February 6.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
How can you buy or sell the warmth of the land?
A call for a ‘truly balanced approach’.
It is thus seemingly still unnoticed (even by many historians) that a genuinely balanced approach to the history of pre-1900 white and black relations in Australia cannot rest solely on an approach to history which is almost exclusively based on the development and population patterns of the victorious white man. A truly balanced approach must take some note of the possible demographic discrepancies between the urbanity and settlement patterns of European Australia and that of the tribal districts and population patterns of pre-contact Aboriginal Australia...The tendency to grant preference to the settlement and population patterns of whites is strengthened by a widely accepted south-eastern and Eurocentric approach to Australian history.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited – Colonial Queensland and the 'History War', Lux Mundi, Brisbane, 2011, p. 5.
History is the most particularizing of the social sciences; it must stand tall to remind the others of the power of contingency in human life...[historians] have a responsibility...to proclaim the deep truth that the world is what it is because of the particular sequences of what has been done. This is not just...a scholars' debate; it is an affirmation of the possibilities of changing the disposition of things...The shape of the world to come remains to be made by human action in circumstances that can never be foretold. [1]
Rhys Isaac, 'History Made from Stories Found: Seeking a Microhistory That Matters’ Common-place 6:1 (October 2005), www.common-place.org (now at http://commonplace.online)
Acknowledgment: Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel, pp. 269, 361 n.71.
____
“…to live as contemporary citizens of Australia is to live inside the ‘unfinished business of settler colonialism’”
Acknowledgment: Jennifer Balin Shelters, et alia cited in a review by Amanda Nettelbeck of Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell eds, ANU Press, Canberra, 2015, in Aboriginal History Vol. 40 (2016) p. 348
____
A leader’s lament for a people’s dispossession of their ancient, ancestral land by white invaders in the nineteenth century.
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sand shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red [human]…
I do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white men who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive. What are [humans] without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, [we] would die from a great loneliness of spirit...All things are connected.
Acknowledgment: Reply, in 1854, by Chief Seattle (b. 1790) to a United States Government plan to buy a large area of his people’s land. Excerpt cited from Environmental Policy and Law, 2 (1976) pp. 148-149.
____
History of Australia’s human occupants goes back thousands of years.
Archaeology [in the Hunter Valley] suggests dates of 20,000 years for human occupation, with some sites as old as 35,000 years. Evidence around Sydney and the Hawkesbury River points to occupation closer to 45,000 years, suggesting people were settling right through this section of New South Wales... Shelters, middens, open camp sites, engravings and art, ceremonial sites and bora grounds have all been recorded throughout the Hunter Valley.
Acknowledgment: Mark Dunn, The Convict Valley – The Bloody Struggle on Australia’s Early Frontier, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2020, p.12.