May 12.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Humanitarian concern
A humanitarian’s reading of the situation
[Prior to the 1830s] the first phase of humanitarian concern climaxed in a long, anonymous report [1] sent from New South Wales in October 1826 to the Methodist Missionary Society in London. 'A Letter from a Gentleman in New South Wales to a friend at ----' is 28 pages long and provides a savage assessment of the impact of colonisation. It is an important document requiring close examination. 'Strange to say' the Gentleman began, civilisation has been the scourge of the natives. Disease, crime, misery and death have been the 'sure attendants of our intercourse with them'. Could we but trace each poor individual's history,* he lamented, 'what a tale it would unfold'. The results were not incidental to colonial progress. Indeed it was 'a sad truth to assert' that settler prosperity had been 'their ruin, our increase their destruction'. The colonial venture was marred with a fatal flaw. It was tragic, not triumphant. The fate of the Aborigines shadowed the land. With what pleasure, he asked rhetorically:
can we possibly survey the rapid encroachment of White on these unhappy people? With what feelings can we look forward, but with those of deep regret, when we are assured that every new step which advances our interests is fatal to their existence? That every acre of land reclaimed by our industry is so much wrested from that pittance which Providence has bestowed upon them.
The future for the Aborigines was bleak, the prognosis desperate for if 'such be the truth the ruin of the Aborigines is inevitable'. Tribe after tribe, he concluded, must successively endure the same measure of sufferings until total annihilation 'ends up the sad catastrophe'. 'Should such a state of things be realized', he declared:
what will future generations think of our boasted Christianity, of our lauded Philanthropy when our posterity read in the early page of Australian history the miseries and ruin which marked our adoption of this land – when they find recorded that our proprietorship to the soil has been purchased at such a costly sacrifice of human happiness and life.
But there was more than moral outrage in the Gentleman's lament. He viewed the Aborigines as the legitimate owners of the land and was profoundly troubled by the fact that they were dispossessed without treaty, purchase or negotiation. Justice, he insisted,
demands what humanity dictates and Christianity requires, that we should not usurp the possession of another's rights, however advantageous such may be to ourselves or however easy of accomplishment. How we have usurped the rights of others in possessing ourselves of their land without even the offer of an equivalent. And we have thus done, also, at the heaviest possible cost to the rightful proprietors, viz, their certain ruin. We are then deeply indebted to this unhappy people; debtors beyond what money can repay or restitution recompense – for Property may be returned, but life cannot. Deeply then are we in arrears to these injured Beings at whose expense we live and prosper.
The logic was relentless, the moral judgment unforgiving. 'None can defend our conduct towards the New Hollanders', the Gentleman declared bluntly, 'let us not therefore persist in it, and let them receive from our hands some reparation for the wrongs we have done them'. [1]
Letter to a … Friend, October 1826, Methodist Mission Society, in Correspondence, Australia 1812-26, Folder 4, AJCP.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering In Our Hearts, pp.7-9, 253 n.9.
* For a fuller text of this report see Henry Reynolds, Dispossession pp. 2-3.