Journey 1: James Backhouse and George Washington Walker’s tour to Mauritius, the Australian colonies, and South Africa in the 1830s

This example of early human-rights activism in turbulent post slavery Britain offers historians a fresh view of a global network of humanitarian reformers that extended into the Antipodean colonies. The Eyewitness to Empire research project unearths this history to tell a larger global story about the reach of humanitarian activism in what is known as the Age of Reform. In the Southern Hemisphere, where antislavery rhetoric sat uneasily beside settler confiscation of Indigenous land, the politics of compassion could be fraught and Quaker eyewitness to suffering could, at times, be miscalculated.

To date, scholarship has paid attention to the Backhouse and Walker’s assessment of convict discipline in the Australian penal colonies, yet until now little work has considered their extensive humanitarian networks and interventions regarding Aboriginal people in the face of settler frontier violence, and in particular, their distribution of the important British House of Commons 1837 Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements). This key report sought to halt frontier violence and advance measures to ‘protect’ Aboriginal people across the British colonies of settlement (see below).

Backhouse and Walker were fundamental to the creation and expansion of humanitarian networks in the Antipodean colonies during the 1830s, the ‘Age of Reform’. This project reveals the dense circuitry of humanitarian networks in the 1830s and 1860s and charts the traffic of ideas, policy and sentiment regarding the treatment of Indigenous peoples, convicts and enslaved and indentured workers in Britain’s second empire. It reunites for the first time important archives, images, objects and plant specimens to tell the story of reform in the Antipodes.

This study of Backhouse and Walker’s journey has been made possible by access to the rich archives located at Friends House Library, the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London and the Mitchell Library in Sydney, including published narratives, reports, letters, diaries, journals, artefacts and artwork.

Travel ‘Under Concern’

In 1831, supported by the Society of Friends’ London Yearly Meeting, Backhouse and Walker set sail on the ship Science to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in the company of a group of Chelsea Pensioners (retired soldiers of the British Army). The pair were travelling ‘under concern’, a traditional Quaker style of religious journeying with a 200-year lineage whose purpose was to witness and testify to the sufferings of others.

By the 1830s, many Public Friends travelled ‘under concern’ throughout Europe, the Atlantic and the Caribbean as part of a this longstanding political and religious tradition. Backhouse and Walker were the first to bring this practice to the Australian colonies.

James Backhouse’s official account of the journey, Narrative of Visit to the Australian Colonies (1843), described the driving motivation for the visit as ‘solely for the purposes of religious duty’, with the appendices containing reproductions of their certificates showing the support of the powerful Quaker Yearly Meeting to demonstrate the religious legitimacy of their voyage.

Curiously, Backhouse chose to post a version of the report published by the Aborigines’ Protection Society rather than that published by his own Quaker cohort, the Society of Friends. To these reports, he attached his own letters appealing for the rights of Indigenous peoples and urging that the recipients read and enact the report’s findings. He outlined the responsibilities of settlers and the government. For example, Backhouse wrote to Anglican reverend John Espie Keane of Bathurst, New South Wales:

The British Government is now awaking to a sense of its error of conduct towards the Native Tribes of its colonies … I hope that reading the Report may stir up thy zeal … on this interesting and highly important subject.

Backhouse sent the Aborigines’ Protection Society version of the report to key men of influence whom he had met in Sydney, including Colonial Secretary Alexander McLeay, Rev. John Dunmore Lang, Rev. John Saunders, Rev. William Cowper and Rev. Lancelot Edward Threlkeld. These men would be central to the formation of the Sydney branch of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (the Australian Aborigines’ Protection Society) in October 1838, suggesting that the report’s distribution was part of a transimperial moment of humanitarian activism.

From Cape Town, George Washington Walker wrote to one woman, Emma Freeman, wife of W. H. Freeman. Emma and her husband were landholders in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, and friends of Major Archibald Clunes Inness, the police magistrate at Port Macquarie, who also received a copy.

To Emma, Walker wrote:

Backhouse and myself … have used some pains in giving extended circulation to the ‘Report’ (which has reached us since our arrival here) ‘of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes, reprinted with Comments by the Aborigines Protection Society’. From our extensive acquaintance with the Settlers and Influential Inhabitants of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land, we have a better opportunity perhaps than most, of knowing in what quarters the said publication is likely to be made the best made use of. Among those we know at Port Macquarie, there are a few who have made the condition of the poor Aborigines such a subject of concern. Perhaps none have had their situation more heart, I mean in disinterested grounds, than thy self.

The subject has been too long suffered to slumber. While the race of Aborigines has literally been melting away before the white men on the lands of those unfortunate people – the rightful possessors of the soil – the British public, at length has had its attention awakened to the matter.

We do not know if Emma Freeman ever received the 1837 report.