Out of the Silence
Page 2
In this study we use the term ‘frontier’ to refer to that phase of European settlement from the time when settlers first intruded into Aboriginal country to the point when colonial authority over Aboriginal people was effectively established. In this respect South Australia’s were pastoral frontiers, driven further and further inland by settlers in search of fresh grazing land for their sheep and cattle. South Australia’s frontiers incorporated not only the largest territory amongst Australia’s colonies but also the longest-lived and most protracted struggles for British settlement because until 1911 it included within its jurisdiction the Northern Territory, which only earnestly began to fill with settlers from the 1870s after the establishment of the Overland Telegraph Line. In a detailed sense, however, our history of how these frontiers were managed concludes in the 1870s when the limits of good grazing land within South Australia’s current northern borders were reached; from that time to the end of the nineteenth century, the patterns by which the Central Australian frontier evolved would prove to be relentlessly repetitive of those that had emerged between the 1840s and the 1870s further south.32
The frontier phase in most regions was typically characterised by Aboriginal resistance to the invasion of their lands, which took the form of attacks on settlers, their stock and their property. Aboriginal resistance was met in turn by an assertion of European force designed to suppress that resistance. As Henry Reynolds has argued in regard to Aboriginal sovereignty, a key characteristic of the Australian frontier – one that proved to be as true of South Australia as of Australia’s earlier colonies – was the uncertainty of Britain’s effective occupation: if a rule of government ‘extends as far as … its administrative machinery is in efficient exercise’, then in Australia, British sovereignty was only of ‘a qualified and limited order’.33 In this respect the frontier phase, as Julie Evans has argued, highlights the ‘unsuitability’ of the rule of law, which remained insecure until such a time as the Aboriginal peoples it purported to protect had been dispossessed.34 Tom Griffiths has made a similar point somewhat more bluntly: it was in the very nature of the frontier ‘to undermine the rule of law and the legal method’.35
Remembering the frontier
The question of whether and how a rule of law operated on Australia’s frontiers has been central to recent critiques of frontier historiography. In his controversial book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Keith Windschuttle argued that, with some notable exceptions, most of the violence of Australia’s frontiers occurred in the context of legitimate police actions; colonial authorities were dealing with Aboriginal criminality, not warfare. The ideal of the rule of law, which assumed that Aboriginal peoples would be protected and if need be punished as British subjects, was certainly central in the thoughts of British policy-makers at the same time the colony of South Australia was being planned, but how did it translate into practice? A close examination of how the settler frontier evolved ‘on the ground’ and how it was policed suggests that not only was the rule of law an ideal impossible to implement but that, perversely, the often genuine attempts to impose it undermined its effectiveness by diminishing settlers’ faith in its capacity to protect their interests, and encouraging their own forms of ‘frontier justice’.36
This question is critical to the issue of how frontier conflict between Aboriginal people and Europeans has been recorded and remembered. In 1968 W.E.H. Stanner famously observed the remarkable absence of Aboriginal people from twentieth century histories of Australia.37 Although his insight is largely true of the national histories produced at that time, the very prominence of the idea risks obscuring a much more complex, ever-evolving, and often contradictory story of remembrance. As Tom Griffiths has astutely observed, Australia’s was a ‘strange frontier’ of ‘fear and distain’, not easily conceivable in terms of ‘a romance of campaigns and heroes’.38 In large measure, this can be traced back to the foundational fiction that Aboriginal people were protected as British subjects and that, by association, Australia was settled rather than conquered. In reality the colonial state, as well as settlers, were required to use force to secure the lands they claimed and affect the subjugation of Aboriginal people to state authority. Wars were fought, but these were wars that could not generally be openly acknowledged. The inherent tension between Aboriginal people’s nominal status as subjects of the Crown and the lived experience of violent dispossession shaped the way frontier conflict was reported and remembered.
The records of European settlement leave little doubt that war was being levied against Aboriginal people to dispossess them of their lands and ensure their subjugation to state authority. Governors and Police Commissioners, Mounted Police and settlers understood this fact full well, and they also understood the tension between this reality and the ideal that a rule of law prevailed. A good deal of the violence that occurred on Australia’s frontiers happened beyond the reach of metropolitan surveillance and before the arrival of police and colonial officials whose task it was to uphold the law. Privately recorded accounts of conflict suggest that frontier clashes often went officially unreported, and if news of them did come to the notice of attentive officials, time, distance, and settler solidarity made them difficult to prove. Settlers were often caught between a desire to record their experiences and a reluctance to incriminate themselves. This tension can be seen in the written records of settlers, especially in a euphemistic language that recorded, while at the same time masked, the violence of the frontier: the ‘Natives were dispersed’, for instance, or perhaps they were ‘taught a lesson’.39 These forms of language, writes Tom Griffiths, ‘reveal that many colonists accepted murder in their midst; but they reveal, too, an awareness that it could not be openly discussed’.40
South Australia presents a particularly useful case for examining at closer range the historical memory of Australian settlement and its counterpart of Aboriginal dispossession because, from amongst all of Australia’s former colonies, it has always cherished a reputation for the humanitarian treatment of Aboriginal people. South Australia prides itself on its ‘sense of difference’.41 Perhaps the most comprehensive examination of this idea remains Douglas Pike’s 1957 work Paradise of Dissent, a history of the colony’s first thirty years which focuses on its social, political and economic foundations. Pike explores the qualities that set the Province apart: foremost among them was that it was a colony free of the ‘convict stain’; it was a planned colony, built on Wakefield’s theory of systematic colonisation; and it was a colony predicated on liberal ideals of religious and political freedom.42 The idea that it was a colony more liberal in its approach to the treatment of Aboriginal people came to adhere to this overarching idea of ‘difference’. The origins of this claim can be traced to the colony’s founding documents: the Letters Patent, which acknowledged prior Aboriginal title to the land, and the Proclamation, which undertook to place Aboriginal people under the protection of the rule of law as British subjects. These were innovations of the British Colonial Office rather than ones welcomed by South Australia’s founders, yet even by the late nineteenth century they became seen as emblematic of the colony’s ‘benevolent intentions’ toward its Aboriginal subjects.
Yet despite its often covert face, and despite the fact that it has more recently emerged as an apparently ‘hidden’ history, the story of frontier conflict has never disappeared – at least entirely disappeared – from public view. In contrast to W.E.H. Stanner’s famous conception of the ‘great Australian silence’, which expresses the exclusion of the story of Aboriginal dispossession from Australia’s ‘textbook’ history throughout most of the twentieth century, local historical narratives have always kept the story of Aboriginal and European conflict in view. In the memoirs of settlers, in published local histories, and in memorials and commemorative tributes to the past, the history of a violent frontier is something that may be remembered with partiality, but is never quite forgotten. The events of the past, and the questions of how they were recorded
and remembered, are not separable ones but are inexorably linked, and those links maintained in memory. Aboriginal peoples have always remembered the violence of their dispossession; but South Australia’s settler-descended communities have also always engaged with this aspect of their history, although its forms have shifted and changed through time.
Our society, writes philosopher Janna Thompson, is an ‘intergenerational community’ of institutions and moral relationships that ‘persist over time and through a succession of generations’, and its ‘moral and political integrity’ relies upon ‘its members accepting transgenerational obligations and honouring historical entitlements’.43 This conception of society as an intergenerational community informs our approach to this history and underpins our concern with the nexus between history and memory. What do we find when we compare the recoverable history of the frontier with the patterns of how it is both remembered and forgotten? What, in turn, might this suggest about the status of our nation’s history, as well as its legacies in the present? These questions are the subject of this book.
PART 1
‘THE WAR BETWEEN THE RACES’
Chapter 1
FOUNDATIONS
In January 1830 Charles Sturt was exploring the inland river systems of eastern Australia when he came upon a new river, which he would name the Murray, and decided to follow it to its outlet.1 During this journey Sturt constantly encountered Aboriginal groups and actively sought their knowledge of the country and their assistance as guides. To smooth his passage through their lands he conscientiously observed Aboriginal diplomatic protocol by approaching each group cautiously and openly, distributing presents and requesting assistance. In his journal of the expedition Sturt commented on the nature of the protocol and the importance of Aboriginal aid:
They sent ambassadors forward regularly from one tribe to another, in order to prepare for our approach, a custom that not only saved us an infinity of time, but also great personal risk. Indeed, I doubt very much whether we should ever have pushed so far down the river, had we not had the assistance of the natives themselves.2
Sturt’s conciliatory approach proved invaluable on one of the few occasions when he feared that violence was imminent: as a group of Aborigines was threatening his party an Aboriginal man he had encountered earlier came to his assistance and persuaded the aggressors to retreat.3 Having been guided down the river, the expedition finally arrived at its terminus, a body of water that Sturt named Lake Alexandrina. Intent on finding where it flowed into the sea Sturt’s party rowed across the Lake, and observed a chain of smoke signals rising from the surrounding hills; their approach was being watched.4 When they attempted to land a large body of Aborigines came toward them, ‘fully equipped for battle’ and intent on opposing them, but they retreated when Sturt levelled his musket at them.5 He was surprised at this response. How did they know about muskets, when other groups further up the river certainly had no knowledge of the weapon? What he may not have realised is that whalers and sealers had worked the region for the past 30 years from their base on Kangaroo Island, often raiding the coast in search of Aboriginal women. As Sturt’s party set up camp that night, conscious that all around them were Aboriginal camps, the explorer looked out upon the scene and imagined the future landscape of European settlement on rolling hills ‘that seemed to invite civilised man to erect his dwellings upon them’.6
In the course of his expedition, Sturt regularly commented on the numbers of Aboriginal people he encountered: ‘We found the interior more populous than we had any reason to expect; yet as we advanced into it, the population appeared to increase’.7 On another occasion he wrote, ‘we seldom communicated with fewer than 200 daily’.8 Yet despite the extensive Aboriginal population, and the hospitality of his hosts, Sturt never saw them or wrote about them as the owners of the country through which he travelled. What he saw, in his mind’s eye, was a patchwork of neatly cultivated fields, wisps of smoke rising from scattered farm-houses, vessels plying their trade along the river, and church spires in the distance. Towards the end of his journal Sturt speculated on the prospects of the region. This was, he suggested, a spot ‘to which the colonist might venture with every prospect of success, and in whose valleys the exile might hope to build for himself and for his family a peaceful and prosperous home’.9
Planning a colony
Meanwhile in London a small group of men interested in both the practice and principles of colonisation was beginning to coalesce. Robert Gouger, who planned to emigrate, and Edward Wakefield, who studied emigration while in debtor’s prison, met and began developing the notion of systematic colonisation. One of the problems of colonisation elsewhere, Wakefield argued, was that land could be acquired too cheaply and too quickly, leading to an inefficient dispersion of settlement and a shortage of labour. His proposal was that land be sold at a price low enough to attract middle-class capitalists, but not so low as to encourage working men as land investors. Instead, he proposed, a percentage of the moneys derived from land sales should be used to fund the emigration of labour, and in this way a rational balance between capital and labour might be maintained. By July 1829 a ‘Sketch for a proposal for colonising Australia’ had been forwarded to the Colonial Office.10
Here was a plan for a colony, but as yet no place to locate it. News of Sturt’s explorations reached London during 1830 and by January of 1831 Gouger’s promotional pamphlets were now referring to ‘the new colony of South Australia’.11 By the end of 1833 the South Australian Association had been formed to garner support and promote the proposal of this new colony to the Colonial Office.12 As a charter for the proposed colony was being drawn up, some in the colonial office expressed the reservations that it was too ‘republican’, and that it might not be genuinely self-supporting.13 The view of James Stephen, legal counsel to the Colonial Office and soon to be its Under Secretary, was blunt:
There is no joint-stock – no proprietary body – no Chartered Company. It is simply a Plan for selling the Lands of the Crown and applying the Proceeds to the foundation of a Colony to which at the expense of the Crown, Poor Persons are to be conveyed as emigrants.14
Negotiations and compromise continued until in July and August 1834 the Act establishing the Province of South Australia passed both Houses of the British Parliament. The preamble to the Act declared all the lands of the colony ‘waste and unoccupied’. There was not a single reference to the significant Aboriginal population Sturt had observed just a few years before. Indeed, the planners of the colony had given almost no thought to how they would deal with that population once they set foot on the ground. Not long after the Act was passed, a new Whig government came to power under Lord Melbourne. Evangelical reformers were now in the ascendency, and men who had campaigned against slavery now turned their attention to the question of Aboriginal people’s rights in British colonies. They also, for the first time, questioned the South Australian Colonisation Commissioners charged with supervising the establishment of the colony about their plans regarding Aboriginal people.15
In 1835 Governor George Arthur, hearing that measures were being proposed to secure justice for the Aborigines of Australia and that a new colony was to be established on Australia’s southern shores, wrote to the Secretary of State with his thoughts on the matter. Noting that the Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land had been reduced to no more than 130 souls due, in part, to ‘the warfare so long waged’ between the Aborigines and settlers, he offered cautionary advice drawn from his own experience:
On the First occupation of the colony – It was a great oversight that a treaty was not, at that time, made with the natives, and such compensation given to the Chiefs, as they would have a fair equivalent for what they surrendered – a mere trifle would have satisfied them; and that feeling of injustice which I am persuaded they have always entertained would have had no existence.16
Arthur was in a good position to offer this advice, having witnessed in his long term as Lieutenant Governo
r the escalation of violence between Aboriginal people and settlers in Van Diemen’s Land. ‘Every effort’, he suggested, should be made to come ‘to an understanding with the natives of Southern Australia’ on the cession of lands before settlement commenced. The failure to secure the goodwill of the Aborigines would make it ‘impossible to prevent a long continued warfare, in which the whites as well as the Aborigines becoming more and more inflamed as their mutual injuries accumulate will destroy each other in detail’.17
Responding to Arthur’s concerns, Sir George Grey wrote to the South Australian Colonisation Commissioners, quoting Arthur’s letter, and asking what provisions were being made for the welfare and protection of the Aborigines? The Commissioners, who had a considerable investment in the new colony and were anxious to make a start, initially responded with soothing but essentially platitudinous noises.18 Grey would not be assuaged by platitudes, and again demanded to know what consideration was being given to the rights and interests of the Aboriginal people. The territory covered by the new colony extended far into the interior of New Holland, he observed, and would ‘embrace in its range numerous Tribes of People whose proprietary Title to the Soil, we have not the slightest ground for disputing’. Before His Majesty could approve anything, he added,