Buxton and his allies had long been in receipt of communications from missionaries in the Australian colonies, which also blamed British colonists for the degradation, and worse, of indigenous peoples. James Backhouse from the Norwich community of Quakers was a close acquaintance of Buxton’s relatives the Gurneys, and became a critical source of information on the colonies of the southern hemisphere. Buxton introduced him to the personnel of the Colonial Office in order to ‘smooth his path’ for a proposed tour of the Australian colonies with his fellow Quaker George Walker. From 1832 to 1838 the pair travelled through Australia ‘for the purpose of discharging a religious duty’. Their connections with Elizabeth Fry meant that transported prisoners’ rights would be one crucial issue, but relations between British settlers and Australian Aborigines were also a subject of investigation. Backhouse sent copies of his reports as well as personal letters to Buxton, requesting that he lobby for ‘legislative action on penal reform and policies regarding Aborigines’.
Governors of Australian colonies also commissioned reports from the two Quakers, which were printed for circulation in the colonies and in Britain. The report on Tasmania was representative: ‘we cannot but deprecate the short sighted policy, by which, in the Colonization of New Countries, the lands of the Aboriginal Inhabitants have been wrested from them, with little or no regard to their natural and indefeasible rights’. Humanitarian members of the Aborigines Committee were naturally receptive to such representations, and the message was reinforced when the Committee interviewed witnesses and received written testimony from Australia.
The two main witnesses from New South Wales, Archdeacon Broughton and the Presbyterian minister J. D. Lang, reinforced the warning that the fate of Tasmania’s Aborigines might be replicated on the mainland:
The deadly antipathy which has existed between the Aborigines and the Bushrangers of Van Diemen’s Land provoked a series of outrages which would have terminated in the utter extermination of the whole race, if the local Government had not interposed to remove the last remnant of them from the island; an act of real mercy, though of apparent severity.
At least, Broughton confidently declared, the survivors on Flinders Island were now ‘more advantageously placed with regard to the advantage of acquiring Christianity’. The voices of the ‘survivors’ themselves were not heard.
The directors of three of the main missionary societies, Dandeson Coates of the CMS, John Beecham of the WMS, and William Ellis of the LMS, also gave evidence on Australia, emphasizing ‘the illicit intercourse of Europeans with the female Aborigines... a source of the most afflictive and distressing consequences... [leading] to infanticide to a considerable extent’. Information on these practices had come to Coates from the Revd W. Watson, a CMS missionary in New South Wales. The Committee’s Report concluded that the effects of free British settlement in New South Wales had been ‘dreadful beyond example, both in the diminution of [the Aborigines’] numbers and in their demoralization’.
Missionary opinions varied about the role deliberate murder might have played in this disaster. The Committee’s main informants on Australia were loath to imagine that anything like the systematic murder of Aborigines at the hands of ‘respectable’ Britons was being carried out (as are some contemporary historians). While ‘many deeds of murder and violence have undoubtedly been committed by the stock-keepers (convicts in the employ of farmers on the outskirts of the colony), by the cedar-cutters, and by other remote free settlers, and many natives have perished by the various military parties sent against them’, the Report advised, ‘it is not to violence only that their decrease is ascribed’. According to Broughton’s evidence quoted in the final Report: ‘They do not so much retire as decay; wherever Europeans meet with them they appear to wear out, and gradually to decay: they diminish in numbers; they appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth.’ This conception of European influence working indirectly rather than systematically to ‘diminish’ Aborigines was reinforced by the evidence of Lang, also quoted in the Report: ‘From the prevalence of infanticide, from intemperance and from European diseases, their number is evidently and rapidly diminishing.’
Lancelot Threlkeld, who maintained a Methodist mission at Lake Macquarie, however, joined others with frontier experience in blaming relatively well-off and ‘respectable’ squatters (rather than the actions of colonial ‘riff raff) for attempts to ‘exterminate’ the Aborigines persisting on ‘their’ land. Threlkeld had raised the ire of local settlers through his attempts to prevent the systematic abuse of Aboriginal women and killing of Aboriginal men. His 1825 report to the LMS Directors pointed out that ‘no man who comes to this colony and has ground and corn can dispassionately view the subject of the blacks, their interest says annihilate the race’. According to local settlers, ‘blacks were only a specie of baboon that might be shot down with impunity, like an Ourang Outang!’
Violence around Threlkeld’s station intensified over the next decade as settlers moved up the river valleys of northern New South Wales. Aboriginal resistance, typically through killing of stock, inspired exterminatory settler raiding parties. Threlkeld compiled evidence on the atrocities, which he passed on to other missionaries, officials, and members of the judiciary. He also mobilized an informal network of support following his speech to the founding meeting of the Aborigines Protection Society in Sydney. He accused newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald of ‘criminality in the sight of God’, for having inflamed their readership’s mind against the Aborigines, warning that, ‘while [editors] could shelter behind the editorial ‘‘we’’, that would avail them nothing when they were called to answer for their deeds ‘‘before the Judge of all’’ ’. His 1837 report to the LMS complained that a ‘war of extirpation’ was under way in New South Wales. Anyone who tried to speak out faced intimidation from ‘lawless banditti’ who defied British law ‘to its very teeth’. Threlkeld won some initial sympathy from Governor George Gipps, but alienated the Governor with his next report, which implicated the colony’s senior military officer for killing innocent Aborigines during a campaign along the Gwydir River valley.
Although Threlkeld was unusually vocal, he proved less successful at imbricating himself within Buxton’s international humanitarian network. His direct testimony did not figure in the Select Committee’s proceedings. Threlkeld also managed to alienate influential churchmen in the colony, like Samuel Marsden, and even his own LMS superiors, who judged that he was spending their money recklessly and had cut him off from further funding by 1826. ‘While Threlkeld could produce large amounts of information about the Awabakal people, in particular, and what he assumed was their ‘‘need’’ for salvation, he could not promote their cause in an appealing enough manner to ensure important moral support from Britain.’ This reflected not only his financial circumstances but also the contingent ways that ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ travelled from colony to metropole through the imperial networks of the day. James Read in the eastern Cape was at least as controversial a figure, yet his testimony was taken seriously and helped shape the understandings of powerful humanitarian interests because of the close relationship that his superintendent, John Philip, had forged with Buxton. Activist missionaries in Australia, such as Threlkeld and Louis Giustiniani of the Western Australia Missionary Society, lacked the kind of mediation between their local concerns and the agenda of metropolitan agencies that Philip could provide for the LMS missionaries in the Cape. The Aborigines Committee consequently chose to rely upon the more muted and restrained testimony of figures such as Broughton and Lang, who either knew little of the activities of remote ‘frontier’ missionaries or, in Threlkeld’s case, were actually in dispute with them.
Giustiniani earned the contempt of the Swan River colonists by threatening to expose them before the ‘enlightened British public, and the whole civilized world’ Without an effective conduit such as Philip, he wrote directly to Glenelg with accounts of a punitive expedition, which had taken ‘revenge’ for the killing of five settlers by killing and mutilating eighteen Aborigines. This kind of missionary appeal provoked settler newspaper editors to forge their own trans-imperial webs of communication. In the Cape and New South Wales, for instance, editors copied extracts from each other condemning the same humanitarian ‘enemies’, such as Glenelg and Stephen in Britain, and the unfortunate Richard Bourke. Thanks to correspondence between the Graham’s Town Journal and the Sydney Morning Herald, Bourke carried a reputation as a naive, sentimental, and ‘meddling’ reformer from the Cape to New South Wales. From the beginning of his tenure in Australia, Bourke found himself vehemently opposed by a vocal section of the New South Wales settlers for Ordinance 50 and other reforms at the Cape.
Though figures such as Giustiniani’s testimony did not figure much in the Aborigines Committee’s proceedings, it still made waves in Britain. Glenelg condemned the governor of the Swan River Colony for threatening the vengeful general destruction of local Aborigines. He had also insisted that settlers and soldiers who shot Aborigines claiming self-defence be brought to trial. In 1839 Gipps in New South Wales issued a public notice declaring ‘that each succeeding dispatch from the Secretary of State [Glenelg’s successor], marks in an increasing degree the importance which Her Majesty’s Government, and no less Parliament and the people of Great Britain, attach to the just and humane treatment of the aborigines’. Although metropolitan intervention in Australia did not extend to restoration of land seized from indigenous people, it had real and unsettling effects for many settlers. As the Aborigines Committee recommended, ‘Protectors of Aborigines’ were appointed to each of the Australian colonies. They were to attach themselves to specific tribes and ‘protect them as far as they could... from any encroachments on their property, and from acts of cruelty, oppression, or injustice, and faithfully represent their wants, wishes, and grievances’ to the colonial government. The intersecting roles of the Protectors and the missionaries in the colony were made clear in the Committee’s Report:
Especially [the Protectors] should claim for the maintenance of the Aborigines such lands as may be necessary for their support... The education of the young will of course be amongst the foremost of the cares of the missionaries; and the Protectors should render every assistance in their power in advancing this all- important part of any general scheme of improvement.
The Myall Creek massacre of 1838 provided a test case for the effectiveness of the new measures. Eleven former convicts were tried for the murder of twenty-eight Aborigines. Despite Threlkeld’s evidence of a conversation involving one of the culprits, a jury of colonists acquitted them. One of the jurors later remarked, ‘I look on them [the Aborigines] as a set of monkeys, and I think the earlier they are exterminated the better. I know well they [the accused] are guilty of murder, but I for one, would never consent to see a white man suffer for shooting a black one.’ On Governor Gipps’s insistence, seven of the settlers were retried for the murder of a child among those killed, and this time they were found guilty and hanged—an unprecedented penalty for the murder of Aborigines. Settler invective indicted not only the judiciary and the Aborigines, but also the ‘ineffective’ and ‘misguided’ missionaries who saw the Aborigines as reclaimable in the first place.