August 27.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Conscientious objector and Fundamentalism
Conscientious objection in the earliest colony
Australia's first punitive expedition provoked the first clash of conscience. Following the spearing of one of his servants in December 1790, Governor Phillip decided to dispatch a military detachment to punish the tribe considered responsible. He instructed Captain Watkin Tench to take 50 men and capture two of the offending tribe and to kill and decapitate ten others. Tench suggested less stringent measures – six Aborigines captured of which two would be hung and four transported to Norfolk Island. If they could not be taken alive they were to be shot and beheaded. Tench explained that the Governor had determined to 'strike a decisive blow, in order, at once to convince them of our superiority, and to infuse an universal terror' in Aboriginal society.
While Tench sought successfully to moderate the Governor's instructions his younger colleague, the 29-year-old Lieutenant William Dawes, objected to the expedition itself. Although on duty at the time Dawes wrote to his commanding officer Captain Campbell refusing to take part in the venture. Both Campbell and Phillip pressed him to obey orders and threatened him with arrest. After consulting the settlement's Anglican clergyman, Rev. R. Johnson, Dawes agreed to march with the detachment but subsequently told the Governor he regretted his decision. While reporting the incident to the Secretary of State, Lord Grenville, Phillip remarked that Dawes had 'very clearly showed that he would not obey a similar order in future'. A year later he refused to apologise to Phillip although requested to do so. [1]
It was a portentous clash of will, aspiration and conscience. Phillip was the man of empire with a vision of flourishing colonial enterprise. If the Aborigines stood in the way they would be coerced, if necessary by means of terror. Dawes was an evangelical Christian, an enthusiast and humanitarian, a personal friend of William Wilberforce and associated with the nascent campaign against slavery which was soon to widen out and embrace the Empire's indigenous people.
Historical Records of Australia, 1, 1, p.294; Historical Records of New South Wales,1, part 2, pp.543-6.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp.1-2, 253 ch.1 n.1.
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Fundamentalist religion and racism.
In the early 1920s in New South Wales, there were about twenty reserves under state-employed teacher-managers, to which missionaries were granted access. The Aborigines Inland Mission flourished in New South Wales reserves as a fundamentalist church. [1] Charles Rowley encountered Aborigines in country towns of New South Wales in the 1950s and 1960s who believed that 'their skin colour was an affliction visited by God' [2]
...In Queensland, there were thirteen reserves on the mainland by 1924, ten on islands off the coast. The churches ran most of the mainland reserves, and the three mainland reserves run by government were described in 1924 by Australia's Yearbook as 'mostly in the nature of penitentiaries'. [3]
Charles D. Rowley, Outcasts in White Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970, 219
Charles D. Rowley, A Matter of Justice, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1978, 113
Yearbook Australia, no. 17 (1924), 957.
Acknowledgment: Tim Rowse, Indigenous And Other Australians Since 1901, pp. 95, 97, 476 n.1, n.2, n.3.