December 1.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
The suggestion of a treaty existed from early years.
“…the consideration that all aggression originated with the white inhabitants.”
In January 1828 the convict adventurer Jorgen Jorgenson who had recently travelled across the Central Plateau [of Tasmania], had proposed to [Governor] Arthur that 8,500 hectares in that region should be set aside for the Big River people because it contained the best kangaroo hunting grounds in the colony and it could be used as a 'check' on their entering the Settled Districts. [1] But Arthur had another plan – to establish a reserve in the north-east region of the island. It was located well away from the Settled Districts, and he believed that, isolated from the settlers, the Aborigines could be 'civilized' and 'Christianized'. The proposal was based on colonial policy in the British colonies in South Africa and in Canada, where special areas had been set aside to 'civilize' indigenous populations. He knew from Archdeacon Scott in New South Wales that 'civilizing' Aborigines in defined locations outside their own country was alien to their cultural beliefs and practices, but he believed:
It is but justice to make the attempt, for, not withstanding the clamour and urgent appeals which are now made to me for the adoption of harsh measures, I cannot divest myself of the consideration that all aggression originated with the white inhabitants, and that therefore much ought to be endured in return before the blacks are treated as an open and accredited enemy of the government. [2]
On 19 April 1828 he issued a proclamation that divided the island into two parts – one for the settlers, the other for the Aborigines. He appears to have taken this step in the belief that so many Aborigines had been killed in the Settled Districts that the remainder could be 'induced by peaceful means to depart'. But he warned them that should they resist they would 'be expelled by force'. By these 'prompt and temporary measures' he expected to open negotiations with 'certain chiefs of Aboriginal tribes' with a view to their civilisation and 'leading them to habits of labour, industry and settled life'. [3]
The idea of negotiating with 'certain chiefs' and perhaps 'entering into some kind of treaty' had already been suggested by the Quaker settler W.G. Walker. [4]
1. Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson, 35.
2. HRA, series III, vol. vii, 28.
3. ibid., 180-4.
4. TAHO CSO 1/316, 86-8.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 100-101, 370 n.48, n.49, n.50, n.51.
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Two decades later in South Australia
Lisa Ford points out that settler violence was “clothed in law” which, in important ways, settlers constituted and controlled; ‘authority itself was enmeshed in and compromised by settler violence’ and frontier settlers were ‘seldom merely lawless’ but ‘savvy masters of the discourses and the politics of settler jurisdiction’.[1]
...On 5 September [1849], the Register published an editorial titled ‘Murderous Encounters’:
Those settlers who are confirmed in the pastoral career have almost insensibly acquired the persuasion of some ‘right divine’ by virtue of which the lands included in their ‘runs’ and the aboriginal occupiers of the soil have become wholly subject to their absolute rule. They view the sable denizens of the forest as dangerous interlopers, or something worse. [2]
Ford, Lisa 2010, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. pp. 107, 85.
Register, 5 September 1849: 2E
Acknowledgment: Skye Krichauff, “The murder of Melaityappa and how Judge Mann succeeded in making ‘the administration of justice palatable’ to South Australian colonists in 1849”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 41 (2017) pp. 25–26 n.18; 29 n.39