The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales by Anna Johnston, 226 pp, UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia, 2011, ISBN 9781921401541 (pbk), $39.95.

At first sight, possibly because of the back cover blurb and the opening lines of the introduction, one expects the book to be a new biography of the Reverend Lancelot Edward Threlkeld in his role as Missionary to the Aborigines at Lake Macquarie from 1825 to 1841. Although Threlkeld is the main character Anna Johnston insists that her work is neither biography nor history but a literary/cultural study. Be that as it may, I would argue that it is history and it is good history.

For the last 40 years colonial, imperial and cross-cultural historical studies have been dominated by the literary theorists and references to Foucault, Said and their contemporaries are almost mandatory in the historical literature. Johnston is really in this same historical tradition despite her claim to examine the archive ‘as a set of writing and reading practices, seeking to make different meanings than a historian might’. Of course she has in her sights historians with selective vision such as Henry Reynolds and Keith Windschuttle.

The ‘Paper War’ was Threlkeld’s own term for the bitter controversies he had with the directors of the London Missionary Society (LMS) – who first employed him at Lake Macquarie – the Reverend Samuel Marsden and the Reverend Dr John Dunmore Lang, involving him in public disputes and a libel case. Johnston extends the term to take in the paper archive that resulted.

The book has an introduction on colonial archives and textuality, five main chapters, a brief conclusion, a select bibliography, 39 pages of detailed notes and references and a comprehensive index. Each chapter is set in a colonial context. The first chapter, ‘Colonial Morality’, introduces the main players, Threlkeld himself, the Reverend Daniel Tyerman and his lay colleague George Bennet of the LMS who approved the mission, Marsden and Lang, and the two British Quakers, James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, who were caught up in the Paper Wars as observers and witnesses.

The second chapter, ‘Colonial Linguistics’, is concerned with Threlkeld’s pioneering work on the Awabakal language and how it was understood and used. The missionary’s linguistic work has always been regarded as his greatest achievement. Johnston appears to recognise this though throughout the book she is overly aware of what she sees as Threlkeld’s academic limitations. Anyone studying his linguistic work should begin with the LMS director Samuel Greatheed and the early missionary linguistic work in Polynesia.

Chapter 3, ‘Colonial Press’ takes us right into the Paper Wars. The narrative focuses on the harrowing story of Tommy, an Aboriginal prisoner, who was hanged in 1827 and attended by both Threlkeld and Lang. The attempt by a Catholic priest to baptise Tommy on the scaffold drew forth an angry correspondence in the press with Threlkeld writing as Spectator in the Sydney Gazette, to be followed by five more letters early in 1828 designed to expose the ‘heresies’ of the Catholic church. In a three-cornered correspondence that ensued Lang and Threlkeld became sparring partners, Lang identifying Spectator as ‘that well-known Missionary to the Aborigines, who has expended upwards of £2000 in forming a petty settlement, at Reid’s Mistake’ and making a snide allusion to his former acting career.

Chapter 4, ‘Colonial Respectability’, discusses Threlkeld’s embarrassing plight in 1828 when the LMS refused to honour his bills, wrongly accusing him of extravagance and presumably resenting his independent stance. Threlkeld’s published Statement in defence of his position is analysed as well as Threlkeld’s libel case against Lang in 1836 after Lang had published three articles on ‘Missions to Aborigines’ in his own newspaper The Colonist which were scornful and defamatory. The outcome of this case was seen as a Pyrrhic victory for Threlkeld as Lang was to pay one farthing damages.

Chapter 5, ‘Colonial Legality’, also involves the courts but it is the section of the book that is most concerned with Aboriginal issues such as the appropriateness of British law, the place of customary law, the use of Aboriginal evidence and the question of sovereignty. One question that is not comfortably resolved is the non-baptism of Biraban and presumably other Aboriginal people who were nominal Christians, who could have given evidence if baptised.

The question went deeper than Tommy’s case. The baptism question had split the Society Islands mission where Threlkeld had worked previously. The LMS had allowed individual missionaries to pursue the practices of their own churches. Some of the Calvinistic Methodist missionaries (including Threlkeld’s great friend John Williams) were prepared to baptise anyone who asked; those of Dissenting background regarded baptism as the first stage of church membership requiring impeccable character. In Tahiti the whole national conversion process had been delayed because the missionaries refused to baptise King Pomare II because of his drunken bouts and his homosexual behaviour. However, he did get baptised and was accepted as an antinomian though not admitted to church membership. No doubt Threlkeld would never have baptised Pomare whom he loathed just as he would never baptise Biraban whom he loved because his friend was frequently drunk. Although the Aboriginal mission came under Church of England control presumably more liberal Anglicans felt obliged to respect Threlkeld’s uncompromising position. It would be interesting to know if Biraban ever asked for baptism.

The Paper War is well-written and well-researched and is, as the blurb confirms, an ‘engaging and intelligent book’. While the unifying theme is exploring and interpreting the paper archive, Johnston has a professional interest in contemporary colonial studies and the networking theories of the British empire and humanitarianism. As a historian trained before the literary/cultural revolution I find the intrusion of the names of contemporary scholars in a historical narrative somewhat anachronistic but Johnston’s references are all pertinent and deftly done. To bury the names in remote endnotes would be inconvenient which rather justifies including contemporary names in the text.

Johnston suggests that her methodology is different from that of historians in regard to how documents come to be created but I doubt if this is so. Source criticism should always be a vital part of the historian’s approach. We should look at the documents in much the same way as she does except that, traditionally, the historian regarded this work as ‘homework’ and did not share it with his or her readers.

Because The Paper War is so well conceived and insightful I would like my comments to be taken as an alternate point of view rather than as criticism. Johnston resorts to social class and the Church/Chapel social divide as explaining most of the issues. While class was an undeniable factor the other two important factors in the breakdown of relationships were personalities and denominationalism (as distinct from the Church/Chapel divide).

Applying modern class terms to the past can be misleading. To see Threlkeld described as ‘a working-class British subject’ when he was the product of training designed to remove all traces of a working-class background seems a little anachronistic and that was why I prefer the term ‘mechanic class’ used by that incipient lower-middle class for themselves. Certainly some of the first LMS missionaries were working class, and as their critics said, ‘could not look a gentleman in the face’. But Threlkeld could look a gentleman in the face.

I do not take Lang’s jibes against Threlkeld too seriously as he had a somewhat warped personality and a penchant for malicious satire. His nasty unpublished satirical attacks on Marsden and the whole body of colonial clergy were far worse than anything he wrote about Threlkeld. The two missionaries to the Aborigines, William Walker and Threlkeld got off comparatively lightly – ‘Good grants of land, good flocks of sheep & good herds of cattle, are very good things after all for a zealous Missionary to the Aborigines’ (Fragment, Lang Papers, National Library of Australia). Any connection with trade was seen as self-aggrandisement and in Lang’s view, only men with university degrees should be conducting missions, yet he did have Threlkeld on his committee to supervise the German mission at Moreton Bay.

In the relationship with Marsden it is true that Threlkeld and Lang both thought Marsden was anti-chapel and had persecuted the LMS missionary William Pascoe Crook when he attempted to found a Congregational church in Sydney in 1810. While it was true that Marsden saw no need for a chapel in his parish he would not have interfered had not the Governor demanded it. Both Lang and Threlkeld wrote about the suppression and it appears to have been the initial cause of the breakdown of relationships.

None of the disputes make proper sense without taking into account the rise of denominationalism from around 1811 with the formation of the Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious Liberty to the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. Many of the LMS missionaries nurtured in an eclectic Calvinistic Methodism were converted to the new political Nonconformity. Threlkeld, who had been a field preacher for the Vicar of Hatherleigh, and Crook declared themselves Congregationalists and the influence of these men became a disrupting factor both at home and in the mission field.

The almost fanatical embrace of Dissent had an adverse effect on personality. Threlkeld was described as one of the ‘perpetual blisters’ on the LMS in 1832 and the others were significant. With their new-found freedom and zeal for reform these men were seen as trouble-makers by the establishment. Historian Coupland blamed them for stirring up hostility to the Boers in South Africa and John Smith in the West Indies became a martyr when he died in prison in 1824 for his presumed role in the slave revolt in Demerara. These men were models for Threlkeld to emulate. The LMS itself also fell victim to the rise of denominationalism and became a predominantly Congregationalist organisation. Tyerman and Bennet represented the two sides struggling for hegemony within the LMS.

While this review concentrates largely on the participants in the Paper War a large part of the book concerns Aboriginal issues particularly in relation to the evolution of the law. Johnston is even handed in her approach though occasionally allows herself to be influenced by politically correct secondary sources rather than ‘the tradition of the elders’. Biraban was after all a man of high degree schooled by the wise men of an earlier generation.

The Paper War deserves to be widely known. Like another Aboriginal history classic, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming by Robert Kenny (Scribe 2010), it deserves better quality presentation. The paper cover with its deliberate dog-eared appearance may be symbolic but it does not have market appeal. The illustrations (mostly portraits) are adequate but John Fraser’s linguistic map (fig. 23) is really too cramped to be useful and the print is too small to read.

Niel Gunson

The Australian National University