Pride and Its Paradoxes: Settler Queer History and Indigenous Calls for Truth-Telling

At one o’clock on 21 March 1840, wealthy Scottish farmer Anne Drysdale arrived at Melbourne, in what was then the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. As she disembarked, she entered the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong lands of the Eastern Kulin nation. A squatter with no run and no stock, Anne lamented that there was nothing to do “but to go to the Bush.” Bringing a £1250 inheritance to establish her run, Anne travelled southwest to Wadawurrung country. There she joined a tight-knit colonial elite near Geelong and met Caroline Newcomb. Known posthumously as the “Lady Squatters,” the pair went on to build their shared wealth and social standing through land and stock acquisition, innovative farming practices, and civic participation. In her diary, Anne described Caroline as “my partner, I hope for life.” This image of their relationship—whether described as partnership, loving friendship, or lesbian—dominates their public and academic representation.

The façade of Coriyule, Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb’s beloved Gothic Revival house. “Coriyule,” John T. Collins, 22 December 1970. Image courtesy State Library of Victoria.

When divorced from the violent colonial processes in which it was imbricated, this representation of Drysdale and Newcomb’s relationship becomes a partial truth at best. The distancing of the “Lady Squatters” from their full historical context sits uneasily with Indigenous calls for truth-telling and treaty. In truth-telling, the colonist, too, bears responsibility for speaking contemporary and historical truths. Too often, however, Aboriginal people continue to shoulder the burden of truth-telling. As Tony Birch argues, settlers have largely avoided accountability by positioning Indigenous peoples as “memory-tellers for a white nation shy of its own story.” This settler silence is compounded, in cases such as the Lady Squatters, when early colonizers leave no direct ancestors. Yet their presence lingers: remembered in the town of Drysdale and suburb of Newcomb, and their property—Coriyule—recognised as a place of historical LGBT significance.

Part of the slippery—even evasive—nature of truth-telling in settler-focused histories of sexuality and gender is its relationship to a sense of shared identity. Public and popular histories are often premised on a narrative of personal discovery in which hidden truths are recovered. Perhaps, too, appeals to a historical “queer” lineage have particular resonance in a period when even our most anodyne histories are the subject of politically motivated attempts at erasure. However, there is a corresponding risk of making these claims’ emotional validity rest upon their subjects’ palatability. Family historian Ashley Barnwell identifies practices of “silencing and rationalizing” that help sustain family narratives of “good”—or at least ignorant—colonizers. Perhaps there is an element of these familial practices in dominant modes of, and engagement with, queer history. Could our antecedents cease to be kin if we face, too deeply, their role in their societies rather than celebrate their perceived identity in ours?

Reconsidering the Lady Squatters within a truth-telling framework allows a deeper understanding to emerge: one that recognises the curious intersection of the economic, the imperial, and the queer. Anne Drysdale emigrated to the Port Phillip District at a time when emergent settler-capitalist narratives lay increasing ideological and material claim to the “waste lands” of the Australian colonies, beginning the transition away from penal transportation. Immense profits could be gained by those pastoralists who fed Britain’s industrial wool market; exploiting this potential, however, required the ever-increasing appropriation of Indigenous land. Concurrently, the restructuring of the East India Company and the economic compensation of British enslavers following abolition  encouraged new sites of imperial mobility and colonial investment. Though neither Drysdale nor Newcomb appear personally motivated by profit-making, they nonetheless benefited economically from the British world’s restructuring.

Nor were the women impeded by the ideological centrality of marriage and familial bonds to Port Phillip’s pastoral society. Settler-capitalism hinged upon the systemic categorization and ordering of human utility: separating the deserving from the undeserving, instituting new hierarchies of labour and seeking to align economic, social and moral roles. Integral to establishing proper order was the capacity to form a society built around a complementarity  of the sexes, embedded in companionate marriage. Nonetheless, there is no indication that Drysdale and Newcomb’s unorthodox relationship was ever critiqued publicly or privately.

This absence of critique should not be dismissed as the result of ignorance. In 1841, the Clyde Company Papers record a brief allusion to the marriage-like nature of their partnership, and both colonists and colonial administrators acknowledged the romantic and sexual relations between convict women. However, Drysdale and Newcomb’s relationship was publicly shaped into the model of chaste intimacy, social respectability, and female exceptionalism that characterized imperial womanhood. Nowhere is this clearer than in the writings of their friend, the irascible Presbyterian minister, author and immigration organizer John Dunmore Lang. Lang’s seemingly paradoxical acceptance of the relationship, which sometimes bordered on reverence, legitimated their bond through an idealized depiction of natural femininity. For Lang, this doubling of womanhood produced order and calm from animalian chaos. Despite confessing his limited ability to parse the nature of the women’s relationship, Lang wrote that the domesticity of their cottage produced in him the thought “that the very horses and cattle seemed to consider themselves more at home here than elsewhere.” 

A modern, idealised depiction of Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb. “Caroline Newcomb and Anne Drysdale,” Ministry of Education (Victoria), 1990. Image courtesy State Library of Victoria.

 The integration of the Lady Squatters into the colonial structure extended, particularly later in their career, to direct authority over Indigenous individuals. Such authority extended beyond land occupation and the forms of passive charity that often accompanied it, such as giving rations, blankets, and clothes. In November 1843, the women were directly involved in the theft of Indigenous children: a practice significantly predating the publicly recognised Stolen Generation of the twentieth century. On 16 November, Drysdale recorded the arrival at their home of two Palawa girls, Katherine (“Kitty”) and Maryanne Scott, from King Island. Following Bev Roberts’ editorial notes on Drysdale and Newcomb’s diaries, the girls appear to have been taken from their Indigenous mother, following the death of their father, a white sealer. The role the women played in the girls’ lives is difficult to trace in detail, but its outline emerges from scattered entries. The girls’ training and education appears primarily to have consisted of religious instruction and servitude, preparing them for assimilation into settler society, their standing preordained by their race and class. The whole of this particular truth, however, remains to be coaxed from its place in the marginalia and fully written.

At its core, truth-telling calls on settlers to consider our place on country: that is, in our relations to Indigenous law and custom as much as to land itself, both individually and  through our ancestors. Considering the Lady Squatters as our “queer” ancestors, then, implies a relationship for which we must be accountable if we are committed to truth-telling. As Ben Miller writes, history “can no longer afford to escape the uncomfortable embraces of all our kin.” Such embraces demand a fuller engagement with complicity as much as identity, and a contemporary pride mature enough to reckon with these questions. The way forward, then, can only be through an honesty that challenges us to look back and tell a more robust and complicated truth. A truth, perhaps, that sometimes challenges prevailing perceptions of queer alterity.

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Jacobin Bosman is a second-year PhD candidate and Graduate Researcher Academic Associate at the University of Melbourne (Australia), under the supervision of Professor Zoë Laidlaw. He lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong land.

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