January 6.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Occupation and sovereignty
“...putting down the [Indigenous] resistance with what Bonwick described as 'great slaughter'.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie also thought it necessary to demonstrate military strength to the Aborigines. It is often said that Macquarie was exceptionally tolerant, but perhaps this was only by comparison with other governors even less humane than himself. Irked by Aboriginal resistance to the westward expansion of Sydney and particularly angry at what became called the 'harvest raids', Macquarie deployed the military into that region, putting down the resistance with what Bonwick described as 'great slaughter'. [1]
James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, Sampson Low, Son and Marston, London, 1870, p.131.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, p. 39.
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“It was a double occupation.”
The frontier wars were about both the exercise of sovereignty and the ownership of property. The two have often been conflated, and yet the distinction between them lies at the heart of international law. The confusion arose because...the British government claimed to have acquired both together. When annexation took place the Crown became both sovereign and landlord. The Aborigines lost at one and the same time their right to exercise authority over their territory and their customary title to the land. It was a double occupation.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, pp.173-174.
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Ancient Occupation, Ancient Law, Ancient Proprietorship.
The Hawkesbury -Nepean River cuts a large semicircular ring under the edge of the sedimentary sandstone escarpment that was pushed up some 50 million years ago, a process punctuated by various volcanic events that left 'risings' such as Prospect Hill dotted around the plain. About 30000 years ago Aboriginal people were living in this relatively fertile area between the mountains and the coast, and generations of ancestors of the people who lived along the creeks and rivers witnessed the sea rise and flood the river valley that is now Sydney Harbour. During the period from around 18000 to 16000 years a rich estuarine landscape formed in the upper reaches of Sydney Harbour, in Broken Bay to the north and in Botany Bay to the south. These areas were for several thousand years some of the most densely populated regions of Australia.
It was on this tapestry of open woodlands, creeks and rivers across a plain surrounded by rugged mountains and escarpments that warfare between colonists and 'the real proprietors of the soil', as [Governor] King later called them, took place. In many ways, the terrain shaped the nature of the conflict...It united what was a long and at times gruesome and bloody period of wars.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, pp. 6-7.
“In 1788, Aboriginal people were a sovereign people who governed this land with a complex societal structure of law, language and culture.”
~ Pat Dodson
Acknowledgment: Quoted by Michael Mansell, Treaty and Statehood: Aboriginal Self-determination, The Federation Press, Sydney, 2016, p. 74.