Threlkeld arrived in 1824 under the aegis of the London Missionary Society to found a mission to ‘civilise’ and convert Aboriginal people to Christianity at Lake Macquarie. Early New South Wales was a magnet for men like Threlkeld. Think of John Macarthur, William Bligh, Francis Greenway, George Caley, John Grant – all admirable types, in their way, for their boundless energy, dedication, and vision; but also highly flawed characters: adversarial ‘perturbators’, restless, irascible, self-important, and extremely annoying.

Johnston has other overarching purposes in this book: it is a case study in textual analysis. She reminds us that she is no mere finder of ‘facts’ (I fear she has historians in mind here). Rather, she wants to show us that ‘reading texts and tracing the movement of ideas complicates a chronological teleology’. In other words, texts are not direct and accurate reflections of past events. They are constructed, mediated by power relations in society, by church, state, and empire, shaped by pre-existing patterns of address, of writing, of lobbying. Historians everywhere will be grateful for this insight.

Bracketing the book at beginning and end is another, more recent, paper war: the ‘history wars’ of the 1990s. Threlkeld played a bit part in the battle between Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle, both of whom come in for a drubbing in Johnston’s conclusion. This connection was also explored by Alan Lester in 2006; here it seems a little out of date, as the ‘history wars’ have been well and truly over for some years now. (The dimming effects of time may account for the priceless line: ‘Windschuttle is by no means a postmodernist.’)

To explore the ‘paper war’ of the 1820s, Johnston has drawn together an enormous and rich archive, presumably uncovered during the research for her earlier study Missionary Writing and Empire (2003). It includes Threlkeld’s published linguistic work, his attacks on his enemies, as well as newspaper reports and debates, letters, court case transcripts, missionary society archives, and parliamentary reports that involved him and his mission in one way or another. The Paper Wars launches into the anatomisation and analysis of this ‘hydra-headed collection’ in order to recover what Johnston calls an ‘ethnography of white colonial culture’ from the silent, dry pages.

The book’s structure is unusual. Chapters two to five are based roughly on different types of records, as well as on themes and events. We begin with Threlkeld’s impressive linguistic work on the Aboriginal language of Lake Macquarie and the Hunter Valley and its later nineteenth-century published versions (chapter two). We then return to the 1820s press reports on Threlkeld’s work and his own engagement with the public via the newspapers, particularly after the execution of an Aboriginal man, Tommy, for murder, in 1827 (chapter three); the letters and published material associated with Threlkeld’s arrest for debt after Reverend Samuel Marsden refused to sign off on his bills and the London Missionary Society failed to honour them, including his own lengthy and ill-advised published defence (chapter four); and, finally, the records of court cases in which Threlkeld and his Aboriginal friend and teacher Biraban acted as translators for Aboriginal men brought to trial in colonial courts (chapter five). Each of these sources and themes is contextualised by some research on language, law, the early colonial press, and so on.

Most biographical and historical studies of Threlkeld have focused on his linguistic work at Lake Macquarie, his role as intermediary for Aboriginal prisoners, and his courageous and outspoken criticism of frontier violence. Johnston has provided a far wider, richer context in which to see him – the fascinating and complex world of the small but often virulently opposed group of religious men in Sydney, the gossipy society of early Sydney, and the larger network of missionaries and their supporters worldwide. Linking them all is the net of printed words, cast across the globe. New and unflattering light is thrown on Threlkeld in the process: no longer a cross-cultural hero, he emerges as a deeply flawed human being – ‘opinionated, self-regarding, litigious and pious’.

An interdisciplinary project attempting such a broad sweep of analysis was perhaps bound to have a few problems. One is that there are too many extraneous voices in the text. Johnston’s habit of citing numerous other writers and theorists often derails the analysis and bogs down the story that she is trying to tell. She is clearly more than capable of taking control, and her writing is at times wonderfully clear and evocative, so why she should persist with the postgraduate habit of citing every single source in the literature is mystifying. This, together with the minute dissection and intense focus on the texts, tends to disconnect them from the tragic or poignant human experience that they describe.

The book labours under the common but mistaken belief that the colony was emerging from its ‘penal’ origins to a ‘free settler’ phase in the 1820s and 1830s. Hence all sorts of things look ‘new’ when they were in fact well established. For example, the long history of Aboriginal people and the British legal system, and the fact that governors and judges had been struggling with such issues from the start, is missed. It could have helped explain Threlkeld’s contradictory stances on whether or not Aboriginal people could give evidence in court – Aboriginal killers who were not accepted as subjects of British law had escaped the noose in the past. The colonial legal system was not ‘nascent’ in the 1820s but had been developing, with a local flavour, from the beginning. And it was not through the newspapers of the 1820s that the white colonists became aware of Aboriginal Law. They had been watching – and accepting – its enactment in Sydney’s streets and contest grounds for over thirty years.

The strangest thing about this book is that while it deals with the fate of Aboriginal people, and with a number of individual stories, Johnston declines to extend her ‘ethnographic’ approach to them. It is as though half the story is missing. They pop in and out of the text as patient language teachers and translators, as hapless accused standing in courtrooms, as condemned men trembling on the scaffolds. But we learn little about them as people – about country, family, networks, personalities, cultures, laws, or strategies, all of which would have shaped their interactions with missionaries and settlers. Johnston is rightly uneasy about ‘pursuing the chimera of the unmediated native voice’, because her sources are ‘so laden with ideological baggage’. But the quest for the ‘native voice’ is not the same as the ethnographic task of trying to grasp the world of cross-cultural encounters. After all, it is this encounter that fascinated, humbled, and drove Threlkeld himself. It might have illuminated what remains so striking about his story, despite his flaws: his unwavering dedication to studying Aboriginal language, and wanting to get it right, which he could easily have given up, but which became a priceless gift to future generations; and his awareness of their suffering, which compelled him to speak out against settler violence and atrocity in defiance of most of the rest of colonial society. At the same time, his familiarity with Aboriginal Law, and what Inga Clendinnen calls ‘a tough warrior culture’, probably also led to his urgent attempts to bring an end to internecine fighting, battles, and killings – through the British courts, if necessary. Perhaps it is this, and not the ‘cracks in the British legal system’, that also explains his and others’ prevarications in the courtroom.

The Paper War is an important book nonetheless in its bold interdisciplinarity and its magnificent span. Johnston’s insistence on looking at an entire, connected archive, her careful examination of these diverse texts within their myriad contexts, and her recreation of this forgotten world, make it a valuable and welcome contribution to our understanding of colonial New South Wales, missionaries, and empire.