FUTURE OF ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS
(essay)
There is a lot of debate about the history and antiquity of human
settlement in Australia. The question of establishing the date of
earliest settlement has become highly charged. There is a raging
academic controversy over dating and identifying a whole school of cave
art in Arnhem Land. One academic has even asserted that these paintings
were produced by some people other than the ancestors of the present
Aboriginal inhabitants, implying that these forebears would have been
too primitive to produce such complex and spectacular works of art. Tim
Flannery has constructed a sweeping narrative, attractive to many, that
ancient Australians almost single-handedly, by hunting and with the
overuse of fire, wiped out most of the extinct large animals such as the
dyptodron. This value-loaded story is contested by other scientists and
scholars such as Professor Marcia Langton, Dr David Bowman, Professor
John Chappell, John Benson and James Kohen, author of Aboriginal
Environmental Impacts. Some of them make the powerful methodological
point that it’s an extraordinarily wide-ranging, ideologically driven
conclusion from very limited and contradictory evidence.
A book by multi-disciplinary scientist Dr David Horton is very important
in this context. While Dr. Horton is a little slow to start, and just a
bit repetitive, he assembles from a number of inter-related scientific
spheres quite convincing evidence that the associated theories
characterising ancient Aboriginal populations as “firestick farmers”,
and attributing to these ancient populations the extermination of the
megafauna, are both quite wrong. These two theories have developed among
some academics over many years and been broadly popularised by Tim
Flannery. Dr Horton advances, and devastatingly documents from
archaeology, a much more convincing narrative in which ancient
Aboriginal populations were a more modest part of the ecosystem in
Pleistocene Australia and used fire more sparingly than Flannery and
Pyne, etc, say.
The decisive episode in the extinction of the big animals was the
uniquely extreme desertification event in Australasia-Sahul about 25,000
years ago. Horton very effectively points out how the romantic narrative
of early Aboriginal populations as “firestick farmers” and successful
hunters and exterminators of the dyptrodon and the giant kangaroo is
often used to minimise the importance of the devastation of the
environment associated with the British conquest of Australia.
Certain basic facts about Australian prehistory are clear. A
continent-wide Aboriginal society of considerable cultural complexity
and with a number of variations, has existed for a very long time, at
least 40,000 and probably even 60,000 years. Secondly, Australia, New
Guinea and Tasmania were one continent (called by scientists Sahul) for
a considerable part of this time, and were finally separated at the end
of the last ice age, about 6000 years ago. A fair amount of contact took
place between some parts of northern Australia and other places. For
instance, contact and cultural influences from New Guinea and the Torres
Straits, took place with Aborigines in the Cape York area, and
considerable contact, probably for up to 500 years, existed between
Malay fishermen from Macassar and Aboriginals in Arnhem Land, with much
cultural interchange, and even a certain amount of intermarriage.
Paul Sheehan’s book Amongst the Barbarians promotes a dubious version of
Australasian prehistory that devalues the cultural achievements of the
first Australasians
Part of the methodology of Paul Sheehan’s populist book is that he finds
“scholars” and “authorities” that generally devalue and criticise the
culture and achievements of the people that he regards as divisive:
Asian migrants, multiculturalists, Aborigines, etc. His “experts” on
Aboriginal culture are David Foster, Tim Flannery and an American
academic, one Stephen J. Pyne, who appears on the first four pages of
Amongst the Barbarians. Pyne’s theory is that the Australian Aboriginals
were the greatest firebugs in human history. In passing, Pyne says: “An
entire continent bypassed the Neolithic revolution, which had spread
agriculture to the Old World. Unlike the Americas no autonomous
agricultural centres developed in Australia.”
In fact, Australian prehistory is by no means that simple. Pyne
discloses a certain ignorance. Australia and New Guinea were one
continent until 6000 years ago and all experts agree that agriculture
developed in the New Guinea highlands at least 9000 years ago and
probably earlier. There are some real puzzles in the prehistory of
Australia and Sahul, one of which is why agriculture did not spread
overland to other parts of Sahul, and also why there is such a distinct
linguistic and cultural break between Melanesian culture in New Guinea
and Aboriginal culture in Australia. Nevertheless, there was one
independent development of agriculture in Australasia/Sahul, and that
was in New Guinea.
Our continent did not bypass the Neolithic revolution, as Pyne and
Sheehan say. They might have known this had they read, for instance, A
Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea and Sahul by Peter White and James
O’Connell (Academic Publishers, December 1982), or the more recent
Archaeology of Aboriginal Australia: A Reader, edited by Tim Murray
(Allen and Unwin, 1998).
So much for Sheehan’s experts, some of whome seem to be ignorant of the
basic literature in the field. The inquiry into Australasian prehistory
has really just begun. In reality, the achievements of Aboriginal
society in Australia, and Melanesian society in New Guinea were quite
considerable. The very first, and most amazing achievement, was getting
to the continent at all, 60,000 years ago or thereabouts. The ancestors
of Aboriginal and Melanesian society seem to have constructed boats or
rafts and developed sufficient sailing skills to cross the large sea gap
between Asia and Sahul.
From the time of white settlement in 1788, the contact between white
Australia and Aboriginal Australia has been brutal, ruthless and
imperial, qualified by constant and sometimes fairly effective
Aboriginal resistance to white conquest. Keith Willey’s useful book,
When the Sky Fell Down is a comprehensive reconstruction of what can be
deduced about the destruction of Aboriginal society in the Sydney
region. Eric Wilmot’s wonderful novel, Pemulwuy, the Rainbow Warrior
(Sydney Weldons, 1987) is an excellent artistic attempt to re-create the
world of the well-documented initial Aboriginal military resistance to
white conquest.
This resistance, undermined and finally defeated by a combination of the
military superiority in weapons and resources of the invaders, and the
devastating impact of the diseases introduced from white settlement into
populations that didn’t have immunity to those diseases, recurs
throughout the history of white settlement all over Australia.
The disastrous impact of European diseases on Aboriginal peoples without
immunities, is a common story in the Americas, the Pacific and
Australasia, but that does not stop some historical revisionists even
attempting to alter this history. There is even one medical historian,
who laborioriously tries to construct a narrative in which smallpox
didn’t spread from white settlement, as almost all the witnesses at the
time said it did, but came overland from the Malay contact with Arnhem
Land. Predictably he, too, becomes one of Sheehan’s “experts”.
In this context, Sheehan ignores the definitive book on this topic, Our
Original Aggression, by the late Noel Butlin, the distinguished
Australian statistician and economist (after whom the Noel Butlin
Archives in Canberra are named), published in 1983, and his Economics
and the Dreamtime (ANU Press, 1994). In these thoroughly reputable and
pretty well unanswerable books, Butlin established quite clearly from
the records that the epidemics close to the settled areas of Australia
spread from the settled areas.
He also, as part of his research, using his skills as a statistician,
satisfactorily proved for most geographers and anthropologists that the
number of Aborigines in Australia at the time of settlement was probably
between 600,000 and a million, many more than the 300,000 previously
accepted as the likely figure.
Throughout the 19th century, as white settlement spread, there was a
frequent effort on the part of British colonial authorities in Australia
to kill off the Aboriginals, interspersed with much more episodic and
less effective moments of attempting to “protect” them. Sometimes the
protection was almost as bad as the more overt attempts to exterminate.
In Tasmania, the Protector of Aborigines, the earnest and fairly
well-intentioned George Augustus Robinson, eventually was forced, more
of less by circumstance, to preside over a desperate scheme to create a
reservation for the surviving Tasmanians, which ended up being on a
bleak and unpleasant island, unsuitable for such a purpose, where the
surviving full-blood Aboriginal Tasmanians died out, the last survivor
being Truganini.
The present Tasmanian Aboriginal community is descended mainly from a
mixed-blood community that developed on the islands of Bass Strait from
white sealers and the Tasmanian women who they seized during the brutal
era of European conquest of Tasmania. Perhaps the most vicious,
appalling but effective feature of this war of extermination and
conquest, was the recruitment of Aboriginal mounted police from the most
brutalised group of young males from tribal remnants, who were unleashed
by white colonial society on tribes other than their own, with a licence
and encouragement to kill. Some of these ugly episodes are covered in
Bill Rosser’s moving book Up Rode the Troopers, The Black Police in
Queensland (Queensland University Press, 1990).
Sheehan loathes critical Australian historians
The following short piece of purple prose is from the second-last page
of Sheehan’s book:
“Thirty years of poisoning of the nation’s history has taken its toll.
Many histories now parrot a hatred of Australia. The
politically-motivated accusations of racism, made hollow by overuse,
have been pumped up to include ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’. The mud has
stuck. The nation’s sense of certainty at the end of the century has
been eroded by the politics of stealth and division.”
Well, at the risk of incuring Mr Sheehan’s displeasure by further
poisoning the nation’s history, as he puts it, I hereby read into the
record some material from a historian, Sir Hudson Fysh, of whom Sheehan
possibly approves.
The brutal butcher Kennedy and Sir Hudson Fysh
From the more civilised standpoint that is now happily accepted by most
Australians, it is quite difficult to remember just how barbaric was the
conquest of Australia from its original inhabitants, and how sickening
the celebration of this conquest by British White Australia up until
very recent times. I recently acquired at a book fair a standard piece
of the Australiana of the 1930s, a book Taming the North by Hudson Fysh
(Angus and Robertson, 1933), later Sir Hudson Fysh, the founder of
Qantas.
The version I have is the revised and enlarged edition published in
March 1950. This book ought to be reprinted as a reminder of the brazen
way British White Australia justified its ruthless suppression of all
Aboriginal resistance to conquest. The book is a biography of the quite
famous squatter, Alexander Kennedy, the Scottish settler who “opened up”
the area north and west of Cloncurry for white settlement.
This area was the tribal land of the warlike Kalkadoons. After the
Kalkadoons had been constantly provoked by the squatters pushing further
and further into every corner of their tribal lands, they finally
speared a couple of the most offensive intruders. The vengeance of the
bloodthirsty squatters, aided by the native police, led by the
notoriously vicious F.C. Urquhart, who ended up Queensland Police
Commissioner, was absolutely awesome.
Using their superior firepower, they wiped out several hundred
Kalkadoons. What is most amazing about these brutal incidents is the
unctuous and brutally frank way Sir Hudson Fysh describes them and other
events in this war of extermination against the Kalkadoons and praises
the bloodthirsty Kennedy and Urquhart.
The illustrations and the cover of the book are also extraordinary
expressions of the ideology of conquest that pervaded British Australia.
These illustrations portray the “rugged and manly” white settlers, with
their carbines, pursuing and shooting the “naked savages”. Fysh
routinely repeats, as if they were true, the fairy stories about
Aboriginal cannibalism. He says:
There is no doubt that the blacks right through northern Queensland were
cannibals. Urquhart says that his boys always told him the blacks did
not like the taste of whites much — they were too salt — but they
relished Chinamen, hundreds of whom were killed when taking provisions
across the Peninsula to the Palmer River goldfield in the early days
following its discovery by Mulligan. This fact was put down to the
salt-beef diet of the early whites, while the Chinamen lived mainly on
rice.
The following extracts from Fysh’s book celebrate several of the
massacres.
At last, Eglington, the white officer in charge, arrived on the scene
and soon the situation was under control. A brush with the murderers
ensued and many of the natives were killed, the rest making their escape
to the rough country. Kennedy returned about this time and asked
Eglington if he thought he had got all the murderers. “Yes,” said
Eglington.
“Did you get a piebald black?” asked Kennedy.
“No,” was the answer.
“Well, come along. That fellow is one of a mob that I have had my eye on
for a long time — a cheeky trouble-making chap. We shan’t be safe now
till they are out of the district.”
A long trip into the hills followed, the native police hot on the trail
and Kennedy as keen as the rest. A yell of defiance was heard, the
pursuers were discovered by the retreating party and hurled threats from
their supposed safety in the rugged hilly country. However, they did not
reckon on the deadly carbines of the whites and the native troopers, who
speedily shot the warlike bucks down.
The piebald lay dead. He was a most peculiar freak, normal in physique,
build, and intelligence, but his dusky skin was patched here and there
with healthy, pinkish-white areas.
A later massacre
Kennedy was filled with a fierce rage and urged the speedy following up
of the murderers. This was the last straw. The killing of his cattle was
bad enough, but the loss of his partner … showed that nothing but a
terrible lesson would suffice. …
The blacks were finally located in a gorge and, though showing some
hostility at first by hurling spears in an attempt to stay the approach
of the party, they broke and fled at the first sign of rifle fire. There
were natives behind boulders, behind trees, and up trees, and every now
and then they made attempts to sneak away to better cover when the
opportunity occurred. One small party got away over the spur of a hill,
being assisted in their flight by the cracking of the carbines, which
stirred up the dust around their feet. Kennedy borrowed Urquhart’s
horse, Hamlet, and went off in pursuit. … Kennedy was like hell let
loose that day …
Some natives who had remained in hiding bobbed up here and there as they
made a dash for better cover. One fellow jumped up from behind a boulder
and raced for the nearest creek, and Kennedy, who was on foot at the
time, sprang after him. Reaching the steep bank the native jumped into
the water, meaning to make for the opposite bank. As Kennedy reached the
edge he took careful aim with his carbine, but the weapon failed to go
off. Hurling the carbine in after the native, Kennedy jumped into the
water, and commenced to grapple with his enemy.
Urquhart fired just in time to prevent serious consequences, for Kennedy
could not swim. Two of Urquhart’s boys went into the water and brought
Kennedy ashore. It took the boys two hours’ diving to recover the
carbine.
The self-righteous Urquhart even wrote an execrable poem celebrating the
second massacre! Hudson Fysh’s interest in Kennedy stemmed largely from
the fact that Kennedy was one of his first investors in Qantas, and
there is a picture in the book of Kennedy as an old man in 1931 getting
out of one of the early Qantas planes. Never has Karl Marx’s aphorism
that modern capitalism comes upon the scene “bloody in tooth and claw”
been more clearly demonstrated than in the reverent way Hudson Fysh
writes about the bloodthirsty Kennedy.
In a very real sense, part of the initial capital to develop the pioneer
Australian airline, Qantas, was surplus value derived from this conquest
and massacre, that is, from the blood of the murdered Kalkadoons. In my
view, as an act of long overdue historical recognition and repentance,
Qantas should be renamed Kalkadoon.
No doubt Paul Sheehan has been reduced to appoplexy by recent news that
Professor Colin Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide
Studies at Macquarie University, has prepared a general brief against
previous Australian governments for genocide on four major grounds. One
of these is that the colonial authorities stood by or authorised
settlers or police to slaughter 4000 Aborigines in Tasmania from 1806 to
1835, and some 10,000 in Queensland between 1824 and 1908.
P.P. McGuiness, as an “expert” on Aboriginal affairs
The editor of Quadrant and Sydney Morning Herald columnist, the
irascible, arrogant, pompous and chronically self-congratulatory P.P.
McGuiness, has in recent times appointed himself as a bit of a pundit on
Aboriginal affairs. One of his preoccupations is ridiculing all notions
of past genocide, which is a pretty tall order, considering all the
evidence for past massacres — of which the incidents recounted above are
only a few — many of which have been documented by Henry Reynolds.
McGuinness associates this rejection of past genocide against Aborigines
with throwaway remarks questioning the genocide involved in the recent
massacres of Kosovar Albanians and East Timorese. He seems to have a
particular soft spot for the “civil rights” of “alleged” practitioners
of genocide such as the white British conquerors of Australia, the
Serbian dictator Milosevic and the Indonesian military. To each their
own!
McGuinness’s other unpleasant obsession is his ridicule of the notion
that thousands of Aboriginal children were stolen from their parents. He
claims that (1) it wasn’t a matter of government policy, despite Robert
Manne’s documentation of national meetings of public servants in
Aboriginal affairs, where such lines of policy were implicitly endorsed,
and (2) he ignores or ridicules the personal testimony of the many
hundreds of Aboriginals who assert that they were forcibly removed from
their parents.
This second obsession is very offensive indeed to those who were
forcibly removed and to many thousands of other Australians. McGuiness’s
approach reached a kind of high point in the notorious ABC program in
which he gratuitously insulted Lois O’Donoghue, one of the stolen
children herself, in his most arrogant way, by pouring contempt on the
idea that any children were stolen. His extraordinary performance on
that occasion took many people’s breath away.
Michael Duffy, another “expert” on Aboriginal affairs
The Murdoch tabloid directed at the less formally educated sections of
society, the Daily Telegraph, retains three rabidly right-wing populist
columnists whose function is to cater to the perceived prejudices of the
paper’s audience, to whit, Piers Ackerman and the Janissary journalists
Miranda Devine and Michael Duffy.
On the Telegraph opinion page of January 5, 2000, Duffy has a carefully
worded piece headed, Keep the H word out of our history. He goes out of
his way to stress the Jewish origins of a number of prominent public
critics of Australian racism against Aborigines, while of course
disclaiming any anti-Semitism, in singling out these Jews.
Apparently Jews are more sensitive on these things because they got here
more recently and their familiarity with the Holocaust directed at the
Jews of Europe has made them overly preoccupied with such matters and
led them to exaggerate the magnitude of the atrocities perpetrated on
Australia’s Aboriginal population. Get the message! Rootless
cosmopolitans don’t understand Australian history as well as older “real
Australians” such as Duffy, who properly understand in their bones that
our treatment of the Aboriginals wasn’t all that bad.
Duffy is worried that the Labor side of politics may be gaining some
momentum among liberal-minded Australians by its defence of Aboriginal
rights, and he bemoans the fact that the vigorous defence of Aboriginal
rights, and a vigorous focus on past wrongs done to the Aboriginal
population, is dividing Australia. He says:
The last thing Aborigines — or those genuinely interested in their
wellbeing — need is for their future to be affected by the introduction
of concepts and words which inflame and confuse our view of those
horrors which did happen here.
And, later:
In the meantime, the best thing the rest of us can do is resist attempts
to polarise Aboriginal matters. This includes attempts to change the
meanings of words in common use.
Elsewhere he makes the extraordinary statement:
Most people would now agree that One Nation was in fact not a racist
phenomenon.
So we had all better get the message. Pauline Hanson is not racist, and
anyway, many of the people making a fuss about Aboriginal oppression are
a just a bunch of Jews. British Australia did some bad things to the
Aboriginal population, but we shouldn’t exaggerate it. After all, the
main danger in Aboriginal affairs is not really the oppression of the
Aboriginal people, but the damaging possibility that inflaming anger
about injustices to Aborigines will interfere with the Sydney 2000
Olympics.
In the Telegraph a bizarre competition is developing between Duffy and
Piers Ackerman, with the two tabloid columnists trying to outdo each
other in the vicious extravagance of their comments on Aboriginal
affairs. Well, Duffy now has to be way in front in this contest, with
his contribution on March 25 to the debate on mandatory sentencing. The
following extract is something of a new low in nasty tabloid treatment
of these matters:
It is particularly nauseating that this new racism has been practised in
the name of virtue. Many of these sanctimonious whites, this small army
of lawyers, anthropologists, public servants and journalists, have lost
touch with the spiritual roots of their own culture and have tried to
redeem themselves by feeding off Aboriginal issues, which they pervert
to suit their own decadent spiritual requirements. Their new religion is
anti-racism, and everything is interpreted as a racial issue, no matter
how wrong and destructive of Aboriginal interests this might be. It is
time these white moral maggots were shaken off the body of black
Australia, from which they have sucked so much life.
White maggots, indeed! White maggots of Australia unite! Within a couple
of days of Duffy’s extraordinary outburst in his column, an opinion poll
was published in the newspapers of March 28, showing that more
Australians opposed mandatory sentencing than supported it, and many
more again opposed mandatory sentencing of adolescents. I’m considering
having a badge made for public sale, with the slogan, “I am a white
maggot”.
It almost goes without saying that it would be fascinating to get Duffy
down on a couch and try to draw out of his mind by psychoanalysis what
ghosts and demons are running around in his head about “rootless
cosmopolitans” and “white maggots” “interfering in Aboriginal affairs”.
The saga of Jack and Lallie Akbar
A brutal and instructive episode in both Aboriginal affairs and
Australia’s race policy relating to Asians, sharply refutes McGuiness’s
proposition that no state policy was involved in the stolen children
saga. A moving and informative book by Pamela Rajkowski called Linden
Girl, a story of outlawed lives (UWA Press, 1995) recounts the
extraordinary saga of an “Afghan” (actually an Indian Muslim from the
Punjab), Jack Akbar, who married a young Aboriginal woman, Lallie, in
Western Australia in the 1920s.
This scholarly and thorough book documents how the notorious Western
Australian “Protector” of Aborigines, Auber Octavius Neville, had Jack
Akbar and Lallie, who ultimately produced a family of three children,
imprisoned several times for the “crime” of marrying each other. It is
an extraordinary story of human courage and endurance. The devoted
couple escaped a number of times, on one occasion making an
extraordinary journey across the Nullabor Plain with Lallie pregnant,
and which they only survived because he was an experienced camel driver
and she, coming of a tribe of desert Aborigines, was used to living off
the land.
Eventually they beat the rap, so to speak, for their marriage “crime”,
and lived happily for many years after the Department of Aboriginal
Affairs eventually gave up trying to separate them out of exhaustion.
The significance of this book in relation to the stolen children is that
the author found repeated and constant references in “Protector”
Neville’s private papers to the policy of removing mixed-race children
from their Aboriginal parents in an attempt to “breed the colour out”.
One of Neville’s objections to the marriage between Akbar and Lallie was
that in his racist universe they were both coloured, and therefore a
union between them would only perpetuate the continuation of undesirable
coloured races.
Auber Octavius Neville was by far the most forceful person in the
adoption of the stolen children strategy in Aboriginal affairs. In the
minutes of the meeting of Protectors of Aboriginals from the different
states and territories that in 1937 adopted the policy as official
strategy, he emerges as the most forceful, domineering and articulate
advocate and practitioner of this terrible government practice.
Aboriginal resistance
The history of Aboriginal resistance to the war of conquest, has been
carefully covered over in the past, but Forgotten rebels: Black
Australians who fought back, by David Lowe (Permanent Press, Melbourne,
1994). Black War by Clive Turnbull (1948), and Aboriginal Tasmanians by
Lyndall Ryan (Allen and Unwin, 1996), and in particular the wonderful
and ongoing work of Henry Reynolds, describing the many episodes of
Aboriginal resistance, have gone some distance towards correcting the
historical record.
Australia’s collective repressed memory. Sexual relations between
conquerers and conquered produced multitudes of mixed-blood Australians
from the first moment of settlement, and many of them have been absorbed
by “white” Australia
Despite the very real attempt at extermination, Aboriginal Australia
displayed an extraordinary resilience in some ways. From the first days
of settlement, sexual relationships between whites and Aboriginals
produced many mixed-blood offspring, who survived because of their
immunity, inherited from the white parent, to imported diseases. Many of
these were absorbed, because of the shortage of women, into white
colonial society, giving rise to a very widespread but often hidden
Aboriginal ancestry among working-class and rural populations. Recently,
even the well-known television personality Ray Martin has discovered a
remote Aboriginal ancestor.
This question of the amount of “racial” mixture in older Australian
populations has been constantly repressed in the collective memory.
There can be very little doubt about the widespread Aboriginal
contribution to “white” Australian population, particularly in the older
settled areas and in rural and pastoral areas.
Particularly during the explosion of pastoralism beyond the 19 counties
around Sydney, from the 1820s onwards, all observers noted constant
sexual relationships between ex-convict shepherds and Aboriginal
populations. Even the rapidly developing distinctive Australian version
of the English language was strongly influenced by the interplay between
Aboriginal idiom and Irish Celtic speech on the pastoral interface
between Aboriginal and European Australia.
Conflicts over women were flashpoints for many of the physical conflicts
between whites and Aboriginals. “Half-caste” girls, in particular, were
in great demand for domestic labour and sexual services in the bush. The
Aboriginal contribution to the gene pool of “white” society is
substantial in much of rural Australia.
In pastoral Australia the curious institution developed very widely of
the “drover’s boy”, in which Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal women
travelled with drovers, dressed as men. This has been immortalised in
Ted Egan’s popular song. As in the American South, this question of some
black ancestry is the haunting refrain that exists in the recesses of
many family histories. The explosion in numbers of people asserting
Aboriginal identity in successive censuses is the surfacing of this
widespread repressed family memory.
Many other mixed-blood people became part of a surviving, and later
reviving, Aboriginal society in many parts of Australia. In Victoria,
southern South Australia, Tasmania and NSW there are very few full-blood
Aboriginals left, but there is now a large and vigorous Aboriginal
society of mainly mixed ancestry.
In the 19th century, a sometimes well-intentioned, but often vicious,
white paternalism emerged in relation to Aboriginal affairs and the
anthropological study of Aborigines. The work of Protectors cum
anthropologists, such as Daisy Bates and T.G. Strehlow, has been used to
justify some paternalistic practices and to defend essentially
conservative policies in relation to Aboriginal affairs. Recently an
anthropologist working in Aboriginal affairs, Ken Maddock, has attempted
to use his anthropological prestige to buttress the reactionary Quadrant
project in relation to Aboriginal affairs.
Even a well-known, prize-winning, although rather opaque novelist, David
Foster, has made spectacularly reactionary public statements on
Aboriginal issues, once again, quickly seized on by Paul Sheehan in his
book. A theme that was begun in the 19th century by the fantasist Daisy
Bates, was that of “the passing of the Aborigines”, which she associated
with a wild exaggeration of perceived barbaric rituals and practices in
traditional Aboriginal society.
The eccentric and tortured Daisy Bates became a byword for these two
themes, and her largely invented stories of ritual infanticide came to
be a core element in the conventional European view of traditional
Aboriginal society, which she kept repeating forcibly was dying anyway.
Dick Hall, in his wonderful and effective book Black Armband Days
(Random House, 1998), thoroughly and comprehensively “deconstructs” the
previously all-pervasive Daisy Bates legend.
Some of the bones of allegedly ritually eaten Aboriginal babies that
Daisy Bates sent to the South Australian Museum, were later found to be
the bones of feral cats, and a lot of the other bones can’t be traced.
The impact of the Strehlow-Bates school of Aboriginal “anthropology” has
been enormous. The ease with which someone like Pauline Hanson or the
authors of the book Pauline Hanson, The Truth (Pauline Hanson Support
Movement, 1997), just reel off wild assertions implying that tribal
Aboriginal eating of babies was an almost normal dietary practice,
underlines the unpleasant ideological impact of this thoroughly white
paternalist, shoddily researched, or even falsified Daisy Bates style
“anthropology”. Whenever some racist wishes to abolish ATSIC, like
Pauline Hanson, or cut off funds for Aboriginal health and welfare, its
become almost routine for them to throw in dubious anthropology about
Aboriginal “baby eating” and other barbarities alleged to be part of
traditional Aboriginal culture.
The main figure in this paternalistic extinctionist attitude to
Aboriginal culture and affairs was the extraordinarily talented,
prodigiously energetic, but possibly slightly mad, anthropologist T.G.
Strehlow. There is no question that Carl Strehlow and his son, T.G.
Strehlow, put together a thorough record of the Arrernte culture through
their anthropological efforts over many years. Nevertheless, both
Strehlows’ thoroughly racist preconceptions led them to exaggerate
perceived brutal aspects of Arrernte culture. T.G. Strehlow’s racist
Eurocentrism made him the originator of a general theme that has become
almost a mantra of racists who wish to appear learned. His view was that
Arrernte society, although brutal and in parts even Satanic was,
nevertheless, in its own way, authentic. (T.G’s father, Carl was head of
the Finke River Mission, at Hermannsburg, in the Northern Territory from
1894-1922, and T.G. was raised and individually taught by his father to
the age of 14.) He had absolute contempt, however, for mixed-blood
people, who he regarded as degenerate, not authentic Aboriginals, and
demeaning to the white “race” also.
This Strehlow view of Aboriginal traditional society as cruel, brutal,
authentic but doomed, and half-caste society as loathsome and
degenerate, has become the accepted ideology on Aboriginal affairs of
many racists and bigots in Australian society. The many variations on
this theme permeated most attempts to address the problem of Aboriginal
society until very recent times. The state project of stealing
mixed-blood children from their parents (the stolen generations) stems
from the Strehlow view that half-caste society was vile. The Hermansburg
Lutheran Mission, where Strehlow’s dramas were played out, was one of
the saddest and most contradictory of Christian missions. It certainly
acted as a kind of refuge for Aboriginal people trying to survive the
widespread physical attacks on them, but the price they paid was a
constant assault on their cultural traditions by the narrow and bigotted
Lutheran missionaries, who regarded Aboriginal traditional religion as
Satanic.
The important book by the infuriating postmodernist, Paul Carter, The
Lie of the Land (Faber, 1996), is very illuminating on this. Ploughing
through Carter’s maddeningly obtuse text is, in this instance, well
worth the effort. The chapter “A Reverent Miming” is an extraordinary
mine of information about what happened at the Hermansburg Mission.
Carter describes, in a pathetic and moving way, the constant pressure on
the Aboriginal elders and religious leaders by the Christian religious
maniac, Pastor Albrecht, to surrender to him the traditional Aboriginal
religious artifacts, the tjurungas. He also describes the official
Lutheran ceremony of “desacralisation” of the Manangananga Cave in which
these objects had been preserved for many hundreds of years. Both
Strehlows accumulated a collection of thousands of these looted
Aboriginal sacred objects, and many of the Aboriginal people in central
Australia are still fighting a vigorous battle with the Strehlow estate
to get them back for the Aboriginal people before they are dispersed via
Christies or Sothebys to rich collectors around the world.
The account of these events in Carter’s book is supplemented by the
account in One Blood (Albatross Books, 1990) by the Anglican, John
Harris, who provides a perceptive overview of the experience of
Christian missions in Australia.
Australia played a bloodthirsty role in the South Pacific. Nevertheless,
150,000 people from the South Pacific now live in Australia
From the time of white settlement, Sydney became the main port for the
British looting and conquest of the South Pacific. British ships out of
Sydney supplied guns to Maori chiefs in New Zealand and to many tribal
chiefs throughout the Pacific, using their trade in guns to increase
British political influence, and to thereby facilitate their looting of
the area.
This activity was almost universally bloodthirsty. The notorious
activities of Samuel Marsden, the Anglican minister, flogging magistrate
and missionary gun-runner, and the later “blackbirding” of many
thousands of Melanesians as semi-slave labourers to Queensland, are only
the best-known examples of a whole system of conquest and exploitation.
A typical event was the incident in 1837 when, without warning, the men
of Sapwauahfik Atoll (then called Ngatik) in Micronesia were killed by
the crew of a trade ship, out of Sydney, who wished to steal a cache of
valuable tortoiseshell possessed by the islanders. This is recounted in
the fascinating book, The Ngatik Massacre (Smithsonian Institute, 1993)
by Lin Poyer
The story of this community is, in its own way, just as fascinating a
story as that of the Pitcairn Islanders. After the massacre, several of
the European murderers settled on the island and were joined by a
collection of other Pacific beachcombers, who cohabited with the female
survivors of the massacre, giving rise to a vigorous new community with
its own complex culture, which now numbers some hundreds, descended, in
a way, from the murderers and the surviving widows of the murdered men.
Needless to say, a collective memory of the massacre is an important
part of the cultural history of the island.
Quite a lot of South Pacific history is like this, containing terrible
memories of past atrocities mixed with the extraordinary resilience of
the surviving indigenous people, recreating a life and culture for
themselves from whatever is left to and available to them.
In the light of this bloodthirsty Australian participation in Pacific
history, an interesting feature of the racial history of Australia is
the presence, today, of vigorous communities of indigenous people from
all over the Pacific. For a start, people from the Torres Strait
Islands, who are mainly Melanesian with some Polynesian influences, have
scattered all over northern Australia, from Darwin to Brisbane, and
there are even communities in Sydney and Melbourne.
There are maybe 30,000 of these people. The descendents of the
Melanesians (Kanaks) who managed to avoid deportation from Queensland
between 1900 and 1910 have developed into a vigorous, self-confident
community, nearly 20,000, mainly in Queensland centred on Mackay.
More recently, large communities of people from Polynesia have settled
in Australia: Samoans, Tongans, Cook Islanders and others, and some
Melanesians from Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There are now perhaps 40,000
people of this background from the Pacific in Australia. There are also
about 60,000 Maoris from New Zealand and quite a scattering of
descendants of Africans and West Indians, sent to Australia as convicts
in the 19th century, or who came, like the black Americans at Eureka,
during the gold rushes. (In an article in the Journal of Australian
Studies No 16, Ian Duffield calculates that 1% of the convicts sent to
Australia were African or West Indian blacks. This makes a total of
almost 2,000 black convicts. In Watkin Tench’s account of the early
colony, there are nearly 20 mentions of different black convicts. In
“Australian Race Relations 1788-1993” published in 1994, Andrew Markus
records: “Sir Frank Villeneuve Smith, at various times attorney-general,
premier and chief justice of Tasmania, and the first president of the
Tasmanian Club, was of part-African descent”.)
The complexity of the history of the infusion of people of colour into
the Australian community is underlined by the nasty hullabaloo directed
at the head of a well-known and successful Western Australian Aboriginal
writer, Colin Johnston, and the noted academic, Bobbi Sykes, whose
detractors claimed that they didn’t have the right to classify
themselves as Aboriginal because their coloured ancestor was actually
from somewhere else, despite the fact that they had identified from
childhood with the black community. If you take together all these
people, plus the more than 350,000 people who now identify themselves as
Aboriginal according to the census, you have a community in Australia of
indigenous people of colour from Australia or the South Pacific, of more
than 600,000 people.
The phenomenon that has taken demographers by surprise, and driven
conservative racists to fury, is the explosive numerical expansion of
the self-identified Aboroginal population at the past few censuses. At
each census the number of Aboriginals has gone up far more rapidly than
either natural increase or even intermarriage can account for. What has
actually happened is that many Australians who have a family memory,
often concealed for survival reasons, particularly in the rabidly racist
19th century, having rediscovered and come to terms with their
Aboriginal ancestry, feel sufficiently at ease to acknowledge it to the
census takers.
The racists, of course, ascribe this to the (very limited) financial
advantages, available to people of Aboriginal ancestry, but the more
obvious explanation is the same kind of thing that drives other people
who engage in the now widespread, very human preoccupation with family
history, to proudly proclaim the convict ancestry, which was once such a
terrible stigma. Recently, Paddy McGuiness has put a new slant on these
things, asserting that because a majority of Aboriginal people appear
currently to marry non-Aboriginal people, the existence of Aboriginal
identity is questionable and the rapid complete “assimilation” of
Aboriginals is likely. This McGuiness slant is not very useful in making
an accurate projection for the future.
The overwhelming majority of children of unions between Aboriginal
people and non-Aboriginal people tend to identify mainly with the
Aboriginal part of their heritage, and even if they don’t, are often
forced to do so by the residual racism in Australian society. In real
life there is no prospect at all of Aboriginal identity dying out
because of intermarriage.
The stolen children
The stolen children is the issue that most sharply embodies the brutal
history and the unacknowledged guilt of white racism in Australia. To
assist in the process of the widely acclaimed “passing of the
Aboriginals”, the racist authorities in British Australia in the 19th
century began a process of stealing Aboriginal children from their
parents to turn them into a docile labour force for the emerging
Australian capitalist society.
Over the past 150 years, nearly 50,000 Aboriginal or mixed race children
were stolen from their parents in one way or another. The process of the
descendants of this child stealing rediscovering their Aboriginality is
a part of the explosion in Aboriginal numbers in the census. In addition
to this, in the early years of settlement, and in fact all through the
19th century, other mixed-blood people disappeared into the underclass
of white society, often into the Irish Catholic section of it, where
they were more accepted and could partly avoid the rabid racism of the
British ruling class in colonial Australia.
The extraordinary popularity among white Australians of Sally Morgan’s
wonderful bestseller, My Place (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987) about
her experiences tracing her Aboriginality, clearly indicates that many
people are beginning to come to terms with the sorry history of white
Australia in these matters. Another very moving book on this topic is
The Lost Children (Doubleday, 1989) edited by Coral Edwards and Peter
Read, which is the life stories of 13 stolen children told by
themselves.
The definitive overview of the whole question of the deliberate
disruption of Aboriginal life involved in the stolen children policy, is
the magisterial and comprehensive new book, Broken Circles. Fragmenting
Indigenous Families 1800-2000 by Anna Haebich (Fremantle Arts Centre
Press, 2000).
Another feature of colonial Australia was the intermarriage with
Aboriginals of some migrant groups that had few women among them. Quite
a few Chinese married Aboriginals. In central Australia very many of the
“Afghan” camel drivers (they were mostly actually from the north-west
frontier of what is now Pakistan, but crude British shorthand classified
them as Afghans) married Aboriginals, and there is a community in
central Australia, which mainly forms part of the Aboriginal community,
with Pakistani names, who are descendants of these unions.
The explosion of Aboriginal numbers in the recent censuses is obviously
a coming together of the delayed results of all these past practices and
events. The antagonistic response to it from some of the more backward
and racist white Australians is obviously a product of a very bad
conscience about Aboriginal relations in the past. For me, these matters
have acquired a strong personal aspect in the last few years, because,
as I describe elsewhere, an inquiry by one of my relatives into our
family history has produced a hauntingly circumstantial, but difficult
to document, inference of some probable remote Aboriginality, from an
Aboriginal ancestor who may have deliberately disappeared into the more
accepting Irish Catholic working class of the 19th century.
Indigenous Australia and white Australia
It is obvious that my starting point in these matters is the imperative
need for Australians to take a determined stand in defence of the
interests of indigenous Australia against the current explosion of
racism and attacks on the material interests of Aboriginal Australians.
It seems to me absolutely clear that it is a reactionary diversion for
essentially conservative people such as Pauline Hanson and Paul Sheehan
to make indigenous Australians, Asian migrants and others scapegoats for
the problems of modern Australia. Such attempts must be opposed, fought
and defeated.
Hundreds of thousands of white Australians are prepared to defend the
rights and interests of indigenous Australia, as is shown by the
enormous response to the events such as Sorry Day, Queensland
pastoralists who have spoken up for Aboriginal reconciliation, the
thousands of people who have spoken out against mandatory sentencing,
and even the statements of conservative figures such as Malcolm Fraser.
Nevertheless, having said this, there are real, if episodic, conflicts
of interest between some ordinary white Australians and some indigenous
Australians, and that is one of the factors that gives momentum to the
racist diversions of the people such as Pauline Hanson. These conflicts
of interest are real and can’t be glossed over.
For a start, many Aboriginals live either in poorer working class areas
of major cities or in provincial cities or country towns of high
unemployment, low income and limited facilities and prospects for
everyone. Because of past oppression, and current social problems, the
unemployment rate among Aboriginal youth, with the concommitant social
dislocation, is much higher than that of any other social group.
Problems such as alcoholism and drugs are proportionately higher among
Aboriginal youth. The health problems of Aboriginal communities are
worse than those of whites, and the life expectancy of Aboriginals is
lower than that of whites. In addition to this, and for all the above
reasons, the proportion of Aboriginals in the prison system is far
higher than the proportion in the community. (This has been the case for
the last 30 or 40 years. Before that, for the whole of the 19th century
and the early part of the 20th century, the Irish Catholics numerically
dominated the prison system, out of all proportion to their numbers in
society at large, much to the mock horror of upper-class British
Australia, which got very worked up about the criminal propensities of
Catholics. The reason for this over-representation of Catholics in the
prisons was exactly the same as the current over-representation of
Aboriginals. At that stage Irish Catholics were the poorest of the
population, at the bottom of the social heap. In Paul Sheehan’s book, he
also makes great chauvinist mileage from the proposition that
Vietnamese, Arabs, Turks and Maoris (Sheehan’s codeword for Maoris is
“New Zealanders”), recent immigrants from poor countries or poor
circumstances, are somewhat over-represented in the prison system. So
what’s new?)
The widespread presence of an often physically obvious indigenous
Australasian community, in the poorest sections of Australian society,
gives rise to very sharp and quite human conflicts of interest. In some
country towns a heavy concentration of mainly unemployed youth, a fair
percentage of them black or brown, is a prominent feature of life. In
some towns it is difficult to run a small business because of the
desperate behaviour of unemployed youth. Such problems don’t lend
themselves to easy or short-term solutions, and it is not useful or
intelligent to treat the sometimes racist responses of poorer white
Australians to these circumstances as racism of the same sort that
Pauline Hanson expresses. Such conflicts of interest are to some extent
conflicts among the people, and should be treated as such and approached
as realistically and humanely as possible, trying to take account of the
real interests of all concerned.
Such conflicts aren’t so acute in major urban centres such as Sydney,
Brisbane and Melbourne, but they exist there, too. In some areas of
Sydney, for instance, quite a lot of house burglaries are committed by
unemployed indigenous youth, and a fair percentage of the current wave
of minor hold-ups in newsagencies and convenience stores, with knives or
syringes, are committed by brown or black youth, often driven by
narcotics habits, as are their fellow white armed robbers. While the
human tendency to urban myth often exagerates the proportion of
burglaries and hold-ups performed by Aboriginals or Pacific Islanders,
nevertheless, in my patch, the inner west of Sydney, these conflicts of
interest between ordinary Australians are quite real. I have been a
retailer, with a large, late-opening, seven-day-a-week shop in King
Street, Newtown, for the past 12 years.
We have been burgled three times, and we have been robbed or held up
half a dozen times in those 10 years. One of the burglars was caught,
and he was white. Four of the hold-up men or robbers were brown or
black. Luckily no one was ever injured, and we never lost too much,
because, as a matter of routine, we don’t keep much money in the till.
Many other small businesses in the inner west have had similar
experiences, as have many householders. There is no doubt that these
experiences inflame a certain amount of racism directed at indigenous
people, who are perceived by many to be the main perpetrators. It’s a
mistake to put this response of ordinary Australians to real problems in
the same category as the Pauline Hanson response.
In my experience, this kind of problem comes in waves, to do with the
constantly changing demographics of the inner-city. In my 10 years on
King Street, I have seen several generations of very young Aboriginal
kids “working the strip”, so to speak, and finding outlets for their
frustrations in thieving and vandalism. Like any other shopkeeper, when
a new bunch of young kids, white or black, starts appearing full of the
obvious unemployed adolescent testosterone, I go on a bit of a war
footing until they pass on to other things. I’ve outlasted quite a few
groups like this. On one occasion, seeing the telltale signs, with a
couple of young kids causing a disturbance, while another one tried to
get behind the till, I confronted the group, and told them to leave
because I knew what they were up to. One of them said to me, “Oh, are
you a racist?” To which my response was, “This is my bit of turf. I
don’t give a fuck whether you’re a Koori or an Eskimo, I know what you
are up to, so piss off.” On that occasion they all burst out laughing,
and did leave and never came back.
On another occasion, a few years ago, I was sitting outside the shop on
the bus seat for 10 minutes, on a muggy Saturday afternoon in spring,
drinking a Coke before I went back inside to get on with my work,
watching the world go by, when I saw the following fascinating tableau.
A very well-built, gleaming, tough-looking young black bloke about 17,
stripped to the waist, wandered along the other side of the street,
rather out of it, high on something, talking to himself in a loud voice,
carrying a short iron bar, which he was banging on the walls and doors
as he passed, much to the consternation of the people, for instance,
inside the cafe opposite.
When he reached the houses opposite, after the cafe, which are inhabited
by students from Moore Theological College, he disappeared down the path
of one of them, with what appeared to me malicious intent. As the Moore
College students are my neighbours, I quickly adopted a kind of
Neighbourhood Watch approach, crossed the road, and gingerly followed
him down the path, where he had already commenced trying to make entry
through a door with his iron bar. I yelled out to him: “Stop that mate!”
until he stopped. Then I hastily retreated, as he groggily came back
down the path and wandered further off down the street.
He then stopped, turned around and started throwing stones at me, one of
which hit me hard, from quite a distance. He was a pretty good
stone-thrower, that bloke. He then wandered off down King Street,
towards his own patch, still grumbling to himself, still waving his iron
bar. I felt a certain satisfaction that I’d protected the neighbours
from robbery without too much fuss or any real danger to myself, and I
hoped he wouldn’t inflict too much harm on anybody else, or himself.
Other small robberies have been more threatening and less amusing, and I
and other staff members have been several times threatened with knives
or clubs. On these occasions I’ve had no compunction in calling the
coppers. I only call the police if there’s any physical threat to my
staff or myself. If the poor bugger who has tried to hold us up, driven
by his addiction, ends up inside, whether he’s black or white, that
can’t be avoided.
This unfortunate choice is despite the fact that I know that the prison
system doesn’t solve anything, except that it gets the immediate threat
off the street, if and when the bloke is caught and convicted. I try to
handle these matters realistically, without contributing further to the
race prejudice in our society. I know a number of other small business
people in this area, for instance, the newsagent in Chippendale, the
next suburb, who shares my non-racist views, but has nevertheless been
held up on a number of occasions, and takes a similar matter-of-fact
approach to these problems.
However, my experience in these matters has given me a bit of insight
into all sides of these problems. The racist form of the response of
victims to some of these urban problems is by no means the same thing as
the belligerent, deliberate racist scape-goating of Pauline Hanson, and
one of the real tasks in relation to Aboriginal-white relations is to
address these kind of current problems in a very concrete way, without
either pandering to racism, or lightly shrugging off the real concerns
of the working class and middle class victims of urban crime.
One of the most dangerous but poignant incidents close to me happened
several years ago. A planning meeting for the Campaign against the Third
Runway was being held in the house of my daughter, who also lives in
Newtown. At the end of the meeting, walking up to King Street, a bloke
from the International Socialists who had been at the meeting, a bloke I
know quite well, a serious-minded, quiet individual, also the trade
union delegate for his fellow workers on a university campus, was
assaulted from behind and robbed. He woke up a few days later in
hospital, in intensive care, and he was three months off work.
Eyewitnesses to the incident identified his assailant as brown or black,
and the motive appears to have been robbery. (The assailant was actually
picked up by the coppers a few hours later.) The bloke assaulted is back
at work and once again engaged in his intense trade union, political and
anti-racist activity, and more power to his elbow. He is, however,
probably a bit careful about dark streets at night.
All of this leads me to my major conclusion. The problems of Aboriginal
society in Australia are, historically speaking, products of the
imperialist British conquest of this continent. The rights and interests
of Aboriginal and other coloured Australians have to be vigorously
defended by all other Australians, as well as Aboriginals. All attacks
on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, the Wik and Mabo
decisions, and on funding for Aboriginal welfare, and the repellant
phenomenon of mandatory sentencing, which bears down so heavily on
Aboriginal youth, should be vigorously opposed and defeated.
Considerable funds and resources should be devoted to getting at the
sources of the problems in Aboriginal society, as they should at the
problems in Australian society as a whole, particularly youth
unemployment. All racism should be defeated and condemned. However, real
conflicts among ordinary people that derive from these historic
oppressions, should be treated with realism, sensitivity and care,
taking into account the real interests of all Australians, pink, yellow
or black, working class and middle class.
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