Redmond Barry Fellow 2013

Marguerita Stephens
Assistant Protector William Thomas and the Kulin people, 1839–1867: the end of things?

William Thomas, a London schoolmaster and Wesleyan lay preacher, was one of the five men appointed by the British Government under the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, 1839-1850, to protect the Aboriginal people of that newly colonised territory. Officially one of four 'assistants' to Chief Protector G. A. Robinson, Thomas was recognised by Lieutenant Governor La Trobe as the most competent, knowledgeable and determined of the protectors and was appointed as Guardian of Aborigines in 1850 when the Protectorate was dismantled. His wife Susannah was his partner in all the work. Thomas continued as Guardian until just before his death in 1867. Throughout the whole of these 28 years he kept a daily journal.

William Thomas' journal is a document of international historical importance, illuminating the British evangelical and humanitarian movements in Australia in the pre-1860 era, and on 'Victorian exceptionalism' in regard to the history of race relations in Australia and Aboriginal citizenship. The journal provides a wealth of information about the daily lives of individual Kulin men and women in the early days of colonial occupation, and highlights the economic reliance of colonists on Aboriginal labour.  It reveals the agency of Victorian Aboriginal leaders in the establishment of 'Aboriginal Stations' in the 1860s. Thomas' journal is unmatched in the wealth of detail it contains about Aboriginal lives and deaths in this period, and in its documenting of the attitudes of individual settlers and colonial administrations to Aboriginal people.

Dr Stephens has worked closely with the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages (VACL) to recover and transcribe the journal in its various iterations. Her three-volume annotated transcription, plus a volume of Thomas' language materials, will be published late in 2013. As the 2013 Redmond Barry Fellow, Dr Stephens' project is to produce a single volume narrative for the general reader of the interlocked lives of William and Susannah, and the Kulin men and women, whose biographies emerge from the journal. Thomas was both an ally of the Kulin, and a paternal agent of colonialism. Between himself and the Kulin there was mutual respect and mutual antagonism, suspicion, resistance and cooperation. The narrative will explore the complexities of these relationships, and repopulate Victorian history and place with the multidimensional, individual Aboriginal men and women who emerge from Thomas' journal.