February 27.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Legacies of colonialism
… the appalling reduction in the Aboriginal population during the first 150 years of European settlement
The awful but surely undeniable fact of Aboriginal history, the one fact which transcends all other facts and all other estimates, reconstructions, analyses, guesses, misrepresentations, truths, half-truths and lies, is the fact of the immense and appalling reduction in the Aboriginal population during the first 150 years of European settlement. This must be the starting point of any morally responsible discussion of the past treatment of Aboriginal people and therefore must precede any discussion of death by violence.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, ‘Hiding the bodies: the myth of the humane colonisation of Aboriginal Australia’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 27 (2003) p. 81.
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Of course other forces, notably disease, played a far greater role in the Aboriginal population decline, as we have seen. What, then, was the relative weight of these various factors: disease, white and black violence, malnutrition caused by ecological change, and a loss of purpose – all of them legacies of colonialism? Quite accurate figures of Aboriginal depopulation exist for the Port Phillip District because of the presence of Aboriginal Protectors who kept detailed records...Despite the presence of the Port Phillip Protectorate, the violence on the Victorian frontier created a ratio of Aboriginal to European deaths of twelve to one, similar to Australia wide estimates of ten to one. Overall, a pre-contact Indigenous Victorian population of about 10,000 in 1834-35, conservatively speaking, declined to 1907 by 1853 – a decline of 80 per cent in eighteen years. [1] Indeed, if smallpox is included, a huge population loss had already occurred before 1835. Using demographic modelling, Noel Butlin estimated that the Aboriginal population in Victoria might have numbered 50,000 in 1788, but was more than halved in 1790 by smallpox, and halved again by smallpox around 1830, just before European settlement. [2] Settlers faced a much depleted people.
What caused this dreadful depopulation after 1835 of another 80 per cent? It has been estimated that in Port Phillip, of the 8,000 Aboriginal deaths in the first two decades of settlement: 4000-5000 were from disease (up to 60 per cent); 1500-2000 were from violence (up to 25 per cent), including 1000-1100 from white violence; 150 by Native Police; 250 from inter se fighting; and 1000-2000 dying from natural causes (up to 25 per cent), no doubt hastened by malnutrition and ecological stress...Overall in Port Phillip, about six out of every ten Aboriginal deaths was due to introduced diseases, two from white and black violence and two from natural causes in a context of rapid ecological change. Eight of every ten deaths in the frontier period were a legacy of colonialism, or as Alfred Crosby might call it 'ecological imperialism'. This ratio most likely operated on all Australian frontiers. [3]
Blaskett, 'The Aboriginal Response to White Settlement', pp. 394-5.
Butlin, Our original Aggression, pp. 143-4.
For a recent discussion of the Victorian figures, see Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 90-3.
Acknowledgment: Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians – A history since 1788, pp. 76-77, 386 n.56, n.57, n.58.
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“...the fact that they were clearly dispossessed...”
The rights of Australia's original inhabitants thus represent a fundamental condition on the global stage which involves contemporary discourse, ideologies and issues related to mode of production, technology and human behaviour, all of which calls for a special attention and the most sincere and unbiased reflection. Not because of some preference to a particular ethnicity, culture, skin colour, minority or similar, but exactly because of the status of Aboriginal people as Australia's first nations, and because of the fact that they were clearly dispossessed and displaced, afterwards seeing their natural property and civil rights overruled. Moreover, because any analysis and depiction of human history ought to be balanced and focussed on the condition of all humanity, not just a preferred section of the same.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, p4.