February 16.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘The land was taken...by force.’
“The land was taken...rhetorically, as well as by force.”
[Another] factor in shaping early colonial encounters was the logic of colonial possession. The land was taken from the Eora, the Dharug and the Kuringgai rhetorically, as well as by force. David Day argues, in his book Conquest, that dispossessing another people of their land has three stages: a legal claim, a practical assertion of ownership, and a moral assertion of ownership. [1] We have already seen how the British justified not offering a treaty to reinforce the legal claim by [Captain James] Cook at Possession Island in 1770. The practical assertion of ownership took many non-violent forms and was practised over decades after 1788...
Many settlers fenced, built and tilled the soil to confirm their claim. To the British, planting a crop or erecting a hut had always been an effective assertion of ownership.* Army officers and officials soon aped the gentry back home, building fine villas and estates across the Cumberland Plain, laying it out to agriculture. In doing so, they totally transformed the Aboriginal landscape into an English one – or as near as they could; fomenting a revolution of ecology and power in this space more complete than any European political revolution. This was the Australian Revolution, the outcomes of which are still reverberating.
D. Day, Conquest: A New History of the Modern World, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2005, pp. 1-14.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A History Since 1788, pp. 26, 27, 381 n.21
* For claims that Aboriginal occupants did these very things, see Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture, Magabala Books, Broome, 2018. For a differing perspective note Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers Or Hunter-Gatherers - The Dark Emu Debate, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2021.
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Hunting Indigenous people.
Some of the most chilling examples of frontier attitudes are those, like [Edward] Hobkirk’s, which are contained in private records. As historian Richard Broome notes, looking at the private letters of settlers helps us ‘to fully understand the frontier and its violent face’. However, the fact is that exhaustive research has turned up few accounts, and most are brief, but no less disturbing for their brevity. In fact, the terseness and almost mundane character of the remarks is troubling because it implies how easily frontiersmen dismissed the lives of Aboriginal people. Writer George Carrington related in his book Colonial Adventures and Experiences how he saw on one station, ‘two large pits full of dead blackfellows, of all ages and both sexes’. [1] A journal entry by prospector James Mulligan stated: ‘Mr Firth’s people are gone out after the blacks’. [2] Station manager Blagden Chambers described the finding of twenty-five bodies after ‘a Native Police action’ on the Warrego River in the early 1860s. [3]
One particular form of brutality, sometimes associated with Native Police operations, was the practice of “nigger-hunting”, which one author referred to as ‘a most unpleasant task’ but one that ‘had to be done if the white man was to make good as a stock producer’. [4]
George Carrington, Colonial Adventures and Experiences (London, Bell and Daldy, 1871), 152-3.
‘Expedition in Search of Gold and Other Minerals in the Palmer Districts, by Mulligan and Party’ in Queensland Parliamentary Votes and Proceedings 3 (1876), 403-4.
Blagden Chambers, Black and White, (Melbourne: Methuen, 1988).
G.J.C. McDonald, Beyond Boundary Fences (Perth: Hesperian Press, 1996), 82.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 pp. 67-69, 275 n.49, n.50, n.51, n.54