Making numbers count: The birth of the census and racial government in Victoria, 1835-1840

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 121, 2003, Pages 26-47

  Watts, Rob ^a  

^a RMIT UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149299199     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610308596235     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. H.G. Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1797-1854, vol. 1 (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1904)
2. Batman was similarly cast by James Bonwick, another colonial writer, as an Antipodean 'William Penn'. See J. Bonwick, John Batman: The Founder of Victoria ed. C.E. Sayers (Melbourne: Wren, 1973), 17
3. See also J. Bonwick, Discovery and Settlement of Port Phillip, ed. H. Anderson (Melbourne: Red Rooster Press,1997)
4. Sullivan, Men & Women of Port Phillip (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1985)
5. and A.G.L. Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria Before Separation (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, 1996)
6. V.H. Arnold, Victorian Year Book 1973: Centenary Edition (Melbourne: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Victorian Office Victorian Government Printer, 1973), 11-13
7. J. Caldwell, 'Population', in Australians: Historical Statistics, ed. W. Vamplow (Sydney: Fairfax Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987), 35
8. M. Foucault, 'Governmentality' in Michel Foucault: Power - The Essential Foucault (vol. 3) ed. J. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 201-21
9. S. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986)
10. B. Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 3
11. M. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain (New York: Harvester, 1975)
12. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1975)
13. Hacking, 'How Should · We Do the History of Statistics?' in The Foucault Effect, eds G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (London: Harvester, 1981)
14. P. Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
15. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press 1988)
16. Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
17. The Politics of Numbers, eds W. Alonso and P. Starr (New York: Russell Sage,1987)
18. T. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
19. and S. Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
20. Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. J. Goldstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 3
21. Foucault, 'On Governmentality', Ideology & Consciousness, 6 (1979): 5-22. It is a moot point how much Foucault's work is all that different from Max Weber's arguments about the modes of rationality associated with the rise of the capitalist ethos
22. See M. Weber, General Economic History (Trans. Knight) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 275-8, 352-70
23. Hacking, 'How Should we Do the History of Statistics?', 183
24. Curtis, The Politics of Population, 4
25. Foucault, M. 'On Governmentality', 5-7
26. See also B. Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 109
27. M. Dean and B. Hindess, eds, Governing Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1-5
28. See M. Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 3
29. A. Desrosieres, 'How to Make Things Which Hold Together: Social Science, Statistics and the State', in Discourses on Society: The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines, eds P. Wagner, B. Wittrock & R. Whitely (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991), 195-218
30. N. Rose, 'Calculable Minds and Manageable Individuals', History of the Human Sciences 1, no. 2 (1988): 179-200
31. N. Rose, Governing the Soul (London: Routledge, 1989)
32. N. Rose, 'Governing by Numbers: Figuring out Democracy', Accounting Organisations and Society 16, no. 7, (1991): 673-92
33. N. Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
34. N. Rose and P. Miller, 'Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government', British Journal of Sociology, 43, no. 2 (1992): 172-215
35. N. Rose and P. Miller, 'Governing Economic Life', in Foucault's New Domains, ed. M. Gane (London: Routledge, 1993)
36. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1997, 2nd ed.)
37. See D. Day, 'Aliens in a Hostile Land': A Reappraisal of Australian History', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 23 (1988): 3-15
38. M. Burleigh and F. Wupperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
39. R. Reece, 'The Aborigines in Australian Historiography', in Historical Disciplines and Culture in Australia, ed. J. Moses (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press 1979)
40. H. Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Melbourne: Penguin, 1987)
41. H. Reynolds, Fate of Free People: A Radical Re-Examination of the Tasmanian Wars (Melbourne: Penguin, 1995)
42. See R. Broome, 'Aboriginal Victims and Voyagers, Confronting Frontier Myths', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 42 (1994): 71
43. B. Morris, 'Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror', in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, Special Edition of Journal of Australian Studies, eds B. Attwood and J. Arnold, no. 35 (1992): 72-87
44. I think here of such canonical texts as Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria; G. Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851-1861 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963)
45. Cannon, Who's Master? Who's Man? Australia in the Victorian Age (Melbourne: Nelson, 1971), 93-101
46. Cannon, The Historical Setting' in Historical Records of Victoria (HRV), Beginnings of Permanent Government Foundation Series (vol. 1), (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Service. 1981)
47. S. Priestley, The Victorians: Making their Mark (Sydney: Fairfax Syme & Weldon 1984)
48. D. Barwick, 'Changes in the Aboriginal Population of Victoria, 1863-1966', in Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, eds D. Mulvaney and J. Golson (Canberra: ANU Press, 1971)
49. and D. Barwick, 'This Most Resolute Lady: A Biographical Puzzle', in Metaphors of Interpretation, eds D. Barwick, J. Beckett and M. Reay (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985)
50. R. Broome, 'Aboriginal Workers on South Eastern Frontiers', Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 103, October (1994): 38-58
51. A. Lattas, 'Savagery and Civilization: Towards a Genealogy of Racism', Social Analysis, no. 21 (1987): 28-47
52. CD. Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1963)
53. J. Camm, The Early Nineteenth Century Colonial Censuses of Australia, Historical Statistics Monograph No. 8 (Bundoora, Australian Reference Publications, 1988)
54. Forster and C. Hazlehurst, 'Australian Statisticians and the Development of Official Statistics', in Commonwealth of Australia Year Book 1988 (Canberra: ABS, ABS Cat. no. 1300.0, 1988)
55. For the text of treaty see C.M.H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, 1788-1850 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1977), 90-2
56. See also D. Barwick, 'Mapping the Past: An Atlas of Victorian Clans, 1835-1904', Aboriginal History 8, no. 2 (1984), 100-31
57. and I. Ellender & P. Christiansen, People of the Merri Merri: The Wurundjeri in Colonial Days (Melbourne, Merri Creek Management Committee, 2001), 17-21
58. A Frost, Towards Australia: The Coming of the Europeans, 1400 to 1788', in Australians to 1788, eds J. Mulvaney and J. White (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987), 348
59. The British House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines in June 1837 decisively backed the official view declaring that: 'so far as the lands of the Aborigines are within any territories over which the dominion of the Crown extends, the acquisition of them by her Majesty's subjects upon any title or purchase, grant or otherwise ⋯ should be declared illegal and void.' The Aborigines of Port Phillip, 1835-1839 (HRV, vol. 2a), ed. M. Cannon (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Service, 1982), 64
60. Rose and Miller, 'Governing Economic Life', 23
61. Rose, 'Governing by Numbers: Figuring Out Democracy', 676. Whether statistics are merely 'reflective of reality' or enter constitutively into 'reality-making' is a much larger question as Hacking has argued, and one still to be fully teased out. See Hacking, 'Three Parables', 29-33
62. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 198
63. Camm, The Early Nineteenth Century Colonial Censuses of Australia, 1
64. Those musters, as Forster and Hazlehurst point out were 'natural expressions of a gaol culture' and involved people literally turning out to be counted. Forster and Hazlehurst, 'Australian Statisticians and the Development of Official Statistics', 2-3
65. M. Cannon (ed.), The Early Development of Melbourne, HRV, vol. 3 (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Service, 1984), 419
66. Hacking, Three Parables', 241-4
67. A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 78-113
68. A.G.L. Shaw, The Gipps-La Trobe Correspondence (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1989), xii
69. Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 354
70. R. Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, Geoge Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1992), 691
71. In his liberal Dreamtime story, Locke makes a distinction between those who work hard and those who are 'lazy and quarrelsome': '[God] gave the world to the use of the industrious and the rational ⋯ not to the fancy of covetousness of the quarrelsome and the contentious.' J. Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1952), 32
72. J. Critchett, 'A Distdnt Field of Murder': Western District Frontiers, 1834-1848, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), ch. 7
73. M. Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 409
74. J.R. McCulloch cited in D. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998)
75. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1748/1975), 157
76. W. Thompson (Lord Kelvin), 'Electrical Units of Measurement', in Popular Lectures and Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1889), 73
77. Historians like Barwick have used the census material collected by the Aboriginal protectors to estimate the Aboriginal death toll after white settlement began in Port Phillip. Most of it was the product of illness not massacre. Barwick estimates that by 1863 only 1,907 Aborigines were alive in Victoria, amounting to a decline of 80 per cent from the likely population as at 1835. Barwick, 'Changes in the Aboriginal population of Victoria, 1863-1966', 292-3
78. Camm, The Early Nineteenth Century Colonial Censuses, 1
79. Poovey, Making a Social Body, 420
80. R. McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory 1880-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997)
81. A. Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989)