February 7.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...the title deeds being the stories told and the paintings...
The British, capable of defeating the French, could easily have protected the Aborigines
The British administration in Van Diemen's Land knew what was happening, even admitting to being appalled by it. Governor Thomas Davey wrote in 1813: 'I could not have believed that British subjects would have so ignominiously stained the honour of their country and themselves as to have acted in the manner they did towards the Aborigines'. [1]
Their shame, however, was not sufficient to rearrange their priorities. The authorities no doubt wished that their invasion might have been accepted peacefully by the Aborigines. They made some feeble efforts to curb the settlers' brutality. As in most early Australian settlements, the founding rhetoric contained all the right words:
You are to endeavour, by every means in your power, to open an intercourse with the natives, to preserve them from oppression, and to conciliate their good will – enjoining all persons under your government to live in amity and kindness with them; and if any person shall exercise any acts of violence against them...you are to cause such offender to be brought to punishment, according to the degree of the offence. [2]
The words were empty. The Government did not have the will to enforce the law. It was often said that the British, who had recently defeated the French, could easily overcome the Aborigines. This could well be put another way. The British, capable of defeating the French, could easily have protected the Aborigines. In the final analysis, the possession and settlement of Tasmania was a much more important goal to them than the preservation of Aboriginal life, let alone any recognition of their culture or rights.
Davey, cited in Bonwick, 1870: 59
Lord Hobart to Lieut.-Governor Collins, 7 February 1803.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 88, 139 n.30 and 31.
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“Thus land was owned and mutually recognised as owned, the title deeds being the stories told and the paintings emanating from those stories.”
Each [Indigenous] family was attached to a landowning clan, which owned an 'estate' of land that was theirs to manage and nurture. It had recognised boundaries, denoted by hills, a river or some other recognisable landform. Through kinship relations, marriage and other agreements, people moved beyond their owned estates to forage across a wider range of land according to the season. Groups used each other's estates through reciprocal rights or ceremonies of permission to form these foraging ranges. Thus land was owned and mutually recognised as owned, the title deeds being the stories told and the paintings emanating from those stories. The land of others was not coveted, for without ownership of the story, ownership of land was meaningless.
The important rules of this Great Tradition revolved around land and people, enmeshed into one. Thus all people were interrelated. The great Aboriginal questions upon meeting were: what is your country and who are your kinsfolk? Kinship was the social cement of Aboriginal society. People lived in small groups foraging across the land. They were part of a clan held together by either patrilineal or matrilineal descent.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A history since 1788, pp. 12.
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The first step in liquidating a people...is to erase its memory. Destroy ... its culture, its history.’
Acknowledgment: Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Penguin Books, New York, 1981, p. 159.