April 14.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Extreme Brutality
But the protests of the minority have been disregarded by the people of the settled districts: the majority of outsiders who take no part in the outrages have been either apathetic or inclined to shield their companions, and the white brutes who fancied the amusement, have murdered, ravished, and robbed the blacks without let or hindrance. Not only have they been unchecked, but the Government of the colony has been always at hand to save them from the consequences of their crime.
Acknowledgment: 'The Way We Civilise', Cooktown Courier, 14 April, 1880.
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“Aboriginal people were incarcerated on cattle stations, and were subjected to extreme brutality...”
...over both the living and the dead there hung a shadow of death. Its vision was ultimate destruction, its name was history. Many settlers believed that Aborigines were doomed to disappear in the encounter with civilisation... Settlers were secure in the idea that they did not have to kill all the people in order to eradicate them. Time was on the side of the settlers, as death was an event that was overtaking Aboriginal people no matter what they did.
The social Darwinism of the late nineteenth and twentieth century posited the telos of human civilisation moving or evolving toward greater complexity and greater inclusiveness. Survival of the fittest, in social life, meant not only brute power as the measure of success, but the eradication of competition so that the end of history would be marked by a human monoculture. Settlers' sense of destiny allowed them to imagine themselves working with the inevitable (natural) tide of history. The deaths they inflicted were not necessarily intended to destroy whole groups, and many of them believed that what they did not complete, nature or history would complete for them. It was a win-win outcome for death. [1]
Aboriginal people of the Victoria River District understood these relationships very well. They say today that the stations are built on the blood and bones of their ancestors, and while they use the expression rhetorically, they mean it entirely literally. [2] In the cattle country of the Victoria River District there was no hint of soothing the pillow of the dying race. Quite the opposite, Aboriginal people were incarcerated on cattle stations, and were subjected to extreme brutality, including starvation, and physical and sexual abuse. Not all stations were equally abusive by any means, but as I have suggested in Hidden histories, [4] the laws that gave pastoralists almost unlimited power over Aboriginal people ensured that people had few, if any, forms of redress. [4]
There were people who were more kindly disposed towards Aborigines who found this to be a tragedy. A few queried the proposition that Aborigines were destined to die out, seeing in place of destiny a set of practices of dispossession, starvation, neglect, and other forms of cruelty. For example, see Woods, J. 'The Natives in the Far North', Sydney Morning Herald, 22 July, 1880:
D.B. Rose, Hidden Histories: Black stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations, North Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1991: 35.
Rose 1991: 149
My analysis remains situated primarily on VRD and Weave Hill stations because Aboriginal people's understandings of their history vary, and across the north people tell the stories of their lives in the pastoral world differently – see, for example, A. McGrath, Born in the Cattle, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986.
Acknowledgment: Deborah Bird Rose, “Aboriginal life and death in Australian settler nationhood', Aboriginal History, Volume 25, 2001, pp.152, n.19, n.20, n.21, n.22.