THIS CHAPTER RESPONDS TO two challenges. One is John MacKenzie's suggestion that in our studies of empire and settler colonialism we ought to deconstruct the terms ‘British’ and ‘British settler’ into their component parts – English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. The other comes from Australian historian Ann McGrath, who urges historians to work harder than they have done so far to disentangle the component ethnicities that made up the category ‘white’ that is so foundational to whiteness and settler colonial studies.

In setting out to understand the ethnic dimensions of British settler colonialism, as these two historians wish us to do, this chapter focuses on the relationships between Scots and Aboriginal people in the eastern Australian colonies – New South Wales (NSW), Victoria and Queensland – from the mid 1830s to the early 1860s. This was a period of intense pastoral expansion, high immigration and rapid political change. In these decades, a set of struggling British colonies under direct British rule, mostly dependent on convict labour, and occupying relatively small regions in a vast continent, were nearly all transformed into a set of large, free, self-governing democratic colonies. It was the period when some regions experienced intense frontier conflict and violence, while others saw its end and the emergence of a post-frontier society characterised by a mix of Aboriginal employment, poverty, institutionalisation and interaction with the newcomer populations. For the settlers, my focus is both on Scottish pastoralists, often known as squatters, and their Scottish-Australian critics, often the educated middle class, including journalists, politicians, amateur ethnographers, and men of the church. In the course of exploring these diverse relationships, this chapter considers some key individual Scots in the Australian colonies, including the explorer Thomas Mitchell, pastoralists Niel Black, Angus McMillan and the Archer brothers, writers Katherine Kirkland and Mary McConnel, newspaper editor Thomas McCombie, missionary John Green, and perhaps most significant of all, Presbyterian minister, editor and writer John Dunmore Lang. It also considers those Aboriginal individuals and communities who encountered these Scots, from the Kurnai in the south to the Kabi Kabi and Wakka Wakka peoples in the north.

In exploring the interactions between Scots and Aboriginal people in eastern Australia, we confront the question of whether there were any significant differences between Scottish and other settlers in terms of their ideas about Aboriginal people and especially their actions towards them.