'When the Moon shall become as large as the Sun': Unsettled settlers and the early Sydney press. Issue 1 (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Warren, Mick
• Is Part Of: History Australia. Volume 17:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 115
• Page End: 133
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: New South Wales -- settler colonialism -- emotion -- newspapers -- imperial humanitarian governance; Australia -- History -- Periodicals; Australia; History; Periodicals; 905
• DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2020.1717351
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1449-0854

Abstract

Abstract: The scale of militarisation in early New South Wales has recently received significant scholarly attention. Some scholars lament the ways in which cultural histories of the frontier have obscured the material and military dimensions of dispossession. Far from an image of inept 'Redcoats' struggling through torrid terrain, what has emerged from this renewed focus is an understanding of the sophisticated military strategy that developed across the colony in response to increasing Aboriginal resistance. But to disregard the insights that cultural history provides risks obscuring the emotional and imaginative relationships forming between settler communities and colonial administrators that both shaped and responded to this violence. Focusing on public narratives of frontier violence and the importance of emotive language in the diversifying New South Wales press between 1803 and 1838, this article places fear and settler victimhood at the heart of the dialectic which accelerated the dispossession of Aboriginal people. Just as humanitarianism was coming to dominate the course of British imperial governance into the 1830s, comprising an 'emotional community' opposing settler violence, white victimhood was hardening as the central myth around which settler subjectivities were fashioned.