November 12.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“ My country – all gone.”
Atrocities committed...women kidnapped...traumatic loss of land..denial of tenure... “My country - all gone.”
George Augustus Robinson probably had more first-hand experience of the impact of settler violence than any other European. He was directly involved in the politics of dispossession from 1829 to 1849 in Tasmania and Port Phillip. In Tasmania he spent many months out in the bush travelling with Aboriginal companions at a time when conflict with the settlers still raged. He was informed on many occasions of atrocities committed by frontier settlers and understood the profound anger and hatred which they had provoked. While on the north coast he heard many stories of violence and kidnapping of women by renegade European sealers who lived on the islands in Bass Strait. He wrote reflectively in his journal:
Thus it is that their wrongs are handed down from generation to generation. How can we wonder at their committing outrages upon the white inhabitants? The children have witnessed the massacre of their parents and their relations carried away into captivity by these merciless invaders, their country has been taken from them and the Kangaroos, their chief subsistence, have been slaughtered wholesale for the sake of filthy lucre. Can we wonder then at the hatred they bear to the white inhabitants? This enmity is not the effect of a moment. The flame of Aboriginal resentment can and ought only to be extinguished by British benevolence. We should make some atonement for the misery we have entailed upon the original proprietors of this land. [1]
Given their contact with Aboriginal communities and at least rudimentary knowledge of local dialects, the missionaries and protectors were able to gain some understanding of the Aboriginal reaction to the traumatic loss of their land. This often informed their own view of the nature of colonisation and they tried thereby to moderate the behaviour of the Europeans and stir their conscience about the deepening tragedy being played out on an ever expanding frontier. With an understanding of Aboriginal society came an appreciation of the importance of land and the deep emotion and spiritual ties which bound people to soil. The humanitarians were among the first to reject the views of colonists like [Richard] Windeyer who argued that the Aborigines had no recognisable form of tenure. The pioneer missionary William Walker realised as early as 1821 that the Aborigines 'possessed some tract of country which they call their own'.
...The political and legal importance of the Aboriginal sense of property was clearly apparent to the humanitarian movement. Joseph Orton argued in 1842 that it was 'an important truth' which had been 'designedly or ignorantly overlooked' that the Aborigines had 'decidedly a property in the land of their birth which right is recognized and held sacred by themselves in their respective relations of tribes, families and individuals'. [2] Missionaries in contact with Aborigines who were losing their land were able to understand something of the anguish they suffered. Francis Tuckfield noted in his journal:
...they are conscious of what is going on – they are driven from this favoured haunt and from their other favoured haunts and threatened if they do not leave immediately they will be lodged in the gaol or shot. It is to the missionaries they come with their tales of woe and their language is – 'Will you now select for us also a portion of land/ My country all you gone. The white men have stolen it'. [3]
Plomley, Friendly Mission, op. cit., p. 202.
J. Orton, Letterbook, op. cit., 28 Jan. 1842.
Tuckfield Journal, op. cit., p. 176.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp.31-33, 255 n.31, n.33, n.34.