Saxe Bannister was appointed Attorney General of New South Wales probably at least in part because his interactions with the Six Nations had brought him to the attention of the Colonial Office. He found himself plunged into conflict with competing settler factions. The chapter focuses primarily, however, on his interaction with Indigenous resistance, particularly by the Wiradjuri, in the context of the violent conquest of Australia. Bannister tried to apply the British rule of law as he saw it to frontier contexts, calling for the declaration of martial law during warfare in both Bathurst and Hunter Valley. He also tried unsuccessfully to prosecute police officers and local settlers for extrajudicial murders. Bannister left New South Wales in disgrace but his legal legacy persisted in debates that had implications across the British settler empire: the court case would later lay the groundwork for the legal refusal of Indigenous sovereignty in exchange for the protection of Indigenous people against settler violence. The chapter highlights the importance and the contradictions of the British ideology of the rule of law.

The former Attorney General of New South Wales, Saxe Bannister, on whom this chapter focuses, travelled to the Cape Colony after being forced from his position in Australia. In the late 1820s, he argued for the need to apply British justice impartially in a frontier context, leaving an important record of colonial violence. He revealed abuses in colonial courts in two cases of settler violence against Khoekhoe people in the eastern Cape, despite putative British legal reform; highlighted Xhosa wrongs in the face of dispossession; and accused the colonial government of countenancing an illegal slave trade in San children. Khoekhoe people tried to use Bannister’s legal expertise to interact with the colonial government through petitions, while Xhosa chiefs funnelled statements of grievance through him, albeit to little immediate effect. I also suggest that Bannister thought of the Khoekhoe as analogous to the Haudenosaunee, in part because of their roles as military allies of the British, and may have shared political strategies with them. Bannister simultaneously believed that he, through his association with the trader Francis Farewell, had inherited a treaty with the Zulu leader Shaka giving the pair territory in Zululand. Despite being disappointed in his effort to monetize this ‘treaty’, Bannister later vigorously promoted the creation of the British colony of Natal. The chapter explores paradoxes of imperial liberalism and its difficult relationship to anti-colonial resistance.