January 24.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Civilisation
“When savages are pitted against civilization, they must go to the wall...”
Generally speaking, abuses were ignored or accepted as part of the colonizing process. As the Cooktown Herald observed on 24 January 1874,
“When savages are pitted against civilization, they must go to the wall; it is the fate of their race. Much as we deplore the necessity for such a state of things, it is absolutely necessary in order that the onward march of civilization may not be arrested." [1]
In terms of white economics, such wholesale carnage could prove ill-advised. When native police turned their carbines on station blacks, some squatters complained. Although the employment of Aborigines was an obvious answer to the pastoral industry labour shortage, the majority of squatters firmly supported the policy of "keeping the blacks out".
Quoted in N. A. Loos, "Aboriginal Resistance on the Mining, Rainforest and Fishing Frontiers", in Lectures in North Queensland History, D.J. Dalton, ed. James Cook University, Townsville, 1975, p. 166.
Acknowledgment: Ross Fitzgerald, From the Dreaming to 1915 – A History of Queensland, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1982, p. 143.
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Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Early on the golden morning of 13 May, 1787, a fleet of eight ships, the Sirius, the Supply, the Alexander, the Charlotte, the Scarborough, the Friendship, the Prince of Wales and the Lady Penrhyn, together with three store ships, weighed anchor in Portsmouth harbour, and sailed down the Channel for the high seas.
Acknowledgment: Michael Cathcart, Manning Clark's History of Australia, Penguin Books, Australia, 1996, p. 3.
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Possibly an apocryphal story. Mahatma Gandhi purportedly was once asked: What do you think of Western civilization? To which question Ghandi replied:
I think it would be a good idea.
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Private property – regarded...and disregarded
[Citing John Locke Henry Reynolds writes] that no government ‘could take from any [person] any part of [their] property without [their] consent’...The relevance of these sentiments for the Aboriginal peoples needs little accentuation...if Australia had a founding principle, it was the sanctity of private property.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 136, 138.
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...a justifiable war against the invaders of their country…..
A young military officer, William Darling, who spent time with the exiled Tasmanians on the islands in Bass Strait observed that they ‘considered themselves as engaged in a justifiable war against the invaders of their country’. [1] The missionary and so-called protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, spent even more time with the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples out in the bush, and declared that ‘they were staunch lovers of their country’ who considered ‘every injury they can inflict upon White Men as an Act of Duty and patriotism and however they may dread the punishment which our laws inflict upon them – they consider the sufferers under those punishments as Martyrs in the cause of their country. [2]
W Darling to Arthur, 4 April 1832, Sir George Arthur Papers, Ml, ZA 2188
NJB Plomley (ed.), Friendly Mission, THRA, Hobart, 1966, pp. 88, 202.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 35, 250 n.11, n.12