May 30.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘Conditions of successful colonization’
Colonisation...was not for those of tender or restless conscience.
Few other things so ensured alienation from mainstream society than a too great concern for the blacks…To those hardened against, or indifferent to, the fate of the Aborigines, such commitment was tantamount to betrayal of race, community, colony or nation. And it was more even than that. The humanitarian called so much into question. They cast doubt on the morality of the whole colonial venture. They burrowed beneath that sense of certainty necessary to push one’s fortune in the new world.
The ‘friends of the blacks’ were seen to gratuitously assume an air of moral superiority, to consider themselves as more virtuous than the rest. Their contemporaries called them Exeter Hall enthusiasts,* maudlin philanthropists, meddling pseudo-philanthropists, do-gooders, bleeding hearts, nigger-lovers and many other abusive epithets.
The problem was that even mild remonstrance about the position of the Aborigines challenged the ethics of colonial progress which was premised on the exploitation of land taken from the real proprietors and even on the eventual extinction of the race. The editor of the Rockhampton Bulletin observed in 1867 that ‘the disappearance of the black race before the face of the white man’, was an inevitable fate to which ‘we must of necessity submit as one of the conditions of successful colonization’. [2]
…Colonisation, it was said, was not for those of tender or restless conscience. The brutal business had to be done. In a letter to the Port Phillip Patriot in 1842 ‘A Colonist’ observed that the
irretrievable step of taking possession of a country infers many minor wrongs to its inhabitants, besides the first great act of spoliation; but he who would govern in a country so situated must steel his breast to their wrongs which are unanswerable. [3]
Rockhampton Bulletin, 6 Aug. 1867.
Port Phillip Patriot, 30 May 1842.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp. xiv-xvi, 253 n.5, n.7.
* The meetings of the Anti Slavery Society were held at Exeter Hall and such were the significance of these political meetings that the phrase "Exeter Hall" became a metonym for the Anti-Slavery lobby.
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…an editorial in the Brisbane Courier of 1865 [described] Aboriginal people in Queensland as ‘the invaded native tribes’ saying that ‘we have made no adequate provision to reserve to them any portion of the broad territory which we have invaded, and which, before our coming, was all their own’. [1] Or when the colony’s leading newspaper proprietor to be, the conservative politician, minister of the crown, co-proprietor of the Brisbane Courier, Charles Hardie Buzacott (1835-1918) in a famous leader in one of his early journals the Peak Downs Telegram in December 1866 stated: ‘We are, and, while both black and white races jointly occupy the country, shall remain in a state of actual war’. [2[
Brisbane Courier 3 Nov 1865, p. 2.
Peak Downs Telegram 11 Dec 1866 editorial.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p. 43, n.64, n.65.
Tickets of Leave
A Ticket of Leave (TOL) was a document given to convicts when granting them freedom to work and live within a given district of the colony before their sentence expired or they were pardoned. TOL convicts could hire themselves out or be self-employed. They could acquire property. Church attendance was compulsory, as was appearing before a Magistrate when required. Permission was needed before moving to another district…
Acknowledgment: Convicts of Australia