However, much of the violence on the frontier was not of this sort; it was not sanctioned by the state, and it lay beyond even a pretence of the rule of law. While some writers in the late nineteenth century remembered key moments of state-sanctioned violence to justify the history of Aboriginal dispossession and feed the growing mythology of the pioneer, others alluded to a more secretive, less morally certain aspect of the Australian frontier experience, one that was less easy to tell. This was a more localised and personal experience of what Tom Griffiths describes as Australia’s ‘strange frontier’, a frontier not easily given to a ‘romance of heroes and campaigns’. Those colonists who viscerally felt the ‘fear and distain’ that accompanied settlement – who felt required to raise their weapons and fire upon Aboriginal people at times when there were no police, let alone military detachments to support them – often felt the need to be circumspect in their remembrance. In theory, Australia was colonised, not invaded; Aboriginal people were not ‘enemy aliens’ against whom war could be waged, but British subjects protected by the law. Even in retrospect, these ‘founders’, itching to tell of the dangers and dramas they faced as they established their lives in a new world, needed to be cautious about what they revealed.
In the early 1850s Johnston Frederick Hayward was one of the first settlers to establish a pastoral property in the southern Flinders Ranges. The historical record reveals that he was involved in a number of violent clashes with Aboriginal people, the most significant of which entailed the murder of one of his shepherds. Having made his fortune, Hayward returned to England and lived out the remainder of his life as a country gentleman. In these later years, probably the 1880s or 1890s, Hayward wrote a memoir of his time in Australia which remained unpublished until 1929. Replete with allusion, his memoir shows a palpable tension between a desire to reveal and an imperative to conceal the violence of those times. The early years were difficult and dangerous, he tells his reader, but the ‘nigger hunts’, as he puts it, ‘gave a zest to life that was not wholly disagreeable’. Yet despite the many years that have passed, he is still loath to incriminate himself. One of the stories he tells concerns the murder of his shepherd Richardson. In the aftermath of Richardson’s murder, with rumours abroad that Aboriginal people in the district were about to attack his station, he resolved ‘to attack them before they commenced their raid’. He describes in detail his preparations for a dawn attack, but then concludes, ‘beyond giving them a good fusillade … I doubt we did more than frighten them awfully’. Rumours, he adds, that fifteen Aboriginal people had been killed by his men soon dwindled to five, ‘and then just one’. Of the Aboriginal man arrested and imprisoned for Richardson’s death, Hayward writes that when he was eventually released from prison and returned to the district, he soon received that ‘punishment he so richly deserved’. Although Hayward leaves his reader in no doubt that the man was killed in retribution for the shepherd’s death, he is constrained merely to imply it.39
In 1885, Mounted Constable Wurmbrand reported the killing of one Aboriginal man in a clash with police in Central Australia. Missionaries at the nearby Hermannsburg mission complained to authorities that they understood 17 people had been shot. When asked for clarification of his report, Wurmbrand denied the charge, and reasserted that only one man had been killed while resisting arrest. His account was accepted.40 Many years later William Benstead, manager of Glen Helen station who accompanied Mounted Constable Wurmbrand on this patrol, referred to the incident in an unpublished memoir. Warrants were held for the arrest of those they were tracking, he wrote, ‘so on this occasion we ran no risks as far as our necks were concerned; but all the same, caution was used, and whatever happened, it was usually reported as having successfully dispersed the natives; it read better.’ ‘What happened that day,’ he continued elliptically, ‘it is a thing of the past, and of little use writing up now; but I am sure that seventeen out of this lot never killed or troubled anyone else.’41 Even years after the events they describe, settlers, writing only to an audience of family and friends but still aching to tell their stories, felt as reticent to fully confess what they had done as they had when the events had originally transpired.
This opaque aspect of frontier culture is more likely to be more transparent in journal accounts or reminiscences that were not written for publication, and that only appeared in print decades later when the eyewitness accounts of early pioneers were being sought out for publication. Alexander Buchanan’s diary of his overland journey with sheep from Sydney to Adelaide in 1839 was not published until 1924, when it appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. In the editorial introduction, Buchanan is given a place as a great pioneer of the early days of the colony. He is introduced as a man of ‘great repute’ and ‘high character’, who in his lifetime commanded ‘respect and confidence’ to such a degree that his name was known as ‘a household word’. This reputation as a respected pioneer is apparently untarnished by his following narrative, in which he liberally gives accounts of the Aboriginal people he and his party shot during the course of their months-long overland journey. What clearly emerges from his account is that a deliberate culture of terror prevailed in subduing any possible obstacle to the overlanders’ progress through the country. But despite writing daily accounts in his journal of Aboriginal people fired upon and killed by his party, Buchanan maintained the culture of secrecy. Near their journey’s end, when he was asked ‘if the blacks had been troublesome’, Buchanan applied the necessary caution and did ‘not say we had shot any’.42
Whether dealing with privatised violence or with well known events that involved state-sanctioned action against Aboriginal people, most settler accounts of the frontier experience engage in some way the story of conflict with Aboriginal people. For the mainly first-generation settlers who were now producing their narratives as revered pioneers, these encounters were often at the heart of their experience. Some accounts dramatise violence as a vital element of a pioneer adventure narrative, some express a moral ambivalence about Aboriginal dispossession, while others use a vocabulary of concealment that both reveals and disguises the realities of violence. Mostly, though, violence is remembered in terms that serve the burgeoning sentiment of nationalism, with its celebration of the figure of the pioneer. What these foundational accounts demonstrate is a partial kind of remembrance, one that recalls and at the same time forgets. As Simpson Newland noted in his Preface to Paving the Way in 1893, ‘the time has not yet arrived in the life of Australia when the historian or novelist can write with an untrammelled pen’.
Chapter 9
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN WHISPERING
The future of the past: 1900–1920s
By the beginning of the new century, and with the decline of the ‘eyewitness’ pioneers who had recorded their memoirs, the living memory of conflict on South Australia’s frontiers retreated considerably further backstage in the building of a foundational story. Now a state within the new nation, South Australia began more consistently to nurture a pride in the idea that, since foundation, it had always been more benevolent and benign in its treatment of Aboriginal people than was the case elsewhere. Discussions in the press about Aboriginal matters became routinely couched in these terms. In 1909, for instance, an article about the need for protective legislation was prefaced with the assurance that ‘Governor Hindmarsh’s famous proclamation of the province of South Australia breathed a solicitous regard for the welfare of the aboriginal population.’1 Despite the fact that concern for Aboriginal welfare – evident in documents like the Proclamation and the Letters Patent – reflected Colonial Office ideals more than settler sentiments, the idea of ‘solicitous regard’ for Aboriginal welfare began to be adopted more broadly as one of the state’s markers of ‘difference’.2 While this foundational difference could be regarded as a source of congratulation, the place of Aboriginal people in the history of British settlement could also be seen as irrelevant to the present, rendered redundant by the pass
age of time and the ‘inevitability’ of Aboriginal disappearance. Despite the humanitarian concerns of the founding fathers, this writer continued, nothing had altered ‘the practical result’ that Aboriginal people had, ‘with slight exceptions, disappeared from the greater part of Australia’.3 They had no civil rights and warranted none, for ‘the aborigine is a child, and needs for a long while to be treated like a child’. The ongoing neglect of Aboriginal people was justified on the basis that they were ‘incapable of such social, industrial, intellectual, and moral progress as to enable [them] to take any real part in the nation.’ This was the nub: with no place for Aboriginal people in the new nation’s vision of its prosperous future, a presence in its past seemed to have little point.
Despite the fact that Aboriginal peoples’ status as British subjects had been powerfully underscored at the point of first settlement in 1836, over the course of the nineteenth century no over-arching ‘Aborigines Acts’ were passed by the South Australian parliament. In theory of course, Aboriginal people continued to share the same ‘rights and privileges’ as other British subjects; indeed, in the 1890s some were exercising those rights by voting in colonial elections. However, for much of the second half of the nineteenth century the belief that Aboriginal people were a dying race was so pervasive that it seemed just a matter of time before they would cease to be a group about whom legislators needed to bother themselves. This era of calculated neglect changed in the years leading up to and following Federation, as most colonial or state parliaments passed dedicated ‘Aborigines Acts’. The reasons for this change in Aboriginal policy are various, but central to it was the issue of ‘race’. At a time when ‘racial purity’ was being hailed as a hallmark of national integrity, the fact that the ‘half-caste’ population was growing became a matter of concern.
South Australia was the last state to pass an Aborigines Act, not because the government had any doubt about the necessity of it, but because political expediency slowed the process. An Aborigines Bill, modelled on Queensland’s Aborigines Protection Act 1897, had been brought before parliament in 1899, but objections to certain provisions saw it sent to a Select Committee for review. The pastoral lobby were its most vociferous opponents, objecting to the provisions that sought to protect Aboriginal people from exploitation, such as the requirement that pastoralists obtain permits to employ Aboriginal labour. Their objections won the day and the Bill was withdrawn. In 1908 the newly appointed Protector of Aborigines, William Garnett South, a former mounted constable who had served in Central Australia, discussed a proposed bill for the ‘protection and control’ of Aboriginal people in his Annual Report, emphasising that separate Acts were required for South Australia and the Northern Territory on the grounds that ‘in South Australia proper the chief problem is the half-caste, who is yearly increasing’.4 The Act would provide him with the ability to remove ‘half-caste children’ from what he regarded as the degrading influence of camps and the corrupting influence of older relatives. His vision was that Aboriginal ‘full-bloods’ would soon die out while the mixed descent population would eventually be ‘merged into the general population’.5 In 1910, on the eve of the Commonwealth’s takeover of the Northern Territory, the Northern Territory Aborigines Act was passed. South Australia’s Aborigines Act, ‘for the better Protection and Control of Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants’, was passed in 1911. The provisions contained in the 1899 bill, designed to control the employment of Aboriginal labour, remained in the Northern Territory Act but were excluded from the South Australian one.
The Act, like those already operating in the other states at this time, gave the government tremendous control over the lives of Aboriginal people. It gave the Protector power to remove children from their parents. Aboriginal freedom of movement was now strictly controlled; at the discretion of the Protector, Aboriginal people could now be confined to or removed from reserves, and whole districts could be declared off limits to them. Regulations under the Act gave the superintendents of Aboriginal institutions sweeping powers. Aboriginal people could now be removed from an institution or reserve for being ‘habitually disorderly, lazy, disobedient, insolent, intemperate, or immoral’.6 Refusal to obey a superintendent’s ‘lawful orders’ could be punished with a fine or imprisonment. The regulations were akin to those that might operate in a prison or reform school. As Chesterman and Galligan have put it, after Federation and under the various Aborigines Acts of the early twentieth century, Aboriginal people were still technically citizens, but they were ‘citizens without rights’ who were systematically denied the rights and privileges routinely enjoyed by other Australian citizens.7 With South Australia’s Aborigines Act of 1911, the age of surveillance and control of Aboriginal people had truly begun.
In 1911, the same year as the Aborigines Act was passed, the Reverend John Blacket’s History of South Australia was published in a revised and extended edition. An overview of the progress of the colony and its transformation into a twentieth century state, it takes the nineteenth century image of the hardy pioneer and turns him into the guardian figure for future generations. For Blacket, the pioneer did not belong in an age now past, but was the very character best equipped to serve the future needs of the new nation. It would be the future labour of the pioneer’s descendants, rather than the decrees of politicians or lawyers, that would make the nation ‘determined, energetic, masculine, and self-reliant’. The most valuable lesson to be carried down from the pioneers was that success only arises from having ‘battles to fight’, ‘foes to conquer’ and ‘difficulties to surmount’: for it is ‘grappling with difficulties, contending with adverse circumstances, that made our pioneer fathers and mothers the men and women they were’.8 This was a very evolutionary struggle in which, presumably as the ‘losers’ of progress, Aboriginal people were expected to fall by the wayside.
By the early twentieth century, then, the pioneer legend had not only become consolidated as a story of national origins, but also offered an ideal character to a nation anticipating its future prospects. As the twentieth century progressed the pioneering story would come to have increasing weight and influence, and in this story Aboriginal people would play a minor role, either as helpmates in or as obstacles to the pioneer’s efforts. Of the pioneer’s first struggles with Aboriginal people, Blacket had little more to say than that in the early days ‘the native tribes were fierce and treacherous’, and had tested the settler’s patience by giving him ‘much trouble’.9 While the figure of the pioneer was coming to occupy a first place in the emergent story of a proud Australian nation, Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century was entering the age of Aboriginal policy defined by assimilation and governmental control. At the national level, as W.E.H. Stanner famously put it, a ‘great Australian silence’ settled like a blanket over the nation’s consciousness of the history of colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession.
Although the days of the violent frontier seemed to be a barely recalled feature of the national past, in some parts of Australia they were an ongoing reality well into the twentieth century. In August 1928, in the Northern Territory now under Commonwealth jurisdiction, itinerant labourer and prospector Fred Brooks was speared on Coniston station by a Warlpiri party, apparently for abducting an Aboriginal woman, and in the following month, station owner Nugget Morton was attacked. A police party under the command of Gallipoli veteran Mounted Constable William George Murray undertook two punitive expeditions that scoured the country over several weeks. Murray’s official reports of those expeditions documented twenty nine Aboriginal fatalities. Other reports suggest that Aboriginal lives taken in retribution for the station attacks were as high as 70.10 The Coniston massacre took place almost twenty years after the Adelaide Observer’s editor confidently observed that Aboriginal people had, ‘with slight exceptions, disappeared from the greater part of Australia’.11
Only a couple of years before the Coniston Massacre, Rodney Cockburn published a series of sketches on the �
�Pastoral Pioneers of South Australia’ in the Adelaide Stock and Station Journal (1923–1927). It was, and remains, the most comprehensive record of those whose labour on the pastoral frontier led to the wealth now enjoyed by the state of South Australia. Those who, in their own words or by their known deeds, had recorded the ‘troubles’ of the pastoral frontier and documented their own violent retaliations against Aboriginal aggressions – figures such as Robert Leake, James Brown, Fred Hayward, Samuel Stuckey and Alexander Buchanan – are all present in the roll call of Cockburn’s ‘Pastoral Pioneers’, and all receive a high place in the annals of South Australia’s founding fathers.
Out of the Silence Page 19