Edward John Eyre (1815–1901) is in many ways the iconic Australian explorer. Against all odds, he walked across the vast Nullarbor Plain, battling the vagaries of the desert climate and the unforgiving landscape to ‘open up’ the country from Adelaide to Albany. Although he was born into a very different life in England, by his early twenties he had already made a name for himself as an overlander of sheep and cattle half a world away in the Antipodes, forging stock routes through the outback of the south-eastern colonies in the 1830s. Uncharacteristically for the times, he gained a reputation for befriending Aborigines, a practice that helped him survive that extraordinary ‘journey of exploration’ for which he is still best known within conventional accounts of Australia’s past.[1] The naming of the Eyre Highway and Lake Eyre still commemorates his feat of endurance on maps and landmarks although its precise historical significance is perhaps diminishing within the popular imagination.
This familiar narrative places Eyre fairly easily within local explorer historiography, in the company of other ambitious young men from the ‘old world’ who were intent on making better futures in the ‘new’. Few of these explorers, however, acknowledged so openly the role of the Aborigines in supplying vital food and water or engaged so willingly with their different ways of knowing the world. While their personal dispositions might have differed, all these men were nevertheless representatives of European civilisation and progress, reporting back to investors and settlers in burgeoning towns along the coast—as well as in distant England—the potential of the surrounding country to support pastoral expansion, to be wrested from the so-called strictures of primitive land use and be converted into productive private property. Accordingly, the lives of these individuals can no more be seen in parochial terms than can the histories of the nations whose foundations they establish.[2] They were men who, in living out their hopes and dreams in the colonies, were also the ferrymen of the global market economy.
In seeking to look beyond the constraints of the nation when considering the life of an individual, Transnational Ties: Australian lives in the world invites us to reflect, too, on the possibilities that biography presents for the writing of global histories. This mix of genres might seem odd in that it seeks to bring together two apparent oppositions of conventional social inquiry: is it the individual agent or the broader social structure that should be accorded priority in explaining human experience?[3] Such calls to bridge the divide regarding ‘the forces that have shaped the modern world’[4] are of course by no means new. The historian Morris Cohen argued 60 years ago (with the class and gender assumptions of the time intact) that
in studying the individual life of an outstanding man, we may be studying social forces in their clearest expression. The real problem is not whether history is to be written as the biography of great men or as a tracing of social forces, for the great men are precisely the points of intersection of great social forces.[5]
The sociologist C. Wright Mills similarly exhorted us to adopt an integrated approach, although the intention in his case was to advance prospects for social justice by empowering individuals through their appreciation of the significance of their historical position and its relationship with their present circumstances:
We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise…No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society, has completed its intellectual journey.[6]
If grasping the relationship between history and biography has the potential to enhance understanding of enduring social inequalities, it is difficult to conceive of a field of inquiry in which the task is more urgent than the history of settler societies, such as those Eyre helped advance at the beginning of his career. In the Australian case, Indigenous peoples continue to fare far worse in the contemporary era than the majority of the population on every indicator of social disadvantage, a characteristic that is common to the native peoples of New Zealand and North America, who share a similar history of dispossession and dislocation.[7] Meanwhile, heated debates about the telling of the national story[8] have seen revisionist and post-colonial critiques[9] drawn ever more controversially into the public domain. While issues of sovereignty, self-determination and land rights in settler societies remain contentious internationally and domestically,[10] however, the problems arising from settler colonialism seem to excite far less interest in the former heart of empire, where mainstream imperial historiography remains relatively detached.
The historian Nicholas Dirks commented recently that ‘[w]hen imperial history loses any sense of what empire meant to those who were colonised, it becomes complicit in the history of empire itself’.[11] Dirks was drawing particular attention not only to the recent popular books and television productions of Niall Ferguson, whose robust advocacy of Western civilisation radically discounts past colonial violence and oppression, but to that level of academic distance that characterises conventional texts such as The Oxford History of the British Empire. Such influential accounts of Britain’s past, Dirks claims, not only ignore the empire’s troubling legacies in the present; they fail to acknowledge the reciprocity of empire whereby European economies and ideologies developed in response to, rather than in isolation from, colonialism.[12]
That such anxieties and presumptions about colonial pasts appear themselves to be specific to time and place further highlights the need to appreciate more fully the consequences of European expansion from the late fifteenth century to the present. In this sense, Eyre would be a rich subject for historical inquiry even if he had simply stayed in Adelaide and had been content to build up his holdings and prestige in the local community, which was so assiduously extending its control beyond the initial settlement. Eyre proceeded, however, to develop a career in colonial administration that took him from a modest post in 1842 as Resident Magistrate and Protector of Aborigines (a reward for his journey of exploration) to a number of increasingly important government appointments in New Zealand, St Vincent, Antigua and Jamaica, where his repressive policies culminated in his violent suppression of the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865 and eventually led to his recall to England. The notorious ‘Eyre controversy’ prompted three years of public and legal disputes over his actions in Jamaica. His ‘trans-colonial’ experience therefore makes Eyre that much more fruitful as a subject of analysis in that the story of his life does not simply represent the generalised concerns of capital in a settler society such as Australia. It also forces us to acknowledge that his role in Australia’s constitution as a nation—to say nothing of Britain’s role as coloniser—was simply part of the vast and multifarious imperial endeavour in which Europe was engaged as it set about normalising and universalising its interests abroad.
Accordingly, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, Eyre’s personal readings of the colonial encounter throughout his career help clarify the nature and purpose of colonial governance by locating in time and place its characteristic discursive features, its responsiveness to specific economic imperatives and its association with particular modes of violence and coercion.[13] That is, my broader research on Eyre’s interventions in Australia, New Zealand and the Caribbean engages centrally with the questions of agency and determination that have long preoccupied the social sciences.[14]
I focus my present reflections on how two conventionally separate styles of historical writing, biography and global history, might be helpfully enmeshed to examine the strategies and techniques of colonial governance—while also alerting us to their contemporary manifestations—through the life of Edward Eyre.
Given the title of this book, it is perhaps important to note that I understand my methodological approach to be comparative rather than ‘transnational’—a term I have been reluctant to employ in the colonial context where its use seems anachronistic in the sense that it anticipates a status that is still in the process of formation.[15] I argue that it is this formative stage of nationhood that demands closer scrutiny, particularly in terms of explaining how and why Britain’s commitment to the rule of law was so severely tested—and indeed could break down completely—while sovereignty was still in the process of being secured. In seeking further detachment from the ‘comfortable frame’ of the nation,[16] my use of comparative historical inquiry also directs attention to the common and distinctive ways in which racialised laws and practices were called on to fulfil European ambitions in the lands of others.
In facilitating analysis of how the nation is constituted in different colonial contexts, a comparative approach must also do more, of course, than simply extend the bounds of geographical inquiry. Each site should be clarified mutually through the comparison so that detailed examination of their substantive similarities and differences demonstrates how broad-based economic and ideological factors were expressed locally. For instance, historical analysis has the unique capacity to specify the complex circumstances in which race develops, to unearth detailed evidence of how such ideas about social differentiation are grounded in very material concerns and in association with particular disciplinary regimes. Moreover, in relation to colonial governance in the British Empire, it seems additionally important to be able to say how and why ideas about race took different forms in different colonies and performed different functions in Britain than elsewhere.[17]
In his book The Comparative Imagination, George Frederickson describes his approach to comparative history as one that ‘combines elements of cultural contrast and structural analysis’ involving ‘the interaction between the peculiarities of culture and ideology on the one hand and the recurrent and generalisable structural factors on the other’.[18] To this end, I argue that Eyre’s contrasting perceptions of the colonial encounter in Australia and the Caribbean reflect the particular nature of the economic interests that were at stake in each place and the different modes and rhetoric of governance he considered necessary to uphold them.
The following thoughts about my way of understanding Eyre’s career focus on the operations of two key concepts of colonial governance—race and the rule of law—and conclude by considering their continuing significance as primary measures of social justice in Australia and elsewhere.
[1] I am grateful to Patricia Grimshaw for her thoughtful reading and suggestions and to the editors and anonymous referees for their comments.
Eyre was always eager to meet with local people when passing through their country. His expeditions also comprised a number of Aborigines including Wylie, Cootachah, Neramberein, Joshuing, Unmallie, Kour and Warrulan. Originally from King George’s Sound, Wylie was the only person to complete the long westward journey with Eyre. Wylie went on to become a native constable in the area and Eyre eventually arranged for him to receive government rations. Wylie was another of the King George Sound travellers whom Tiffany Shellam discusses in Shaking hands on the fringe: negotiating the Aboriginal world at King George’s sound (2008, PhD Thesis, The Australian National University); and ‘Manyat’s “sole delight”: travelling knowledge in Western Australia’s southwest, 1830s’, in Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (eds), Transnational Lives (under review). Warrulan was the son of Tenberry whom Eyre met at Moorunde. Drawings of Wylie and Tenberry and his family are included in Eyre’s Journals. At the end of 1844, Eyre undertook to educate Kour and Warrulan in England, where, unfortunately, Warrulan died. Kour later returned to Australia. Little further is known of Eyre’s relationships with these individuals, or of their attitudes or those of their families to accompanying Eyre on his expeditions or to England. Aboriginal people played a largely unacknowledged role in exploration, acting as guides, interpreters and emissaries. See Reynolds, H. 1990, With the White People: The crucial role of Aborigines in the exploration and development of Australia, Penguin, Melbourne; and Schaffer, K. 2001, ‘Handkerchief diplomacy: E. J. Eyre and sexual politics on the South Australian frontier’, in L. Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European encounters in settler societies, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 134–50.
[2] For a comparative study of the effects of dispossession in the settler societies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, see Evans, J., Grimshaw, P., Philips, D. and Swain, S. 2003, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous peoples in British settler colonies, 1830s–1910, Manchester University Press, Manchester.
[3] Carr, E. H. 1961, What is History? Macmillan, London, p. 25.
[4] Fredrickson, G. M. 1997, The Comparative Imagination: On the history of racism, nationalism, and social movements, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 9.
[5] Cohen, M. R. 1961, The Meaning of Human History, The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, p. 221.
[6] Mills, C. W. 1970, The Sociological Imagination , Penguin, Middlesex, p. 12.
[7] The 1991 Royal Commission On Aboriginal Deaths In Custody and Bringing Them Home: Report of the national Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1996), together with landmark judgments such as Mabo v. Queensland (1992), unequivocally relate Indigenous disadvantage to the historical experiences of colonisation and dispossession.
[8] In Australia, a recent conservative backlash has called for the return of a more celebratory view of the nation’s foundations. See, for example, Windschuttle, Keith 2002, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1. Van Dieman’s Land 1804–1847, Macleay Press, Paddington; and Connor, M. 2005, The Invention of Terra Nullius: Historical and legal fictions on the foundation of Australia, Macleay Press, Paddington. For responses to this, see Macintyre, S. and Clark, A. 2003, The History Wars, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton; and Manne, R. (ed.) 2003, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black Inc., Melbourne.
[9] Early examples include Rowley, C. D. 1970, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Melbourne; 1970, Outcasts in White Australia, Penguin, Melbourne; and 1971, The Remote Aborigines, Penguin, Melbourne; Reynolds, Henry 1982, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia, Penguin, Melbourne; 1987, Frontier: Aborigines, settlers and land, Allen & Unwin, Sydney; and 1987, The Law of the Land, Penguin, Melbourne; Carter, P. 1987, The Road to Botany Bay: An essay in spatial history, Faber & Faber, London; and Thomas, N. 1994, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, travel and government, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
[10] In February 2008, in the ‘spirit of reconciliation’, newly elected Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, issued a national apology to members of the Stolen Generations who had been ‘separated’ from their families (see Endnote 7). Meanwhile, the previous conservative federal government’s ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory continues (see Endnote 49) with certain modifications. In June 2008, the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, also apologised for a century of boarding school policies and practices, which similarly sought to break down indigenous cultures. Unlike his Australian counterpart, Harper promised $2 billion in compensation.
[11] Dirks, N. B. 2006, The Scandal of Empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass.,p. 332.
[12] Ibid., pp. 330–2. For accounts that deal with the reciprocity of empire, see, among others, Armitage, D. 2000, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Cooper, F. and Stoler, A. L. (eds) 1997, Tensions of Empire: Colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, University of California Press, Berkeley; Hall, C. 2002, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867, Polity, Oxford; and Lester, A. 2001, Imperial Networks: Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain, Routledge, London. It is worth noting that Seeley reminded his students at Oxford more than a century ago that ‘the expansion of England involves its transformation’ and that ‘England owes its modern character and its peculiar greatness from the outset to the New World’; Seeley, J. R. 1883 [1931], The Expansion of England: Two courses of lectures, Macmillan & Co., London, pp. 93, 102. See also Elliott, J. 1991, National and Comparative History, An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford, 10 May 1991, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
[13] See Evans, J. 2002, ‘Re-reading Edward Eyre: race, resistance and repression in Australia and the Caribbean’, Australian Historical Studies. Special Edition. Challenging Australian Histories, vol. 24, no. 120, (June), pp. 411–34; and 2005, Edward Eyre, Race and Colonial Governance, Otago University Press, Dunedin.
[14] Key figures in the social sciences including Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber engage theoretically with these questions. For examples in history, see Thompson, E. P. 1963, The Making of the English Working Class, Victor Gollancz, London; and 1978, The Poverty of Theory, and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, New York. In sociology, see, for example, Giddens, Anthony 1976, New Rules of Sociological Method: A positive critique of interpretative sociologies, Hutchinson, London; and 1984, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the theory of structuration, Polity, Cambridge. For a joint analysis of Thompson and Giddens, see Sewell, Jr, William H. 1990, ‘How classes are made: critical reflections on E. P. Thompson’s theory of working-class formation’, in H. J. Kaye and K. McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical perspectives, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, pp. 50–77.
[15] Alternative views are discussed in Lake, M. 2003, ‘White man’s country: the trans-national history of a national project’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 122, (October), pp. 346–63.See also Curthoys, A. and Lake, M. (eds) 2006, Connected Worlds: History in transnational perspective, ANU E Press, Canberra; and Darian-Smith, K., Grimshaw, P. and Macintyre, S. (eds) 2007, Britishness Abroad: Transnational movements and imperial cultures, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
[16] See the Introduction to this volume.
[17] My broader work on Eyre engages with this in more detail: see Endnote 13. See also Wolfe, P. 2003, ‘Land, labor, and difference: elementary structures of race’, American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 2, (June), pp. 866–905.
[18] Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination, p. 9. See also Cooper, F. and Stoler, A. L. 1997, ‘Between metropole and colony: rethinking a research agenda’, in Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, pp. 1–56.