With debates on the Constitution, Recognition and a possible Treaty ramping up in the mainstream media it’s time to expose the lies that have conveniently masked Australia’s history. Indigenous people farmed, managed and governed the continent for millennia. In this three-part series JD Anthony reflects on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth, Melissa Lucashenko’s The First Australian Democracy and Abdullah Ocalan’s The Roots of Civilisation to ask “Is it possible for us to see that the past was not more primitive and savage than the present, and that the future need not be barbaric?”
We never studied Australian history at school. Maybe we never actually “studied” at all, but we were schooled if not educated. Either way, there was no such subject as Australian history. We did British history and later a sort of general world narrative focussed on heroic leaders and imperial wars. The template for this grand narrative was a map on the wall showing the whole British Empire upon which the sun never set.
Being a Catholic boys’ school, we also learnt Latin, mainly by reading Virgil and Cicero. We scanned the Roman republic and empire and were led to believe that the Romans, great as they might have been in ancient times, were really just a prototype for the British. The latter of course brought civilisation to the far reaches of the globe, not just the circumference of the Mediterranean. Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, ever, ever shall be slaves. As my mother sang to me all those years ago.
Australia’s place in this god-given colonial schema was the destination of brave seafarers and a tabula rasa for explorers and doughty settlers. Exploration, discovery and hard work were the main themes, but to be honest it was all a bit boring. Some stories teased me – the little girls who snuck out before dawn so they could watch the sunrise over the Blue Mountains, or the drover’s wife sitting up all night with a shotgun to protect her children from that scary snake, or the bushrangers. There was a wild colonial boy, Jack Doolan was his name, of poor but honest parents he was born in Castlemaine … As we sang in the car on those long drives to relatives down the coast.
But this version of our history contained no overview, no discursive sweep of time and space, little mention of previous European exploration (just Dirk Hartog and the Dutch marooned on the WA coast, something about Van Diemen, nothing about the French), and almost no geography or understanding of soil, climate or plants. And it never occurred to me that we were closer to Asia than Europe.
The Victorian Education Department’s “Eight Book” (a text for Intermediate English, first published in 1928 and reprinted until 1940) celebrates Australia as the happy land (Australia Felix) waiting thousands of years for the settlers to arrive. It’s a sort of cultural fairy tale starting with the southern sunrise (The Morning Star paled slowly, the Cross hung low to the sea) and ranging from The Magpie’s Song to The Lights of Cobb and Co. Stories of the Empire include Kipling’s Grand Trunk Road of India, and some reference to Europe, Rome and other parts of the world. Seven pages on the Anzacs and the Great War. And only the barest mention of Indigenous Australians – just four and a half pages from CEW Bean’s The Old Inhabitants and a melancholy poem The Last of his Tribe. The Bean excerpt, taken from his early book The Dreadnought of the Darling, acknowledges the “black man” as the original occupier of the land, a stone age nomad who lived in “poor remains” not even deigned as ruins, wandering “the blank utter darkness before Australian history began,” wearing “elementary clothes” but who still “managed to work out two or three wonderfully efficient instruments” for hunting and fishing. There’s a grudging tone of admission here that more could maybe be said, but – as Thomas Mitchell wrote in another excerpt – the land “lay before me with all its features new and untouched as they fell from the hands of the Creator. Of this Eden it seems that I was the only Adam.” (On Pyramid Hill, Victoria, 1836).
Texts like these formed the opinions and mapped out the discourse for generations of urban Australians, not just for me. They provided the ideological basis for terra nullius, a term from Roman law meaning “nobody’s land” which asserted that a particular territory had never been subject to the sovereignty of any state. As far as we were concerned, at school in those days, the “aboriginals” were a stone age people with no government, without law, mere nomads and savages. This was reinforced by the publicity surrounding Blainey’s Triumph of the Nomads (1975) which praised them as successful and triumphant in their discovery of the land, in their adaptation to it, and their mastery of its climate and food reserves. But just by its title kept them trapped within a nomadic status with numerous connotations of primitive, unsettled, ancient children who were simply not as good as us.
White Australia learnt a little bit more about, and from, the First Australians, during the turbulent anti-war era – the dispossession, the resistance, Jandamawra, the massacres, the denial of human rights. On a camping holiday in northern NSW, having laughed at the sign to Bogan Gate and driven all day through the Pilliga, my partner and I stopped at Myall Creek and listened to the wind in the trees, and I think we wept. Around that time the Indigenous nations protested at the Bicentenary and the Tall Ships and Invasion Day, and we supported them, passively at least.
But in my own understanding these were all bits and pieces, just colonialism and politics mixed with fairness, and to some extent posturing to position myself on the “right side.” I still knew nothing.
The concept of terra Nullius was legally amended by the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision, which led to the possibility of Indigenous Land Rights being claimed in some parts of Australia, but it was only a partial victory. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation explain:
“The (British) colonisers acknowledged the presence of Indigenous people but justified their land acquisition policies by saying the Aborigines were too primitive to be actual owners and sovereigns and that they had no readily identifiable hierarchy or political order which the British Government could recognise or negotiate with. The High Court’s Mabo judgment in 1992 overturned the terra nullius fiction. In the same judgment, however, the High Court accepted the British assertion of sovereignty in 1788, and held that from that time there was only one sovereign power and one system of law in Australia.
“The traditional English view of sovereignty was described by William Blackstone in the 18th century as deriving of necessity from one ‘supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority’. . . Australian governments and courts have not accepted the existence of remnant Indigenous sovereignty, and Australian Aborigines have not gained the status of domestic dependent nations, as bestowed on the Indian tribes of North America.”
The legal sticking point seems to be the concept of the Sovereign State, as important now to Australia as it was to the British Empire and indeed to Roman Law two thousand years ago.
The imperial and colonial viewpoint was still being echoed by the then Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, as recently as November 2014 when he said during a breakfast for British PM Cameron:
“As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it’s hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush. The marines and the convicts and the sailors that straggled off those 12 ships, just a few hundred yards from where we are now, must have thought they had come almost to the moon. Everything would have been so strange. Everything would have seemed so extraordinarily basic and raw …”
Around the time of the Mabo decision, at the old State Museum in Melbourne, I saw a display of eel traps and rock diversions constructed by Aboriginal people to catch fish in the streams of South West Victoria. This blew a lot of cobwebs away – the Aborigines were clearly not hunter-gatherers but settled and productive people who constructed feats of engineering to ensure a regular and predictable supply of food. Was this an isolated case of social and technical progress I wondered? Why had we never learned of this before? Was there more we did not know?
To be continued: Tomorrow … Pieces of the puzzle.
This article was originally published on Ranterulze.net.
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