"Providence Designed It for a Settlement": Religious Discourses and Australian Colonial Texts

Emma: How favoured the place seems, Mamma; as if Providence had designed it for a settlement.

Mrs. S.: It might indeed have been so ordained, my dear: you know nothing happens without God's knowledge: the party might have been under His especial providence when they selected it.

(A Mother's Offering to Her Children)

In the above quotation from A Mother's Offering to Her Children (1841), the first children's book published in Australia, Mrs. Saville is convinced not only that God is an Englishman but that imperialism is part of the divine plan. The settlement in question, in the far north of Australia, is represented in this exchange between mother and daughter as having been waiting for British ships to land, like a sleeping princess waiting for the kiss that will awaken her, and Emma Saville, modeling for the book's child readers how the imperial project is to be understood, articulates the identification of Christianity and imperialism naturalized in A Mother's Offering and many other Australian colonial texts for children.¹ As well, this passage displays a feature common in Australian narratives of exploration and settlement: a telling silence concerning the original owners of the land, the Aboriginal people who had for many thousands of years enjoyed the advantages of the place "ordained" by Providence as a British settlement. The nineteenth-century children's texts that I discuss in this article belong to a period of colonial expansion, when the Australian landscape was transformed and British rule established. They all display the naturalized racism of their time, manifested in the assumption that white races are inherently superior to black races, and they mobilize discourses of Christianity in order to justify the imperial project.² Their narratives, which focus on the adventures of white children and young people, depend for drama and excitement upon two kinds of conflict: with a strange and often hostile land and with Aborigines generally constructed as Other—barbaric creatures, whose actions and words are always set against a normative British model. But colonial texts do not display a homogeneous set of ideologies; while they are all influenced by discourses of imperialism, they are also shaped by other discourses: of religion, race, class, and gender. And these discourses (as well as the ideologies they embody) are frequently at odds with one another, producing textual conflicts that speak eloquently of the complexity and ambivalence of colonial experience.

The central site of conflict in Australian texts is derived from the fact that "settlement" also constituted "invasion." The main thrust of colonization took place between 1788 and 1901, the period between first settlement and the founding of the nation of Australia; land was appropriated, cities established, and the Aboriginal population decimated through dispossession, warfare, and disease. At one extreme, Aborigines were viewed as examples of natural man, "brutish and unregenerate, lacking shame and moral sense" (White 13), while an opposing point of view held by philanthropic settlers and churchmen promoted the equality of all humans as children of God. The historian Henry Reynolds points to the conflict between the philanthropists' position and the inexorable march of imperialism: "the concept of racial equality was inconvenient in a society bent on dispossession and a threat to all those individuals and institutions with capital invested in Australia" (106).

It is impossible to overestimate the importance that Aborigines placed and continue to place on their spiritual connections with the land; individual Aborigines derived their identity from the land of their birth through a complex system of totemic associations. Rituals and ceremonies ensured the safety of the land, the renewal of plants and animals, and the coming of the rains. When white settlers appropriated land, Aborigines at first believed that these newcomers must be reasserting spiritual connections with the land known in a previous existence, so foreign was the notion that land could be claimed purely for gain. Many of the texts manifest powerful tensions between explicit and implicit treatments of Aboriginal spirituality; while its very existence is explicitly denied, or depicted in ways that serve the colonial imperative to locate Aborigines within the category...