January 10.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Attitudes past and present
“These savages...appear to us intelligent, cheerful and very deserving.”
Another [churchperson] who was concerned that something be done for Aboriginal people was Archbishop John Bede Polding. Polding arrived in Sydney in 1835 as head of the Catholic Church in Australia, and by 1840 was deeply concerned at the little that his church was doing for Aborigines. He decided to set some initiatives in motion prior to a trip to Europe, first communicating his feelings to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith...in Lyons, the organisation responsible for the Catholic Church's missionary work:
I have felt sincere and deep regret for not having a priest to devote to the conversion of the savage nations. I am convinced by my own experience that the faith would easily spread among the tribes which are removed from all intercourse with the Europeans, with whom any contact is commonly a source of corruption. These savages, the object of so much contempt, appear to us intelligent, cheerful and very deserving. I have had from time to time the opportunity of seeing them, and when I speak to them of religion, I find it very easy to make them comprehend... [1]
Polding to Central Council for the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Lyons, 10 January 1840, cited in Thorpe, 1950: 187.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 109, 142 n.112.
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“...to make them 'quiet'...is effected by massacring them indiscriminately”.
In early 1868, in response to press reports of a Native Police massacre of unoffending Aborigines at their camp on the Morinish goldfield, inland from Rockhampton, [F.W.] Chesson of the Aboriginal Protection Society argued that the level of official neglect and culpability concerning “barbarous outrages” was without example in the colonies. “Many of the leading journalists and public men of Australia have given utterance to strong feelings of indignation at the shocking state of things in Queensland” he concluded. [1] Yet the Colonial Office continued to register its impotence “beyond [the Home Government] raising their voice” in verbal protest at the colony's excessive behaviour. [2]
“Putting it in plain English this is what we Queenslanders do” the editor of the Cooktown Courier commented a decade later: “we set the Native Police on them [the Aboriginal inhabitants] to make them 'quiet'. This is effected by massacring them indiscriminately”. [3]
F.W. Chesson, Aborigines Protection Society to the Duke of Buckingham, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 15 January 1868, Public Records Office (UK), Co 234/21, 57510, 153-54.
Colonial Office, Minutes, 21 January 1867, Public Records Office (UK), Co 234/16, 57333, 282.
Cooktown Courier, 10 January 1877, quoted in Reynolds, Indelible Stain, 109.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, “PLENTY SHOOT 'EM” - The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier” in Genocide and Settler Society – Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses, Berghahn Books, 2005, pp. 159-60, 170 n.34, n.35, n.36.
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...the history of forgetting...began to unravel...”.
Once the colonies federated on 1 January 1901 and the framework for the writing of national history was in place, the desire to forget the violence of the frontier, or at least dismiss it as an inevitable by-product of a far greater good, became stronger. The history required to build the nation was to be different from the history that accompanied colonisation. The nation-state and the historical profession often walked hand in hand, with every political act and gesture conscious of its place in history. Many historians sought to set Australia apart and define its identity. As white Australia and the British connection, the central ideas that sustained the nation between Federation and the 1960s, began to unravel in the late twentieth century, so too did the history of forgetting.
Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas' Point, p. 63.