Aborigines reacted in complex ways to the European invasion; there was a variety of situation and diversity of motivation which will continually confound the over-confident or over-simple generalization. Yet patterns did recur. One was the interplay of attraction and resistance which ran through the politics of post-contact Aboriginal society. While Europeans were far more likely to notice the resister there were blacks who endeavoured to find a place in the new society. The missionaries and officials at Port Phillip noted several such cases. E. S. Parker claimed that many young blacks were willing to accept European ways and that they openly avowed ‘their dislike for the wandering and comfortless habits of their own people’. He instanced the case of youths who established themselves on his station and built themselves ‘permanent habitations of saplings and reeds in imitation of one built by Government men’.1 The Commissioner for Crown Lands in the Monaro in the 1840s reported the case of a local man and woman who separated themselves from their clan, cleared a block of land, built a hut and began farming. When the first Aborigines were recruited for the Port Phillip Native Police Force they ‘broke unsolicited their spears and other native weapons’ and throwing them into the river said ‘they would no longer be black fellows’.2 The missionary Francis Tuckfield noted in his journal that young blacks had expressed themselves in the ‘most decided and encouraging manner about becoming settled and adopting the European mode of living’. Some had made strenuous efforts to do so but had been compelled by their kin to return to the bush. He referred to the case of Kam-kam who built himself a house and when urged to join his clan hunting and skirmishing brought his ‘instruments of war to the Missionaries that he might urge this as an excuse for not going’.3
To explain the attraction of white society we must consider how it must have appeared to Aborigines coming in from the bush. We can assume that those young blacks who went willingly towards the Europeans fully expected to be able to participate in their obvious material abundance. Reciprocity and sharing were so fundamental to their own society that they probably expected to meet similar behaviour when they crossed the racial frontier. They presumably thought that residence alone would win them equality, that kinship and sharing would flow naturally from contiguity. Though Aborigines were accustomed to differences in power and status based on age and sex they had no experience of the extremes of wealth and poverty which existed in European society. Material equality was one of the central characteristics of traditional life throughout Australia. Those blacks who wished to live like Europeans can hardly have imagined that the desperate poverty of the fringe camp could sit so near the plenty of town or farm or station.
But misconceptions about white society and expectations of reciprocity were only one side of the story. Aspects of traditional life must also be considered. Aboriginal society was loosely articulated; during a typical year groups waxed and waned, clans coalesced and dispersed. Visits to European camps or stations could be easily encompassed within the normal pattern of movement about tribal territory. What is more the attraction of the white settlements worked on latent divisions within traditional society. Discipline was maintained by the older men who managed both the pace at which the young were initiated and the bestowal of women and girls as they became available for marriage. While the fully initiated men controlled the only possible, or conceivable, passes on to the plateau of full adulthood their authority over the young remained unshaken. The Europeans, often unwittingly, challenged that dominance. This was particularly true in the case of young men and women who had not been fully incorporated into traditional society. Still awaiting final initiation they were the group least firmly attached to customary mores. At the same time it was the young who were most useful to the Europeans. They learnt new skills and mastered rudimentary English before the old people and in the case of girls were more sought after as sexual partners by white frontiersmen. So beneath the over-arching clash between black and white there were subsidiary tensions between those who were attracted to and those who resisted the Europeans. This secondary conflict often coincided with lines of stress latent in traditional society and especially those between young and old.
One of the most interesting accounts of intra-tribal conflict was written by A. C. Grant in his unpublished account of life on a pastoral property in the Burnett district of southern Queensland. The old men, he observed, did not like the changes which gradually deprived them of their authority. The arrival of the Europeans had the effect of making the active young men ‘of more importance than the old fellows, who were beyond learning English’ and found it difficult to acquire the new skills. They never learnt to ride while the ‘youthful generation became adepts’. The young men began to openly challenge traditional food taboos and scoffed at tribal custom although their new assurance rapidly fell away when they were sick. The tribal elders battled to retain their authority by means of ‘sacred cor-roborees, incantations, magic bones and stones, etc’. Grant described how the Aboriginal camp was swept by a mania for marble playing and little circular rings of cleared ground could be found everywhere. Even in such a minor aspect of European culture the old were disadvantaged:
Old men, grey headed warriors, Grand fathers, sage in council, valiant in war, played with little demons of grandchildren satanic in their nimbleness of finger, and sureness of aim, and superior in the jargon and tricks of the game … The amusing and saddening feature to me was the airs of equality which an English speaking, useful brat of nine or ten years, would assume towards his grey headed and battle scarred old grandfather.4
Yet in many tribal groupings the old men managed to minimize the defection of the young. They were often helped by European violence which united the clans in hatred and temporarily closed off the option of going in to white settlement. Among the Walbri, for instance, the Coniston massacre reinforced the authority of the older men who had previously tried with only limited success to ‘dissuade their juniors from becoming entangled with white men’.5 Many nineteenth century sources provide evidence of the effective assertion of tribal authority. The Commissioner for Crown Lands on the McLeay River observed in 1846 that many of the young people who worked casually for the Europeans would be happy to remain permanently about the settlements ‘were it not that they were absolutely prevented by the old members of their tribe’.6 A Victorian settler noted similar developments in the Western District where the old men invariably took away any boys who manifested ‘an inclination to leave their wandering habits’.7 On the far side of the continent Governor Hutt concluded that the older natives, both men and women, were opposed to innovations and expressed ‘decided hostility against the youths … who indicate any inclination for civilized habits’.8
Tribal leaders used an array of methods to preserve their authority –threats, sorcery, ritual spearing, even execution. Howitt referred to the fate of a young Dieri man who accompanied his expedition north into central Australia. He deserted when the Europeans ventured into what to him would have been hostile territory and returned to his own country. However, Howitt learnt that he had been pursued by an armed party of kinsmen and executed because he had become ‘too familiar with white men’.9 The Commissioner for Crown Lands in the Maranoa described the great animosity felt by blacks still in the bush for those working on the stations. ‘Every effort and trick is resorted to’, he wrote, ‘to seduce them away, to destroy their fidelity and attachment’.10 He instanced the case of his guide Jemmy who had been indispensable to him. Jemmy returned to his tribe for a week only to reappear emaciated almost beyond recognition. He told the Commissioner that he had to immediately leave the white man’s service because he had a stone in his stomach and the old men had told him he would die if he stayed with them. Taplin told a similar story of conflict among the Narrinyeri of South Australia. The old men began to complain to him because the young people would not conform to their customs. A youth called Tungeriol eloped with a girl he had no right to and went to live under the protection of Europeans on a nearby cattle station. Some months later he was decoyed into the bush, grabbed by five men and smothered. Taplin tried every means to discover the executioners but was never able to do so. But the fate of the defiant Narrinyeri youth illustrated an issue of much wider significance.
The control and bestowal of women was a major focus for inter-clan conflict both before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Three aspects of traditional society fostered sexual competition and conflict–a marked masculinity in Aboriginal populations, the widespread practice of polygamy and the control by old men over the bestowal of women. Elopement, adultery and abduction were, as a result, common occurrences. The sudden intrusion of an almost womanless white population added considerably to existing tensions. Frontiersmen abducted women and often took them away for considerable periods of time. On the other hand Aboriginal women may have gone to European men willingly and actually sought them out either to escape undesired marriage or tribal punishment or to gain access to the many attractive possessions of the Europeans. The disruption caused by the settlers provided the opportunity for young men to grab control of women from the elders and seek sanctuary among the white men in order to escape retribution. Such a situation was described by the West Australian Inspector of Aborigines on the north-west coast at the turn of the century:
The tribal laws and customs have been annulled through the natives coming into constant contact with Asiatics; where in former days old men had the young women, who supported them through hunting, to-day most women are in the hands of young men and boys (who by tribal law are not entitled to them), having stolen them from their rightful owners by brute force, leaving the old to fossick for themselves, whilst the young men, with their so-procured women, follow up the pearling boats or go into Broome.11
Where the old men continued to exert their authority they were able to use their control over the bestowal of women to discipline the young men. F. J. Gillen reported the case of a young central Australian man who had lived with Europeans since childhood and so had missed out on initiation and the related operations of circumcision and subincision. Though he spoke good English and had practically forgotten his own language he eventually decided to accept initiation. Gillen explained the circumstances:
One day he came to me and said ‘I think I will go and get cut’… and I said ‘look here, Jim, you are a fool to submit to that’. He said in reply ‘Well, I can’t put up with the cheek of the women and children. They will not let me have a lubra, and the old men will not let me know anything about my countrymen.12
In some cases the old men seemed to have welcomed the chance to send the young away to work for Europeans for the difficult and often prolonged period between puberty and marriage. They appear to have used the pastoral stations or pearling luggers as safety valves to relieve some of the pent up pressures of traditional society intensified by rapid change. Several perceptive observers of Aboriginal society noted this practice. Writing of South Australia in the 1840s Moorhouse noted that young men were persuaded to live with the Europeans in order to keep them away from the old men’s wives. At the end of the century W. E. Roth, Queensland’s Northern Protector of Aborigines, claimed that old men encouraged youths to ship with pearlers so as to retain their control over the young women. Europeans frequently tried to protect blacks threatened with tribal punishment and their power was often sufficient to provide effective sanctuary from physical violence if not necessarily from sorcery. When faced with interfering white men the blacks turned to secret and surreptitious methods to punish or execute those who continued to defy tribal authority. Governor Hutt endeavoured to uncover the hidden influence of the old men which ‘paralysed and menaced’ the attempt to assimilate the young, but he was continually frustrated because the ‘threats were so vague, the influence so carefully concealed’.13
But the pressure of an assertive white legal system and the physical scattering of tribal populations progressively sapped the power of the old men. They looked on with impotent fury as European influence penetrated deeper into Aboriginal life. E. S. Parker wrote of a clash he had with two influential Loddon River blacks. They objected to Parker’s assertive promotion of European culture and the continuous subversion of their children. Parker explained that one of them:
complained in his anger that the white fellows had stolen their country, and that I was stealing their children, by taking them away to live in huts, and work, and ‘read in book’ like white fellows.14
Simpson Newland wrote of an old man from the upper Darling who remained intransigent in face of the pervasive influence of European culture. Although he recognized that further resistance was futile and acquiesced in the submission of his kin he refused to have any contact with the white man ‘much less work for him, wear his clothes, or even eat his food’.15 At times the gap between the old people and the young grew so wide that the elders refused to pass on the traditions and beliefs of their tribes. F. J. Gillen saw it happen in Central Australia. No sooner, he wrote, do the blacks come into contact with the white man than the younger men:
break away from the control of the older men, who, in normal conditions of the tribe are all powerful. It is only the older men who are really acquainted with the ancient customs and traditions, and these they will not reveal to the younger ones who have broken away from the tribal rules, and refuse to be governed by what to the old men are laws rendered sacred, because they have been handed down from the far past.16
The decision of elderly Aborigines to reject the youth of their own clans was by no means a universal one. Yet in many camps across the continent old men and women drifted towards death, lonely, bitter and disregarded.
Clearly the European invasion put great pressure on indigenous political organization and undermined traditional authority. But did new patterns of leadership emerge as a response to the white challenge? It is by any reckoning a complex question and will take some time to answer. The problem is compounded because Europeans who provided most of the evidence often believed that either Aboriginal society had a system of chiefs or should acquire one. In the early period of contact settlers were frequently convinced that renegade Europeans–escaped convicts and the like–had taken control of the Aborigines out in the bush and were stirring up trouble. Thus an official notice of 1796 suggested that two escaped convicts ‘direct and assist’ attacks on the settlers.17 Five years later another Government report stated that there was reason to believe that ‘some vagabonds’ were living with the blacks and ‘instigating them to commit many acts of violence on the settlers’.18 Similar suggestions were made in Tasmania and at Moreton Bay where the blockading of the road to the Darling Downs was attributed to the fact that ‘pale faces were at work amongst them’.19
From what we know of traditional social organization and of the experiences on the other side of the frontier of people like Davis, Morrell, Thompson and Buckley there is little reason to suppose that stray Europeans had any significant influence on Aboriginal behaviour. G. A. Robinson thought the idea of renegade white leaders ‘one of the most puerile inventions that was ever conceived’.20 Far from being thought worthy of emulation Buckley and Thompson were considered as rather simple souls whose minds had been affected by their journey back from the dead. We also know something of a European who lived for years on the islands of the Western Torres Strait. He was neither a powerful chief nor ‘the Wild White Man of Badu’ and was only able to survive by being both useful and circumspect. Barbara Thompson met him and reported that he was called Weinie by the islanders:
and had no particular authority, being the joint property of two brothers, and was very useful to them in repairing their canoes. She had often heard her own people remark that they would be glad to catch a white man like Weinie to work at their canoes for them.21
The idea that rogue Europeans were responsible for tribal resistance served two functions–like any conspiracy theory it could be used to explain away black hostility while at the same time confirming white belief in Aboriginal incompetence.
Settlers’ accounts abound also in references to powerful Aboriginal chiefs who it was thought directed the attacks of warrior bands on the lives and property of the Europeans. Names like Eaglehawk, Jupiter, Belba and Oromonde were coined for these largely fictitious figures. Much of the evidence concerning Aboriginal leadership was provided by people with little understanding of, or interest in, traditional society and must for that reason be regarded with great suspicion. Moorhouse, the South Australian Protector, carefully observed black methods during one of the large scale attacks on overlanding parties on the lower Murray in the early 1840s. These were possibly the biggest groups ever to confront the settlers but even then Moorhouse could detect no indication of military leadership in the European sense. He wrote that:
the natives had no chief or leader. They appeared to be arranging their intervals of distance with each other on their approach towards us. I have nothing to lead me to infer that they have chiefs.22
There is more evidence to hand relating to a number of young men who became prominent by their resistance to the Europeans in and near the major colonial towns–Pemulwy in Sydney, Yagan in Perth, Dundalli in Brisbane. They were certainly well enough known to be recognized by the settlers and they were clearly at the forefront of skirmishes with the Europeans although their motives may have been those of personal revenge rather than racial retribution. Each of the three created considerable anxiety among the Europeans who saw them as symbols of black resistance. Pemulwy was, according to Collins, ‘said to be at the head of every party that attacked the maize grounds’23 and to others ‘a riotous and troublesome savage’, a ‘most active enemy to the settlers’.24 Yagan was thought to be ‘at the head and front of any mischief’.25 In the eyes of another he was ‘the Wallace of the Age’.26 The evidence concerning such people as Yagan and Pemulwy is very much more substantial than what we have about any individuals on the pastoral frontier. But we are still no closer to the question of leadership. Clearly they were courageous and resolute in their reaction to Europeans but that does not mean that they were leaders of their own people especially as they seem to have been relatively young men. In traditional society the old men were paramount in matters of ritual and belief but in more secular areas the fundamental egalitarianism of Aboriginal society militated against the emergence of permanent leadership. Europeans who knew the Aborigines best were aware of this. Symmons, the West Australian Protector, remarked in 1841 that the blacks were a people ‘owning no chief–literally a pure democracy’.27 Writing of South Australian Aborigines Taplin noted that ‘all members of the clan are held to be equal’.28 The early New South Wales missionary William Walker thought Aboriginal society would be better if there was more subordination. But if a man:
whom Englishmen have called chief, should in the least degree, offend one of those over whom he is placed in authority, he will raise his waddy and knock him down.29
Despite the cultural barriers to the emergence of strong secular leadership it is possible that Aborigines were influenced by what they saw of European society with its officers and overseers, governors and superintendents. Evidence for such cultural influence is very difficult to find although there are one or two suggestive scraps of information. The West Australian pioneer G. F. Moore was handing out Government rations to a group of blacks at York when one man came forward saying: ‘Give it to me, I, Darrama am the Governor among the Yoongar, as your Governor is among the white men.’30 Many years later when Logan Jack was on his expedition across Cape York he met a young man who had worked on the pearling boats. Speaking in English he told the white explorer that he was captain of many canoes. Both these cases are interesting but it is impossible to know if the two men in question had merely borrowed English words or if they had also adopted the concepts which they expressed as well.
There is still another aspect of leadership to consider. It seems that in some places groups of mainly young Aborigines who had broken away from tribal authority coalesced into gangs, or as they might be termed, reconstituted clans, under powerful authoritarian leaders who based their power on personal charisma. Mosquito, the leader of Hobart’s ‘tame mob’ is perhaps the best documented example. He was doubly an outsider–a mainland rather than a Tasmanian Aborigine and considerably acculturated as well. Yet he seems to have exercised great authority over his companions although we will never be certain about the inner dynamics of these groups. A contemporary observed that the ‘tame mob’ consisted of twenty to thirty blacks who ‘had absconded from their proper tribes in the interior’ many of them having ‘transgressed tribal laws in their own districts, and were obliged to live abroad for a season’. Mosquito, he explained, had power over them: ‘in a sense superior to any known among the equality-loving Tasmanians, and governed them after the approved European model.’31
The case of the Tasmanian woman Walyer is even more interesting although the evidence is more fragmentary. Like Mosquito she was considerably acculturated having lived with the Bass Strait sealers. She spoke English, could use guns and had presumably adopted other aspects of European culture. Robinson is the main source of our knowledge about her and he attributed his information to several other Aborigines. She was, he wrote, ‘at the head of an Aboriginal banditti’ and was known to issue her orders ‘in a most determined manner’. As with Mosquito’s tame mob her companions were ‘the disaffected of several nations’. It was said of her that she:
boasted to the other women how she had taught the blackfellows to load and fire a musket, and instructed them how to kill plenty of white people, and that she was wont to recount her exploits how she used to tell the blackfellows how to act when they used to rob a hut.32
There may have been other ‘banditti’ like those of Mosquito and Walyer in other parts of the country and indeed the case of Pidgeon in the north-west of Western Australia in the 1890s springs immediately to mind. The members of these gangs seem to have shared many characteristics with Aborigines who rode on the other side of the white man’s law, the trackers and troopers of the native police forces. Both outlaws and ‘police boys’ were typically young, having grown to adulthood after the arrival of the settlers, were considerably acculturated and often rebels against tribal authority. The parallels were underlined by the fact that many outlaws crossed from one side of the white man’s law to the other. Mosquito, Pidgeon, the Dora-Dora brothers and many others began their careers riding with the European police and ended up trying to evade them.
The move from the bush into white society was not merely a spatial journey. Among other things it was a transfer from one economic system to another, from the domestic mode of production to the burgeoning capitalist economy of colonial Australia. When groups of blacks walked into camps and stations and townships they carried few material possessions. But their cultural luggage was very much richer and more important in determining their reaction to the new world. They came from a society where economic activity was geared to immediate use not to the creation of a surplus for exchange. Once the current needs had been met each day could be devoted to leisure–to sleeping, gossiping, sexual intrigue, to politics, ritual or ceremony. Like hunters and gatherers elsewhere the Aborigines do not seem to have spent more than three or four hours in the field seeking food. Each family unit had direct access to the means of subsistence and each embodied all the various skills needed for survival, if not for sociability. This was the irreducible foundation on which the equality of traditional society rested. Thus Sahlins argued:
Primitive peoples have invented many ways to elevate a man above his fellows. But the producers’ hold on their own economic means rules out the most compelling history has known: exclusive control of such means by some few, rendering dependent the many others.33
Europeans were quite clear as to the economic and social role appropriate to Aborigines who came in from the bush. Governor Macquarie argued that when they had given up their ‘Wild wandering and Unsettled Habits’ they would become progressively useful to the country either as ‘labourers in Agricultural Employ or among the lower Class of Mechanics’.34 A generation later Governor Gipps gave his attention to the means by which the Aborigines ‘could be induced to become voluntary labourers for wages’. Though ‘by nature wild’ he believed that proof existed that they could be ‘induced to submit to the restraints which are imposed on ordinary labourers’.35 Numerous plans were devised to impose the required discipline on Aboriginal workers. In Perth in the 1840s the Government issued a directive that blacks would only be admitted to the town if they were wearing a woollen shirt which had to be earned by labour, thus practically conveying the lesson ‘of the value of acquiring property’.36 Education of the children was held out to be the great hope especially if they could be separated from their parents and brought up in institutions. A West Australian official put forward a scheme for the socialization of black children in 1840. He argued that an institution be set up to which the children be induced ‘and even compelled’ to go and enter upon a ‘field of action which would gradually wean them from their present erratic habits’. This scheme was quite elaborate. He suggested the children should be taught to walk to and fro for a limited distance in ‘Gangs merely to form a habit’. The next step would be to make each boy bring back any loose wood that might by lying about to be used for cooking. Subsequently they would be made to carry an axe to cut wood ‘thus gradually bringing them on by steps to a habit of labour’.37 Other gangs would meanwhile collect ballast stones, grow vegetables, break up ground or make roads.
Several attempts were made to encourage Aborigines to become gardeners or small farmers and thereby ‘feel the sweets of property’. 38 In 1815 Macquarie endeavoured to settle a group of Sydney blacks on the shores of the harbour and provided them with huts, small patches of garden, rations, clothes and a European assistant in order that they would learn to prefer ‘the productive Effects of their own Labour and Industry to the Wild and precarious Pursuits of the Woods’.39 The failure of this and similar schemes has usually been attributed to the Aborigines’ total lack of understanding of agriculture. Yet traditionally they did harvest root crops and wild grasses and often from the very same patches of soil appropriated by the settlers for agriculture. The big difference lay in the fact that they did not see the need to sit around and wait for the crops to grow. Confident in their knowledge of the environment and their ability to ensure, by appropriate ritual, its continued flowering they arranged their timetable to return to an area when a new crop had matured and ripened. Clearly there was a big gap between the productivity of Aboriginal foraging and European horticulture even in the crude colonial environment. But the crucial difference was not in the use of the land but in the institution of private property. Small European farmers and gardeners remained in one place not just to nurture their crops but because they owned the land and all it produced and residence was required to effect and affirm that ownership.
During the first half of the nineteenth century there were numerous settlers who appreciated that the difficulty of ‘bringing in’ the blacks ‘to a habit of labour’ was due to lack of motivation rather than incapacity, to the ‘difficulty of finding some inducement sufficiently powerful to excite them to continuous labour’.40 Samuel Marsden remarked in 1825 that he was pessimistic about the future of the Aborigines. ‘The time’, he wrote:
may come when they may feel more wants than they do at present –they seem to have all they wish for Idleness and Independence. They have no wants to stimulate their exertions and until they have, I fear they will remain the same.41
Perhaps the clearest analysis of the problems of attempting to impose the discipline, punctuality and regularity of wage labour on Aboriginal society was provided by Jack McLaren in his account of his life at the tip of Cape York at the turn of the century. He set out to establish a coconut plantation using the local blacks for labour. Being a solitary European the option of force was not available to him and he was required to use patience and diplomacy to extract the amount of work he required. The blacks sought access to his trade goods but otherwise they could continue to survive independently. He provided an interesting catalogue of his problems. It was, he wrote, no easy matter to persuade the natives to work on succeeding days:
We worked yesterday and are tired and would rest, they would say adding pointedly that in their habitual mode of life they worked not at all, and hunted only when the need for food was on them. Whereupon I would point out that in their wild life they had no tobacco, or flour, or coloured cloth, or tinned meats or tinned fish, or any other of the luxuries they coveted, and that the only way to obtain them was by working all day every day.42
To his annoyance the blacks took a long time over their meals. Even their method of eating appeared unnecessarily time-consuming. After the midday meal the whole camp would sleep and if McLaren did not wake them they would doze the afternoon through. Even while they were working there were constant distractions. When they came across food they would immediately down tools to dig the yams, cut out the sugar bag, pursue the wallaby, causing disruption which might last several hours. Unless he supervised their work all the time they would sit down, smoke or go to sleep the minute his back was turned. ‘Often in those early days’, he reminisced:
did I return from a brief absence to find the whole of the labourers stretched like black shadows on the ground, I tried upbraiding them. It was no use. I tried ridiculing–saying scornfully that they worked like women or children, that they had neither strength nor endurance. That was no use either … There were, in fact, no means by which I could persuade them into sudden acceptance of a daily routine of toil.43
The historical record bristles with colonists’ complaints about their problems in trying to get Aborigines to behave as ‘voluntary labourers for wages’. Governor Hutt concluded that black attitudes to labour were the ‘chief and serious difficulty’44 which had hampered assimilation. They would not work regularly; would not settle; they were unpunctual. ‘Every species of labour seems to be irksome to them’,45 wrote the Commissioner for Crown Lands at Moreton Bay. ‘Nothing’, commented a woman settler from New England, ‘can really repay them for performing any labour beyond that necessary to procure them enough game to enable them to exist from day to day’. Occasionally local blacks worked on her property but ‘they all looked on working for us as a personal favour, and gave us to understand as much’.46 ‘If they do service for others’, wrote J. B. Walker of the Tasmanians, ‘they do it through courtesy’.47
But it was not just the habit of labour that had to be induced but also those concomitants the subordination of servant to master and the separation of the worker from the means of subsistence and production. The second was the most difficult because it was hard to convince the Aborigines that they were working for their own benefit and not for white employers. G. A. Robinson explained to the Superintendent at Port Phillip that on the stations of the Protectorate the blacks were ‘taught to feel that their occupation is for their own advantage’.48 E. S. Parker was even more acutely aware of the problems of convincing the Aborigines of the advantages of wage labour and imbuing them with the ideology of capitalism. In a report from his station on the Loddon he explained how it was essential to bring the blacks ‘under the influence of Christian principles’ which would provide the fundamental underpinning for the socially desired behaviour. Even then it was essential:
that in all cases where they are employed they should be made to feel that their occupation is for their own benefit rather than for the advantage of the employer. They appear generally to feel that they owe us nothing and that they are under no obligation to work. If the suspicion therefore be aroused in their minds that they are working more for the benefit of the whites than their own advantage they will speedily recede from their employment.49
It has often been assumed that the blacks were unable to acquire enough skills to compete successfully in colonial society. The evidence suggests otherwise. Aborigines displayed their adaptability within a few years of the settlement at Sydney Cove. Collins believed that if well treated they ‘certainly might be made very serviceable people’; in a number of occupations they proved themselves ‘as handy and as useful as any other persons could have been’.50 By the 1840s the catalogue of Aboriginal occupations had grown much larger. G. A. Robinson noted that:
as far as they have been employed, they have been found faithful guides, able Bullock drivers, Efficient Shepherds, Stockkeepers and Whalers, good Boatmen, Horsemen and Houseservants, Husbandmen, Policemen, Handicrafts and other useful employments [sic].51
When they had only recently arrived on the fringe of white society Aborigines must have found many European occupations incomprehensible. As they lacked any immediate rationale they may have been thought to have ritual significance. Yet many jobs in the colonial economy required only limited formal skills and in some the blacks had distinct advantages. In much of rural industry they may well have been more immediately useful than new-chums from urban Britain. But while they were able to pick up the actual mechanical tasks associated with various jobs they were not willing to accept the social relations and cultural milieu in which they were set. While they might handle the tools of the labourer they were reluctant to accept the discipline that went with them.
Aborigines living in and around colonial towns did develop small scale trade in products gained by hunting, fishing or collecting. Fish, shell-fish, crustaceans, bark, sandalwood, skins, birds, feathers were at various times bartered with or sold to Europeans. But markets were uncertain and the blacks were regularly cheated. E. S. Parker noted in 1839 that Victorian Aborigines were the mainstays of a profitable trade in marsupial furs and lyre bird feathers yet the whites acquired them for almost nothing. He endeavoured to secure conditions which would obtain ‘for them the just value of the produce of their hunting excursions’ and drew up a scale of ‘prices’ for Aboriginal commodities which he vainly hoped the Protectorate could enforce. The basic unit was the pound of flour:
1 Kangaroo skin–2 lbs flour, 3 lbs if large
2 Oppossum skins–1 lb flour
1 Basket, large–6 lbs flour
1 Basket, middle–4 lbs flour
1 Basket, small–2 lbs flour52
One pound of flour was to be equivalent to 1 lb of rice and 1 lb of meat, ¼ lb of sugar and ¼ of rice and one knife. A tomahawk had the value of 2 lbs of flour.
Many Aboriginal groups discovered that prostitution provided a more certain return than vestigial hunting and gathering. In some places a large and lucrative trade developed and especially around the northern coasts where prostitution became one of the essential service industries supporting the pearling fleets. From the critical comments of white authorities it is obvious that substantial sums of money were earned by black communities in towns like Broome and Thursday Island. ‘The trading with young girls is very profitable to the natives’, wrote the Inspector of Aborigines at Broome, ‘as for one nights debauchery from ten shillings to two pounds ten is paid in rations and clothing’.53 The situation at La Grange Bay would, he said rather coyly, ‘speak for itself’. For eight months of the year ‘an average of 150 coloured men came into contact fortnightly with the natives’. Money and food earned by the women was shared in the fringe camps allowing most of the men to avoid the need to labour for the Europeans, to ‘make a living in ease and idleness’.54 At Cape York at much the same time officials reported that the ex-trackers Waimara and James were the ‘bosses’ who organized labour for the luggers and women for the crews. Whether such indigenous entrepreneurs emerged elsewhere is impossible to say.
Officials in both West Australia and Queensland were determined to stamp out the trade. Waimara and James were deported to a Reserve; police in Broome drove the blacks out of town. Their motives were mixed. There was genuine official concern at the massive health problems accompanying a widespread epidemic of V.D. but it was equally clear that the colonial governments were determined to prevent the blacks from becoming economically independent. When the Western Australian Inspector of Aborigines visited a Broome purged by the local constables his first remarks were instructive. He noted that very few blacks could be seen about the town and residents told him ‘they could now get hold of a native willing to work’.55
Begging was another means by which blacks could avoid the need for regular wage labour. The morality of the practice looked very different to blacks than to censorious whites. Moorhouse wrote in 1842 that he found it a difficult task to make Adelaide Aborigines believe that ‘begging lessens them in the estimation of Europeans and that their supplies would be more certain and more creditable, if gained by cultivation of their own ground’.56 Begging was a natural response from people who shared without question and who believed that reciprocity was the greatest social good. The conviction that the white man owed a great debt for appropriated land merely strengthened their determination to continue a practice which helped to augment meagre diets and maintain a precarious existence on the rim of European society.
Many Europeans believed that they genuinely offered their culture and religion to the blacks. Yet white society was less able than Aboriginal society to assimilate outsiders on terms of equality. The only entry point available was at the very bottom of the social hierarchy where resistance to assimilation was at its strongest. For all their fine words colonial elites were not offering equality to the blacks but merely space on the lowest rungs of society. Unskilled Europeans could not afford a similar generosity. They feared the economic competition of cheap labour and were never willing to concede equality to the black outsider who was ‘a good deal bullied by the white labourer, who lost no opportunity of asserting his superiority over him’.57 Unfortunately, wrote E. S. Parker, ‘there exists an aversion on the part of most European labourers to see the natives taught to work, avowedly for the reason that a successful result might interfere with the price of labour’.58 Similar arguments were presented in the Adelaide Examiner in 1842 by Dr. Richard Penny, one of the most perceptive European observers of Aboriginal society in nineteenth-century Australia. His comments are worth quoting at length:
All the efforts for civilizing the native, have been with the object of his becoming a portion of our labouring, civilized, population, and forming an integral part of it, and it has been this, that has caused all such attempts, to end in failure. The two races can never amalgamate–the white labourer, and the native, (be he ever so useful), can not be brought to work together on equal terms. We could never succeed in incorporating the native with the mass of the labouring population, for there is always enough of that antipathy of races existing, to induce the settler to place the native, however deserving, in an inferior position to his white servants, and to give him the more menial offices to perform; but if the settler being a friend of the Aboriginal cause, were not disposed to make any distinction, but that of merit, the servants themselves would not perform those offices, whilst they could shift it on that of the blacks.59
When it came to sexual relations the caste barrier was raised even higher preventing almost all contact between black men and white women. ‘No European Woman’, wrote William Shelley in 1814, ‘would marry a Native, unless some abandoned profligate’.60 Over sixty years later John Green told a Victorian Royal Commission that he had known of several cases where Aboriginal and part-Aboriginal children had been brought up with European families. All would go well, he remarked:
until they came to an age that they would like to make love. As soon as this was known by mamma or papa, there must be something done to stop it, so the white daughter or son is told they must not make so free with the darky; they must remember that, although he or she has been educated in the family, it would be degrading to make love with them. So the cold shoulder is soon turned on the darky; they soon feel it, and a change is seen in the darky; instead of one of the most cheerful they will mope about until they can find a chance to join their friends the aborigines.61
With neither property nor marketable skills the Aborigines were stranded, poverty-stricken and powerless, on the fringes of colonial society. A few individuals temporarily escaped the inexorable dictate of the market by being kept in social and even geographical isolation allowing them to achieve an elevated status which could not be sustained once the special circumstances were brought to an end. Guides on exploring expeditions often attained an importance unmatched by blacks elsewhere in the society as a consequence of their special skills, the paramilitary nature of the exploring party and the social limbo of the inland journey. Children and youths taken into the homes of the colonial elite were afforded a status dependent on their hosts’ class position rather than their own. Native police troopers were deliberately kept in isolation from the wider community and encouraged to feel superior to the white working class. The original regulations for the force at Port Phillip specified that the troopers were to be prevented from ‘associating with those who may instruct them in vicious and disorderly habits’. They must be made to ‘discriminate between the differing classes of white people’, avoiding the working class while showing ‘respect to the upper and well conducted’.62 Settlers seem to have often adopted similar policies with their Aboriginal servants. The Tasmanian pioneer J. H. Wedge did not allow ‘his blackboy’ May-day to ‘live with or associate with servants’.63 But once troopers left the native police, expeditions came back from the bush, upper-bourgeois protectors returned to England, the artificial platform was removed. The assertion of social reality, the sudden descent, was a harsh and often shattering experience. This may well explain why so many ex-trackers and ex-troopers ended up as renegades alienated from both white and Aboriginal society. These themes can best be illustrated by reference to the careers of a few blacks who suffered these experiences.
Bungaree was a New South Wales Aborigine who was well educated, could speak Latin and behaved ‘as a gentleman in elegant society’. He entered the native police but found his position in society anomalous in the extreme and remarked to his superior officer in a ‘melancholy tone’:
I wish I had never been taken out of the bush, and educated as I have been, for I cannot be a white man, they will never look on me as one of themselves; and I cannot be a blackfellow, I am disgusted with their way of living.64
Mathinna was a young Tasmanian girl who was temporarily adopted by Governor and Lady Franklin. ‘She had dwelt in the Colonial palace’, wrote Bonwick, ‘had been taught, petted, and trained to high hopes’.65 When the Franklins returned to England it was thought that Mathinna’s health would not stand the journey. She was placed in an orphanage and virtually abandoned to eventually drown while drunk at the Oyster Cove settlement for the remnants of the Tasmanian tribes. At much the same time in South Australia a young Aboriginal girl called Maria was taken into Government House in Adelaide. Seduced by a prominent merchant she was sent away when her pregnancy became apparent and fell ‘into disreputable habits of life’66 and was not even acceptable at the Poonindie mission. George Grey discussed the career of the West Australian youth Miago who sailed for several months on the Beagle and proved a ‘temperate, attentive, cheerful’ servant. But on his return to Perth he found European society uncongenial and went back to the bush. Grey considered the reasons why:
Miago when he was landed, had amongst the white people none who would be truly friends of his–they would give him scraps from their table, but the very outcasts of the whites would not have treated him as an equal–they have no sympathy with him–he could not have married–he had no certain means of subsistence open to him … He had two courses left open to him–he could either have renounced all natural ties, and have led a hopeless, joyless life amongst the whites–ever a servant–ever an inferior being–or he could renounce civilization, and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth.67
But most Aborigines were not frustrated guests waiting patiently to be admitted to an unwelcoming white society. Generally speaking blacks were not impressed by what was offered. ‘They do not court a life of labour’, wrote a Victorian Justice of the Peace in 1849:
that of our shepherds and hut-keepers–our splitters or bullock drivers–appears to them one of unmeaning toil, and they would by no means consent to exchange their free unhoused condition for the monotonous drudgery of such a dreary existence.68
It was difficult to persuade Aborigines to accept the inequalities of white society. Taplin noted that Aboriginal men had ‘quite a dignified bearing with an air of freedom altogether different from low class Europeans’.69 They do not ‘understand exalted rank’, wrote a Victorian clergyman, ‘and, in fact, it is difficult to get into a blackfellow’s head that one man is higher than another’.70 James Gunther, the pioneer New South Wales missionary, commented on the consequences of the blacks’ ‘peculiar form of government’ which:
admitting of no distinction of rank, but allowing each man to share in their consultations and decisions as to any questions arising among them stamps a feeling of independence and even haughtiness with an appearance of dignity on the character of the men rarely to be met among differently governed natives. As they have no titles for distinction nor a proper name for a chief so they have neither a word in their language to signify a servant … no man has an idea of serving another, this idea of their own dignity and importance is carried so far that they hesitate long before they apply the term Mr. to any European even when they know full well the distinction we make (between master and servant).71
The value of economic incentives was undermined by the egalitarianism and reciprocity of Aboriginal society. Increased wages awarded for improved efficiency were immediately shared with kin whether they were employed or not. It was difficult, a north Queensland missionary wrote, for Aborigines to ‘understand individualism’. 72 Their system of socialism’, commented another, was a barrier to progress because it hindered ‘any improvement or rightful ownership’.73 Taplin observed that South Australian Aborigines ‘always resent the payment of superior wages to one man because he is a better workman than another and never will allow he is more worthy of it than themselves.’ This aversion, he wrote:
to acknowledge superiority is a great evil when the Aborigines come in contact with the colonists. They will never permit one of their own people to be placed over them as a ganger or overseer.74
Thomas Mitchell pondered on the problem of the Aboriginal response to white society when he returned to the settled districts after his Queensland expedition and was required to consider what should happen to the guides who had accompanied him into the interior. He appreciated the importance of equality in traditional society–‘all there participate in, and have a share of, Nature’s gifts. These, scanty though they be, are open to all’. But among Europeans the ‘half clad native finds himself in a degraded position … a mere outcast’. Experience in Australia and elsewhere, he argued, had shown the ‘absurdity of expecting that any men’ would leave their woods purely from choice ‘unless they do so on terms of the most perfect equality’.75 Drawing on his experiences of white-Aboriginal relations in South Australia Richard Penny concluded that if the black was:
to accept the terms of civilization that we offer him, everything would conduce to keep him in the lowest scale of society, he would be constantly subject to all sorts of oppression, and would make but a bad exchange for his native independence.76
Penny argued that not only was this the objective situation facing the Aborigines but that they were fully cognizant of it. ‘These are things’, he wrote, ‘which the friends of the Aborigines overlook: but the natives themselves … are well aware of this, and it is a reason assigned by them for not remaining at the stations of the settlers.’77 Bonwick argued that young Aborigines were not content with their position when living with white families. ‘However English lads may reconcile themselves with a life of subordinate servitude’ the same could not be expected of the blacks as it was ‘too opposite’ to their instincts.78 Backhouse and Walker believed that many experiments with the Aborigines, had failed because they had been ‘placed in situations where they felt themselves looked down upon by the whites’.79
By the middle of the nineteenth century many settlers had concluded that the Aborigines would never adopt European civilization, that they were incapable of ‘improvement’ and were indeed a doomed race. Yet a minority of whites appreciated that black behaviour manifested faith in their own culture, that it betokened strength not weakness, affirmation not failure. The problem they realized was not the incapacity of tribesmen but their ‘intractableness’, their ‘martial spirit’.80 The present generation, wrote a Victorian settler, ‘cling to confirmed habits and old associations with a tenacity which nothing can overcome’.81 From the Darling Downs the Commissioner for Crown Lands wrote in 1850 that the ‘roving life’ still had charms for the blacks ‘far too powerful … to overcome’.82 The Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia observed that:
the bush has so many attractions, that they prefer the precarious subsistence it affords to the food of the white man which must be earned by labour. Their … roving life still has charms for them far too powerful for any inducement that the habits and customs of civilization can offer to overcome.83
A majority of Aborigines endeavoured to maintain direct access to their land both for its spiritual significance and the means of subsistence that it provided. They sought to preserve their independence from the labour market and the abject position that it assigned to them. This increasingly meant that hunting and foraging had to be supplemented by returns from casual labour, prostitution, begging and pilfering. ‘Why should they vex themselves with the drudgery of labour’ asked a New South Wales settler in the 1830s:
they are not labourers at all, and for the same reason that any other gentleman is not viz. that he can live without labour. So also can they, and as comfortably as they wish to live.84
Clearly fringe-dwelling blacks did not live as comfortably as they would have liked but it is essential to stress the element of choice in their predicament. They chose to maintain the maximum degree of independence possible in the circumstances at the cost of their standard of living, even of their well being. They opted for Aboriginal values, settlement patterns, family life, rhythms of work even when that choice meant a miserable level of material comfort. Although Europeans increasingly imposed restraints, and on reserves and missions they were almost overwhelming, the blacks continued to exercise choice and thereby shape their own history. There were great penalties–malnutrition, ill-health, despair, population loss–but by retaining even a small area of autonomy nineteenth-century fringe dwellers ensured the survival of at least elements of Aboriginal culture in those parts of the continent where the impact of the invasion had been most devastating. It was a course of action fraught with risk yet the Aboriginal renaissance of the last decade suggests that ultimately the sacrifices were justified.