In prose of lyrical clarity and uncompromising honesty, Bruce Pascoe invites readers to be awakened, enthralled by fresh and breath-taking truths about the story of Australia. This book, from a writer of Bunurong and Cornish heritage, illuminates the past with a frank, meticulous, considered, proud and passionate scholarship. Convincing Ground is unique. Carmel Bird This is a beautiful book built upon ugly truths which we must all confront. Maturity and independence of the Australian people will never be attained until we are honest about the past and about ourselves. This is not a ‘black armband’ work, but it does explore the ‘whitewash’ habits we have embraced. The colonial shackles are heavy and to lift them off requires a deliberate, conscious espousal of the gross ugliness here rendered with poetical lyricism. This is a book for all of us: it will do us great good even as we are disturbed by it. Bruce Pascoe says: ‘History can never be undone but we have a duty not to pretend it didn’t happen’. Politicians who now seem to love history cannot escape this narrative. Passionate it is because the truth fuels passion; lies never attain that status. Peter Gebhardt Bruce Pascoe’s personal and resonant journeying through his Gundidjmara history is layered with contemporary critiques of an Australia that could have been, and if we listen and question, could still be. None too gently, Pascoe appeals to all Australians to learn to embrace all aspects of our past within our present, and through such courage, to learn to ‘fall in love with’ our country. By critically examining major historical works, sources and witness accounts of the colonisation of Gundidjmara lands, Pascoe releases a cathartic questioning of Australia’s past that is both compelling and investigative. Taking us back to the ‘convincing ground’ of 1833–34, where the Gundidjmara were to be ‘convinced of white rights to the land,’ through violence and conflict, Pascoe has created a new Convincing Ground; one bound within the desire for justice, respect, and ultimately, an honest and unflinching embrace of this country and its incredibly complex histories. Steve Kinnane
Bruce Pascoe’s first two books, Night Animals and Fox, were published by Penguin. His later novels, stories and histories have been published by Magabala, Bruce Sims Books, Aboriginal Studies Press, Transworld and Seaglass. He won the Australian Literature Award in 2000 for the novel, Shark. With Lyn Harwood he published and edited the literary magazine, Australian Short Stories, for sixteen years and 64 issues along with other literary publications. He is currently preparing a dictionary and learning program for the Wathaurong language of the Geelong–Ballarat region. Research of the language has uncovered new documents which provoke alternative interpretations of our history. Pascoe has a Bunurong and Cornish heritage which informs his books. After living at Cape Otway for over twenty years he now lives at Gipsy Point with his wife, Lyn Harwood. Other books by Bruce Pascoe Novels: Fox Ruby-eyed Coucal Shark Earth Ocean Ribcage (Leopold Glass) Story collections: Night Animals Nightjar History: Cape Otway–Coast of Secrets Children: Foxies in a Firehose
Bruce Pascoe
Convincing Ground Learning to fall in love with your country
First published in 2007 by Aboriginal Studies Press © Bruce Pascoe 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its education purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Aboriginal Studies Press is the publishing arm of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. GPO Box 553, Canberra, ACT 2601 Phone: (61 2) 6246 1183 (61 2) 6261 4288 Fax: Email:
[email protected] Web: www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data: Pascoe, Bruce, 1947– . Convincing ground : learning to fall in love with your country. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 978 0 85575 549 2 (pbk.). ISBN 978 0 85575 694 9 (ebook PDF). 1. Aboriginal Australians, Treatment of — History. 2. Aboriginal Australians — Government relations — History. 3. Aboriginal Australians — Ethnic identity. 4. Australia — Race relations — History. 5. Australia — Colonisation — History. I. Title. 994.0049915 Front cover image: woorrkgnan — moorraka (birthplace — burial place), Vicki Couzens © 2004, acrylic and paper on canvas. Tattered possum skin cloak with skeletal figure overlaid. The figure is symbolic of both how we were buried in the old days, and the resting places of our Ancestors — in the earth. The markings on the possum skin panels tells a story of the Land, the Laws, the Dance, the Songs. It is about how we are born of, and belong to, the Land. We return to the Land; it is who we are. Index by Michael Harrington Printed in Australia by Ligare Pty Ltd
This is not a history, it’s an incitement Bruce Pascoe for the Australians
Contents
Acknowledgments Preface Introduction
viii ix 1
oneâ•…
Franks is Dead History, How it Starts threeâ•… The Lakes fourâ•… Lady Macbeth’s Clean Hands fiveâ•… The Lie of the Land sixâ•… The Psychology of the Frontier sevenâ•… Brave Explorers eightâ•… Lake Corangamite nineâ•… The Raised Sword tenâ•… The Great Australian Forge elevenâ•… The Great Australian Face twelveâ•… Golden Boy thirteenâ•… Don’t Mention the War fourteenâ•… The Language of War fifteenâ•… The Language of Resistance sixteenâ•… Native Born seventeen True Hunter eighteen Germaine to the Problem nineteen The Whispering Land twenty Elbows on the Bar
5 30 40 44 51 61 69 73 78 88 116 122 145 166 178 195 223 234 242 249
Appendices I Wathaurong Language Sample and map II Place Names of the Geelong–Ballarat Region III Jillong Timeline
259 262 265
twoâ•…
Notes Bibliography Index
275 282 291
Acknowledgments
For their assistance in the preparation of this book I would like to thank the Wathaurong Aboriginal Co-operative, State Library of Victoria, Mitchell Library of New South Wales, Geelong Historical Records Centre, Victorian Parliament Manuscripts Library, Public Records Office of Victoria; Chester Eagle, Kenny Laughton, Peter Gardner, Dr Ian Clark, Maureen at Colac Library, Michael Cannon, Doris Paton-Woollum Bellum; Ivan Couzens, Gundidjmara Aboriginal Community; Craig Edwards, Lindsay Arkley, Anita Heiss, Rhonda Black, Steve Kinnane, Roger Leuers, Brendan Marshall, Denise Lovett, Richard Fry; Damien Bell, Winda Mara Co-op; Antoinette Smith; Annette Peisley, Joy Evans, Max Joiner, Helen Stagoll; Arthur Williams, Opoutuma; Julia Ditterich, librarian, Sacred Heart College, Geelong; Paul Paton, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages; Alex Blaszak,Victorian Archaeological Survey; Steve Wadsworth and Lyn Harwood.
viii
Preface
I love my country and its people. While working on a dictionary for the revival of the Wathaurong language I kept turning up new information on how the Kulin Nation (the clans surrounding Port Phillip and Western Port bays) defended their land. There was plenty of unused material in the archives but more importantly I was told stories and shown diaries, letters and photos by Indigenous and n on-Indigenous Australians which proved crucial to an understanding of those turbulent days. Few of my sources were scholars and they had had no previous opportunity to paint the picture of their ancestors’ lives. From that perspective our national story looked quite different and it seemed unfair that most Australians’ knowledge of their homeland was blighted by a cruelly inadequate history. This book is for the Australians, old and new, black and white. Some might find the style offensive and abrupt but it has been written so that Aboriginal Australians can recognise themselves in the history of their country. Too often Aboriginal Australians have been asked to accept an insulting history and a public record which bears no resemblance to the lives they have experienced. I begin with western Victoria because it’s what I know best and it provides some telling incidents supported by reliable sources. From that point I wanted to compare the events and attitudes of colonial Australia to those of today. In doing so, I ask a lot of questions of the reader because I don’t have all the answers. It seemed like a good time to begin a fresh and honest debate. It may prove upsetting for some, but they are questions crucial to a Christian democracy and it is impossible to answer them with glib or patronising banter. ix
Preface
Many will scream ‘black armband’ but I hope readers will be patient and make up their minds after looking at our history from an Indigenous perspective. There’s nothing to be lost and everything to be gained. We’re stuck with each other and we’re stuck with our history, not just the school history of triumphal explorers, miners and pastoralists. Australia’s first white immigrants were convicts, soldiers and imperial harvesters, not all were saints and most were prejudiced against the incumbent landholders from the beginning. It’s not a pleasant history, no country has such a thing, but neither is it the end of morality and civility. The worst thing we could do would be to pretend that history didn’t happen. We can learn and grow rather than cant and cringe. Australia is a magnificent continent. We know that. We swim in her seas and rivers, we toast her sunsets with cups of tea and home-grown wines. We know her worth and love her for nurturing us. We are a strong, resourceful, friendly and humorous people but too few of us know much more than a fairystory history, a story which insults all of us and insults our land. We can make a great nation here, one worthy of the land, but we must be honest with ourselves and learn how we were lucky enough to live here. It won’t be easy and sometimes we will be hurt and confused, but nations are not forged without the metal getting hot. They are wrought out of earnest, respectful debate. We’ve got the land, we’ve got the energy, and we’ve got the wit, but have we got the grace of knowledge and generosity? Sometimes a decade arrives when nations have the chance to turn away from bigotry and selfishness and turn to their countrymen and women and embrace them as loved members of the human family. But do we have the ticker for it?
x
Introduction
There’s a woman at Cape Otway and I can’t get her out of my head. I think of her every day. I know what she eats, I know what she looks at when she wakes. I know the most intimate things about her. I know that she is left handed. I know that she is meticulous and I’m sure she has a son. I know all these things but I dearly want to know what she thinks. I discovered her bedroom and kitchen and like a thief turning over the contents of her drawers I began to know her and her secrets, the things only lovers and family should know. I am shamed but men under thrall do not always act with honour. Is she beautiful? Her aunty certainly was. Very beautiful. And probably cheeky, raunchy. I’ve seen a photograph of her. The secret mischief in her eyes, even at eighty. But the woman of my fascination is probably more discreet, or at least I imagine her so. Because of her things, how she goes about her life. Or is that the romantic notion of a man under her spell, a man aching to see her, to ask her just one question, to look into her eyes, even for the briefest moment. What right do I have to crave this woman’s attention, to lie awake at night wondering about her? My claim on her is that she is an Australian and so am I. We have both slept, loved and eaten within sight, sound and smell of the bay she saw every morning. She is my countrywoman. Dead now, murdered, but if we had met we would have been able to talk tides and fishing, fruiting and waterproof seams. You see, I found where she slept, where she cooked, where she sewed her winter clothes, discovered that she was left handed and her son too most probably. 1
Introduction
On the Cape Otway cliffs, in the longest unbroken human occupation site in the southern hemisphere, I found her seamstress’ kit. I saw that she had five different needle sizes in two different shapes and could dress the end and edge of her needles to keep them in perfect order so that the seam she sewed was completely waterproof. And when I went to use her implements I also discovered she was left handed. Later I found her son’s hammer and axe. Well, I am guessing that it was her son but given the incidence of left handedness in any human population and that the man and woman lived at exactly the same time the chances are they are mother and son. He was also a meticulous craftsman. The hammer he made from a piece of limestone is among the most beautiful objects I’ve ever handled. But not as beautiful as his mother’s sewing kit. It is no bigger than the top of a match box but on the two flat surfaces there are graded holes, grooves and notches to hone needles, cut thongs and yarns and dress needle points. The person who made it was deft and proud. I can imagine her heart filling with pride at her ability to care and provide for those she loved. She was proud, beautiful and left handed. I blushed. It was information far too intimate for a stranger to know. I looked out over the view from her doorway. The tide was going out and pools were being revealed where she had gathered her crayfish, abalone, skutus, urchins, sea lettuces, sweep and whiting. I knew that because I had fished there and taken home the same bounty so that I could sit among my family and feel proud. I used her recipes: the char-grilled rock lobster, the sweep stuffed with pepper cress and bower spinach, the abalone poached on coals with sea rocket and bush pepper garnish, echidna and yam in the earth oven cooked to perfection in lomandra baskets resting between clay heat beads. The sea urchins never make it home. We always crack them open in her tidal pool and scoop out the mandarin segment of roe and suck it between our lips and savour it on our tongues before letting it slide down our salty throats. I blushed again and sweat formed in the corner of my eyes. It was impossible that my countrymen and women could find this most womanly of women inhuman. The failure to understand that this woman could bake and sew and keep a neat home, provide
2
Introduction
for her children, love her husband and most of all know and love her country binds me and my fellow Australians in the grip of an ignorance she never knew. I wake at night dreaming that I could take food from that woman’s hands. Take the food she offered; not her land.
3
One
Franks is Dead Everybody agrees that this is what happened. Franks and Flinders were killed by blows from steel hatchets landing so heavily that Franks’ skull was driven into the turf. And that’s the point at which agreement stops. The Champion arrived at Point Gellibrand in Port Phillip Bay in 1836. On the ship Charles Franks brought 500 sheep and a partner, George Smith, and a shepherd called either Flinders or Hindes, but nobody seems certain. The waters off Point Gellibrand are shallow, clear and calm, crowded with mussels, oysters, flounder, flathead and garfish. Only twelve months earlier, Bunurong, Wathaurong and Woiwurrung people feasted on this bay of plenty; their ovens and houses are evident but already the people are scarce, avoiding the frenetic activity of the white people. It is winter but even so the days can be brilliant with mild sunshine, the wavelets scattering light as if from a shattered mirror. It is God’s own country. A man might become anything here. In those days women could please themselves. In this mood of limitless opportunity Franks removes his sheep from the Champion on 23 June and, on the advice of George MacKillop, decides to take up land around Mount Cotterell on the headwaters of the Barwon River. It took until 2 July to cover the 20 miles (32 kilometres) of flat volcanic grasslands. After depasturing the sheep George Smith returned to Point Gellibrand to bring up more stores. On 8 July Smith arrives at Mount Cotterell, sees no sign of Franks or Flinders but the stores appear to have been ransacked.
5
Convincing Ground
He takes fright and returns to Point Gellibrand where he conscripts the help of Mr Malcolm, Mr Clark, Mr George Sams, Mr Armytage, Dr Barry Cotter, Charles Wedge, and Mr Gellibrand. Gellibrand asked Henry Batman to accompany him with William Windberry, George Hollins, Michael Leonard, Benbow, Bullett, Stewart and Joe the Marine. On the way they fall in with Mr Wood and his large party, some of whom were David Pitcairn, Mr Guy, Derrymock, Baitlange, Ballyan and Mr Alexander Thomson. So, a party of well over 23 people are curious enough to drop what they are doing to investigate the upsetting of a cask of flour at Mount Cotterell.1 Or have they already mounted similar expeditionary forces since the establishment of the first Yarra settlement less than a year before? Are they at war with the Kulin Nation and recognise this as a beachhead in the war for possession of the Port Phillip plains? When Captain William Lonsdale is appointed Police Magistrate of Port Phillip in July 1836 the frontier community is under token jurisdiction, but it is an indelible indication of the true activities of the previous twelve months that when George Smith notices an upturned barrel of flour he has no trouble in mobilising a small army to investigate the cause. These men do not believe a delinquent possum is rampant, they mount a volunteer force of heavily armed volunteers. They are not involved in casual reprisal but a calculated vigilante campaign. The party followed a trail of flour and discarded stores and came across a band of about seventy to one hundred Wathaurong people. In responding to Lonsdale’s investigation of the incident Henry Batman says he yelled at them but they didn’t move so he fired his gun once above their heads and they ran off; John Wood said several shots were fired but none could have taken effect because they were fired from too great a distance; Edward Wedge believed that by the nature of the cuts to the heads of Franks and Flinders, whose bodies were found near the stores, they had been ‘inflicted with a particular type of long-handled hatchet’ which he had given to the natives earlier in the year ‘to conciliate them’;2 Michael Leonard says several shots were fired but to his knowledge noone was injured; William Windberry says that the party went after the blacks to retrieve the stolen property but he did not think any were killed. 6
Franks is Dead
William Lonsdale receives the evidence and advises the Colonial Secretary that no harm had been inflicted on the Aboriginal people despite it being common knowledge in the colony that at least twelve were killed. The Wathaurong said over 35 but, of course, they were never invited to give evidence. No investigation is made of other attacks which follow the first punitive expedition. The court hears that the murderers of Franks and Flinders were Goulburn Aboriginals Dumdom and Callen. The Daugwurrung are the people of the Goulburn River and this evidence places them in Wathaurong and Woiwurrung country, but given known clan movements of the time this is unlikely. But to the avengers one group of Aborigines is much the same as any other. George Smith says it was impossible that Charles Franks could have provoked the murder because he ‘had a great aversion to the native blacks, and would not give them food, thinking it the best way to prevent them from frequenting the station’. 3 He’d arrived for the first time only days before at a ‘station’ at the headwaters of the Barwon River, heartland of the Wathaurong and Woiwurrung people, a land they would defend with their lives. Mr Franks was ‘very mild and gentle in his general conduct, and I do not think he would molest anyone,’4 concluded his partner, Mr Smith, but Robert William von Stieglitz, in a letter to his brother, casts a different light on Franks’ gentle Christian demeanour. Stieglitz went to Franks in order to buy lead which all knew Franks had in great supply. Franks told Stieglitz that the lead was excellent for ‘making blue pills for the natives’. 5 Some historians take the word pill literally and assume it is a euphemism for the manufacture of strychnine to lace bullock carcasses in order to poison Aborigines, a common practice in the colony and further refined in Port Phillip. When challenged about this practice it was a common defence to say that the poison had been for the crows. This was a popular jest in Port Phillip because at the time many referred to the blacks by the American euphemism ‘Jim Crow’. It’s more likely, however, that Franks was making his own shotgun balls. Either way, it seems this mild Christian had been murdering Aborigines to secure the ‘selection’ he and his partners, George Smith and George Armytage, had decided upon. It seems he came upon his ‘great aversion to the blacks’6 in a very short space of time, perhaps even in advance of meeting them, so that he thought 7
Convincing Ground
it necessary to bring the ingredients of their destruction in his first stores. Joseph Tice Gellibrand, Attorney-General of Tasmania until recently, and now the token representative of law and order for the Port Phillip Association, wrote of the Franks murder on 7 August 1836: ‘Several parties are now after the natives and I have no doubt many will be shot and a stop put to this system of killing for bread’.7 The press were also phlegmatic in their understanding of the true nature of the conflict. The Cornwall Chronicle records the event thus: ‘The avenging party fell on the guilty tribe…and succeeded in annihilating them’.8 It’s only twelve months since the arrival of the colonists and yet it is a matter of conversation, among men meeting for the first time, how to eliminate the annoying insistence of the Indigenes to protect their land. Entrepreneurs in Van Diemen’s Land frustrated by the restrictions being placed on land acquisition determine to form a company to take up the green fields discovered by sealers at Port Phillip. In their correspondence with each other they discuss the advantages of taking up broad acres where no civil authority exists to hamper their enterprise. Mindful of the Colonial administration’s increasing desire to ameliorate the Indigenes and the Van Diemen’s Land governor’s determination to uphold that line, they confect a series of documents to disguise the true nature of their activities. The clans of the Kulin peoples surrounding Port Phillip and Western Port are about to experience one of the most blatant thefts in the history of humankind. John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner were both sons of convicts, both had built fortunes from property in Van Diemen’s Land and joined to become the two principals of the Port Phillip Association. Batman was a chaotic character and his wild nature swung recklessly between acts of kindness and bloody-minded self-interest, while Fawkner was a more calculating and meticulous personality. Within days of landing at Port Phillip they were at loggerheads, Batman parading around the settlement with Aborigines he’d brought from Sydney and Fawkner making plans for hotels and newspapers, the stuff of prosperous settlements. But their different humours didn’t prevent them from co-operating in the wholesale division of the Kulin lands. 8
Franks is Dead
Some of the most astute businessmen in Hobart helped establish the Port Phillip Association and they were joined by the more entrepreneurial members of the administration and judiciary. It was a formidable combination of law and enterprise; the entrepreneurs providing cash and energy and the legal minds steering the Association through the administrative shoals of colonial government by concocting sham documents of possession in the most portentous and arcane language. These men were involved in very influential circles and knew how to weasel their way around Governor Arthur’s instructions. Batman, Fawkner, Gellibrand, Charles Swanston, and others were the most celebrated business people in the colony and their plot to gazump the authorities and the real owners of the land is still celebrated in Australia as the bringing of the light to the heathen wasteland instead of the white shoe brigade land sham it really was. Thousands of pounds changed hands in weeks as frantic entrepreneurs threw themselves at the Association in their haste to secure land. Most land was ‘selected’ unsurveyed and thousands of sheep were offloaded on the tranquil shores of Point Gellibrand where as many as eight ships rode at anchor on any given day, such was the speed of ‘settlement’. In fact some of the party sent to revenge Franks’ murder were recruited from the crew and passengers of these ships. Nothing happened at random here; this was an orchestrated campaign where the colonists work against both the Kulin Nation and the colonial governments in Sydney and Hobart. The unanimity of the colonists’ purpose can be gauged by their relationships with each other. They were eager to see all the lands populated by like-minded individuals in order to thwart the government’s purposes, and to murder and disperse the black population in order to secure the ‘peace’. Indeed they went to great lengths to ensure that their friends joined the colony, their letters to each other confirming that they were anxious to create a solid confederacy to protect their interests and obscure the deceits instituted to acquire them. George MacKillop, who admired Smith, Armytage and Franks in their precipitous lust for land, was experienced in the process of dispossession having already applied the procedure to great 9
Convincing Ground
effect in India where he had worked in partnership with Charles Swanston. Swanston went on to become exceedingly rich in Port Phillip, his interests in land and banking making him one of its most respected and powerful citizens. Swanston and MacKillop have extensive business dealings with the staunch churchman George Smith, Franks’ fellow squatter. These are respectable people, already wealthy from their Indian and Van Diemen’s Land investments; churchgoers, solid citizens, good enough to name streets after, but they were directly involved in the war to dispossess the Kulin people. How did these solid citizens justify their actions? They describe the murder of the ‘gentle’ Franks as an ‘outrage’, the term coined for the action of a black man raising a hand against a white, not patriots desperate to protect their mothers’ lands, but criminals to be destroyed before justice could intervene. They urge other settlers to ‘full satisfaction’ against the blacks. 9 Black resistance is labelled criminality, for to equate it with armed resistance is to acknowledge prior ownership. The squatters applaud the appointment of the Police Magistrate Foster Fyans in Geelong. Fyans earned the sobriquet ‘Flogger’ for his administration of ‘justice’ at Moreton Bay and Norfolk Island, and the esteem with which the gentlemen of Port Phillip regard him was earned by his thoroughness in defending their lands in the Indian Colonial war. What is establishing itself in Port Phillip is a close-knit club of men experienced in dispossession, war, treachery and silence, experience gained in the British Empire’s most recent wars against legitimate landowners. This is a land war and conducted in the same manner as any other in the history of conflict between nations. At Portland, to the west of Port Phillip, the Henty brothers had already established a sealing colony, and the conflict with the Gundidjmara people is symbolised by a clash on the beach for possession of a single whale. Both sides probably saw it as a beach head in the fight for possession of the soil itself. The battle site became known as the Convincing Ground, the place where the Gundidjmara were ‘convinced’ of white rights to the land. The Gundidjmara were beaten in that battle but never convinced of its legitimacy.
10
Franks is Dead
Australians, however, have absorbed that conviction so completely that they are battling the Gundidjmara in the courts and shire offices today so that they might build houses on the Convincing Ground. The events on that soil in 1833–34 and the attempts to consecrate them in the courts in 2007 keep the battle of the Convincing Ground alive. This book is an attempt to show how colonial attitudes continue to forge modern cultural imperatives. So little heed was taken of what Aboriginal people said or did that the colony could never progress except with enormous misunderstanding and, eventually, ill will. The nature of the planned dispossession precluded any partnership or cultural acknowledgement of the Indigenes because the occupation of their lands was predicated on their unworthiness to hold it. To draw close would reveal the humanity of the adversary, to acknowledge the women as wives and mothers, to admire the men for their courage, and the care and inventiveness with which they provided for their clan could not be allowed. It was crucial to the ‘plan’ to ‘convince’ authorities that the Kulin were barely human. This deliberate misrepresentation of the Kulin people is still taught in schools today and continues to stand between us, our country and our identity. But who are the Kulin people? Did they exhibit evidence of brute savagery or were they just in the way of money changers? Some settlers, more curious than the majority, report a ‘story’ told to them by members of the Kulin nation gathering in large numbers near the Botanical Gardens for what they claimed would be a momentous event.10 Over 150 people from the Yerrunillam balug, Devil River clan of the country north east of Delatite River, arrived and brought with them a spirit man named Kuller kullup who was well over 80 years of age. He was at least six feet in height, fat, and with a fine upright carriage. His forehead was corrugated; the fine horizontal wrinkles looked scarcely natural; it seemed as if a native artist had been at work on his countenance; and his cheeks too were finely and strangely wrinkled. His friends — indeed all who saw him — paid respect to him. They embarrassed and encumbered
11
Convincing Ground
him with their attentions. He could not stir without an effort being made by someone to divine his wishes. At sunrise, the adult Aborigines — strangers and guests — sat before him in semicircular rows, patiently waiting for the sound of his voice, or the indication by gesture of his inclinations. None presumed to speak but in a low whisper in his presence. The old man, touched by so much fealty and respect, occasionally harangued the people — telling them, probably, something of their past history, and warning them, not unlikely, of the evils which would soon surround them. Whenever Mr Thomas approached for the purpose of gathering hints of the character of his discourse, the old man paused, and did not resume his argument until the white listener had departed.11
William Thomas, the Aboriginal Protector for the Melbourne region, thought it his right to be addressed by this man but each time he came and sat in the circle Kuller kullup refused to continue. Thomas had an evangelical approach to his job and privately abhorred his charges as savage heathens. We are in his debt, however, because he kept good records and was able to confirm with Billi-billari that the big man had come from a tribe inhabiting the Australian Alps who lived in caves, separately from all other people, and were rarely seen. Billi-billari told Thomas that these remote people dreamt the corroborees which they passed on to all other Aboriginal clans. The Kulin had never seen Kuller kullup before but the legend says he had been living for as long as anyone could remember. There is a comparable story told in the early days of the Port Phillip settlement that a huge man who glistened with Bogong moth fat lived far away in the mountains and was rarely seen by other people. This man was responsible for ensuring the sky was lifted above the sun so that it could not fall down and eliminate the people. He had been urging clans from all over Port Phillip to bring him axes. Axes streamed into the mountains but still this man wanted more. He needed axes to cut an unbelievable number of poles to hold up the sky because he had noticed it was falling down. White correspondents record the event with the usual patronising tone, convinced that the people had been duped. In their way of thinking it was a scam, just like any number of schemes Europeans had used to rob each other. 12
Franks is Dead
But theft among the clans was unknown, tools and hunting equipment was held in common and left where any authorised person might come along and use it. The people weren’t robbed of their axes; they gave them because they knew the need was urgent. But the whites scoffed; Henny Penny, the sky’s falling in, they mocked the simple savages. Such heathen innocence. But what if you look at that story in the light of what we know of the circumstances of the frontier and the dramatic change in behaviour of blacks towards whites around that time? Perhaps the sky was falling in as far as the big man was concerned, perhaps the spirit man had seen the invasion for what it was and the collection of axes was not for the metaphoric purpose of holding up the sky but to wage resistance in a united stand across the frontier. Was that his address to the meeting on the Yarra? Is that why he refused to speak in the presence of whites? We will never know because that man, and his clan from the Australian Alps were never heard from again. Did he fall victim to some heedless act of violence on his journey east? Just another black man to be killed on sight? I would like to know what that man knew, just as I crave the knowledge of the left handed woman at Cape Otway. I wish they had not been taken away from us so soon. How might our history have changed if that man had been able to guide his people in resistance? What might have been if white people had held intelligent discussion with men like Kuller kullup, men who dreamt the cultural representations for all the peoples of south-eastern Australia? Unfortunately, people like Thomas could not believe that another race had a viable faith in the progress of the human family. The relationship between black and white in the race of races fell at the first hurdle. But back to the start of that race. John Batman, head of the Port Phillip Association, entrepreneur, braggart and syphilitic, had been given no colonial authority to enter Port Phillip, no right to select all the land thereabouts and no right to bribe the Kulin people with beads, mirrors and axes to sign two title deeds. But he did, even if he fabricated both the document and the signatures. 13
Convincing Ground
Obviously the Wathaurong and Woiwurrung people did not speak or read English but in accordance with their custom were prepared to trade with visitors, even someone with half a nose. More probably, however, they were negotiating temporary habitation rights as they did with their neighbours during particular harvest periods or spiritual ceremonies. The rite of passage ceremony was called Tanderrum, a word used frequently by the Wathaurong in those early conversations with William Todd, Batman’s supervisor at the first landing point at Indented Head. William Buckley was also familiar with the term. Buckley escaped the first penal settlement at Sorrento in 1803 and lived with the Wathaurong people for the next 32 years. He was a source of valuable information about Indigenous culture but his knowledge was plundered for the single purpose of land acquisition and he never recovered from his unwitting role in the destruction of the culture he had adopted. William Robertson, who claims to have initiated the Port Phillip Association with Batman, wrote that it was Buckley alone who gave away the land. George Russell remembers the bequest like this: ‘When Buckley saw Robertson take the knapsack from Gellibrand, who showed signs of fatigue, and carry it along with his own pack, Buckley was so pleased with this kindly act, that with a sweeping gesture of his arm toward the hills, he presented Robertson with all that country’.12 At first glance this reads like a cosy little colonial story where the natives fall to their knees in respect for British civilisation. In the past, historians have accepted such accounts simply because they were written, but Buckley was considered an infant by his Wathaurong saviours, indeed the ignorance he displayed during his thirty years in the clan precluded any authority being given to him. Oh, they loved him as one of their own and demonstrated that on many occasions, but he was too ignorant of cultural rules to trust with major decisions. He wouldn’t have been in the position to give away land but, more importantly, as we can see from his later actions and thoughts, he was not inclined to betray his black family. Within days of rejoining his countrymen he is completely disillusioned and inclined to grumpiness and depression. George Russell’s description of Buckley’s actions is at odds with every other
14
Franks is Dead
report on Buckley’s demeanour. If Buckley ever waved his arm to Robertson it was more likely to brush away a fly, but what we see here is a little myth-making in preparation for arguing the case before the colonial authorities. Every action of Batman’s entrepreneurs is part of a calculated campaign to advance their financial interests. Franks is killed, Buckley waves his arm and both become pieces in the campaign mosaic. To understand what is going on in those early years Batman’s treaty has to be studied more closely. The document called the Dutigalla Deed was drawn up by the consortium of business men who had devised a plan to pre-empt the official settlement of the Port Phillip district. Not only was the document written in a language the Kulin didn’t understand but also in an arcane legal form of that language no longer used by colonial authorities: ‘to Give, Grant, Enfeoff and confirm unto the said, John Batman, his Heirs and Assigns’.13 Gellibrand had constructed this title on Batman’s request but it was never intended that the Aborigines should understand it. The Bellarine version of the title was finished while Batman was on his way back to Tasmania, almost an afterthought. When you’re on a good thing, fake it. The documents did not use conveyancing techniques but a long forgotten feudal land transfer. Enfeoff was a term defining feudal possession, sometimes referred to as livery or seisin, and described the practice of passing a handful of soil or leaves to another as a symbol of the land being transferred. The Kulin rite of Tanderrum used a similar symbol of transfer but it represented rite of safe passage through the land, not ownership. Recipients of the privilege were handed foliage, water and available foods of the estate which signified ‘that as long as they are friendly, and under such restriction as the laws impose, they and their children may come there again without fear of molestation, the presents of boughs and leaves and grass meant to signify that these are theirs when they like to use them’.14 Batman’s treaty meant to take advantage of this goodwill in a coldly calculated deception. Members of Batman’s party were under no misapprehension about the purpose of the documents or their illegality. John Wedge, a member of the Port Phillip Association, wrote to fellow member James Simpson of the proposal to find
15
Convincing Ground
blacks who might possess the authority to transfer land to Batman: ‘there is no such thing as chieftainship amongst them, but this [is] a secret that must, I suppose, be kept to ourselves or it may affect the deed of conveyance, if there be any validity in it’.15 Wedge was given the task of drawing the deeds to scale but had great difficulty because none of the boundary points had been fixed with instruments and the furthest had probably not been visited. Alistair Campbell in John Batman and the Aborigines analyses the deeds in great detail and states that no group of eight men would have had the authority to transfer land, especially as most of those alleged to have signed the document were not even on their own land. The marks which Batman says were signs of the land’s boundaries were not etched into the trees until the day after the documents were signed. William Howitt, one of the most prominent anthropologists of the time, showed these marks to other Kulin people who ridiculed the idea that they held any cultural or legal meaning or had in fact been drawn by any Kulin person. And in any case Batman says the signs were marked during the ceremony of tooth evulsion, a blatant attempt on his part to pretend intimate knowledge of the people. The Kulin did not practise tooth evulsion but his own natives, brought from Sydney to help capture Port Phillip Aborigines, did. Campbell analysed the signatures on the deed and found they ‘were drawn with a spreading nib in the same style of approximately equal size and design. There appear to be no errors or false starts and they are neatly arranged’. Three copies of the deeds were drawn and required 12 marks by each man. ‘It is inconceivable that Batman could have persuaded eight unrehearsed Aborigines in a few hours to have drawn the marks with the neatness and penmanship shown in the document, not once, but twelve times’.16 These are people who have never held a pen or drawn on paper. And furthermore, the 120 miles (193 kilometres) Batman said he traversed in order to acquire the land could not have been covered in the few hours he was ashore. Batman’s journal says he left the Kulin at 10 am to return to the ship and his report offers 12 midday, so the most generous allowance from dawn to noon allows 5–6 hours. The leading phrase of the deed refers to a branch of the Marybyrnong River, but the stream Batman describes was in
16
Franks is Dead
fact the Yarra and not seen by Batman until the day after the treaty was signed. Those signatures are themselves suspect because the Dutigalla deed uses the names of eight men and the Geelong deed uses the same names as if they also possessed the Bellarine Peninsula. Batman is not just telling porkies, he’s fabricating blatant lies in a callous attempt to defraud everyone. Many contemporary influential Australians have cleaved to the same principle. ‘I am monarch of all I survey,’ Batman muses while looking over the ‘deep, black diluvium, with grass 3 foot to 4 foot high [0.9–1.2 metres]’. ‘My right there is none to dispute,’ 17 the great man opines, neglecting the artifice he has engaged to defraud the colony. Most of these facts have been known for decades but still the myth of legitimacy pervades Australian culture. Batman’s deeds were displayed by Museum Victoria in 2004 with great fanfare and unambiguous pride. The continuing respect for these documents allows the people to indulge the myth of lawful acquisition. Instead of revisiting the entire illegality of the seizure, the public has the luxury of believing the land was acquired cheekily at some kind of mortgagee’s auction where the maiden aunt had no idea of the value of her property. Not stolen, just snapped up at bargain price. History can never be undone but we have a duty not to pretend it didn’t happen. Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of the Colony of New South Wales, and George Arthur, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, had expressly ordered that no-one take up land without the authority of the Crown and that all residents of the colony were to ameliorate the condition of the Aborigines. The orders from the Colonial Office in London were unequivocal. William Wilberforce had managed to introduce a bill to the House of Commons abolishing slavery after having failed in his previous eighteen attempts. Wilberforce dedicated his life to this struggle. That he was successful in 1833 was not just an indication of changing humanitarian standards but also the good fortune of having his Clapham Group carry the balance of power for the first time. Australian politicians with the same luxury are more likely to introduce a goods and services tax, outlaw birth control or make the right to vote optional. Wilberforce’s tenacity sent
17
Convincing Ground
shivers through colonial powers and coincided with the discovery of the wide grasslands of Port Phillip. Some who tricked out their greed with paternalism learnt to couch their ambitions in different language after 1833 knowing that previous techniques of eliminating Indigenous landholders would now be outside the law, in fact considered murder, rather than a necessary and justifiable expedient. The tenor of the advice Bourke received from Chief Justice Forbes of the Supreme Court anticipated most of the abuses the new colony was about to endure. Defining the true limits of the Colony within your Commission as Governor, declaring that all settlements made on any land within such limits, without the permission of the local government, is illegal and cautioning persons against purchasing any portion of such land from the aboriginal inhabitants under the impression that such purchases will be respected as conferring legal title… I deem such a measure of the more importance, as the example of Messrs Batman and Gellibrand will be surely followed by other persons nearer home and much trouble may be occasioned if the Crown seems tacitly to assent to the right of the Savage to sell, and of His Majesty’s subjects to buy the land of the Colony.18
Governor George Arthur was a straight man, his enemies said rigid, but he was true to his commission and tried, within the confines of his limited wit and the fact that he thought the idea that Aborigines could own land was ridiculous, to accommodate the new instructions from London, and this earned him the derision of John Batman, a man who preferred to spend afternoons rolling drunk with men and women of similar inclination. Arthur tried to avoid conflict wherever possible but Batman, son of convicts, selfmade man and ‘gentleman’, taunted Governor Arthur, appealing to his fellow ‘countrymen’ to throw off the colonial shackles. The Colonial Government was sticking to its commission, but Hobart was seething with excitement after the bays and plains of the Port Phillip district were properly explored. Reports of excellent pasturage were fuel to the fires of progress and independence and contradicted Captain Collins’ 1803 report which had painted a bleak picture of the first settlement at Sorrento: sandy soil, little 18
Franks is Dead
water, flies, no hotel and no white women; which is why he took his mistress with him and why both were keen to return to the fleshpots of Hobart. Two hundred years later it’s hard to contain Hobart and fleshpots in the same sentence but this just proves how grim Sorrento must have seemed to Collins in 1803. The whalers and sealers knew better and had probably been using the bays for upwards of twenty years but they had a vested interest in not sharing this information with the authorities because they weren’t supposed to be there either. And besides, sealers and whalers aren’t interested in pasture, just seals and whales. And black women. That’s probably where the trouble started, where the modern history of these south lands began. Secrecy and lust. When Captain Flinders arrived in Port Phillip in 1802 the Wathaurong people were sufficiently aware of firearms and white men to hide from the Englishman’s party as it climbed the You Yang ranges to view the great expanse of the western grasslands. There were already official reports of sealers murdering Aboriginal men and stealing the women. Lieutenant Tuckey found it necessary to murder two Wathaurong while surveying the western shore of Port Phillip Bay as part of Collins’ Sorrento experiment in 1803. It’s no surprise that recriminations began almost immediately. And if the previous provocations had not been sufficient, the arrival of the Henty family at Portland in 1832 certainly set the seal. The Henty family were already enormously wealthy landholders in Surrey but could see their fortunes and, more importantly, their social status dwindling in England and decided to emigrate to a land where taxes and inhibitions were unknown. They set about enforcing their usurpation of lands in Van Diemen’s Land and Portland with unwavering ruthlessness and subtle connivance. Like politicians of today they appear to have selected servants willing to do the killing for them if the reports and diaries of Chief Protector Robinson and others are to be believed. Knowledge of the Henty tactics spread quickly among neighbouring clans and well before Batman arrived the Indigenous population were suspicious of white people. The Gundidjmara were becoming increasingly offended by the Hentys’ depredations on their fisheries, lands and women. They took 19
Convincing Ground
a stand against the sealers on the beach but they were decimated by Henty henchmen. The black heathens had been ‘convinced’ who was boss. The Convincing Ground is an emblem of our nation. It was a key battle in the dispossession of the Indigenes and yet the Hentys and the authorities successfully hid it from our accepted history. Or are we hiding ourselves from it? The official reports are so vague and euphemistic and the ‘evidence’ provided so oblique and contradictory that it slips almost unnoticed from our history. Today, we, as Australians, are so willing to be ‘convinced’ of settler glory that we allow such incidents to be withheld from our children and scholars. In those early years men with compassion or perception were ignored in favour of the venal and violent. As an example, William (Andrew) Todd was left at Indented Head to guard John Batman’s stores and ‘titles’ in 1835. Todd was a reasonable man and for a while relations with the Wathaurong were peaceful and cordial; but this probably had more to do with the fact that William Buckley was present and helped allay the fears of the Wathaurong, already aware of the atrocities at the Convincing Ground. Todd’s civility served to ease their anxiety but even as he befriends them he wonders in his diary what will become of them when the more voracious members of his party begin settlement of the land with all the disruption and violence that would entail. John Wedge, another member of Batman’s Indented Head party, recommended that the Bellarine Aborigines receive daily provisions, even if those provisions be damaged or of inferior quality, as a permanent sign of goodwill and a crucial foundation for the settlement. But when John Batman’s brother Henry replaced Todd he did not honour Wedge’s agreement. Wedge had a greater understanding of consequences than any of his fellow entrepreneurs and after Franks’ murder he proposed that the perpetrators be sent to King Island where they would have plenty of food ‘as a little promptitude in meeting the outrages in the commencement will save a deluge of blood as it respects both Europeans and the blacks’.19 Wedge also believed that Buckley was important to the settlement’s success, but most of the other members treated the
20
Franks is Dead
wild white man with disdain. Wedge was no saint; he had little of Wilberforce’s fervent humanity; it was just that he was looking rationally into the future and could see that a little temperance of the squatters’ greed could prove beneficial to their interests. His partners, however, had no such sophistry and could see no reason to restrain their plunder. Observing this Buckley became suspicious of Batman and entered the camp of his English countrymen with reluctance. It became obvious to Buckley that any preliminary goodwill could not disguise their ruthless intentions. Once Buckley’s Wathaurong clan became aware of the Batman deception and the violence to follow, Buckley’s position was untenable. John Morgan, a desperate journalist arrived in Hobart from his failure in California, wrote a histrionic sketch of Buckley’s life, embellishing it, where it seemed to him too domestic, with details from American Indian culture, source of much more racy and violent fare. In the manner of any modern tabloid journalist he garnished the account with stories of cannibalism and constant warfare, so that it reads more like the Cowboy and Indian chapbooks, all the rage in California at the time. Morgan had free reign because Buckley could neither read nor write. If war and cannibalism had been prevalent at the rate Morgan suggests, the population of western Victoria would have been nil but, on the contrary, the first squatters found vast numbers living on the produce of the lush plains and bountiful waters, often in substantial villages of stone and timber houses. Profound evidence of civilised life was deliberately ignored, destroyed wherever possible, and Buckley’s reports on that civilisation were ridiculed and, to make sure they were never given credence, Buckley himself was portrayed as an idiot. Buckley had at least one Aboriginal wife and probably more than the one child we know about and he insisted that he had led a very enjoyable life of fishing, hunting, ceremony and popular theatrical entertainment. He certainly witnessed the ritual consumption of kidney fat and, while appalled by the act, recognised it as more akin to the sacrament of the blood and flesh of the Host than cannibalism.
21
Convincing Ground
He was a huge man and when the Wathaurong found him wandering helplessly through their lands after escaping the penal settlement at Sorrento they believed him to be the returned spirit of one of their recently departed dead. The belief system of the Kulin Nation of central Victoria was that the spirits of the dead sometimes reappeared as white wraiths. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Buckley bore a spear he had taken from the grave of a recently departed warrior. They called Buckley ‘Murrangoork, or Ghost Blood, but soon came to realise that they had adopted a largely incompetent, but apparently harmless, white man. And Buckley was satisfied with that, so satisfied that he avoided contact with the white sealers who occasionally visited the district, and considering the events of his later life, regretted the day he visited Batman’s camp, met Todd and remembered the word for bread. The press and historians regurgitate Buckley’s story interminably. It is an extraordinary yarn of survival but the focus is always on the Englishman and never on his saviours. When the Geelong Art Gallery decided to mount a Buckley exhibition in 2002 no Wathaurong artists were included. Despite the fact that the community has a number of basket weavers who have revived traditional methods, the only baskets included were by a white woman who used non-traditional methods, styles and materials. The paintings hung were all by white artists and mostly of white characters. The managers were astounded and offended to be challenged on what they saw as a fine historical exhibition. They were good people, well meaning, among the most enlightened in their community, but they acted under all the false assumptions that created our history in those early Port Phillip days. And, like many Australians, they were shocked that their actions might be considered racist. We can either learn from history or fall in love with the bedtime story of its deception and repeat it endlessly. The truth about Buckley’s life and its implications for our history are often overlooked in favour of the more colourful and racy events, whether invented by Morgan or not. Buckley’s only great contribution to Wathaurong life was that he was in no position to claim their land. First, he was a pauper whose family
22
Franks is Dead
had no experience of land ownership and, second, he was on his own, incapable of mounting a land grab even if he were inclined. And that’s the main point; he didn’t seem inclined. The life he led with the Wathaurong was richer in food, culture and harmony than anything he’d experienced before. Why would he want to change it? In England he had been so poor he went to war in order to eat and was then transported to Australia for life for stealing some cloth. Morgan fabricates much of the violence but even so it couldn’t compare to the violence and hardship Buckley had experienced in civilisation. When he expressed these sentiments the white squatters of Port Phillip and Hobart were scandalised and immediately dismissed him as a fool. How could he possibly prefer the society of barbarians? Todd met Buckley on a beautiful headland surrounded by waters rich in fish, molluscs, water birds and outstanding beauty, a point where tranquillity steals upon the soul. It is also an area where the young men and women from as far away as the Murray and Darling rivers were initiated. As the season for that year’s ceremony approached the Wathaurong became anxious and tried to convince Todd and party to leave but the new arrivals were ignorant and heedless of the subtle etiquettes of people they considered the temporary barbaric custodians of the land. Batman left them with instructions ‘to warn off all persons found trespassing on the land I had purchased from the natives’.20 At this point of tension it was probably only Buckley’s reassurances which prevented the Wathaurong from attacking the party, a forbearance they would live to regret. Not all white men were as tolerant as Todd or as well informed as Buckley and no white man since has had the opportunity to become so immersed in the subtleties and luxuries of Kulin life. Buckley found it impossible to impress on his countrymen the value and sophistication of Wathaurong cultural life and was terrified of the repercussions of informing them that he was an escaped convict rather than a shipwrecked sailor. These impediments compounded the misunderstandings and contempt which accompanied Buckley’s reunion with his race, so that in a
23
Convincing Ground
couple of months his relationship with them had collapsed and the wholesale theft of land and murders of tribesmen caused the Wathaurong to treat him as a traitor. Buckley became enormously depressed. He’d failed to bring his two civilisations together; treated as a figure of fun by his own race and with suspicion by his adopted clan. The rich life he’d enjoyed for three decades was his no longer. He broke their trust and received none from the colonials in return and ceases to be a significant figure in colonial history within months of meeting Todd. Today the people of the Wathaurong community tell a good joke. Q: Why is William Buckley the only Wathaurong person known to any Australian? A: Because he was white. Boom boom. No, not very funny, but in the context of Australian history viciously true. Australians find it disturbing to have the colonial myths unstitched but we need to examine all these landmark incidents with a critical eye if we are to understand ourselves. There’s no need to indulge in an orgy of flagellation because the major proponents were operating within the limits of their humanity at a time and place where there was no restraint on the worst inclinations of their nature. Every war is like that. The beasts club the enemy and the instigators of the war sneak in when the field is quiet to peg out their claim. We don’t know very much about the first clashes between June 1832 and July 1836 because that information, like every other action in the district, was kept secret from authorities. Later, when rudimentary colonial authority was established what little the Crown Commissioners discovered was excluded, more often than not, from their reports to the Governor in Sydney or the Colonial Office in London for fear of dismissal after having failed their commission, a commission which expressly forbad theft of land or mistreatment of the Indigenes. In the beginning of the Port Phillip Association’s campaign there was some residual if tokenistic goodwill between white and black. Lip service was paid to the treaty so that: For a few years after 1835 Europeans had to negotiate with the ngurangaeta [clan head] of particular areas and were able to rely 24
Franks is Dead
on their goodwill, but when squatters outnumbered the Kulin they sneered at the tattered dignity of the landless chiefs. The next generation, eager to forget that the European occupation was accomplished by carnage rather than courage forgot the generosity of the Woiwurrung, Bunurong and Wathaurong.21
In the space of just eight years 12,000 Europeans had arrived with one hundred thousand cattle and one and a half million sheep.22 The Kulin were being eaten out as quickly as they were being shot. The new proprietors did not number the Kulin dead but made a careful tally of the 59 Europeans and several thousand head of stock they claimed were killed by the Kulin. The Port Phillip Association knew that Batman’s ‘titles and deeds’ could only delay the involvement of the Crown in the disposal of land and so speed of occupation was their primary concern. They couldn’t afford even the most casual scrutiny of their actions by colonial authorities and railed against Bourke and Arthur as purveyors of conservatism, sheet anchors on the course of development, but neither man was particularly oppressive — they merely stood between these feral entrepreneurs and their greed. The squatters muffle the clamour of their activities in a cone of silence and in this vacuum myth takes the place of history. Vast tracts of land were ‘selected’ in those first years, the first great battles fought and with meticulous deliberation the details of these attacks were left off the public record or replaced with a gift for euphemism from which contemporary predators in politics have learned to justify the excision of another’s wealth unto themselves. And the colony of 1836 was as quiescent as the public of 2005 and the squatters who dared question the tactics were considered bleeding hearts and race traitors just as they are today. This book was begun during the build up to the war in Iraq when the United States tried to bribe other states to support the invasion of a sovereign country for reasons which have been found since to be incorrect. American rhetoric in 2003 never mentioned the simple intent to usurp another nation’s control of its resources, relying instead on the euphemisms of democracy and justice. Batman and his confederates used identical dissimulation. The history of war shows that they are seldom fought on moral grounds but most often on greed, the greed of the population, or at 25
Convincing Ground
least that part of the population in a position to scoop up the spoils from a dead man’s hands. The rest are sold the pup of divine right and then told to go out and kill and be killed in its name. By the time Franks was killed the warfare around the bays was in full, silent swing and the social and behavioural codes entrenched, well learned in the previous campaigns in India, America and Africa. London’s new liberal theories of human evolution and the rhetoric of the Anti-slavery Society are mere words in the colonies, platitudes only to be taken seriously over tea and cake at the Strand, as far removed from frontier Realpolitik as the moon. The ‘Colony Rules’ are so pervasive, and the exponents so assured of success, that colonists pay only lip service to Bourke’s commands. There is a contemptuous swagger to their insolence and it infects every sentence of their republican chorus. Over half of the first Western District squatters are Scots and they bring to Port Phillip a ruthless determination wedded to strict Caledonian allegiance and avarice. The cold calculation of their efforts to keep their activities secret and obfuscate their true intentions with bogus treaty documents is gilded by sanctimonious pronouncements of their wish to uplift the lives of the Indigenous population. Anyone reading these documents could be forgiven for thinking a pantheon of saints was bringing the Lord to Port Phillip instead of the venal and venereal diseases of men. Batman wrote: As available lands in this Colony were occupied by flocks of sheep, and fully stocked, it would be a favourable opportunity of opening a direct friendly intercourse with the tribes in the neighbourhood of Port Phillip, and obtaining from them a grant of a portion of the territory upon equitable principles, not only might the Resources of this Colony be considerably extended, but the object of civilisation be established, and which in process of time would lead to the civilization of a large portion of the Aborigines of that extensive country.23
But we see a different attitude altogether if we look at what Batman’s Van Diemen diaries record of his attitude to the Indigenes who dared defend their land.
26
Franks is Dead
The natives arose from the ground and were in the act of running away into the thick scrub, when I ordered the men to fire upon them, which was done, and a rush by the party immediately followed. We only captured that night one woman and a male child about two years old…next morning we found one man very badly wounded in the ankle and knee, shortly after we found another. Ten buckshot had entered the body, he was alive but very bad. There were a great number of traces of blood in various directions and we learnt from those we took that 10 men were wounded in the body which they gave us to understand they were dead or would die, and two women in the same state had crawled away, besides a number that were shot in the legs…On Friday morning we left the place for my farm with the two men, woman and child, but found it impossible that the two former could walk, and after trying them by every means in my power, for some time, found I could not get them on so I was obliged to shoot them.24
Obliged? What kind of man is this? Upon what assumptions does he act? What is the nature of his conversation with his squatter friends on how to acquire and keep land? If these are thoughts he commits to his diary what are the guffawed allusions among his mates after half a bottle of port? He never wrote ‘This is the place for a village’ when referring to his Yarra district in Port Phillip but he did intend it to be the place for a pillage. Turning from the pages of this account of ruthless attacks on the Indigenes of Van Diemen’s Land it is sickening to read the sanctimonious bleating about Aboriginal welfare in his official Port Phillip report. Batman was more than enthusiastic to pursue and murder Tasmanian Aboriginals on behalf of Governor Arthur in exchange for rewards of land, one of the few times their opinions coincided. Even his first foray under Arthur’s commission saw the implementation of Batman’s standard tricks. He massively under reports the number of Aborigines killed and massively over reports the provocations. Gellibrand’s correspondence conveys similar calculation: ‘we are about to enter a war of extermination, for such I apprehend is the declared object of the present operation and that in its progress we shall be compelled to destroy the innocent with the guilty’.25
27
Convincing Ground
Batman is obliged and Gellibrand compelled. It is interesting to ponder the forces operating on both men to generate this compelling obligation to kill but even more fascinating to see the word ‘war’ enter colonial discourse. Gellibrand and other letter writers and editors use the word freely in their analysis of the situation. War is officially declared in both New South Wales and Tasmania but our nation hardly dare mention its name. Today politicians run like rabbits from mention of the ‘w’ word in relation to the frontier. Is it because acknowledging that the country was at war is proof that the land was stolen from the people, not given up without a fight? The public record is full of reports where hundreds of Aboriginal warriors engage the Europeans in battle to retain their land. In 1837 two hundred Wathaurong raid the Clyde Company’s Gulf Hill station in an attempt to drive the white men off the land. During the Eumerella War of the Mount Eccles district there were parties of as many as three hundred fighting last-ditch battles for their country. In every part of Australia forces of this magnitude rise up to defend their land after the real intention of the ‘civilisers’ is apprised, but the history we tell our children today avoids the Resistance entirely because to acknowledge it mocks our legitimacy. The attitude of men like Batman and Gellibrand is unequivocally aggressive but their reputations have been enhanced over time as our country searches for a foundation of honour. Like any nation we strive to find heroes in our past, men and women fit to be the parents of our character. This search has led us into marshes of deception, blithely trying to convince ourselves and our children that there was no war, that the Aborigines gave up the land without a fight, didn’t deserve to have it in the first place and that the principal characters of the frontier were running around like Gandhi. I want to believe the best about my countrymen too, for I love this country with a fierce passion, but refusing to face the facts makes us look like the dumbest child in the international class. Men like Gellibrand and Batman are acutely conscious of their place in history and how they might be perceived in that history and, like almost every other official in the colony, prepare the
28
Franks is Dead
ground for that perception, by producing dual reports, one to brag, the other to delude. Of his Port Phillip days Batman produces two such reports. The Port Phillip Exploration document is a largely accurate journal but altered to romanticise his undertakings and published in the Journal of Australasia in 1856. The second report was for Governor Arthur, written in Gellibrand’s legalistic jargon and skewed to put the best official light on their activities. He had more angles than a map of New Guinea. John Glover, the colonial artist, had occasion to observe Batman’s character at close range and reports that Batman ‘is a rogue, thief, cheat, liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known’. 26 But artists are notoriously oversensitive. In later years, John Batman, hiding his eroded face behind a rag, is wheeled about the town in a bath chair by two Aboriginal retainers he’d taken from Sydney and brought to Melbourne as a charade of racial harmony.27 In that one vision the whole period of history is encapsulated and in choosing to believe the deceptions of Batman and his partners we are allowing ourselves to be wheeled around our country in a bath chair of ignorance.
29
Two
History, How it Starts Frederick Taylor was one of the colonists’ favourite henchmen. Wherever he went in the district massacres occurred. When Franks was murdered Taylor was not far away and participated with unusual enthusiasm in the many reprisals. Any warlord anywhere in the world has always been able to draw recruits like Taylor from the general population. Psychotics abound and gravitate inexorably to the wars of race and religion. You start a website denigrating blacks and one of the visitors to that site will think it a good idea to bomb their house in the belief he has God on his side. Someone objects to the way a man stares at his girlfriend’s brief bikini and a mob can be armed within hours to win back that beach for ‘Australians’. In every society at every point of history men have been found to do the violent work of entrepreneurs or zealots. You want someone to rape the wives of Amazonian Indians resisting logging of their homeland; recruits will queue around the block. You want vigilantes to disrupt an independence movement in Papua you will have so many recruits they’ll form their own army. You want men to dissuade Australian Aborigines from the idea that they own the land, you’ll find plenty willing to shoot pregnant women and laugh. World history is full of examples of brutes who volunteer for such tasks. George Augustus Robinson’s diaries, among others, show Robinson’s alarm at the frequency of the same attitudes. The frontiers of war provide an ‘acceptable’ outlet for the blood lusts of some men. Frederick Taylor was one of those men prepared to commit murder for no other reward than wages.
30
History, How it Starts
After his sprees to avenge the murder of Franks and other untold casual atrocities Taylor remained vigilant for Indigenous malfeasance. In September 1836 he intercepted an Aboriginal man who refused to give Taylor his name. The impertinence! The opportunity! Edward Freestun, one of Taylor’s convicts, gives a different story. Freestun says the black man gave his name as Gilgoran and throwing off his cloak proceeded to help Freestun and another convict labourer, John Whitehead, load Taylor’s dray with fence hurdles. On completion of the task Gilgoran went on his way to the settlement. Taylor, however, claimed to recognise him as the same man who had attacked Captain Flitt with a tomahawk three months earlier. Taylor gets one of his men to intercept Gilgoran and tie him to a tree while he sends two other men to bring Flitt for the purposes of identification. The Aboriginal man is Curacoine, a senior and well respected man of the Wathaurong people, and the rendering of his name as Gilgoran was a common enough colonial mistake of phonetics. According to Taylor, Curacoine began making a noise as if to call for help. John Whitehead objected to the noise and told Taylor that if the black didn’t stop ‘he would put him on one side’. Taylor told Whitehead ‘he might do as he pleased’.1 Whitehead duly shoots Curacoine and then drags him down to the river and throws him in, still alive but mortally wounded. Whitehead and Freestun return to the tree and begin a fire to eliminate the blood stains but they must have become a little peckish because they then use the fire to cook their dinner. The incident is reported to Lonsdale after it becomes gossip in the colony and he is obliged to bring it to court. Taylor tells the court that when Whitehead said he intended to put Curacoine to one side he had no idea he meant murder. Flitt corroborates the evidence in a deposition to the court and both he and Taylor are called as witnesses in the trial of John Whitehead but before the trial Flitt and Taylor leave the district for Van Diemen’s Land. So, for want of ‘evidence’, Whitehead is released and Taylor’s guilt in encouraging Whitehead to commit murder is never examined.
31
Convincing Ground
Frederick Taylor is cynical and savage in the extreme but his career could only have flourished in the nod and wink climate of the phantom law being encouraged by the authorities and squatters. Entrepreneurs engaged in illegal activity need brutes like Taylor. The dog is trained to kill; let him slip the collar, lash his jaws with crimson and when he returns scold him for being a naughty puppy. Don’t beat him because that might break his spirit and you need that spirit just as the legislators of apartheid needed maniacal white supremacists to enact it. Port Phillip is like this. The mad dogs have been released to stun the country with terror. The intentions of the colony are poisonous, premeditated and popular. In 1839 Taylor massacred at least forty Aborigines at Murdering Gully, Mount Emu, where he managed Puuroyuup for MacKillop and Smith. Annoyed by the theft of some sheep, Taylor attacked a sleeping encampment of Djagurd wurrung and Colijon, slaughtering all but a handful and throwing the bodies of the dead into a waterhole. Karn, one of the survivors returned to the camp, recovered the bodies from the water and ‘was placing them on the ground four deep, head to head’2 preparatory to burial, when the Europeans returned and took him captive. A second survivor, Wangegamon, escaped by swimming to the other side of the river and hiding in grass from which vantage point he saw his wife and child killed. After the bodies were ‘thrown into the creek the water became stained with blood’. 3 Missionaries from, ‘Buntingdale’, the Wesleyan mission at Birregurra, questioned the severity of Taylor’s response and while he felt confident in escaping punishment he was canny enough to go to India until the dust had settled, which it did with incredible celerity, allowing him to return and continue his indulgences in Gippsland. Taylor was involved in the murder of numerous Aborigines in Victoria and settlers queued up to gain his services. Not all settlers were like this, of course. James Dawson, one of the most considerate men in his relations with the Aborigines, arrived with his family from Scotland in 1840 and, after establishing a dairy on the Yarra, took up land near Port Fairy in 1844. Such had
32
History, How it Starts
been the speed of westward settlement, however, that Gundidjmara defence of their lands had been almost exhausted by this time. Dawson was an educated and tolerant man and recorded his observations meticulously. He was one of the few squatters to search for information about the substantial stone, timber and turf houses of the people, most preferring to burn these villages to the ground rather than face the questioning of authorities regarding their rights to occupied land. Such was the speed of destruction of these buildings that settlers arriving only a few years after the colony’s establishment saw no sign of them. Dawson records all the information he can glean from Aboriginal informants but other white people also report on their existence. Job Francis at Lake Condah comments on the extent and sophisticated structure of villages and Charles Griffith reports on a meeting he had in a house which was 15 feet (4.5 metres) long and high enough for a man to stand.4 Twelve people were comfortably accommodated. Some houses had areas reserved for widows and children, bachelors and widowers, as well as conventional families. Thomas Mitchell’s second in command sees numerous houses west of the Grampians, one ‘capable of containing at least 40 persons.5 The buildings were so impressive he suspected William Buckley must have been involved even though Buckley had never been within 200 kilometres of the area. They were big, complex structures but contemporary Australians know nothing about them. Dawson encouraged the Kirrae wurrong people to camp on their tribal lands within ‘his property’ and proceeded to detail their language and culture. Dawson’s daughter, Isabella, became fluent in the language and together they made a more thorough inventory of south-western Victorian culture than any other coloniser attempted. He was a fearless advocate of Aboriginal people and incurred the contempt of fellow colonists for his constant letters to the newspapers and willingness to report ‘settlers’ who committed crimes of violence against the Indigenes. And yet this wonderful Scot with the benefit of his intelligence and liberal outlook assumed that it was his natural right to occupy the lands of a sovereign people. It wasn’t Dawson who killed the Kirrae in order to steal
33
Convincing Ground
their land but he occupied it only a few years later. If Dawson, one of the few to understand the complicated system of clan boundaries and land obligations, saw no flaw in the imperial principle of forced land usurpation then what hope was there for justice to survive, or even arrive? Historians are upset when decent men like Dawson are criticised but he knew who the land had belonged to and still built his house upon it. A colleague argues that there was nothing else he could do because he arrived after the land was usurped. But that’s what we’re still saying today when both major political parties defy Native Title and seek to eliminate Aboriginal culture ‘for the Aborigines own good’. Just because we weren’t there when injustice occurred doesn’t absolve us from responsibility to try to set it right. Unless, of course, we are happy with things as they are. The press and pastoralist push attacked the few men like Dawson and didn’t spare any clergy troubled by their conscience. The Wesleyan missionary, Benjamin Hurst, railed publicly about the brutal treatment of the Aborigines stating that Christian principles had become so corrupted that settlers left church on a Sunday to spend the rest of the day hunting and shooting blacks. Hurst believed over two hundred Colijon and Kirrae had been shot around the Colac lakes alone. The press launched into Hurst with blustering outrage, declaring him un-Christian and cowardly. La Trobe commanded him to give evidence for his claims but abruptly dismissed Hurst’s verbal explanation. La Trobe established his own investigation but, tellingly, declined to appoint Charles Sievwright, Assistant Protector of Aborigines, giving the task instead to the Portland Magistrate, James Blair, whose fear and hatred of Aborigines was known to all in the district.6 Chief Protector Robinson reported in 1840 that Blair advocated killing all in a tribe who refused to hand over those suspected of attacks on whites.7 Blair set out to discredit Hurst’s informant, Tulloh, and found plenty of squatters willing to tell all kinds of stories against the young man. In fact Blair only asked his friends to give evidence and most of them had already been involved in massacres. Blair’s most powerful card in the pack was to elicit outlandish stories of cannibalism from these scoundrels who seem to pluck their ‘facts’
34
History, How it Starts
from a variety of populist pamphlets and phrase them in almost identical sentences. Academic Colin Tatz believes most reports of cannibalism are third hand or worse while reliable first-hand accounts are ignored. Most of the references to cannibalism in Port Phillip originate from Blair’s inquiry and are still repeated today as graven proof of the degraded morality of all Aboriginal people. When Pauline Hanson, Queensland political figure, talks of the debased cannibals of Australia, it’s likely her reference, if indeed she has one, is Blair’s report to La Trobe. The focus on cannibalism is a strange phenomenon. Incidents of cannibalism have occurred in every society and cases arise even today. Infanticide is also one of the proofs of Indigenous immorality, but the practice was rife in eighteenth-century Britain when colonisers invoked it as one of the reasons Aborigines didn’t deserve the fair plains of Australia. One of the most frequently quoted incidents of infanticide comes from a report by Foster Fyans, Geelong Magistrate, who claimed to have seen a baby dashed against a tree.8 Fyans witnessed this event while standing on one side of the Moorabool River while the ‘assailant’ on the other side was obscured by a grove of trees. So at best Fyans is 400 metres from the scene. Did he see a possum being dispatched or a hairless kangaroo? Both were delicacies of Wathaurong diet and both were killed in this fashion. What Fyans did or didn’t see is not as important as the fact that our scholars build an argument on flimsy evidence from proven and prejudicial liars. Another source of reports of infanticide and cannibalism comes from The Colony of Victoria 1864, by William Westgarth who was hip deep in dispossessing the Kulin people. His reports are often quoted but, in fact, he didn’t witness an incident of either but used third-, fourth- and fifth-hand hearsay. Infanticide, like cannibalism, was never investigated with any intellectual integrity but used as an emotive call to the avid and ignorant to despise those standing in the way of unimpeded access to land. Those most offended by the thought of cannibalism ignore the existence of mortuary cannibalism in early Christian practice and its representation in the modern Sacrament. Colonials deliberately
35
Convincing Ground
misrepresented the nature of the events witnessed and today’s commentators ignore the relationship of Indigenous mortuary practice to communal grief and religious belief. The educated class were not truly deluded by the practice, merely opportunistic in how they publicised it. Having Blair, one of the greatest anti-Aboriginal propagandists, investigate squatter violence and Aboriginal perfidy is like asking radio shockjocks to judge corporate ethics. The settlers combine to destroy the credibility of witnesses and urge La Trobe to withdraw their rights to land within the colony. Blair concluded his inquiry by saying ‘the settlers of this district are, I may say without exception, gentlemen of education. Most of them have arrived from home within the last two years, and who cannot, therefore, be supposed to have so soon forgotten the principles in which they were educated as to render their society dreadful’.9 La Trobe accepts this whitewash and sends it to Gipps without risking an opinion from the Aboriginal Protectors who have been appointed for that very purpose. The Superintendent of Port Phillip adds his own emphasis to Blair’s report by claiming that not one authenticated death of an Aboriginal has been reported in the last eighteen months. Even with the attitude to truth current in the colony this is an incredible claim. Blair himself was implicated in massacres but escaped the charges just as he has helped his friends in other instances. The duties of police magistrates were conflated with the registration of land acquisitions and as a consequence the impartial application of the law is impossible. The squatters are smugly satisfied with their control of the legal and judicial process and gloat that the district has gone ‘quiet’. Deathly quiet. The squatter, Arthur Pilleau, told Chief Aboriginal Protector Robinson that settlers were encouraging their men to shoot blacks and to keep it quiet.10 A new methodology had been developed to escape censure, Pilleau claims; Aborigines are shot singly or in pairs and the bodies disposed of thoroughly. He estimated that twenty blacks were shot for every white. Pilleau was inclined to the view that this was not such a bad thing, the sooner to bring peace to the district.
36
History, How it Starts
Individuals of goodwill or keener sensibility were overwhelmed by the craven and crude. The first acts of most European visitors to the shores of Australia were to steal stocks of food, implements or women from Aborigines. One of the few truly intelligent approaches by an English official is marred by subsequent thefts and violence of ever increasing severity. Sailors from a whaling brig stole food and canoes from the Bunurong in 1801 but when the brig returned in 1802 Lieutenant Bowen made serious attempts to ameliorate the situation. He arrived on shore holding aloft a green bough in the customary Kulin symbol of peace and even removed his clothes, on request, as a mark of respect. On a later occasion he danced with the Bunurong but all this was in vain because a second landing party from the same brig stole a quantity of timber, shellfish and swans against the express wishes of the people. Another group of sailors demanded fur cloaks and weapons and when their demands were not met they fired repeatedly into the group, killing at least two and injuring many. On sailing away the captain ‘took possession of the port in the name of his King’.11 Lieutenant Bowen’s actions seem extraordinary in the context of the past and future attitudes of sailors and settlers but perhaps he was just attempting a more civilised approach to achieve the same ends — possession. It didn’t seem to matter who landed on the shore: sealers, governors convicts or gentlemen, almost all visitors fire on Aborigines within their first 24 hours on the continent. They never admit to an understanding that the people were resisting the invasion of their lands, nor did it occur to them that killing people was no way to negotiate or conciliate. Despite what they thought of the Indigenes’ level of humanity, it seems an incredibly stupid tactic to enrage the occupants on day one. Was it incompetence or arrogance? Had the gentlemen entrusted with the implementation of Westminster’s charter shredded that plan to confetti in their own minds well before their bow drew alongside the Australian shore? Was anyone in England under the delusion that on this land imperialism would be undertaken with genuine care for the Indigenous population? When you label a race as heathen barbarians without any attempt
37
Convincing Ground
to enquire into their belief system or methods of civil governance can you ever interact with those people without the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other? The invasion is undertaken by people whose psyche is primed to believe that it is in the best interests of the invaded to lose their land, their spirit and their lives. Or perhaps we make ourselves believe in any myth that leads to the sating of our greed. In Rebellion at Coranderk, Diane Barwick outlines a series of murderous attacks carried out by sailors and colonial officials from 1798 to 1803, long before Batman’s party arrived. Wedge reported an attack on Aborigines by bark gatherers who shot several Aborigines while trying to steal women on 15 March 1836. He reports another attack prior to 1835 where whalers succeeded in stealing four women. Similar campaigns were conducted by sealers in Portland. In his journal Wedge considers that ‘unless some measures are adopted to protect the Natives a spirit of hostility will be created against the whites which in all probability will lead to a state of warfare…and will only be terminated when the black man ceases to exist’.12 The cessation of that existence was just what the colony, including its clergy, expected and desired. Bishop Broughton tells the Select Committee on Aborigines in 1837, ‘They do not so much retire as decay; wherever Europeans meet with them they appear to wear out, and gradually to decay: they diminish in numbers; they appear to actually vanish from the face of the earth’.13 Abracadabra, sim sala bim! The clergy were the educated members of society and their mission as professionals was to dispense tolerance and love to all humankind. To express such thoughts so publicly and confidently requires an enormous effort of delusion or malice or a failure to comprehend any of Christ’s teachings. Too often the men charged with the implementation of Britain’s finest principles seem to have forgotten all but one of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt have no other God before me. It was too late to hope for a more civilised society, the tone had been set, the prejudices entrenched, the enmity permanent. If any of the settlers had met the lady from Cape Otway they would not have wondered about the perfect tailoring of her cloak, the robust
38
History, How it Starts
health of her children, the cosy warmth of her neat house; they would have seen a barbarian whose greatest need on earth was to learn the Ten Commandments, commandments the colonial proselytisers applied with vicious discrimination.
39
Three
The Lakes Who were the first men to bring this duplicitous civilisation to Port Phillip? What sophistry of mind did they possess which allowed them to pray to the Lord our God but interpret his Word with such bias? Let us examine the actions of some of the first to push into the western plains immediately after Franks’ murder. These men are all Christian but all are aware of concerted attacks on the Wathaurong, Bunurong and Woiwurrung around Melbourne and quite a few have participated in these crusades. How did they explain their actions in their prayers? Hugh Murray was one of the first white men to see the Colac lakes. It was September 1837 and Murray, like other venture capitalists, was breathless in the search for open plains not yet occupied by too many graziers. He wasn’t in the first wave of ‘settlers’ and had to leapfrog lands already ‘selected’ by members of Batman and Fawkner’s Port Phillip Association. On the track Murray met Rev Naylor searching for JT Gellibrand and GBL Hesse who had gone missing while engaged in a hectic dash for broadacres. Naylor, told of the open plains he’d seen around the lakes,1 and Murray and his partners, Lloyd and Carter, hastened to find the Elysium but were beaten by JN McLeod who arrived in the gathering dark and surprised a large party of Colijon collecting fish in their extensive lake weirs. The people fled, apparently apprised of the results of meeting white people with guns. The Europeans camped that night by the lake but stayed awake as they could hear the Aborigines within a stone’s throw of their camp. In the morning the entrepreneurs emerged and were soon approached by an old man and a boy. The old man was crying and
40
The Lakes
begged them to return a boy who had been stolen from his mother by Dr Clarke three weeks earlier. The old man said the mother was ‘sad very much’ and had not stopped crying.2 It’s not certain if McLeod knew Clarke but in any case the old man’s courage was not rewarded because McLeod turned to the fishing nets of the Colijon, divesting them of ‘the delicious little smelt’ and left some trinkets in their place, despite having taken the hand woven nets as well. The old man’s faith in direct appeal to the white men was probably quenched on the spot. The people who are soon to punish every spearing of a sheep with the murder of as many as fifty or more Aborigines think nothing of picking up Indigenous possessions as if they have been left as souvenirs. The assumptions of superiority and immunity from the laws of human decency are betrayed by such casual theft. To steal and destroy become campaign traits of every excursion westwards. At this time the Colijon had done the squatters no harm, most never having seen a white man except Buckley, and so to take the nets, the spears, the cloaks and baskets, and most of all set fire to the thatch of the stone houses, exhibited gross contempt and ignorance, but more importantly eliminated hope of peaceful relations. Peace was not part of the plan. The casual and deliberate theft, destruction and aggression indicate that the Europeans had arrived with well drilled tactics ready for immediate implementation. Historians pay almost no attention to these acts and yet all vengeance parties admit to it. Most of the stones from destroyed houses are picked up and used to build the famous Western District basalt stone fences. Local historical associations go all rosy cheeked and nostalgic ‘about these great feats of British engineering’,3 but stare blankly and uncomprehending when advised of the five-roomed houses from which many of the stones were stolen. One of the great myths of Australian life is that southern Aboriginal people were nomads who did not build houses more elaborate than skimpy windbreaks. The truth is that stone, turf and bark houses were common in the district. On 28 January 1836, soon after Gellibrand had arrived in Port Phillip, he was venturing only a few miles from the bay where his party ‘fell in with about 100 native huts’.4 It is only a passing reference and reported with
41
Convincing Ground
no great surprise. Obviously it was common to find such large settlements, probably representing a resident population of around four to six hundred people, perhaps more. It is important to note the extent of this housing and the permanent occupation it represents. James Dawson of Camperdown describes the housing in detail including evidence he had accumulated of stone and turf houses large enough to accommodate twenty or more people. Some large houses had roof rafters supported by central poles. This is more than a house, it’s a small town hall. Despite the obvious importance of these buildings most have been destroyed within twelve months of Batman’s arrival with only the foundations to speak for the civilisation of Port Phillip and the Western District. It is difficult to convince historical associations and the mandarins of Aboriginal Affairs that these towns of stone dwellings existed. Schoolteachers have challenged me, politicians have threatened me, tourist operators expressed scorn, but the evidence is irrefutable. We as Australians might prefer the myth that the people lived in nothing but windbreaks and perhaps this ‘fact’ is perpetuated because it hides the ownership of the land and the permanent utility made of its resources, requirements which Native Title legislation uses to dismiss Indigenous claims, be it in north Queensland or the Convincing Ground at Portland. A descendant of the warriors of that war, Damien Bell, Chairman of the Winda Mara Co-op at Heywood, points to the extensive stone fish traps and aquaculture techniques as evidence of sophisticated culture, but his assertions received concrete confirmation after the bushfires of January 2006,5 when the foundations of very large buildings were revealed in southwest Victoria. Some were five metres in diameter and capable of housing four large families. The 150 sites were grouped together, unmistakably forming a town of a permanent population supported by their fishing industry. Here are the houses reported by Gellibrand, Lawson, Robinson, Griffith and a host of others but ‘invisible’ to today’s Australia. We spend a lot of money excavating the sites of convict prisons to uncover fascinating objects like tobacco tins and shoe buckles but why have we, as a nation, spent so few resources to find the
42
The Lakes
buildings so frequently reported by early ‘settlers’? It is a crucial key in the search for the nation’s soul and the reason for our steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have one. Deprivation of housing was one of the most destructive acts short of murder. Once deprived of housing in the cool Victorian climate the exposure to the new pulmonary infections was incredibly debilitating. In combination with the theft of possum skin cloaks and bedding, the destruction of the houses created hardships from which the clans suffered greatly. After a few years of war there were so few men alive that the re-building of the stone walls and turf roofs was impossible, and in any case the people were under constant pursuit and harassment and unable to stay in one place long enough to contemplate such large constructions. Introduced diseases were given optimum conditions for success.
43
Four
Lady Macbeth’s Clean Hands Once the West was won, attention turned to explaining to God and government how it was won. Apart from the efforts to prove that the Indigenous population did not deserve such wonderful land, the sophists sought to wash blood from the hands of the colony and explain the elimination of the Indigenous population as the result of passive means; the natural debility of the people, their despair when faced by a superior culture, their corruption, their susceptibility to disease. Those efforts continue today at the highest levels of academia and government. Look, God, they just fell over. A big case has been made for disease being the prime eliminator of the people, some historians sniffily assert, the only one. Certainly syphilis had a severe impact on fertility, and smallpox epidemics swept through clans but the death rate from smallpox may have been dramatically overrated because the population had been previously exposed to smallpox thirty to forty years earlier when sealers first visited the coast. Judy Campbell in Invisible Invaders even excuses Europeans of having introduced the disease, laying that blame at the foot of the Macassans. She plots the course of the disease from north to south; but using the same evidence and assuming that sealers had visited the southern coastline late in the 1790s you could argue that it was first brought to the shores by sealers from any number of ships, any nationality of their crew and any one of their ports of origin. Campbell’s thesis argues that violence was not a significant cause of death because the Aboriginal population had already been significantly reduced by disease. The earlier smallpox epidemic did
44
Lady Macbeth’s Clean Hands
reduce the population but it rebounded with a level of immunity and a steady recovery of numbers so that by 1835 large numbers of Aborigines still lived on their land in robust health. Subsequent letters from squatters and official dispatches indicate a rapid decline of the Victorian population after 1835 and although introduced syphilis and pulmonary disease gained a grip on populations and reduced fertility it cannot account for such an immediate drop in populations. By 1838 some districts appear to have almost no Aboriginal people. Campbell acknowledges that smallpox was often introduced by giving blankets to the Aborigines which had been deliberately infected with the bacterium. This ploy was used in America where death rates amongst some Indian communities was 100 per cent.1 In 1763 it was estimated that up to half of all Indians across America died from smallpox. Even though the same unimaginable act was perpetrated in Australia, medical records and casual observation indicate that far less carnage resulted from the re-introduction of smallpox in the 1830s possibly because of immunity gained in the first epidemic. Campbell argues that the American statistics of 1763 prove that the same impact occurred in Port Phillip but she supplies no data to support that argument and steadfastly ignores the evidence of war as a cause of depopulation. Her contribution to the debate is very important, because no-one else has investigated contact diseases as extensively, but it is necessary to analyse these cataclysmic death rates with an eye to all possibilities. If smallpox was responsible for the decline in numbers you would expect to see a disproportionate number of men because of the propensity of the disease to kill women, particularly pregnant women. The population statistics, however, indicate the reverse, an alarming reduction in the numbers of adult males between eighteen and fifty, implicating war as by far the more serious cause of death. Campbell’s own data analysing longevity indicates that many Aboriginal people lived well into their seventies but a study of age distributions a decade after Batman’s arrival and combined with Campbell’s own analysis of gender balance show a huge hole in the population where men of warrior age should be. This is a vastly different story from the one painted by most of our historians.
45
Convincing Ground
The majority of squatters were under no illusion as to the cause. Some pretended to believe in the natural decline of an inferior species but the truth was embedded in contemporary knowledge. EM Curr, no great friend of the Aborigines and handy with a weapon himself, estimated that 15 to 25 per cent of all deaths could be attributed to murder. In 1844 William Westgarth believed that the population around Mount Eccles had fallen by 50 per cent and most of this was the result of frontier violence. George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines, after touring western Victoria, estimated that forty blacks died in battle for every one white man ‘and if the statement of the Aborigines were admitted it would be trebled’.2 Robinson sent this report to La Trobe but it was ignored. Deaths from disease of whatever magnitude did allow some Europeans to speculate on their biological superiority. Andrew Markus’ book, From the Barrel of a Gun, is very uncomfortable reading, making you squirm in your skin as you read the press articles collected from the period. In these pages the victors refashion history. Darwinism is in full flight and Australians leap on the theory to explain their occupation of the continent and provide the kind of succour Cardinal Broughton wallowed in when pontificating on the ‘disappearance’ of the heathen. The letters and reports chosen by Markus are eerily similar to the sentiments expressed in the Port Phillip press and indicate the underlying assumptions of the squattocracy. Mr GJ Brockman of Kalgoorlie in defending himself against public charges of violence towards Aborigines says ‘I may remark here that placing a native in the stocks “and whipping him with saddle straps” would not hurt and is not a cruel punishment. He suffers in no way beyond confinement’. Brockman alleged his victim had stolen a pair of boots.3 Brockman defended his district against infamy, and the ease with which he considers his assumptions acceptable to civilised debate is as chilling as his admissions. Ours is singled out as the district where natives have been most cruelly treated, and yet we can certainly show a cleaner sheet in
46
Lady Macbeth’s Clean Hands
this respect than any other place in Australia. There has never been a district settled where so few natives have been shot (possibly if we had shot them down instead of trying to utilize them we should have got more praise than we get at present).4
From the Barrel follows the correspondence about the allegations of slavery and violence aired by the missionary, Rev J Gribble. Sir Paul Hasluck, a former federal parliamentarian, remarked that Gribble may have achieved more if he’d kept his claims to himself, implying that it was un-Australian to involve London in domestic affairs. Hasluck was in parliament when today’s politicians were cutting their teeth on racial politics, and as a later Governor-General, was a considerable influence on Liberal values. When you read Gribble’s mild rebukes of Carnarvon settlers it is hard to imagine how a cultured and educated man like Hasluck could have taken exception. Gribble describes six ‘slaves’ chained by the neck and ankle to each other and then to a tree in the scorching sun where they stayed day after day. Even after they were ‘trained’ to their slavery these people were chained neck and ankle to each other and the wall of a corrugated iron enclosure. In another place he saw 37 similarly chained in an enclosure 30 feet (2.76 metres) square. In Black Australians Hasluck complains that Gribble’s disclosures were unjust and unproductive ‘because colonists were sensitive about their honour’. Hasluck was Minister for Territories in the Menzies government and a parliamentarian for over two decades, yet he could remain relaxed and comfortable despite reading about people chained to the wall, not because they had committed a crime but because they ‘are slippery customers’ and might abscond from their slavery. The first impulse of Hasluck, a cultured man who published poetry and literary vignettes, is to chastise Gribble for impulsiveness. At a later date he questions the notion of Aboriginality because blackfellas are refusing to die and some are coming into the towns and adapting to contemporary culture, living in European-style houses, washing cars, mowing lawns. How dare they! Hasluck in his position of Minister for Territories attempts to redefine Aboriginality more narrowly so that only those not
47
Convincing Ground
living like white men, regardless of their genetic heritage, might be considered black. Later on he wrote, ‘the superiority of western civilization both on its merits and its established position as a way of life of the majority…indeed the incompatibility of civilized usage and pagan barbarism — left only two possible outcomes: separate development or assimilation’.5 Hasluck was a poet, philosopher and politician but he failed to examine the nature of the civilisation he condemned. Such intellectual myopia has bedevilled this country for over two hundred years. It’s time we stiffened our intellectual spine. Hasluck grew up in an era and district where the opinions of the Western Australian newspapers were taken seriously. Too seriously. But when did poets and philosophers rely on the daily press to form their opinions? The Victorian Express of Geraldton published an admonishment in 1886. Gribble must leave the district at once, for as long as Mr Gribble is here the Church of England must suffer in reputation. The settlers here are a fine manly lot of fellows, no better and no worse than their fellow men from a moral standpoint, but scorning all this is base and mean. They come to a place like this and find bareness; nothing to encourage them, but, rather, much to discourage, and like the true Britishers which most of them are, they face every difficulty, and determine to open out the country…This means not only profiting themselves in the future…but also making the whole colony richer…this has been accomplished with comparatively little bloodshed. A few, maybe, were shot — a few had to be shot to save greater bloodshed in the future. The Rev Mr Gribble may cavil at this, but who with any truthfulness, and who is conversant with the subject can say it is not so.6
At a public meeting in Carnarvon Gribble is accused of not being a true Britisher. In a letter to the West Australian Brockman writes, ‘if he continues with his campaign the colonists will dispose of the blacks and bring in ‘Malays and Chinamen instead’.7 The men involved in this tirade of abuse represent some of the most wealthy and ‘distinguished’ Australian families. Towns, streets and art galleries are named after them and yet this is what 48
Lady Macbeth’s Clean Hands
the flower of Australian society was thinking. They received official compliance with their methods of murder and slavery in Britain’s other colonies and now, with the strategies honed to a razor’s edge, expect to receive the same acclamation here. Anyone complaining was not a Britisher. The parallels with Australia’s contemporary political methods admonish us. At the same time as Brockman was blustering around in the north-west, Joseph Bradshaw and Andreas Gunn were cutting the figures of dashing cavaliers in the Kimberley. Gunn’s diary of the time recalls, ‘We crouched in the dark, with our nerves strung to a high pitch of excitement. It was one of those rare moments when we play the game of life with death and are victors whether we win or lose. The game was the thing. The stakes were nought’.
He’s talking about a raid on their camp by the Indigenous owners of the land they have stolen. An instantaneous photograph of a magnificent savage, bedizened with red ochre and decked with lines and bands of bird down, flashed on my mind as he sprang. I have the photograph yet along the shining barrel of my Martini-Henry rifle. For an instant my finger quivered on the hair trigger, and then a sharp bark rang out. There was a solitary groan.8
Their ‘run’ was 12,400 square kilometres on the Victoria River. They were prepared to kill for it but as Germaine Greer has pointed out, people like Gunn and Bradshaw and Stan Kidman later, had no attachment to the land. They’d kill to keep it one month and sell it for a profit the next. Gunn’s wife went on to write We of the Never Never, the famous but cruelly racist account of their lives in the north, while Bradshaw gave his name to an incredible gallery of paintings which he ‘discovered’. Desperate to deny the longevity of Aboriginal occupation of Australia, today’s historians and archaeologists, riding the coat tails of conservative political and academic power, claim that the art in these galleries is too good for it to have been created by the ancestors of contemporary Indigenous people. The art must have been painted 49
Convincing Ground
by a more sophisticated race who visited and left. Extra-terrestrials perhaps. This incredibly biased and inept commentary, which we are supposed to accept as academic research, fails to acknowledge that art of almost identical style exists at Mount Borradaile in western Arnhem Land. These galleries are in the care of descendants of the ancestors who first began to paint those caves over the space of several rises and falls in sea level and several alterations to climate, and not only that, those direct descendants have the authority to add their contribution to that art and are doing so. Not only is the art consistent with the entire occupation of the period, new art was added to it in 2004. We cannot allow the gainsayers to get away with outright deception for their own ideological ends. When do we get sick of being lied to and decide to expend the energy to examine the history and culture of our own country for ourselves? It is not just the attitudes of the frontiersmen we need to examine; a critical scrutiny must be applied to all contemporary commentary on the foundations of our civilisation. Special scrutiny should be applied to those arguments which attempt to shift all blame for violence inflicted on Aboriginal people to the victims themselves, particularly those which seek to explain the demise of Aboriginal people on their inferior intellect, morality or constitution. Science and Darwinism tried that in the nineteenth century until later science proved that the brain capacity and genetic structure of Aborigines and Caucasians are identical. Those preferring to rest an argument on relative morality should examine the religion and morality of Indigenous Australians and then compare it to those who murdered them in the 1800s and those who try to excuse or deny it today.
50
Five
The Lie of the Land In 1836 the lies and deceptions were running at breakneck speed even among the more refined Port Phillip squatters. Despite possessing the same prejudices as his fellows Hugh Murray was not the cruellest man to enter Port Phillip and yet he pursued with relentless ferocity any who dared steal his sheep. Oh, his parties were always large and well armed but he insisted no-one was ever killed except for one man shot in the process of throwing a spear. Squatters followed the well developed colonial technique: keep your own killings quiet, encourage or pay others to do it for you when you can, and wherever possible accuse the victims of bestiality, therefore deserving of their death. When Murray met Rev Naylor, supposedly searching for Gellibrand and Hesse on behalf of Gellibrand’s wife, the clergyman was leading a party which included some Barrabool whom he had ‘hired’ so they could wreak havoc on the Colijon who were occupying land being sought by squatters. Naylor ‘allowed’ these Barrabool to spear two of the Colijon with whom Naylor believed they were in enmity. Murray saw them return holding portions of flesh aloft and reports sententiously about the horror of cannibalism, but neither he nor Naylor interfered in the raid made possible by the new weapons at the Barrabools’ disposal. What Naylor and Murray witnessed was not cannibalism but more like American Indians’ counting coup. They adopt the well established imperial technique of condemning the act but obscuring the fact that the inter-tribal attack they incited by bringing strange clansmen onto the land of others achieved exactly what they had intended; to clear the plains for themselves and blame the clearance on someone else. 51
Convincing Ground
As discussed before in reference to La Trobe’s reports, cannibalism is one of the first accusations levelled at any group of Indigenous people inconveniently in possession of land desired by Europeans. Almost all reports are coloured by avarice and the repulsion felt by Europeans for such acts while ignoring the incidence of the same in their own societies. Many colonial accounts mention that skin is removed from behind the knees and in front of the elbows and indicates a more ritualistic practice than hunger or blood lust would suggest. In one of the most complete reports, Charles Sievwright, Assistant Protector of Aborigines, refuses to leave a ceremony where Jarcoort people prepare the body of one of their daughters. The girl was killed during an argument brought about when two opposing clans are forced to take residence together on George Augustus Robinson’s ill-informed insistence. Sievwright knew that both groups would be insulted to live in the same camp and wasn’t surprised when violence occurred.1 Sievwright got on well with the Jarcoort and understood them better than most but it didn’t stop him from insisting on witnessing the mourning ceremony while lounging on a log from which vantage point he could watch in comfort. The girl’s body was opened at the chest and the initial incision was accompanied by prolonged singing and wailing. Methodically the organs, blood and serum were removed from the chest cavity, and portions of skin meticulously sliced away. Sievwright admitted the grief displayed was extraordinary but refused to go when requested and continued to watch as portions of the body were consumed. He interprets the enthusiasm for the consumption as avidity and ferocity but can’t explain why this particular ceremony is conducted in this way while all other burials he has observed proceed normally. The girl’s head is smoked for preservation and memorial and in all other ways the respect and grief attest to the people’s love for the girl. Sievwright is repulsed when offered part of the body but the people seem confused by the Assistant Protector’s refusal to leave the scene. Perhaps they think he wishes to be included in the ritual, but whatever they think or Sievwright thinks it is compromised by cross-cultural misunderstanding. Sievwright had been told by the
52
The Lie of the Land
people that they abhorred cannibalism but, naturally, he is shaken by the scene he witnessed and unable to see it in any light but savagery. He believes they have no ‘religion’.2 Something else is going on in this ceremony and it might be repugnant to most other civilisations but to call it cannibalism in the absence of true understanding is extremely prejudicial and to report only that part of the ceremony obnoxious to Christians without explaining the attendant grief and ritual is mischievous. Modern political figures might be excused by their historical ignorance for using such examples in a prejudicial way, but anyone with anthropological awareness must read that report and know that the ceremonial use of the body and the obvious grief mean the incident is not an example of cannibalism. What the ceremony means has been lost with the destruction of the Jarcoort elders who might have been able to explain the higher significance. The squatter, CB Hall, was more alert to the subtle cultural messages than most. He reported to La Trobe: ‘Their cannibalism and cutting out of warriors’ kidney fat were only manifestations probably of their religion or superstition, as the rack and the faggot have been, and the prison is now, the means by which the dominant orthodoxy of the day is vindicated on the other side of the world’. 3 This perceptive gentleman was never invited to comment again but his abhorrence of murder seems to evaporate as he is later accused of allowing his cook to shoot two Jacelet men. Perhaps Sievwright gained a more profound insight into the ritual after the Muston’s Creek massacre. A party of Kirrae, two men and their wives, two other women and two children, left the Mount Rouse Protectorate in 1842 on their way back to their own country but while camped at night a posse of at least eight white men, possibly with the involvement of the squatters Osbrey and Smith, stormed into the camp and five of the Kirrae were killed. On that excursion the squatters had some neighbours, some labourers, a visiting cousin, an accountant, a draper and the proprietor of the Melbourne Daily News.4 Quite a party. It seems everybody liked to get involved in a bit of rough justice. In Scars in the Landscape Ian Clark brings together all the documentary evidence on numerous murderous clashes of the period, and reports one of the participants in this incident saying
53
Convincing Ground
that the party ‘rode off in great glee’5 as if the attack had been premeditated to relieve the boredom of a summer evening. So, had this odd assortment of people, some from as far away as Geelong and Melbourne, assembled at this remote station with this kind of sport in mind? Like getting a couple of slabs and a few of the boys together to go trout fishing and with any luck monstering a few barmaids just for a lark? Anyway this mob of the colony’s finest had their fun and left the scene. The survivors hurried back to Mount Rouse taking it in turns to carry the surviving child on their shoulders. Sievwright set off to investigate with Pwebingannai as his guide, the Kirrae man who had just survived the massacre and whose wife was one of the dead. The Assistant Protector and Pwebingannai gave aid to one of the women who, though mortally wounded, was still breathing. At the same time Sievwright, in his capacity as magistrate, was busy taking notes and trying to get depositions in an attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice. The court would later dismiss the case for lack of evidence but it only came to notice because Assistant Protector Sievwright arrived so soon afterwards. If he hadn’t, the name Muston’s Creek would not appear in the pages of our history. This is a silent war. Meanwhile Sievwright endured the extraordinary grief of Pwebingannai who was devoted to his wife and now, painted in mourning white, attempted to perform funeral rites for her amid the chaos of the dead, the dying and a white man trying in good faith to record the evidence of gunshot wounds which had been administered at point-blank range. Pwebingannai cut off one of his wife’s arms and returned with it to Mount Rouse. This is not cannibalism, this is grief. European society believes in not desecrating the dead, traditional Aboriginal society believes in remembrance. All commentary by the ignorant should be avoided, and in this regard I am very ignorant, but it seems obvious that the colony, with help from people like the Magistrates Blair, Fyans, Murray, Naylor and fellow citizens of power, had deliberately misconstrued this aspect of Indigenous culture for their own advantage. They are not saying that these are not the sort of people we want here, as the Coalition government has said of boat people arriving on our shores, they are being even more decisive; these are the sort of people who need to be eliminated. 54
The Lie of the Land
This attitude is firmly entrenched in the early days of any colony. Clifton Crais, in analysing the South African frontier, claims that the colonisers needed to create a colonial identity and this necessitated the demonisation of the dispossessed so that they could be portrayed as the other. From the 1820’s Africans were increasingly represented as libidinous, uncontrolled, lazy and disrespectful of established authority…The growth of negative appraisals centred on two issues…violations of private property (thievishness) and the unwillingness of Africans to labour for whites (indolence)… Settlers were continually outraged that Khoikhoi living on Mission Stations were averse to acknowledge that much of the country is now all private property. 6
The sentiments and prejudices being expressed in the colony of Port Phillip are identical to those aired in the South African Planters’ Club, not because the Indigenous people are identical but because the colonisers are and have learnt the same rules from the same sources and use the same words in their rhetorical war chest: outrage, clearance, pacify, bestial, infanticide, cannibal, treacherous. Just as in India, America and Africa these words become the conversational currency. The colonists extend this attitude beyond the Indigenous peoples to the fauna and flora in an attempt to justify their abrupt entry into the landscape and the changes they seek to wreak upon it. The flora and fauna are as deficient as the Indigenous inhabitants but, behold, we have arrived to correct the mistake! Peter Conrad in his Boyer lecture describes how many early naturalists were scandalised by the grotesque creatures they encountered. The kangaroo is a ‘mistake’, the eucalypt a product of God’s joke, the whole country ‘was the Creator’s clumsy apprentice work’.7 Some believed that the skin of a platypus had been sewn together as a scientific hoax, while others refused to believe the country had been created by God. The land as well as its people are thought barbaric and offensive, just waiting for the correction of civilised Britons. Which is why Ferdinand von Mueller, the famed horticulturalist, imported the blackberry and his compatriots the rabbit, fox, pig and deer. 55
Convincing Ground
The colonists encouraged each other to deplore everything about the land and its people but behind their scorn for the other was a calculated intention to take advantage of it, using any strategy and any form of words which might confer legitimacy. So, regardless of what Rev Naylor and Hugh Murray thought they witnessed at Colac when the Barrabool returned with portions of flesh on their spears and the prejudicial interpretation with which they twisted it, what were they doing? Looking for the lost squatters, Hesse and Gellibrand, for which Mrs Gellibrand had paid Naylor, or setting up displaced and already disenfranchised Aboriginals to create havoc on the frontier and further hasten the demise of the traditional owners of the land? Aboriginal people from distant clans sometimes conducted revenge attacks on ‘warrigals’, wild blackfellows, but Europeans often encouraged these crimes so that their own crimes could be sheeted home to people who were not permitted to give evidence in the courts. The Native Police Corp was formed in 1837 to provide protection to squatters in outlying districts of the colony. It proved ineffectual in capturing relatives charged with ‘outrages’ but was brutally efficient in effecting capture and murder of those they viewed as mainmate, literally, enemies or foreigners. Marie Fels in Good Men and True states that they were often participants in Native Police actions for their own ends entirely, sometimes capturing women while on patrol, but they were more often scapegoated for slayings in which they were not actually involved and in some cases not even present.8 Historian Peter Gardner analysed the reported incidents of inter-tribal warfare and found most accounts were compiled by third-hand reports or worse. There was none of the evidence which squatters and colonial courts insisted on at all other times. It looks like part of the war’s propaganda. This pattern of disruption to Indigenous lives had been refined in all colonial outposts and became a normal strategy of warfare. The colonists were not responding with spontaneous panic but with well-rehearsed strategies. They knew their own law and the windows of opportunity through which they could exploit it.
56
The Lie of the Land
William Buckley was just another weapon in the armoury. He was sent out with another party led by Captain Pollock in search of Gellibrand and Hesse but, while Aborigines they encountered had seen the ‘explorers’ heading west, there was no hint that they had been murdered. A more detailed commentary on events couldn’t be received because in the middle of the meeting Pollock’s men rode up and scared the Aborigines away. Buckley had expressly requested they not do this in order to give him time to get a complete explanation of events, but it seems Pollock and his party, like so many of the other ‘rescue parties’, were more interested in ‘exploration’ than in the search for the lost carpetbaggers. The squatters had no interest in communication with the Aboriginal clans because they were looking to a future where colonial strategies eliminated the impertinence of their existence. The mood was volatile on both sides and the frontier erupted in violence while the colonial authorities searched for ways of rendering the chaos more palatable to their political masters. La Trobe wrote to a number of squatters asking them to report on the progress of settlement and the state of the Aboriginal clans. He was trying to collect material so he could respond to the stern letters he was receiving from London where reports of massacres in Australia were being met with far greater opprobrium. Many of La Trobe’s respondents replied with callous disregard for the welfare of the Aborigines, most using the tried and true euphemisms of ‘taught them a lesson’, ‘took full account’, ‘set them to one side’, ‘discouraged them’ and ‘dispersed them’ in order to veil the true nature of the ‘clearance’ of the Aborigines from their lands. That Hugh Murray’s language was milder than some didn’t mean his mind was less calculating or his intentions less nefarious. They never lost an opportunity of stealing our sheep…In such cases the settlers assembled and pursued them, and when their encampment was discovered they generally fled, leaving behind them their weapons, rugs, etc, which together with their huts, were destroyed. I am happy to think that they met with more forbearance here than in many other parts of the country, and to be able to state with certainty that never upon any such occasion, or at any time since their country was first occupied, was one
57
Convincing Ground
of their number shot to death, with one single exception, when I believe a man died of a shot wound he received after having thrown a spear’. 9
Thank goodness for that, Hugh, for a minute there I thought we’d named the main street of Colac after someone intent on his own advancement and the eradication of the only obstacle in the way of his greed and self-aggrandisement. Murray’s own emphasis in the sentence seems to plead too much, or perhaps he is just blind and deaf, because his neighbours report ‘much loss of life’, ‘clashes’ and ‘all out war’. Squatters who arrive after 1850, however, blithely report the docile nature of the remaining few Aborigines. Much has happened between 1835 and 1850 but Hugh Murray, in residence for the entire period, must have blinked. As quoted earlier, Bishop Broughton confidently reports to the Select Committee of 26 June 1837 that the Australian Aborigines simply wear out, decay and vanish. Wear out, vanish! The clergy seem to have a better grip of euphemism than all the venture capitalists and politicians combined. Clergy and squatters within two years of occupation seem to have averted their eyes and ears from the actions committed in their neighbourhood. If you aren’t given a convenient lie to explain away an unpleasantness, invent your own. A section of CB Hall’s report to La Trobe has been quoted earlier (p. 53) and may have saved the Superintendent of Port Phillip much frustration had his perceptions been acted upon but perhaps it was already too late. Hall was discomfited by the presumption of the frontiersmen that, as a squatter, he would share all their views and methods. He travelled through the district in 1840 following the wheel ruts of Major Mitchell’s expedition and reported some disturbing scenes. At the period of my entrance into the colony of Australia Felix, in almost every part of it the mutual relation of the natives and settlers, at first, was one of distrust and violence. This it was stated, arose from the attempts of the blacks to steal sheep, or other property of value, from the settlers. These robberies were
58
The Lie of the Land
often accompanied by violence and murder, committed in the treacherous manner common to most savages. Such occurrences naturally led to reprisals, in which the superior arms and energy of the settlers and of their servants told with fatal effect upon the native race. Instances of this deplorable result might be observed by the explorer in the early days of the settlement of the colony. Native Skeleton in a Waterhole — When I was passing with cattle over the Eastern Wimmera, a shepherd came up and entered into conversation with me. He held a carbine in the place of a crook, and an old regulation pistol was stuck in his belt, instead of the more classical pastoral pipe — pastoral pursuits in Australia being attended at this time, with circumstances more calculated to foster a spirit of war than one of music. After some conversation he led me to a waterhole, where the skeleton of a native — exposed by the shrinking water in the summer heat — lay on the mud. There was a bullet-hole through the back of the skull. ‘He was shot in the water,’ the man told me, ‘as he was a-trying to hide hisself after a scrimmage! There was a lot more t’other side.’ Bones under a Gum-tree — ‘I might see the bones a-sticking up out of the ground close to the big fallen gum-tree, where they’d been stowed away all of a heap’ — a grave good enough, he took occasion to assure me, for the ‘sneaking, murdering, black cannibals.’ Bones under the Logs of a Bush Fire — On another branch of the Wimmera, when looking for the horses one morning, after camping out, my black boy came back, his complexion changed to yellow with fright; taking me away to a short distance, he showed me three to four bodies, partially concealed by logs.10
Hall is no shrinking violet, he has no great estimation of the Indigenous people but he is one of the few to mention the casual finding of dead bodies, not buried in the local way, but ‘all of a heap’. These examples would have been known to many but only a new chum, perhaps a man with his conscience still in place, would mention it. Hall stumbled on the aftermath of battles which had been occurring all over the district. Within hours of seeing their first white man the Colijon of Colac have had a child stolen, at least one
59
Convincing Ground
warrior shot, the rest dispersed, houses burnt, their weapons and fishing nets stolen and ‘unfriendly’ tribes introduced to their lands with the express purpose of chasing them from their traditional country and leaving the acres open to Murray, Clarke and the leaping frogs in their wake. This is our history, this is why things are the way they are.
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Six
The Psychology of the Frontier The psychology of the frontier is complicated but self-interest promotes any opinion be it Darwinism and the indisputable Godliness of the British or the pretence that they actually believed what they were doing was right. As former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, observed, ‘in a two horse race always back Self Interest because at least you know it’s trying’. A peculiar example of how the selfish mind can pretend to believe anything to its own advantage is given by Rebe Taylor in her excellent history of Kangaroo Island, Unearthed. The first white men to take up residence on the island did so in co-habitation with women stolen from Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands. Gentlemen who later take up land on the island ostracise these men because they are mere sealers and ex-convicts, not real British gentlemen. They say the first white men are not legitimate settlers because they have no authority from the Crown and they are living in sin with black women, although the same could be said for many men in the early days of the colony. The newcomers aren’t as morally offended as they are greedy and look to any excuse to legitimise their own claims and refute all others. To this end they make Indigeneity a transmissible disease, any hint of transaction with Aboriginal women leaves the earlier settlers infected and beyond the pale so that today it is acceptable to exclude them from the local museum. Just as many such stories have been expunged from the national memory. The presence of those women on Kangaroo Island, however, makes a mockery of the theory of the last Tasmanian, a term which
61
Convincing Ground
still finds its way into the press and Hansard despite such obvious evidence that it is incorrect and offensive. Self-Interest ran on strongly in Port Phillip and many of the venture capitalists respond to Governor La Trobe’s request for information about the early years by explaining their method of acquiring land and the legitimacy of their claims. So sure are they that dispossession is not a crime that they reveal their acquisitions in great detail but leave their strongest assertions for the fact that no Aborigines were killed, or none that I saw, oh, my men fired shots but I’m sure it was over their heads, in any event they never came back! Hugh Murray’s own letter to La Trobe bears all these hallmarks. The methodology was planned well in Hobart, schooled by years of experience in India, Africa and Van Diemen’s Land, so that the Port Phillip Squatters were more like an invading army than a group of keen graziers. They knew each other, had discussed tactics, as the letters of Gellibrand and Batman reveal, and were determined to thwart the Colonial Government’s control of the distribution of lands in the new frontier. Their responses to events in Port Phillip were calculated sequences in the plan rather than random reflexes. Not only had they prepared their invasion thoroughly in advance but also the excuses and obfuscations, which they would present when required, to uncooperative authorities. Niel Black, who couches most of his public thoughts with great care, is more direct in his personal journal and writes that the perpetrators of violence against Aborigines hid their actions by hints and slang phrases, as the Protectors of Aborigines are always on the lookout for information against the whites, and anything plainly said would subject them to a prosecution…I believe they…are slaughtered in great numbers and never a word said about it…After they got the first taming by means of a few doses of lead effectually administered, it seldom happens that they occasion much trouble afterwards.1
Black makes it sound as though he is reporting incidents relayed to him by others but, in fact, he was a perpetrator of many offences himself. He expresses his repugnance for the way some frontiersmen
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The Psychology of the Frontier
behave and insists on purchasing an established property so he won’t have to exterminate the owners of the land; but it doesn’t stop him from destroying any habitations he finds on his properties and driving off the remnants of the people. At his Glenormiston property he destroyed a large dwelling and left signs to advise the owners never to return.2 His morality can be measured superior in minutes not degrees. Like Black, Thomas Manifold is ingenuous in the extreme. He was the first settler to land sheep at Point Henry. Having gathered detailed information about that district from members of the Port Phillip Association he was determined to settle to the west of Birregurra. He replies to La Trobe’s request: ‘I am afraid I can give little information. Although each tribe had its district, and each family its portion, I never could perceive that they became in any way attached to a particular spot, or attempted to construct a dwelling having any greater permanency than the common miamia’.3 A strange observation given that other members of his party of ‘squatters’ report seeing stone houses and those who followed his tracks only days later report the same. He goes on to tell La Trobe that they have no religion and their numbers are greatly overrated. Manifold is securing the ground for his legitimacy although the reports of settlers less well versed in the ‘colonial code’ contradict each of his claims. Manifold would have done well to ask his brothers, both of whom participated in massacres, their opinion, in particular on the drawn-out Eumerella War. All the Manifold brothers were vigorous in pursuit of their acquisition of vast properties, and while Thomas acted the part of statesman and gentleman he forgot that there were witnesses who, unlike most in the colony, recorded frontier history in their diaries. Perhaps the Manifolds just assumed the complicity of all the white brethren. Unfortunately for them some couldn’t resist recording the great deeds of the brave pioneers. In the manuscript history of the McGarvie family, neighbours of Manifold, and the same family that later produced a Governor of Victoria, it is reported that, Many innocent Aborigines were killed indiscriminately for some transgression or other. In 1840, after discovering a large
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Convincing Ground
number of sheep missing from their properties, Peter Manifold and Arthur Lloyd of Colac, pursued a group of approximately 50 Aborigines. After rounding up the group they fired at random and left. Many would have been wounded or killed: however neither man suffered any censure’. 4
Later McGarvie relates that ‘other settlers made a sport of hunting Aborigines in the manner of kangaroo shoots. The name of Manifold is one of the most ‘respectable’ and well known in western Victoria and the nonchalance of his deception of La Trobe, if in fact La Trobe was deceived or simply happy to have received an acceptable reply, speaks volumes for the feeling of immunity with which the advancing pastoralists felt they could effect their well rehearsed plan of assault. They were not stupid men; they were investors, entrepreneurs, and must have been assured that their sins would be smiled upon or at least dismissed with a squeamish grimace. The Liar in Australia has proved in the earliest days of his arrival that he can escape punishment as long as the Lie is the one the majority wish to believe, need to believe in order to soothe the timid Christian conscience. Regardless of their relative cunning, however, they all use the same euphemisms, often in identical sentences: the natives commit ‘outrages’, they are ‘cannibals’, they are ‘filthy, ugly and stupid’, none ever die from gunshot wounds when ‘dispersed’, they are ‘treacherous and cruel’, have salacious designs on the white women, even though there are so few European women in the colony that the most common question asked of the invaders is ‘Where are your women and children?’ It’s a man’s world and in this world Foster Fyans was right at home. The Eumerella War was raging around Mount Eeles (now Mount Eccles) and the ‘outrages’ were still occurring in the Stony Rises, so the authorities stationed the Geelong Police Magistrate and more than thirty mounted troopers from Sydney on the west bank of the Pirron Yallock Creek.5 Under the leadership of Fyans and Sergeant Hatsell Garrard they conducted incursions into the district, moving from station to station ‘to keep the raiders in check’. 6 But the ‘fallacy of dealing with the blacks as if they were civilised human beings, capable of knowing right from wrong, 64
The Psychology of the Frontier
was soon made apparent, and the mounted police often had to act on the dictum that a charge of buckshot was the most effective argument that could be used against such savages’7 and when cattle were speared or sheep driven off the squatters would assemble with Fyans and Garrard and deliver ‘swift punishment, a work which could not be shirked on any consideration’.8 Fyans tells La Trobe he thinks the only solution is for the squatters to deal with the Aborigines ‘on the spot’ because their ‘habits of idleness, extreme cunning, vice and villainy’ meant that it was impossible to do anything with them short of abrupt justice.9 Perhaps Fyans is prejudiced by the fact that he has taken up land around the Colac lakes and these ‘idle villains’ are in his way. The editor of the Port Phillip Patriot declared on 23 February 1841 that ‘a few mounted police, well armed, would effect more good against the Aborigines in one month than the whole preaching mob of Protectors in 10 years’. The use of the word ‘against’ in that sentence says volumes about the public attitude to any impediment to their avarice. So confident were they of success that the squatters were claiming outrageous acreages. JC Hamilton’s Pioneering Days reports that ‘like many newcomers, Gibson and Hamilton attempted to claim a much larger area (30,000 acres) than they could hope to retain or needed for their present stock’.10 In 1848 Gibson applied for 150 square miles around Lake Bringalbert. The confidence to scoop up parcels of land as big as Wales encouraged the squatters to ignore the risks. Brown and Oliver pushed on beyond the settled area in 1845 until Brown was killed. Mr Brown, was shepherding sheep not far from the station, and, seeing a camp of blacks, he went over to have a chat with them, not fearing any harm as he had a double barrelled shotgun with him. He was in the act of stooping down to get a firestick to light his pipe with, when a blackfellow struck him over the head with a waddy. It was necessary to teach the blacks a lesson, and the station people met and decided to take the law into their own hands. A call to arms was made — the footmen going one way and the horsemen the other. They were all armed with flintlock muskets and pistols of the same sort — heavy clumsy weapons they were, but effective enough. (I have put a ball into a tree at
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Convincing Ground
a hundred yards with one of these pistols.) It was a bad day for the ill-fated darkies. They opened fire and many of the blacks went under. What happened that day is a scene from the past, and the curtain is drawn over it all. One of the blacks, mortally wounded, made it to a cave and died there. He was found years after, sitting in an upright position, petrified, and was one of the sights of those wonderful caves, until he was stolen and taken to England where he was exhibited. The lesson given the blacks that day made them understand that they must respect the lives of white men’.11
Some salient facts about this report are that Brown was attempting to push beyond the known frontier to claim a massive slice of the Western District, the penalty for killing a white man with a stick is for the entire clan to be shot and that while the caves are ‘wonderful’ the murdered warrior is merely a ‘sight’ to be exhibited. Squatters travel with light emotional baggage. The entire frontier is like this; no interfering morality, no uncommitted members of the party, no evidence that doesn’t put them in the best light. Brown’s report contains many obvious inconsistencies. His casual approach to the camp when considered under the circumstances of his annexation of the people’s land seems at odds with the sudden ‘call to arms’. Most of the historical documents can be read in several different ways but one of the research methods rarely used, it seems, is to question the validity of squatters’ statements or the benevolence of their intentions as reported by themselves. By 1896, just five years before Federation, the colony has tidied up the matter in its mind. This passage from the Age on 26 September 1896 sums it up. The pathetic death of King Billy, the last of the Ballarat blacks, recorded in Thursday’s issue, calls attention to the curious problem of race decay and extinction. The favourite theory at Exeter Hall is that the disappearance of the native races is due to the cruelty and malignity of the white race. Those who are acquainted with the history of this colony from its first settlement are aware that no such charge can be alleged against the Victorian people, and that the black race has decayed, and is
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The Psychology of the Frontier
rapidly dying out from causes quite outside of the power of the white man to control. Scenes of violence sometimes occurred in the early days no doubt, when a family was exposed to attack by native tribes; but it may be safely asserted that the use of offensive weapons against the natives was not resorted to except for the purposes of defence. Ever since the Port Phillip was constituted as a separate colony the natives have been regarded as a sort of pets. Not only has the Government established refuges for them into which they could come if disposed…but the settlers have ministered to their needs more ungrudgingly than to the wandering members of their own race… In Australia fortunately, we are free from this race problem. The aboriginals were of too low a stamp of intelligence and too few in number to be seriously considered…What we have to be afraid of is that…we shall be overrun by hordes of Asiatics.12
I occasionally have to check the date of that Age report because it seems to me I read similar things during the Vietnam war. The Age saw itself as a liberal journal under the leadership of David Syme and enthusiastically espoused the theories of Social Darwinism. It saw itself, and still does, as the voice of reason, but in the late 1800s it seemed to be applying a balm to the colonial conscience. In January 1888 it reports: It seems a law of nature that where two races whose stages of progression differ greatly are brought into contact, the inferior race is doomed to wither and disappear…The process seems to be in accordance with a natural law which, however it may clash with human benevolence, is clearly beneficial to mankind at large by providing for the survival of the fittest. Human progress has all been achieved by the spread of the progressive races and the squeezing out of the inferior ones’.13
An editorial on 26 September 1896 explained: Why an unprogressive race which had existed for untold ages should suddenly die out in the presence of a more advanced civilization is the question which suggests itself to many a
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Convincing Ground
startled conscience today. The answers which have been given to that question are not quite satisfactory. The ravages of newly introduced diseases amongst savages are admittedly terrible, and the vices of whites so easily adopted by the inferior races, must have a powerful influence on the duration of life. But the curious thing is that the Australian blackfellow does not seem to have perished from these causes, but rather from a general sterility with which the females are stricken…There seems so far a confirmation of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest that an inferior race has a tendency to wither away in the presence of the superior very much in proportion to the inequality between the two.14
So, there you are, hysterical infertility brought on by the luminous superiority of Europeans. These are the liberals of the colony desperately opining about the circumstances of the past, fervent in their wish that they and their ancestors did little more violence than simply arrive. It is scary to think these editorials were written just a handful of Melbourne Cups short of Federation and the Constitution. Those people are like me and Prime Minister John Howard; desperate to be proud of their country. But all of us, black and white, must investigate our past and on examination of that record come to some basic agreement of how the past unfolded. Some, like academics Keith Windschuttle and Ron Brunton, and politicians John Howard and Mal Brough, may deny it, but the rest of us must arrive at an understanding before the ulcer of despair erupts like the poisonous grievances of other lands which, left untreated, foment into ulcers of civil disruption.
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Seven
Brave Explorers When Joseph Tice Gellibrand and George Brooks Legrew Hesse went missing in 1837 they were depicted as brave explorers felled by vicious savages and that furphy persists to this day. Just as La Trobe has his followers wanting him elevated into a pantheon of saints there are contemporary historians urging monuments to be erected for the ‘explorers’ who gave their lives for the sake of science. Western District school teachers and historians write and ring beseeching me to offer them words of comfort about the unblemished character of this or that ‘explorer’, this or that ‘statesman’ of the frontier. They want heroes, they want to inspire people about the foundations of Australian society, but blameless people are hard to find, especially those in pursuit of fame or fortune. When I offer dissenting views on the character of Gellibrand or La Trobe or Murray, these people, desperate for a comfortable story, attack the messenger. They write to the papers declaring me un-Australian. The truth often gets in the way of a favourite story. Gellibrand fled creditors in London for the wild shores of Van Diemen’s Land and is soon installed as Attorney-General. He falls out with Governor Arthur who is disquieted by the unruly company kept by his principal legal officer and later astounded by the distasteful, and often illegal, schemes Gellibrand employs to gain grants of government land only to sell them on at enormous profit. When dismissed from his office by Arthur, Gellibrand teams up with Batman and the Dutigalla group, later to become the Port Phillip Association. They plot to subvert Arthur’s conservative colonial
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Convincing Ground
plans by stealing a march to the newly ‘discovered’ lands of Port Phillip where they plan the ruse of using an implausible treaty document to convince the Colonial Office of their good intentions and rights over the new district. Gellibrand’s plan, as always, is to take up free land in the name of ‘opening up the savage lands’ and then sell it at enormous profit to those English migrants with fewer contacts in the ruling class. He proclaims that the best way of getting rid of the Aborigines is ‘sitting on the blacks to eat them out or drive them out’.1 It’s hard to imagine sitting on someone having such a deadly effect. Gellibrand’s avarice grieves Arthur but his inclination to mix with disreputable people and engage with them in endeavours of questionable legality unnerves the Governor for fear of undesirable reports about his Attorney-General reaching London.2 Arthur does not immediately dismiss Gellibrand but plans with him to round up and expel all Aborigines from Van Diemen’s Land.3 Gellibrand suggests a military line to march across Tasmania to mop up Aboriginal resistance and expel them to offshore islands. George Augustus Robinson is employed to promise the Indigenes eventual return to their homes. The Tasman solution is one of the ploys of experienced colonisers, an inspiration to spin doctors everywhere. Having tidied up the little item of threats to his Tasmanian investments Gellibrand arrives in Port Phillip with fellow barrister, George Hesse, and they storm west ignoring the advice of their guide, William Akers, that they are following a line too far to the south. They miss their intended rendezvous with Captain Swanston and wander further westward. Akers, exasperated, returns to Melbourne and nothing further is heard of them. Of course they’ve been slaughtered by savages; they wouldn’t just starve or fall off their horse would they? But they do. The venturers are never seen alive again. It is an outrage that gentlemen should be slaughtered by blacks who go unpunished, so Gellibrand’s wife funds a search party led by Naylor and Parsons. These two gentlemen arrive in Melbourne, rock up to Police Magistrate Lonsdale and in a peremptory manner demand horses for the search party. Lonsdale takes a dim view of this attitude but they go further and insist on the services of William Buckley, the ‘wild white man’, but when Buckley refuses, his horse
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Brave Explorers
is found hamstrung by a sharp blade and has to be destroyed. The perpetrator is never found. They do, however, engage the service of some dispossessed Barrabool tribesmen who are keen to avenge their losses against any old foe and it is these men who Naylor ‘allows’ to run amok in the Colijon camp. The same men who told Naylor that the Colijon admit to the murder of the two gentlemen explorers. This is the first time any cognisance is given to black evidence despite the fact that it neatly allows the Barrabool to attack Colijon with white consent and for the whites to then claim the vacated land. Cape Otway Aborigines, however, told how Gellibrand and Hesse stumbled into their camp starving and close to death. One died almost immediately and they killed the other some time later. Once again, Australian historians, adamant that it’s impossible to accept Aboriginal accounts in other circumstances, fall over themselves to repeat these allegations as facts, even though the report is at least fourth hand and never committed to paper. Stranger still is that the recollection of Henry Allan of Allansford seems to have been ignored altogether. It was Allan who ‘leant’ La Trobe an Aborigine to help him reach the coast of Cape Otway. Allan’s account of the incident is that ‘Gellibrand was assisted by Aborigines who found him near the coast and when he died a few days later buried him in the sand’.4 They say Hesse died in the forest. The historian, Pescott, claims that Isaac Hebbe had been told the same story by Allan but never includes it in his history of Gellibrand’s death. Why is that so? In a comprehensive report of one of the most sensational stories of the time why would you fail to include such a crucial piece of evidence?5 They may have been killed by Aborigines, although the skeleton found shows no signs of violence, but they were engaged in wholesale dispossession — it was a risky game. Gellibrand’s Tasman solution and his boasts of the best way to deal with blacks don’t suggest he would have conducted himself like Christ on his journey through the plains of Port Phillip. There is no butter melting in Gellibrand’s mouth; he is ruthless in his pursuit of profit as his scandalous Hobart transactions illustrate. Is a man like this capable of treating the black benefactors, upon whose charity he is suddenly dependent, as his saviours or is
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Convincing Ground
he more likely to starve them out, ‘sit on them’? His early reports to La Trobe seem written by a saint but given his other less savoury utterances the tone reminds you of the practised modulations of a lawyer using weasel words to con the only man who might stand between him and his fortune. Reading ‘Gellibrand’s Memorandum of a Trip to Port Phillip’ it is hard to dislike the man.6 He is full of praise for the country, treats William Buckley kindly and has hopes that the Aborigines will learn to grow potatoes. But at the same time he is riding through Wathaurong country visiting and assessing the available allotments. He’s a tyre kicker. His basic assumption is to acquire land he is fully aware belongs to someone else. He says Buckley has to be cultivated for the Colonists’ advantage and the Indigenes weaned onto a life of dependency to keep them out of the way. There is a kindly spirit inside him but it has a cold, pragmatic edge and it insists that everyone and everything will give way to his commercial advantage. He’s a cultivated, good-humoured man and a favourite of many historians, but to me he is just one more ruthless property charlatan. The death of Gellibrand and Hesse is tragic, but no more tragic than the death of any person. Just because we don’t know their fate is no cause to begin a process of sanctification. Gellibrand was a greedy man and would have died true to his nature, as men do. The fact that he died hungry is the result of his own pigheadedness and poor bushcraft, because if he’d followed the advice of his guide, Akers, he would have lived to continue his pursuit of unseemly wealth. Australians have a habit of loving such people. Born in another age he may have raced yachts against the Americans with the proceeds of corporate crime. Let’s not declare a holiday for Gellibrand’s death as one of our prime ministers declared for a charlatan’s boat race.
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Eight
Lake Corangamite I’d like to tell a story about that country around the Western District lakes. How it feels today, what the country can tell us of the past. We’re not sidetracking here, rather delving deeper, discovering that the repercussions of history are still felt, that the history is modern, touchable, we can’t just ‘get over it’. This is a story about a visit to the stone lakes, a country of such beauty and wildness, such stillness and silence that warm days are gentle and stretch out like a sleeping cat. Lake Corangamite takes its name from the Colijon word koraiyn, meaning bitter or salty; they use the same word for the white man’s alcohol. They found it bitter to the taste and to their life. It’s a curiosity that despite the antipathy white squatters held for the Aboriginal people and the contempt with which they regarded the Indigenous culture they often chose to preserve local Aboriginal names for the properties they stole from them. Drive through this area and you pass Pirron Yallock, Colac, Elliminyt, Warrion, Beeac, Irrewarra, Birregurra, Geelong, Werribee, Burrumbeet, thousands of them; you see property names like Mone Mone Meet, Buninyong, Kardinia, Gerangamete, Moodmere, Pyalong, Murdeduke, Tarndwoorncoort, Trawalla, Yan Yan Gurt, Wooloomanatta; there seems to be a compulsion to remember the original name even while trying to forget how the property came under white ownership. As if usurpation is not complete unless you steal the name as well. It’s eerie to have the names but almost none of the people. I took a journey to Lake Corangamite in gorgeous early autumn sunshine. The Burrumbeet road through the Stony Rises dips and 73
Convincing Ground
bounds through volcanic mounds where eucalypts and wild apple trees wrestle their roots into rock. It’s great to be Australian. No-one is hungry enough to strip any fruit tree bare; there’s always something for the traveller. The day is divine, the fruit is delicious, every gate post bears an Aboriginal word and yet there is a bleakness about my search that no bounty, no joy at seeing such beautiful country seems to shift. I don’t meet anyone on this day who isn’t generous, warm, humorous, wry; good honest country Australians, and yet I approach my task with foreboding despite this generosity and friendliness. For instance, there’s a house on the highway near Pirron Yallock made out of local stone and over twenty years I’ve tried to get permission to have a look at it. It’s a striking house — gun embrasures let into the walls. I ask members of local history organisations. They know nothing about it, seem vague about whether they’ve seen it or not. Argue that the slots might have been to ventilate the Cobb and Co. horses that used to be stabled there but can’t explain why it is called a fort. The Information Centres are emphatic that no house in the district would ever have slots in the wall, no, no, not in this town. On another occasion it was being run as a kind of nursery– museum but the proprietor took an instant dislike to me and refused entry. I didn’t hold out much hope for his enterprise and sure enough it was closed in a matter of months. The next time I tried I could hear a person walking by the door. The radio fell silent but there was no answer to my knock. Bluestone makes for a bleak house at the best of times but these grim rocks seemed to be infecting the residents. Except on this day, this sublime day in March, the day of free apples and friendly faces, a young woman answers the door holding a child’s building block and the child she’s been playing with turns to look at me with that open-mouthed awe with which children will scrutinise the stranger. The woman is pleasant, pretty in a country way, dressed in the coarser fabrics of forest protesters. Oh, of course, she says, go on round the back, it used to be a museum or something but we live here now, take as many photos as you like. I ask about the slots in the wall and her face falls a little and she lowers her voice and becomes confidential. It’s an old house, she 74
Lake Corangamite
says, the settlers had a lot of fights with the Aborigines, they used to shoot at them through those slots. She falls silent and brings her hands together and stares at me, seeming to wonder if I appreciate the horror. She’s a good person. In her world people should not shoot at other people. Her child will be given every opportunity to exhibit the goodness of its little heart. I take my photos at the back of her house, the garden plump with ripe fruit, a picture of the rustic paradise. But it wasn’t always so even though the fruit and sunshine may have been contemporaneous with the embrasure and carbine. I call out my thanks as I leave and her voice trills from deep in the house like a bird thrilled by the fecundity of its world. In amongst the Stony Rises I get lost, of course. I do it almost deliberately. I love being lost, the opportunities it provides, and of course I’m approached on one of these apple-laden lanes by a rustic on a four-wheeled motor bike and the irony is on his face even before I wind down the window. He knows I’m lost and he knows I don’t care. He’s got sheep like that, used to correcting their errant little cloven hoofs. Because I’m in this lonely, little travelled part, his country, he treats me as a friend, a brother, and even when I ask about the fish traps in the lake his face clouds only a little and he directs me faithfully to the correct road. And when I look in the rear view mirror he’s waving as if knowing I’m like a twelve-yearold on a lazy adventure. Good bloke, good decent Australian. But the gate I arrive at, as he said I would, is padlocked, so I drive further on and turn in to the next farm house and as I approach I notice how tiny it is, how bone grey and flaky the fibro sheets of its construction. At the back door I peer through the glass and see all the strewn boots, five different sizes, the baby’s cot jammed against the window of a side room, the blatant poverty, the washing drying on a clothes horse. He comes out, the farmer, and hears my request to photograph the lake and seems to guess immediately what I’m after, a grim line momentarily forming on his lips, but he shows me how to approach the shore by going past the smallest dairy I’ve seen in years, down along the fence line, through the gate, no worries. He is kind in the way of really hard-up people, but at the back of his eye there’s a look of shock that someone should have enough time to take photos in the middle of the day. 75
Convincing Ground
I don’t know how he came by this farm but I can see the work ahead of him in every rotten post, every gate clinging to its hinge with nothing but the pride of being a gate, and I can feel the weariness come over him as he sees someone with no fixed list of desperate tasks, someone now strolling through his paddocks of labour to take sunny snaps. Of other people’s houses and their fish traps. The people who gave his property its name. He knows this is what I came for; I saw the realisation in his eyes seconds after we met, and I can imagine the frustration he struggles to hide with his genuine good nature. Someone here to take photos of the blacks’ houses and fish traps, just jumbles of rocks if you ask me, and here I am slaving my guts out on a salty farm with never enough money to buy a pair of socks without standing in the supermarket juggling the really cheap pair, a size too small and a hateful colour, against the slightly dearer pair, but in a pleasant brown and bound to last longer, but $6.50 against $4.50. I’ve had years when I’ve stood in supermarkets like that and it’s soul destroying. It can make you bitter, jealous, hate the people with time to stroll in the sun, who won’t have to try and hang a gate in the gathering dark so the baby can’t get to the dam. And some babies do. Soul destroying. But this bloke doesn’t hate me, goes out of his way to ensure I get where he knows I need to go but when he sits down to his dinner tonight, conscious of another three hours work ahead, he’d be inhuman if he wasn’t just a little resentful. But my concern for him soon evaporates. I can see the fish traps striding out over the shallow salty lake and I look about, trying to imagine where a fisherman might have his house, and, yes, there it is, no, there they are, on the rise from which you’d be able to see the fish coming along the concourse of stones first built by grandfathers in a time so distant their names have become synonymous with creation. Oh, the walls are tumbled down now, you can see the shiny spots on stones where cattle have rubbed, the roof beams and thatch have long been burned, but they’re there, thirty, forty, fifty, many houses and this is just the fishing camp. How many must have lived in the Rises, those Colijon, Jarcoort, Kirrae wurrong? 76
Lake Corangamite
The sun rests on your back like a lazy cat and the pelicans glide across the water, sleepy and mesmerised by their own reflections. I can see the fish come, the giggles and shrieks of children, the smoke spiralling in perpendicular coils, the dozing dogs and I am sorry for the beleaguered farmer but I am devastated for these people, that such beauty and peace should have been stolen, that such easy bounty should have been replaced by a grinding labour of devastating grimness. I sorrow for farmer and fisherman alike but oh, how it hurts to see the waste of that generous civilisation. It hurts to think Australians allowed it then and accept it now. Hardly anyone comes here today and those who do often bear the names you see in the early history books. Schools, libraries, historians and politicians might ignore the story of this land, wanting something more cheerful and heroic: if only Bourke hadn’t been such an idiot, if only Brahe had waited one more day, if only Angus McMillan hadn’t been a murderer. But the truth is etched on the stones of this old, tired land. There is no need to gnash our teeth, strike our foreheads until blood flows, no need to apologise, no need to despair, but there is every urgency to know and reflect on that knowledge, to wonder what we as Australians need to do next. Often you find the answer in the wilderness, in the stone country.
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Nine
The Raised Sword In wondering about my country and my countrymen and women I am intrigued by the people who blithely swept the Aboriginal people off the land they had ‘selected’ and then turned around with finicky pride to paint the Indigenous place name on a board, stepped back to assure themselves it was hung straight, sufficiently grand to honour their land. But I also wonder how they could raise the sword in the same hand they hold the Bible, that they could bring the rifle to the same shoulder their child will snuggle into just hours later. What impulse is involved when a man strikes another man down or impales a child on a bayonet? In the world’s history what energy allows the mind to justify acts which all religions consider barbaric? What power exists which can cause a woman, who kisses her baby on the brow and sheds tears at the innocence of its pouted lips, to turn aside when her neighbour’s child is raped or slaughtered? Are the words: Jew, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Nigger sufficient in themselves? Any consideration of history, can’t fully explain the events of that history without an analysis of the fount of violence and the efficacy of its waters. Is there only one way for history to proceed? Do the Amazonian Indians have to give way to the timber mills of multi-national corporations. Do the people of the Baliem Valley in Irian Jaya have to fall before the imperatives of Indonesian imperial economics and culture? Is that the inevitable outcome of history? And must these massive changes be achieved by unimaginably callous violence and deceit? 78
The Raised Sword
Is that what our species’ future insists upon or is there another way, is there a path where violence, greed, invasion, continuous economic growth are not the only tools of progress and imperium not the only measure of evolutionary success? Might a society develop where land wars are forgone for the greater good? Can negotiated borders survive in the world or must they succumb to a perpetual wave of tanks and bombers surging back and forth like rapid ice ages? Is there another way for us to behave? What are the functions of violence and aggression in the human psyche? Do we need Hitlers and Pol Pots, Husseins and Mugabes just in case our species is painted into a corner and the only way out is to fight in a chaotic eruption of savagery? Do we need to chain up a few psychopaths to be released when civilisation is not enough? Or might we cultivate a resolution and toughness in the common soldier, the well trained farmer, the gritty sailor, the earnest accountant? The kind of instant bravado displayed by ordinary, unremarkable citizens when the Twin Towers of New York came down and the nightclubs of Bali exploded? Those tough surfers with not a day’s military experience between them who stood in the burning Sari Club and allowed others to climb on their back and out of the building to safety? The footballers from Adelaide who in another part of the building re-entered the inferno to drag Australian and Indonesian strangers from the flames, not knowing if another explosion or falling roof might claim their own lives? Can we find the corpuscle of humanity that races unnoticed through their veins and reward it over the platelets of cunning demonstrated by tax frauds? Must we revenge every slight? Is there another way of looking at the past so that the victor can bear to look the defeated in the face, not in gloating triumph but with concern for the future? I ask these questions of you because I don’t know the answers. I have ideas, and like many in the world I’m trying to recruit people to the idea of embarking on a voyage of self discovery, not to achieve dominion but to find how to set our world feet on a path toward a civilised future. I ache to be a proud Australian because there is so much of which to be proud but why do we stubbornly refuse to repair the damage of our sins? 79
Convincing Ground
I want to be proud of our enormous achievements, the undeniable qualities of generosity and courage displayed by Australians every day. Like most peoples we long to be proud of our country but this pride often renders us incapable of acknowledging those qualities we possess of which no-one should be proud. We would like tennis player Lleyton Hewitt to be more sportsmanlike, cricketer Shane Warne not to stretch our credulity further than the leg break that beat Gatting, and we wish businessman Alan Bond hadn’t sullied the America’s Cup win by being jailed for fraud not long after. We don’t want our achievements to be the result of fraud, violence and deceit. We don’t want our athletes to be drug cheats, we want them to have the grace of John Landy when he turned away from the race of his life to lift Ron Clarke, the stricken comrade who tripped and fell, to his feet. If only we could do that without those whisperings of cringing conscience in our heart. Part of me would like to return to those days of heart-bulging pride when, in the antipodean dark, I listened on the crystal set to the deeds of the great Australians defeating the English cricket team at Lords. I’d rather not know that Donald Bradman wasn’t simply the best cricketer the world has seen but also a share trader whose methods were brought into question, that Darren Lehman isn’t just a jovial champion but also capable of racial abuse and Shane Warne isn’t just the best bowler the world has seen but a man thrown out of the 2002 World Cup for failing a drug test. Many will say sportsmen don’t matter, that they are unimportant in the national drama, but a nation’s values are displayed in every aspect of its life. We want Warne not to disappoint us but most of us also want to believe that our Prime Minister didn’t misrepresent why Australia sent troops to the Iraq war and we don’t want to think of members of our government and public service sitting around a table fabricating deceptions about the fate of refugees, especially as those refugees were fleeing the Taliban who we claimed were the Axis of Evil. Did we go to war to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq or were there less noble motives? We have to get our heads out of the sand and understand that what politicians do they do in our name. It is our character the world judges. There is no hope of returning to crystal-set innocence; if
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The Raised Sword
we are to take credit for the national triumphs, the sunny national character, we have to accept all the deeds of that character; we have to accept John Howard, Charles Franks and Angus McMillan along with James Dawson, John Landy and Caroline Chisholm. Warts and all, that’s how knowledge of country is achieved. Not just an air-brushed version of Sir Donald Bradman that denies his ruthless and self-serving commercial character, not just reverence for Sir Thomas Mitchell the Explorer but acknowledgment that he casually shot Aboriginal people as they attempted to flee from his approach. We must not take pride in the undoubted goodness of James Dawson without recognising that despite his knowledge of crimes committed against the Gundidjmara he occupied the land he knew to be their home. What is it that drives apparently good people to treat others with such cruelty? Must good people strike pre-emptively against those they consider to be bad? Is violence intrinsic to the nature of men? Must it be rehearsed and practised lest we perform it less well? All these questions and no potatoes. As a nation we hold widely divergent views of our history and yet we hold these convictions on the basis of such little evidence. As we all learn more, will our views become less polarised? Sometimes when describing the colonial frontier it is like talking about the Tasmanian Tiger; no-one has seen it for eighty years but everyone seems to have an entrenched opinion about whether it exists, and both sides argue from little personal knowledge. Perhaps the discovery of America’s ivory billed woodpecker after being thought extinct for a century should inspire us. That bird was rediscovered by a single person in a kayak who had set himself the task of searching the most remote reaches of the everglades. Australia needs men and women to embark on arduous journeys of discovery; not for a thylacine but for our soul. Too many people committed to a reappraisal of contact history attempt to paint Aboriginal people as an uncomfortable pastiche of Pollyanna and Gandhi. Aboriginal people are people, incontrovertibly identical to Europeans except for skin colour. Violence was not absent from Aboriginal society. Punishment for infringing the law could be capital but in general terms open
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warfare was uncommon. Indigenous people made a pact of sustainability with this continent and warfare is only sustainable when birth rates are unsustainable. The Indigenous population of Australia was very stable until waves of introduced disease and war produced catastrophic losses. Scientist and philosopher, Tim Flannery, maintains that Aboriginal people applied population restraint in response to the low nutrient base of Australian soils. These conditions meant that all animal life, including human, had to be cautious and circumspect in their relationships with each other and the fragile environment. Violence was a low-yield, high-risk activity and so people evolved a more conservative behavioural approach. The stable population and clan borders were a product of this caution and were inculcated into successive generations so that violence took on a symbolic rather than functional purpose. No people on earth have ever maintained a system of political and cultural life for as long as Australian Indigenous people. Some historians like to point to the outbreaks of Indigenous violence witnessed by early squatters as evidence of the base, violent and treacherous nature of the people, as if the War of the Roses and the Crusades were exemplars of civilised restraint. Aboriginal life underwent traumatic change once clans were pushed into the lands of neighbours already trying to resist the white tide. Food became short after sheep grazed the staple yam daisy crops to their roots. Competition for ever decreasing resources created enormous volatility while the introduction of a divergent legal and moral system eroded the Indigenous law and morale. Internecine clashes were inevitable. The advance of the white frontier was aided by the generally flat terrain and the fact that Indigenous agricultural practices left the country open and easily traversed. More than one settler commented on the similarity to an English park. The speed of white encroachment was aided by geography and an established agriculture and the fact that the Aborigines of Victoria believed the white squatters to be their ancestors risen from the dead. This belief persisted for almost a year until Indigenous patience evaporated. The squatters were like cane toads tipped out of a bucket. They leapfrogged each other to claim the open plains of Australia Felix,
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the term Thomas Mitchell coined after his expedition of ‘discovery’ in 1835. His report indicates that it never occurred to him that the ‘English park’ he so admired had been created by a system of husbandry of greater antiquity than the entire history of Britain. Thomas Mitchell failed to ask himself some obvious questions but as he’d been shooting Aborigines ever since he left Sydney it may be that his journal is a document written for the English parliament and not an actual account of his acquired knowledge of the country’s ownership and development. In any case the stable Indigenous boundaries and absence of a history of land war meant the Aborigines were unprepared for the military might, morals and numbers of Europeans swarming across their lands. Perhaps the conservative social and legal principles established over 60,000 years had left the Indigenes vulnerable to the vicious intensity of a less morally encumbered army. When the intentions of the Europeans became obvious the Kulin speared the advance guard of shepherds, but most of these men were expendable convicts and hardly caused a dent in European confidence. When the warriors turned their attention to the ‘gentlemen squatters’ all hell broke loose and massacres and imprisonments so decimated the Kulin numbers that they began to target sheep instead. This phase of the war saw the Europeans brought to their economic knees and Indigenous resistance began to bite so hard and on so many fronts that the European advance was halted and in some cases reversed. The Gundidjmara had the Europeans on the run in the battles called the Eumerella War, the Jarcoort won significant victories in the fastness of the Stony Rises and Warmdella of the Wathaurong led fifteen men on at least six attacks on the stations of Kenneth Clark, Robert Williams von Steiglitz, John Campbell, Dr D Wilsone and others in the latter part of 1840. The Woiwurrung and Wathaurong had borne the brunt of the early advance but Warmdella and his warriors were determined to halt the invasion even though they’d lost the tactical advantage by their restraint in those first crucial months. Among Warmdella’s warriors was Yammerbock who maintained his resistance right up to the point where there were almost
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no surviving adult Wathaurong men but himself. In despair he collected the remnants of his people and led them to ES Parker’s Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate where he had been assured that his people would be protected by the light of Christian kindness.1 That this promise was so soon revoked and the mission lands consumed by conniving squatters may have been the last nail in the coffin of Yammerbock’s people and his faith in the Christian God, but perhaps he knew the nature of the enemy well before he led his people into God’s church. Michael Cannon, in Who Killed the Koories?, details the raids of various groups around the Werribee–Loddon area when the Kulin formed confederacies and changed the nature of their resistance to a war against all white people, not just those who had encroached on their land or committed violence against them. Jackie Jackie and his guerrilla band attacked stations in the upper Yarra in the 1840s and escaped the punitive raids of troopers and squatters to extend his campaign into the Goulburn district. By this time he was arming his warriors with captured European weapons so that La Trobe introduced a new law banning the possession of firearms by ‘natives or half-castes’ and by empowering ‘any constable or free-person whatever, providing that no personal harm be used…than may be absolutely necessary’2 to take arms from Aboriginal warriors. It is extraordinary the number of doctors, clergymen, barristers and educated men who were part of the early advance in Port Phillip and astonishing how quickly they resorted to extreme violence to defend lands they had occupied only weeks earlier. In most cases they didn’t even own that land in a legal sense. Henry Monro was the son of the Anatomy Professor at Edinburgh University. In response to Jackie Jackie stripping his shepherd of his warm clothes and driving away the sheep, he organised a band of seven Europeans to ride down Jackie Jackie’s band, killing at least two despite the fact that La Trobe had already sent a contingent of Mounted Police to do the job. The Professor of Anatomy’s son was undertaking his own study of anatomy. Two hundred warriors then attacked Sandford Bolden’s property near Heidelberg. Like the others Bolden was targeted for his particularly brutal treatment of women and children.
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Many of the warriors in this raid were armed with muskets and ambushed the Mounted Police as they crossed a river. La Trobe was alarmed by the new tactics and issued instructions for the police to prevent Aborigines from entering Melbourne, including the women who were sneaking in to buy ammunition. Assistant Aboriginal Protector Parker reported that warriors were joining guerrilla bands in increasing numbers. La Trobe considered the colony under siege and pleaded with Governor Gipps to despatch a regiment of soldiers. Major Lettsom arrived and listened with half an ear to La Trobe’s cautioning for judicious force. Lettsom lost no time in attacking Jackie Jackie with the largest contingent of soldiers and police the colony had seen. Some Kulin were shot, including the great warriors Windberry and Tom, and the methods of imprisoning the rest caused some of the more just officials to call for an enquiry but of course it failed because it was impossible to find white witnesses, even though Tom’s body had been penetrated by many sabre thrusts as well as shotgun fire. Black witnesses claimed that far more were killed than Lettsom reported but black evidence was not allowed in colonial courts. La Trobe cautioned Lettsom to be circumspect and euphemistic in his report of the campaign to London. With a doctored report and a sudden absence of white witnesses, Lettsom and his soldiers escaped without reprimand. Australia has made a habit of lauding the deeds of people like Lettsom, Breaker Morant, Fyans, McMillan, Mercer, Gellibrand and Batman. Streets and towns are named after them such is the depth of pride and the shallowness of knowledge. Do we see violence itself as a virtue, the mechanical arm of Darwinism, a fast-tracking of evolution and an assumption of its direction? Evolution has entertained many dead ends over the millennia and the humans involved never knew if they were on the cul-de-sac or the highway. Like youths exhilarated by the power of young muscle our judgment can be clouded by assuming we are the chosen ones, God’s idea of human destiny. Perhaps God is determined that those to reach his pinnacle retain the humility to continue growing their own vegetables and have chickens and
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rabbits in the back yard. God might be a gardener and we’ve made the mistake of thinking he was chairman of the board. Too often lust for oil, land or women clouds our perspective of why we embark on particular ventures. In hiding from our primary motivation and the contravention of rules our society professes to revere, we build a theory based not on scientific and moral investigation but on a series of excuses and fabricated history to excuse crimes our religion says we must never commit under any circumstances. In the course of re-inventing history and fabricating alibis some resort to Darwinism while others seek to explain their actions by claiming they are involved in a kind of Biblical purge against the heathen or infidel, that the violent spirit of man was created just for this purpose. None seem to wonder if what they do is for the common good or the common wealth, that the pre-emptive strike may eliminate from our species the legitimate and humanising spirit of democracy and forbearance, a sustainable land-use philosophy and a spiritual attachment to place which has ensured stable territorial borders and might, if applied in a modern state, eliminate the primary cause of violence that we see on our news every night. Jared Diamond in his new book, Collapse, speculates on the collapse of seemingly indestructible states. Sophisticated and wealthy states from the Mayan to the Norse collapsed at the peak of their development. Diamond isolates the key factors of disintegration: deforestation and environmental neglect, the failure to produce their own food, the wasteful excesses of war and the predilection to build monuments to kings which tied up generations of workers who had to be fed and clothed but contributed nothing to the common wealth. Diamond says the Egyptians, Mayans and others sometimes had over 80 per cent of the population and state resources building a monument for the pharaoh, king or grand poo bah. He also gives as an example the Mayan kings who committed so many to the field of battle in such distant places that the people who carried provisions to the soldiers ended up eating 90 per cent of the food themselves. He then goes on to point out that America is as vulnerable as the Mayan on every key indicator of collapse behaviour.
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We should be more modest and inquisitive when theorising on the intentions of God or the logical direction of human development. For all we know God’s crest might be a crossed rake and shovel surmounted by a particularly fine turnip. I hope not, I hate turnips, but then God may not have intended me to be the kind of person to survive. Once again I’m asking questions I can’t answer, but I ask them because the answers I’ve heard so far are unconvincing. I suspect if violence has a role it is for sustainable procuration of food and selfdefence in circumstances of last resort. It seems inconceivable to me that violence was intended by God and Mohammed to eliminate unbelievers. The world is littered with kings who thought they were God or had a special authority from him. The stones of those kingdoms now grow weeds and yet at the time it was inconceivable that they would be toppled, just as it is hard to imagine that the Sydney Harbour Bridge will cease to exist. There have been civilisations which prospered without violence but they are few and seem of little interest to a world fixated by kings, generals and weapons. On his program, Late Night Live, Phillip Adams, reported on the excavation of the ruins of an Indus Valley civilisation which relied entirely on its good relations with everyone to become an important trade and market centre. No weapons of any kind were found by archaeologists. The population had prospered without resort to an army or general violence against neighbouring countries. We must speak out against violence committed in any of God’s names. We should never be ashamed or fear being called wimps when we express outrage when men massacre women and children in the name of their God’s goodness. We must resist these justifications when they come from other religions but never ever ignore the occasions when they come from our own. A murderer of babies is just a murderer whether he has the bomb strapped to himself or drops it from a plane so high in the sky it is invisible to the victim. Vanity and blinkered environmental, spiritual and historical analysis are not behavioural traits likely to perpetuate a culture. Are we Australians on the highway to humanity’s destiny or doing donuts in Darwin’s cul-de-sac?
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The Great Australian Forge Australians like to say their country came of age on the shores of Gallipoli, that on those sands the national character was forged. This popular sentiment, favoured by politicians and historians alike, conveniently ignores the furnace of the frontier. The sacrifice of Australian soldiers at Gallipoli is undeniably one of the most selfless and tragic incidents in Australia’s recent history. The young men who leapt out of the trenches knowing that they would meet a rain of fire, did so because their sense of duty had sublimated their knowledge of certain death. I cannot imagine the turmoil in those young hearts and minds while waiting for the order to deliver their breasts to the guns. I will never forget those men. I have not forgotten the uncle I was named after to ease the grief of his sister when he died in World War II. I still ache for the wounds to the hearts and minds and bodies of those doomed youths, the theft of their future, their contribution to their country and family, I am reduced to throat-aching tearfulness every time I hear the Last Post played by a lone bugler. Young Australian service men and women have displayed enormous character and resilience in those wars but we cannot ignore the contributions to the national character made at Murdering Gully, Red Banks, Coniston and Convincing Ground. We cannot pretend that the pervasive belief in racial superiority that provided justification for those massacres has no link to the prejudice and arrogance of many Australians today. I suspect I have a great deal in common with Prime Minister John Howard. I would be surprised if the pre-pubescent Howard
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did not listen to English Test Cricket series by crystal set, willing Australian heroes to victory. I feel sure, as a primary school student, his reaction to the Anzac Day services was like mine, and I am certain he had eyes for no other competitors in the Melbourne Olympics than those in the green and gold. I revered ABC nature radio broadcaster Crosby Morrison and author Alan Marshall for their love of their country but the more I read Marshall the more I realised my hero countrymen were just men after all; and in pursuing more knowledge of Crosby Morrison’s passions realised that one of the football grounds I played on twice a year had once been home to a dozen species of birds now extinct in Victoria. While Howard seems to have sustained a story of fewer and fewer doubts and greater and greater triumphs I have learnt a history where the heroes are few and quite often black. My parents were passionate Australians but they were not fools; they may have been uneducated but they knew that history is complex, that few heroes shine in all corners of their heart. My father reserved his highest praise for pastor Doug Nicholls, footballer ‘Polly’ Farmer, boxer Dave Bracken and his mate, builder Pat Davey. Good men, he assured me, and made a point of introducing me to each of them. It never occurred to me until a decade later that his unalloyed heroes were all black except Davey. I think my father was a very unusual man. He had a prickly relationship with authority and the cabal of orthodoxy which separated him from many of his fellows. He hated deceit and hypocrisy. As Manning Clark once said, everything he did in his life was to earn his father’s respect. I feel like that about both my parents, the two most just human beings I have ever met. Our language can often reveal our heart. As Malcolm Knox so incisively explained in the Melbourne Age on 27 January 2003 in response to the charge of racial abuse being levelled at the Australian cricketer, Darren Lehman, ‘To believe this was the first time Lehman used this terrible language about black people is to show the indulgence of a parent…Lehman’s misfortune is that he is the man who got caught revealing the unwitting racism that infuses not only Australian cricketing culture but mainstream Australia.’1
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Lehman is a good bloke, great team man, and liked by many in the cricket world, so the story goes, but just as he represents his country in hitting the ball hard he represents us by what he thinks and says. Sport is a great and potentially innocent part of any culture but its best practitioners are too often seen as gods rather than mortals with strength and hand–eye co-ordination. It would be wrong to make too much of Lehman’s outburst but at the same time it is impossible to dismiss the underlying hint of racism which finds more frequent expression than this incident. Lleyton Hewitt complained about a black umpire in 2004, Australian cricket crowds abused South African cricketers with the racist epithet, kaffir boetie, in 2005 and racially insulted the Sri Lankans in 2006. Australians fought pitched battles at Cronulla to reclaim the beach for Australians but Prime Minister John Howard refused to denounce violence committed by people draped in the Australian flag. We are not a racist nation, he declared. That is what we would all wish for our country. Australians have it within them to be among the most generous and open-hearted people on earth and at their best accept people for who they are, not what they are. I currently play cricket in a team which includes three Aboriginal people of varying skin colour and it seems to me that each is judged as a human being wholly and solely. I haven’t heard a racist remark and can’t imagine Lehman’s ‘black c***’ epithet going unchallenged. None of my team mates is an exceptional Australian, all are ordinary working people on ordinary wages but they behave much better than a lot of their wealthier countrymen. Are they morally superior beings or simply in possession of better information? Many Australians think sport defines us, but it is a complicated definition falling somewhere between Darren Lehman and the cricketers of Eden. I’m much more comfortable with a broad and complex national character than a simple and narrow selfconsciousness. John Howard watches cricket from the monocultural confines of the members stand while I play it on the scorched fields of Australia. Howard’s elevation of Bradman as ‘greatest Australian’ makes a mockery of the work of scientists, artists, engineers, doctors and educators. The habit of raising figures like Bradman and Bond to the status of national hero is the most startling indication that
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we have yet to come to terms with the history and responsibilities of nationhood. The heroes we choose reveal a great deal of what is in our heart. Intelligence, compassion and commitment to the welfare of others are not qualities likely to be popular in Australia. David Marr believes that John Howard pursues policies of deliberate disadvantage to Muslims and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and savages any press who dare suggest there is a racist element to his philosophy. No-one in the Australian government turned a hair when we so enthusiastically joined forces with the American President in labelling other sovereign nations as the Axis of Evil, as if our world was a board game. While Americans care for no history but their own, Australians can never embrace the entire history of this country, or the full breadth of our own character, when we continue to nitpick about how many murders make a massacre or whether the resistance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to the theft of their land represents war. The whole richness of the country, the full impact of its voice, the complete understanding of who we are is connected to the umbilical of those early colonial years and to deny it prevents Australians from receiving the full blessing of the land, a blessing which is there for any who inhabit it and are prepared to acknowledge the successful and ancient occupation of the continent, a success unparalleled by any other civilisation on earth. Historians who have read that last sentence might reach for the Quik-Eze and angina tablets appalled that I’d make such a claim. Some historians who claim to represent the truth of our past will reach for their scathing pens to argue the definition of ‘success’ as they’ve argued in the past about ‘massacre’, ‘war’, ‘land rights’ and ‘culture’, but a culture which has developed over a bare minimum of 60,000 years is neither crude nor a temporary historical aberration. There are almost no civilisations in the world’s history that have lasted more than a few thousand years. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island cultures are profoundly sophisticated responses to the environment but, more particularly, the social organisation is the most egalitarian the world has seen. No slaves, no prisons, no race to material, military or spiritual superiority. Many will argue those are not the most important values in a civilisation but their
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application would extinguish every current world conflict inside a generation. Isn’t that a sophisticated response to the complexities of living? A culture which led the world in technology, language, dance and song, a culture which managed to conserve the land over that period to maintain provision of food and water, and a culture whose communal organisation looks incredibly like the first demonstration of democracy, is successful in ways which modern cultures, for all their great ‘inventions’, have failed to emulate. Some extraordinary civilisations have blazed across our skies like meteors but they have all burnt out inside a fraction of the time Indigenous Australians have occupied this land. Where Atlantis succumbed to the rising seas and Pompeii disappeared beneath volcanic ash, and some Persian cultures disappeared beneath sand, Aboriginal civiliations survived several visitations of all these cataclysms. The New Right opposes such ideas as ‘politically correct’ and campaigns with the support of a sympathetic government to urge Australians to ‘move on’, to forget the past. But if we persist in hiding from history we will have learnt nothing from those current and previous civilisations which believed murder and theft would allow their culture to appear holy in the sight of their God. It’s time for this nation to grow up and realise that no action can be excised from our character. We are what we did yesterday and say today, and if we argue that it’s not our fault, because it wasn’t us who drove the Gundidjmara over the cliffs to fall where the rocks meet the sea, then Australians can’t own the past and if you can’t own the past you can’t pretend to own the land and all the riches she waits to deliver. Nations disowning their history invent all kinds of swagger to define themselves. If you can’t take pride in your past it is likely you will elevate sportsmen and entertainers to ridiculous levels of importance. So, let’s look at some of the personalities who were prepared to raise the sword or excuse its use. And what better place to start than Portland, Victoria, one of the first white settlements on the south-east corner of Australia. Just as we write more about Don Bradman and Kylie Minogue than we do about medical researchers and dry land conservationists, Australians are inclined to elevate the national sense of humour to
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sublime laconic heights. But how’s this for a joke? In 1833 or 1834 the Henty brothers and their offsiders fought a protracted battle with Gundidjmara people on a beach near Portland. Just as no-one is certain of the date or how many were killed, they can’t even agree on what caused the battle. MacDonald, a Henty whaler, asserts that the fight began when the Gundidjmara men rebelled against the theft of their wives but Edward Henty states that the whalers went to battle to prevent the tribesmen from taking a stranded whale. The number killed? Nobody knows because no report of the incident was ever made. Foster Fyans, the Geelong Police Magistrate, visited the district to investigate current and past reports of massacres of Aborigines but Edward Henty failed to enlighten him about the incident, perhaps Fyans never asked. In any case it never rates a mention in Henty’s Portland Journal and Fyans’ report to the Governor claimed instead that ‘every gentleman’s establishment’ had been ‘molested by the natives.’2 Fyans was scathing of the Aboriginal Protectors whom he accused of encouraging Aborigines to the view that they had rights before the law. Flogger Fyans preferred ‘to insist on the gentlemen in the country to protect their property, and to deal with such useless savages on the spot.’3 That’s the Police Magistrate talking, the upholder of British law, his instincts for propriety refined in the war against Indian patriots. When Governor Bourke ordered Fyans to distribute clothes and hatchets among the Aborigines he preferred to throw them in the lake. And the joke? Oh, the sand on which those early battles were fought became known to the Henty settlement and Australians to this day as ‘the Convincing Ground’; where the traditional owners were ‘convinced’ of the right of the Europeans to take their women, their whales, their land or whatever took the colonists’ fancy, and the Europeans were ‘convinced’ in return that the authorities would protect their right to do so. Today’s authorities share the same attitude. The Glenelg Shire Council recently approved a housing development for the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the frontier war. In fact the Australian press shares that attitude. Reference to the lust for development on the Convincing Ground battlefield passed across the face of Australian newspapers in small paragraphs on remote pages but, in
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the same month, the disturbance of bones by roadworks at Gallipoli made the front page of most Australian newspapers for weeks in succession. Bill Sellars, an Australian journalist living at Gallipoli, was reported as saying ‘This is a key Heritage site, a sacred place, not just for Australians, but for Turks’.4 Perfectly correct. It is disrespectful of our fine young soldiers to disturb their bones resting so uneasily in foreign soil, and it is right that we view such insensitive acts as vandalism, even if it was our own government who requested the roadworks, but we show our moral selectivity when a housing development on one of the nation’s most emblematic battlefields is allowed to proceed with no public interest. Denise Lovett, of Heywood’s Winda Mara Co-op, said the Glenelg Shire had a plan of protection for Indigenous archaeological sites which might have saved the Convincing Ground, but had failed to implement it. Meanwhile, on a separate front, farmers were being allowed to bulldoze stone houses under the pretence of levelling the land, whole villages razed in the process. It’s not impossible for cattle to graze among the old foundations, they’ve been doing it for the last 175 years, but the Coalition government encouraged people to fear for their leases and barbecues and cynical farmers embraced the opportunity to show the black bastards who was boss. Convincing Ground should remind us to bite our tongues every time we utter the sentiment that ‘Australia is the only nation founded without war’. It’s a myth, a joke, the most ridiculous intellectual folly we could commit, and yet at the point at which we could remind ourselves of the true history of the nation we avert our face and allow the battleground of our soul to be obliterated, wash our minds of memory, impoverish our intelligence with deliberate contempt. If someone attempted to withdraw iron from our children’s diet there would be a public outcry, governments would fall, but we happily permit our children to have their intellectual growth stunted, and all for the comforts of our own delusion. What will it take to convince us that a proper embrace of the past, while it might be painful, will stiffen our spines and minds, make a nation of us, turn us into the country which can rightfully engage the world in moral debate about civil rights and democratic and Christian principles? I think we are on the brink of the most
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courageous or cowardly decision we have ever made. We either bite the tough bullet of nationhood or continue to swim in the Plain Label chocolate mousse of myth; we have the choice of hardwrought steel or artificial custard. I think only our young have the heart for it. I call on them to take the might of their intelligence and apply it to building a foundation of intellectual rigour and moral steel with which we can survive what has to be a staunchly contested debate. I’ve addressed halls of young academics whose hearts burst with compassion for Timor, Africa and India. Never forget those nations you mighty young, but please turn about and look your countrymen in the face. Most of your parents and grandparents never had the courage or the tools but you have access to both. Remember that if you are white not to guess at what your black countrymen and women think, they have perfectly functioning ears, tongues and minds. Remember that if you are black not to settle for beads and mirrors and a pat on the head, and unfortunately you must never accept a promise or a piece of signed paper. That’s how the land was lost in the first place. Also remember that you will never recover the entire land but you can demand to live in it equally and to have the trove of your people’s great history learnt with respect and kept close to the heart of most Australians. All great nations begin like that, not with dogma and stubbornly held ignorance but with justice and respect. We are yet to begin our greatness because the forge for the Australian character was fed slag by compromised whitesmiths in those early days and if we are to understand the national steel we cannot remain ignorant of the metals which compose the alloy, today and yesterday. The whales of Portland are a significant indicator of both the contemporary and colonial mood. The Aboriginal people of Australia had made use of the whale and seal resources for thousands of years before Europeans arrived and Indigenous conservation of that resource allowed Henty and his fellows to become rich men very quickly, but so rapacious was their plunder that most fur seal colonies had vanished into their vats by 1832 and the whales were not far behind.5 They saw each and every one of these mammals as their own and sought to ‘convince’ the Indigenes of this claim’s
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truth. The wholesale slaughter of the breeding colonies eliminated entire species and at Henty Reef, near Apollo Bay, the fur seal colony is only now beginning to re-establish itself, 170 years later. Historian Jan Critchett has brought this period of history into perspective by celebrating the lives of Gundidjmara and Kirrae wurrong men and women who fought for their lands and culture in those early battles.6 Critchett is trying to fill a void in the national comprehension of the past, for when today’s Australians refer to that period of history it is always William Buckley’s name that is invoked. Kaawirr Kunnawarn (Hissing Swan), Wombeetch Puyuun, Curacoine, Yammerbock, Yarrun Parpur Tarneen, Mombourne and Muulapuurn Yuurong Yaar are never mentioned, and in that ignorance some of the metal in the alloy of the Australian soul is withheld and the understanding of the Australian character is weakened. No country should ignore those who gave their life for their land, not in an aggressive invasion of someone else’s land, but in the defence of the soil upon which they and their ancestors were born; in short, great Australians. And speaking of flawed metal, no-one in the history of the country has ever worn a sillier hat than George Augustus Robinson, with the possible exception of Governor General Sir John Kerr on Melbourne Cup Day 1973. Robinson was a builder in England but saw himself cut from grander cloth and emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1828 to try his hand on the frontier where circumstances were to re-invent his life. The colonisers of Van Diemen’s Land, having taken up all the suitable agricultural areas, turned their attention to the Indigenous population’s aggravating attempts to resume their lands. All previous measures to prevent Aboriginal resistance had failed miserably, including Governor Arthur’s scheme to herd all Aborigines from the north to the south of Tasmania in a farcical quail drive, but Robinson, the man for the moment, seized the opportunity to shed the sackcloth of humble tradesman to don the finer fabric of man of importance. He adopted the colony’s plan to remove the remaining Aborigines to offshore islands, thus pretending to be saviour to all.
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Arthur and the colony leapt at the opportunity to be rid of the Aborigines, not just the harassment of their warfare on outlying squatters but also the inquisition from London’s Anti-Slavery Movement and the Aborigines Protection Society, both of which had the ear of Westminster at this time of liberal humanist philosophy. The ‘agreement’ for their eventual removal to Flinders Island was in effect a treaty for them to abandon their traditional lands. It was not, however, the understanding the Aborigines believed they had wrought with Robinson, for that had allowed for a return to the mainland following a period of ceasefire in the Silent War. Historians argue whether it was Robinson or the colony as a whole who betrayed this agreement but the outcome was the same; Van Diemen’s Land ceased to be an Indigenous sovereign state. Despite the hat and his eventual desertion of his ‘flock’ on Flinders Island, Robinson was a more sensitive man than most in the colony; although this is not great praise. He could see what his countrymen could not, that the Aborigines had a sophisticated spiritual outlook, and in this realisation he was able to draw close to the desperate people and convince them that his plan evinced some hope for eventual return to the motherland, if not in triumph, then with a chance of a greater share in the proceeds from their country’s bounty. But there were more canny minds than Robinson’s at work, because once the Indigenous Tasmanians were incarcerated on the island the authorities determined to leave them there. In this they were greatly assisted by the Aborigines’ vulnerability to introduced diseases and their own despair: betrayed by those in whom they had placed trust, removed from their habitation, their diet, and all spiritual connections to the places of their birth. They were victims of Robinson’s missionary zeal and private ambitions. Robinson became a hero in Van Diemen’s Land for ridding it of the ‘plague’ of Indigenous resistance and the whisperings of rudimentary European conscience, but once the offshore islands policy began to fail, and his ‘mission to civilize the natives’ seemed hopeless, his mind wandered to areas where he might build on his reputation as colonial saviour with more success, comfort and remuneration.
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He considered positions in South Australia before deciding in favour of an invitation to act as Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District. If the South Australians, to whom he applied for positions, had inserted the word ‘Chief ’ in any of their letters of offer Victorian history may have been saved the presence of a peculiar hat but missed the volumes of material our vain missionary produced and which have proved invaluable to both Aboriginal and European historians. Robinson’s hubris compelled him to record his deeds, be it the purchase of a roll of calico, the seduction of a fellow officer’s wife or the listing of a series of words given to him by one of the many Victorian Aborigines who placed their trust in this unusual man.7 He was able to talk with the Kulin people, developing a rough understanding of their languages and beliefs and sympathising with their losses, to which the Kulin responded with warmth for they had met precious few with even the vaguest interest in plumbing the depths of fellow humanity. Robinson for his part, however, was far more concerned about the inadequacy of the land and chattels being offered to him by the Port Phillip administration and the slights to his character appearing in the colonial press. He bridled at the most insignificant admonition, fought with any person who seemed not to offer him the respect he felt his reputation and exalted position deserved, and cultivated the vanities to which men of gentlemanly persuasion seem most susceptible. Robinson still defended Aborigines in court, he still took great interest in their culture but he took far greater interest in the quality of cloth allowed for curtains, the amount of provender set aside for his sustenance and the finicky tailoring of his trousers. He became a figure of fun, not just because he assumed the trappings of gentlemen after such a recent catapult into their company, but also because he continued to uphold the rights of the traditional owners of Port Phillip to protection under British colonial law. He was reviled in the press and distracted by it to such an extent that he spent the bulk of his time in support of his own pride rather than defending the people he had been employed to conciliate. Despite the distractions of his vanities he was able to communicate with the Port Phillip clans because they were impressed
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that he was accompanied by several of the inmates of the Flinders Island gulag and the local Aborigines saw this as a good reason to entrust him with some of their precious cultural knowledge. That trust was misplaced because Robinson was playing the role of great conciliator and when the Tasmanians who accompanied him from Phillip Island proved troublesome he abandoned them to their own resources in Port Phillip where they became what the press called outlaws. They could just as easily have been described as hungry and desperate, but Robinson ignored their fate, even that of Truganini, who was thought to be his lover. The great genius of Aboriginal relations cast off his failures as skinks drop tails when caught in a tight spot. This was not the first time Robinson had ignored his responsibilities, but the Indigenes, in the absence of any other supporter, still turned to him for help. One young warrior of the Corondeet, who had witnessed the massacre of so many of his people and the succumbing to dislocation and disease of the rest, believed himself to be the last of his people and in that bleak knowledge felt compelled to unburden himself to Robinson, to speak up for his country and his people. For one whole day he ran beside the Chief Protector’s horse,8 calling out the name of this hill and that creek, the birthplace of this person, the places of massacre of so many others, places where they had netted fish, gathered honey, where the sun had set most spectacularly, and all this richness spanning inestimable time. Now that knowledge dwelt only in his breast and so he ran beside Robinson’s horse calling out the key words of his civilisation, desperate that just one more person should share that knowledge, even one such as Robinson, cantering so heedlessly on his horse. RUNNING AT YOUR STIRRUP While riding through the western plains In 1840 God’s time George Augustus Robinson Protector of Aborigines a carpenter, a chief came upon a black man a black man on his own. That man of Corondeet 99
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knew the man, had heard of his hat knew he was the Protector and so told him that to be protected. Robinson cantered across the plain the black man at his stirrup calling to the white man the names of all his country, the sappy wattle myrniong a line of hills a creek. He told him this, his protector Because who was left to hear He yelled as he ran to the white man’s ear I am the last of my people I need none to look out for me But this is our land Who’ll look after she? Bruce Pascoe 1995 Just as my heart aches for the young men jumping into the arms of bullets at Gallipoli, I ache for that young man, my countryman, who called out to his land in the presence of the last man on earth who might listen. Robinson did listen and did record it for posterity, probably his own, because ambition and self regard soon erased any relic of Christian compassion and he accepted the Crown’s silver and gold and returned to England, resurrected as a gentleman. So much is revealed by our actions. The assumptions of the whole colonial system are embodied in the image of George Augustus Robinson trotting on horseback, anxious to make that night’s accommodation, while a young man, distraught at what has befallen his universe, runs at the great man’s stirrup beseeching him to pay heed to his revelation of country, his people’s entire history, their every belief. It is tragic, it is Australia. All Robinson’s good intentions are weighed against the assumption that he must ride and the Corondeet man must run.
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A convict, a rapist, a murderer, a man who could not recite even one great event in the history of the world might have been treated with more humanity. Robinson was impressed by the solid construction of Aboriginal houses, saying they were ‘sufficiently strong for a man on horseback to ride over.’9 How can you gauge what can support a mounted horse without putting it to the test? His sketch of one house shows a horseman on its summit. Try to visualise the man on horseback, complete with ridiculous hat, crowning the roof of the Gundidjmara house. What did it say about the people who owned that house? What did it say of the motivation and assumptions of the colonisers, even those of relatively good heart? No English pauper’s slum would be treated with such disdain. We owe a great deal of our knowledge of early Indigenous culture to Robinson but he was determined that we should think that. He wrote every report with an eye to the establishment of himself as the expert on anything Aboriginal. For a while that was his reputation, such was Van Diemonian relief at having freed themselves from their Aboriginal scourge, but in fact Robinson was a dilettante and shocking administrator whose awful pride had him use his position to deride every one of his Assistant Protectors, two of whom at least, would have done a much better job than Robinson himself. Charles Sievwright was one of those men even though he came by the position after having a serious problem on the punt. His gambling debts caused him to sell his military commission and call on influential London friends to gain him paid employment. That they acquired for him the post of Assistant Protector of Aborigines in Port Phillip under the erratic leadership of builder-come-good George Augustus Robinson must have seemed like a poor joke six years later. The punt wasn’t Sievwright’s only problem. He liked a drink and a journey and left his wife on at least three occasions for long periods without much financial support. His wife Christina liked a bit of a drink herself and went to all the officials in Melbourne, including Lonsdale and La Trobe, complaining of penury and desertion and eventually child molestation. Well, she did retract that last charge when it looked likely to lose her husband his
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income, but the damage to Sievwright’s reputation was done and his enemies seized on the notoriety to condemn him. Fyans and William Lonsdale both recorded that they had little faith in Christina’s word or her morality but it didn’t stop them accepting her charges against Sievwright. There have always been plenty of men to condemn those who stood between them and a fortune. Sievwright also appeared to like other men’s wives and a good time. Despite the fact that it took his accuser some years to reveal his cuckold’s suspicions, and the only other accuser was a wowser who interpreted noises he heard coming from a distant tent, the claims were accepted as good enough to condemn him. The documents do not confirm anything particularly unseemly in Sievwright’s behaviour towards the wife of fellow Assistant Protector Parker but the sounds of merriment during a pretty convivial drink in the Officers’ Mess may have sounded like it. Anyway, let’s just say it wasn’t a good start…and he hadn’t even got to Geelong. But when he did, who should be waiting for him but Flogger Fyans and they disliked each other immediately, which, knowing the inclinations of Foster Fyans, is a very creditable feather in Sievwright’s cap. But, as they say today, he was as good as dead in the water. The calumny surrounding him was known to all, giving the authorities and the rampaging squatters the perfect opportunity to destroy someone who had the intelligence and determination to see his job performed with honour. And that would not do at all, particularly as Sievwright proved himself to be one of the few people in Port Phillip willing to tackle the injustice being perpetrated on the Indigenous population. Robinson, who should have been by his shoulder, took every opportunity to frustrate Sievwright because he immediately proved himself capable of a close and intelligent relationship with the Aborigines and that was Robinson’s role, there could be only one expert, any other challenger would have to be destroyed. It is not exaggerating in any way to say that if Sievwright’s Keilambete and Mount Rouse farming projects had been allowed to proceed, the history of Victoria might look quite different today. When Sievwright first ventured into the Western Plains he listened to the Jarcoort’s concerns about staying in their own
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country with their own people and observing their own culture. They were close to agreeing to give up the resistance if they could be given a corner of their precious nation. Their numbers were so reduced and they were in such shock at the changes wrought in just a handful of years that they made an agreement with Sievwright to try their hand at farming. Progress was good at Lake Keilambete but even after La Trobe forced their removal from there to Mount Rouse they continued to apply themselves to agriculture. They’d been used to cultivation of their yam pastures and after watching Sievwright’s ploughing operation saw the flaws in it straight away and began improving the method. After the men ploughed, the women broke up the clods across the contour of the land to improve moisture retention and seed propagation.10 Sievwright acknowledged the method’s superiority to cross ploughing. The crops grew, the farm prospered and the people were happier than they’d been since Batman arrived, but could the white men leave it alone? No, it was like a red rag to a bull. No sooner had Sievwright nominated Lake Keilambete as a Reserve for the Jarcoort than John Thomson turned up and ‘selected’ 10,500 hectares for himself.11 As luck would have it, La Trobe had just appointed Thomson as a magistrate and he wasted no time in visiting the Superintendent and complaining in the strongest terms that Sievwright was clearing trees on his property and, even worse, had a large number of blacks with him. The Jarcoort had only just survived the massacre by Frederick Taylor and saw Keilambete as their last chance of independence. They tried to remove Thomson’s sheep and shepherds and in the ‘outrage’ that followed the shepherd Hayes was killed. Thomson called his neighbours together and they held a public meeting demanding that La Trobe deliver them from the black plague. Thomson sees La Trobe again privately and, confident of the Superintendent’s support, returns immediately to Keilambete with Fyans’ Mounted Police and a posse of seventeen armed squatters.12 They scoured the country for three days before finding any Jarcoort, but of course the squatters could identify them as the murderers even though they were two aged men, three women and a youth. All were captured and the men imprisoned for their crimes despite the inability of anyone in the party to speak their language and the
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only evidence against them coming from the men who were trying to destroy the Aboriginal reserve. And of course that evidence was believed with so great enthusiasm that one of those able to ‘identify’ the murderers was presented with a shotgun etched with the inscription ‘for his bravery in beating off a tribe of natives’.13 Everybody was out to get Sievwright: Robinson out of jealousy, settlers like Bolden, whom Sievwright had charged with murder, out of revenge and Governor Gipps and Superintendent La Trobe out of fear that Sievwright’s reports would get back to London. He had to be destroyed. And the Jarcoort had to be relocated. Where was the man to visit the new station and wonder about the beneficial possibilities of Indigenes farming their own land without being continually harassed? Few such men could be found and none who wielded any power. It seems peculiar that at the same time the great humanist movement against slavery and oppression is de rigueur in London but has almost no adherents in the Great South Land. Those charged to conduct colonial duties in accordance with the new liberal values find themselves in pitched battle with entrenched entrepreneurs. Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart are a long way from London and if you offend the powerful elites of the colony you can quickly find yourself with no-one to drink with and no-one to sit next to in church. Just as importantly, your wife will experience the same isolation and soon colonial life becomes unbearable. There is enormous pressure to draw closer to the government officers and landed gentry if you are to have any hope of remaining sane in the penal settlement. It’s much easier to join the new society, crude as it is, and devise cunningly worded reports to disguise the true nature of events in Australia. Most importantly, you have to dredge every skerrick of rumour and scuttlebutt that maligns the Indigenous population to prove that the fate you deliver is well and truly deserved and exactly in line with evolutionary theory. In consideration of the pressures operating on colonial authorities it is not surprising so few voices are raised in dissent at the treatment of the Aborigines. Sievwright and Robinson are almost alone in their meek attempts at amelioration. But when you think about it there is
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almost no-one else in the colony with sufficient intelligence combined with an occupation not compromised by greed or self-advancement. James Dawson is among the most sensitive to the Aboriginal cause but can’t prevent himself from occupying Kirrae land. Anne Drysdale starts out as one of the more humane but, on having some flour and potatoes stolen after she refuses food to the people on whose land she has squatted, begins a series of murderous raids to teach the Wathaurong a lesson. All clergymen, even the ones in possession of a kind spirit, like Bemjamin Hurst and Francis Tuckfield, are massively blinkered by their belief that there is no way forward for the Indigenes while they cling to their savage cultural and linguistic practices. There must be no other God than the one favoured by the Europeans. Rev Tuckfield at Buntingdale Mission near Birregurra collects Wathaurong language but only so he can translate the Bible and the psalms. William Thomas at the Loddon River is a caring man but is repulsed by the naked and lusty people he must ‘save’ from sin. In later years women lead the way in enlightened human values but in the early days of the colony there are so few white women who are not convicts, prostitutes or both. The married women are under the yoke of their husband in an age where independent ideas and women are mutually exclusive notions. So we are left with Robinson and Sievwright and precious few others and the colony is merciless in pursuit of their destruction and the destruction of the whole idea of Aboriginal Protection and land reservation. The colony has to destroy them if they are to prevent London from restricting white settlement to the east of the Mitchell line, the line of wheel ruts left by Thomas Mitchell as he ‘explored’ the country from Sydney to Melbourne and proclaimed the Western District of Victoria as Australia Felix. There are probably only two men in the southern half of the colony who believe it would be best to leave the fair western grasslands to the heathen horde: Sievwright and Robinson. Reading the correspondence of the attack on these two men is like using night vision goggles to watch a tiger stalk a rabbit in total darkness. The rabbit never sees it coming even though he suspects something is in the wind.
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There is something in the wind, a mood, a temper in the colony which all Europeans can feel on their acute cultural antennae. That mood permeates Foster Fyans’ letters to La Trobe. In one, the Police Magistrate claims that the Aborigines have suffered only ‘a very trifling disadvantage and injury’. Later he wrote, Under every circumstance, I conceive that much praise is due to the character of Europeans in this country. They have displayed great forebearances, and evinced an inclination to benefit the Aborigines on every occasion. I also remark that the most trifling act on the part of the European is noticed, and if possible turned to their disgrace, when murder, outrages, and destruction of property pass un-noticed on the part of the native. Situated as the settler is, he dreads to protect his property, and tacitly submits.14
Apart from declaring a passion for the word trifling this passage reveals a cynical note in the correspondence between the two men. La Trobe is well aware of Fyans’ views, although this letter has not been written for the Superintendent but for more liberal eyes in London. Any claim against the Aborigines no matter how grossly confected is accepted as justification for squatter violence. James Kilgour of Port Fairy is so impatient to eliminate the Gundidjmara that he forges the signatures on a document which vastly exaggerates the squatters’ losses, and delivers it to La Trobe as proof of the injustices experienced by white settlers. La Trobe is sympathetic and bemoans the prevalence of unprovoked attacks on good men.15 History relies on the written records of the period and diaries are some of the most valuable, particularly those where the diarist is not writing for a political purpose, that is, with a view to launder their own reputation. Much of the official colonial correspondence, however, is so corrupted by prejudice or, like Batman’s treaties and Kilgour’s forgeries, so full of lies, that they are next to useless as true reflections of what is happening. Most of the more objective reports are written by women. Isabella Dawson, Anne Drysdale, Georgina McCrae, and Sievwright’s daughter Fanny, all provide a perspective on the period so 106
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different from the men that when reading of an incident observed and recorded by both it seems the correspondents were on different planets. Annie Baxter was an extraordinary but contrary example. Like many of these women diarists she portrays the frontier in frank terms, usually avoiding the euphemistic dissembling which is such a feature of records prepared by men. But even though she observes incidents with greater candour than men, she seems, unnervingly, to share their attitudes. I think of Annie every time I think of the Children Overboard Affair and the sinking of the SIEV X in 2001. Like many Australians I couldn’t believe that our government and armed services were forcing unseaworthy refugee boats back to sea, overflying sinking boats and not lending assistance, behaviour which is wholly against the international rules of the sea and the basic instincts of humanity. I couldn’t believe that the press could be so quiescent about the drowning of 353 from the SIEV X, a ship our air force and navy were monitoring and had reported to Canberra was in serious risk of sinking. Many of those servicemen are still suffering from the fact that they had been commanded to offer no help. After I recovered from the shock of having witnessed this act of contempt for human life I considered my nation had lost any right to brag of its image as happy go lucky, she’ll be right, fair go, support the underdog, to hell with authority scallywags and larrikins. All that innocence went down with 353 men, women and children, but I tried to work out why it was possible. How could ordinary Australians allow themselves to be used like this for a political party’s re-election strategy? The natural ruthlessness of politicians like Peter Reith and John Howard had been observed frequently enough during the Wik people’s fight for land and the waterfront strike of 2000 but people like Robert Hill, Phillip Ruddock and John Anderson fell in behind them. I thought those men were merely deluded rather than cruel and uncaring, but they let 353 drown. Men in war situations, men engaged in a battle for their own advancement have been capable of wicked, vicious, unthinkable brutality in every century. Why are we still surprised? Is it because these men are our countrymen and we like to think of ourselves as honest and decent? Is that why we pretend the fair go is our national ethos? 107
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Confused by the motivation for this action I turned my attention to the women who co-operated in the incarceration of children and the drowning of other women. I came to Jane Halton, the liaison between the Department of Defence and the Prime Minister’s Department. I read all the newspaper reports and much later, Marr and Wilkinson’s Dark Victory and I focused on Halton because she seemed so different to the vast majority of women I’d known. I thought that if just one woman in authority had raised her eyebrow the chain of events could have been broken. As I read the transcripts I realised Halton was the crucial link and thought, unfairly I admit, that it was her failure to be incredulous at a dozen or more junctures in the events which had eased the way for bellicose men to poison the Australian psyche. It’s unfair to expect one woman to have raised objection when so many men had buried their heads like ostriches, but that is what I’d come to expect of women. I’d come to expect that they would caution us from indulging our more stupid behavioural characteristics. Morality was going down the drain, our country’s reputation soiled, and all so that one group of men could out balls another group. A blood sport involving real and innocent people. We stopped greyhounds doing it to live rabbits in the 1960s. Turning away from the extraordinary pillage of a nation’s soul, I opened the pages of frontier history and it was then I read the diaries and memoirs of Annie Maria Baxter and realised that Jane Halton had a precedent on the Western District frontier, another woman whose psyche did not match what I thought I knew about women. In her diary, Memories of the Past by a Lady in Australia, Baxter wrote throughout the period of war between 1838 and 1842. The early days were not easy for a refined and educated young wife, particularly after she discovered her husband had been sleeping with an Aboriginal woman. From that point on, Baxter and her husband never shared a bed because, as Annie said, she couldn’t forgive ‘the man who could lessen himself and me so tremendously’.16 Despite her disappointment, Baxter enters into the life of the district with such enthusiasm that she jokes with a man who is worried he might get into trouble for his habit of sh
