Imperial Emotions

de Jane Lydon

"Over the last decades of the eighteenth century, hopes and ambitions turned to conceptions of the great southern land, and the British nurtured fond plans for the Antipodean colonies of Australia and New Zealand conceived as children of the British Empire, one day to assume a glorious inheritance. Many emotional ties first experienced within the British family were applied to, enlarged, and challenged by the relationships and scope of empire: ideas about inheritance and childhood, for example, shaped utopian views of the colonies, while racial exclusion could be couched in terms of class. From colonisation in 1788, the reality of invasion and violence against Indigenous people challenged this imaginary future, prompting mourning and erasure"--