January 10.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Attitudes past and present
“These savages...appear to us intelligent, cheerful and very deserving.”
Another [churchperson] who was concerned that something be done for Aboriginal people was Archbishop John Bede Polding. Polding arrived in Sydney in 1835 as head of the Catholic Church in Australia, and by 1840 was deeply concerned at the little that his church was doing for Aborigines. He decided to set some initiatives in motion prior to a trip to Europe, first communicating his feelings to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith...in Lyons, the organisation responsible for the Catholic Church's missionary work:
I have felt sincere and deep regret for not having a priest to devote to the conversion of the savage nations. I am convinced by my own experience that the faith would easily spread among the tribes which are removed from all intercourse with the Europeans, with whom any contact is commonly a source of corruption. These savages, the object of so much contempt, appear to us intelligent, cheerful and very deserving. I have had from time to time the opportunity of seeing them, and when I speak to them of religion, I find it very easy to make them comprehend... [1]
Polding to Central Council for the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Lyons, 10 January 1840, cited in Thorpe, 1950: 187.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 109, 142 n.112.
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“...dispossession...lay at the heart of the imperial project...”
Heather Burke, Amy Roberts, Mick Morrison, Vanessa Sullivan and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation (RMMAC) “The space of conflict: Aboriginal/ European interactions and frontier violence on the western Central Murray, South Australia, 1830–41” in Aboriginal History, Vol. 40 (2016) p. 172.
Conflict anticipated before 1788
The 'defence of the settlement' against the 'incursions of the natives' was discussed before the [First Fleet] left England. In December 1786 Major Thomas Stirling suggested to the home secretary, Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney – then in charge of planning the Botany Bay expedition – that the marines, upon arrival, might be discovered 'to be inadequate to the service', due to the 'increasing numbers' of colonists and the 'uncertain disposition of the natives who may be naturally presumed hostile to strangers forming a settlement among them'...Stirling felt that because of the 'immense tract of country they possess', the inhabitants were certain to be 'formidable and numerous'.
Confirmation of this prescience
[Marines Captain David] Collins [around 1797] reflected that the colonists 'had not yet been able to reconcile the natives to the deprivation of those parts of this harbour which we have occupied'. He continued, 'While they entertained the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies; and upon this principle they made a point of attacking the white people whenever opportunity and safety concurred'.
Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, NewSouth, Sydney, 2018, pp. 18-19, 90-91.
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...the history of forgetting...began to unravel...”.
Once the colonies federated on 1 January 1901 and the framework for the writing of national history was in place, the desire to forget the violence of the frontier, or at least dismiss it as an inevitable by-product of a far greater good, became stronger. The history required to build the nation was to be different from the history that accompanied colonisation. The nation-state and the historical profession often walked hand in hand, with every political act and gesture conscious of its place in history. Many historians sought to set Australia apart and define its identity. As white Australia and the British connection, the central ideas that sustained the nation between Federation and the 1960s, began to unravel in the late twentieth century, so too did the history of forgetting.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, p. 63.