September 29.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Aboriginal peoples’ land.
“[I] had 'ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil”
Governor Philip Gidley King
Such moral concerns* survived the long voyage to Australia. In 1807 Governor P. G. King prepared a memo for his successor William Bligh offering advice and summing up his knowledge of New South Wales. In a section headed 'Respecting Natives' he observed that he had been unwilling to force the Aborigines to work because he had 'ever considered them the real Proprietors of the Soil'. [1] It was a highly significant comment made on the basis of experience in Australia which stretched back twenty years to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. It was both an official note to a colleague and a confession of inner conviction. But had King thought like that all along? Had he expressed this view to colleagues? Did any of them also think the Aborigines were the real proprietors of New South Wales? Did King worry about the contradiction between his personal belief and the policies of his government which were premised on the doctrine of terra nullius? If he felt it improper to force the Aborigines to work, what did he think about occupying without negotiation or purchase the lands of the real proprietors?
King was not alone. Other settlers shared his scruples and worried about the morality of colonisation. The editor of the Launceston Examiner observed in 1847 that his contemporaries could not 'disburden their minds of the feelings of remorse in enjoying the soil' once the home of the exiled Tasmanian Aborigines. [2] An English visitor of the 1840s reached much the same conclusion, observing that the 'right to Australia' was a 'sore subject with many of the British settlers and they strive to satisfy their consciences in various ways'. [3]
King to Bligh, king Papers, 2, ML MSS. C/189.
29 September 1847.
C. Griffith, The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District, Dublin, 1845, p.170
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. xii-xiii, 253 n.2, n.3, n.4.
* The 'moral concerns' are listed in the immediately preceding entry for 28 September.
____
Aboriginal people trespassers on their own land.
By the mid-1840s the pastoral frontier began to advance rapidly into the interior, and as it did so the clever words of newspaper editors and the ethical dilemmas of evangelists became increasingly irrelevant. For settlers, who were a long way away from Adelaide, and often well beyond the range of police and other government officials, utilitarian concerns prevailed. Not only were they unconcerned about any rights to the land Aboriginal people might have had, they quickly came to view them as trespassers on European land. James Hawker, who established Bungaree station north of Adelaide, describes the attitude of the settlers as they were establishing their runs:
The manners and customs of the natives were not known, and no attempt at friendly overtures were considered necessary towards them in the earlier settlement of the northern districts; in fact, they were looked upon as equally detrimental with wild dogs on a run. All means of extermination were used to drive them away from the runs… [1]
J.C. Hawker, Early Experiences in South Australia, (E.S. Wigg & Son, Adelaide, 1899) p. 12.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions, pp. 5, 141 n.13.