Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  Either way, it seems this mild-mannered Christian was 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’ in a very short space of time, perhaps even in advance of meeting them, so that he thought it necessary to bring the ingredients of their destruction in his first stores.

  Joseph Tice Gellibrand, who until recently was the attorney-general of Tasmania, and is now the token representative of law and order for the Port Phillip Association, writes 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.’ The press are 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.’

  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 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 are both sons of convicts and have built fortunes from property in Van Diemen’s Land. They join forces to become the two principals of the Port Phillip Association. Batman is a chaotic character, and his nature swings erratically between acts of kindness and bloody-minded self-interest, while Fawkner is a more calculating and meticulous personality. Within days of landing at Port Phillip they are at loggerheads, Batman parading around the settlement with Aborigines he has brought from Sydney, and Fawkner making plans for hotels and newspapers, the stuff of prosperous settlements. But their different humours don’t prevent them from cooperating in the wholesale division of the Kulin lands.

  Some of the most astute businessmen in Hobart helped establish the Port Phillip Association, and they are joined by the more entrepreneurial members of the administration and judiciary. It is 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 are involved in very influential circles, and know how to weasel their way around Governor Arthur’s instructions. Batman, Fawkner, Gellibrand, Charles Swanston and others are the most celebrated businessmen in the colony, and their plot to gazump the authorities and the real owners of the land is still celebrated in Australia today as the bringing of the light to the heathen wasteland instead of the white-shoe-brigade land sham it really was.

  Thousands of pounds change hands in weeks as frantic entrepreneurs throw themselves at the association in their haste to secure land. Most land is ‘selected’ unsurveyed and thousands of sheep are offloaded on the tranquil shores of Point Gellibrand, where as many as eight ships ride at anchor on any given day, such is the speed of ‘settlement’. In fact, some of the party sent to revenge Franks’ murder are recruited from the crew and passengers of these ships.

  Nothing happens at random here; this is 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 one another. They are eager to see all the lands populated by like-minded individuals to thwart the government’s purposes, and to murder and disperse the black population to secure the ‘peace’. Indeed, they go to great lengths to ensure that their friends join the colony, their letters confirming that they are anxious to create a solid confederacy to protect their interests and obscure the deceits instituted to acquire them.

  George MacKillop, who admires Smith, Armytage and Franks in their precipitous lust for land, is experienced in the process of dispossession, having already applied the procedure to great effect in India, where he worked in partnership with Charles Swanston. Swanston would go 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 are directly involved in the war to dispossess the Kulin people. How do 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 lands, but criminals to be destroyed before justice can intervene. They urge other settlers to ‘full satisfaction’ against the blacks. 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 has 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 has been 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, their experience gained in the British Empire’s most recent wars against legitimate landowners. This is a land war, and it is 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 have already established a sealing colony, and the conflict with the Gunditjmara people is symbolised by a clash on the beach for possession of a single whale. Both sides probably see it as a beach head in the fight for possession of the soil itself. The battle site becomes known as the Convincing Ground, the place where the Gunditjmara are ‘convinced’ of white rights to the land. The Gunditjmara are beaten in that battle but never convinced of its legitimacy. Today we continue to act as if the Aboriginal warriors are criminals rather than people defending the land from infidels.

  PEACEABLE KINGDOM

  Just sixteen years of exposure to Christianity and my intellectual curiosity was snuffed.

  I realised this last week when I arrived for work in a strange capital and to stranger accommodation. I was unsurprised by the weird décor, but too tired to talk to the people I was supposed to meet and too awake to sleep. So I read the walls.

  The art displayed in motels, hotels, corrugated-iron red-desert demountables, the prim spare rooms of friends of the arts, and caravan parks holds a grim fascination that has replaced the hole left after my tentative faith finally took flight – presumably fleeing to a more willing audience at Hillsong, where it was certain to receive the full Mexican wave and swoon; the postures of certainty and the conviction of the chosen.

  There were two old prints of animals and children in a style as familiar to my generation as the Hoover twin tub. The borders ran with a text I must have seen a thousand times in my life. You see it in people’s homes, old wares shops, the maudlin manse, school halls and virtuous hospitals: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf and the lion and the fatl
ing together; and a little child shall lead them.

  Both pictures were similar and the texts almost identical. The art depicted benign lambs and leopards, innocent goats and a milk-fed, chubby child leading a dangerous animal. Even the cows looked like they’d never kicked over a bucket or thought of butting the dairyman. It was called the Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch.

  The rest of the furniture was all old colonial bumf, so I read these texts with mild interest simply because there were no jam tins handy. And then I saw in the background what I’d never noticed before. In one print, almost hidden by a bridge, was a group of figures. I stood on the bed to get a closer look. Yes, I did take my boots off. I was paying, but I can’t stand vandalism. I was brought up in a family where at least two aunts owned a variety of these same prints and despised children who stood on beds.

  I had never finished reading these texts in the past because I could sniff out a biblical passage from ten metres and was intent on eluding the entrapments of the mild Christ and his devout followers. When I visited my aunts as a teenager I was already protesting against the Vietnam War, where we were told we had God on our side, and fighter planes were embellished with the Christian cross. Or Marilyn Monroe. Both intrinsic to our cultural campaigns.

  I had to peer at the texts because the faux Victorian lamps were mere decorations. Up close I could see that the tiny tableau beneath the bridge was dominated by men in tricorn hats who extended their hands in Christian kindness to a group almost bowed in devotion: Native Americans with feathers, skin tunics and awed, supplicant faces.

  I went to the sister print and there was a similar scene. On the other side of a river from where the bouncing babe was leading a leopard, the tricorn hats were advising Native Americans of their good fortune. The text of this one began, When the great Penn his famous treaty made with the Indian chiefs in the elm-trees shade, the wolf and all that other nonsense laid down with whomever.

  I stared at these prints for an hour, impaled as if by a butterfly collector’s pin. This was the art and text of Christian colony. Every brushstroke, every word, had been calculated to appease the spirit. Not the spirits of the Native Americans – theirs were crushed within months of meeting the hats. It was the Christian spirit that needed a salve, a godly reason for taking another’s land.

  I leant against the wall, overwhelmed by the meticulous planning and implementation. The actual taking of the land was made possible by those vandals and goths, common in any society, who arrived on whaling boats and galleons. Their lust for women and gold had always made colonial transition so much easier. It was said the smallpox contagion was deliberately applied to blankets and given to resistant bands of indigenes: to infect, demoralise, depopulate and depress.

  William Penn was a wealthy English Quaker who was given a tract of land that he called Pennsylvania. He arrived in 1681 determined to raise a community dedicated to the gentle words of the Sermon on the Mount. He was said to deal kindly with the Native Americans, for which they were grateful. Those on their knees are likely to be grateful for the extended hand of a gentle man. They granted Penn an extension of his land measured by an area that could be walked in a day and a half. Penn’s successors cleared a path of trees and logs and trained athletes to run as far as they could in a day and a half. In relay. They claimed 1200 square miles of land.

  It wasn’t Penn’s intention to claim so much, but his ‘treaty’ with the Native Americans could only be forged because the Native Americans by 1684 had become impoverished and powerless. He couldn’t be blamed for the actions of his descendants, but it says a lot about the ability of the Sermon on the Mount to saturate the Christian soul.

  Those who wrought the relay ruse of land acquisition were now represented in this West Brisbane guesthouse by a chubby angelic child whose conquest of savage beasts, which quivered to nuzzle the child’s plump paw, represented the conquest of the Americas by Christians. The savage spirit quelled and brought to heal by the mildest of restraint.

  I stared and I stared. The elaborate performance and explanation of colony was deeply embedded in both the Bible and the Church, and we are lulled into believing the story by tracts as pervasive as the chubby child’s personal circus. My aunts, attempting sanctity, had adorned their walls with similar prints, and at the same time condemned their ancestors’ history, to be reworked by athletic coaches and the painters of pastel Sunday-school posters.

  I stepped off the bed, put my boots on and walked into the balm of a Brisbane spring. I bought an Indian curry and naan and two frosty beers and returned to the verandah of the guesthouse to consume the meal while overlooking a darkening garden of palm and fern and fruit bat. As the beads of frost slipped down the flank of my Tasmanian beer, I considered myself. Me, the radical, the provocateur, the sage of history and cynicism, and I’d completely underestimated the calculated pervasion of the British colonial myth.

  We’d been fed this pap of propaganda since our eyes could focus and our ears could recognise words. Many of us bore the names of famous Christians; the songs our mothers sang while baking apple pie were preparing us for our delusion. The mere presence of sacred babies lulled us into the complacency of acceptance.

  Isaiah was preparing us for a Golden Age when snakes would not bite, lambs and lions would cuddle up and war would be no more. Lovely. In Job we read that ‘you will have a covenant with the stones of the field, and the wild animals will be at peace with you’. Isaiah claimed, ‘He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.’ Lovelier still; a sylvan paradise.

  Ezekiel said, ‘I will make a covenant of peace with them and rid the land of wild beasts so that they may live in the desert and sleep in the forests in safety.’ So the Christian would compensate for God’s bad halo days and rid the earth of dangerous beasts and tame the land. For Christians. The implication is clear. Penn cautioned his followers that there is only one God, and only Christians can expect to inhabit the Golden Age of peace and kindness. All others will be converted … or lost.

  When Edward Hicks began his series of paintings on the subject of lambs and leopards, fatlings and innocence, he was painting from a deep Quaker belief, but at a time when he was disquieted by the failure of his fellow Quakers to live in harmony with one another.

  Despite his concerns, however, he has interpreted the Bible correctly; it calls for man’s dominion over all the wild beasts and places. Despite the presence of other peoples in those wild places, all Christians presumed that it was their duty to defeat nature and soothe the savage breast.

  The curry was good, the beer was better, the night a balm of silk to the skin. But old misery guts chewed the rag of history.

  Most of Australia’s ‘explorers’ were devout Christians, but many experienced dark nights of the soul when hints of regret briefly illuminated their conscience. The Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, was beguiled by the Indigenous night fishing fleets on the Murray River, and you can feel how tantalised he was by the word ‘civilisation’. He resisted the allure successfully, but he was always conscious that the colonial presence was poisonous to the Indigenous population and had no intention of providing justice for them. His own ministrations, of course, he considered the actions of divine grace.

  Thomas Mitchell rode through villages of more than 1000 Aboriginal people and envied the grace, comfort and individuality of their homes, but his admiration always succumbed to his assumption that this way of life had to give way to Christian industry. Mitchell observed fields of harvested grain, but it was months before he realised, or admitted in his diary, that this was an act of industry.

  Charles Sturt was near death when his most blinding realisation of Aboriginal achievement furrowed his Christian brow. On top of a sand dune in the dead heart of Australia he was hailed by 400 Aborigines. He could barely make them
out, such was the progress of his disease, but the horses staggered down the dune and Sturt was aware that if the Aborigines had aggressive intent his whole party was doomed.

  Instead, the people brought coolamons of water to slake the thirst of the ‘explorers’, and then held out those coolamons gingerly to the horses, creatures they had never seen. The explorers were given food. Tubs of well water were set beside their accommodation. They were provided with kindling for their fire.

  Lying on his bed that night, Sturt could see the winking fires of all the houses spread across the Warburton valley. He was enchanted by the laughter and singing as the little town prepared its meals. Women ground grain into flour and Sturt reported the charm of the soft whirring of the mills as if they were a fable of peace. The Golden Age. By ten o’clock the village was silent and at rest. It was an almost Christianly civility.

  But Sturt was aware that any entreaty he might make on behalf of these people would fall on the ears of men who had not lain down with the lamb. How were those women to know that the whisk of their mills was an anthem of doom?

  Hicks painted his Golden Age idylls and plucked verses from the Bible to declare the loveliness of the future for Christians.

  I went back to my room, my mind running with these thoughts, took off my boots like my aunts would have me do, and stood on the bed to look at the paintings again. I didn’t know Edward Hicks from a bar of soap, I did not know the verses had come from Isaiah, but I looked at the angle of the Christian hands and how the Native Americans meekly bent their necks and I knew that this was how we explained ourselves. Afterwards.

  Did we really believe in a Golden Age, or were we happier to give its name to a hotel, utilising the heavy irony of the subeditors from The Age who drank there and fashioned within its walls one of the more debauched hotels of Melbourne?