'A Just Estimate of the Value of Human Life': Second Wave Evangelicalism and the Myall Creek Massacre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 'Myall Creek Massacre', as it has become known in Australian lore, has been explored for its significance to the history of frontier warfare, race relations and legal precedents. This essay explores a different aspect of the historic case: its connections to, and dependence upon, the Evangelical humanitarian agenda flowing out of the Colonial Office. The paper will argue that, against a backdrop of general antipathy toward Aboriginal affairs in New South Wales, a collection of Evangelical voices abroad and at home were key in pursuing a legal outcome that valued the lives of the victims and their humanity. The paper traces Colonial developments in England, with the founding of the Aborigines Protection Society (1837) and its connections to Clapham Sect Evangelicalism, as the backdrop against which legal concern for the humanitarian treatment of the colonies' native populations developed. From here, paying close attention to the dispatches of Charles Grant Jr., the Colonial Secretary, to Sir George Gipps, the Governor of New South Wales, the essay follows these developments into the Australian context and identifies a consistent thread of Evangelical pressure surrounding the eventual guilty verdict delivered to Myall Creek perpetrators in December, 1838. Ultimately it will show that it was Evangelical ideals of personhood and justice that sustained the case in the face of significant pressure to the contrary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".