Title: From Demerara to Swan River: Charles Dawson Ridley and James Walcott in Western Australia
Abstract: This article aims to explore links between the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the colonisation of Western Australia by tracing the lives of some of the first settlers to arrive in 1830.Starting with the Legacies of British Slavery (LBS) database of slave-owner compensation claims, I examine the movement of Charles Dawson Ridley and James Walcott and their families from Demerara, now Guyana, to Swan River, now Perth, Western Australia.Recent research has identified links between recipients of slave compensation after 1833, when Britain abolished slavery, and subsequent reinvestment of these funds in the Australasian settler colonies.However, the figures I examine here participated in the foundation of Swan River, which preceded abolition by four years, exemplifying a more complex process of imperial reorientation.These life stories instantiate several aspects of the larger imperial shift from slavery to settler colonisation: they map the decline of Britain's slave system and divestment from the Caribbean slave system-and specifically Demerara's harsh regime.These biographies also illuminate the subsequent development of the new settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand.Rather than seeing abolition as a historical rupture, it is important to recognise the substantial continuities between the end of Caribbean slavery and the dramatic expansion of the new Anglophone settler colonies sometimes termed the 'settler revolution'. 1 As one system was dismantled and the other began, the plantation offered a key precedent for experiments in labour discipline in the new colonies, while abolition prompted 'translations' of elements of the slave system into mechanisms designed to ensure 'free' labour and colonial profit. 2 These techniques reached their acme in Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of 'systematic colonisation', which drew upon key principles of slavery to advocate for the commoditisation of Indigenous 1