by Bill Gammage
So people burnt, tilled, planted, transplanted, watered, irrigated, weeded, thinned, cropped, stored and traded. On present evidence not all groups did all these, and few Tasmanians may have, but many mainlanders did. What farm process did they miss?
There was one difference. They were mobile. No livestock, no beast of burden, anchored them. They did not stay in their houses or by their crops. Sedentism has been used to disqualify Aborigines as farmers,128 but sedentism contrasts with mobility rather than hunter-gathering. Thomson noted that north Australian clans spent several months mobile and several months sedentary each year, but each period was equally planned and predictable, ‘a regular and orderly annual cycle carried out systematically, and with a rhythm parallel to, and in step with, the seasonal changes . . . the nomadic movements of these people can be forecast with accuracy, and . . . their camps . . . foretold with reasonable certainty’.129 Mobility is an attitude, a habit of mind and body, stirring the same pleasant sensations which cheer bushwalkers, of being your own boss, outside, free of the crowd. In the 1930s an Arnhem woman remarked,
rather patronizingly, as she watched a Fijian missionary working in his mission garden, anxiously concerned because a few plants had died: ‘You people go to all that trouble, working and planting seeds, but we don’t have to do that. All these things are there for us, the Ancestral Beings left them for us. In the end, you depend on the sun and the rain just as we do, but the difference is that we just have to go and collect the food when it is ripe. We don’t have all this other trouble.’130
This was a critical advantage, and not only in drought or crisis. Kaberry thought Kimberley women worked less hard than farmers’ wives, yet got food more certainly:
It is not the steady strenuous labour of the German peasant woman bending from dawn to dusk over her fields, hoeing, weeding, sowing, and reaping. The aboriginal woman has greater freedom of movement and more variety . . . the agriculturalist may be left destitute and almost starving if the [crops] fail or are destroyed by drought, flood, fire, locusts, or grasshoppers, as sometimes happens in China and in Europe. I never saw an aboriginal woman come in empty-handed, though in 1935 there was a drought.131
She concluded, ‘women’s work . . . compares favourably with a European eight-hour day and possibly overtime as well’. Blainey too pointed out that people worked many fewer hours a day to secure food and shelter than farmers anywhere.132 Perhaps neither counted fire or ritual as work, but only people untroubled about food could have held so many corroborees and ceremonies. Of course there were hungry times, or people would not have managed their resources so carefully, but this is so of farming, and as with farming was not the norm. People were not hinging on uncertainty or toil.
Then why did farmers elsewhere become sedentary? Not by choice, 1788 suggests. Was it a step not towards something better, but away from something worse? Were people forced to stay put to defend crops, stock or stores? Not from climate: Europe’s harsh winters and Australia’s harsh summers explain why people might store food, but not why they must stay by the stores throughout the year and throughout the years. Not from pests or diseases: concentrated plants and animals are more vulnerable to these, not less. Sedentary villagers are more vulnerable too, until they build up immunity: introduced diseases were catastrophic for people in 1788, whereas no serious disease was native to Aboriginal Australia. To protect stock from large predators like big cats, wolves and bears? Possibly: only in Australia did people not confront these. But the most dangerous predators are humans. Did farmers stay put to defend their property from other people? Did barbarism put them on the road to civilisation?
Or did plenty tempt them into a population–productivity spiral, crowding the land and cramping them into sedentism? Diamond suggested this: not enough wild food led to domesticating plants, then to better farm skills and increased production, then to a merry-go-round of more people, more food, more people and so on.133 This is a deadly and ultimately futile treadmill, its manifestations now being disputed. Diamond thought southeast people may have been on it: their eel channels, fish traps and nets, and ‘winter’ villages ‘appear to have been evolving on a trajectory that would have eventually led to indigenous food production’.134 The ‘intensification’ theory too argues that over the last 3000–4000 years Australia’s population increased significantly as people refined resources. Tuber and grain templates did support more people, but mobility limits population. No land was crowded in 1788, no warrior obliged to stay and defend, no-one stopped from managing the far reaches of their country. Living on earth’s driest occupied continent may have let people escape a population juggernaut.135
Mobility scandalised Europeans. Their road obliged them to fence and guard, to stay put, to make hard work a virtue. This gave great advantages, including the numbers and technology to explain why a white Australian writes this book. It also led them to condemn people who reduced their material wants, sat yarning in daylight, and gave so much time to ceremony and ritual. These were preserves and pursuits of gentry. It did not seem right that Aborigines should be like that. Aborigines were ‘shiftless and improvident’, uncivilised. The words meant to degrade hunter-gatherers, not to explore how they lived. Is it, for example, uncivilised to protect land and property by religious sanction rather than physical force? The key question is not ‘Why weren’t Aborigines more like us?’, but ‘How did people in 1788 manage lives and land so sustainably, for so long?’136
Somewhere on mainland Australia people used every farm process. Climate, land, labour, plants and knowledge were there. Example was there, in the north and after 1788. Templates and tending made farms without fences, but nothing made people farmers. They used fire so well that nature ruled their resources less than farmers, not more, because they managed over larger areas. In seasons which suited farming this made resources as predictable as farming, and in drought, flood and fire made them more predictable. People limited population but used all their land, gave all life totem guardians, and even under extreme duress rarely stole. They rejected or avoided the farmers’ road, and lived comfortably where white Australians cannot. What they did stands on its own.
Northwest of Birdsville (Qld) Sturt reported,
The spinifex was close and matted, and the horses were obliged to lift their feet straight up to avoid its sharp points . . . the ridges extended northward in parallel lines beyond the range of vision, and appeared as if interminable. To the eastward and westward they succeeded each other like the waves of the sea. The sand was of a deep red colour . . . [Browne] involuntarily uttered an exclamation of amazement when he first glanced his eye over it. ‘Good Heavens’, said he, ‘did ever man see such a country!’137
‘Man’ made such country home for at least 20,000 years. People civilised all the land, without fences, making farm and wilderness one. In the Great Sandy Desert women replanted yam tops and scattered millet on soft sand, then watched the seasons: millet crops a year after its first rain.138 This is farming, but not being a farmer. Doing more would have driven them out of the desert. Mobility let them stay. It imposed a strict and rigid society, but it was an immense gain. It gave people abundant food and leisure, and let them live in every climate and terrain. It made possible a universal theology, and it made Australia a single estate. Instead of dividing Aborigines into gentry and peasantry, it made them a free people.
INVASION
11
Becoming Australian
In July 1837 Alexander Mollison, camped with cattle near Barnawartha (Vic), went with ‘a native black to examine two plains which he describes as well adapted for a station. This black, Jimmy, came to us at the Murray and has been daily pressing me to make my station on his ground.’ They rode to
a forest plain between three or four miles when Jimmy pointed to the right. We . . . shortly came upon a small open plain of very sound ground, the grass quite young, having been burnt only a month before. Proceeding much in the same direction, about two miles through timber, we
came to a creek having very fine large water holes and, ascending a bank on the right, we stood on the edge of a very fine and extensive plain. The grass was too young for immediate pasturage but the ground was very firm and we thought ourselves well repaid for our journey from the camp. Jimmy was delighted to observe that we were pleased and repeatedly reminded me of it, saying, ‘Cobawm bimble, Bunderambo’, fine ground at Bunderambo, ‘Tousand birribi (emu), tousand duck’.
Mollison thought the place too close to the Sydney–Melbourne road for a head-station, but set up a lambing station—proof of its plenty. George Faithfull took it over, then abandoned it because of Aboriginal attacks. This problem overcome, Reverend Joseph Docker took possession.1
So the white man came to Bontharambo, a template associating a ‘forest plain’ with an ‘open plain’ edged by a creek and circled by forest. To activate it before he began seeking a settler, Jimmy burnt it. He knew what would result: a park abundant with emu, duck and more. He managed his land in every sense, indeed with so much sense that he seems to have thought that the newcomers would manage and share it equally sensibly. He paid fearfully for his mistake. Unknowing how momentous his gift was, unseeing how carefully his land was made, uncaring of his pride, they displaced him, and within months his people were fighting a losing battle to save his country.
Places like Jimmy’s, grass and shelter near water, inevitably attracted questing stockmen. Eyre warned, ‘The localities selected by Europeans, as best adapted for the purpose of cultivation or grazing, are those that would usually be equally valued above others, by the natives themselves, as places of resort, or districts in which they could most easily procure food.’2 At Albany (WA) John Wollaston noted, ‘Warrung . . . flourishes where the best feed for stock is found. Hence the usurpation of the ground and the secret destruction of the aborigines.’3 ‘The very spots most valuable to the aborigines for their productiveness,’ Edward Parker declared, ‘the creeks, water courses, and rivers—are the first to be occupied.’ TS Powlett reported, ‘nearly all the Stations are near the very Waters, that the Natives were in the habit of camping at, before the country was settled’.45
Naturally people objected. ‘Damn your eyes, go to England, this is my land’, a man demanded, and a woman, ‘You go to England, that your country; this our country.’6 They ‘complained of the white men bringing animals into their country that scare away the kangaroo, and destroy the roots which at certain seasons of the year form part of their sustenance. This . . . was a very general complaint.’7 It came too late. Courtesy and curiosity usually welcomed the first strangers. Most soon went away, and when others arrived it took time to learn who meant to stay. Even then landtakers impacted unevenly. A family finding a hut on its land could move without much trouble—there was plenty to spare. Trouble came later, as spreading settlement squeezed families, then clans, then country and religion, until an ancient duty to seasons and totems dissolved. Dispossession crept up on the people of 1788.
Some tried to compromise. After Morrill was rescued in 1863, he warned his tribe that white men would take their country. ‘They told me to ask the white men to let them have all the ground to the North of the Burdekin, and to let them fish in the rivers; also the low ground they live on to get the roots—ground which is no good to white people, near the sea-coast and swampy.’8 Few whites had come, yet people were ready to give them country, for they too were of the Dreaming. When such offers were spurned, some people resisted, destroying stock, killing whites, driving out invaders. Always they came back.
They brought the mind and language of plunderers: profit, property, resource, improve, develop, change. They had no use for people who wanted the world left as it was. The Sydney Herald declared,
this vast country was to them a common . . . their ownership, their right, was nothing more than that of the Emu or Kangaroo. They bestowed no labour upon the land and that—and that only—it is which gives a right of property to it. Where, we ask, is the man endowed with even a modicum of reasoning powers, who will assert that this great continent was ever intended by the Creator to remain an unproductive wilderness?9
Darwin called Aborigines ‘a set of harmless savages wandering about without knowing where they shall sleep at night, and gaining their livelihood by hunting in the woods’.10 The people of 1788 spent more time each year managing land than Darwin or the Herald editor in a lifetime. They had no hope of countering such myopia.
The most newcomers would do, even at Albany (ch 8), was to urge people to be like them, or more exactly like the poorest of them, the casual worker, the toiling convert, the loyal servant. For as long as they could, people said no. They valued what they had and believed. Cook saw this:
From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the Superfluous, but with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition. The Earth and the Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life. They covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff etc.; they live in a Warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholsome Air, so that they have very little need of Cloathing; and this they seem to be fully sencible of, for many to whom we gave Cloth etc., left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the Woods, as a thing they had no manner of use for; in short, they seem’d to set no Value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own for any one Article we could offer them. This in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life, and that they have no Superfluities.11
Cook could not know whether Aborigines were ‘far more happier’ than Europeans, but their demeanour and self-sufficiency strongly suggested it. In 1823 James Ross wrote of Tasmanians near Lake Echo, ‘[their elegant gait] was quite indicative of persons who had little to do . . . Their air of independence was quite charming . . . I know of no race of people who have greater claims to that property.’12 South of the Ovens (Vic) in 1824 Hovell decided, ‘Those are the people we generally call “miserable wretches”, but in my opinion the word is misapplied . . . Their only employment is providing their food. They are happy within themselves; they have their amusements and but little cares; and above all they have their free liberty.’13 ‘From our observation’, a New South Wales doctor remarked in 1828, ‘the interior tribes consider the whites, as a strange plodding race, for the greater part slaves, obliged to get their living by constant drudgery every day. Whereas, for themselves, their wants being easily supplied, “they toil not, neither do they spin”.’14 In 1839 two Queensland squatters declared, ‘they are not labourers at all, and for the same reason that any other gentleman is not, viz. that he can live without labour’.15 In 1841 a Canberra squatter observed, ‘they in general shew a determined dislike to settled habits of any kind . . . they are so wedded to their own habits—supporting themselves with so much ease by the chase—that it can scarcely be expected they should adopt ours’.16 Matthew Marsh recalled, ‘There is a kind of gentlemanlike ease about [their] manners. Not all the drill sergeants in Europe can make a man hold himself as the savage does, who never has stooped to a desk or a plough. There is also a natural grace about their carriage.’17 In 1844 Simpson stated, ‘they are in general a good natured, cheerful race, by no means deficient in intelligence, but having few wants, they consider encreased comforts dearly purchased by encreased toil and the abandonment of that merry reckless life they lead in the wilds of Australia’.18 In 1845 a New South Wales Select Committee asked Reverend William Schmidt,
Were they conscious of inferiority to the whites, or did they fancy their own mode of life the most pleasant and best? From some of their own expressions, I judged that they considered themselves superior to us.
Do you mean that they consider themselves superior
to the whole of the white race, or to those they saw in the condition of convicts? To the whole; they preferred their mode of living to ours; when they have accompanied us on some of our journeys, they have expressed the opinion, that they were our masters in the bush, and our servants at the stations; they pitied us that we troubled ourselves with so many things.19
Europe’s social gradations are not apt to 1788 Australia, but Aborigines were more akin to Europe’s gentry than to its peasantry. They commanded no-one, but they had land, sought knowledge, had much time for religion and recreation, and usually lived comfortably in parks they made.
They were therefore unlikely to ask the question Yali asked Jared Diamond in New Guinea: ‘Why do you have more than us?’20 It puzzles PNG villagers that whites so ignorant of plants, so clumsy on a log bridge, so easily tired on the march, so unready to work, should have so much. Something supernatural must explain such unfairness. Aborigines were not puzzled: they had no doubt which lifestyle the Dreaming favoured. Amid the common tumult of humanity, they prospered. Outside cities and towns Australia may have carried more people in 1788 than now. Observers thought so on the Murray, the Murrumbidgee and the Dawson. In 1788 only about 10 per cent of Australia’s people lived in its arid third, but only about 3 per cent do now. Gilmore wrote that the ‘invader’ who lived off the land’s ‘teeming life’ ‘never realised that less than fifty years later, with a population much more sparse than that of . . . the aboriginal he displaced, fish were no longer caught in profusion, and meats had to be taken from the farm and the home-paddock’.2122
