January 19.

“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey

 

Religion and Remembering

Moral support was provided by quoting Scripture.

While pastoralists were rapidly dispossessing Aborigines of their land, leading Australian colonists sought to justify white intrusion. This was not difficult, for since the Enlightenment, a body of theory existed extolling material progress and European colonizing virtues. Nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon societies like those established in colonial Queensland were particularly ethnocentric and unquestioning in this respect. Moral support was provided by quoting Scripture. As J[ames] D[unmore] Lang explained in the Moreton Bay Courier in 1856, "The white man had indeed only carried out the intention of the Creator in coming and settling down in the territory of the natives. God's first command to man was 'Be fruitful – multiply and replenish the earth.' Now that the [A]borigine had not done and therefore it was no fault in taking the land of which they were previously the possessors." [1]            

  1. Moreton Bay Courier, 19 January,1856 – quoted by Henry Reynolds, "Progress, Morality  and the Dispossession of the Aboriginals", Meanjin 33, no. 3 (Sept. 1974) p.307. 

Acknowledgment: Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915 – A History of Queensland, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1982, pp.204, 257 n.1.

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“The 'unconscious reflex' of silence regarding the history of dispossession...”

Every community needs a creation story, a story which explains the genesis and growth of a people and their culture. In Eden-Monaro, as in many other areas of Australia, explanations for the presence of settler culture have always included reference to the bald fact of Aboriginal occupation. Since colonisation began in south-eastern New South Wales, the story of one culture's progress has been set against another culture's decline. Creating local history has meant finding an explanation for local dispossession.

In Hunters and Collectors, Tom Griffiths wrote of the 'unconscious reflex' of silence regarding the history of dispossession that has pervaded much of Australia's settler culture. [1] On the far south coast and the Monaro, these silences have sometimes been so deafening that they reveal a deep sense of unease in relation to the history of settlement. In southern Eden-Monaro, there has rarely been a rational or comfortable creation story. Almost always, in the region's press and in local histories, there has been a struggle to explain, to forget, or to come to terms with unpleasant memories. But the struggle of settler culture to explain the presence of Aboriginal culture, and the way in which this has changed over time, tells us much about the making of history in Australia.

  1. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, CUP, 1996, p. 108.

Acknowledgment: Mark McKenna, “This Wonderful Invasion” in Looking for Blackfellas' Point - An Australian History of Place, pp. 65, 240 n.6.

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David Reiff, in his thoughtful book entitled Against Remembrance, challenges his readers with these words:

"Lest we forget" is a mournful reminder that...forgetting is inevitable – both on our own parts and with regard to us after we are gone... What is worth paying heed to is just how easy [remembrance] turns out to be for nations to 'revise' and 'rewrite' their collective memories. That alone should signal to us how much closer historical memory is to myth on one side and contemporary politics and ideology on the other than it is to history.

Acknowledgment: David Reiff, Against Remembrance, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2011, p.6, 15.

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