February 19.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...their numbers diminished...’
Aboriginal peoples had a ‘plain and sacred right’ to their soil
In 1835 Britain’s House of Commons established a Select Committee to inquire into the conditions of Aboriginal people in British settlements [in the BritishEmpire]...The Committee’s report of 1837 was forthright in its condemnation of past British policy towards ‘the uncivilized nations of the earth’. This had been a policy that had not only sacrificed many thousands of lives, it stated, but continued to have disastrous consequences for Aboriginal peoples:
Too often, their territory has been usurped; their property seized; their numbers diminished; their character debased; the spread of civilization impeded. European vices and diseases have been introduced amongst them and they have been familiarized with the use of our most potent instruments for the subtle if violent destruction of human life, viz. Brandy and powder. [1]
The Select committee’s report spoke strongly of rights. Aboriginal peoples had a ‘plain and sacred right’ to their soil, and Europeans had not only intruded upon that soil, but had then punished the original inhabitants for presuming to ‘live in their own country’. [2]
House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1837, 7, no. 425. Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements), p. 77.
Ibid., p. 5.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp.pp. 1, 187 n.1, n.2.
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And forty years later...
In February 1878, a teamster named James Ellis was murdered by Aborigines at Granite Creek in the Northern Territory. In an account of the aftermath of Ellis’ murder, the Advertiser reported that Mounted Trooper Stretton had led a combined party of police and settlers who had gone out and ‘administered to the savages a lesson not at all too severe for the occasion’. [1] They had tracked suspects to an Aboriginal camp three miles from the murder scene and, although it was not clear ‘whether any attempt to capture the miscreants was made on this occasion’, the camp was fired upon and ‘seventeen blacks bit the dust’. In their use of firearms, the writer argues, the police party had acted in accordance with their duty, for ‘the blacks are British subjects, and were in armed rebellion against lawful authority’.
Yet having attempted to justify these shootings in terms of ‘lawful authority’, the reporter’s following comments pinpointed precisely the inconsistencies in the workings of the rule of law on the settler frontier. Legal niceties, he wrote, such as evidence and testimonies in a court of law, were cumbersome technicalities that had little reference for frontier conditions and which had all too often led to ‘farcical’ results. [2]
Advertiser, 20 February 1878
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp.124-125, 203 n.90, n.91
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A generation earlier
In 1843,writing from Moorundie on the River Murray where he had been appointed Sub-Protector of the Aborigines and Resident Magistrate, Edward Eyre outlined the ‘legal disabilities’ Aboriginal people were exposed to as British subjects:
In declaring the natives British subjects, and making them amenable to British Laws, they have been placed in the anomalous position of being made amenable to laws of which they are quite ignorant, and which at the same time do not afford them the slightest redress from any injuries they may sustain at the hands of Europeans. [1]
Government Record Group 24/6/1843/170, State Records Office of South Australia.
Acknowledgment: Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence, pp.58-59, 195 n. 14.