December 23.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
White progress..traced by blood
“White progress in the Colonies is well traced by the blood they have shed.”
From the day they first arrived in Palmerston [1882] the Jesuits were dismayed at the attitude of white colonial society to Aborigines. [the Very Rev Anton] Strele wrote, '... there whites can hardly conceal the wish of their hearts that all the blacks should be exterminated'. [1] In his first report to his Jesuit Superior, Strele wrote Alborum ingressus in Coloniam, et inter per eam sanguine Albis effuso sattis indicator ('White progress in the Colonies is well traced by the blood they have shed.')
On the Daly River mission, the Jesuits had found themselves in confrontation with settlers and police, including the ubiquitous Mounted Constable Willshire, who had been transferred further north to avoid any more controversy over his treatment of Aborigines in the region of Hermannsburg. It was not just the immediate physical danger to the Aborigines which worried the missionaries, but the corrupting behaviour of settlers, both European and Chinese, bringing liquor, opium and prostitution.
Perhaps hardest of all for the Jesuits, as well-educated men, was the intellectual battle: the need to counter the low view of the Aborigines which pervaded current scientific writing. 'In all that is essential to our nature they are our equal', stressed [Jesuit Donald] MacKillop. It was also necessary to counter the accepted wisdom that this was a dying race. Indeed, the Jesuits knew the Aborigines were in danger of dying out, but not through their own inadequacies. 'The doom of the whole people is not yet sealed' , wrote MacKillop. 'We must move quicker or in the end fail'. [2] He continued:
Australia, as such, does not recognise the right of the black man to live. She marches onward, truly, but not perhaps the fair maiden we paint her. The black fellow sees blood on that noble forehead, callous cruelty in her heart: her head is of iron and his helpless countrymen beneath her feet. But we are strong and the blacks are weak; we have rifles, they but spears; we love British fair play, and having got hold of this continent we must have every square foot. Little Tasmania is our model and, I fear, will be until the great papers of Australia will chronicle, 'with regret', the death of the last black fellow. There is a feeling abroad, too, which might be worded thus – it is God's providence that the native races here, as elsewhere, must disappear before the British people. This, of course, I do not admit. The laws of nature, not God's providence, require that in given circumstances an inferior race will disappear before a superior, but so do they require that death will follow starvation, or be the consequence of poisoning. [3]
Strele, Literae Annuae, 1882, cited in J.C. O'Reilly, The Jesuit Mission Stations in the Northern Territory, Ba (Hons), Monash University, 1967: 86
MacKillop in Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December, 1892.
Ibid.
John Harris, One Blood, pp. 472-473, 525 n.77, n.78, n.79
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The poisoning remembered to the present day.
…poison damper along the coastline laka
truth will set you free
my people live with trauma every day
like cyclone on repeat old man wu’u*
mana lake* our time is running low
gotta learn ‘em song and shake-a-leg
so my culture can grow…
* wu’u = sick (p. 171) mana lake = old men getting sick (p. 169)
**Puuya Kuntha = strong heart
Acknowledgment: Iron Range Danger Gang, “Puuya Kuntha”** “in Homeland Calling – Words from a new generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voices, p. 34.