« The reservation and the reserve lie beyond the boundary of the settler normal: Jessica Hansen, ‘Boundaries on the “Wild” : Late Nineteenth-Century Governmental Language Concerning Yellowstone National Park and the American Indian’, Kalamazoo College, 2017
Settler anxiety and missionary pacification: Sean Carleton, ‘Settler Anxiety and State Support for Missionary Schooling in Colonial British Columbia, 1849 –1871’, Historical Studies in Education, 2017 »

South Australia as a laboratory of settler political traditions: Angela Woolacott, ‘Radical roots in Fiji: The impact of colonialism on Don Dunstan’, Griffith Review, 55, 2017, pp. 103-112

02May17

Abstract: South Australia’s reputation for progressive reform extends back to its origins in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s scheme for imperial systematic colonisation. Wakefield’s grand plans, which inspired followers and shaped several colonies in Australasia, aimed to rid Australia of convict transportation and to assist respectable free settlers. While land policy would limit the expansion of the frontier and regulate class relationships, those who worked hard would be able to acquire land, and settlers would have a voice in the framing of their laws. Wakefield’s scheme was born in the milieu of early nineteenth-century British philosophical radicalism. Jeremy Bentham died before South Australia was settled, but he was a keen supporter of its planning, and suggested that it be named to reflect its radical promise: ‘Felicia’, ‘Felicitania’ or ‘Liberia’. Regardless of just how well the state has lived up to those early rosy hopes, its sense of reformist exceptionalism has been woven into its history. One of its most important political leaders, Don Dunstan, the democratic socialist and nationally influential premier from 1967-68 and 1970-79, self-consciously adopted this tradition by titling his 1981 political memoirs Felicia.


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