The Colonial Kitchen by O'Brien Charmaine;

Author:O'Brien, Charmaine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4699959
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model

The established squatters believed they were a superior class, styling themselves as “exclusives.” They did not take kindly to immigrant interlopers moving in on the upper social territory they had claimed; the newer arrivals considered these early squatters to be men of low principle who had profited from misery and corruption—selling weak men rum and “rorting” the government system. Both groups were united though in their abhorrence of emancipists, ex-convicts living civilian lives. The free settlers believed that anyone who had come to the colonies as a prisoner could never be truly redeemed and was to always be treated with suspicion. Emancipists were held as being inherently dishonest and constitutionally wedded to a nefarious lifestyle; even if they became rich they could not “wholly overcome the prejudice against them.”12 Social interaction with former convicts was to be studiously avoided by respectable persons as one’s reputation might be marred by the association. As the territory of the Australian colonies expanded and the free population increased and dispersed more widely across the continent, it became difficult to know who had spent time as an involuntary guest of the British Crown. This heightened anxiety about unwitting association with emancipists and social interactions were often made tense by this underlying suspicion about another’s true origins.

Emancipists had their own division between those who had committed crimes in England and those whose delinquency was carried out locally.

At a further remove the colonists were concerned that they were under surveillance from London. They understood that the view from the Metropolis was that people living in Australia were upstarts, morally suspect and culturally incompetent and that they were being watched and judged on their behavior.13 Think about it this way: Britain was the imperious “mother” and the colonists her least favorite children she had been only too happy to see leave home; in the way of human psychology this made them desperate for her approval. London prescribed the standards that mother most valued and she needed to see that the colonists could perform these orthodoxies in order to win her love and affection. Many of the colonists had no intention of settling permanently in Australia; their ambition was to go home to Britain triumphant with material success but they knew they would need to show they had upheld moral and social standards for the “mother land” to wholeheartedly clasp them back to her bosom.

Stand back further again and the “savage” was still seen to be skulking in the background, a menacing presence in the untamed expanses, giving rise to doubt as to whether Australia could ever be a civilized place.14 By the mid-nineteenth century, there was small chance of an urban-dwelling Australian interacting with an Aboriginal. Dispossessed Aboriginals who had survived the settlers’ guns, their diseases and malnutrition wrought on them by the drastic change in their diet were segregated on settlements out of sight of the white population.15 Emancipists however were all around—they were the majority of the Australian population until the 1850s—and it was their presence that corrupted the place and made it uncivilized.

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