For a time, British Empire history continued to flourish, and with it detailed knowledge about the interconnected hierarchy of British power. But, like an outmoded dialect, that knowledge was discarded in the 1970s and 1980s as irrelevant to Australian self-understanding. It is only now being gradually reconstructed, for new and different purposes. The main concern now is the networks that grew and flourished across British territories, networks of family and friendship, of men and women, as the reality underpinning the institutionalised power that interested an earlier generation.

Now, it seems, nation-building and national independence have gone their way in their turn. With considerable authority, Angela Woollacott’s Settler Society in the Australian Colonies points the way for a new generation. We hear echoes of the imperial generation, and even an echo of the supposedly long dead ‘Whig history’. Woollacott’s reference to the ‘protracted struggle’ of women for the vote and other forms of civic emancipation is strangely reminiscent of W.C. Wentworth, though Wentworth’s concern, of course, was the civic emancipation of men.

‘Now, it seems, nation-building and national independence have gone their way in their turn’

The geographical perspective is equally large. Some of the best parts of Woollacott’s book are in its references to Western Australia and the Indian Ocean, where there is a sweep of interconnection rather different from that in the east. The Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857–58 figures largely, as it ought to do. Woollacott also draws together a wide range of contemporary scholarship. Perhaps she overstates its novelty. ‘Various scholars,’ she says, ‘have pointed to the mid-nineteenth century decades as a time when the empire was envisaged as an interconnected body politic.’ And yet this was a truism of Australian writing fifty years ago, when giants such as Keith Hancock, Margaret Kiddle, Max Crawford, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and John La Nauze stalked the land.

A distinctive ancestor of this text is Michael Roe’s pioneering Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835–51, published in 1965. With both Roe and Woollacott, the method consists of treating historical actors as the bearers of great ideas, most of them brought ‘in their baggage’, as Roe would have said, from the centre of empire, ideas which, memishly, seem almost to have a substance and trajectory of their own.

‘Some of the best parts of Woollacott’s book are in its references to Western Australia and the Indian Ocean’

In Roe’s day, this meant giving a new importance to ideas as players in their own right on the Australian historical stage. Since the 1960s, under the pressure of new scholarship, the ideas that Roe wrote about have tended to fragment, looking different from one individual to the next, and within each bearer changing with the years. In the process, they have become events rather than things, and contingent on people rather than the other way around. The new work on the history of emotion takes us powerfully in this direction. So does cognitive psychology and neurophysics.

Woollacott has her own take on this. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, for instance, figures largely in this book. In traditional historiography, Wakefield seems to be the bearer or creator, par excellence, of a great idea, namely ‘systematic colonization’, which inspired the British settlement of South Australia and also, as Woollacott points out, the now largely forgotten settlement of Australind, south of Perth, as well as settlements in New Zealand. Woollacott also remarks on the way the British government’s land regulations for New South Wales in 1831 were ‘influenced’ by Wakefield and his supporters. He was, she says, ‘a major historical figure’.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield by Benjamin Holl (courtesy of the National Librrary of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

She goes further. As with the other major figures in her book (Dumaresqs, Macleays, Prinseps), she presents Wakefield as one of a family network, a fabric of blood relations spread across the empire. In this way she draws a connection between the way individuals operate within families, especially from a gendered point of view, and the way they colonise. She has significant things to say, for instance, about violent manhood. Colonial democracy itself, and responsible government, rested partly on the assumption that citizens (meaning men) were typically rational and respectable. But as she points out, a readiness to kill and to turn a blind eye to killing was another part of the masculinity package. Without violence the colonial project had to fail.

But perhaps there was even more to Wakefield than this. Ideas are enigmatic things. Wakefield’s skill lay in distilling conversation already in the air. For instance, a year or so before he got his great idea together the wealthy New South Wales settler James Macarthur had suggested to the British government, in the same terms, that colonial land should be seen as a ‘fund’ which the government could use to draw off excess population from the mother country. Such talk jarred with the hard orthodoxies of classical economics, and Macarthur echoed the humanitarian economist Simonde de Sismondi, whom he had met not long before.

Woollacott unearths much moral ambiguity in the way family members talked to one another about the process of colonisation. Wakefield’s ‘system’ can likewise be heard as part of a larger conversation, subtly fraught in the same way. The British Empire was an extraordinarily complicated enterprise, full of profound patterns of light and shade. We need a book twice as long to bring that out.

As it stands, the book is a concise, useful, fresh, and often original summary of a vast and difficult topic, which, after two centuries of thought, we are still a long way from understanding well.