Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous peoples and settlers in 19th century Pacific Rim cities by Penelope Edmonds, and: Prophetic Identities: Indigenous missionaries on British colonial frontiers, 1850–75 by Tolly Bradford (review)

The first of these books is a comparative study of urbanization and Indigeneity in the Pacific Rim cities of Melbourne and Victoria. Penelope Edmonds opens her argument with the proposition that the nineteenth-century frontiers did not exist solely in the backwoods and borderlands of empires but were also present in the proliferation of towns and cities that were the triumph of settler colonialism. Cities such as Melbourne and Victoria were imagined by their British inhabitants as projections of imperial power, and sites in which Anglo-Saxon civilization and culture were reproduced on a virtually blank slate. For Edmonds urbanization, modernization and colonization were critical elements of a powerful imperialist narrative in which Anglo-Saxon ascendancy was represented as overwhelming Indigenous peoples around the globe. Yet if such grand and racist narratives provided colonists with the justifications for marginalizing their local predecessors as wild, primitive and doomed, the actual practice of colonial city-building was complicated by the stubborn perversity with which Indigenous people continued to persist in frontier cities long after they had begun to flourish.

The comparative value of the two cities is in the neat parallels of their careers. They were settled within a decade of each other—Melbourne, then called Port Phillip, in 1837 by pastoralists from the convict colony of Van Diemen’s Land, and Victoria by the traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1843. Edmond’s describes the two communities in these early years as “transactional contact zones”: places dominated by mercantilist economies in which relations between the new arrivals and Indigenous inhabitants were complex and fluid (242). Victoria, as a product of fur trade society, was a particularly good example of what Edmond’s calls “an indigenized polity” (3). But even Port Philip, where European elites were hardly inclined to marry into Aborigine families, remained a collection of tents and houses the frontier ran through, rather than around. And colonial relations in both sites were tempered by the influence of a powerful humanitarian lobby in London, and the attempts of that lobby’s local agents and missionary allies to conciliate and adapt Aboriginal populations to British modes of living. By the 1850s, however, that metropolitan influence was on the wane, and racist and reactionary theories of human difference were in the ascendancy.

The second half of the century saw gold rushes and subsequent migration transform both communities from frontier outposts into imperial cities and hubs of empire. The changing conditions on the frontier were amenable to the logic of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, and increasingly vigorous attempts were made by colonists to establish exclusively White cities. Edmonds shows how civic leaders sought to eradicate urban populations of Indigenous peoples through legislation, city planning and occasionally force. Edmond argues that despite the goodwill of metropolitan philanthropists and Indigenous resistance by the end of the nineteenth century the mutable and complex diversity of the earlier colonial period had been replaced by rigid racial stratification. And in a sense that stratification has shaped this book as well, because, despite the suggestion of the title, and frequent reminders of Indigenous agency, the experiences of those peoples who paid the highest price for the new geography of the settler-colonial cities are not explored here in any detail. This is a criticism which could not be levelled at Tolly Bradford’s Prophetic Identity, which has as its conceptual heart the Indigenous perspective missing from Edmond’s accounting of things colonial.

In Prophetic Identities Bradford pursues a similarly comparative approach to that of Edmonds, a similar periodization and a similar line of argument. For both historians Indegenity was not an extant structure against which the great waves of nineteenth-century European expansionism broke, but a product, in Bradford’s words, of global processes that operated in distinct ways in...