Quaker Humanitarians, Imperial Journeys & Early Histories of Human Rights in the Antipodes
Eyewitness to Empire
This website tells the story of the troubled politics of witnessing and humanitarian reform in the Antipodes for the first time. It traces the little known British Quaker journeys of investigation to Australia and the Pacific in the nineteenth century, coinciding the abolition of the slave trade in British settlements (1833).
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were key to the antislavery campaigns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and crucial to the flowering of abolitionism and an evangelical humanitarianism that was critical of Britain’s conduct in the colonies. Yet much of the scholarship on this centres on the transatlantic world, missing the crucial chapters of British imperialism in the Australian and Pacific colonies.
The site traces the nine-year journey of Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker’s 1830s tour to Mauritius, the Australian colonies, and to the Bass Strait islands; the journey of Daniel and Charles Wheeler’s tour to the Pacific, including Hawaii and Tahiti in the 1830s; and Joseph Neave and Walter Robson’s tour to Australia, including Queensland and the Pacific Islands in the 1860s. These Quakers were travelling ‘under concern’, a traditional form of investigative travel officially sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends.
In these colonies of settlement and slavery in the Southern hemisphere, the Quakers interviewed convicts, Aboriginal peoples, and the enslaved and unfree. Their journeys to document slavery, colonisation, and the injustices of empire were humanitarian eye-witnessing exercises and also unpredictable cross-cultural encounters. As we show, at times the terms of inquiry could slip their bounds and moral certainties could begin to unravel.
This research brings these key Antipodean histories of dispossession, slavery, and humanitarian activism into conversation with the larger, global histories of empire and human rights. We hope that this website offers a rich, visual and publicly accessible view into these early Antipodean journeys of humanitarian action and thought, that at times were fraught. We showcase rare archives, images, maps and objects that are reunited for the first time to tell these hidden stories.
We acknowledge the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, and Pacific peoples, and respects their sovereignty in lands and waters.
See the five Quaker journeys to the Antipodes:
Journey 1: Backhouse and Walker 1832–1838 (Australia, Mauritius and the Cape Colony) overview
In 1832–1838 British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled to the Australian colonies of Van Diemen’s Land, New South Wales, and Swan River in Western Australia, Mauritius and South Africa’s Cape Colony. Backhouse and Walker were fundamental to the creation and expansion of humanitarian networks in the Antipodes, where they made major interventions in matters concerning Aboriginal peoples, penal reform, slavery and education.
Journey 2: Backhouse and Walker: Slavery and Freedom In the Bass Strait
In October 1832 Backhouse and Walker sailed colonial sea-frontier of the Bass Strait Islands to interview the Aboriginal women and the European sealers who lived together. The Quakers exchanged gifts with Aboriginal women. Above all, the Quakers wanted to collect women’s ‘testimony’ or evidence of their ‘sufferings’. They believed that the women were ‘slaves’ and the sealers their brutal ‘masters’. But the women believed they were free.
Journey 3: Daniel and Charles Wheeler in The Pacific and Australia, 1832-1836
In 1833–1838 British Quaker Daniel Wheeler and his son, Charles Wheeler, sailed to the Australian colonies, New Zealand and the Pacific, where they visited Hawaii and Tahiti. The Quakers went to the Koloa plantation on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai in 1836 and were troubled by concerns over slavery. They met key Pacific leaders Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti and King Kamehameha III of Hawaii.
Journey 4: ‘The Germ of Slavery’? Neave and Robson to Queensland and the Pacific, 1866–1868
In 1866–1868 British Quakers Joseph Neave and Walter Robson travelled to Queensland, Australia, amid fears of a new ‘Pacific slavery’. Here they were drawn into key humanitarian and political circles who protested against the Pacific labour trade, and they expressed their concern about the violence towards Aboriginal peoples. The Quakers travelled on a missionary ship to the Pacific and Neave to New Zealand in 1869 to investigate the labour trade and missionary activity.
JOURNEY 5: the Curious afterlife of the 1837 ‘Select Committee Report on Aboriginal Tribes’ in the australian colonies
Quaker James Backhouse’s distribution of the 1837 British Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements) to influential people in the Australian colonies reveals the humanitarian circuits of information and policy within empire. The scope of this distribution and the breadth its recipients is visualised here for the first time using ArcGIS StoryMaps technology.
