March 20.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“without treaty...or apology.”
Opinions in favour of ‘extermination’
During the years of the Black War many settlers declared that the Aborigines should be exterminated, although they often used the word 'extirpated'. There are sufficient recorded comments of this kind to indicate that such sentiments were commonly expressed and were not regarded as exceptional or out of order in polite society. A prominent landowner giving evidence to an official committee declared that the country must belong to either the black or white race and that there appeared to be 'no other remedy but their speedy capture or extermination'. [1] Other prominent settlers joined the chorus. One wrote to the governor, when conflict was at its height, arguing that if the Aboriginal attacks did not cease 'then the dreadful alternative only remains of a general extermination by some means or other'. [2]
Committee for the Aborigines, Minutes, 1830, TSA, CBE1, p.7.
W Barnes to G Arthur, 20 March 1830, Tasmanian Colonial Secretary in Letters, TSA, CSO1/1/323, p.303
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp.139, 265 n.16, n.17.
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“...the natural owners of the soil are thrust back without treaty, bargain or apology.”
If the Aborigines lived in clearly defined areas and had a strong sense of property the implications were clear – the settlers had dispossessed them and had incurred deep moral obligations to the victims of their hunger for land. By the 1830s and 1840s a minority of humanitarian settlers were expressing deep concern about the development of Australian colonization. Their attitudes reflected the success of the Anti-Slavery movement in Britain and of the establishment of a House of Commons Select Committee to investigate the position of native people in the Empire. If Australia wasn't settled by occupation of wasteland then the nature of local colonization was open to question.
We hold [Australia] neither by inheritance, by purchase nor by conquest, but by a sort of gradual eviction. As our flocks and herds and population increase, our corresponding increase of space is required, the natural owners of the soil are thrust back without treaty, bargain or apology. [1]
While the visitor [G.C.] Mundy was able to look objectively at the situation, some settlers thought that the taking of Aboriginal land was morally objectionable.
It is not just to say that the natives have no notion of property, and therefore we could not rob them of that which they did not possess; for accurate information shows that each tribe had its distinct locality...from these their hunting grounds they have been individually and collectively dispossessed. [2]
G. C. Mundy, Our Antipodes, London, 1857. p. 48.
Rev. J. Saunders reported in The Colonist, 19 October 1838.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Dispossession – Black Australians and White Invaders, p. 76.
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[In 1905] Commissioner Roth observed that:
If the natives continue to be dispossessed of the country upon which they are dependent for their food and water supplies, by their lands being rented for grazing rights at a nominal figure —lands from which the lessees naturally desire to drive them —bloodshed and retribution will be certain to ensue. [1]
Royal Commission, State of Western Australia 1905: 28
Acknowledgment: Pamela A Smith, 'Into the Kimberley: the Invasion of the Sturt Creek Basin (Kimberley region, Western Australia) and Evidence of Aboriginal Resistance', Aboriginal History, Vol. 24 (2000) p. 78.