In the previous post, I looked at how Australian history, in the popular imagination and in academic circles, is dominated by narratives that are too often spun out of little but outraged assertion and fanciful interpretation. On the other hand, careful examination of primary sources, many of which are only now being put into easy public access, tells a very different story.
There are, in particular, three dominant narratives of Australian history, as taught in Australian schools:
• Aboriginal people were “herded” onto missions;
• Aboriginal people were driven from their lands;
• Countless children were stolen from their families.
The previous post looked at the last first, and showed how it creaks, if not collapses, under the weight of primary evidence. Of the other two:
Herding Aborigines onto missions
Between 1840 and the present, the Aboriginal population on missions never exceeded 20 per cent of the total Aboriginal population in contact with the state, except during the Depression when it rose to about 30 per cent. In other words, for most of the time, more than 80 per cent of the Aboriginal population lived away from missions, across the state.
As I also pointed out to an outraged narrative-believer, to argue that Aborigines would never have voluntarily gone to missions and become, as the majority are even today, devout Christians, is to deny Aboriginal people agency. It also ignores a common fact of long-standing Aboriginal culture: nomadism. Rare, initial-contact memoirs such as William Buckley’s are unequivocal that, traditionally, Aboriginal people moved near-constantly within their lands. Living as they did off the bounty of the land (and living remarkably well), they went, to put it bluntly, where the food was.
Missions, more importantly, their rations, were a new and abundant source of food. Naturally, Aboriginal people gravitated to them as seasonally as anywhere else.
Mission staff rarely numbered more than three or four. They were flat out issuing stores, building cottages, supervising farm work, running the schools, providing medical attention. As far as I know, no mission ever had a fence around it to keep people in.
Many times in the Protector’s correspondence, an issuer would ask urgently for more stores as a large number of “Natives”, sometimes hundreds, had arrived at their depot. A few weeks later, they were gone again. People came and went as they chose […]
At Point McLeay, from [George Taplin]’s journal, from the letter-books and from the Protector’s letters, one can read of hundreds of people suddenly arriving from down the Coorong or from up the Murray for ceremonies. They camped a mile or two away, and needed provisioning. A week or two later, they had gone back to their own country.
This would have been an entirely familiar way of life to many Aboriginal Australians. Others chose to settle more permanently, where they were expected to be self-sufficient.
Rations were strictly for the sick, aged and infirm, mothers with young children, and orphans. Able-bodied people were expected to hunt or fish or gather, or work for farms and stations. Families that had been deserted or widowed were also provided with rations […]
Rations were provided to isolated individuals. For example, on many occasions, an old man or woman on a station might need to be looked after. The Protector asked the lessee to ask the person if they wanted to go to a mission to be better cared for there, but they said no, they wanted to stay on their land, so he arranged for the station-lessee to provide that person with rations, often for years […]
In sum, there does not seem to be any evidence of “herding”, or any obvious intention to ever do so.
It should also be borne in mind that some of the most recognisable and vibrant strands of modern Aboriginal culture stemmed from mission life. The renaissance in Aboriginal art owes much to missions such as Oenpelli and Hermannsburg.
The famous dot painting style, meanwhile, originated at the Papunya settlement, according to National Museum of Australia, an “assimilationist settlement”, for Aboriginal Australians “been forcibly removed from their homelands”.
Driving Aborigines from their lands
There is only one instance in the Protector’s letters of a pastoral lessee trying to drive people from his lease (in 1876), and as soon as the Protector was informed, he wrote to remind the lessee that he would be in breach of his lease, which stipulated that Aboriginal people had all the traditional rights to use the land as they always had done, “as if this lease had not been made”, as the wording went. It was assumed that traditional land use and pastoral land use could co-exist, as, of course, they could and still can. I’m informed that that condition still applies in current legislation […]
The Game Act has always expressly exempted Aboriginal people from restrictions on hunting and fishing in “close season”, even now […]
From the earliest days, Aboriginal people were encouraged to lease plots of land, up to 160 acres rent-free, and to live on the land, which was usually in the country they came from […]
During the 1890s, more than forty Aboriginal people, including at least three women, held such leases. One mission may have wound down precisely because the more capable men took out leases of their own, leaving the mission bereft of labour and in debt.
In sum, there does not seem to be any evidence of any intention to drive people from their country. Again, quite the reverse.
So, if there is so much primary evidence to the contrary, why are the clearly flawed – if not false – dominant narratives clung to so tenaciously, even literally furiously?
Because the conventional paradigm, the “black-armband” version, fits together. It makes sense. It doesn’t need evidence. And perhaps in other states – Queensland, for instance – conditions were harsher for Aboriginal (and Islander) people. But that’s for researchers up there to follow up on, if they will.
There are such things as facts.
Quadrant Online
Unfortunately, nowadays facts are ‘hate speech’ and ‘harmful misinformation’.
None of this, of course, is to suggest that the colonisation of Australia was a benign and utopian process. Of course there was suffering, even brutality, but how could it have been otherwise, given that it was a process that brought perhaps the most diametrically opposite cultures on Earth into collision?
Aboriginal women and children were, indisputably, often treated appallingly. But, then, so, all too often, were women and children in general. Especially those forced into the loving arms of the state.
History, as I wrote in the first part, is complex and difficult. Unfortunately, complexity and difficulty are too much for some people to deal with. Far easier to furiously assert simple narratives, no matter how false.