See What You Made Me Do
Page 39
So what did gendered violence look like before colonisation? It’s impossible to say for sure. The written history of Indigenous Australia didn’t begin until white people arrived, and then was largely recorded by notoriously unreliable observers – men who ‘far preferred generalisation to reportage’, as the culture critic Robert Hughes observes in The Fatal Shore.31 These amateur observers – the first to record Aboriginal life as contact was being made – were often twisted by prejudice, and even outright fabricators.
Consider this evidence for the so-called tradition of ‘bride-capture’, one of the earliest ‘proofs’ that violence against women was ‘cultural’. As is forensically laid out by historian Liz Conor in Skin Deep, this trope was born in 1798, when judge advocate and secretary of the colony David Collins†† despaired over the ‘lust and cruelty’ inflicted on Aboriginal women by Aboriginal males.32 Women from enemy tribes were ‘stupefied with blows’, he wrote, until, streaming with blood, the victim was ‘dragged through the woods by one arm … the lover, or rather the ravisher, is regardless of the stones or broken pieces of trees which may lie in his route, being anxious only to convey his prize sadly to his own party, where a scene ensues too shocking to relate.’
The reason Collins couldn’t ‘relate’ what happened was because he’d never seen it. His bride capture story basically amounted to unsubstantiated smut – and its prurience multiplied as the adaptations from his writing proliferated. British newspaper editor Robert Mudie, one of many to cite Collins, added his own rhetorical flourish: ‘Every marriage … in the neighbourhood of Port Jackson … is attended by more violence than the rape of the Sabine women by the Romans.’ In a geographical dictionary from 1854, Collins again was cited in the category ‘Races of men in Australia’, which read: ‘The treatment of females in Australia is in the last degree brutal. Wives are not courted or purchased, but are seized upon, stupefied by blows, and then carried off to be the slaves of their unfeeling masters.’ As Conor explains, such accounts were pure fantasy. ‘There is no evidence in the colonial archive that Aboriginal men routinely abducted women.’33§§ And yet, this and other myths still have currency today.
Tropes like this endured because they served the colonial project of dispossession. For the colonisers, the bride-capture trope had at least two purposes: it framed all Aboriginal men as brutal perpetrators (undeserving of humanity or sympathy, let alone claims to land), and all Aboriginal women as victims (to be ‘protected’ by the civilised Europeans – very often by removal from their land).‡‡
Few anthropologists bothered to study the lives of Aboriginal women (who were generally portrayed as chattel and ‘no more than domesticated cows’34) until the mid-1930s, when anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry went to live with Indigenous groups in the Kimberley. What she revealed overturned ‘the widespread idea that Aboriginal women are mere drudges, passing a life of monotony and being shamefully mistreated by their husbands’.35 In particular, she showed that intimate relationships were unions of economic interdependence, not male exploitation, in which love and loyalty were primary (‘a man would sit for hours by the side of his sick wife, stroking her arm, moving the branches so that they could cast more shade, and fetching her water’). Both parents devoted such care and attention to their children that, according to the Western view at the time, they would be seen as overindulgent. What really set them apart from the colonisers, however, was their balance of power: despite marriages being polygamous and arranged from an early age, women had relative sexual freedom, and even pursued their own affairs. That didn’t mean relationships were free from violence, but they didn’t generally fit the mould of victim–perpetrator: ‘I, personally, have seen too many women attack their husbands with a tomahawk or even their own boomerangs, to feel that they are invariably the victims of ill-treatment,’ wrote Kaberry. ‘A man may perhaps try to beat his wife if she has not brought in sufficient food, but I never saw a wife stand by in submission to receive punishment for culpable conduct. In the quarrel she might even strike the first blow.’36 Where violence did exist, it generally occurred within a regulated framework of laws, codes and rituals – and those who broke these laws were called to account and punished.***
Perhaps the best proof we have that modern family violence has no specific roots in pre-contact Indigenous Australia is what we know about the traditional status of Indigenous women. On a day-to-day level, women were largely independent of men: they sourced the vast majority of food, heading off every day with other women and their children to fish, hunt small animals, gather bush foods and collect other goods, like ochre and medicinal herbs. Men had no say in where they went or what they did, and while they were out, the women and children ate as much as they needed, bringing back only the surplus to feed the men. That dynamic alone was a significant check on men’s power over women: it meant that husbands could not dictate what their wives did during the day, and could not punish them by restricting their food. Indeed, as Kaberry observed, women actually exercised this power in their intimate relationships. After a struggle, for example, ‘the wife will pack up her goods and chattels and move to the camp of a relative … till the loss of an economic partner … brings the man to his senses and he attempts a reconciliation’.37 This is why experts like Atkinson resist defining traditional Indigenous culture as ‘patriarchal’. She suggests a more precise term would be ‘egalitarian hegemony’: a system of male authority balanced ‘by woman’s sovereignty and authority in the social, economic, and spiritual domains’.38
One thing is clear: the chaotic family violence in Indigenous communities today – supercharged by alcohol### and substance abuse – has no background in traditional culture. ‘If these practices were traditional laws, there would be no Aboriginal society in existence today,’ Marcia Langton told the National Press Club in 2016. ‘If we look at the Indigenous homicide rates, assault and hospitalisation rates, incarceration rates, rates of removal of Aboriginal children, we see a rapidly disintegrating society. This is not the society of old.’39
What I find particularly galling about this debate over ‘cultural’ violence, though, is that one glaring fact never seems to get mentioned: domestic abuse as we know it today does have a clear cultural heritage – in Britain.
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Unlike the ongoing debate over gendered violence in traditional Indigenous culture, there is no question that domestic abuse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England was widespread and its perpetrators went largely unpunished. In the mid-nineteenth century, abused women in England were dying ‘in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality’, wrote John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in the Morning Chronicle, ‘without ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of law’.40 Unlike Indigenous law, which even missionaries praised for its strictness, British laws regulating domestic abuse were designed to protect marriage, not women. Perpetrators of serious violence were commonly either exonerated or given a small fine or light sentence. That’s not to say that sadism was encouraged: men were expected to beat their wives responsibly. In the late 1700s, Francis Buller of Devon, one of the most senior judges in Britain, became known as ‘Judge Thumb’ after reportedly offering this advice: a husband could thrash his wife with impunity provided that he used a stick no bigger than his thumb. Judge Buller’s ‘rule of thumb’ never became written law but was cited repeatedly in cases across Britain and the United States.41
There is copious research on domestic abuse in Georgian and Victorian England, but perhaps nothing so vivid as the paper produced by the remarkable British feminist Frances Power Cobbe. In 1878, eleven years after the last convict ship left for Australia, Cobbe published Wife Torture in England, a devastating report on domestic abuse in the working-class areas of England. Violence against women was so commonplace that the lives of married women were ‘simply a duration of suffering and subjection to injury and savage treatment,’ wrote Cobbe, ‘far worse than that to which the wives of mere savages are
used.’ This treatment wasn’t adequately captured by the term ‘wife-beating’ – a term that conveyed black eyes and bruises; these were the ‘mere preliminary canter before the race’. The violence Cobbe was documenting was so extreme, and characterised by such cruelty, that the only appropriate term for it was ‘wife-torture’.42
In the so-called ‘kicking districts’, people were living ‘lives of hard, ugly, mechanical toil in dark pits and factories, amid the grinding and clanging of engines and the fierce heat of furnaces’.††† But the root cause of domestic abuse, as Cobbe saw it, wasn’t drink or overcrowding; such things only exacerbated the violence. The cause, she said, was the attitudes men held towards their wives. ‘The notion that a man’s wife is his PROPERTY, in the sense in which a horse is his property … is the fatal root of incalculable evil and misery,’ she wrote. ‘Every brutal-minded man, and many a man who in other relations of his life is not brutal, entertains more or less vaguely the notion that his wife is his thing, and is ready to ask with indignation (as we read again and again in the police reports) of any one who interferes with his treatment of her, “May I not do what I will with my own?”’
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This was the culture that invaded Australia in 1788. The land it declared empty was home to more than 750,000 people from over 500 different groups, united under the complex systems of the Dreaming. Their tight-knit systems of kin and clan were antithetical and a profound challenge to the atomised, hierarchical society that was about to overrun them.
First Nations people had survived and thrived for at least 65,000 years because they insulated their cultures against the kind of social chaos that engulfed parts of England. Their cosmology recognised that human relationships were fraught, and that maintaining peace within families and between the sexes required dedicated time and effort. ‘The absolute essence of Aboriginal relationships,’ writes Atkinson, ‘was the vibrancy of mediating the conflicts natural to all human associations.’ The strength of these familial relationships – and the relationship to the land – was the cultural backbone of pre-contact Indigenous Australia. ‘Men and women came together in ceremony … through dance, art, music, theatre, crafts and storytelling … These were activities of relationship, of making connections, of creating, maintaining and healing relationships, in which the primary virtues were “generosity and fair dealing”, and working to “unite hearts and establish order”.’43 Ritualised combat was also central to the maintenance of tribal harmony. Formal duels between men were ‘a common practice in Aboriginal Australia’, writes anthropologist David McKnight, who spent many years living with tribes on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. In cases of intra-tribal conflict, ritualised fights known as ‘square-ups’ were staged to end antagonism between the groups. ‘After the fight, a dance was held to show that there was no animosity.’44
This ‘unusually rich’ social network of enduring relationships so awed the great anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, he described them as ‘an intellectual and social achievement of a high order’, comparable to the European development of parliamentary government.45
All of which makes the current state of family violence across Indigenous Australia especially tragic. Here lived cultures with almost unique expertise in managing relationships and intimacy, using practices forged over tens of thousands years – until they were dismantled and almost destroyed by white Europeans.
This is not a case of natural selection. From 1788, British colonisers legislated the destruction of First Nations cultures – which they believed to be ‘doomed’ – and set about replacing them with their own.
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The culture that arrived with the tall ships in Sydney Cove was not only deeply patriarchal, but sexist. Europeans considered all women to be naturally inferior, but on this inferior plane there were two categories: the ‘good’ chaste women who were deserving of male protection, and the whores, who were to be used and abused however men saw fit. As Hughes writes, domestic abuse was endemic in the colony: ‘at night, the huts around the stockade would resound with the shrieks of women being thrashed. The forest warden at Longbottom (a farm halfway between Sydney and Parramatta), a man named Rose, tied his wife to a post and gave her 50 lashes with a government cat-o’-nine tails; another settler … stabbed his wife and hung her on a gum tree, with complete impunity.’ In 1841, the Canadian convict Franćois-Maurice Lepailleur, transported for rebelling against the British and imprisoned at Longbottom, wrote in his diary, ‘We hear more women crying in the night here than birds singing in the woods during the day.’46 This ubiquitous and unrestrained kind of gendered violence wasn’t just a reaction to the colony’s harsh conditions. It was a type of violence introduced to Australia like an invasive species. ‘The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions,’ writes Hughes. ‘The brutalisation of women in the colony had gone on so long that it was virtually a social reflex by the end of the 1830s.’
To men from this culture, Aboriginal women were so alien as to be essentially inhuman. Their confident sexuality – sacred and uncoupled from shame – rendered them as sex objects in the eyes of many of the invading Europeans. They were deemed naturally promiscuous and perpetually available, stripped of their names and called ‘black velvet’, gins and lubras. In the Outback, Aboriginal women lived in a ‘world of men’. ‘On pastoral stations, Aboriginal women and girls were preyed on by any and every white man whose whim it was to have a piece of “black velvet” wherever and whenever they pleased,’ writes the historian Henry Reynolds.47 Settlers promoted free access to Aboriginal women and girls or ‘studs’, as a recruitment perk for work on their remote stations. As one police constable from Camooweal in Queensland commented, young Indigenous women were ‘run down by station blackguards on horseback, and taken to the stations for licentious purposes, and kept there more like slaves than anything else’.48 In 1900, at Ardock Station, east of Camooweal, nine Aboriginal women were imprisoned behind a rabbit-proof fence as sex slaves for the white station hands. There was no escape: even those who managed to get away were pursued and forced back to the station, where they were savagely beaten for trying to escape.49
White women also participated in the brutalisation of Aboriginal women and girls: not only did they turn a blind eye to the sexual predations of their husbands and sons, but as ‘bosses’ in the homestead, they could be just as harsh – sometimes more so. ‘In many cases our women considered white women to be worse than men in their treatment of Aboriginal women,’ writes historian and activist Jackie Huggins, ‘particularly in the domestic service field.’50
This cruelty was not limited to Outback stations; across the country, the rape and abduction of Aboriginal women and girls became a type of sport. As McGlade writes, the object of ‘gin sprees’ and ‘gin busting’ excursions was ‘to rape, maim or kill as many black women as possible’.51 A horrifying sample of this routine brutality was documented by missionary Lancelot Threlkeld, who wrote in 1825 that he had ‘heard at night the shrieks of [Aboriginal] girls, about 8 or 9 years of age, taken by force by the vile men of Newcastle’.52
Since the authorities had no interest in prosecuting white men for raping Aboriginal women and girls, Indigenous men took it upon themselves to punish the perpetrators, under their own laws. The traditional penalty for the crimes of abduction and rape was often death. This in turn set off a terrifying cycle of violence.
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It would be a shallow reading of history that depicted Aboriginal women as passive victims through this. Indigenous women, then and now, adapted to their conditions. As they and their men were banished from traditional hunting grounds, prostitution was a way for women to regain some of their lost economic power – to exchange sex for goods like flour, sugar, tea or chewing tobacco, or small sums of money. Sometimes this was the only way to support what was left of their groups. As the Indigenous academic Larissa Behrendt writes, ‘Many Aboriginal women used the “gin spree” as a source of income.’53
Of course, across the frontier, there were also Aboriginal women who willingly entered into liaisons and relationships with European men, who may have ‘actually sought them out either to escape undesired marriage or tribal punishment or to gain access to the many attractive possessions of the Europeans’.54 Indeed, historian Ann McGrath was surprised to hear, during her research into these inter-racial unions in the Northern Territory in the 1980s, several older Aboriginal women speak ‘joyfully’ of their ‘longer-term liaisons’ with white men.55 But, as Behrendt is careful to point out, there was no such thing as a simple exercise of choice for Indigenous women – such ‘relationships took place against a background of continual frontier and sexual violence’.
At the end of the nineteenth century, humanitarians and clergy were so alarmed by the scale of prostitution and violence against Aboriginal women and girls that legislation was devised to control and protect the Aboriginal survivors of the Frontier Wars. In every state and territory (except for Tasmania, where the government insisted Aboriginals were extinct), legislation was passed to bring full-blooded Aboriginal people under government ‘protection’, and force them to live on missions and reserves, where they would be segregated from the white community. This was considered an act of kindness – a way to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of a ‘doomed race’ expected to disappear within decades.56