Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  At a meeting of the Aboriginal Protection Society in Sydney in 1838, Richard Windeyer, a young barrister who had been scandalised by the Myall Creek massacre, and who was campaigning to have Aborigines permitted to give evidence in court, nonetheless spoke on similar lines as Lang in Moreton Bay. As quoted in the Colonist, 27 October 1838, ‘He disagreed with the sentiments that the natives had been usurped by fraud and violence by the Europeans He could not look upon the natives as the exclusive proprietors of the soil. Nor could he entertain the ridiculous notion that we had no right to be here. He viewed colonisation on the basis of a broad principle laid down by the first and great Legislator, in the command He issued to man to multiply and replenish the earth the land belonged to him who should first cultivate it.’

  Captain Sturt, said Windeyer, had stated in his journals that he had travelled three hundred miles (480 kilometres) and only met one family. Now, he wished to know, ‘whether these three hundred miles belonged to this one family? No. He only had a title to lands, who first bestows labour upon it.’

  And yet there was an abiding uneasiness. ‘If we have no right to be here,’ said Windeyer, ‘we have nothing to do but to take ship and go home.’

  Occasionally a less ambiguous statement would appear, such as that in the Launceston Advertiser of 26 September 1831. ‘Are these unhappy people, the subjects of our King, in a state of rebellion, or are they an injured people, whom we have invaded and with whom we are at war? . . . They have never been subdued, therefore they are not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation, defending in their own way their rightful possessions, which have been torn from them by force.’

  Such opinions did not wash so well, said EW Landor, the Western Australian lawyer settler, once you had to live amongst the nomads. ‘The most prominent idea in the imagination of a settler on his first arrival at an Australian colony is on the subject of the natives. Whilst in England he was, like the rest of his generous minded countrymen, sensibly alive to the wrongs of these unhappy beings . . . Full of these noble and ennobling sentiments, the immigrant approaches the scene of British colonial cruelty, but no sooner does he land, than a considerable change takes place in his feelings. He begins to think that he is about to place his valuable person and property in the very midst of a nation of savages, who are entirely unrestrained by any moral or human laws or any religious scruples, from taking the most disagreeable liberties with these precious things . . . We have acted exactly as Julius Caesar did when he took possession of Britain . . . We have a right to our Australian possessions; but it is the right of conquest, and we hold them with the grasp of power.’

  Such would often be the language of the frontier—‘You don’t know them as we know them.’ That was the rhetoric in Moreton Bay, as the settlement at Brisbane was transforming itself from penal colony into a commercial port serving a rich hinterland. ‘If we hold this country by the right of conquest,’ the Moreton Bay Courier of 9 December 1848 wrote, ‘and if that right gives us a just claim to its continual possession, we must be empowered to enforce our claim by the strong arm, when necessary. One law must apply to our conquered nations.’

  Edward Curr, a former Van Diemen’s Land pastoralist who had become an early Port Phillip settler and conservative, and had seen the process of encounter between the nomads and the pastoralists frequently, could understand the Aboriginal side. He believed as a rule of thumb that whenever there was encounter between Aboriginal tribes and white pioneers, a war began which lasted from six months to ten years according to the nature of the country. If the Aboriginals had many fastnesses to retreat to, the war was longer. ‘Hence the meeting of the white and black races in Australia, considered generally, results in war. Nor is it to be wondered at. The White Man looks on the possession of the lands by the Blacks as no proper occupation, and practically and avowedly declines to allow them the common rights of human beings. On the other hand, the tribe which has held its land from time immemorial and always maintained, according to native policy, the unauthorised digging up of one root on its soil to be a casus belli [reason for war], suddenly finds not only that strangers of another race have located themselves permanently in their lands, but that they have brought with them a multitude of animals, which devour wholesale the roots and vegetables which constitute their principal food, and drive off the game they formerly hunted. They are also warned that they are not to hunt the livestock that is present on the land which they consider theirs. The tribe, being threatened with war by the white stranger, if it attempts to get food in its own country, and with the same consequences if it intrudes on the lands of a neighbouring tribe, finds itself reduced to make choice of certain death from starvation and probable death from the rifle, and naturally chooses the latter.’

  Curr’s reflections show that pioneers did indeed often understand the dilemma they presented to the natives, as well as the dilemma the natives presented to them. White men took women from amongst the natives, but no extra enlightenment came thereby. It is not to excuse anything to recognise that killing might become the way out not only for commercial frustration (the decimation of flocks), not only for cultural frustration (the apparent refusal of Aborigines to give up their claim to land and sites of importance), but even from moral frustration for a problem which seemed to test a wisdom greater than normal men possessed.

  Edward John Eyre, the South Australian explorer, declared in his Journals of Expeditions of Discovery, ‘that our presence and settlement, in any particular locality, do, in point of fact, actually dispossess the Aboriginal inhabitants’. The localities most cherished for grazing and cultivation were also the places where Aboriginal food was most easily procurable. In South Australia in 1840, however, Governor George Gawler and his Land Commissioner, Charles Sturt, had to explain to a group of leading, disgruntled settlers why the Aboriginals would be given the right to select land as reserves before the British did. For South Australia, both at the level of its charter and by government instructions was meant to recognise native rights. Charles Sturt wrote to the settlers on 1 August 1841: ‘I am desired by His Excellency to say, in reply, that it is to him a matter of deep surprise that persons of intelligence, like yourselves . . . should consider any rights that any European possesses to the province as preliminary to those of the Aboriginal inhabitants. Those natural indefeasible rights which, as His Excellency conceives, are vested in them as their birthright, have been confirmed to them by the royal instructions to the Governor, and by the Commissioners’ instructions to the resident Commissioner.’

  Elsewhere, though, native attacks put any idea of ‘natural indefeasible rights’ out of settlers’ minds. In 1840, the Port Phillip pastoralist David Waugh went to Melbourne on business and when he returned to his station, having taken out his squatter’s licence and procured supplies, he found that the local Aborigines had killed the two men left in charge of the sheep and plundered the head station, putting its stockman to flight. The losses were considerable—638 sheep were destroyed or died from wounds.

  There had been similar depredations by Aboriginals in Van Diemen’s Land. One account tells us, ‘Mr Bell’s house and servants attacked on Great Jordan Lagoon; the natives kept at bay from the house, but one man received a spear through the thigh. Mr Hopley murdered about a mile from Mr Betts’, James Macarthy desperately wounded. February 12 1830, Mr Howells’ dwelling burned, Mrs Howells and her children narrowly escaping the flames.’ And so on.

  A quarter of a century later, in the Wide Bay area around Maryborough, north of Moreton Bay, many stores and houses were robbed and two settlers were killed, and again stock losses were considerable.

  A young Irish lawyer, GF Moore, who had landed in Western Australia in October 1830, within a month found himself on the first punitive expedition in that colony against natives, a fracas which became the murderous battle of Pinjarra, south of the Swan River settlement, provoked by a number of raids by the Nyoongar people. Moore came from the robust Protestant tradition of County Tyrone. A
s soon-to-be Secretary of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society, Moore was an apostle of agriculture, an upholder of colonisation. Yet he was not closed to the value of the indigenes and had a sympathetic concern for them, ultimately learning their language and recording some of their stories, though ‘he wished sadly that they would not steal his pigs’. He published a descriptive vocabulary of The Language In Common Use Among The Aboriginals of Western Australia.

  The Nyoongars were a remarkably tall and robust group of Aboriginal people. Their tribe, said Moore, ‘had long been indulging in almost unchecked commission of numerous outrages and atrocious murders’. Amongst the killings was that of Private Nesbitt of the 21st Regiment and the spearing of a civilian.

  The punitive expedition was led by Captain Stirling, the governor, and came at last upon undulating hill country with nutritious food for cattle where the voices of many natives were heard. ‘The moment was considered propitiously favourable for punishing the perpetrators . . . should this prove to be the offending tribe. His Excellency rode forward two hundred or three hundred yards with Mr Peel and Mr Norcott, who knew the natives and their language, and commenced calling out and talking to them for the purpose of bringing on an interview. No answer was returned because the noise of the natives seemed so clamorous.’ The instant they saw a party of advancing police, the natives, about seventy in number, ‘started to their feet, the men seized their spears and showed a formidable front before retreating, gradually quickening their pace until the word “forward” from the leader of the gallant little party brought the horsemen in about half a minute dashing into the midst of them, the same moment having discovered the well-known features of some of the most atrocious offenders of the obnoxious tribe’. Norcott recognised one ‘celebrated for his audacity and courage’ and announced that ‘these are the fellas we want, for here’s that old rascal Noonar’. The native turned around and cried, “Yes, yes, Noonar, me,” and was in the act of hurling his spear at Norcott in token of requital for the recognition, when the latter shot him dead. The identity of the tribe being now clearly established, and the natives turning to assail their pursuers, the firing continued, and was returned by the former with spears as they entered the river.’

  It is not just to say that a godly, civilised, companionable and curious man like Moore would colour the truth, but everything seems to go conveniently for the attackers—Noonar is identified, then identifies himself, then threatens Norcott’s life before being shot in self-defence. The identity of the tribe is absolutely established and the natives turn to assail their pursuers—that being the reason the firing continued. When the governor’s rearguard came up, the Nyoongars were subject to crossfire and took to the river, hiding amongst the roots and branches and holes in the banks or lying in the water with their faces only uncovered. But they were still treacherous, in Moore’s account, ‘ready with a spear under water, to take advantage of anyone who approached within reach’. Those who exposed themselves ‘were gradually picked out of their concealment by the cross-fire from both banks, until between 25 and 30 were left dead on the field and in the river’. On being assured of personal safety, eight women and some children emerged from their hiding places and were detained as prisoners until the end of the battle.

  Having, no doubt with sincerity, established the guilt of the victims, Moore was not abashed by the potential numbers of dead. ‘It is . . . very probable that more men were killed in the river, and floated down with the stream. Notwithstanding the care which was taken not to injure the women during the skirmish, it cannot appear surprising that one woman and several children were killed, and one woman among the prisoners had received a ball through the thigh.’ During the height of the fire, a number of men cried out that they were females and should be spared, ‘but evidence to the contrary was too strong to admit the plea’. Perhaps half of the male population of the tribe was wiped out, including ‘fifteen very old and desperate offenders’, and so the bugle sounded the ceasefire. Captain Ellis had been badly wounded in the right temple by a spear and a constable had received a wound above the right shoulder. After a consultation over the prisoners it was resolved to set them free, ‘for the purpose of fully explaining to the remnant of the tribe the cause of the chastisement which had been inflicted’.

  There is intense sorrow in these events—the sorrow of the suddenly and cruelly stripped-down DNA of the tribe, and the sorrow in the fact that the views of the time and the tenuousness of European settlement in Western Australia made such a scene philosophically, scientifically and theologically inevitable. For a man to say round the campfire that night, after the women and children had been let go, and as the supplies on the packhorses were unloaded to make damper and to cook beef, that the Nyoongar had died for their country would have been a proposition laughed to scorn, even though sophisticated minds, from Stirling’s to Moore’s, were gathered round the crackling wood.

  It was a further misfortune for indigenes that the great passion of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century science, on whose behalf people from Phillip onwards sent back Aboriginal skulls for study in Europe, was phrenology. This so-called science dismissed the Aboriginal skull and brain as substandard. In the Colonial Literary Journal of August-September 1845, a correspondent wrote under the name ‘Aneas’: ‘The Aboriginal cranium appears to be large, although in reality the brain is not so . . . The great preponderancy of the brain in the New Hollander, as in all savage nations, lies in the posterior parts of the head—the seat of the passions, and inferior sentiments; the moral and intellectual portions, with few exceptions, are very deficient.’

  With eminent men assuring the settler of the primitive nature of the Aboriginal brain, there was less reticence about putting a bullet in it. An allied myth which condemned the Aboriginal was that native ownership had been bloodlessly yielded up due to the cultural inferiority of the Aboriginal. As one phrenologist said in November 1851, ‘The Cape Caffre and the New Zealanders, possessing superior phrenological development to our Aborigines, have each cost the British nation much blood and treasure to subjugate, while the dim twilight intellect of a New Hollander yields his country a bloodless conquest.’

  In 1838, the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld, who had tried to train the Hunter Valley natives in agriculture, attacked the pseudo-science of phrenology as ‘this miserable attempt’ to deduce that Aborigines ‘have an innate deficiency of intellect rendering them incapable of instruction’, a belief that led men to the idea that they were merely ‘part and parcel of the brute creation’.

  This made it all the more valid to exploit their labour. One commentator wrote of early Queensland: ‘Gladstone [the town] would suffer much from want of labour, if the despised black were not to be found, for a small piece of tobacco or a handful of flour . . . ever willing to render any service required of them. Many a time that I noticed a native groaning under a heavy load of bark, that he was carrying on his naked back to some white that would perhaps swear at him, not give him the promised tobacco or flour, and if he hung about his dwelling, bring out a pistol [and] threaten to shoot if he did not move off.’

  Ultimately it was the unwillingness of the natives to accept the eminently better—in white eyes—European order of things which most bemused settlers. W Ridley, a member of the Select Committee on the Native Mounted Police, Queensland, in 1861 wrote, ‘Bungaree, who after taking prizes in Sydney College, speaking good Latin, and behaving as a gentleman in elegant society, returned to the bush, and then entered the black police, once said, in a melancholy tone to Lieutenant Fulford, “I wish I had never been taken out of the bush, and educated as I have been, for I cannot be a white man, they will never look on me as one of themselves; and I cannot be a black fellow, I am disgusted with their way of living.”’

  The identical tension was reported by Sir George Grey in his Journals of Two Expeditions in North-West and Western Australia: ‘The officers of the Beagle took away with them a native of the name of Miago, who remained absen
t with them for several months. I saw him on the northwest coast, on board the Beagle, apparently perfectly civilised; he waited at the gun-room mess, was temperate (never tasting spirits), attentive, cheerful, and remarkably clean in his person. The next time I saw him was at Swan River, where he had been left on the return of the Beagle. He was then again a savage, almost naked, painted all over, and had been concerned in several murders.’

  Yet Grey was sympathetic to Miago. When he landed, he said, none among the white people would be truly friends of his—they would give him scraps from their tables, but the very outcasts of white society would not have treated him as an equal. He could not have married a white woman, he had no certain means of subsistence open to him. Grey thought he himself faced with the same dilemma would have made the choice Miago did, and gone back into the bush.

  Often, on the frontier, reflections on the native enigma were not as subtle. George Dunderdale, a clerk of the court in Gippsland who had travelled widely both in the United States and Australia, knew the rawness and directness of the treatment of natives in the region. Charles James Tyers, the Crown Lands Commissioner for Gippsland, was questioned by Dunderdale about his modus operandi. ‘He was informed that some cattle had been speared and he rode away with his horse to investigate the complaint . . . Traces of natives were soon discovered, and their probable hiding place in the scrub was pointed out to Mr Tyers. He therefore dismounted, and directing two of his black troopers armed with carbines to accompany him, he held a pistol in each hand, and walked cautiously into the scrub. The two black troopers discharged their carbines. The Commissioner had seen nothing to shoot at, but his blacks soon showed him two of the natives a few yards in front, both mortally wounded. Mr Tyers sent a report of the affair to the Government, and that was the end of it. This manner of dealing with the native difficulty was adopted in the early days, and is still used under the name of “punitive expeditions”. That judge who prayed to heaven in his wig and robes of office said that the Aborigines were subjects of the Queen, and that it was a mercy to them to be under Her protection. The mercy accorded to them was less than Jedburgh [a border town in Northumberland where stock thieves were said to be summarily strung up] justice: they were shot first, and not even tried afterwards.’