January 31.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Practices and Attitudes
The small print states: 'While expressing horrified indignation that kidnapping should take place in the South Seas, Samuel Walker Griffith pretends to be dispite [sic] the fact that the murder and kidnapping of Queensland natives is occurring under his very nose'.
Caption to illustration in 'Civilization in Queensland' Queensland Figaro, 31 January, 1885.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2013, p.174 No. 24.
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“She ‘caused trouble’, [Constable Murray] said, by preaching a doctrine of equality.”
Annie Lock soon resumed her more usual ministry, going north alone to live among the Walpiri people near Barrow Creek. Annie Lock was an eccentric person, unorthodox even by the standards of her own mission, preferring to work alone among remote Aboriginal people, bringing the gospel and health care…
At the enquiry into the 1928 ‘Coniston Massacre’, Mounted Constable William Murray, who liked to be called ‘the Scourge of the Myalls’, was charged with multiple killings of Aboriginal people. Murray blamed Aboriginal assertiveness on Annie Lock. She ‘caused trouble’, he said, by preaching a doctrine of equality. The Board’s report was critical of missionaries for not keeping Aboriginal people in their place. [1]
Sydney Morning Herald, 2, 3, 9 and 12, 31 January 1929
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.561-562, 605 n.43.
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“By the end of the nineteenth century the racist attitudes which were to be the core of 'colonialism' had long been reinforced...”
The popular ideas justifying expansion were those of extending the boundaries of the British Empire – a convenient identification of self-interest with extension of 'civilisation'; of profit with justice and the gift of the British law. The empire would go on indefinitely bringing the 'natives' under its beneficent control. This concept of the indefinitely extending frontier was not seriously questioned by a settler society, itself the product of such a concept. The relationship of white men to coloured men seemed permanent, both in the Pacific and Asia; very few Australians challenged it, even when [Prime Minister] Hughes during World War I proclaimed his 'Munroe Doctrine in the Southern Pacific'.[1] His intransigence at Versailles on the matter of the New Guinea Mandate would have been impossible except on the assumption that European domination of this area of the world was a very long-term arrangement indeed. The granting of the Mandate to Australia finally extended the frontier to the equator, presenting a challenge to 'native administration' experience and resources which the experience with Aborigines had made the country especially unfitted to meet.
By the end of the nineteenth century the racist attitudes which were to be the core of 'colonialism' had long been reinforced by the developments in popular education. The picture of the lone white man controlling by his influence (and his gun) thousands of coloured men had become part of the reading of the schoolboy.
See Argus (Melbourne) 1 June 1918; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, (House of Representatives) – 11 June 1918, p. 573.
Acknowledgment: C.D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, p. 147 and n.2.