Out of the Silence
Page 20
Cockburn does not pass over their ‘trouble with the blacks’ in the course of listing their pioneering achievements; as in memoirs of the nineteenth century, such frontier struggles are called upon to demonstrate the pioneer’s capacity for strength and resolution. Dealing firmly with ‘molestation by the blacks’ is a sign of the pioneer’s ‘bush heroism’, similar to dealing with difficult country, isolation, and the occasional bushranger.12 In the confident and nostalgic mood of the 1920s, the violence of the pastoral frontier could still be a natural wellspring for an inspiring pioneer legend.
Centennial celebrations
Through the 1930s, as Julian Thomas has shown, an historical culture emerged in Australia that was dominated by the theme of foundation.13 Over the decade, a whole new field of historical writing was produced, including ‘works of economic, political and administrative history, biography and general history, commemorative volumes and school textbooks’, which in cementing a sense of the foundational past, aimed to project a sense of the bright national future.14 At the same time, Australia was preparing for commemorations of British settlement both at national and state level. 1934 saw Victoria’s centenary, 1936 South Australia’s, and 1938 Australia’s Sesquicentenary. On the national scale, Sesquicentenary festivities were primarily geared around presenting the image of a unified and progressive nation in which internal troubles were minimised.15
In this national climate it is hardly surprising that South Australia’s official centennial celebrations in 1836 had little to say about the place of Aboriginal people in the foundational story, either in terms of their ‘humanitarian’ treatment by the colonial state, or in terms of the dramas of the frontier. Rather, commemorative activities served to celebrate not so much the achievements or failures of the past but, as Nicholas Thomas has noted, ‘something of the nation’ that came later.16 Throughout 1936, the state paid honour to one hundred years of progress with a spread of special publications and activities. In November, South Australia’s history as a province of the British Empire was celebrated with an Empire Pageant, performed on the Adelaide Oval for a crowd of almost 24,000 spectators. Involving performances of 14,000 children from the state’s schools, it depicted the Yeomen of the Guard escorting an enthroned Britannia, and included tableaus of the empire’s many colonies, from the Rajahs of India on elephant back, to boys dressed as Canadian ‘Red Indians’, to ‘Wattle Blossom’ girls performing a ‘symbolic dance’ of Australia. The pageant’s combined tableaus offered a vision, as The Mail reported in its pictorial spread, ‘in which Britannia gathered together all peoples of the British brotherhood of nations to pay homage to the flag’.17 Also in November, two marble panels were modelled for the Centenary Memorial at Holdfast Bay, the site of the colony’s Proclamation in 1836. One panel depicted Governor Hindmarsh reading the Proclamation, and the other told a story in marble of one hundred years of civilisation from the first overland journey of cattle to South Australia, to the building of the Overland Telegraph Line, to the moment of Federation.18
Centenary celebrations accelerated in December, in anticipation of Proclamation Day on 28 December. Throughout the month, local governments and schools across the state organised re-enactments of historic moments. These included the Glenelg Carnival’s ‘Proclamation Pageant’, and a performance by the Marist Brothers College in Mount Gambier of the laying down of the Overland Telegraph Line.19 The culmination of celebratory activities across South Australia was the Pageant of Progress, which coursed through Adelaide’s main city streets for more than two miles and contained 236 floats. It was headed by an escort of Mounted Police dressed in uniforms of 1852, and led off with historic floats of Captain Flinders on the Investigator in 1802, Captain Sturt’s journey of exploration along the Murray in 1831, and Governor Hindmarsh’s landing in the HMS Buffalo at Holdfast Bay in 1836.20
In this celebration of European discoveries and arrivals, Aboriginal people appeared only fleetingly as the minor characters who prepared the historical stage for the main act. A ‘Stone Age’ float preceding Flinders on the Investigator captured this role, depicting twenty Aboriginal people in a wattle tree setting ‘centuries in time removed from the white man’. In a nod to South Australia’s pride in its humanitarian beginnings, Aboriginal people were also included in the float depicting Captain’s Sturt’s epic journey along the Murray. The float’s image of Sturt and his men in their whaleboat while ‘armed natives’ menaced them with spears referenced Sturt’s famed reputation as a conciliator in avoiding bloodshed in first encounters with Aboriginal parties and turning potential aggression to goodwill.21 The last float to include Aboriginal figures depicted the arrival of Governor Hindmarsh on the HMS Buffalo, flanked by four Aborigines who added a picturesque touch ‘as puzzled spectators of this historic event’.22 Aboriginal people did not figure in the some 230 floats that followed in the Pageant of Progress; they had appeared to introduce the authenticity of nativeness to the story of white Australian arrival, and here their role ended. ‘Nativeness’ as a borrowed symbol of authentic Australianness appeared in other celebratory events, such as a Corroboree of 5000 Boys Scouts, which attracted visiting scouts from across the British Empire, and opened to the public with an admittance fee of 1/–.23
A special centenary issue of the Advertiser in September paid much attention to ‘a century of progress’, and devoted only one column to the subject of Aboriginal people as the ‘vanishing race’, ‘an anachronism in a fast-moving world’. Having played their introductory role as shadowy extras to the main actors of history, they naturally exited the stage: ‘These, then, were the people who flitted, like dusky shadows, across the background of a stage on which was enacted the drama of the settlement of the colony’.24 In the Royal Geographical Society’s Centenary History of South Australia, Aboriginal people appear again only as a kind of pre-historical sketch, an introduction to the more substantial story of settlement: ‘Into the story, in a vague and shadowy way, came those pleasant, pathetic, nomadic people, the aborigines. As we occupied the stage they receded from it’.25 Shadows without substance, who then depart in silence: this was to be their proper place on the stage of history.
In 1938, Australia celebrated its 150th anniversary of European settlement. The activities were focused mostly in Sydney, commencing on Australia Day, 26 January, and concluding on ANZAC Day, 25 April. The organising committee had Adelaide and Melbourne’s recent centenaries in mind when planning its own re-enactments and parades.26 Starting the celebrations was a re-enactment of Phillip’s landing, held at Farm Cove rather than Sydney Cove to accommodate more spectators. As Phillip and his boatload of marines pulled ashore, they were met by two dozen Aboriginal people who had been shipped in specially from Western New South Wales to add colour to the re-enactment. Lieutenant Ball’s misgivings at the appearance of these spear-waving ‘Indians’ were communicated to the spectators by loudspeaker, as were his instructions to disperse them. With the landing place secured, the Union Jack was raised and a feu de joie fired for King George III.27 Like Adelaide’s Pageant of Progress, Sydney also organised an elaborate procession of motorised floats, the ‘March to Nationhood’, featuring key moments of the young nation’s history. Aboriginal people were again minor players, leading off the parade with a tableau depicting an Aboriginal family ‘cooking possum outside their gunyah’ as the ‘before’ preceding the inevitable ‘after’ of explorers, pioneers, arts and industry. If Aboriginal people were marginal, convicts, as a matter of policy, were entirely absent. Some protested at this omission but it was defended on the grounds that the aim was to reflect Australia’s ‘peaceful development and progress’. As Gavin Souter has put it, ‘It was an early decision of the executive that there should be no representations of war scenes and … it was equally undesirable to depict incidents of convict life in the colony’.28
As Aboriginal extras were being stripped down and painted up to take part in the re-enactment of Phillip’s landing, Aboriginal leaders met to protest the
ir treatment and demand their rights. For the Aborigines’ Progressive Association, 26 January 1938 marked ‘the 150th Anniversary of the Whiteman’s seizure of our country’ and they observed this ‘Day of Mourning’ with a meeting in Sydney’s Australia Hall. The leading resolution protested ‘against the callous treatment of our people by the whiteman during the last 150 years’, and appealed for ‘full citizen status and equality within the community’.29 Speeches at the Day of Mourning urged equal citizen rights, ownership of land and the abolition of the Aborigines’ Protection Board.30
‘Honouring … their obligations’
In retrospect, the Day of Mourning protest meeting in 1938 would come to be seen as the culmination of an inter-war campaign by Aboriginal people for civil and political rights. In New South Wales, William Ferguson and Jack Patten established the Aborigines Progressive Association and challenged the oppressive rule of the Aborigines Protection Board; in Victoria, William Cooper, Secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League, began circulating a petition calling for citizenship rights and a reserved seat for Aboriginal people in Federal parliament;31 in South Australia, the Aborigines Progressive League, led by J.C. Genders, campaigned for a ‘Model Aboriginal State’.32 Aboriginal demands for citizen’s rights were becoming increasingly voiced, from state to state and on a national stage. The commemorative events of the 1930s provided an opportunity for Aboriginal people and their supporters to challenge their marginalisation from a celebratory story of British settlement. David Unaipon, prominent Aboriginal activist and member of the Aborigines Progressive Association, marked South Australia’s 1936 Centenary with a speech from the steps of Parliament House protesting against state surveillance and control over Aboriginal people.33
There was also a mood for change within the broader non-Aboriginal community. The anthropologist A.P. Elkin called for an end to the protectionist policies that had characterised the early years of the century and advocated what was regarded as a more positive policy of ‘uplift’; but although Elkin’s influential book The Australian Aborigines, first published in 1938, paid honour in many ways to the richness of traditional Aboriginal culture, he regarded the only viable future for Aboriginal people as one of ‘absorption’.34 In 1937 the federal government called a meeting of State and Federal Aboriginal authorities in Canberra to discuss and co-ordinate Aboriginal policy. By the end of their deliberations they had agreed that the ‘destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of the full-blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the commonwealth’.35 For William Cooper of the Australian Aborigines’ League, absorption within the Commonwealth did not preclude the realisation of unfulfilled rights. Writing to the Minister for the Interior in October 1936, he emphasised that contemporary Aboriginal people were ‘heirs with the white race of all the rights of British nationhood’, but were also ‘the descendants of the original owners of Australia,’ and that title to their lands was not invalidated by conquest.36
While it seems inevitable that public celebrations happening around the country would have an air of settler triumphalism, the place of Aboriginal people in reflections on South Australia’s history, while minor, was by no means invisible. A number of centennial publications brought Aboriginal people forth from the shadows, not in light of the contemporary rise of Aboriginal rights, but rather in order once again to remember the fraught frontier as an essential part of the pioneer legend. ‘Story of the State: From Wilderness to Wealth in a Hundred Years’ was published by the journalist Ernestine Hill in the Centenary Chronicle. Her piece reminded South Australian readers of many of the more dramatic episodes of violent conflict in the colony’s early history – the murder of young Frank Hawson at Port Lincoln, the massacre of the Maria survivors on the Coorong and the ‘troubles’ on the Rufus River – as illustration of the hardships endured by pioneers in making ‘the country safe for the settlers for all time’, and their efforts in bringing South Australia to modern ‘success and achievement.’37 Ruth Hawker, the granddaughter of prominent pioneer George Hawker, published a centennial children’s story in which a family of modern children journey back into the ‘yesterday’ of the early pioneers. Amongst the excitements they face is an Aboriginal attack on the homestead. This dramatic episode ends happily enough for them: while the girls and women remain stoic throughout, the men, aided by the modern-day boys, beat back the attacking ‘savages’ by shooting as many as they possibly can.38 As centennial contributions to the pioneer legend, Hill’s work harks back to John Bull’s unapologetic tone of pioneer stoicism, while Hawker draws on the literary tradition of ‘Girl’s Own Annual’. In an age divided between increasing demands for Aboriginal rights on the one hand and the significant invisibility of Aboriginal people in commemorations of ‘progress’ on the other, these local commemorative stories served both to announce the violent history of the frontier and to disguise it within an orthodox story of the pioneer.
Yet if an orthodox pioneer legend provided one kind of framework for remembering Aboriginal people, the original intent embodied in South Australia’s Proclamation provided another. A feature of the voices of disquiet that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s is that contemporary calls for Aboriginal rights were anchored in a sense of historical obligation and moral responsibility to fulfil the colony’s original undertakings to protect Aboriginal rights. In 1921, for instance, Dr Herbert Basedow gave a talk in the Adelaide Town Hall in which he outlined his efforts to provide ‘relief’ to the ‘natives of the interior,’ and he reminded his audience of the colony’s first Proclamation in which the Governor ‘promised justice to the blacks and bespoke for them the kindly consideration of the white invaders’.39 In 1929 a correspondent wrote to the Advertiser and protested South Australia’s history of its treatment of Aboriginal people. Quoting extensively from the Proclamation, he emphasised particularly the pledge to punish with ‘exemplary severity’ any acts of injustice against them. ‘Is it not an irony’, he concluded, ‘to speak of the rights of the natives being equal to those of the colonists, and can anyone point out how or where the privileges of British subjects have been allowed the blackfellow? It appears to me that the humane and generous intentions of Governor Hindmarsh have been studiously ignored, rather honored in the breach than the observance’.40
On the eve of South Australia’s centennial year, prominent natural scientist John Burton Cleland addressed the Royal Society with the reminder that ‘the proclamation read by Governor Hindmarsh at the establishment of the Province dealt with the rights and protection of the natives, and only one-third with the affairs of the white inhabitants. Governor Hindmarsh stated that the natives were to be considered as much under the safeguard of the law as the colonists themselves, and equally entitled to the privileges of British subjects.’ He suggested that ‘South Australians could not mark the centenary of their State in a better way than by honouring some of their obligations to the Aborigines’.41 In a letter to the editor on the ‘centenary effort’, a correspondent argued that the current most important task was to enforce ‘the proclamation of His Excellency Governor Hindmarsh’ regarding justice to Aborigines.42 Another noted Hindmarsh’s promise to pursue ‘every legal means to secure to the aborigines all the rights of British subjects’, and asked whether the centennial celebrations would include ‘anything worthy … in living out those charges?’43
A similar sense of historical obligation drove the Aborigines’ Protection League campaign in the late 1920s for the establishment of an Aboriginal State which would be governed by Aboriginal people themselves. The League attracted the support of campaigners such as Herbert Basedow and Dr Charles Duguid, as well as prominent Aboriginal activists including George Rankine, Mark Wilson and David Unaipon. J.C. Genders imagined that the experiment might be commenced in Arnhem Land and, if successful, be replicated in other parts of the country. A petition seeking the establishment of a model Aboriginal state, with 7,000 signatures, was put to the Australian government in 1927.44 The plan was driven
by a deep sense that an historical injustice had to be corrected. Aboriginal people, Genders wrote, were ‘landless proletarians’ whose lands had been over-run, and who ‘wanted some of the land back which has been stolen‘. For him, the recognition of land rights and self-government was not a radical innovation; it was the belated honouring of a ‘time-honoured policy’. He reminded his readers that early Governors, like Gawler in South Australia, ‘had definite instructions’ that ‘land was not to be taken’ from Aboriginal people ‘without their consent’. This was a ‘sacred trust’ that had ‘been greatly neglected’.45 Genders was an octogenarian at the time these proposals were made, a radical conservative who wanted imperial obligations honoured. As historian Andrew Markus has observed, some people humoured Genders for being ‘ahead of his time’, but Genders himself later reflected that ‘in reality his ideas were 150 years out of date’.46
The Sturt re-enactment of 1951
The year 1951 offered a new opportunity for both national and state commemoration with the Jubilee of Federation. As they had done during the national and state commemorations of the 1930s, Aboriginal people used the occasion to promote their rights and culture. The Aboriginal production An Aboriginal Moomba: Out of the Dark was staged at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre, sponsored at the urging of the Australian Aborigines’ League by the Melbourne City Council, which feared the risk of another proposed Day of Mourning.47 In an age of assimilationist policies, as Sylvia Kleinhert has argued, An Aboriginal Moomba served as an affirmation of unbroken Aboriginal cultural identity and ongoing political agency.48 But across the nation, the event that most forcefully captured the public imagination was the re-enactment of Charles Sturt’s epic voyage of exploration from Sydney to the mouth of the River Murray. Sturt’s original journey had been symbolically significant in unifying three states of the Federation, but it also held especial significance for South Australians, for his expeditions of 1830 and 1831 had been influential in the establishment of the South Australian colony.49 The re-enactment of Sturt’s journey would re-animate a foundational moment, one in which the complex history of British possession and Aboriginal dispossession would be channelled into the individual achievements of the explorer.50 The expedition departed Sydney on New Year’s Eve 1950, amidst ‘a blaze of pageantry’. Crowds dressed in period costume sent off the expedition from Government House on what would be a six-week journey. Actors played Sturt and his second-in-command McLeay, while their crew was made up of members of the Australian Military Forces, and was supported by a convoy of army vehicles. The convoy travelled overland to Maude, on the Murrumbidgee River, where their whaleboat was launched into the river. The re-enactment would retrace each stage of Sturt’s original journey based on the record of his journal.