July 28.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Principles but no treaties or compensation.
“...their rights rest upon principles of justice”.
Despite all the fine words it is doubtful if the [Colonization] Commissioners ever really intended to respect Aboriginal land rights. From the very beginning they argued that the Aborigines were not in actual occupation of the land and therefore there was nothing to negotiate about, or give compensation for. Not everyone was happy with this situation. Humanitarians in both Britain and South Australia felt betrayed.
The first Annual report of the Colonisation Commissioners speaks of lands being reserved for the benefit of the natives. Have such reserves been made? One acre of land has been reserved for the tribes in this vicinity. Princely donation! Well may the native South Australians rejoice in their munificent Christian neighbours – reserve one and take one hundred thousand. But ought such things to be? The rights of the original possessors are not at all affected by Acts of Parliament or Commissioner's Instructions: their rights rest upon principles of justice. It is impossible to deny the right which the natives have to the land on which they were born, from which age after age they have derived support and nourishment, and which has received their ashes. We must give them compensation for that which we deprive them of. Let us, therefore, as honest men, do justice to the Aborigines of our adopted land. [2]
Letter to the Editor from 'A LOVER OF JUSTICE', SOUTHERN AUSTRALIAN, 28 JULY 1838.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Dispossession, p. 80.
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Colonists counted the number of Europeans, sheep and cattle killed, but not those of the Indigenous Kulin clans.
Anthropological and historical analysis of Victorian clans and their leaders is extra ordinarily difficult, mainly because of the rapidity of European usurpation and the government’s failure (unique in British colonial administration) to negotiate treaties of cession and pay compensation in order to legitimise European ‘settlement’. Colonists began their illicit occupation of Kulin land in 1835; within six years almost 12,000 Europeans had appropriated the estates of most Kulin clans and dispossessed the owners. By 1851 the newly-separated colony of Victoria was occupied by 77,345 Europeans, 391,000 cattle and 6,590,000 sheep. The new proprietors did not enumerate the surviving Kulin or count those who had been killed, but their written records carefully tallied the loss of several thousand sheep and cattle and the ‘murder’ of fifty-nine Europeans in the Port Phillip District. [1]
Experienced colonial officials investigating these deaths usually reported that European lust or cruelty had prompted retribution and decided that many reports of stock ‘theft’ were falsified or exaggerated in order to excuse delinquent employees or justify demands for government compensation. Certainly hungry Aborigines did harvest some of the introduced animals denuding their land and polluting their waters, but drought, diseases and dingo depredations were the main causes of stock losses during the 1830s and 1840s.
By 1861 some 540,000 Europeans immigrants had claimed all of Victoria except for the mountains and the mallee country they considered uninhabitable. Fewer than 2,000 of the original owners had survived what eye-witness accounts called ‘wanton slaughter’, starvation, and the effect of European-introduced diseases, notably influenza, measles, tuberculosis and the venereal infections then labelled ‘syphilis’ (the symptoms in fact suggest a combination of syphilis and gonorrhoea). [2]
Serie (1963) provides census totals for Europeans and stock numbers at various dates. Nance 1981 (see also her thesis, Blaskett 1979) identifies 59 European deaths, usefully criticises historians’ errors, and assembles evidence on internecine ‘killings’...
See Barwick 1971 for an account of population decline.
Acknowledgment: Isabel McBryde, 'Mapping the past: an atlas of Victorian clans 1835-1904', Aboriginal History, Vol. 8 (1984) pp. 108-109, n.12, n.13.
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‘The whites, far from showing any regard for the lives of the original owners of the country, ignored all their rights as to property, and yet were most brutal in retaliation when their rights were transgressed.’
Acknowledgment: Northern Star, 28 July, 1914 – Cited in Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, p.60.