Book reviews: Hidden in Plain View, Dark Emu, Vandemonian War
Three books bear out that complex indigenous societies existed before the arrival of white settlers.
Family histories have become the hottest thing in recent years — eclipsed in popularity in the online space only by gardening and pornography, or so it’s said — but they carry a special weight for indigenous Australia. There they’re not just a hobby. They’re about documenting survival.
A new historiography of black and white Australia is remaking the way we think about our past. The repeated slaughters on which the nation was built are slowly being unpicked, the accounts of their almost casual brutality multiplying. But along with that work also come some occasionally counter-intuitive conclusions.
The received wisdom, for instance, that 1788 was a calamity from which pre-existing societies could never recover is crumbling at the edges, with growing material evidence of a cultural sophistication and resilience that took a body blow but refused to give up.
To be certain, it can too often feel like a case of one step forward, two steps back. The fraught negotiation over meaningful indigenous constitutional recognition, after much previous discussion and reports that are often referred to but rarely acted on, is a case in point.
Next week’s annual Garma cultural festival, on the Gove Peninsula in northeast Arnhem Land, will have as its single priority the recent declaration of the Uluru Statement from the Heart — a consensus of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia on the way ahead — and the Referendum Council report that followed it.
Significantly, as well as amending the national birth certificate to allow an indigenous “voice” to parliament, these documents call for a truth-and-reconciliation process. Much of this will be painful for all involved, but just as with Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology for the Stolen Generations — a cruel social phenomenon directly resulting from white Australia’s brutal origins — it will be a necessary catharsis.
But with indigenous Australia’s numbers expected to hit a million in little more than a decade, the old narrative that deaths by disease, deprivation and straight-up murderous intent were simply the end of the story for entire communities, starting with the Sydney Basin, needs rethinking.
In 1834, for instance, a visiting Englishman and three friends, along with four Aboriginal men and another European, spent their morning fishing from a rowboat outside the Sydney Heads, catching snapper, kingfish, a small shark and dozens of red bream.
Returning to cook and breakfast on their catch at Camp Cove, just inside the harbour’s southern entrance — these days part of the city’s moneyed and overbuilt eastern suburbs, but 50 years after the First Fleet’s arrival still a distant outpost of Sydney town — the Englishman, William Proctor, found a sight that astonished him.
Alongside a large lagoon was a settlement of about 100 Aboriginal men, women and children, in family groups, each with their own gunyah or bark-and-bough shelter, a fire out the front, and their dogs. Half a century after white invasion, that is, here was a thriving Sydney Aboriginal community, presumably interacting with the invaders but living on its own terms.
Historian Paul Irish uses this incident to lay out, in his important and gripping new book Hidden in Plain View, a central paradox of early colonial Aboriginal history. We know there was a vibrant population in what Irish describes as “coastal Sydney” at the time of Arthur Phillip’s arrival, probably equal in number to the 1500-odd souls the NSW governor-designate brought with him. And we know that from the early 20th century on there was a growing and visible Aboriginal population in the city. But what, Irish wonders, became of its 19th-century Aborigines, who seem to have been written out of history, or depicted as having been supplanted decades later by indigenous arrivals from elsewhere?
The answer, he finds,
is hidden in plain view. Sydney’s Aboriginal people did not disappear to be replaced by Aboriginal migrants … but evidence of their ongoing presence is less obvious than the vast galleries of rock engravings, the early colonial descriptions and drawings of their ancestors, or the activities of contemporary Aboriginal communities that catch the public’s eye.
In fact it has remained hidden, Irish argues, precisely because of the “widespread belief that Aboriginal people died out or disappeared from Sydney by the mid-19th century, and that any Aboriginal people in Sydney after this time were either from somewhere else or had lost any cultural attachment to the area”.
None of this will be news to any of the city’s contemporary indigenous population and those from elsewhere, many of whom have grown up knowing exactly what their Eora descent is: 230 years is barely a dozen generations among a people whose lineage goes back thousands.
Indeed the latest scientific evidence of an unbroken habitation of the continent pushes its beginnings back even further than was previously proven, to an origin point of about 65,000 years ago.
But Irish’s genius is in tracing the historical record to demonstrate precisely how the survivors of the smallpox epidemic that ravaged the Aboriginal population soon after the British arrival were the basis of a regrouping that fashioned a continuing existence on land they considered, rightly, never to have ceded.
This may only have been dozens of people, he admits, “rather than the many hundreds that there could have been”, with the knock-on effect of losing “the thousands upon thousands of Aboriginal children who would never feel the soft sands of Sydney’s beaches under their feet over the next two centuries”.
He is careful, that is, to acknowledge the utter trauma that the arrival of those 11 First Fleet ships wreaked on an entire people. He does not shy from events such as the massacre of Aboriginal men, women and children by soldiers and landowners at Appin in 1816.
But he is equally determined to pay tribute to those who survived: “That they found the strength to carry on, rebuild and find a place for themselves in the growing colony is nothing short of incredible.”
Irish fleshes out the way that, while rapid urban growth displaced Cadigal settlements from Sydney, that was not the same as pushing Aboriginal people away, and the survivors and their descendants continued to enter the town on a regular basis despite no longer living there.
Further, they did so largely on their own terms, establishing cross-cultural relationships with the settlers that were “neither random nor universal” but were selective and strategic.
And so to that vibrant, cultured gathering at Camp Cove in 1834, as well as others along the waterline, not just on the harbour but south to the Cooks River and around Kurnell, on Botany Bay. As the colonists pushed north and west towards whatever fertile soil they could find, much of the land to the immediate south and southeast, as well as the harbour’s southern shores, remained important Aboriginal space.
Irish cites Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow’s important work on this, Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River. They believe waterways provided barriers to European settlement that gave Aboriginal people room to regroup and “choose their ways to interact with the new economy and society”.
Furthermore, it isn’t just the well-known Aboriginal identities who are influential in this story, early names such as Bennelong, Colebee or the resistance warrior Pemulwuy. Broadcaster Stan Grant, who has written the foreword to Hidden in Plain View, discovered details of his own great-great-grandfather, Frank Foster, as a direct result of Irish’s work.
Foster, born in 1870 and living his early life in the rough atmosphere of the Circular Quay boatshed, was the grandson of people who saw the British arrive at Sydney Cove — or Warrane, as they knew it. Foster was neither unique nor unusual, Grant writes, and his descendants and those of many like him have been in Sydney all along, “here in this massive metropolis hidden in plain view”.
Irish’s strategy, of rethinking and reinterpreting existing data to present a compelling display of Aboriginal social strength, mirrors that used by Bruce Pascoe in his recent award-winning book Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?
Pascoe, an indigenous Victorian, combed early journals and assembled other evidence to demonstrate that pre-colonial Australia was not in fact peopled by opportunistic hunter-gatherers — the popular image of an Aborigine standing on one leg, spear in hand, waiting for a kangaroo to hop by — but was an extensively farmed and tightly managed ecosystem created over thousands of years by disparate but linked democracies.
He documents sophisticated fish traps and other systems of animal management including nets the quality of anything then able to be produced in Europe, terraced agriculture, permanent built villages, fabricated dams, and grains produced from domesticated grasses and used to bake bread 15,000 years in advance of any such thing produced in the Middle East.
Pascoe’s work came out of his earlier research into the frontier wars. He writes here that it began to bother him that those first encounters were so often portrayed as being between colonists and hunter-gatherers, when in fact the written accounts time and again referred to Aboriginal people “building dams and wells, planting, irrigating and harvesting seed, preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds or secure vessels, creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape”.
None of this is based on speculation; it is all from the documentary evidence. The reason so little of the evidence remained so soon after first encounters was that much of the built and cultivated landscape was quickly destroyed as settlers encroached, either deliberately, through malevolent ignorance, or as a result of the herds of cattle and flocks of sheep they drove before them.
This trail of destruction leads back to the truth-telling work that increasingly is being done to document, with detailed precision, the government policies that led to such violence and its bodily effect. That is, the massacres — until very recently, euphemistically still referred to as “dispersals” — and their number.
All of indigenous Australia has direct links to this. So do many descendants of settler Australians, as dual Miles Franklin winner Kim Scott touches on in his new novel, Taboo.
Laying bare this real history of invasion will need to be a national exercise if it is to have meaning, and that will come not only from communal remembering — the work of the Makarrata commission called for in the Uluru Statement — but from dogged research that re-examines the colonial record.
Hobart-based historian Nick Brodie achieves this with stunning scholarship in The Vandemonian War. Pascoe’s method is to weave together contemporary accounts of first-contact agricultural techniques; Brodie goes to the archival record, in this case official communications between London, Hobart and various districts and front lines in Van Diemen’s Land.
He finds that the “settling” of the island involved far more than mere skirmishes between European-born farmers and Aboriginal people. It was “no unofficial frontier conflict [but] was an orchestrated invasion prosecuted by an empire”. His conclusions are likely to irritate people on the right of the so-called history wars that kicked off in the early 2000s, those who built a straw man against claims of a Vandemonian genocide, or that there was even an official government policy of warfare, asking: Where is the evidence?
Well, here it is. Brodie picks his way through government files, discovering in the Colonial Secretary’s Office the correspondence code 7578 — the designation created in August 1828 and allocated to all matters concerning Aboriginal people. The histories of all wars are laid out in the machinery of the bureaucracies that prosecute them. Bundle 7578, held in the State Library of Tasmania, is a reminder of this.
Back and forth flies a storm of requests and orders, key among them the first one Brodie quotes, written by the Colonial secretary himself to the police magistrate of Campbell Town and dated September 5, 1828:
With regard to the hostile appearance which you represent these people to be assuming, the Lieutenant Governor has no hesitation in stating that He thinks you should expressly intimate to the Military Force which is placed at your disposal, that they should adopt decided measures, in driving the Natives from the settled Districts.
“Decided measures”, rather like “dispersals”, carries a distinctly final tone almost 200 years later. The documents, Brodie notes, tell the story “of an empire conquering an island and calling it settlement”.
The pattern was nationwide, whether official policy or not. Writing in 1857, the aristocratic wife of a Scottish immigrant squatter who carved out some of the earliest cattle and sheep runs in northwestern NSW and southern Queensland, regretted what she called “this guerrilla warfare with the blacks”, claiming it was “generally the Aborigines who commence the warfare by spearing some unfortunate shepherd or stock-keeper”.
She took umbrage at the use by some liberals of the word “murder” for the killing of Aboriginal defenders of their own land, calling it a “simply absurd” misunderstanding of an economic requirement. By his own admission her husband was personally responsible for a handful of black deaths on his push north from Sydney, depicting them in his memoir — the grandly titled Mount Abundance: or, The Experiences of a Pioneer Squatter in Australia — as merely a necessity, a byproduct of war.
In the same work he is silent, however, on the larger single massacre of about 40 people for which a contemporary writer squarely blamed him. None of this prevented him from being elected a member of the NSW Legislative Assembly, with all the attendant social status.
And so the truth-telling must go on. My own two children are carved directly from that Scottish family line, and we are far from alone in our connection to such atrocities. As a nation, we will get this right only when we fully acknowledge what happened, both good and bad.
Stephen Fitzpatrick is The Australian’s indigenous affairs editor.
The Garma cultural festival takes place from August 4 to 7. www.yyf.com.au
Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney
By Paul Irish
NewSouth, 240pp, $34.99
Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?
By Bruce Pascoe
Magabala Books, $176pp, $35
The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion
By Nick Brodie
Hardie Grant, 422pp, $29.99