January 3.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Australia’s Human History
“Australia's human history began over 60,000 years ago.”
Australia's human history began over 60,000 years ago. The continent was discovered by a group of voyagers who travelled across a vast passage of water to a land where no hominid had roamed before. Over millennia, they explored and colonised every region, transforming the terrain as they moved, making the country their own through language, song and story. They harnessed flame to create new ecosystems, dug the earth to encourage crops, and built water controls to extend the natural range of their resources. They thrived in the extreme aridity of the central deserts and hunted the glacier-filled gorges spreading from the Tasmanian ice cap. They enjoyed times of regional abundance, endured great droughts and adapted to millenia-long floods that saw the sea level rise about 125 metres. They watched territories disappear, lakes dry, volcanoes erupt, dunefields form and species come and go. Theirs is a remarkable story of transformation and resilience.
Acknowledgment: Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming – Uncovering Ancient Australia, Black Inc.,Carlton, 2018, p.1.
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Then in the late eighteenth century (according to European time) invading soldiers, convicts, “explorers” and settlers began to take over and rename this ancient land.
...before the pastoral interest sent in the flocks and herds and retainers, and convicts and Native Police, and the state sent in commissioners and magistrates, and the churches their ministers and missionaries, the explorer made his own kind of conquest. By naming the rivers and hills and rocks after the icons of his own culture, he began at once to paint out the past and with it the culture and legitimacy of the land's original inhabitants. Naming those lakes and waterfalls and canyons after Wellington and Victoria...or some wealthy benefactor or great aunt, was an act of stunningly simple effect; with a few strokes, writing the history of the place according to the lights of the explorer and his masters, substituting their ancestors for Aboriginal ones... [1]
A few facts...only 96, of an estimated 2,000-3,000 Kurnai people in the region when the Highlanders arrived in 1841, were left alive to be counted sixteen years later. - Rodney Hall, Preface to Caledonia Australis p. xiii.
Acknowledgment: Don Watson, Caledonia Australis – Scottish Highlanders and the frontier of Australia, Vintage, Milsons Point, 1997, p. xx.
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“We were hunted from our ground, shot, poisoned, and had our daughters, sisters and wives taken from us...”
[Tom] Petrie tells of a quite shocking series of murders of Aborigines on the run next to his own, where his father knew the facts but, because he had to depend on Aborigines' evidence,* saw no point in laying information. [1] Old Dalaipi, who worked for Petrie for a long time, summed up the whole story as the Aboriginal saw it.
We were hunted from our ground, shot, poisoned, and had our daughters, sisters and wives taken from us...They stole our ground where we used to get food and when we got hungry and took a bit of flour or killed a bullock to eat, they shot us or poisoned us. All they give us now for our land is a blanket once a year. [2]
Constance Campbell Petrie, Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland, Curry O'Neil, Windsor, 1980 ed'n, pp.6-7.
Ibid. pp. 182-183.
Acknowledgment: C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1986, p.158.
* Aborigines were not permitted in this period (1840s) to give evidence in colonial courts of law in Australia. Note entry for 27 December.