ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the key place of Australia's Indigenous people in processes, as their dispossession was justified by ideas about racial difference. It examines the shared evangelical program that underlay both anti-slavery and missionary work, with its emphasis upon hard work in agricultural labour. The chapter reviews the final phase of the British anti-slavery movement during the 1820s and early 1830s, in which evangelical missionaries in the Caribbean attempted to administer religious instruction to slaves, prompting hostility from slave-owners who blamed them for insurrection. As Elizabeth Elbourne showed, the inquiry's report applied the language of anti-slavery to British settlers and sought to define principles that would uphold the rights of the Khoisan and Bantu peoples of southern Africa, Australian Aboriginal people, New Zealand's M-uori and Pacific Islanders. Many missionaries to Australia had been inspired by predecessors in the Caribbean and continued to use the language of anti-slavery in their work throughout the nineteenth century.
