August 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Original proprietors of the country
Conflict around Bathurst in 1824 inspired a vigorous exchange of letters in the Sydney Gazette which canvassed contending views about frontier settlement, attendant violence and the nature of both up-country settlers and the Aborigines. The exchange began in July [1824] with a letter from a correspondent who chose the name Fidelis and who lamented the fate of murdered stockmen: 'so many defenceless and unprotected fellow men' who were stationed 'beyond the reach of succour, inhumanely murdered, robbed, or pillaged'...
Fidelis believed that the attempt to reason with the Aboriginal offenders would be 'attended with as much success, as would the application of eloquence to subdue or command any kind of undomesticated cattle'. So mercy should be 'unquestionably be laid aside' until by a 'true sense of our superiority they would discontinue their murder and rapacity'. [1]
The humanitarian riposte came quickly. In the next issue of the weekly paper Philanthropus denounced the view of Fidelis and introduced many of the themes which were to run through public discourse for many years. He began by affirming the humanity of the Aborigines and the common origin of all peoples. 'I think they have with myself and all other men' [sic] he declared, 'one common ancestor'. He was, therefore, willing to call them brethren, and to 'acknowledge them entitled to my compassion and fraternal respect'. Then in a direct challenge to frontier settlers he declared:
Hence, I have been led to estimate even the least one of these, my despised and injured brethren, at more value than all the sheep and cattle on Bathurst Plains: than all the flocks and herds in the territory of New South Wales; than all the animals in the whole world!
But the Aborigines had a further claim on the settlers. They were the original proprietors of the country to whom was owed 'an equivalent, in such kind and manner as may afford or secure to them the greatest benefit'. This put their attacks on the Bathurst Plains stockmen in a different perspective. 'If we do not approve of their conduct', Philanthropus observed, how can we approve of the settlers' own behaviour 'in having first invaded their land, and in great measure, deprived them of their pleasure and subsistence'. [2]
Sydney Gazette, 29 July 1824.
Ibid, 5 Aug. 1824.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 4-5, 253 n.5, n.6.
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“...one soul of theirs is, like one of our own…”
Catholic Archbishop John Bede Polding and his fellow bishops [wrote] in a pastoral letter in 1869:
[Some of our fellow colonists] in justification of a great crime, have striven to believe that these black men are not of our race, are not our fellow creatures. We Catholics know assuredly how false this is; we know that one soul of theirs is, like one of our own, of more worth than the whole material world, that any human soul is of more worth, as it is of greater cost, that the whole matter of this earth, its sun and its system or indeed, of all the glories of the firmament. [1]
Pastoral Letter of the Archbishop and Bishops of the Province – 1869, cited by P. O'Farrrell, Documents in Australian Catholic History, Geoffrey Chapman, Melbourne, 1969, 413-418.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 32-33, 79 n. 48.