March 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Different understanding of land
Custodianship or real-estate.
Had [the Aborigines] known the implications the arrival of these strangers would have for their future, they may have met the intruders more frequently with violence and less often with curiosity.
The European explorers had a clearer idea of the chain of events they were setting in motion. In 1835 Major Thomas Mitchell wrote: 'As I stood, the first European intruder on the sublime solitude of these verdant plains...I felt conscious of being the harbinger of mighty changes; and that our steps would soon be followed by the men and the animals for which it seemed to have been prepared'. [1] The irony was that the Aborigines had often helped the European explorers and the first settlers as they bumbled through the bush loaded down with equipment and plagued by inexperience.
As time passed the Aborigines realised that the Europeans were permanent intruders who aimed to use their land. At Burrumbeep, Victoria, in 1841, Timberroon of the Bullucs stamped on the ground and yelled at George Robinson: 'Country belonging to me; country belonging to me. My Country'. Similarly, Edward Curr was confronted on the Murray River in the 1840s by an elder of the Moitheriban tribe who spat at him and shouted that the water, the fish and the ducks all belonged to his tribe. [2] Each confrontation was a dramatic clash between the Aboriginal people who saw the land religiously, as an intimate part of themselves and all life, and the Europeans who saw it economically, as a commodity to be taken, exploited, bought and sold.* The clash was enacted again and again as the frontier of settlers moved across the southern and eastern parts of Australia between the years 1820 and 1870.
Unfortunately, the Aborigines were unable to change the course of European history, as it crashed in upon them. In 1822 the British government, 20,000 kilometres away, made a fatal decision. It dropped the duty on Australian wool to one-sixth the rate of that on German wool to encourage wool production in Australia, and to reduce imports from Germany. This led to a rapid expansion of flocks and the inflow of over 200,000 British immigrants to Australia between 1832 and 1850. The frontier of European settlement moved rapidly and inevitably across most of south-eastern and southern Australia. In a fantastic land grab which was never again to be equalled, about 4000 Europeans with their 20 million sheep occupied over 400 million hectares of Aboriginal land stretching from southern Queensland to South Australia by 1860. [3] The Aborigines were quickly outnumbered in their own land.
T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, vol. 2,
T. W. Boone, London, 1839, p. 159.Quoted in A.S. Kenyon, 'The Aboriginal Protectorate of Port Phillip', The Victorian
Historical Magazine, vol 13, no. 3, March 1928, p. 158; E.M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965, pp. 80-81.T.H.Irving, '1850-1870' in F.K. Crowley (ed), A New History of Australia, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1974, p. 154.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians - Black Responses to White Dominance 1788-1994, pp. 36-37, 245-246 n.2, n.3, n.4.
* That moneyed 'real estate' view of Australian land is now a predominant value shaping the lives of millions of contemporary Australians. Presumably it is one of the so-called "Australian values”. In contrast, Indigenous relation to land is best expressed by the term “custodianship”.– RB.