March 13.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Cruelties and Dispossession
“...cruelties have been perpetuated repugnant to Humanity
Tasmania's third governor, William Sorell, reacted in [with] similar [concern] in 1819 when informed about the ways of up-country settlers. In a proclamation on 13 March [1819] he declared:[1]
It is undeniable that, in many former instances, cruelties have been perpetuated repugnant to Humanity and disgraceful to the British character...The Impressions remaining from earlier injuries are kept up by the occasional Outrages of Miscreants whose Scene of Crime is so remote as to render detection difficult; and who sometimes wantonly fire at and kill the Men and…pursue the Women for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their children. This last Outrage is perhaps the most certain of all to excite in the Sufferers a strong thirst for Revenge against all White Men and to incite the Natives to take vengeance indiscriminately according to the general practice of an uncivilized* People, whenever in their Migrations they fall in with Herds and Stockmen. [1]
GOVERNMENT AND GENERAL ORDERS, GOVERNMENT HOUSE, HOBART TOWN, 13th MARCH 1819 – cited by Clive Turnbull, Black War – The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Sun Books, South Melbourne, 1974, pp.57-58.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts. p. 3 n.4.
'Uncivilised' – This word could, on occasions, more aptly describe the violence perpetrated by white settlers in the colonies. See entries for 14 March and 22 March. - RB
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“...the generosity of the treatment [by] the white race, who are dispossessing them...
...although reference to the Aboriginal predicament figured only sparingly in the parliamentary debates that framed the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, an anxiety (at times verging on paranoia) that the faltering folk memory of their displacement invoked seem ever-present. It would be most dramatically conjured by future wartime Prime Minister William Morris Hughes at the inauguration of the national capital, Canberra, in March 1913 when he candidly observed that Australia and the United States were two nations "destined to have our own way from the beginning" - for they had "killed everybody to get it!". As testament, he observed how this "first historic event [sic] in the history of the Commonwealth" was unfolding "without the slightest trace of that race that we have banished from the face of the earth" – that is, the Aboriginal people. "We should not be too proud lest we should, too, in time disappear," he intoned: "We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have". [1]
Such stunning verbal juggernauts were rare; but an adjunct to the White Australia project also involved administratively deciding upon what was to become of the depleted Aboriginal survivors of white dispossession. Even though they had not been entirely "banished from the face of the earth", the landscape of most white Australian minds (and probably consciences) had already been cleared of them by the belief that they were, in any case, "a doomed race", decreed by Western science to "vanish", whatever remedies the settlers might now attempt. [2] As Attorney General Alfred Deakin sanctimoniously intoned during the White Australia debates, he hoped that the "dying race...in their last hours" would be able "to recognise, not simply the justice, but the generosity of the treatment which the white race, who are dispossessing them and entering into their heritage, are according them". [3]
Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 1913, quoted in Meaney, Search for Security, 241.
R. Evans, Fighting Words: Writing About Race (Brisbane, 1999), 124-25; R. McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939, (Melbourne, 1997) 48-59.
R. Hall, Black Armband Days (Sydney, 1998), 136.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, '"Pigmentia" Racial Fears and White Australia' in Genocide and Settler Society, pp.108, 121 n.24, n.25, n.2.