contain the challenge that anoverwhelming, and increasingly discontented, body of freedpeople presented tominority British rule in Jamaica became more urgent.

Significantly, Eyre's resort to repressive solutions correlated with a trans-formation in his discursive representation of freedpeople. Eyre's public state-ments became more commonly inflected with an explicit vocabulary of race thatsupported the coercive intent of the ideological framework within which hehad already begun to represent the peasantry as innately deficient.97 In March1864, on the occasion of the Baptist Jubilee celebrations, for example, Eyre hadpraised freedpeople for their encouraging progress in acquiring civilised values.Eyre hoped that the influence of Christian missionaries would soon see the'degrading influence of slavery' extinguished and 'country people' might become

9 2 Eyre to Newcastle, no. 87, 4 March 1864, CO 137/380, PRO, London.9 3 Eyre to Newcastle, no. 195, 19 August 1863, CO 137/374, PRO, London.9 4 Enclosed in Eyre to Cardwell, no. 285, 1 November 1864, CO 137/385, PRO, London.9 5 Eyre to Cardwell, no . 23, 8 February 1865, CO 137/388, PRO, London.9 6 See, for example, Eyre to Cardwell, no . 102, 20 April 1865, CO 137/390, PRO, London, for an

indication of the determination of the Jamaican government to criminalise poverty. In thisdespatch Eyre informed Cardwell of a proposed act to remove difficulties in the way of obtain-ing a conviction for theft of money by making it unnecessary to specify what particular coin ornote was taken.

9 7 Holt, 213-16 , 237, 264, 309, confirms that during this period discourses on race increasinglyframed the perceptions of Europeans in Jamaica. Colonial Office personnel were by no meansimmune from the 'hardening' of discourses on race. See Holt, 279-85 , 286, and Heuman, BetweenBlack and White, 112.

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'as industrious as honest as truthful as virtuous as are the peasantry of anyother Country'.98 When Eyre embarked on a tour of the country parishes incelebration of his permanent appointment the following month, however, hebegan to temper his praise.

Eyre received representations from various groups in each of the parishes hevisited. Evidence of poverty and distress among the rural population becameglaringly apparent with magistrates and small landholders alike complaining ofwidespread escalation in the theft of food from provision grounds. In respondingto these local concerns, Eyre began to locate the cause of the peasantry'seconomic distress within the nature of the people themselves. He intimated nowthat the peasantry's 'antisocial' behaviours might have less to do with the effectsof slavery that with an innate propensity towards indolence and immorality."It was beginning to appear, too, that such behaviours might also be resistant tothe best efforts of 'civilisation' to change them.

By the end of March 1865, as unrest was spreading throughout Jamaica,Eyre shifted firmly from regarding freedpeople as a peasant class who wouldeventually attain equality, to speaking of them as a race of people incapable ofeducation or reform, and, therefore, susceptible to repression—'I confidentlyhope', he said, 'that the adoption of a system of punishment which is muchdreaded by the Negroes, will lead to a rapid diminution in the crime ofLarceny'.100 With few Europeans exerting a civilising influence, Eyre feared that'races only just emerging from ... a state of barbarism' might fall rapidly back-wards. Indeed, Eyre looked to the very immutablity of freedpeople's inferiority tohelp explain Jamaica's decline as being brought about by 'something very wrongand defective both in the habits and the character of the people'.10' As othershave observed of slave societies more generally,102 with the discrediting of slaveryas a mode of social and economic control, the role of race as a legitimatingdiscourse of difference can be seen to assume even heightened significance inbolstering European privilege post emancipation.

98 Eyre to Newcastle, no. 94, 9 March 1864, CO 137/380, PRO, London.9 9 Eyre to Cardwell, no. 256, 10 September 1864, CO 137/384, PRO, London.

100 Eyre to Cardwell, no. 69, 30 March 1865, CO 137/388, PRO, London,101 Eyre to Cardwell, no. 90, 19 April 1865, CO 137/390, PRO, London. By the time it dawned on

him that he would have to justify to British authorities his use of terror against freedpeople.Eyre remarked: ' the Negro is a creature of impulse and imitation, easily misled, very excitable,and a perfect fiend when under the influence of an excitement which stirs up all the evilpassions of a race little removed in many aspects from absolute savages'. (Eyre to Cardwell,no. 321, 8 December 1865, CO 137/396, PRO, London.) See Holt, 278-89, where he discussesthe contributions of Thomas Carlyle, Henry Taylor, and Governors Eyre and Darling to suchdiscourses. Holt, 285, observes that 'Jamaican governors had never been racial egalitarians, ofcourse, but compared with their predecessors Darling and Eyre filled their dispatches with aharsher, less tentative judgment of black capacities and tendencies'.

102 See for example Patrick Wolfe, 'Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race',Forum Essay, American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866-905 and Frederick Cooper,Thomas Holt and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Poste-mancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Cooper, Holtand Scott, 30, observe: 'The peculiarity of the African was invoked . . . to explain why the sternhand of colonial authority was still necessary to get Africans to do what their own welfarerequired.'

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Eyre's determinination to uphold colonial authority at all costs intensified inthe face of increasingly overt resistance, leading him to speak openly about justhow opposed the interests of ruler and ruled were in Jamaica. Where a morecircumspect governor might have quelled such controversy by responding morecalmly, and more privately, to criticisms, Eyre made the condition of freedpeople,the nature of his administration, and, in particular, the repressive character ofcolonial rule, matters for public debate. Rather than divert attention from theentrenched discrimination that characterised post-emancipation societies, Eyresought widespread corroboration for his claims that the extent of suffering inJamaica was exaggerated. His actions in disseminating for refutation the damninganalysis of post-emancipation Jamaica posed by Edward Underhill, the secretaryof the Baptist Missionary Society,103 in particular, inflamed an already volatilesituation.104 Similarly, his circulation of the 'Queen's Advice', the British govern-ment's call for freedpeople to continue working on plantations rather than foster-ing the mixed economy that they had been advocating, further destabilised thesituation by revealing to freedpeople that Eyre's attitudes and actions were nothis alone.105

As the situation grew worse for his government, Eyre called for Europeantroops and for warships to tour the coast.106 Meanwhile, public protest meetingswere held across the country and reports of suspicious activity were rife—persist-ent rumours of imminent rebellion, on the one hand, and proposals for re-enslavement, on the other, exacerbated tensions and fuelled anxieties. Eyre'sdeclaration of martial law following the alleged rebellion at Morant Bay inOctober 1865 finally resolved the crisis with an extended reign of terror. Fright-ened by the uprising, the horrors that prevailed in its aftermath, and continuedrumours of revolt, the House of Assembly agreed to its own abolition and CrownColony government was reinstalled after two hundred years of self rule inJamaica.

Conclusion

The interaction between Eyre as an individual agent and the different colonialformations that framed his administrations reveals a significant correlationbetween challenges to the varying conditions of colonial rule, the coercion ofcolonised peoples and the use of race to justify continuing discrimination and

103 See E.B. Underhill, The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition (London: Jackson et al,1862). Underhill later condemned Eyre's decision to publish the letter. See enclosures in Eyreto Cardwell, no. 336, 20 December 1865, CO 137/396, PRO, London.

104 'Since the date of emancipation no subject had so seriously agitated the public opinion ofJamaica, or called forth more acrimonious discussion', Bakan, 75, n. 34.

105 See Eyre to Cardwell, no. 169, 6 July 1865, CO 137/392 and Cardwell to Eyre, no. 264,4 August 1865, CO 137/392, PRO, London.

106 Eyre to Cardwell, confidential, 13 March 1865, CO 137/388, PRO, London.

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repression. This is not to deny Eyre's personal culpability as an individual, and nodoubt racist, subject whose administrations in the Caribbean represented aparticularly rigid form of colonial authority culminating in the use of state terror.But regarding Eyre simply as a reprehensible individual in Jamaica—or, indeed,a heroic individual in Australia—effectively insulates from criticism the coercivenature of the various colonial structures in which his interventions took place.

Rather than revealing an (impossibly) inherent racism, therefore. Eyre's useof race can be seen to have arisen within (one might even say produced through)the distinctive power relations that shaped colonial rule locally. Accordingly,while certainly related to the increasingly hardened attitudes to race apparent inthe metropole during the second half of the nineteenth century, discourses ofrace emerge as having specific productive effects in these distinctively colonialcommunities and as being associated with particular forms of resistance andmodes of coercion. In Australia, the notion of authenticity was congenial to theelimination of an independent Aboriginal culture, the management and confine-ment of Aboriginal peoples and the denial of their on-going claims to the land.In the Caribbean, on the other hand, the alleged immutability of freedpeople'sinferiority rendered them susceptible to repression, thereby reconciling theirtroubling sovereign individuality to the on-going conditions of colonial rule.Once brought within the folds of colonial discourse in South Australia, therefore,Eyre's interventions at the beginning and the end of his colonial career reconcilerather than confirm an apparent paradox by identifying, in one individual, thebroader correlation between race, resistance and repression that characterisedcolonial government more generally.

University of Melbourne

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