2002/01/01 by Julie Evans · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy #Australian History and Society #Diaspora, migration, transnational identity
paper · doi:10.1080/10314610208596190
openalex publication_date 2002/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The subject of this article is mid‐nineteenth‐century explorer and colonial official Edward Eyre. In supplementing existing biographical accounts, it investigates the interplay between Eyre the individual and the different colonial formations that framed his administrations at the beginning and the end of his career. In so doing, the paper brings to bear on discussions of Eyre's Australian and Caribbean writings certain comparative perspectives arising from his interventions in very different parts of the British Empire. The analysis suggests that with due attention to local circumstances, understandings of colonial governmentality can be extended by viewing colonial histories within comparative frameworks. In highlighting the contingency of race, and grounding its different discursive formulations in distinctive colonial contexts, this also contributes to that body of work that retrieves the historical correlation between race, resistance and repression. Accordingly, in the settler colony of Australia, Eyre's understandings of Aboriginal peoples came to be characterised by a preoccupation with establishing their authenticity, a discursive construction that authorised the containment of Aboriginal people together with their rival claims to the land that he had once proclaimed. In the former slave colony of Jamaica, the massive outnumbering of Europeans, and the urgency of their need to control a newly freed population, precipitated Eyre's concern to allege the immutability of freedpeoples’ inferiority, thereby denying comprehensively their participation as equal citizens post emancipation.