February 23.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...the cruellest abuse...’
A note in regard to terra nullius
The invasion and settlement of Aboriginal Australia has to be understood in the context of British imperial expansion worldwide. By the time the British reached Australia in 1788 the moral justification for taking land from indigenous peoples had been developed on earlier frontiers, and the Royal Navy and British Army were well-experienced in colonial service and frontier warfare. The argument of terra nullius, first cited by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government (1689-90) to justify the British dispossession of the native Americans, was used to ignore native sovereignty in the Andaman Islands in 1789 as well as to claim that Australian Aborigines had no title to their land. [1] Most Europeans accepted these colonial claims as legitimate, but there were a few dissenters. Baudin, the visiting French naval captain, told Governor Philip Gidley King in Sydney in 1802 that the British action of taking Aboriginal land was against 'justice and equity', while as long ago as 1776 the English writer Richard Price pointed out the hollowness of the terra nullius argument when he wrote: 'If sailing along a coast can give a right to a country, then might the people of Japan become, as soon as they please, the proprietors of Britain'. [2]
Anthony Pagden, 'The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c.1700', in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, I, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 34-54; Jeremy Black, War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1998, p. 146; Alan Frost, 'New South Wales as terra nullius: the British denial of Aboriginal Land rights' [Australian] Historical Studies, 19, 1981, pp. 513-23. Merete Borch, 'Rethinking the Origins of Terra Nullius', Australian Historical Studies, 117, 2001, pp. 222-39.
Letter – Post Captain Nicholas Baudin to Philip Gidley King, NSW Governor, 23 February 1802, HR NSW, V: 830; Price quoted in Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c1500-c1800, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1995, p. 82.
Acknowledgment: John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005, pp. 7, 127 n.33, n.34
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A reminiscence on the past.
...The past is all we have. The present is but a breath, and the future doesn't exist except as a projection of the past. The past – the full sum of human experience – is all we have on which to base our hopes and plans, and from which to draw our conversations, ideas and stories. When asked, 'Do you draw your characters from life?', Eleanor Dark responded in exasperation, 'In Heaven's name, what else is there to draw them from?'. [1]
Eleanor Dark, Untitled and undated typescript of a talk or essay about a novelist' 'autobiographical urge'. Dark Papers, MLMSS 4545 Box 10.
Acknowledgment: Tom Griffiths, The Art of Time Travel, pp. 272, 361 n.85.
Events from the past impinge on the present.
...dormitory children on Aboriginal missions and settlements suffered much more than the physical damage of malnutrition and poor amenities. The system, in place for over 60 years, did untold psychological and social damage as well. Mission and settlement families were doubly undermined by the removal mentality; first being taken from extended families and home country, and then having their children separated into the dormitories. This breaking of the child parent bond was the cruellest abuse, with parents reduced to waving to their children through the barbed wire enclosures which prevented access or escape.
Acknowledgment: Rosalind Kidd, Black Lives GOVERNMENT Lies, University of NSW Press, 2000, p.16.