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Chained in Silence: black women and convict labor in the New South

then plaits it with new research on convict labour and on the various forms of colonial-born and immigrant free labour as well as Aboriginal labour, which became increasingly available during the 1840s and 1850s, to conclude that in the foundational period the settlers exploited all the varieties of labour available to them in order to satiate their voracious hunger for land. In the chapter on frontier violence and political manhood, however, she compares the Crown Lands Commissioners’ reports from the colonial frontier in New South Wales in the 1840s and 1850s with the diaries and memoir of the settler Thomas Murray-Prior, as well as the novels of his daughter, Rosa Campbell-Praed, to show how the language of colonialism bolstered the ideology of white imperial masculinity. The civil officers and settlers, she argues, masked their own violence against Aborigines by using euphemisms like ‘collision’ and ‘pursuit’, while simultaneously using emotive terms like ‘atrocity’, ‘murder’, ‘outrage’ and ‘aggression’ to describe Aboriginal violence against the settlers. Such ‘carefully chosen terms’, she concludes, enabled settlers like Murray-Prior who could ‘evaluate different kinds of violence’ to commit violent acts against Aboriginal people on the frontier while at the same time pursuing an important political career in the city. What emerges from the book is a brilliant exposition of the ideas, beliefs and practices that underpinned the ideology of settler colonialism in the foundation period of the Australian colonies and how it drove the demand for settler self-government in the 1850s. The book not only breaks new ground in its approach and argument, it also takes the study of Australian colonial history to a new level of sophistication. It will certainly generate vigorous debate about the character of Australian colonial history. More importantly, however, it will cement Woollacott’s place in the top rank of Australia’s historians. Lyndall Ryan University of Newcastle, Australia lyndall.ryan@newcastle.edu.au