Henry Prinsep's Empire

Henry Prinsep is known as Western Australia’s first Chief Protector of Aborigines in the colonial government of Sir John Forrest, a period which saw the introduction of oppressive laws that dominated the lives of Aboriginal people for most of the twentieth century. But he was also an artist, horse-trader, member of a prominent East India Company family, and everyday citizen, whose identity was formed during his colonial upbringing in India and England. As a creator of Imperial culture, he supported the great men and women of history while he painted, wrote about and photographed the scenes around him. In terms of naked power he was a middle man, perhaps even a small man. His empire is an intensely personal place, a vast network of family and friends from every quarter of the British imperial world, engaged in the common tasks of making a home and a career, while framing new identities, new imaginings and new relationships with each other, indigenous peoples and fellow colonists. This book traces Henry Prinsep’s life from India to Western Australia and shows how these texts and images illuminate not only Prinsep the man, but the affectionate bonds that endured despite the geographic bounds of empire, and the historical, social, geographic and economic origins of Aboriginal and colonial relationships which are important to this day

Book Review: Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History

Transnational history has become something of a phenomenon in the Anglophone world, and Australian historians have followed their international counterparts in their enthusiasm for the potential of its broader, borderless, perspectives to enhance national stories. This volume brings together some of our most respected historians to consider the impact of the transnational on Australian history making, on how historians approach their craft, the questions they ask, the sources they seek and how they utilise them. In an interconnected world where ‘national’ integrity has been challenged by technologies promoting the apparently seamless flow of information, finance and labour, it was always likely that historians would be attracted by transnationalism’s implications for the discipline; the challenges of, as Mae Ngai (2012, quoted by Macintyre, 134) puts it, reimagining histories from ‘the outside in’, a reorientation comparable to social history’s commitment to history from the ‘bottom up’. Historians have refocused their interests on global ‘webs of connection’ (to use Tony Ballantyne’s imagery) in an effort to ‘recover the movement of people, ideas, ideologies, commodities and information across the borders of the nation states’ (Ballantyne 2012, 26). Such a re-conception has been characterised as a historiographical ‘turn’ in much the same way as earlier ‘turns’ towards social, cultural and gender histories

Henry Prinsep's Empire

Henry Prinsep is known as Western Australia’s first Chief Protector of Aborigines in the colonial government of Sir John Forrest, a period which saw the introduction of oppressive laws that dominated the lives of Aboriginal people for most of the twentieth century. But he was also an artist, horse-trader, member of a prominent East India Company family, and everyday citizen, whose identity was formed during his colonial upbringing in India and England. As a creator of Imperial culture, he supported the great men and women of history while he painted, wrote about and photographed the scenes around him. In terms of naked power he was a middle man, perhaps even a small man. His empire is an intensely personal place, a vast network of family and friends from every quarter of the British imperial world, engaged in the common tasks of making a home and a career, while framing new identities, new imaginings and new relationships with each other, indigenous peoples and fellow colonists. This book traces Henry Prinsep’s life from India to Western Australia and shows how these texts and images illuminate not only Prinsep the man, but the affectionate bonds that endured despite the geographic bounds of empire, and the historical, social, geographic and economic origins of Aboriginal and colonial relationships which are important to this day

Sir Paul Meernaa Hasluck (1905-1993)

Sir Paul Meernaa Caedwalla Hasluck (1905–1993), governor-general, historian, poet, politician, and public servant, was born on 1 April 1905 at Fremantle, Western Australia, second of four surviving children of English-born parents Ethel Meernaa Hasluck and his wife Patience Eliza, née Wooler, both of whom were Salvation Army officers. Paul spent much of his childhood at Collie, where his parents ran a home for boys; there he attended a single-teacher primary school. To facilitate Paul’s further education, the Haslucks moved to Guildford, a suburb of Perth. With the aid of a scholarship he studied at Perth Modern School (1918–22), where he did well in English literature and history, and impressed his teachers with his intelligence and integrity. In January 1923 he entered a cadetship with the West Australian. A voracious reader with a particular liking for the works of Montaigne, he led an active social life, later describing himself as an ‘eager and puppyish fellow, making friends with anyone’ (Hasluck 1977, 84)

Durack, Dame Mary Gertrude (1913-1994)

This item was commisioned by Australian Dictionary of Biograph