The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Inga Clendinnen, an authority on the Jewish Holocaust and respected Australian historian, also baulked at the application of the genocide definition to the Australian context:

  I am reasonably sophisticated in these modes of intellectual discussion, but when I see the word ‘genocide’ I still see Gypsies and Jews being herded into trains, into pits, into ravines, and behind them the shadowy figures of Armenian women and children being marched into the desert by armed men. I see deliberate mass murder.

  Bain Attwood’s Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005) was a fine circuit-breaker to the History Wars. He showed clearly that Keith Windschuttle’s role in these debates was not as a historian. Windschuttle is a reader of history and public intellectual, not a historian, and Fabrication is a work of historiography, not history. I consider Attwood’s book a good starting place for Australian readers of history to think about how we might come to terms with our past. I therefore take his view seriously:

  In my opinion, genocide is neither a necessary nor a useful concept for the task of understanding the nature of the white colonisation of this country.

  But I remain unpersuaded that these views should be the final word. Let me enumerate my reasons.

  First, the fact of Truganini.

  Second, Michael Mansell’s point that ‘the British had more impact on Aborigines than the Holocaust had on the Jews’ is particularly apt in respect of the history of his people. The old people of Tasmania are no more. Only their descendants remain. (Lawson: ‘… if the destruction of their ancestors was not total, it was comprehensive. All original communities had been destroyed since the British invasion, and the population reduction was greater than 99 per cent.’)

  Third, I bridle at assessments that derogate from the gravity of what happened to the Tasmanians. In this respect I am resistant to Attwood’s approach:

  in becoming the universal trope of trauma [the Holocaust] can also simultaneously enhance and hinder other historical and memorial practices and struggles. In the Australian context, it had undoubtedly done both. My concern here, though, is the way in which invoking the Holocaust has become, in some hands, a means by which other crimes are cast as minor by comparison to its absolute evil. As Peter Novick has argued, making the Nazi genocide the benchmark of atrocity and oppression can ‘trivialise’ crimes of lesser magnitude. This is not merely a distasteful mode of speaking, but a truly disgusting one, he points out. Yet, as he suggests, it is one that readily occurs when something like the Holocaust becomes the touchstone in moral and political discourse.

  Without in any way diminishing the Holocaust (as if it could be diminished), I cannot accept any moral comparison that diminishes the fate suffered by the Tasmanians.

  Fourth, the accounts – both from the oral histories of Aborigines and from the documented sources of colonial times – referring to the death of Aborigines on the frontier speak to me of the profoundest moral problem of this history: the heavy discounting of the humanity of the Aborigines. It is not the horrific scenes of mass murder that are most appalling here; it is the mundanity and casual parsimony of it all. No people on earth were considered lower. No people rated lower on the ruling scales of human worth, and their deaths elicited the least level of moral reproval. My point is that while the reproof of the time reflected the morality of the age, the racism that underpinned that calculus cannot hold sway today. The Tasmanians were human beings. They were gone within half a century. And only their descendants remained.

  Fifth, there is Tom Lawson’s thesis in The Last Man, to which I now turn.

  The Scylla and Charybdis of colonialism

  Tom Lawson is professor of history at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. His book The Last Man, published this year, is subtitled A British Genocide in Tasmania. If his thesis has any power, it is to make plain that the consensus view outlined above is a long way from having resolved these questions. He puts forward a compelling counter-interpretation.

  I will avoid a summation of Lawson’s book, for it is better read in its own right. It is worth reading in its own right. Even if you come to these questions with scepticism or indeed indignation, you have a duty to hear out his scholarship.

  If you read Lawson after Reynolds’s An Indelible Stain?, you will be struck by a subtle but critical point made by the Briton about who would wear the indelible stain. For Reynolds:

  the question that Murray’s words still confront us with is whether our history has left an indelible stain upon the character and reputation of Australian governments – colonial, State and federal – and upon the colonists themselves and their Australian-born descendants. [emphasis added by Lawson]

  But in response, Lawson notes that:

  George Murray had not himself been that interested in the moral implications of genocide for the colony, but for the metropole. The ‘indelible stain’ that Murray feared was, it is worth repeating, upon the reputation of the British government.

  It is a crucial reorientation of Reynolds’s framing. The discussion of what happened to the Tasmanians in the first half of the nineteenth century is about a British colony run by the British government. The principal players in this history, Governor George Arthur, his predecessors and successors, his superiors back in Downing Street and their agents, such as George Augustus Robinson, on the colonial frontiers were members and agents of the British government, acting under the ultimate authority of the Colonial Office. They administered British policy, and this would remain the case until responsible government was vested in Tasmania in 1856.

  It probably required a Briton to face this matter squarely. We might want to discuss the legacy bequeathed to subsequent pre-and post-Federation Australian governments and the colonists who were protagonists in and inheritors of this history, but Lawson’s first point is that the destruction of the Tasmanians occurred in a British colony governed by the British Crown:

  This was a British genocide, carried out on the other side of the world by British men, articulating British ideas, discussed in British newspapers and ultimately embedded in British history and remembered in British museums.

  This is Lawson’s account of how an island population of several thousand was reduced to an official figure of seventeen inhabitants in fifty years:

  Some indigenous people in Tasmania died at the hands of settlers who wished to exterminate them. Some died in the process of being removed from land that settlers wished to develop. Some died in the process of being removed from the land and ‘civilised’ into Europeans. Some died from warfare between the island’s nations that was promoted by their declining resource bases, a result of British presence. Some died of imported diseases. And, of course, some survived, but with little or no access to a culture that the British considered worthless and had attempted to destroy. This happened over the course of a colonisation played out during more than 50 years.

  It is not Lawson’s contention that there was a state project aimed at genocide – ‘clearly there was no state project of extermination in either Tasmania or continental Australia’ – but rather that the colonial project itself had a fatal logic – ‘genocide was the inevitable outcome of a set of British policies, however apparently benign they appeared to their authors’ – because ‘even those aimed at protection … ultimately envisaged no future whatsoever for the original peoples of the island’.

  And this is the point that Lawson makes which is so compelling to me, and which is so important to grasp: indigenous Tasmanians were nearly extinguished between the Scylla of extermination and the Charybdis of protection.

  These two pincers served the same ends: the preservation and continued prosecution of the colonial enterprise without relent, with sparing pity, but with no pause to the destruction it was so obviously causing the native peoples of the land being colonised, and of which the colonial authorities were acutely conscious long before the bitter end was reached.

  This is how Lawson puts it:

  the British government knew
explicitly that it had unleashed a destructive process that would eradicate those societies. Its representatives disavowed, and indeed even regretted, the exterminatory impacts of their presence, yet they never faltered, never sought to roll back colonial development. Indeed, they even developed an understanding of the world that saw as inevitable the dying out of ‘inferior’ indigenous races.

  Coming to terms with the past

  Lawson’s is a perspective-shifting analysis for me: that frontier destruction and protection served the same colonial logic. A logic that envisaged no future for the native peoples, whose homelands were to be usurped and societies swept aside by the expanding colonies. Which, in the case of the Tasmanians, led to utter destruction.

  Of course, I have always understood that protection worked in concert with frontier dispossession, and facilitated it. It is just that protection seemed to be, if not pulling in an opposite direction, then at least divergent – ameliorating the harshness of frontier colonisation. Instead, protection pulled in the same direction as the frontier – which is what Lawson shows so powerfully in the case of its conception and inception in Tasmania.

  I am a third-generation legatee of mission protection. The Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford started in 1886 was the initiative of Johann Flierl, a Bavarian missionary en route to German New Guinea. Waylaid in Cooktown, he started the mission after seeing the devastation of the Guugu Yimidhirr peoples in the wake of the Cooktown gold rush of 1873. The following year his successor, George Schwarz, took up Flierl’s mission. The mission was an initiative of its society back at Neuendettelsau, not of the colonial government of Queensland, but following the Aboriginals Protection Act 1897 (later replaced by the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act 1939) the mission and the Queensland state became entwined. Pursuant to these laws, in 1910 my grandfather was removed from the bush as a boy. Dispossession on the frontier and the state’s protection apparatus – native police ‘dispersing’ the frontier tribes, protectors removing children to the missions, and Aboriginal reserves – led to what would be called the stolen generations. Protection provided new souls for the mission. What began in the 1880s as a safe haven for young women and an enticement for young men wanting partners, from 1900 turned into a receiving station for masses of huddled young, separated from their families.

  Protection and preservation were not there for nothing. For the other side of Queensland’s frontier had been and still was a charnel house: consisting of moments when the pitiless logic of colonialism ended in genocidal doom for some groups. As Queensland lacks the defining sea boundaries of the Vandemonian island, the annihilation of tribes on the frontier is more obscure. But there is a wide consensus in Aboriginal histories that the fiction of terra nullius was turned into the remorseless fact of homo nullius in some parts of Queensland.

  As inheritors of the mission’s religion and traditions, people like me necessarily hold complex perspectives on this history. The missionaries’ kindnesses and humanity were mixed with the racialism of the time, and their objection to and support for various aspects of the colonial enterprise does not tell a simple story.

  This dialectic has been part of my life and identity. The dingoes and sheep of my own exploration of our mission history as a student at Sydney University spoke to this historical and spiritual turmoil.

  I will not get into the permutations of the protection regimes that emerged across the Australian mainland following George Augustus Robinson. The Tasmanian model was ameliorated with the setting aside of Aboriginal reserves in other states and the Northern Territory. The attitudes of the churches towards indigenous cultures, languages and heritage – and the conviction and vigour with which they sought to deracinate their charges – varied widely, according to the proclivities of particular denominations, individual missions within denominations, the personalities of key missionary figures, and the period of history. Therefore, while many missions and government settlements destroyed indigenous cultures and languages, others actively preserved them, and unofficially (and later sometimes officially) allowed Christianity to coexist with native religious beliefs. The language of the Guugu Yimidhirr survived because of Missionary Schwarz’s conviction that their mother tongue best conveyed the Gospels to their hearts. Robinson’s prototype house of confinement at Wybalena, Flinders Island, might have been the most extreme example, but its original logic remained at the core of all subsequent protection regimes.

  So how is this to be dealt with? I cannot let Lawson’s thesis on the Tasmanian genocide be set aside, and I also know that without the Lutherans my people would have perished on the Cooktown frontier. It is for me no longer an ambivalence; it is a clear understanding of the good and bad in the past. Yes, it is often said that history has many shades of grey, but this appreciation of complexity and nuance should not provide refuge from the truth that our nation’s history includes times of unequivocal evil and times of redeeming goodness.

  Whatever the ideological and symbolic villainy he represents to Aboriginal people, there is no mistaking Captain James Cook’s extraordinary courage and stature as a seafaring explorer. Indeed, it is ridiculous to dispute it. For me, it is the same with Schwarz. I still cleave to my testimonial to the old man, published in the Australian on the eve of the parliamentary apology to the stolen generations:

  The nineteen-year-old Bavarian missionary who came to the year-old Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford in Cape York Peninsula in 1887, and who would spend more than fifty years of his life underwriting the future of the Guugu Yimidhirr people, cannot but be a hero to me and to my people. We owe an unrepayable debt to Georg Heinrich Schwarz and to the white people who supported my grandparents and countless others to rebuild their lives after they arrived at the mission as young children in 1910. My grandfather Ngulunhdhul came in from the local bush to the Aboriginal reserve that was created to facilitate the mission. My great-grandfather Arrimi would remain in the bush in the Cooktown district, constantly evading police attempts to incarcerate him at Palm Island and remaining in contact with his son Ngulunhdhul, and later his grandson, my father. My grandmother was torn away from her family near Chillagoe, to the west of Cairns, and she would lose her own language and culture in favour of the local Guugu Yimidhirr language and culture of her new home. Indeed, it was the creation of reserves and the establishment of missions that enabled Aboriginal cultures and languages to survive throughout Cape York Peninsula. Today, those two young children who met at the mission have scores of descendants who owe their existence to their determination to survive in the teeth of hardship and loss. Schwarz embodied all of the strengths, weaknesses and contradictions that one would expect of a man who placed himself in the crucible of history. Would that we were judged by history in the way we might be tempted to judge Schwarz – we are not a bootlace on the courage and achievement of such people.

  My childhood home was on the first street on the northernmost side of the village, named after Flierl. Next is the main street named Muni, a rendering of Schwarz’s Guugu Yimidhirr name. These parallel streets name the key figures of our mission history in succession. The third is named after Wilhelm Poland, who, supporting Schwarz, raised a young family in the earliest years of the mission. A prolific writer and translator, he gave an account of the capture by troopers in July 1888 of Didegal, one of the Guugu Yimidhirr still living in the bush, who was suspected of killing a white man three months before. Didegal was treated as an outlaw, like my great-grandfather. Arrimi eluded police all his life, but Didegal did not:

  But, this time, Didegal’s fate was sealed; he was the victim of his own treachery. On the following morning, his pursuers had little difficulty in tracing the clear imprint of his footsteps through soot and ash, and had completed their mission before midday. The man who was still planning mischief 24 hours previously now stood before us in irons, but with that characteristic look of sneering disdain still dominating his dark features. I must admit, I felt a certain compassion towards him. Was he not, after all, a
poor, misguided heathen?

  After a short break, the troopers saddled their horses, shouldered their guns, indicated to the captive that he was to follow them, and made their way back into the privacy and secrecy of the bush.

  No one ever saw Didegal again. Some distance from the beaten track the party was ordered to a halt, a shot was fired, and Didegal was dispatched for good. He was, after all, only a black fellow.

  This is what I mean by the casual parsimony of killing on the frontier. Anonymous, extrajudicial, unreported, mundane. Like eradicating vermin. Or inferior beings of human likeness.

  A Rightful Place

  Burning Men: An American Triptych

  Guy Rundle

  Pete Seeger

  There are people who die at a great age, and it seems impossible they were still alive. When the writer Edward Upward, a quintessentially 1930s writer, Berlin and cabbage soup and railways, died in 2009, amid Facebook and convenience stores, it seemed like a sort of trick of the century. That is not the case with Pete Seeger, the musician and activist, whose passing at the age of ninety-four marks the end of a long continuity.

  Last year he was playing at gatherings at the tail-end of the Occupy movement; he did the first of these in the late ’30s, a tall young man of ferocious energy, wielding a five-string banjo, the then somewhat obscure instrument he’d heard played at a square dance in North Carolina. Before the guitar went electric, the banjo was electrifying, its sharp strings and hard shell giving it an urgent intensity. Seeger sang and played it for strike parties, union benefits, hunger marches, peace rallies; later, for civil rights rallies, antiwar rallies, counterculture gatherings, anti-nuclear concerts, the global anti-capitalist movement, Iraq War rallies, and Occupy. He played protest songs and old folk ballads, songs of war and love, and thousands of children’s songs. He revived and sharpened ‘We Shall Overcome’, wrote ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’, ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ and dozens more, made famous ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and dozens more.