Infanticide at Port Phillip: Protector William Thomas and the witnessing of things unseen

Abstract

Turn the pages of any omnibus ethnology, anthropology or history of Aboriginal Australia published from the late eighteenth century through to the early twenty-first century and there is a good chance that you will find an entry on infanticide. Along with cannibalism, infanticide has stood as a leitmotif for the perceived savagery and, at times, the sub-humanity, of the Australians just as it has done for other inhabitants of the non-metropolitan world. And yet these paired tropes of savagery - the one circulating predominantly within a terrain of contested masculinity, the other predominantly of contested femininity - always circulated in fluid discourse wherein the very uncertainty that surrounded claims about their performance invited surveillance and the interrogative operations of the colonial state.