Abstract: Art history is replete with works whose prior existence is affirmed only by text, most commonly through titles and descriptions in catalogues, but also by passing mentions in other sources. A significant Australian colonial illustration of this phenomenon of textually surviving lost art concerns ‘Several Paintings on Panel’, described in detail by a colonial witness, which depict scenes intended to convey government messages to Indigenous Tasmanians during the Vandemonian War. These descriptions do not match the better known and frequently reproduced Tasmanian Picture Boards, typified in Figure 1, which survive in several archives around the world and have been the subject of considerable study and commentary. Their iconographical recovery is, we argue, an important correction to the imagery of frontier relations in 1820s and 1830s Van Diemen’s Land specifically and colonial Australia more generally.

Excerpt:

Positioning Myself: Teaching My Family History

White Settlers /Indigenous People

Voting rights / No vote until 1960

Public education / Residential schools

Title to land / Theft of land

Free Mobility rights / Pass system 1882-1936

Run for public office / No representation

Sell wheat freely / Limits on market

Support for famine / Mass starvation

Low cost loans / No personal loans

Abstract: Based on a metanarrative analysis of the self-reflexive process I undertook during my research into the “solidarity encounter” between Indigenous women and White women in a contemporary Canadian context, I argue that self-reflexivity is a fraught mechanism for grappling with and dismantling structural privilege. I recount how, despite my best self-reflexive efforts and expectations to the contrary, I could not completely forestall some of the ways in which my subjectivity and hence power would infuse the research—specifically, in how the specter of the liberal subject would haunt it. This haunting, I contend, is indicative of the limits of self-reflexivity when it is underpinned by modernist/liberal ideologies of subjectivity. In short, I convey the perils and promises of self-reflexivity as a mechanism for revealing researcher impact on and for leveling power relations in social justice research (and beyond). Specifically, I identify in my own practice elements of the “validated reflexive strategies” critiqued by Wanda S. Pillow. I conclude that self-reflexivity is most valuable when approached as a window into structural oppression and privilege and not only into the power of researchers as individuals. Building on Sara Ahmed’s reflexive “double turn,” I argue that radical reflexivity is a better model for avoiding the vortex of a self-reflexivity performed by modernist/liberal subjects. I propose that radical reflexivity can assist researchers to identify the ways in which our structural positions overdetermine (though never absolutely or seamlessly) the contours of our scholarly and political commitments.

Abstract: The approximately 18,000 imperial troops who arrived in New Zealand with the British regiments between 1840 and 1870 as garrison and combat troops, did not do so by choice. However, for the more than 3,600 non-commissioned officers and rank and file soldiers who subsequently discharged from the army in New Zealand, and the unknown but significant number of officers who retired in the colony, it was their decision to stay and build civilian lives as soldier settlers in the colony. This thesis investigates three key themes in the histories of soldiers who became settlers: land, familial relationships, and livelihood. In doing so, the study develops an important area of settler colonialism in New Zealand history. Discussion covers the period from the first arrival of soldiers in the 1840s through to the early twentieth century – incorporating the span of the soldier settlers’ lifetimes. The study focuses on selected aspects of the history of nineteenth-century war and settlement.

Land is examined through analysis of government statutes and reports, reminiscences, letters, and newspapers, the thesis showing how and why soldier settlers were assisted on to confiscated and alienated Māori land under the Waste Lands and New Zealand Settlement Acts. Attention is also paid to documenting the soldier settlers’ experiences of this process and its problems. Further, it discusses some of the New Zealand settlements in which military land grants were concentrated. It also situates such military settlement practices in the context of the wider British Empire.

The place of women, children, and the regimental family in the soldier settlers’ New Zealand lives is also considered. This history is explored through journals, reminiscences, biography and newspapers, and contextualised via imperial and military histories. How and where men from the emphatically male sphere of the British Army met and married women during service in New Zealand is examined, as are the contexts in which they lived their married lives. Also discussed are the contrasting military and colonial policies towards women and marriage, and how these were experienced by soldier settlers and their families.

Lastly, the livelihood of soldier settlers is explored – the thesis investigating what sort of civilian lives soldier settlers experienced and how they made a living for themselves and their families. Utilising newspapers, reminiscences, biography, and government records the diversity of work army veterans undertook in the colony is uncovered. Notable trends include continued military-style roles and community leadership. The failed farming enterprise is also emphasised. Going further, it offers analysis of the later years of life and the different experiences of soldier settlers in their twilight years, particularly for those with and without family networks in the colony. The thesis challenges the separation between ‘war’ and ‘settlement’ by focusing on a group whose history spanned both sides of the nineteenth-century world of colony and empire.

Abstract: U.S. citizens rarely feel implicated in the harm caused by the U.S.’s widespread use of drones, and both drones’ opponents and proponents focus on value calculus of their usage. Nasser Hussain’s “Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” looks at the problem from the wider angle of the harm continuous use of drones wages on affected communities. This article links inattention to drones’ effects to a related blind spot, “settler common sense”: the way non-native settler colonial subjects rely on framings of the world that normalize settlement as the background truth against which experience of the world is interpreted – and thereby render invisible other possible framings of justice and resistance. If U.S. citizens do not feel implicated in ongoing injustice toward Native Americans, how did that denial become possible? Looking at this problem may help us understand something about our capacity to ignore the use of drones as instruments of terror. In turn, Hussain’s points about how drones are experienced on either side of their usage may help us understand something about settler common sense and indigenous resistance.

Abstract: Inspired by postcolonial and feminist scholarship and new work on the law and British humanitarian governance, along with recent considerations of the maritime and ‘oceans connect’ approaches, this article examines the apparent ’emancipation’ acts of colonial officials and Quakers who turned to the law to retrieve high-status Aboriginal women from sealers on both sides of the Bass Strait oceanic frontier. Foregrounding issues of Indigenous law and political diplomacy alongside those of Europeans, and attending to questions of intimacy, gendered governance, protection and the law, the article considers how these variously intersected in an ‘anomalous legal zone’ – the watery Bass Strait world stretching between Van Diemen’s Land and the Australian mainland. In paying attention to Bass Strait as one oceanic and colonial legal field, and the appeals to law to address the problem of abduction, the article argues that higher orders of diplomacy were at play in a precarious period when the rapid colonisation of Aboriginal lands, negotiation and the stabilisation of incendiary frontier violence were necessary. Here, the attempted legal regulation of intimacies on colonial peripheries was directly connected to issues of land, invasion, diplomacy and treaty making.

Abstract: A large body of scholarship has explored how interracial marriages and informal sexual contracts alike became the target of state regulation in settler colonial societies, as categories of racial identity and their classifications in law became increasingly fixed through the late nineteenth century. In late colonial western Canada and Western Australia, settler governments deployed different legal strategies to manage the shared perceived problems of Indigenous prostitution and interracial cohabitation. As part of a wider program of Aboriginal governance, these governmental interventions were tied not only to late colonial ideologies about racial purity but also to an objective to contain Indigenous people’s mobility and their access to settler cities and towns. In both countries, however, authorities were confronted with the limits of the law in regulating interracial contact.

Abstract: China’s three northeastern provinces (Fengtian, Heilongjiang, and Jilin) were transfigured by Japanese imperialism in the opening decades of the 20th century. South Manchuria and the Kwantung Leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula in particular became the site of a railway imperialism that would, beginning in 1905, allow Japan to claim a sphere of influence in the northeast and profit from the export of soybeans, coal, lumber, and other raw materials from the region. The South Manchuria Railway Company (or “Mantetsu”), which held the dual mantle of joint stock-owning company and governmental national-policy company, was the central organ in Japan’s so-called management of Manchuria. The expansion of Mantetsu’s rail network (originally built by Czarist Russia in the late 1890s) in the post–World War I years allowed for greater extraction of resources and greater wealth for company stockholders, while giving rise to an upswell of protest from a burgeoning nationalist movement in mainland China as well as in the northeast itself. Throughout the preconquest period (pre-September 1931), bureaucrats, Mantetsu employees, doctors, teachers, and economic sojourners of every stripe made a home for themselves in Japanese Manchuria, parts of which were transformed to replicate the modern conveniences and amenities of the metropole’s urban centers.

The Manchurian Incident, which began on September 18, 1931, with a plot by renegade officers from the Kwantung Army (a division of the Japanese Imperial Army) to destroy Mantetsu track and blame it on Chinese brigands, led to the military takeover of the three northeastern provinces by January 1932. The establishment of the army-led state of Manchukuo in March 1932 gave way to a new kind of Japanese power and influence on the continent—one that operated independently from Tokyo and at the pleasure of the Kwantung Army. Despite repeated proclamations of pan-Asian unity and the harmony of the five races by the state’s propaganda agents, Manchukuo existed for the purpose of strengthening Japan’s war machine, as well as for planning a total renovation of the domestic Japanese state in line with army objectives.

Abstract: In the post-World War Two period, the federal government of Canada initiated a series of food subsidy programs (the Food Mail Program and Nutrition North Canada) and nutrition and health education initiatives that were officially intended to address hunger and malnourishment in Northern Indigenous communities by imposing settler foodways on Indigenous people. Interrogating food subsidy programs and nutrition and health education initiatives as part of a broader settler colonial project of Indigenous elimination, this paper reveals the ways in which the Canadian federal state employs contemporary discourses of development and humanitarianism to legitimise and normalise its presence and actions in Northern Indigenous territories.

Access the article at: www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal

Abstract: Contributing to recent research into settler colonialism, this paper takes an on the ground look at how this system manifests today. This research turns its lens on the white settler, unmasks settler myths of innocence and contributes to an understanding of how whiteness and white supremacism shape settler colonialism in what is now called the United Sates. This is a placed based study, focusing on the Klamath and Salmon Rivers. Consequences and complexities of the “back to the land” movement are looked at, and the question of “back-to-whose-land?” is asked? A convivial research approach, which is a back and forth interplay of analysis and action, has been utilized for this project. Also examined are efforts by settlers to engage with unsettling, both as individuals and through a collective settler effort at organizing, under the name “Unsettling Klamath River.” Unsettling can be described as the work of white settlers within the broader movement to decolonize, that is led by Indigenous People. Some false narratives have begun to shift and yet, this population of white settlers remains largely in a state of paralysis due to; a fragile settler identity, a reliance on a false entitlement and a debilitating fear of what will happen if truth-telling occurs. Building upon lessons learned, this paper concludes by offering ways that white settlers can begin to chip away at oppressive structures and move forward out of a state of complicity into a sense of responsibility, that is long overdue.