February 1.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

 'Snipe shooting'

“...private persons go out to kill blacks... ”

"Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859 [1] and particularly influenced European thought. By the late 1860s and early 1870s Queenslanders were generally aware of his ideas on evolution, and in particular the Spencerian concept of 'the strong exterminating the weak'. [2] Some colonial frontiersmen used this concept to justify the fate of indigenous Australians. The 'doomed race' theory appears to have grown out of a mixture of these racial 'scientific' theories, and 'was a manifestation of ultimate pessimism in Aboriginal abilities'. [3] So much so that 'regarding the law and its duty towards Aborigines', a prominent colonial lawyer and parliamentarian in 1883 wrote that Aborigines were 'in the same position as those lower animals in whose behalf the law in certain circumstances thinks fit to interpose'. [4] In 1875, part-time journalist and then lawyer (and later judge), Charles Heydon, who was on the ship Governor Blackall sent from Sydney to search for the survivors of the wreck Maria off the far north Queensland coast near Cardwell, claimed that:

              ...private persons go out to kill blacks, and call it 'snipe shooting'.  [5] * 

1. C Darwin, ‘The origin of species – By Means of Natural Selection’ in R M Hutchins (ed) Great Books of the Western World – Darwin, Vol 49. Encyclopedia Brittannica, Chicago, 1952.

2. 'It was the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer, and not Darwin, who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" though Darwin came to employ the expression in later editions of Origin of Species', W Sweet, Spencer, Herbert http://www.iep.utm.edu/spencer, p.2. R Evans, "The Owl and the Eagle" in Fighting Words, 1999, p.41.

3. R. McGregor, Imagined Destinies, Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1997, pp. 18. Nearly 60 years later, the editor of the Cairns newspaper Northern Affairs, in June, 1931, was still referring to the North Queensland Aboriginal as 'dying out', p. 17.

4. W E Hearn, The Theory of Legal Duties and Rights: An Introduction to Analytical Jurisprudence, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1883, p. 60.

5. 'Alleged Outrages Committed on the Aborigines in Queensland by the Native Mounted Police', Queensland Votes and Proceedings (QV&P) , Vol. 11, 1875,, p.623. See also Sydney Morning Herald, 2 February 1874, p.3. Heydon went on to become NSW Attorney General, and later a judge of the Industrial Court (1909). See Australian Dictionary of Biography, ADB Online

Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2013, pp. 4-5, 210 n.13, n.14, n.15, n.16, n.17

* For a fuller version of the quote, see the entry for 21 February.

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Strategies of settler colonialism

This is a story of how settlers in overwhelming numbers, bearing new diseases, plants, animals and new technologies, and with the blessing of the British Imperial Government, supplanted the original owners of a continent. Ecological change, disease, violence and force of numbers swept away Indigenous economies and supplanted them with new forms shaped by global capital. Patrick Wolfe and others have identified three strategies of settler colonialism: confrontation, incarceration and assimilation, which he has termed 'the logic of elimination'. [1] To justify these acts, settlers created images and knowledge that eulogised themselves as pioneers and wealth-creators, and denigrated Indigenous people as non-producers and not worthy of owning land. This discourse justified dispossession, and was followed by a Civilising Mission to change those seen not as different, but inferior. Albert Memmi termed this creation of false images and discourses the 'usurper complex' by which those who take power unlawfully have to justify such acts – to themselves and others. All these pathways of dispossession and denigration led to the social, economic, cultural and bodily impoverishment of Aboriginal people….It was perhaps not inevitable – but the practices of colonialism narrowed and shaped the options of both indigenous and settler Australians...

1. P. Wolfe, 'Nation and Miscegnation: Discourse continuity in the post-Mabo era', Social Analysis, no. 36, October 1994, p. 99.

Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A history since 1788, pp. 2-3, 379 n.3.