This chapter focusses on the rise of humanitarian literature relating to the southern hemisphere settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the 1830s, when humanitarian concerns about the treatment of Indigenous peoples coincided with the abolition of chattel slavery and the proliferation of coerced and indentured labour. It examines how travel writing and poetry of witness encouraged humanitarian intervention on colonial frontiers, often by ventriloquising the voices of Indigenous peoples in the aftermath of violent massacres. It considers the wider networks and print media in which humanitarian literatures originated, such as open letters, religious tracts, treaties, and petitions. The chapter argues for the importance of a sentimentalised aesthetics of eyewitness immediatism drawn from abolitionist literature in shaping (and distorting) attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. It considers what the framework of humanitarianism can tell us about the literary culture of the 1830s and about the period’s cultural politics of emotion, as metropolitan social commentators sought to redirect sympathetic norms away from distant suffering and towards white poverty at home.

The term ‘protection’ in Australia is closely associated with the practices and institutions of assimilation imposed upon Indigenous people through much of the twentieth century. These practices and institutions were backed by laws that granted state governments wide-ranging powers of control over Indigenous lives, purportedly for their own good. The multi-generational impacts of assimilative policies continue to resonate for Indigenous communities today. Yet apart from the legal regime of assimilation that defined Indigenous policy through the mid-twentieth century, protection has a longer and more complex history in Australia, as it does globally. This chapter traces Australia’s history of protection, from its nineteenth-century origins as a program designed to build Indigenous people’s status as British subjects, to its twentieth-century expressions as a legally-empowered system of state guardianship. While the history of protection is one of legal authority, it is also a history of Indigenous political action.