In July, friends and family of historian Julie Marcus gathered at the Arkaba Hotel for the launch of Sex and Savagery in the Good Colony: South Australia 1836–1901. Launched by Katrina Schlunke, the event celebrated an important, wide-ranging and accessible account of our colonial past.

We are pleased now to be able to share Katrina’s launching speech.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are launching this book, this opus, this profound reimagining and recontextualisation of the creation of the colony of South Australia on unceded Kaurna Country. That is, Indigenous created, connected and nourished Country that was turned into non-Indigenous property, land and picturesque landscapes through the utilisation of massacre, sexual assault, Christian ideologies and administrative processes driven by racial fantasies and profit making. And yet here we stand on unceded land. So this is not just an acknowledgement of Kaurna Country but an accompanying recognition of the persistent valour of the Indigenous peoples, past and present who live with the unpredictable chaos that is colonisation.

Sex and Savagery in the Good Colony: South Australia 1836–1901 is not just a book about those early years of take over but a thoughtful map of the connections between now and then. Styled as a set of short chapters we could also read this book as a set of parables that illustrate the ways in which colonial white power works. The key words that Julie has chosen to organise how we might approach this labyrinthine system are all there in the title: Sex, Savagery and Good. Let me take them each in turn.

Sex

In a book that seeks to show the usually hidden violence of colonisation then the even more hidden incidence of sexual assault and gendered violence needs to be sought and shown so that, as Julie suggests in her dedication to Rita and Jackie Huggins, it can be stopped. This book slows the reader down, stops us gliding over familiar colonial stories so we can see. Three quotes:

George Fife Angus (1870s): ‘Take pains to please your husband.’

William Wilshire (1890s), writing of two young Indigenous women he had kidnapped: ‘Whilst I was writing up my journal, which was an every night occurrence, my boys had divided, forming themselves into half-sections with the lubras, and perfecting themselves in the art of love.’

Peter Horsetailer, Kaytetye Elder (1930s) writing of the coming of the telegraph line and the taking of a young Kaytetye girl: ‘They fed her and she worked late because those whitefellas didn’t have a nice little lady to do their work for them … And they took her inside and made her camp overnight with them.’

Direct sexual violence is there in the kidnap, rape and imprisonment of Indigenous women and children but it is enabled by the patriarchal ideologies of the ‘founding fathers’ who would suggest their own tightly controlled domestic fiefdoms as a model Indigenous peoples must adopt. These supposedly opposite parts of a controlling whole is not so much an argument Julie makes but a succession of events in this colony that this book shows. That women were to please men worked within this colony (and so many others) as a frightening ideological cliché that could be turned this way and that, to the language and actions of ‘taming’ and much later ‘controlling’ of Indigenous women and children. Appreciating the connections between then and now is one part of the art of this book. The links we are able to see between a colonial frontier and the ‘modern’ family, make of South Australia not so much a unique entity but one cog in a very large, imperial, gendered machine.

Savagery

Savagery has always been a European term and as this book shows, a European action. The fantasy of racial hierarchies and colonial goodness that gave rise to the term savage is here sharply bought back to its colonial home. It is also a term with multiples resonances within the book. From the beginnings of this colony the Kaurna and other Indigenous peoples were made to carry and embody, everything the European could not bear to publicly acknowledge. We might call this the shadow or othering or simply the convenient frame that allowed for the stealing of land, the violations of people and introduction of vice that was said to be the very things this particular colony would not do. In the first instance the direct violence that was used to clear Country to make farmland or townships is documented and hauled out of its quietened place. But Julie also shows the ways in which terror was deployed. The surprise attacks on small family groups, the ‘clearing’ of land and its food resources, the random shootings and beatings and the repeated ‘hunting parties’ and ‘picnics’ so that so called ordinary language loses its purchase. But covering as this book does, the period from the 1830s to the 1900s the ‘savagery’ is also shown in the shift from the overt (albeit often disguised or silenced over time) violence of perpetrators on horseback to the formation of state-based control and unspoken ‘understandings’, often referred to as ‘policies’. That is, what arose was punishment and ordering of Indigenous peoples through a devilish mixture of surveillance (all those records) and an unspoken and so limitless approach shared by colonisers turned nation builders. In Part Eight Julie refers to a series of zones; Pastoral, Missionary and Indigenous and this reminded me of the film Zone of Interest. That film features the German family of the Auschwitz Commandant who live a bucolic existence directly beside the walls of the concentration camp. The idea of ‘the zone’ is shown to be a way in which horror and banality can exist side by side. This device might be something that could describe how non-indigenous Australians manage our history here. We live within a colonising regime which precisely grants us the power to believe we do not. That take me to Julie’s third term from her title, ‘Good’.

Good

Thinking of myself in relation to this launch and this book, I thought how fitting that the ‘Schlunke’ of my name, so often read as foreign to the Australian colonial project, should in its South Australian context shown to be anything but. However I now think my key qualification for launching this book is that every night as a child, in some Presbyterian/Lutheran mash-up, I would say the prayer: God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy (etc. down the whole family line) ending on the crescendo, ‘And make Treena a Good Little Girl, Amen’. How could Julie have guessed? The path traced in this book from the Christian ideals of having a ‘pious people’ put upon this land and the sense of righteousness that that gave rise to, is forensically unpacked. It is not at all a straightforward path – goodness rarely is. We see the thinking of some Christian witnesses like Beecham who points out this land was never ‘waste’, never unoccupied but we also read that it was a Christian duty to work that land in a godly way to fulfil God’s promise. And that the people whose Country it was must be bought to that God … As a technology of power, as a convenient propaganda and as an insidious force of restraint, ‘goodness’ is laid bare as something that this particular place may need to pay greater attention to.

This book then is not an easy or ‘good’ read in the expected sense. It is a feast of intellectual imagination that re-sets how the European history of South Australia will be figured. Written with an anthropological lens, it reveals a white religious culture that lives on. It does so in elegant prose and is structured to be read and put down, picked up, and read again. I suggest you take your time with it, it will be time well taken.

Katrina Schlunke writes and researches the interconnections between art, writing, race and Indigenous interventions. Her most recent essay is ‘The Practices of Care: Extinction and De-Colonisation in the Natural History Museum’ (2024) and her most recent poem was ‘Burning Captain Cook’, published in Southerly (2022), ‘The Way We Live Now’. She is a Potsdam Postcolonial Chair (University of Potsdam) and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Sydney (Department of Gender and Cultural Studies) and the University of Tasmania (School of Creative Arts and Media).