May 8.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Justifications for violent dispossession
The ‘civilising ‘ of the Indigenous inhabitants
It is necessary, in order to make the majority of the community understand the urgent necessity for reform, to dispense with apologetic paraphrases. This, in plain language, is how we deal with the Aborigines: On occupying new territory the Aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there. Their lives and their property, the nets, canoes, and weapons which represent as much labour to them as the stock and buildings of the white settler, are held by the Europeans as being at their absolute disposal. Their good are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away, entirely at the caprice of the white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet; in fact, the first introduction between blacks and whites is often marked by the unprovoked murder of some of the former - in order to make a commencement of the work of “civilising” them. [1]
Brisbane Courier, Saturday, May 8, 1880.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, Preface.
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...and the justifications advanced for dispossessing the ‘dying race’.
Instead of acknowledging a serious social problem, many Queenslanders preferred to rationalise dispossession. The “doomed race” theory (later dismissed by Archibald Meston, the first protector of Queensland Aborigines, as “a shameful subterfuge”) argued that Aboriginal extinction was decreed by historical and biological laws. [1] A popular adaptation of current scientific models, this theory was widely accepted during the late nineteenth century. In 1865, the Brisbane Courier hypothesized: “The miserable creatures who once roamed unrestricted over the vast territory now occupied by our enterprising colonists are fast disappearing. Their case is a hopeless one. It seems to be a general law that the encroachment of the whites brings about the extinction of the blacks. They disappear before the white man’s face.” [2]
During the 1870s, correspondents to the Courier, the Bundaberg Star, the Port Denison Times, and the Queenslander reiterated the same idea, with varying degrees of satisfaction. Some, like J. Mortimer, interspersed their remarks with expressions of regret [3]… [But] the easy passage from ethnocentrism to racism was well illustrated by an outspoken correspondent to the Queenslander in 1880: “He [the native of Australia] never seeks to improve land for those who will come after him. This justifies our presence here; this is the only plea we have in justification of it and having once admitted it we must go the whole length and say that the sooner we clear the weak useless race away the better.” [4]
Archibald Meston, Queensland Aboriginals: Proposed System for their Improvement and Preservation (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1895), p. 20. Meston had oscillating views about the doomed race theory. He ultimately agreed with the common view that Aborigines were doomed (he gave them 50 years) even though he did not subscribe to the theory.
Lang, Aborigines of Australia, p. 83 (quoting Brisbane Courier, 7 Aug. 1865).
See Winifred Cowin, “European-Aboriginal Relations in Early Queensland 1859-1897” (BA thesis, University of Queensland, 1950), p. 61.
Henry Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, p. 105 (quoting letter from “Never-Never”
in Queenslander, 8 May 1880). Emphasis added.
Acknowledgment: Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915, pp.209-210, 257 n.18, 258 n.19, n.20, n.22.
8 May, 1876 - Death of Truganini. Note entry for 18 August and Harris, One Blood, p.99.