ABSTRACT
As well as providing descriptions of life in Port Jackson in his An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, David Collins also documented the expansion of British imperial and colonial interest from the initial Sydney Cove settlement into other areas of Australia and New Zealand. 1 The first volume of the Collins text included a report from the lieutenant-governor of the British settlement at Norfolk Island, Phillip Gidley King, providing his assessment of two Māori men he ordered to be kidnapped from New Zealand in 1793 to assist with the production of flax which grew on Norfolk Island. Collins also documented the expansion of the British settlement from Port Jackson to the ‘frontier’ region around the Hawkesbury River from 1794, and the conflict between the British settlers and Aboriginal communities that resulted. British expansion in the region created a number of new ‘nodes’ of imperial activity, as the British began to operate at different sites within a Tasman world. 2 In each of these nodes we can discern very different modes of connection with local indigenous peoples, shaped by both the reaction of the particular indigenous peoples to British incursion, the varied modes of British intervention in the region, and the racially informed ideas which the British brought to each encounter. Collins’s Account was a profoundly influential text in the creation and reiteration of racial thought in this developing Tasman world, as his text clearly articulated a sense of Māori property ownership and political development, while his ethnographic assessment of Aboriginal people fed into metropolitan racial thought to bolster a concept of Australian indigenous people as marking the limits of human difference.
