On the political traditions of settler colonialism (Australia, for example): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s “settler transition”’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2016 | settler colonial studies blog

On the political traditions of settler colonialism (Australia, for example): Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream and Australia’s “settler transition”’, Journal of Australian Studies, 2016

27Jul16

Abstract: Focusing on radical labour historian Ian Turner’s The Australian Dream (1968), this article reflects on the evolution of Australia’s settler colonial imagination. During a few crucial decades in the nineteenth century, colonial traditions were overcome by settler colonial ones. The former espoused a system where British rulers would paternally manage a colonial environment and all its populations (pastoralists, free settlers, convicts, emancipated convicts, and Indigenous peoples); the latter advocated the establishment of self-reliant agricultural communities of free settlers. In Replenishing the Earth (2009), James Belich distinguished between settler “transition” and settler “revolution”, and emphasised the imaginative elements that underpin and precede the shift to settler self-government. As the global settler transition took hold, locales usually associated with the perception and expectation of degenerative processes were reconfigured as propitious sites for experimenting in sociopolitical regeneration. Following and expanding on Belich’s framework, this article links Australia’s settler transition with its historiography.

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