Protection, Settler Politics and Indigenous Politics in the work of William Thomas

William Thomas, fresh from humanitarian social circles in London and armed with instructions to “protect” Aboriginal people as they were faced with the British colonisation of their country in the Port Phillip district of the New South Wales (NSW) colony, reached Melbourne in late 1838 to begin to work in early 1839. Along with 3 other Assistant Protectors also travelling from London, he arrived to carry out a humanitarian experiment imposed from the metropole without the consent of colonial authorities.¹ At the time of Thomas’ arrival, there were approximately one thousand settlers in the township, but the population was to grow rapidly, and is estimated to have reached four thousand by the end of 1839. In this year, the first group of British immigrants, numbering one thousand and thirty-six, arrived to boost the Port Phillip settler population.² Melbourne was a burgeoning town, with a complex political system where 2 regimes, one settler-colonial, the other Indigenous, came into contact. Thomas remained in the colony until his death in 1867, keeping detailed journals of his work as Assistant Protector and later as Guardian of Aborigines.

Using Thomas’ journals, reports and other colonial documents this paper explores the conjunction of imperially designed protection policy, settler politics, and Indigenous politics in the early work of the Port Phillip Protectorate through a focus on a single event: the “Lettsom incident” of October 1840. Acting under the instructions of NSW Governor George Gipps and Port Phillip Superintendent Charles La Trobe, a detachment of mounted police, led by Major Samuel Lettsom, twice raided the campsites of a large group of Kulin people in Melbourne. In the second raid, hundreds of Aboriginal people were captured and marched to jail at gun and bayonet point, before all but thirty were released in subsequent days. Two Aboriginal men were killed, one in the raid and one when later attempting to escape. Lettsom’s raids, while justified as retaliation for frontier violence on the edge of British settlement, took place not on the fringes of the colony, but in its main town, Melbourne. Furthermore, many of the people held, as well as the 2 who were killed, were not from Kulin groups who had been involved in the original frontier attacks that Gipps had authorised and for which La Trobe gave as the ostensible reason for the raids. While the raids were seemingly disconnected from the Protectorate, Gipps used them to justify an explicit change in policy that saw the Protectors sidelined. Instructions from London had emphasised “itinerating” (moving with Aboriginal people in their seasonal movements about their country) whereas the new policy envisaged the creation of permanent stations operating as places of “refuge” for Aboriginal people. The Lettsom raids, therefore, were a turning point in relations between settlers, the Protectorate, and Indigenous communities.

In order to understand the full significance of the Lettsom incident, we need to take a broad view of politics and a long view of colonial relations. Colonial relations with local Indigenous communities were first established in June 1835 when John Batman, heading a group of fourteen settlers from Van Diemen’s Land who had come seeking new land to colonise across the Bass Strait, signed 2 treaties with Kulin clans around the Melbourne and Geelong areas.³ Batman was accompanied by a group of Aboriginal men identified as “Sydney blacks” who helped him negotiate a “purchase.” The colonial and British governments refused to recognise this treaty, deeming all land to belong already to the Crown, and therefore not open to negotiation between Aboriginal people and settlers.

Regardless of the treaty’s status within the colonial power structure, it is important to try to understand its meaning in local relations. Within Aboriginal culture, land “sale” in the European sense was not possible; as Richard Broome puts it, a clan could not “sell its religious and social birth right to strangers who did not know the country, nor how to care for it.”⁴ However, Kulin communities did have systems where temporary access to country for visiting clans could be negotiated through appropriate ceremony.⁵ In his discussion of the...