Category Archives: Australian history

Unfortunately, I think that Australians may be more aware of African American political activists than they are of Indigenous Australian ones. William Cooper is now commemorated by an electoral district and a statue in Shepparton, but neither of these capture Cooper’s contribution to Australian history – in fact, in some ways they do a disservice to it. William Cooper’s attempt to have designated Aboriginal representation in Parliament never eventuated to this day, and the Shepparton statue commemorates an event which was only tangentially connected with his lifetime of Indigenous activism. The resolute, handsome face that stares out from the cover of Bain Attwood’s book William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story should be instantly recognizable to us, but it is not.

William Cooper was a Yorta Yorta man, born on the junction of the Murray and Goulburn Rivers in northern Victoria. His date of birth -sometime around 1860- is inexact, but as Attwood points out, the actual date was largely immaterial compared with the significance given to the place of someone’s birth, their family and kinship group and totem. Nor was his paternity particularly relevant. Attwood claims that that the Yorta Yorta, like other groups, tried to establish a reciprocal kin relationship with the white invaders of their country, by encouraging sexual relationships between their women members and whitefellas (p.5). Thus, several of Cooper’s siblings adopted the surname of Atkinson, for John Olbury Atkinson who worked on the nearby Moira run as overseer, while other siblings (including Cooper) adopted Cooper as their surname, perhaps for Edward Cooper – or maybe not. This meant that Cooper was “half-caste”, a distinction which he himself vehemently rejected, but which came to have ramifications as Aboriginal Mission policy changed over time. He was taken as a child to Melbourne in 1867 by the leaseholder of the Moira station, politician John O’Shanassy, and appeared to have lived with him in his Camberwell mansion Tara Estate- or maybe he worked for O’Shanassy in his New Imperial Hotel in Elizabeth – it’s not really clear. In any event, he returned to the Moira estate on his own Country as a teenager, and learned horse-breaking and pastoral skills that he drew on for the rest of his working life.

It was around 1874 when ‘Billy’ Cooper first approached the Maloga mission, established by Daniel and Janet Matthews on land selected by the Matthews brothers on the Barmah sandhills on a bend of the river Murray. This land had been traditional ceremonial grounds, and was formerly part of the Moira station – a source of later conflict. He moved there largely for the safety of his mother and younger siblings, but he himself moved away to work on surrounding pastoral stations. In 1881 the Matthews were joined by Thomas Shadrach James, from Mauritius, who worked as a teacher there and later married Cooper’s sister Ada. Cooper returned to Maloga more or less permanently from 1882, and two years later, he converted to Christianity, part of a wave of conversions amongst Indigenous men at Maloga at this time. The influence of the Matthews and Thomas James on Cooper’s political mindset was fundamental. Through their preaching, and drawing largely on the Old Testament and hymns, they gave him a framework that held that all people were God’s children and thus potentially equal, and that salvation was promised in the future for the oppressed. (p. 38) Shortly after his conversion, Cooper married Annie Murrie, but she died suddenly of respiratory illness after having two children. He remarried 21year old Agnes Hamilton in 1893 and over the next seventeen years she was to have seven children, six of whom survived infancy. However, the Maloga mission fell victim to the priorities and policies of the Aborigines Protection Association NSW which comprised white clergymen, philanthropists and leading parliamentarians under the patronage of the governor himself. Maloga was stripped bare, and incorporated into Cumeroogunga Mission, which is better known today. After initial problems, Cumeroogunga boasted 60 buildings by 1908, with three streets, gravel footpaths, a church, a meeting house, a school, a dispensary, storerooms and many outbuilding. With over 300 people, it was the largest Aboriginal reserve in NSW. But Cooper left the Mission in 1909 after conflict and controversy over the refusal to grant land blocks arose yet again, and following Agnes’ death from tuberculosis. Further deaths followed, including his eldest daughter in August 1913, his eldest son Daniel at Ypres during WWI, and several years later, Jessie the eldest daughter from his marriage with Agnes died of peritonitis after giving birth. In 1928 he married for a third time, to Sarah McRae (daughter of the artist Tommy McCrae). Cooper was to live to a ripe old age, but the reality of the foreshortened Aboriginal life expectancy, meant that he was surrounded by family deaths. In 1933 he and Sarah decided to move to Melbourne and embarked on a new phase of his activism as a seventy-year old.

Here Cooper set in train the actions for which he is best known today. He established the Australian Aborigines’ League around 1934, an organization which is often confused with the Aborigines Advancement League (of Victoria) which was formed in 1957. He was supported in this by several white supporters. The first was English-born fervent Christian and self-described “Christian communist” (p. 119), Helen Baillie, who had connections with many other Christian humanitarian networks involved in missionary work among Aboriginal people. The second was Arthur Burdeu, another fervent Christian, but wary of left-wing influences subverting Aboriginal organizations. Like Cooper, he was a strong Labor man; they had both lost family members in the Great War, and they lived relatively close to each other. He was appointed president of the Australian Aborigines’ League, even though by its constitution, full membership was only open to Aboriginal people. This raises the inevitable question of whether the League remained the voice of Cooper and other Aboriginal members, and whether the letters in Cooper’s name (generally composed by Burdeu) represented his views. By looking at the way that Cooper and Burdeu worked together, Attwood concludes that the letters in Cooper’s name by and large did represent his views, although formal statements were generally Burdeu’s work (p. 132). Cooper was joined by fellow Indigenous campaigners Shadrach James (his nephew) Anna and Caleb Morgan, Margaret Tucker, George Patten and and Doug Nicholls.

So what were Cooper’s views? Throughout all his activism – right from his time at Maloga- he drew on his Christian belief that as the first people of the land, created by God, and as British subjects, they had a rightful claim on the land, and on the government. However, ‘equal rights’ or ‘citizenship rights’ as distinct from Indigenous rights, were conditional in the sense that they rested on the capacity of their people to exercise them – not so much an entitlement as something that had to be earned (p.134). He framed this in different ways at different times.

At a time when Aboriginal people’s difference was deemed to be the cause of their plight and constituted the grounds upon which they were denied the rights and privileges enjoyed by British subjects, they emphasised their common nature with their fellow Australians and demanded the same rights as Australian citizens had. But in pressing these claims they often made reference to their difference, though the differences they had in mind were primarily rooted in their people’s history rather than culture (or civilisation) and race (or biology). Most often, Cooper and the members of his organisation invoked the fact that they were the descendants of this county’s first peoples and that the British Crown had given them an undertaking to protect them.

p.203, 204

This was exemplified in the petition that he drew up in 1933, prior to the establishment of the Australian Aborigines’ League but promoted and submitted under its auspices. It is not surprising that Cooper should turn to a petition as an instrument of persuasion. Indigenous people in Australia and across the empire, tended to look to the King/Queen as the source of power, rather than the local government, and had turned to petitions as their means of communicating with them. This petition, addressed to King George V argued that the commission issued to “those who came to people Australia” included a strict injunction that the original inhabitants and their heirs and successors should be adequately cared for. Given that the terms of the commission had not been adhered to, in that their lands were expropriated by the King’s Government and legal status was denied by the King’s Government in the Commonwealth, they prayed that the King would intervene to prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race, give better conditions for all, and grant them power to propose a member of parliament “in the person of our own blood or white man known to have studied our needs and to be in sympathy with our race, to represent us in the Federal Parliament”. (p. 103) Actually, this was a watering-down of Cooper’s lifelong call for parliamentary representation, prompted probably by his white advisors, because he believed that white men could not “think black” and therefore they needed an Aboriginal representative in Parliament. The petition was signed by over 1800 Aboriginal people – no small feat when access to missions and permission to circulate the petition had to be sought over and over again. It was held back for some two years until after a meeting of all the administrators of Aboriginal affairs in Australia in mid 1937. It was only when this meeting failed to deliver any outcomes that the petition was finally submitted to the Australian government. However, it fell largely on deaf ears. Although Prime Minister Joseph Lyons expressed his sympathy, the petition was dismissed by the secretary of the Department of the Interior, J. A. Carrodus and was never submitted to the King. I found myself angered by such a supercilious dismissal, and the words of the Uluru Statement “the torment of our powerlessness” spring to mind.

Asking did not work: perhaps protest would. After witnessing a ceremony in Melbourne on 24 January 1937 to celebrate John Batman’s founding of Melbourne, Cooper realized that the imminent 150th anniversary celebrations in Sydney on 26th January 1938 would be of the same triumphalist tenor. Drawing on his Biblical schema of epochs and days – of Judgement and Restitution, Mourning and Hope, and eventual Deliverance, Cooper proposed “a day of mourning” to be held simultaneously with the sesquicentennial celebrations. The original idea was his, but the proceedings themselves, held at the Australian Hall, were dominated by Bill Ferguson and Jack Patten of the Aborigines Progressive Association. Cooper, Nicholls and Tucker attended, driven to Sydney by Helen Baillie in her little car, but did not play a prominent part.

Although Cooper lived in Melbourne, he and many of the League’s members retained their emotional connection to Cumeroogunga. He continued to appeal to NSW government to provide Aboriginal people with land and capital so that they could develop the land for their communities and become self-sufficient- something he had urged since his Maloga days. He urged that the services provided on reserves should be put into the hands of Aboriginal people themselves, and that regulations should ensure that no resident could be expelled from a reserve without an open enquiry. In June 1937, contrary to the wishes of the Aboriginal people, Arthur McQuiggan had been appointed as manager of Cumeroogunga, despite repeated complaints about his violence as superintendent of Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Home. Some people made preparations to leave, but were prevented from doing so by the police on the basis of “quarantine” regulations. Cooper submitted another petition signed at Cumeroogunga to the government, but this had no effect. On 26 January 1939 Jack Patten, born and bred at Cumeroogunga, returned there and addressed a gathering of the people in the church two days later, urging them to “walk off”, before they were prevented from leaving again. Cooper and Burdeu were rather ambivalent about this direct action. The League had long had a preference for representations, appeals, petitions and public meetings, and Cooper and Burdeu were apprehensive that Patten’s methods would alienate the League’s white supporters. In the end, it was socialists, communists and Labor supporters in Melbourne who backed what they saw as a “strike” at Cumeroogunga, providing moral and material support for the people who had walked off. But after nine months of hardship, the protest achieved nothing, and there was a tailing-off in the League’s activity, exacerbated by Cooper’s decline in health.

By now WWII was in train. Cooper had lost his son in World War I, and he was disillusioned by the failure of the Government to grant citizenship to the thousands of Aboriginal men who had enlisted in the AIF after World War I. He pointed out that Aboriginal men had ‘no status [and] no rights’ and ‘no country and nothing to fight for but the privilege of defending the land which was taken from him by the white race without compensation’. (p. 197) This was not necessarily a popular stance.

It is ironic that the only monument to William Cooper (presently) is the one in Shepparton, funded by Jewish philanthropists through Gandel Philanthropy. The monument depicts him holding a petition defending the human rights of Jewish people in response to Kristallnaucht, “The Night of Broken Glass” which he presented to the German Consulate in December 1938. The petition served an Indigenous purpose as well: it stated “Like the Jews, our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another race”. This fleeting act, which has captured and been embraced the (white) public imagination, tends to overlook the fact that several left-wing groups, churchmen, pacifists and civil libertarians had already raised their voices against the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Consistent with Attwood’s claim that this is a minor part of Cooper’s contribution, he spends only four pages on this petition, although he expands in further detail in the footnotes. I think that it says much about white Australia and its unease with Aboriginal activism, that Cooper should be commemorated for this one act of solidarity with an overseas injustice, rather than his activism against injustice here in Australia over many decades.

Attwood started his book by pointing out that, especially in relation to Cooper’s childhood, documentary sources are thin. Cooper was an eloquent speaker, but he found writing a struggle, and often turned to his white supporters to undertake this task. Moreover, members of Cooper’s family have their own stories about him, which differ in places from the stories Attwood is telling. He points out that a biographical approach can misrepresent the life of an Indigenous man or woman by casting them as exceptional.

Make no mistake: I believe Cooper was a remarkable man. But the political work for which he is best remembered was the product of a broad network of family, kin and community, and the outcome of a historical experience that he and his fellows had in common and shared with each other.

p. xiv

The book has many black-and-white photographs throughout the text, courtesy of Cooper’s family, and they emphasize both Cooper’s striking bearing but also his embeddedness amongst other activists. Attwood is writing within the academic discipline of history, and this tone pervades the book, with an essay-like introduction and conclusion, a cautious use of “I” and rather stilted cross-references in parentheses to different parts of the book. I sense a reserve in Attwood’s writing.

I’m sure that Attwood did not intend it this way, but I found the book ultimately depressing. William Cooper worked all his life for Aboriginal rights, but had little to show for it. His optimism that if only people knew; if only the King knew, then things would change- was sadly misplaced. He had a faith in white Australia that was not reciprocated. There are, of course, many resonances today. I hear shades of William Cooper in Noel Pearson, who shares his suspicion of “the left” and his deep faith in Christianity particularly in the linguistic and schematic framing of injustice in biblical terms. Cooper’s faith in white Australia echoes in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the call for a Voice has resonances of his call for parliamentary representation. Hopefully this time – at last- white Australia will recognize the generosity of what is being offered and finally fulfill William Cooper’s expectations.

Rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

One of the things that I do when I’m not reading, practising my Spanish or listening to podcasts about Rome, is work at my local Heidelberg Historical Society. Our newsletter, which is published every two months, has a feature called ‘A Hundred Years Ago’ which draws together items of local interest from the ‘Heidelberg News’ and, to a lesser extent, the major Melbourne newspapers through Trove. I’ve been writing this feature since 2015 so I’ve gone through the war, through the ‘Spanish’ flu, the commemoration of fallen soldiers and now I’m up to the 1920s. I’d like to know more. A local paper, by its nature, is full of quotidian events with a heavy emphasis on the civic and the worthy. Leaving aside the Bowling Club results and church socials, I’m finding myself interested in the emotional tenor of the times. With a title like ‘The Confident Years’, I was hoping that Robert Murray might unpack the mindset of the 1920s, but I found myself disappointed.

The book, reissued by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2020 (no doubt with this centenary in mind), was originally published in 1978. This new edition is, as the author admits in his preface

varies little from the original, published in 1978, but has been slightly abridged or amended

p. vii

There are the occasional mentions of Gough Whitlam or Donald Trump as points of comparison, but I suspect that much of the text and certainly the bibliography is unchanged, with not a single book or article published after 1978.

It started well. In the opening chapter, Murray writes:

The 1920s, the decade that followed the war, have gone down in legend as gay and glittering. Relative to the years that preceded and followed them, this was certainly so. From the perspective of the 1970s, Australia’s 1920s were straitlaced, drab, and crushed in a narrowness of vision and stridency of statement. Yet for all the smothering smugness, it was also a time when the spaciousness and order of the nineteenth century merged almost felicitously into the freedom and affluence of the twentieth.

They were above all confident years, when reasonable people could believe- with from the late-century perspective, a quaint dogmatism of certainty- in nation and leaders, in socialism or free enterprise capitalism, religion or atheism. A world war had been won; during it the socialist revolution had won Russia, but had later been overthrown by counter-revolution elsewhere in Europe. This was just enough experience of what the young century had to offer to drive the imagination. The long years had yet to come when the world would live for more than two decades with the shadow or reality of depression and more world war, when not only capitalism and socialism but the very millenia-tried bastion of the Christian belief itself would eventually crumble almost discredited before new generations to whom disillusion seemed merely the way of things.

p.5

This is what I was looking for in this book, but I found that most of the book involved politics with a capital P and the machinations of political operatives on all sides. After an introductory chapter ‘Fit for Heroes’, there follow four chapters dealing with the Nationalist, Labor and Country parties (Ch. 2 The Political World of Billy Hughes; Ch.3 Post-War Labor; Ch. 4 The Big Fella and Chapter 6 Bruce-Page Australia). Chapter 5 inserts an analysis of the Big Boys of the press (Ch. 5 Packer, Murdoch, Fairfax and Co – how depressing that they are still household names a hundred years later) and Ch. 8 After the Bulletin looks at literature and theatre both on stage and screen. Chapter 9 Workers and Bosses looks at the strike activity particularly in the last years of the decade, and Chapter 10 Countdown to Catastrophe ushers in the Depression of the 1930s.

In these chapters, Murray is careful to pay attention to State politics as well as Federal politics, and he introduces male politicians of all stripes with potted biographies. There is a lot of politics squashed in here, as events and crises unfold and pass by.

My favourite chapter was Chapter 7 The Golden Years, which came closest to what I was looking for in the book. There are more women in this chapter although it, too, reads a little like an almanac even to the point of finishing with ‘A Miscellany of Australia’s Twenties’ containing observations that didn’t fit anywhere else. In his preface, Murray mentioned that he interviewed people who were alive during the 1920s, and this chapter- although I enjoyed it most of the whole book- had a bit of the ‘oral-histories’ about it.

This is the only book that I have found that focusses on the 1920s in Australia beyond those ‘So You Were Born in 1925’ type books in newsagents. In terms of capturing a mindset, I gained much more from Deirdre O’Connor’s Harlem Nights, and perhaps I am going to have to look at individual chapters in books about other themes that are less tied to a chronological period (e.g. Janet McCalman’s Journeyings; or Kirsten Otto’s Capital, both of which I have read previously) or fiction -especially newspaper fiction- of the time. I found myself wondering about my own time, a hundred years later, and whether a book about our 21st century ‘Twenties’ that focussed on Australian politics, technology and culture would capture what it is to live now. It would have to include those things of course, but they would not be sufficient. Perhaps I need to send Hugh Mackay back in a time machine to 1920 to measure the emotional climate for me.

Sourced from: State Library of Victoria as an e-book.

It’s fitting that this book should start with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written out in full. I wonder if in decades to come, this statement will be as well known to Australians as the Gettysburg Address or John of Gaunt’s ‘This Sceptred Isle’ speech. I’d like to think that it will be.

In his foreword, Reynolds notes that there was not universal Indigenous support for the statement, but that it was undoubtedly the most widely canvassed document addressed to the wider community by First Nations representatives, drawn from over 1000 participants, meeting at 12 locations around the country.

It was also a masterpiece of forensic advocacy – succinct, with scarcely a wasted word, utilitarian where necessary, elegant, even poetic in places. It is a document that will endure. But its lasting political impact is yet to be determined.

p. 2

He points out that most of the political discussion so far has been about the Voice to Parliament, which reflects the strategic choice of the Referendum Council to go for Voice- Treaty – Truth. The response by the Australian government was quick and dismissive. (I wonder how Malcolm Turnbull feels about that now?) In this book, however, Reynolds concentrates on the starting premise of the Statement: the issue of sovereignty.

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs… This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain unattached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years? With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart, reprinted p. viii and ix

Now, I admit that sovereignty is not exactly the most gripping topic. It is mired in the 17th and 18th century international jurisprudence that was triggered by Spanish, Portuguese and British colonization in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Even the names are offputting: Grotius, von Pufendorf, Heineccius, de Vattel. This international law formed the basis of American court cases in the 1820s and ’30s when settlers were moving across the American continent. It’s a pretty specialized area, and doesn’t lend itself easily to the much-vaunted and Americanized ‘water cooler conversation’. But in essence, Reynolds argues here that Britain stuffed up colonization in Australia from the very start, acting in ways that were inconsistent with received international law at the time. Despite some hand-wringing from the Colonial Office as a result of humanitarian pressure-politics, the error was perpetuated and entrenched when the Australian colonies achieved self-government. It is was inconsistent then, and it is inconsistent now with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007 and ratified by Australia in 2009. If blame has to be apportioned, it can be directed at the British government up until 1856 but from then on, it lies at Australia’s feet.

In the introduction Reynolds explains his own ignorance of the fraught relations between White Australians and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people until he went to teach at James Cook University in Townsville, where his students were living this history. From there, the book is divided into 2 parts.

Part 1 ‘The First Sovereign Nations’ explores different aspects of sovereignty. Chapter 1 ‘Taking Possession’ looks at Captain Cook’s ceremony on Possession Island off the NW coast of Cape York in August 1770 where he took possession of the country in His Majesty’s name, together with all the bays, harbours, rivers and islands situated on the coast. Right here we have a glitch: according to his secret instructions of 30 July 1768 he was instructed to ‘with the consent of the natives take possession of convenient situations’ or if he found it uninhabited, ‘take possession by setting up proper marks and inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors’. He did not find it uninhabited, nor did he seek or gain consent. When the First Fleet landed in 1788, Arthur Phillip’s commissions on 12 October 1786 and 2 April 1787 made no mention of consent. Immediately on arrival, Phillip wrote back that there were far more Aboriginal people than Sir Joseph Banks and James Matra, who had advised the Colonial Office, had suggested. Nor was inland Australia uninhabited.

Chapter 2 ‘This Ancient Sovereignty’ explores the dawning realization that Aboriginal people lived in tribal groups, in specific districts with known boundaries, and that there were no ‘unpeopled’ lands. Each First Nation contested the encroachment on their traditional lands, and fought for their own country and nowhere else. By the time Ralph Darling was appointed as governor to NSW in 1825, his instructions were to treat Aboriginal nations no longer as British subjects but ‘as if they proceeded from subjects of any accredited State’.(p. 41) This stance was reversed in 1837 when they were again ‘considered as Subjects of the Queen’ (p. 72).

Chapter 3 ‘Whose Land?’ looks at the concept of terra nullius and the acceptance within Australia that, even if this was a mistaken characterization, it was an understandable and even appropriate decision on the part of the British government as a consequence of the failure of Aboriginal society to reach a designated level of ‘civilization’. However, this flew in the face of late 18th and early 19th century international law and the recognition of Native American property rights elsewhere in the Empire, especially in the American Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Marshall between 1801 and 1835 and in New Zealand courts in 1847. By the mid 1830s, humanitarian reformers, previously involved in the slave trade, turned their attention to the fate of Indigenous peoples in British colonies, especially through James Stephen, the permanent under-secretary. Aboriginal protectors, governors (particularly George Arthur in Tasmania, to whom Reynolds gives credit) and eventually the Secretary of State argued that pastoral leases should not allow the driving off of the ‘Natives’ who “have every right to the protection of the law from such aggressions”. (p. 68) Once the colonies gained self-government, this stance was largely ignored.

Chapter 4 ‘Effective control?’ highlights the concern that the Australian government had over the ’empty’ north. The question of ‘effective control’ was important in international law and applied by the British government elsewhere in the world. Britain refused a Portuguese claim to territory in central Africa between Angola and Mozambique because there was no sign of Portuguese jurisdiction or authority and no real occupation. The same issue arose in Nicuargua, when claims of being a successor state to the Spanish Empire were rejected. If the standards of international law as they were understood at the time of Australian federation were applied, neither the states nor the federal government exercised effective control over large areas of Australia.

Ch. 5 ‘Australia and the Law of Nations’ returns to international law. There is, Reynolds claims “clearly more support in international law for the Uluru Statement than many Australians likely imagine.” (p. 90) He turns to the Australian cases of R. v Murrell in 1836 (and I’m surprised that Reynolds did not reference ‘my’ Justice John Walpole Willis here at all) and Cooper v Stuart (1889), both of which cast long legal shadows. He then jumps ahead to the Mabo case of 1992.

Ch. 6 ‘Treaty yeh, Treaty now’ looks at George Augustus Robinson’s ‘peace treaty in all but name’ that brought the Black Wars in Tasmania to an end. Reynolds is dismissive of John Batman’s attempt at a treaty in Port Phillip, pointing out that treaties can only be negotiated by the Crown. The British government, however, abandoned the policy of treaty-making in Australia, even though it ratified treaties in North America, thus condemning hundreds to violent deaths (p. 122). This did not mean that there were not informal ‘treaties’.

There seems to have been some common characteristics of successful negotiations, including understandings about access to water, and about hunting parties avoiding sheep and cattle. In exchange, animals were regularly slaughtered and given to the local band in return for a promise not to spear them out on the range…But an even more significant factor was the provision of young men, who quickly acquired the new skills that, when added to traditional bushcraft, made them valuable additions to any station’s workforce. Young women were provided to be trained in domestic work and to provide sexual comfort. It was often done with reluctance but with an understanding that if not mutually arranged the women would be taken by force. But a frequent underlying consideration was that with a negotiated settlement the station in question became a relatively secure haven away from ambient violence. The ‘white boss’ became a defender of ‘his’ blacks, even able at times to protect them from violent neighbours and marauding police patrols.

p.116

But if we are to move beyond the informal, ad-hoc and contingent, as the Uluru Statement urges us to do, a treaty is needed. To a certain extent, some state governments are picking up the baton after Bob Hawke promised to negotiate a treaty at Barunga in the NT thirty years ago. But, despite state-level treaties, there will still need to be a treaty between the national government and First Nations.

Only then will the vexed problem of how to deal with what in the Statement from the Heart was called ‘this ancient sovereignty’ be resolved

p.125

Part II of the book is titled ‘Searching for Truth-Telling’ takes the reader into the politics within which the Uluru Statement from the Heart has been launched.

Chapter 7 ‘The Truth about 26 January’ deals with the almost-annual controversy that emerges every January, and points out that the date has been problematic for some time. It was clearly on display in 1938 (150th anniversary) when the Sydney re-enactments were accompanied by a Day of Mourning in Victoria and New South Wales. Claims that 1788 brought the rule of law are inconsistent with the subversion of existing international law represented by Phillip’s instructions and later actions.

Chapter 8 ‘Settlement, Conquest or something else?’ points out that although the term ‘settlement’ suggests coming to rest, or establishing tranquility, it is a term far removed from the “gritty, turbulent and often bloody business of colonisation.” (p. 143) Although within a generation, observers in NSW and Tasmania recognized that the distinct First Nations had their own forms of law and government, a conceptual dissonance developed between the way the law was understood on the frontiers, and the way it was dissseminated in books, newspapers, speeches and sermons. This chapter describes this conceptual dissonance, which has bubbled along quietly for the past 150 years.

Chapter 9 ‘The Cost of Conquest’ highlights the widespread knowledge of the violence of the frontier, contrasted against the ‘great forgetting’ described by WEH Stanner in the 1960s and 1970s. Here he returns to his own ignorance of the violence, and his attempts to enumerate the deaths on the frontier. His first attempt was in a Meanjin article in December 1972 (perhaps 10,000-12,000 as a guess), followed by The Other Side of the Frontier in 1981 where he hazarded 20,000 deaths for the country as a whole, a number which remained unchallenged until the ‘history wars’ between 1996-2002. Of course, in 2002 Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History whipped up a storm of controversy.

In Chapter 10 ‘Queensland was Different’ he points out that there were two distinct phases in the conquest of Australia. The first unfolded over the first 70 years, the second played out in the second half of the 19th century as colonists pushed into the top third of the continent north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Although Queensland had been settled in the first phase, the conquest of the second phase took place as an Australian project, not a British one. The squatters of this second phase took with them the attitudes shaped by violent conquest in NSW. They rejected the idea that Aboriginal people were British subjects, and that killing an Aboriginal person left one open to a charge of murder (p.179). The most egregious departure from the rule of law was the deployment of the Native Police force from NSW, with the purpose “to kill Aboriginal people in sufficient numbers to terrorize them into submission” (p. 184). Raymond Evans and Robert Orsted-Jensen have sampled the remnant records that ended up in other government documents and came up with a figure of 40,000 Aboriginal men women and children killed by the Native Police, and another 20,000 violent deaths at private hands. It is true that this is Aboriginal people killing other Aboriginal people, and Reynolds points out that the truth-telling called for in the Uluru Statement will need to deal with this as well (p. 198)

Governors and settlers had long characterized this conflict as ‘warfare’ and in Chapter 11 ‘Remembering the Dead’, Reynolds contrasts this silence about frontier violence, and unwillingness to recognize Aboriginal warriors as patriots (in the truest sense of the word) with Australia’s remembering and commemorating of Australian citizens who have died in overseas wars. This is exemplified by the expense lavished on the Australian War Memorial, and its steadfast refusal to include frontier wars under its aegis. He suggests that a formal ceremony of placing a tomb for the unknown warrior in the heart of the War Memorial next the the grave of the unknown soldier would have been an event of “immense national importance, a symbol of respect, inclusion and reconciliation”. (p.207) He acknowledges that there is little chance now that this will ever happen.

Chapter 12 ‘The Consequences of Truth-Telling’ looks at the removal and replacement of statues in South America, the southern states of the United States, the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Georgetown University and in Britain. He looks at the daubing of statues in Sydney’s Hyde Park in 2017, and a new statue of Lachlan Macquarie erected in 2013 which received similar attention. This chapter includes a potted summary of the rest of the book from p. 215 – 219 which seems rather oddly placed so late in the narrative. He points out that Australians have been ready to call the early governors – Phillip, Macquarie, Brisbane, Arthur and Stirling – to account, but less likely to pay attention to Sir John Forrest (WA), Sir John Downer (SA) and Sir Samuel Griffith (Qld), who as premiers and attorney-generals in the late 19th century and early 20th century oversaw the violent suppression of Indigenous resistance. They have suburbs and universities named after them; in some cases their families are still prominent in political and legal circles.

He continues this train of thought in Chapter 13 ‘Inescapable Iconoclasm’ where he particularly looks at Sir Samuel Griffith. Reynolds has read the foreword that appears in every volume of the well-regarded Griffith Review, praising Sir Samuel Griffith as ‘one of Australia’s early great achievers” and claiming that their publication emulates Griffith’s ‘sceptical eye and a pragmatically reforming heart and a commitment to public discussion”. (p. 226) What about Griffith University? The Australian Electoral Commission removed the names of Batman and McMillan as Victorian electorates on the basis of their involvement in frontier warfare – what then about the Brisbane seat of Griffith?

[Griffith] oversaw far more bloodshed than the two frontiersmen. But is it a case of it being much easier to take symbolic action against the foot soldiers than against the high command and knights of the realm?

p.231

I think he’s right: it’s easy to attack ‘early’ perpetrators, especially when they are clothed in British imperialism, but less easy for more recent, ‘home-grown’ public figures, whose names are attached to institutions and intellectual endeavours that we value.

His final chapter ‘Conclusion: The Resurgent North’ returns to the Uluru Statement. It will always be associated, he suggests, with “its peremptory rejection by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull”, a rejection that was unexpected and “profoundly disrespectful”. (p. 237) The claim in the Statement that sovereignty had “never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown” was more than a rhetorical flourish, and “it sits there unanswered in the inboxes of the nation’s leaders in both our parliaments and our courts.” (p.245)

This is a timely book, given the insistence of the Referendum Council in pushing the Uluru Statement forward, despite the wish by many politicians to sweep it away. In many ways, the book encapsulates many of the ideas that Reynolds has been putting forward over many years in his other publications, including The Other Side of the Frontier, Why Weren’t We Told? and This Whispering in our Hearts (which I see has been recently republished). Like his other books, it is quietly and doggedly argued. Reynolds is a historian, not a legal scholar, but by necessity this book has had to deal with a great deal of legal argument in order to underscore the illegality, in international law terms, of what we have long taken for granted. It is quietly but passionately argued, from a deep conviction. It raises important questions that, if we are to tell the truth, we will need to face eventually. The questions can be forced upon us by international bodies and treaties, or we can stand up ourselves with First Nations people who, through the Uluru Statement, have invited Australians “to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future”. I know which I’d prefer.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 8/10 (It feels a bit odd even giving it a rating).

South-western Queensland and the rural backlands of Andalusia in Spain are two landscapes and histories that rarely mentioned in the same breath. However, they are not dissimilar to look at: indeed, the image on the front cover could be of Australia’s red centre or the arid desert regions of Andalusia. I suspect by the red tones that suffuse the photograph that it is of Australia, but blood is red too, and it has soaked into the landscape of both settings. In Queensland there were the barely acknowledge massacres of indigenous Australians as settlers moved westward; in Andalusia, there were the bloody atrocities on both sides during the Spanish Civil War.

There are few other people whose knowledge spans both locations, apart from fleeting visits by most travellers. This is where Hispanist and cultural historian Luke Stegemann comes in. He travels the backroads of Queensland as a boxing referee, while he refers to Spain as his ‘second patria‘. Deeply familiar with both, he brings them together in what is described as a “literary examination” of landscape, violence and memory in the two places.

He doesn’t actually describe what a “literary examination” or a “literary meditation” is, but I assume that it is a drawing together of the visions of other writers about an event or place. Certainly, he does reference other authors, but this is no mere desktop activity. He physically visits many of the places that he writes about, mainly as an outside observer. He marries the literary and experiential into a discursive, poetic, beautifully shaped exploration of questions about the memories that a landscape can hold, and the tenacity with which those memories take hold, despite the tacit or overt agreement to deny them.

This book employs two scenarios- the mid-nineteenth century pastoral frontier of south-west Queensland, and a series of early twentieth-century civilian massacres in southern Spain – as pathways towards examining the ways history is turned over and inspected, sometimes with fascination, sometimes with disgust, and its angles then polished for specific cultural and political purposes. Both scenarios are at the centre of contemporary debates around the need to tell, and approved methods of telling, troubled – perhaps better to say infamous – aspects of national history.

p.6

The opening chapters wrestle with the ideas of memory and forgetting, memorializing through graveyards and forgetting through unnamed massacre sites. He shuttles between Australia and Spain, using the writing from one culture to illuminate the other. In places this seems like a linguistic game, with chapters titled ‘The verb that has no name’ or ‘The Language of Eden’. The passing of generations and their knowledge is described grammatically:

The past tense soon closes down the present perfect nature of that claim: people have seen becomes, forever, people saw. Descendants remain, but the last of the witnesses are gone. The final death is often unremarked for who knows who is the last of the witnesses?…Each day, each year, each decade, periods of history move further away and we are left with an imperfect detritus. Windows are closed, doors shut, voices silenced, graves sealed.

p.34

The book is mainly based on the Australian experience, with the Iberian example used as a point of both comparison and contrast. The heart of the book lies in the two long chapters ‘Threnody’ (which I confess I had to look up – it means “a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person”) and ‘Iberian Hinterland’.

The ‘Threnody’ chapter, at 50 pages, has the structure of a guided tour across the landscape of south-west Queensland. At each stop, he gives us a description of the landscape and a short history of the ‘interactions’ that took place there. He intersperses this with the local and amateur histories of these places, which generally celebrate the ‘progress’ of settlement and the ‘success’ of ‘dispersal’.

We have a duty to look unsparingly at the acts committed. We can now both see and understand the absurd vanity of the acquisitive graziers, to say nothing of the wretched illegality of their land grabs; nevertheless our contemporary morality is of limited use in grappling with this history. Unavoidably, the expansion of the Europeans across south-west Queensland involved tremendous cruelty and episodes of outright violence that mark our national history, though this fact must be tempered with the knowledge of acts of tenderness and attempts at understanding on both sides, and what were often immediate and close relationships between Indigenous people and settlers.

p. 85

Nonetheless, as he points out, in order to considered these acts of goodwill, “it is first necessary to climb over the bodies. The toll cannot be avoided.” P. 118 On the Massacre Map produced by the University of Newcastle, the area of South West Queensland is not studded with dots (as the coastal areas are) but when you do click on the massacres, they are of huge numbers of people. I have read of frontier violence before, but it was generalIy deployed against small groups of warriors, or family groups of women and children. I hadn’t imagined 300 people being massacred, as at Bulloo River. Imagine it. The vision is horrifying.

In the succeeding ‘Iberian Hinterland’ chapter, at 63 pages in length, he takes a similar approach, although here he overlays the bloody Civil War history with the tourist itinerary, which exists largely oblivious to what happened less than a century before. I remember reading in the guide book that I took with me to Andalusia just a few years ago, there was still sensitivity about the Civil War, and to not ask pointed questions. But unlike the anonymity and paucity of Indigenous deaths in Australia, there is “a paper trail and a line of bones” that testify to a national total of some 115,000 murdered behind nationalist lines, and 55,000 behind Republican lines (p.135). With the passing of the Law of Historic Memory in 2007 there has been a deliberate political decision that the tacit silence about this slaughter will be broken; that bodies will be exhumed; that Franco will be shifted from the Valley of the Fallen to a private family vault.

Just as there is no turning away from the brutal slaughter of Indigenous people in south-west Queensland, there is no turning away from the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of innocent people in the first months of Spain’s civil conflict. And it has been the slow revelation of these details, the political environment into which they have been released, and the arguments they have triggered around questions of memory, truth, justice, compensation and reconciliation, and where these might find their place in a modern democracy, that have added weight to what might otherwise have been just one more collection of twentieth-century bones- anonymous, roadside or forest-deep- abandoned to their violent quiet.

p. 137

Stegemann sees a similar movement at work here in Australia too, as the Great Australian Silence (in Stanner’s words) is finally being broken down. In particular he points to the Uluru Statement (awarded the 2021 Sydney Peace Prize but still shamefully suspended in limbo four years later). But he points out that reconciliation is hard work. The passing and implementation of the Law of Historic Memory in Spain has been fraught, and is likely to become even more so with the rise of populism. In Australia, the ideological ravine scours ever deeper with social media and a shrill press.

This really is a beautifully written book. You could open any page and find a paragraph that is beautifully crafted and insightful. It has high expectations of the reader. The dual emphasis on Indigenous Australia and Andalusia particularly appealed to me because my interests align along those tracks as well, but also because it illustrates the way that our learning in one field illuminates and enriches the other fields of knowledge that we encounter.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library