Theoretical frameworks from

Developmental psychology

In reality, a person’s identity is a socio-psychological, biological and legal construct; it emerges through the convergence of multitudinous factors of which the most significant include language, race, nationality, and ancestral ties among others. In order to analyze and explain the self-designating strategies of the informants here, this research draws considerably upon theories formulated within the field of developmental psychology, a sub-discipline which considers the numerous transformations that take place across the lifespan involving self-construal such as cognitive growth, the development of language and socialization.

Most significantly for this discussion, the renowned developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson, who coined the term identity crisis, changed his family name three times in his life. Born as Erik SALOMONSEN as a Jew in Denmark, he became HOMBERGER after his adoption at nine years old in Germany, and, only later at the age of 38, when naturalizing as a US citizen, did he assume the alliterative surname ERIKSON, by which time he had converted to Christianity. Erikson’s identity crisis proceeded on multiple levels throughout his life, forcing him to confront his unique selfhood at the interface of phenotype, religion, family genealogy as well as nationality. For example, he was mercilessly teased by his fellow Christian schoolmates for being Jewish while, on the other hand, his blond, blue-eyed, goyish appearance made him an object of derision for his Jewish peers. Later, as a teenager he was to learn that he was originally adopted but his father was unidentifiable. Erikson was born a Dane, became a German as a child and then naturalized as an American in late adulthood. Obviously, it is the summation of his tumultuous identity struggle which led Erikson (1968) to his now classic postulation of the Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development. The two informants in this study are to be located on the trajectory of Erikson’s fifth stage when teenagers ask themselves existential questions such as “Who am I?” and “What can I be?” in their search for a cohesive ego to express themselves with authenticity and integrity.

James Marcia (1973 and 1993) elaborated on Erikson’s work with his Identity Status Theory proposing numerous processes revolving around the choice of personal and social traits, personal values and vocation. For this study I will apply Marcia’s concept of identity achievement where an identity crisis has been traversed and a commitment made to a certain definition of the self.

The fault line of appellation

A name goes far beyond simple denotation; it also functions as a reflection and sustainer of sociocultural order. Above all, it works potently as a fault-line separating those who belong inside a group because they share an identifiable name pattern from those who are on the outside of the group. Consequently, a personal name is not only a gateway to an understanding of the self but also serves as a key to classifying people encountered as either “one of us” or not. On top of this, the identification of a minority person as not “one of us” by means of their name can easily evoke the psyche of othering, a mindset where the ethnic, religious, economic, sexual, cultural or ideological identity of a person or group (the Other) is negated and repudiated in order to validate and vindicate those who need to see themselves in a position of dominance.

In fact, after the identification of physical characteristics, a person’s name is the next best way to assess whether a person should be considered as “one of us”. Such collectivistic mentality has long been entrenched in Japan and has been historically bolstered by a set of anti-individualistic, authoritarian modus operandi such as the official system of name registration cf. Loveday (2014). Moreover, until the 1980s every person wishing to assume Japanese citizenship was obliged to adopt a purely Japanese name and even today this is the most common pattern for naturalizing citizens.

Japanese culture and language has psychologically built into it a binary system of either being “on the inside / one of us” (uchi) or “on the outside / one of them” (soto) and this bifurcating worldview is applied to almost every area of social life cf. the insightful comments of Russel and Cohn (2012) in this connection:

Visitors and tourists are universally soto. As a soto group, they are treated with respect by the Japanese community. Soto people e.g. foreigners, ethnic minorities, wishing to become uchi i.e. Japanese citizens, face many obstacles. Theoretically, it is possible for a foreigner to become a part of Japanese society. However, in reality it is very difficult for non-Japanese to be accepted as an uchi member of Japanese society. In following Japanese customs of collectivism, deciding individually to become a part of a certain group does not mean that one actually is a part of that group. Naturalization does not guarantee inclusion in Japanese society; one must win the consent of the society at large (ibidem: 6).

Due to the prevalent discourse of mono-ethnicity and racial purity, the overt adherence to a non-Japanese ethnicity or mixed Japanese identity is taken by mainstream ideologues as subversive. Admittedly, the number of registered foreign residents is demographically small-scale, numbering around 1.98 million in 2013 according to The Japan Times (2013)-which only constitutes 1.5% of the entire population of the country.

The most common orthodox pattern for a Japanese person’s name is the employment of two logographs for the FAMILY NAME and two logographs for the given name e.g. 山本 YAMAMOTO 太郎 Tarō. On the other hand, someone who is a Japanese-American or Japanese-Brazilian, for instance, who bears exactly the same name, YAMAMOTO Tarō -a name encoded in Roman letters in their native country-may be dismayed to find that their name would never be spelt in logographs in Japan. Instead the name of a person without Japanese nationality is habitually transcribed in the angular script known as katakana and thus a non-Japanese YAMAMOTO Tarō is identified as ヤマモト･タロウ.

Japan has long been characterized as a “shame culture” cf. Benedict (1989), whereby from an orthodox perspective the open declaration of otherness or alterity is regarded as shameful deviancy or subversive defiance of socially constructed norms. In accordance with the entrenched notion that a person is either entirely Japanese or not at all Japanese, no official calculation of ethnic identity is ever carried out in Japan such as in censuses or government surveys, unlike in the USA and many European countries. In Japan a collusive silence of denial overshadows the existence of minorities who can be either of an indigenous or immigrant nature, with their numbers running into the millions cf. Weiner (2009). The very act of directly marking out a Japanese citizen as a minority member is conceived of as a discriminatory act near to defamation because of the imputed shame attached to the taboo of alterity.

The negotiators of Japanese Otherness

Both informants have described during interviews with me how whenever someone first encounters their name they are almost always required to explain their background. Generally, an interlocutor will directly ask them whether they are Japanese or not, as part of a reality check because they were initially taken to be insiders (uchi). The two young informants here have opted or, more correctly been co-opted by their parents, to engage in daily declarations and justifications of their hybrid identity-through their unorthodox appellation.

Full permission has been obtained to use the informants’ real names in this chapter, even after I offered suggestions on several occasions for alternative names in order to protect their privacy. However, the complete unwillingness on the informants’ part to change their names for this research and their insistence on the employment of their real name here is direct evidence of their adherence to authentic selfhood.

Above all, it is essential to recognize that neither of these informants should be taken as representing a particular ethnic category since their identities defy simplistic, reductionist characterization. Banks (2003) has rightly warned of how a researcher can naively and fallaciously project ethnicity onto individuals when such an identity is not a true representation of a person’s self-perception. In this case-study, the informants are all perfect native speakers of Japanese, and possess highly–educated, advanced skills in that language. Neither of them is an immigrant, having been both born and raised entirely in Japan. Moreover, they have been socialized entirely within the Japanese educational system.

With regard to the question of perceived ethnic affiliation, it is worth noting the significant findings of two public surveys (ISSP, 1995 and 2003) carried out on a cross-section of the Japanese public which posed questions about what constitutes being Japanese. Notably, the results claimed that as many as one third of those surveyed do not consider having Japanese ancestry as essential for being “truly Japanese” but predominantly placed an emphasis on the mastery of the Japanese language (78.4%), sharing Japanese customs and traditions (54%) and a person’s own sense of “closeness to Japanese people” (94.2%).

A common but not coincidental feature both informants share is their childhood and teenager involvement with the rigorous demands and cultural discipline of quintessentially Japanese rituals of recreation. Thus, the first informant has been involved since early childhood with that most emblematic and collectivistic of all Japanese boys’ sports: baseball. As for the second informant, she has dedicated herself since adolescence to the mastery of the severely exacting art of Japanese classical dance. From my interviews, it became evident that both informants not only conceive of themselves as Japanese but also positively espouse that identity. However, due to their candidly unorthodox names, they are forced to confront the denial of their Japaneseness almost on a daily basis, ironically even when they are both Japanese nationals. Nevertheless, these apparently self-negating experiences have not prevented them from openly declaring their alterity.

5.1. KARIYA Buraianyūki 狩谷ブライアン友己

The conferment of a bilingual name is a common practice among offspring of parents in interethnic marriages cf. Dumitrescu’s (2011) study of children with Hungarian-Romanian names. In Japan, however, hyphenated family names are not permitted and require exceptional litigation. On the other hand, in many countries bilingual naming is often observable in second and subsequent generations of immigrant groups cf. Ragone’s (2012) observations on Hispanic name patterns in Pennsylvania today where ancestral ties are maintained with a Spanish given name but assimilation symbolized through an American surname.

Without the English middle name of Brian, which due to phonological rules has to be recomposed as Buraian ブライアン, this 20 year-old informant’s name would be purely and perfectly Japanese. However, on the official level in Japan, middle names are not legally permissible. To resolve this prohibition, Buraian and Yūki 友己 have been compounded into a single, undivided name, albeit an exceptionally long one: ブライアン友己. The English name Brian had to be converted into an angular syllabary known as katakana, a system reserved for foreign names and words, since Roman letters are not authorized for use in official records. Currently, Brian holds dual citizenship for both Japan and the USA through his American father but if he wishes to retain his Japanese nationality he must renounce his American citizenship on reaching 22. In our interview, he declared his future intention to surrender his American citizenship in order to keep his legal status as Japanese, as this is how he fundamentally perceives himself.

Today, this young man prefers to introduce himself simply as Buraian in informal situations, although the family name, KARIYA, would be the normal pattern for self-reference and addressing boys over six years old, unlike in Western society. Additionally, Brian openly refers to himself by the Japanese label for biracial people which is hāfu > “half”. This label is frequently applied to children of intermarriage between Westerners and Japanese. Some criticize the word hāfu as implying that a mixed-race child is “deficient” or “incomplete” in a physical and cultural way cf. Yoder’s (2011:145) sad but pertinent comment that “there are cases after cases of Japanese rejection and humiliating treatment of Western-Japanese that have led to identity problems, deviant behavior and even suicide.” Nevertheless, there are others who see the allusion to a semi-Western distinctiveness indexed by the English loanword as social capital that can work in a mixed-race person’s favor, as attested by the success of a few personalities in Japanese mass media from such a background cf. Kamada (2009). As for phenotype, it is debatable whether the first informant can be instantly recognized as of mixed parentage or not, although he consistently identifies himself as biracial. Of course, judgments regarding a person’s physiognomy (and imputed racial identity) are open to diverse interpretation and influenced by a host of variable and subjective factors.

The two ways Brian chooses to refer to himself, first of all only with his English-derived given name, and then by what some regard as a derogatory term of self-categorization as “half” constitutes a case of identity achievement following the terminological framework of Marcia. Brian has now embraced the term “half” and the identity that goes with it, instead of attempting to just ignore it. Inevitably, in his childhood, the foreign element in his name became a ritual of public shaming–to which he would never put up any resistance-because he wanted to comply with his parents’ wishes that it should always be expressed. His English middle name was a heavy burden to carry on top of his biracial difference and was a resource easily exploited for teasing by thoughtless classmates. Ever since elementary school, Brian’s parents had adamantly insisted that his teachers always include their son’s foreign middle name when referring to him, even though such action was frequently contested by teachers who feared singling him out in such a manner would cause social problems. However, his parents’ “policy” has always been to insist on the use of his full name as the best way to make their son proud of his identity; it now appears that this strategy to affirm his identity has proven successful over time. In a similar way it is worth noting that Brian’s two younger siblings also received English middle names to symbolize their dual ancestry and have always maintained their mixed appellation unreservedly in public life.

Unlike in his childhood, Brian no longer seeks initial recognition as a Japanese but directly positions himself as the Other with his English middle name as well as self-identification as hāfu. Thus, his choice of appellation bypasses the necessity to prove his Japaneseness in initial encounters, allowing him time to negotiate over his insider status as interaction progresses and his native Japanese fluency and cultural savoir-faire become self-evident.

Another indicator of Brian’s identity commitment is the fact that he has chosen to major in English Studies and has a positive attitude towards his father’s language, English. This stance should not be taken for granted, for as Tse (2000) has pointed out, very often the desire to be part of the dominant culture among immigrant children in the USA results in the rejection of everything associated with minority status such as the acquisition of their ancestral language. With regard to this, the rejection of non-Japanese language skills is not uncommon among certain children in mixed race families cf. Kamada (2009). I have also noticed a similar kind of repudiation of bilingualism and biculturalism among ethnically pure Japanese male adolescents who grew up in the USA (due to their father’s job) on their return and attempt at reintegration into Japanese society.

The acceptance of alterity only developed in Brian after attending a high school where minority children were commonplace. Experiencing this environment was formative and helped him to overcome the curse of stigmatization brought about by his peers ridiculing him in his earlier school years. Today, he has revalorized his unique appellation. For example, in our first encounter he unflinchingly announced in front of the class that I should only address him as Brian because he strongly disliked his Japanese given name Yūki.

Unfortunately, a further cause of potential social exclusion derives from the rarity of Brian’s rare aristocratic family name狩谷 KARIYA. A frequent occurrence at his current part-time job at a supermarket, where all the staff are obliged to wear name badges in non-logographic script, is the assumption on the part of ignorant customers that his family name is not Japanese, even though it is. In fact, it is impossible to adopt the family name of a non-Japanese father when registering a child with Japanese nationality without going through costly and complex legal proceedings, which explains why Brian bears his mother’s maiden name, KARIYA. The separation of spousal names is the most frequent pattern among those in out-marriage with non-Japanese today and a cause of considerable inconvenience and distress to multinational couples cf. Chapman (2012) who cites cases of wedded couples mistaken as unmarried cohabitants by government officials and children wrongly classified as illegitimate by school authorities–all because they bear different family names from their spouse or parent.

In a set of disturbingly fruitless episodes over a period of three years at his college, Brian has tried in vain to have his wrongly spelt name changed back to the correct version. During his initial college registration, he had written down his name in the officially recorded manner of his family register with logographs as 狩谷ブライアン友己 KARIYA Buraianyūki on all the university forms but administrators had subsequently–without consulting him at all–reconfigured his full name into the angular script as well as completely eliminated his Japanese first name. This reconstruction resulted in a completely foreign-looking simplification of his name in the special script used to mark non-Japanese e.g. カリヤ・ブライアン KARIYA Buraian.

When the college office was confronted by Brian about their erroneous distortion, a slew of excuses were fabricated to cover up the orthographical othering that had taken place in computer records and class registers. When Brian went to petition for his name to be correctly registered at the school office during his second year, he was informed that his middle name Buraian was self-evidently not Japanese–as if that was sufficient justification for his whole name to be transcribed in a script employed for foreign names. Next, it was claimed that the university software could not handle his abnormally long name and a promise was made that an updated version would be purchased. One year later, the offer of any new software was flatly denied but instead it was falsely asserted that Brian had failed to initially register his name in logographs upon entering college.

This Kafkaesque subterfuge and sophistry where Brian has been intractably marked out as non-Japanese for three years demonstrates that even present-day educated university officials are incapable of dealing with a foreign middle name enveloped inside a purely Japanese one. Indubitably, bilingual naming among Japanese nationals is only a recently legalised innovation but that does not excuse the three-year failure to record his name correctly in logographs on all school documents. One wonders with perturbation what his graduation certificate will look like. Paralyzed by the ideology of mono-ethnicity, the administrators remain intransigent. The serious question arises as to what extent Brian’s classroom interaction and evaluation has been influenced by the perception of him as non-Japanese because of this administrative othering.

Brian remains adamant about persevering with the inclusion of his hybrid middle name in all documentation in spite of having to endure these endless acts of invalidation which amount to “micro-aggressions”:

microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults … Perpetrators of microaggressions are often unaware that they engage in such communications when they interact with racial/ethnic minorities (Sue et al. 2007: 271).

5.2. KA Masaki 何雅希 HÉ Yáxī

Masaki was naturalized as a four year-old in 1999 at the same time as her parents, who both originally came from China and where both her mother and father had also majored in Japanese. What is significant is that the Japanese Ministry of Justice did not force her family to Japanize their names, which was the prevalent practice until recently. According to Chinese cultural traditions, her name is perfectly natural in every way. The concept of Masaki’s parents was to maintain their family’s ancestral heritage by giving her the authentic Chinese name of HÉ Yáxī 何雅希. They underestimated the ordeals that their daughter would have to endure because these common logographs appear as “deviant” in Japanese culture.

It needs to be understood that logographs give no indication as to how they should be read out aloud and so they can be pronounced in either a Chinese or Japanese fashion; their phonetic value depends on the language of the user and their semantic value can also vary across cultures. Unfortunately, the single logograph何, which is a common family name in China, merely signifies the interrogative word “ What ” in Japanese and thus fails to make any sense as a Japanese family name. In addition, the vast majority of Japanese citizens construct their family name out of two logographs and not one, as here.

On top of this, there exists another obstacle on the auditory level which is the Japanese oral rendition of the logographs in the given name雅希as Masaki. This pronunciation of the name evokes astonishment because of its modern-day restricted societal application to Japanese males only. Of course, after careful verification of the logographs, an erudite Japanese might re-interpret the anthroponym Masaki in an androgynous manner (because the logographs signify “ rare elegance ”) but the most common reaction is one of incredulity at its gender inappropriateness.

Masaki unconditionally accepts her Chinese family name HÉ 何 but forthrightly labels it as “weird” from the Japanese standpoint. She never introduces herself in Japan according to the Chinese reading as HÉ Yáxī but always employs its Japanese-style pronunciation, KA Masaki, which indicates her assimilatory position. Usually, interaction with strangers proceeds smoothly until she has to give her name whereupon her Japanese identity is instantly thrown into question. Nevertheless, Masaki never shies away from negotiating these relentless corroborations which are tantamount to micro-aggressions. Masaki is constantly pulled into receiving and deflecting assaults on her self-esteem when giving details about her name; she is forever coerced into explaining and even justifying that she is Japanese even if her family name suggests otherwise in every minor transaction requiring verification of her name such as in shops, on the telephone and in the classroom.

It is evident to me that Masaki has attained the stage of Marcian identity achievement by embracing and committing herself to her ethnic duality in her readiness to meet society’s never ending demands for her self-definition, an interactional style that can easily corrode self-esteem. Her positive attitude towards her ancestry is demonstrated by her efforts to obtain a working knowledge of written Chinese, as well as its spoken form; this is no minor feat because a knowledge of more than 4,000 logographs is required, roughly four times the number most ordinary Japanese know. Only after taking a college course on Korean-Japanese residents did Masaki learn of the possibility to replace her family name with an official pseudonym that would enable her to pass uncontested as Japanese. However, Masaki vowed to me during our interview that she would never legally petition for such an alias as it would constitute the betrayal of her heritage.

Masaki does not at all identify with the long-established Chinese community in Japan, the Kakyō (華僑) cf. Maher (1995), but conceives of herself simply as a Japanese national with a distinctive background. Until elementary school, Masaki never questioned her identity nor had it questioned. She used Chinese at home and Japanese in the kindergarten. However, as she grew older the society around her did not allow matters to proceed in such an unchallenged manner. Upon entering elementary school the incomprehensible and unreasonable ordeal of social rejection she was forced to undergo eventually led to overwhelming stigmatization; in her elder sister’s case, it even resulted in the latter’s refusal to attend school for over a year. Masaki felt particularly traumatized when at eleven years old her elementary teacher ordered her to come to the front of the class and speak in Chinese as a specimen of so-called “alien culture” or ibunka 異文化. Growing up, she had no Chinese support network outside her family nor in the neighborhood. Only occasional family visits to her relatives in the Beijing area brought her in direct contact with the Chinese language and culture beyond the home.

It was not until Masaki, like Brian above, entered a state-run high school in the Kobe area with a culturally pluralist approach towards minority children that Masaki began to re-assess herself and start making a positive commitment to her Chinese heritage. Of course, over time the Japanese language has grown more dominant in her home just as switching between the two languages has become less frequent. Finally, it is significant that Masaki has decided to major in the field of International Relations because this is a widely trodden path among people who experience a plural identity: they embark on a quest to transcend the confines of ethnic attachments and search for a space beyond the limitations of in- and out-group identification.

Conclusion: Authenticity as self-valorization

My purpose here has not been to polemically celebrate multiculturalism nor to debunk the Japanese myth of “racial” homogeneity cf. Befu (2001), but to demonstrate how the espousal of hybrid authenticity, symbolized in a name, effectuates self-affirming emancipation resulting in Marcia’s (1973) position of identity achievement. Just as every teenager asks themselves questions how they can validate their identities, these two negotiators of Japanese Otherness have been engaged in a struggle for acceptance since their early school life. In their final teen years they have come to the personal conclusion that open self-declaration and outright visibility is the most serviceable strategy for dealing with who they are. Fortunately, during their efforts to circumnavigate the dominant discourse of mono-ethnicity, they have been able to draw on the support of their parents, siblings and a handful of sympathetic high school teachers. The valorization of their appellation constitutes an unequivocal appeal for recognition as a hybrid Japanese, even though such positioning is stereotypically derided as oxymoronic.

It is worth juxtaposing this case-study with the generally favorable research findings on the effects of a minority’s level of attachment to its ethnic identity. For instance, Phinney & Kohatsu (1997) concluded that the attainment of positive ethnic affiliation in Asian American adolescents is clearly associated with higher self-esteem, better grades and more satisfactory relations with family and friends. Likewise, Lee (2005) found ethnic pride to protect against the effects of racism and engender more psycho-social resilience among Hmong Americans from Laos in the USA.

Finally, we need to realize that the two young people in this case-study, who are caught on the binary frontier of being “either totally” or “not at all” Japanese, offer hope and inspiration in this borderless age of multicultural diversity and the complications that entails. Moreover, the experiences of these indomitable negotiators of plural identity offer us important insights on a universal level. These transnationals have managed to maintain their uniqueness despite being buffeted by the persistent stressors of individual and institutional prejudice. Significantly, even growing up without any minority community support outside their families, these two have stood their ground and defended their dual heritage. Unlike most other minority members in Japan, they have not turned their back on their plural identity in an attempt to pass and de-marginalize themselves. Thanks to their public negotiation of authenticity these two young people will not have to secretly suffer the quiet despair of never coming to terms with the condition of ethnic and cultural alterity.

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Chapter Three

What do I see in the mist beyond the trees?Reflections on the Role of the Pound Keeper in Colonial Van Diemen’s Land, Australia, and Harpswell, Maine,

United States of America

Rosemary Lucadou-Wells

John F. Bourke

Introduction

The article offers a panoramic comparison of the impact of context surrounding an important identity construct in two colonial societies: pound keepers in Van Diemen’s Land, Australia and Harpswell, United States of America. This article compares aspects of the pound keeper’s identity in Van Diemen’s Land, Australia and Harpswell, Maine, United States of America, during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. During those years men undertook the functions of the role. The role of the colonial pound keeper deserves attention because it was important the governance, safety and orderliness of the community. Firstly, the pound keeper’s function was aimed at regularising procedures for the control of animal stock. Secondly, it was a means of protecting crops. Thirdly and importantly, the pound keeper’s role was to improve public safety.

This article considers the identity society imposed upon the pound keeper. The sources researched suggest that it was an identity based upon the need to protect society and crops from marauding animals. The self identity the pound keeper assumed because of his role is also investigated. The sources suggest that the pound keeper’s self identity may have been as difficult to manage as some of the roaming stock he tried to catch.

The materials basing this article include official documents issued by administrative authorities in Harpswell and Van Diemen’s Land, reports from newspapers, cases from early Van Diemen’s Land courts and visual materials such as paintings and photographs.

The methodology is reflective analysis of content from the four different genres of text. These textual data are rich archival sources providing access to cultural heritage (Corti and Thompson 2004: 327). Reflective analysis of the content of such texts, wherein the researcher interprets data in the light of historical information (Bauer 2000: 339) is a qualitative methodology. Thus the role and influence of the researchers on the materials is acknowledged.

The contexts

Van Diemen’s Land is an island approximately 42 degrees latitude and 142 degrees longitude in the Southern Ocean. It was settled in 1803 by the British as a penal colony. Harpswell, Maine, is a township comprising a peninsula and some islands in Casco Bay, 14 miles east of Portland, America (Beach 1899).

The similarities between Van Diemen’s Land and Harpswell include proximity to the sea, their shared histories of having been investigated by early explorers from Holland, France and Britain and settlers in both places being the recipients of land grants from the British. However, a critical difference in the contexts is that Van Diemen’s Land began as a British penal colony, while Harpswell was a free settlement. Van Diemen’s Land, as an island and prison was a place to be feared by people transported from Britain for breaching the laws of England. Thus it was likely to produce feelings of isolation and aloneness. On the other hand, Harpswell was a free settlement and part of a land mass, a milieu likely to engender an atmosphere of inclusion and companionship.

However both Harpswell and Van Diemen’s Land offered the chance to own land. Convicts were eligible to receive a grant of land upon satisfactory completion of their sentences. In this they were on the same footing as the increasing numbers of free settlers to the island. The promise of land ownership was common to both Van Diemen’s Land and Harpswell. Land use in both communities was also similar, with the clearing of forest being undertaken to make way for the sowing of crops and introduction of animals. Despite the similar land usage, different farming methods seem to have been adopted in the two settlements. Visual texts indicate that fencing was not usually adopted by land grantees in Van Diemen’s Land. For example, the My Harvest Home’series of paintings by the artist John Glover (1864) reveal herds of cattle grazing on unfenced terrain and grain crops being harvested from similarly unfenced land. By contrast, historic photographs of Harpswell reveal vestiges of old wooden fences.[2] Thus, in colonial Van Diemen’s Land many of the free and convict land holders allowed animals to roam free, trample crops, foul human drinking water sites and constitute a danger to persons in public places. However in Harpswell, where there were only free land holders, as distinct from a combination of convict and free land holders, it can be inferred that there was a general abhorrence towards straying animals.

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