November 25.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...justice, forbearance...land’
“Unease about settlers' abuses against Aboriginal people in the region.”
At the same time as settlers in the centre were petitioning the Chief Secretary for the formation of a Native Police force to protect their pastoral interests, the missionaries at Hermannsburg were expressing their unease about settlers' abuses against Aboriginal people in the region. In October [1884] the Adelaide-based Protector of Aborigines, Edward Hamilton, requested information from the mission about the degree to which local Aboriginal people might have 'suffered injury from whites'. Reverend [W.F.] Schwarz replied with a cautionary letter, expressing the view that if Aboriginal people were showing hostility to the whites, 'most decidedly has [the whites'] treatment much to do with it'. Drawing on 'what I myself have seen', he asks: when 'treated in the most unjust manner, who can wonder that the Natives at last exasperated try to avenge themselves?' Settlers' punishments of native outrages, he continued, was fatal rather than legal, and made no differentiation between the innocent and the guilty, 'for instance an old woman was brought here who was looking indeed miserable, shot by whites and died here. Most certainly she had not killed any cattle. There could be written much more over this matter'. [1]
Hamilton forwarded Schwarz's letter to the Commissioner of Crown Lands, with a reminder of the economic as well as the moral benefits to be gained by preserving Aboriginal goodwill in the Centre. He urged:
the desirability of some steps being taken to protect these Aborigines from arbitrary and oppressive ill treatment at the hands of European settlers and their employees. There is little doubt but acts of this nature frequently occur and they tend to establish ill feeling, and lead to outrages on both sides involving the government in a costly and inglorious struggle with the Blacks, who if they were treated with a little more justice and forbearance would doubtless live amicably with and prove of much use to the pioneer settlers of these remote localities. [2]
Schwarz to Hamilton, Far Northern Division Police Journal, 24 November 1884, SAPHS 000319.
Hamilton to the Commissioner of Crown Lands, Far Northern Division Police Journal, 30 December 1884, SAPHS 000319.
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Wilshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 26, 189 n.36, n.37.
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“For Aboriginal people...land was the physical and symbolic base for almost every aspect of life.”
There are strong grounds then for arguing that for Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia before the invasion, land was the physical and symbolic base for almost every aspect of life. Social relations were expressed, managed and negotiated through relations to land; political standing was legitimated and authority grounded in landholding. Knowledge was structured by its relation to place, and it was taught, held in memory and performed according to this organisational framework...When we consider how Aboriginal societies...survived the invasion, these social, political and cultural meanings of land are crucial. The onslaught took a terrible toll of the lives of countless senior, authoritative and knowledgeable men and women who died because of introduced disease, violence and then the illnesses arising from poverty and repression...Yet the Aboriginal people who survived carried with them a cultural experience of seeing land as the central organising principle of their society.
Acknowledgment: Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, p.23.