The archives of modern European colonialism are preoccupied with sex. Desire, with its contexts and consequences, presented colonial authorities with opportunities and motive for the exercise of power. Yet the gamut of sexual practices they sought to regulate bore a tenuous relationship to the messy intimacies of lived experience. Those worlds of desire, repugnance, accommodation, and resistance remain beyond our reach. Historians have employed various methodologies to tackle the complexities and silences of the colonial archive. Some have striven to find dissenting, variant or “hidden” voices within bureaucratic records. Some have sought traces of fantasy, desire, and subjective experience in personal writings or works of creative imagination. Some have shown how the fashioning of the archive itself is implicated in the production of both desire and desiring subjects. Arguing that we learn most about colonial sexuality when we allow for multiple possibilities, this chapter presents and describes some of the more influential lenses historians have brought to bear upon their elusive subject: those of erotics, regulation, intimacy, mobility, and violence. While these do not exhaust the possibilities of understanding colonial sexuality, when taken together they reveal how entwined was the emergence of modern sexual mores with colonialism”s history.

At the beginning of 1854, the British Admiralty came to a difficult decision. Eight years earlier, on 19 May 1845, the Erebus and Terror had left the Thames under the command of Sir John Franklin to commence an Arctic voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. They had been glimpsed by whalers a couple of months later in Baffin Bay, but since then, European eyes had seen nothing of the ships or their crews. It was not for want of searching: since 1848 a dozen expeditions had been conducted, by sea and land, in an attempt to rescue the missing men. But the searchers had found very little – only the remains of the expedition's first winter camp on Beechey Island, including three graves. This was forlorn proof that most of the ships’ company had been alive in the spring of 1846, but no information had been left there to show where the ships might have gone next. So in 1854 the fate of the Franklin expedition remained a mystery, and most people in Britain had given up hope that rescue might still be possible. Almost nine years after the ships had departed, stocked with provisions for just three years, the Admiralty judged it time to call a halt. On 20 January the London Gazette announced that unless news of their safety arrived before the end of March, the missing officers and men would be considered to have died in Her Majesty's service.

‘What's in a name?’ demanded George Stevenson, controversial editor of the South Australian Register in a very young Adelaide in 1839. Unlike Shakespeare's Juliet, he thought there was a good deal in it. South Australia had been established as a province in 1836 but in everyday conversation was more often spoken of as a ‘colony’, and this word, he thought, had an unfortunate effect on opinion and sentiment. It conveyed ‘nothing of home or domestic life’, and tended instead ‘to foster a sense of strangerism which it would be well to avoid’. Women in particular were ‘morbid on the subject of “the colony,” and difficult to reconcile to what is unavoidably new in their circumstances’. Similarly, the use of the blanket term ‘bush’ to designate even the most beautiful of country districts tended to frighten women away from a ‘delightful rural life’ in which they might enjoy the ‘dignity of usefulness’. Stevenson's repudiation of the word ‘colony’ reflected a deeper concern that would trouble Australian colonists throughout the nineteenth century. When so many colonists were strangers to the environment and strangers to each other, how could they develop a sense of community, familiarity and belonging? Could this atomised agglomeration of emigrants and native-born become a society, with all that implied? Could they overcome a ‘sense of strangerism’ and learn how to feel at home?

Stevenson's editorial also laid out what was already a familiar formula for achieving that feeling of domestication and belonging. ‘Woman's presence and care is all the bush of Australia requires’, he asserted. Like so many of his generation, his vision for colonial society was one in which closer settlement would transform the undifferentiated ‘bush’ into communities of independent farming families. Variations on this vision of a settled rural society comprising a sturdily independent ‘yeomanry’ held sway throughout the nineteenth century as the ideal form of cultivated society.