Religious Liberty and the Rights of White and Aboriginal Subjects in Colonial New South Wales: The Case of John Dunmore Lang

Abstract

Historians have not yet adequately explored the role that ideas about religious liberty played in discussions of rights and subjecthood in colonial New South Wales, particularly in the context of debates about self-government and the status of Aboriginal people. John Dunmore Lang (1799–1878) made radical arguments for disestablishment and full religious freedom. He was also vociferous—yet paternalistic—in his defense of the full humanity of Aboriginal people. Lang's views on religious liberty have not been brought into conversation with his complex attitudes towards Aborigines, whom he saw as potential rather than full rights-bearing subjects. Through a close examination of Lang's published and unpublished work, this article argues that Lang's views on religious liberty were an outworking of a larger vision of human personhood and the entwining of civil and political rights that underpinned his work. This exploration of Lang's work is a window into a broader moment of transformation in the mid-19th-century British imperial world, in which struggles for colonial self-government were shaped by contestation over the rights of imperial subjects, and to whom these rights extended.