By the 1880s too, the concept of the ‘doomed race’ was well-entrenched in popular culture and Aboriginal people were re-cast as living relics of prehistory.6 For Edward Stirling, Director of the South Australian Museum, Aboriginal people were ‘zoological survivors,’ and he expressed the view that ‘no people upon earth possessed a more ancient ancestry and less mixed pedigree than the aborigines of Australia, and that they more nearly than any other exhibited the characters and conditions of prehistoric man’.7 The newspapers of the day, when discussing themes such as development, progress, race or nationalism, routinely drew on the idea of the natural evolution of civilisation as a variation on the ideal of ‘survival of the fittest’.8 The long-held belief that Aboriginal people were a ‘dying race’ was now attached to a powerful explanatory device. In evidence given to a parliamentary Select Committee in 1899, the anthropologist Frank Gillen described Aboriginal people as ‘interesting barbarians’ worthy of preservation, but added: ‘Scientific investigation goes to show that the aboriginal race began to decay many years before the white man set foot in Australia’.9 As accidental survivors in the modern world, Aboriginal people could be conceived of as existing outside of time and history.
In the arena of state-sanctioned commemoration, stories of land won through the spilling of blood were largely invisible, subsumed to the burgeoning international interest in ‘primitive’ cultures. Like other colonies, South Australia’s contributions to the colonial and international exhibitions that proliferated in the last decades of the nineteenth century routinely included artefacts and dioramas of ‘primitive’ Aboriginal life, alongside displays of local produce and industry.10 Such displays were to become part of a ‘sentimental vision’ of Aboriginal people as primitive ‘spectacle’ that would frame white Australian commemorations of settlement well into the twentieth century.11
South Australia’s Jubilee festivities year of 1887 made reference to Aboriginal people in much the same way as other Australian colonies did in this period, feting Aboriginal ‘primitivism’ in public displays, while Aboriginal people themselves were becoming increasingly coerced into the age of state supervision and control. In the Jubilee year and the years leading to it, the performance of Aboriginal ‘corroborees’ provided a ready forum for the public consumption of a form of Aboriginal culture which, sorted and sanitised, served the master narrative of colonial nationalism. In May 1885 a corroboree, performed by Aboriginal people brought from the mission stations at Point McLeay and Point Pearce, was held for the public’s entertainment on Adelaide Oval, attracting a crowd estimated at 20,000.12 The event was so successful that two further performances were held over the following weeks, attracting crowds of several thousand, and concluding with the Aboriginal dancers re-appearing in European dress to sing the National Anthem.13 Even as these celebrations were taking place, South Australian mounted police were still employing punitive violence in central Australia to suppress Aboriginal resistance to European settlement.14
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Proclamation Day holiday on 28 December had become one of the State’s most iconic ‘sites of memory’. On that day, ‘Old Colonists’ and their descendants would gather to commemorate the State’s foundation. The Governor was usually in attendance, together with representatives of the armed services, and at noon South Australia’s gun-boat, the Protector, would fire a 21 gun salute.15 As the likelihood of Federation loomed, commentators referred to Proclamation or Commemoration Day as South Australia’s ‘national day’ and it was celebrated with gusto.16 Tens of thousands of people celebrated its ‘great annual fete’; tugs would bring visitors from the Port, while colourfully decorated watercraft of all varieties would ply the gentle waters of Holdfast Bay.17 The city itself was decked out with streamers and bunting, carnival attractions did brisk business on the foreshore, and in the nearby parks the visitors were entertained with athletic events ranging from the 100 yard dash to the ‘greasy pole’. While the holiday-makers enjoyed outdoor fun, the official guests gathered in the Town Hall to enjoy luncheon and to hear speeches.18
Given the prominence that the status of Aboriginal people had in the Proclamation itself, and the fact that it was read aloud at every annual commemoration, it is notable how infrequently the issue of Aboriginal rights was raised in the copious editorials and lengthy speeches that marked the event in the last years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Typically these would praise the enterprise of the first settlers – ‘the Pilgrim Fathers of the State’ – the progress of the colony and, not uncommonly, draw attention to South Australia’s sense of difference.19 In 1909, for instance, the Advertiser observed that ‘the colonisation of South Australia was the first true attempt at the utilisation of the empty lands of the Commonwealth’. True it was that other colonies were earlier established, but ‘in every case the taint of convictism was present’.20 In 1914, the Advertiser’s editor noted that in South Australia ‘the foundation was laid very early of those free institutions which one after another was adopted in this progressive State. The ballot, the Real Property Act, religious freedom, and land reform are some of the contributions South Australia has made to the general cause of progress’.21 The Proclamation Day editorial in 1920 claimed that South Australia was the only State to be established with no ‘birth-stain’.22 Among these claims to exceptionalism, discussions of Aboriginal people or issues were almost absent apart from formulaic references to how, at the genesis point, ‘savage tribes faded before the advance of civilisation’.23
The Advertiser’s 1890 account of Proclamation Day is particularly telling in this regard. The journalist mentioned that the Proclamation was hanging on the wall of the Mayor’s parlour, that its language was ‘as noble as the sentiments it expresses’ and, as it had not been published for many years, ‘it will doubtless be read with interest by the descendents of the pioneers’. The verbatim text of the Proclamation was reproduced, followed by a description of the events of the day:
It was not only the white inhabitants of the colony who were taking an interest in the success of the colony; those with darker skins now roll up quite as a recognised thing, and in a staid and solemn Oriental manner appear to enjoy an outing on the beach as much as anyone. The Afghans came in considerable numbers from the neighbourhood of Little Gilbert Street under the leadership of their [Haji Mulia], and their imposing turbans of many colors, embroidered caftans, and linen [continuations] lent a very variegated air to the part of the crowd in which they moved. The Lean Hindoos in striped calico garments were also well represented; Chinamen were present – in the day time – and even a dozen aboriginals lazily wandered up and down on the lookout for a bit of ‘bacey or anything else in the way of creature comforts which might come their way.24
There is no comment on the significance of the Proclamation for Aboriginal rights, and when Aboriginal people are mentioned they are securely anchored in stereotypes of the day, subsidiary to the greater exoticism of Afghans, Hindus and Chinese.
Yet one context of Proclamation Day celebrations that did give rise to discussions of South Australia’s early relations with Aboriginal people was the part of official speeches extolling the virtues of the explorers. By the close of the nineteenth century Charles Sturt’s foremost place in the pantheon of founding figures had become a repeated theme in Proclamation Day speeches. More than just signifying South Australia’s discovery and settlement, he came to personify the story of South Australia’s peaceful origins. When Governor Sir Henry Galway spoke at the Commemoration Day luncheon in December 1914 he observed that South Australia, ‘compared with other parts of this great continent, never had any real difference with the Aborigines’, something owed to the ‘words of wisdom of Governor Hindmarsh in the proclamation which has just been read’. ‘In fact’, Galway continued, ‘Charles Sturt, one of the most illustrious of South Australia’s pioneers – (Cheers.) – went through all his journeyings without shedding one drop of Aboriginal blood’. Galw
ay contrasted Sturt with New South Wales’ explorer Thomas Mitchell, who had conducted his expeditions ‘in the spirit of a soldier campaigning in a hostile country’.25 At the level of such official commemorations, ‘benevolent intentions’ were becoming a primary motif in a developing narrative of South Australia’s historical relationship with its Aboriginal subjects, though it was one that was only fitfully recalled.
The frontier in the pioneering story
In the last decades of the nineteenth century histories of the colony were increasingly appearing in print, sometimes published to coincide with landmark years or events. Their sub-titles hint at the story being told: they are about ‘resources’, ‘productions’ and ‘progress’.26 In 1876 William Harcus published South Australia: Its History, Resources and Productions, a history that presaged the marginalisation of Aboriginal people from the national story. ‘It is a small matter’, wrote Harcus, ‘to supplant the aboriginal inhabitants of a barbarous country and to secure possession of their land’. The difficulties of colonisation, he argued, lay elsewhere:
It is the battling with nature, conquering the soil, holding on against capricious seasons, fighting with the elements and compelling the earth to yield what it never yielded before – a reward for man’s toil – that the real triumphs of an old people in a new land are seen.27
For many of Harcus’ contemporaries, however, the story of how Aboriginal people were ‘supplanted’ and ‘possession of their land’ was secured was no small matter at all. In the closing years of the nineteenth century they would write about it at length. After all, for first-generation settlers this had been an integral part of their story. By the time South Australia celebrated its Jubilee year in 1886, personal accounts of the frontier experience – of attacks from and reprisals against Aboriginal peoples – were becoming a staple of the memoirs and reminiscences that were regularly appearing in the colonial press.28 At the same time, Harcus’ elaboration of the ‘difficulties of colonisation’ suggests the way in which that story would be told: it would be the story of the pioneer. By the 1870s, a pioneer legend was emerging nationally as the principle expression of the ‘Australian experience’. In the well known words of J.B. Hirst, the pioneer legend is one that ‘celebrates courage, enterprise, hard work, and perseverance’,29 and at its heart were the experiences of the men and women who had ‘opened up’ the country. In South Australia, the first generation of settlers were penning their experiences for the benefit of future generations in carrying on the legacy they had left. This was a time for consolidating the historical landscape through which settlers and their descendents sought, through remembrance, to secure their stories of rightful possession.30 While a generation earlier the difficulties of the settler frontier had been subject to protracted and controversial debate – about the status of Aboriginal people as British subjects, and about the use of force in ensuring their subjugation – a generation later, it served to personalise and highlight the ‘bitter experiences’ endured by settlers in a burgeoning saga of pioneering life.31
John Wranthall Bull’s popular memoir and pseudo history Early Experiences of Colonial Life in South Australia was first published in 1878, and he wrote extensively about the ‘troubles’ with Aboriginal people in the colony’s difficult early years. As a successful pastoralist, Bull’s approach to Aboriginal subjugation on the settler frontier was pragmatic. Where Aboriginal resistance interfered with colonial expansion, he argued, the ‘irregular’ but ultimately ‘necessary’ course to follow was the use of deadly force.32 Bull’s account of South Australia’s early frontiers quickly became a source for other foundational memoirs of the period, such as Sub-Inspector of Police Alexander Tolmer’s Reminiscences of 1884 and James Hawker’s similarly named Early Experiences in South Australia, published in 1899. The result, by the end of the century, was the creation of a surprisingly cohesive and circular foundational history which did not disguise the violence of the frontier, but enlisted it as a sign of the hardships of pioneer life, and as a justification of Aboriginal dispossession. By the time the nineteenth century drew to a close, the frontier experience had been told, retold and circulated in published and family memoirs, fictional novels and serialised newspaper features. Well known events such as the Maria massacre, the Rufus River massacre and the troubles at Port Lincoln were now recounted as examples of the treachery of ‘bloodthirsty savages’, and of the vulnerability and courage of early pioneers.33
If an emergent story of pioneer struggle was one framework for early reminiscences of the frontier experience, another was the increasing popularity of colonial adventure romance fiction. A particularly Australian brand of colonial adventure romance, including novels such as The Lost Explorer (1890) and The Secret of the Australian Desert (1895), entered the popular domain in the late nineteenth century as a localised variation on the imperial romance.34 Colonial romance fictions proved to be an inspiring influence for many South Australian pioneering reminiscences, such as ‘Reminiscence of Port Lincoln’ by ‘H.J.C.’, which appeared in The Observer in 1880. H.J.C. was the pen-name of Henry John Congreve, who had worked on pastoral stations around Port Lincoln in the early 1850s. Although some readers probably took his ‘Reminiscence’ as history, it was in fact a piece of historical fiction.35 Certainly an air of factual authenticity frames the story: it begins for instance with an account of the writer’s own arrival in the young settlement, provides detailed descriptions of the country, and is based on real events. But as historical fiction, the primary purpose of Congreve’s story is to create a more generalised frontier saga in which the pioneer’s experience of ‘trials and hardships’ is played out against Aboriginal foes. Beginning with the butchery of Captain B- (Captain Beevor, killed near Port Lincoln in 1849), a party of Aboriginal warriors goes ‘in search of fresh victims to gratify the appetite thus sharpened’. Moving on to ‘the next station’, they find the hut where Mary, the ‘young and pretty wife’ of a shepherd, is discovered with her baby. As Mary raises her eyes to heaven, she is overcome by the savage ‘chief’ Multulti and his murderous followers. In spite of her brave efforts to save herself and her child, Mary is brutally murdered and her child’s brains are dashed out against the chimney.
This is of course a reference to the spearing of Annie Easton in 1849 in her hut at Elliston, shortly after Beevor’s death. Predictably, Congreve makes no mention of a possibly prefiguring event, the poisoning of Aboriginal people with arsenic-laced flour which the Commissioner of Police suspected may have motivated her and Beevor’s killings, since his point is not to relate historical events but to dramatise the pioneer experience.36 The horrific image of the baby’s brains being dashed out on the chimney is for instance pure invention; the baby was left unharmed. As we know, stories of reprisals for Annie Easton’s death have circulated ever since and remain strong in local social memory to the present day, most famously as accounts of ‘the Elliston massacre’ in which some two hundred Aboriginal men, women and children were alleged to have been forced over the coastal cliffs to their deaths. Two years after Congreve’s ‘Reminiscences’ appeared in The Observer, local writer Ellen Liston published her short story about the same events, ‘Doctor’, in the same paper, and it is likely that Liston drew as much from Congreve’s fictionalised tale of Easton’s murder as much as from other circulating stories.37 Yet unlike Congreve’s tale, which focuses on the drama of Easton’s death, a central theme in Liston’s story is the settler reprisals that followed. In this story, the Aboriginal leader ‘Coolmultie’ who attacks the lone woman is as savage a villain as fiction can imagine. Yet at the story’s end, after the settlers have completed their ‘crusade’ against the local tribe, Liston allows her narrator to reflect on the many deaths exacted by settlers in exchange for one of their own. While Congreve drew on settler tribulations purely in the service of colonial melodrama, Liston’s story identifies something of the culture of settler violence that leaves behind an echo of disquiet.
Simpson Newland’s historical nov
el Paving the Way, first published in 1893, also drew on the lived experience of the South Australian frontier, and it referenced events which included not only the deaths of settlers at Aboriginal hands, such as the Maria massacre of 1840, but also the deaths of Aboriginal people at settler hands, most notably the Avenue Range Station massacre of 1849 for which James Brown was charged but never tried. Despite its conventional framework of colonial romance, Newland is at times openly critical of settler violence and greed for land in the campaign for Aboriginal dispossession:
the white man was the personification of ruthless, all-absorbing power; never satisfied without the whole of the country … Those who have seen the process must unhesitatingly though reluctantly admit that the darkest stain on Australia’s fair fame is her treatment of the aboriginal race. We found them a happy, healthy people and wherever we have come in contact with them, in less than fifty years we have civilized them off the face of the land.38
‘The time has not yet arrived’
The fact that first generation settlers wrote so frankly and openly about violence between Aboriginal people and Europeans should not surprise us. Many of the authors were ‘eye-witnesses’ and some of them participants in events that constituted significant crises in the colony’s foundational years. The massacre of some two dozen survivors of the Maria, and its impact on the young colony, could hardly be ignored: it remains the largest European death toll in any one frontier event in Australia’s history. Aboriginal attacks on overlanders in the early 1840s, at a time when the colony was virtually bankrupt, threatened the economic viability of the colony and culminated in a clash at the Rufus River in which at least 30 Aboriginal people died – again, this was probably the largest Aboriginal death toll in any one punitive expedition in the colony’s history. The attacks on settlers in the Port Lincoln district in the 1840s were concerted to an extent that surprised the colonists, and led to repeated petitions for government protection. The European death toll was already significant and threatening to grow when Governor Grey dispatched a military detachment to the region in the expectation that soldiers would be able to quell the violence. These three events, which became centre-pieces of late nineteenth century accounts of frontier violence, were all initiated by Aboriginal people, and the punitive responses were all sanctioned by colonial authorities. There was little reason for later chroniclers to feel coy about elaborating them in detail.
Out of the Silence Page 18