Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.     

Picking Up The Pieces of A Shattered Dream: Quebec and French America

Contrary to the commonly held belief that following the British conquest, French Canadian society limited itself to a clearly defined geopolitical realm conceived as a stronghold into which a defeated people withdrew to build its future, Québécois civilization has been doggedly continental in scale. Events of recent years, including the successes and failures of the Quiet Revolution and the results of the 1980 referendum, lend credence to this view. Today Quebec remains both of and apart from the North American continent, hometoa web of kin that has been spun to even the most distant corners.