December 1.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
‘Violence was clothed in law.’
“...most colonists were “extirpationists at heart”
The leading scholar of the history of Tasmanian Aborigines, N.J.B. Plomley, believed that in the 1820s most colonists were “extirpationists at heart” and there is no doubt that at the time, genocide was openly talked about – or rather what was termed extermination or extirpation. [1]
Many examples of these views could be adduced. William Barnes, a justice of the peace, landowner, and brewer, wrote to Governor Arthur in March 1830 expressing his alarm about continuing Aboriginal hostility. If acts of mutual vengeance did not cease, he remarked, “then the dreadful alternative only remains of a general extermination by some means or other”. [2]
Rural landowner George Espie informed the official government committee set up to deal with the Aboriginal question that in his view the country must either belong to the Black or the White, and that he could see “no other remedy but their speedy capture or extermination”. [3] Temple Pearson, another prominent settler, gave advice to the Colonial secretary in June 1830, arguing that:
Total extermination however severe the measure, I much fear will be the only means left to the government to protect the Whites. [4]
...The colonial newspapers regularly reported on conflict in the interior, and called at times for the destruction of the tribes. In 1826, after reporting several murders of frontier shepherds, the editorial of the Colonial Times declared:
We make no pompous display of Philanthropy – we say unequivocally, SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE – THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES – IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS AND DESTROYED. [5]
N.J.B. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission, [Hobart, 1966], 435.
Colonial Secretary: In Letters, TSA, COL/1/323, 303.
Aborigines Committee Records, TSA, CBE/1, 7.
Colonial Secretary: In Letters, TSA, COL/1/323, 380.
1 December 1826.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?” in Genocide and Settler Society, pp. 141, 148 n.46, n.47, n.48, n.49, n.51.
____
Two decades later in South Australia
Lisa Ford points out that settler violence was “clothed in law” which, in important ways, settlers constituted and controlled; ‘authority itself was enmeshed in and compromised by settler violence’ and frontier settlers were ‘seldom merely lawless’ but ‘savvy masters of the discourses and the politics of settler jurisdiction’.[1]
...On 5 September [1849], the Register published an editorial titled ‘Murderous Encounters’:
Those settlers who are confirmed in the pastoral career have almost insensibly acquired the persuasion of some ‘right divine’ by virtue of which the lands included in their ‘runs’ and the aboriginal occupiers of the soil have become wholly subject to their absolute rule. They view the sable denizens of the forest as dangerous interlopers, or something worse. [2]
Ford, Lisa 2010, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. pp. 107, 85.
Register, 5 September 1849: 2E
Acknowledgment: Skye Krichauff, “The murder of Melaityappa and how Judge Mann succeeded in making ‘the administration of justice palatable’ to South Australian colonists in 1849”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 41 (2017) pp. 25–26 n.18; 29 n.39