‘O Sin, Sin, what hast thou done!’: Aboriginal people and convicts in evangelical humanitarian discourse in the Australian colonies, 1830–50

Abstract

Abstract: Much of the existing scholarship that compares attitudes towards Aboriginal people and convicts insufficiently discusses the significant discursive connections that linked these groups in early colonial Australia. This article is a sustained account of the many ways convicts and Aboriginal people were seen to be similar within the framework of evangelical humanitarianism between 1830 and 1850. This overlay was particularly significant considering the prominence of evangelicalism in the nineteenth-century British Empire and the substantial influence that humanitarians exercised over British colonial policy in this period. In particular, this article discusses three significant discursive connections. First, Aboriginal people and convicts were each viewed as both victims of sinful processes—colonisation and transportation respectively—and as sinners themselves, denounced for their perceived indolence, intemperance and sexual transgression. Second, believing that all belonged to a common humanity, evangelicals were fervently dedicated to the moral reformation and salvation of both groups. Third, in evangelical humanitarian discourse there were moments of explicit comparison in which the degradation of the convict was used to suggest the potential for Aboriginal redemption, and the trope of the ‘savage’ Aboriginal was used to excoriate European behaviour. Exploring the extensive connections between Aboriginal people and convicts thus complicates our understanding of the hierarchies of ‘respectability’ and ‘civilisation’ that were so important to early colonial Australian discourse. Show more