December 19.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Extermination
“The extermination goes on day after day...”
[Alfred] Davidson [Brisbane correspondent to the British Society] was convinced that it had been a mistake to give Queensland 'or any other colony' a constitution without insisting on an 'Efficient Native department' to govern and protect the Aborigines. He related that he was;
telling one of the last Executive Ministry of an act of Native Police oppression and he replied nothing will ever be done for our Aborigines until the Imperial Government does it [sic] he has been in a position to know the feelings of the leading men of Queensland. I believe he is right. [1]
Davidson's passionate denunciation of Queensland policies were largely ignored in the colony. The prominent local politician John Douglas explained to the Protection Society that their correspondent was 'a very excellent man' but that he was isolated and powerless. [2] But the society was persuaded that Queensland was profoundly at fault and condemned the colony in language rarely used in the regular surveys of conditions in all parts of the Empire. The strongest denunciation came in 1874 when the society accused Queensland of pursuing;
in various disguises, the wholesale extermination of the helpless race from whom all has been taken. The extermination goes on day after day, and goes on without any attempt at conciliation, without an effort at civilization, without a pang of remorse, without a feeling of Christian zeal to convert or save. [3]
Davidson was joined in his lonely crusade in 1875 by the Scottish Roman Catholic priest Duncan McNab who arrived in the colony with a long-frustrated ambition to work with the Aborigines. He threw himself into the task, urging bishops and politicians to become engaged in the cause and irritating those he met with his single-minded urgency. Like many humanitarians before and after him McNab was confronted by colonial attitudes and frontier traditions. He was told when he arrived in Queensland that any attempt to 'improve' the Aborigines would fail because they were 'the lowest of the human race' and certain soon to die out. McNab ignored the gratuitous advice which failed to shake his conviction that they had been 'created by God for the same end as other men' [sic] [4]
McNab travelled widely in the colony and soon learnt of the brutality of the frontier, the marauding Native Police and the despair of life in squalid fringe camps.
Letters of A. Davidson to F. W. Chesson, ASS, Rhodes House, Oxford, MSS, British Empire S. 18/C132, 11 May 1869.
ibid. 19 December 1874.
Transactions of the Aborigines Protection Society, 1774-78, London, 1878, p.102.
M. Durack, The Rock and the Sand, Corgi, London, 1971, p.36.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in our Hearts, pp. 104-105, 260 n.31, n.32, n.33, n.34
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Facing history.
Currently in Australia there is a desire amongst many Australians for “truth-telling” in regard to the public acknowledgment of Australian history since 1788. The words of Tunisian writer Nbouri Bouzzi are pertinent:
We must face our memory, judge it, unveil it. Change comes from knowledge..our history is bound by memory and prohibition. We must unveil what we kept hidden in order...to know who we are.” [1]
Notes from BBC Channel 4 TV cited by Joseph Braude, The New Iraq, HarperCollins Publishers, Sydney, 2003, p. 161.