August 12.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The human cost of colonisation
“...members of (Queensland’s) parliament openly admitted shooting blacks...”
The British Society* received most of its intelligence about Queensland from their 'excellent correspondent' in Brisbane, Alfred Davidson, who dispatched 36 letters on a regular basis to London between September 1869 and his death in 1881. He was a persistent and passionate advocate for justice for the Aborigines, an unrelenting opponent of the Pacific Island labour trade. Like many other colonial humanitarians he felt isolated and greatly valued the connection with the Aborigines Protection Society through which he could exert a degree of influence impossible to achieve by action within Queensland itself...
He scanned the colonial newspapers, wrote letters to them himself as well as to the government, lobbied politicians and governors. He was forever frustrated, fobbed off, rebuffed. But as he explained to the Protection Society, 'I still continue to watch every thing and it is known that I do'. [1]
But he was realistic about the forces arraigned against the humanitarians' lobby. 'A few of us have endeavoured to do our best under many disadvantages', he wrote in 1870, but he believed that public opinion was weaker in the colony than in England. The employers, he explained, had a 'clear hold on the newspapers: the claims of capital are felt'. [2] He was deeply concerned about the Torres Strait Islanders who came under Queensland sovereignty in 1879 as the colonial border was pushed north to within a short distance of the Papuan mainland and wrote to the government on behalf of the society. 'I do not expect any support from that quarter', he subsequently explained, 'altho' they will ignore it yet they will have heard what had to be said. I had no reply at which I am not surprised.' [3 ]
Davidson had no illusions about the chance of changing policy towards the Aborigines. 'I am trying to do something for the Aborigines', he informed the Protection Society in 1871, but it was a 'very difficult and discouraging subject'. [4] He explained that members of parliament openly admitted shooting blacks while objecting to any attempts to ameliorate their condition. The murders of these men, he pointed out, are 'publicly avowed and admitted'. [5]
Letters of A. Davidson to F. W. Chesson, ASS, Rhodes House, Oxford, MSS. British Empire S. 18/C132, 4 Jan. 1876.
Ibid., 1 Oct. 1870
Ibid., 16 June. 1879
Ibid., 30 August 1871
Ibid., 12 August 1875
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 102-104, 260 n.26, n.27, n.28 ,n.29, n.30
* This presumably refers to the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) which was an international human rights organisation, founded in 1837, to ensure the health and well-being and the sovereign, legal and religious rights of Indigenous peoples living under colonial power.
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The human cost of colonisation of ‘country’ occupied for tens of thousands of years.
But the path to salvation in this virgin country was not as straightforward as it appeared. For one thing, the road was clearly signposted with the evidence of prior occupation. Every kur (tree), yalluch (river) banyall (valley) woorabee (fish) and murrulbuk (eagle) – every rock, plant and creature – was part of the integrated spiritual, political and economic system for the Wathaurung people, who had made the fertile hunting grounds of the Ballarat basin their ancestral home for tens of thousands of years. For them the gold rush of the 1850s represented a second wave of dispossession; the first was the surge of pastoral expansion – often violent – into Victoria from the 1830s.
It is estimated that prior to European contact there were up to 3240 members of the twenty-five Wathaurung language groups. By 1861, 255 Aboriginal individuals remained in the Ballarat region.
Acknowledgment: Clare Wright, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2013, p.25.