ABSTRACT
While utopian communities have been established on various occasions in the postcolonial world, usually based on religious and communitarian principles, the settler colonies are distinctive in the utopian drive that propelled people to settle. Throughout the British Empire in particular, settlers saw themselves escaping the rigid class structures and economic inequality of Britain and saw the colony oering a new start to free settlers. As one emigrant put it in a letter home: “eight hours is a day’s work. That is the best of this country. We go to work at 8 a.m., and leave at 5 p.m. A man is a man, and not a slave” (qtd. Sargent 2001: 6). But the escape from class was not matched by an escape from the civilizing mission. In the words from an 1828 poem by Thomas Campbell, the immigrant’s anticipation is
To see a world, from shadowy forests won, In youthful beauty wedded to the sun; To skirt our home with harvests widely sown, And call the blooming landscape all our own, Our children’s heritage, in prospect long
(1874: 249)
Our children’s heritage will come when harvests are won from the shadowy forest, imagery that extended to prospects of the cultural enlightenment of the existing “shadowy” inhabitants. The settler colonies are a prime example of the contradictions of imperial utopianism with which this study began. The distance from home ensures the utopian promise of the new place. Reverend Sydney Smith, for example, writes: “To introduce a European population, and consequently the arts and civilisation of Europe, into such an untrodden country as New Holland, is to confer a lasting and important benet upon the world” (Gascoigne 2002: 7). But utopia must be created, usually at the expense of the
indigenous people, and as Alfred Crosby (1986) explains, at the expense of indigenous ora and fauna.
