J.C Byrne, Entrepreneurial Imperialism and the Question of Indigenous Rights

Shino Konishi, School of History, ANU

This paper will focus on Joseph C. Byrne, a slick-tongued Irish traveller who tried his hand in a number of colonial schemes and fashioned a reputation as an expert on emigration. In 1848 he published his two-volume opus Twelve Years’ Wanderings in the British Colonies. From 1835 to 1847, describing his ostensible experiences in New Zealand and the Australian colonies, and then embarked on a lecture tour throughout Britain promoting emigration. In 1849 and 1850 he published a number of emigrant guides to the individual Australian colonies, as well as the Cape of Good Hope and Port Natal in Southern Africa. Descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferate throughout Byrne’s numerous guides. While his texts were partly informed by his own travels, he also quoted liberally from official correspondence, newspapers, and other contemporary works. Thus his accounts not only detail his own individual opinions on the nature and rights of different indigenous peoples as well as their treatment by the colonists, actual and potential, they also reflect a broader spectrum of imperial attitudes towards native peoples.

In this paper I will focus on Byrne’s accounts of indigenous people in the Australian colonies, New Zealand, and Natal, analysing his ideas of how native peoples might best serve the interest of British emigrants: that is how they might or might not be made ‘useful’ to British subjects, and also, in some cases, how their inevitable demise would provide ‘peculiar advantages to emigrants’. These surprisingly diverse accounts of Indigenous people illustrate the problems posed by the ‘native question’ in imperial, metropolitan thinking, and the way in which Britain grappled with envisaging the future place of indigenous people within its colonies in the face of growing settler demands for land as well as security, both physical and commercial.  This was an increasingly acute problem in the wake of the hardening of racial theories, and the apparent decline of native populations.

Shino Konishi is a research fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History in the School of History, ANU.

ALL WELCOME
Please direct enquiries to Kynan.Gentry@anu.edu.au