View the map below. Click and scroll to explore the journey or view the map in full screen on StoryMaps (better for mobile).

This interactive visualisation shows for the first time the location of over twenty-five recipients of the1837 Report of the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements) in the Australian colonies

In August 1838, from Cape Town, Quaker Backhouse sent the Report hot off the press to at least twenty-five men and two women of influence that he had met in the Australian colonies. The precious packages were posted across oceans by ship into the hands of a multi-denominational network of humanitarians, religious figures, colonial officials, police magistrates, and powerful settlers.

Backhouse attached short letters to each parcel. To 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 highly important subject.’ To George Langhorne, a missionary at Port Phillip, Backhouse wrote the report was ‘deeply interesting, and well calculated both to restrain outrage against the Aboriginal inhabitants of our Colonies, and to promote rational sentiments respecting their rights.’

The 1837 Report ushered in a new era of Aboriginal protectorates across the Australian colonies and New Zealand that would have far reaching consequences for Indigenous peoples under the rubric of ‘protective governance’. The report, a touchstone or ‘blueprint’ of British humanitarian policy in the 1830s in new settler colonies such as Australia, North America, New Zealand and the Pacific, was released in the wake of the abolition of slavery in British settlements (1834), when humanitarians turned their attention from the abolitionist cause to the fate of Indigenous peoples in Britain’s colonies. It coincided with a violent land rush in these new colonies, and the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands. Along with recommendations, the report contained hundreds of pages of testimony by Indigenous peoples and humanitarians, as well as colonial and military officials.

Backhouse and Walker attached the highest importance to the report. They believed it would bring a moral ‘awakening’ to settlers who had invaded Aboriginal lands and protection to Aboriginal people on violent frontiers. Despite these efforts, the notion of a ‘humane’ colonisation was always to be an impossible project.