December 2.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Sharing not dispossessing
How can the Aborigines ever own property... if they persist in sharing?
[Samuel] Marsden's view that Aborigines were not materially minded was not inaccurate. The problem was his view that the absence of 'wants' impeded the gospel. Although an obsession with property was a defining European trait, it was a characteristic which was among European society's least Christian features.* How can the Aborigines ever own property, asked William Watson at Wellington [Mission], if they persist in sharing? [1]**
...Although [Marsden] believed the Aborigines to be the most degraded of all people, he believed that the 'task of civilising the blacks' although 'almost a hopeless task', was not absolutely impossible. [2]...Marsden began to see towards the end of his life that Aboriginal people were more degraded by the European presence than they had been before white settlement:
From us they have suffered infinite loss...from us they have contracted the most painful and fatal diseases, under which many of them hourly suffer until death relieves them, and from our example and excitement they are sunk into the deepest moral corruption in every respect. I conceive, as a nation professing Christianity, we have much to answer for on their account to the judge of all the earth. The utmost one can do for them will only be a small atonement, a trifling return for the permanent injury they have sustained. [3]
Despite such sentiments as these, Marsden's vision did not extend much beyond simple charity – gifts of food and blankets.
Watson Diary, 7 July 1836, AJCP, M233, NLA.
Marsden to Scott, 2 December 1826, in Gunson, 1974: 347.
Ibid. p.348.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 75, 83 n.199, n.200, n.201.
* ' The 'real estate' ideology of property can still be seen as an obsession among many Australians, both Christian and non-Christian.
** That Jesus practised something similar to Aboriginal practice, in having a “common purse” (John 13:29) and the practice of sharing amongst his followers described in Acts 2:44, seems never to have been perceived by Christians in Australia then and, to a large extent, now as well. – RB
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They were driven from their country...
Arthur Palmer was one of the [Queensland] politicians who had lived out on the frontier. In public he defended the [Native Police] force. In private it was a different matter. In a letter written in 1882, he expressed sympathy for the ‘unfortunate blacks the way they are treated’. They were driven from their country and ‘whenever they are seen by the Native Police the rule has been to shoot them’. [1] Palmer had been premier for five years in the early 1870s and the minister responsible for the police between 1879 and 1881...He knew what he was talking about.
Palmer to A W Howitt, 5 August 1882, A W Howitt Papers, MS 9356, box 5, folder 1, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 184, 258 n.4.