The Civilisation of Port Phillip: Settler Ideology, Violence and Rhetorical Possession

by Thomas James Rogers

264 pp., Melbourne University Publishing, 2018,

ISBN: 9780522870602 (pbk), $49.99

Review by Jillian Beard

Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research

The Civilisation of Port Phillip provides a detailed examination of an array of rhetoric around the idea of civilisation, and its use in the Port Phillip district during the 1830s and 1840s. This district formed part of the colony of New South Wales from 1788 until 1851 when it became the separate colony of Victoria. Rogers’s re-examination of familiar events in the district during these seminal two decades enlivens our understanding to the ways in which the colonial contest for the space – the lands of Indigenous peoples including the Kulin – was heavily premised not just on physical violence, but also on a contest of ideas. Foremost among these ideas were those of civilisation and savagery. The intellectual histories of these Enlightenment ideas and their application in Australia’s early colonial period has been the subject of considerable recent scholarship. However, Rogers’s work offers a fresh perspective. Instead of tracing their origins, he focuses on how colonial actors in the district took them and used them to evaluate what they saw and experienced. In turn, he describes the discursive choices they made when weaving those analyses into the rhetorical fabric of the emerging colony.

Rogers engages with ‘recurring tropes that settlers used to explain their role, to justify instances of violence, and to imagine their future’ (p. 19). His critical analysis of events, their contemporary description and their presence in the subsequent historiography provide the reader with opportunities to reassess persistent legacies precipitated by the ‘Eurocentric ideal of a hierarchy of civilizations’. Integral to that hierarchy was an understanding of Indigenous societies as being acted upon by more ‘evolved’ European societies. Following anthropologists Pierre Clastres and James C. Scott, Rogers argues that the Indigenous societies encountered by the would-be Port Phillip settlers were not without agency living in a ‘state of nature’ but were the result of political choices (p. 31).

Rogers does a fine job of highlighting the ways in which colonial actors’ evaluations of Indigenous peoples and their actions were highly selective in terms of the evidence they relied on. He reinforces how persistently narrow-minded they were in the conclusions that they drew when relying upon notions of civilisation premised upon Enlightenment stadial theory. Through skilful reading of a wide variety of primary sources, he captures the complexity and fluidity of the emerging hierarchies within Port Phillip society. Moving beyond the assumption that every settler and colonial official saw all Indigenous peoples as uncivilised and problematic and all Europeans as superior, Rogers teases out the nuances of Port Phillip society and reminds us of the historiographical consequences of overlooking them. He portrays circumstances in which an Indigenous guide might outrank a violent convict thanks to their relative usefulness to the colonial project. Similarly, an escaped convict (in this case the infamous William Buckley), might be brought into the service of colonisers by being recast as an ‘Indigenous other’, because his time among the local people equipped him with language and cultural skills that were considered critical to attempts to negotiate with them.

In the same way that evaluations of Indigenous peoples were fluid and contingent on their usefulness to the colonial project, Rogers also demonstrates that descriptions of Indigenous shelters varied according to how colonial actors needed to construe the Indigenous peoples who constructed them. To the emergent humanitarians in the colony, the permanency of these shelters signalled potential for the further and continued ‘civilisation’ of the people who made them. For those more concerned with the possession of the territory on which the structures stood, the recognition of their permanence on the landscape marked them as ripe for destruction: a site for violence. Their presence punctured the ‘myth’ of itinerancy so regularly relied upon to sever Indigenous sovereignty. In a continuance of ‘conciliation’ first practised further north and decades earlier in Sydney, but brought to Port Phillip in the living memories of the Vandemonians who hoped to claim Port Phillip as their own, the huts were destroyed in acts of both physical and rhetorical possession.

While Rogers makes no overarching claims about the scope or scale of colonial violence in the Port Phillip district, each case study he expounds, particularly the later chapters on the search for lawyers Gellibrand and Hesse, and the work of police magistrate Captain Foster Fyans, lays bare how insidious a presence it was, both materially and rhetorically. This is a particular strength of the book and would have sufficed as its singular achievement. The Civilisation of Port Phillip is based on Rogers’s 2014 award-winning thesis and the book is proof the praise was justified. It proffers useful examples of critical historical analysis achieved through deep engagement with primary texts, and relevant historiography. His effort to reframe Eurocentric thinking about Indigenous Australian society is vital, and will prove useful to historians of Victoria and scholars of colonialism and empire. One drawback I perceive is by no means a criticism. Rogers set ambitious goals for his work. To prosecute them he has traversed a wide range of archival and intellectual territory, laying out numerous narratives and ‘colouring in’ their intellectual context and the subsequent rhetorical fallout. This has produced a dense text that may prove challenging for some undergraduate-level readers who would undoubtedly benefit from understanding both his method and his conclusions.