January 12.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
European possessiveness and Indigenous sharing.
European possessiveness and Indigenous sharing
Anger about European possessiveness was clearly one of the motives behind the taking and destruction of [white settlers’] and other property. Aborigines acted to make the whites share their goods; the motivation was as much political as economic. It was not so much the possessions that mattered as affirmation of the principles of reciprocity. The great disparity of property merely exacerbated tensions inherent in the situation. Innumerable small skirmishes over European possessions* appearing to be little better than unseemly brawls, were in reality manifestations of a fundamental clash of principle, the outward showing of one of the most significant moral and political struggles in Australian history. The settlers were transplanting a policy of possessive individualism, hierarchy and inequality. Aboriginal society was reciprocal and materially egalitarian although there were important political and religious inequalities based on age and sex. Two such diametrically opposed societies could not merge without conflict. One or the other had to prevail.
The Other Side of the Frontier – An interpretation of the Aboriginal response to the invasion and settlement of Australia,James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981, p.57
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Between Two Cultures
W. M. Ryan, brought up with Aboriginal people, writes of the tragedy of loss of culture for one old man in the Channel Country.
There were now few people in our main camp. It was late 1916 and under the new Aboriginal Protection Act most of the young men and some young women had been taken for work on the various stations around, the men as stockmen, the women as domestic labour at the homesteads. Those left were mostly old people and I noticed that Curraweenya was missing. They told me he had gone to Dingera Creek and that all the elders from the other groups were there for a talk. These talks...only take place in times of great emergency…
Two days later Curraweenya came back and one night he called all the men together and said: 'This is the end. The white man does not know or obey the Law, and we must do what the white man tells us. The young men are all taken and the young women also...The white man says it is wrong for young men to feed old people and there is no place for us in the white man's thinking. We have buried the turinga* forever. There is no more to say'. Little did I know that I was hearing the epitaph of my people; and, in fact, of all the Aboriginal tribes of the south-west.
Curraweenya asked me to get him two plugs of tobacco from the station store, and I did. He took them and said: 'I go now'. I knew what he meant. Somewhere out there in the desert by Nappa merri he would dig a trench to keep the cold wind off him at night, he would build a fire, and then he was home because he was in his own country. He did not carry any weapons because he did not need them...He would not commit suicide, he would just die with his grief... He had failed and he knew not why, only that his people had met a force greater than their own. I know now just how great Curraweenya was. He was not concerned for himself, but for his people. He died, and all the wisdom of years died with him. [1]
W. Mitchell Ryan, White Man, Black Man, Jacaranda, Brisbane, 1979.
Acknowledgment: Lorna McDonald ed., West of Matilda – Outback Queensland 1890s – 1990s, Central Queensland University Press, 2001, pp. 57-58.
Turinga (churinga) – a sacred representation of an Aboriginal totemic usually made of wood or stone; bullroarer. - The Macquarie Dictionary (1982) p. 346.