Whistleblowing on Indigenous Labour Abuses in Western Australia: Motivations of Settler Humanitarianism in the Late Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the motivations behind settler whistleblowing on Indigenous labour abuses in nineteenth-century Western Australia, focusing on two key figures, the ex-convict David Carley and the pearler and pastoralist John Walkinshaw Cowan. While historical narratives often portray such humanitarian activists as morally exceptional, this article argues that their motivations were complex, rooted in a duality of altruism and personal self-interest. It explores how Carley and Cowan’s personal grievances with local authorities and business competitors fuelled their activism, demonstrating how settler humanitarianism combined concern for Indigenous wellbeing with the pursuit of personal interests. Rather than viewing settler humanitarianism as merely flawed or cynical, the article suggests that its self-serving dimensions were integral to its very possibility. Ironically, the entanglement of moral action with personal benefit that made settler humanitarianism possible also made it vulnerable, since the existence of ulterior motives provided government officials with reason to doubt whistleblower credibility.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".