ABSTRACT
The 1837 report of the Select Committee on Aborigines ushered in a new era of Aboriginal protectorates across the Australian colonies and New Zealand. Until now, historians have often conflated different editions of the Report, paying limited attention to its circulation and colonial reception. This chapter explores three different versions of the Report: that appearing in the official Parliamentary Papers; a shortened edition circulated by the Society of Friends; and an extended version published by the newly founded Aborigines’ Protection Society. Using previously unexamined archives, we reveal why two influential Quakers gave the APS version particular moral weight, and how they distributed it via humanitarian networks to at least 26 influential figures in the Australian colonies. Instead of a single defining narrative setting policy for Aboriginal protection, the report emerges as unstable and constructed. Using the correspondence of a metropolitan Quaker activist, Thomas Hodgkin, and a Quaker traveller-under-concern, James Backhouse, this chapter explores the Report’s complicated narratives, to reveal a range of 1830s attitudes to the culpability of the British nation and the protection of Indigenous subjects.
