The first people to be called Australians were the Aborigines. The explorer Matthew Flinders, who sailed around the continent in 1802–03 and gave it its name, noticed differences between tribes but used ‘Australians’ for them all. At this stage the British convict settlement at Sydney was a tiny speck and no-one there thought of themselves as Australian. Soon the Aborigines lost that title and did not regain it until 150 years later. Who had the best right to the title was an ongoing matter of dispute.
THE NATIVES OF THE COUNTRY
When Australians were ashamed of their convict past, they traced the origins of their country not from the settlement at Sydney on 26 January 1788, but from the voyage of Captain Cook along the east coast in 1770. When Aborigines were taught that Australian history began with Cook, they decided that Cook must be an evil character and he appears as such in Aboriginal myths. Actually Cook, as a man of the Enlightenment, took a favourable view of Aborigines and their society. Nevertheless, he did claim the territory on the east coast for the king.
The Natives of this Country are of a middle Stature straight bodied and slender-limb’d, their skins the Colour of Wood soot or of a dark chocolate their hair mostly black, some lank and others curled, they all wear it crop’d short, their Beards which are generally black they likewise crop short or singe off. Their features are far from being disagreeable and their voices are soft and tunable. They go quite naked both men and women without any manner of Cloathing whatever, even the women do not so much as cover their privates. Altho none of us were ever very near any of their women, one Gentleman excepted, yet we are all as well satisfied of this as if we had lived among them. Notwithstanding we had several interviews with the men while we lay in Endeavour River, yet whether through Jealousy or disrigard they never brought any of their Women along with them to the Ship but always left them on the opposite side of the River where we had frequent opportunities viewing them through our glasses. They wear as ornaments Necklaces made of shells, Bracelets, or hoops about their arms, made mostly of hair, twisted and made like a cord hoop, these they wear tight about the uper parts of their arms and some have girdles made in the same manner. The men wear a bone about 3 or 4 Inches long and a fingers thick, run through the Bridge of the nose which the Seamen call’d a spritsail yard, they likewise have holes in their ears for Earrings but we never saw them Wear any.
They seem to have no fix’d habitation but move about from place to place like wild Beasts in search of food, and I believe depend wholy upon the success of the present day for their subsistance. They have Wooden fish gigs with 2, 3 or 4 prongs each very ingeniously made with which they strike fish; we have also seen them strike both fish and birds with their darts. With these they likewise kill other Animals: they have also wooden Harpoons for striking Turtle, but of these I believe they got but few, except at the Season they come a Shore to lay. In short these people live wholy by fishing and hunting, but mostly by the former for we never saw one Inch of Cultivated land in the Whole Country, they know however the use of Taara and sometimes eat them. We do not know that they eat any thing raw but roast or broil all they eat on slow small fires.
From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon the earth: but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life; they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very whol-some Air: so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sensible of for many to whome we gave Cloth &c to, left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seem’d to set no value upon anything we gave them nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities …
SUNBURNT AUSTRALIANS ARE YOUR BRETHREN
As British settlers advanced into Aboriginal lands, they commonly came to regard Aborigines as a low form of life, who could be killed or ignored. A few committed Christians did defend the Aborigines. Robert Lyon, a pioneer settler in Western Australia, believed in the humanity of the Aborigines and that they should become Christians. He persuaded the authorities to allow him to accompany Yagan, the resistance fighter, when he was sent to Carnac Island. He used the term ‘Australian’ for the Aborigines – and also ‘savage’, believing with other Christians that the Aborigines must have declined into their present position when they split off from the original human population described in the Bible. Hence the odd title of his book: An Appeal to The World on behalf of the younger branch of the Family of Shem (1839).
Time would fail me to enumerate the many instances of disinterested benevolence shown by the Aborigines to the invaders of their country. They repeatedly recovered strayed stock and brought them to the owners, carrying in their arms the kids and the lambs which they found, while they themselves were wandering through the forest in search of food and famishing with hunger. They treated the lost wanderer with the kindest hospitality, dividing their humble repast with him, allowing him to rest for the night in their camp, and conducting him on his way in the morning. They held the house and the property of the lonely settler sacred, aiding him in his toils when present, and sharing their food with his children when absent. They rescued the fainting soldier and the emaciated explorer from the mazes of the forest; and, not only having saved them from the horrors of famine, but restored them to their families, their friends, and the settlement.
Away with dissimilation. If ye pretend to doubt the sunburnt skin of the Australians, apply the lance to their veins. Even this is needless. Ye have already gone to the fountain head and thrust the pointed steel into their hearts. Examine the crimson fluid, as it pours out – there can be no mistake here – and say, Is it not blood of your own? Yes. The bleeding victims of your avarice are your brethren! To slander an innocent race, in order to justify their extermination, is as cruel as it is cowardly and base. Glory in your apparent security; only flatter not yourselves that vengeance will allow the guilty to escape both in this world and the next. Even in life’s short span, ye will have some cause to repent. Ye may disregard the sleeping tribunals of your country; but ye shall not escape the infamy which your deeds justly merit.
How hard is the fate of this people! They may stand to be slaughtered; but they must not throw a spear in their own defence, or attempt to bring their enemies to a sense of justice by the only means in their power, – that of returning like for like. If they do – if they are to be guilty of an act which in other nations would be eulogized as the noblest of a patriot’s deeds – they are outlawed; a reward is set upon their heads; and they are ordered to be shot, as if they were so many mad dogs! Thus, in the most barbarous manner, ye practice what in them ye condemn, the law of retaliation.
THE NEW NATIVES
In the 1810s the first generation of British people born in New South Wales came of age. They were called the native-born and they took the name Australian; the slang term for them was ‘currency’, a reference to the local money supply in contrast to sterling or British money. The badge of a currency lad was the cabbage-tree hat, woven from the fronds of a local palm tree.
In 1823 John Bigge, a royal commissioner sent from Britain, described the native-born in his official report.
The class of inhabitants that have been born in the colony affords a remarkable exception to the moral and physical character of their parents: they are generally tall in person, and slender in their limbs, of fair complexion, and small features. They are capable of undergoing more fatigue, and are less exhausted by labour than native Europeans; they are active in their habits, but remarkably awkward in their movements. In their tempers they are quick and irascible, but not vindictive; and I only repeat the testimony of persons who have had many opportunities of observing them, that they neither inherit the vices nor the feelings of their parents. Many of the native youths have evinced a strong disposition for a sea-faring life, and are excellent sailors; and no doubt can be entertained that that class of the population will afford abundant and excellent materials for the supply of any department in the commercial or naval service.
The Currency Lass, a musical drama written by a convict, was first performed in Sydney in 1844. The plot turns on the hero’s English uncle thinking that his nephew is to marry an Aborigine because the fiancée is described as a ‘native’. This is one of its songs, ‘The Boy in the Cabbage-Tree Hat’.
Talk not to me of your Frenchmen or Dons
Or the graces they claim to inherit.
They’re asses compared to Australia’s sons,
The lads for fun, frolic and spirit!
There, grimace and palaver in plenty you’ll find,
Where foppery comes to them pat, sir;
But the ladies I’ll ask if not more to their mind
Is the boy in the cabbage-tree hat, sir.
His heart ever true to his friend and his lass,
To honour the fair his first duty,
The Currency Lad never flinches his glass
While he pours the libation to beauty.
Let others then seek by each exquisite art
To win your applause and all that, sir.
They may make the attempt but they ne’er can compare
With the boy in the cabbage-tree hat, sir!
NATIVE-BORN ARE TRUE AUSTRALIANS
The gold rushes of the 1850s brought a mass of new settlers and so postponed for a generation the time when the native-born would be in the majority. In the 1870s and 1880s in Victoria the children of the gold-rush generation came of age. Many of the more sober and respectable young men formed the Australian Natives Association, which defended the reputation of the native-born against the criticisms of their British-born parents and advocated the formation of an Australian nation. It was a standing joke in the Association that they were not Aborigines as was commonly assumed, but the Association did agitate to protect and defend the Aborigines.
George Meudell was one of the most assertive of the ‘natives’ and the author of ‘Australia for the Australians’ (1882).
Our present Parliament, no doubt, well represents the successes and failures of our imported society, with its continual struggle to have and to hold; but it is devoid of patriotism, and I maintain that no parliament in which the patriotic element is wanting can have the real and substantial good of the country at heart. Every colonial Britisher considers himself an exile from his fatherland, as he is only here to make money, and never relinquishes the fond idea that ‘there is no place like home’.
Every Australian has the feeling, not shared by ‘foreigners’, that every class interest is limited by, and subordinate to, the interest of the aggregate of the community. This subordination of self and class interest to the interest of all, with the emotional glow which follows and recompenses every act of self-surrender, is the simplest and purest form of patriotism. Knowing, therefore, that the interest of the few is the robbery of the many, the Australian will sternly repress log-rolling and swindling, and will only vote for the man who will represent general and not individual and clique interests. He will be influenced only by a public-spirited desire for the advancement of his native land, and not for the advancement of any particular statesman or party.
One of the criticisms that the older generation made of the native-born was that they were too interested in sport and outdoor activities. The Australian Natives Association tried to counter this image by running lectures and debates and devoting themselves to self-improvement. The novelist Rolf Boldrewood sold thousands of copies of Robbery under Arms (1880) with a hero that reinforced the stereotype. These are its opening words.
My name’s Dick Marston, Sydney-side native. I’m twenty-nine years old, six feet in my stocking soles, and thirteen stone weight. Pretty strong and active with it, so they say. I don’t want to blow – not here any road – but it takes a good man to put me on my back, or stand up to me with the gloves, or the naked mauleys. I can ride anything – anything that was ever lapped in horsehide – swim like a musk-duck, and track like a Myall blackfellow. Most things that a man can do I’m up to, and that’s all about it. As I lift myself now I can feel the muscle swell on my arm like a cricket ball, in spite of the – well, in spite of everything.
AUSTRALIANS ARE WHITE MEN
The Sydney Bulletin, published from 1880, was the first national newspaper. It was radical, republican and a fierce advocate of the White Australia policy, which the colonies adopted in 1888 when they passed uniform legislation against Chinese migrants and which the new Commonwealth enshrined in 1901. The Bulletin claimed with some justice that Britain did not want Australia to adopt a White Australia policy.
By the term Australian we mean not those who have merely been born in Australia. All white men who come to these shores – with a clean record – and who leave behind them the memory of class-distinctions and the religious differences of the old world; all men who place the happiness, the prosperity, the advancement of their adopted country before the interests of Imperialism, are Australian. In this regard all men who leave the tyrant-ridden lands of Europe for freedom of speech and right of personal liberty are Australians before they set foot on the ship which brings them hither. Those who fly from an odious military conscription; those who leave their fatherland because they cannot swallow the worm-eaten lie of the divine right of kings to murder peasants, are Australians by instinct – Australian and republican are synonymous. No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour, is an Australian.
OLD AUSTRALIANS
Aborigines were not thought of as part of the new nation. It was around 1900 that they lost their civil rights so that they could not move or marry without official permission and their children were liable to be taken from them. Aboriginal protests began in the 1920s, and on Australia Day, 26 January 1938, the 150th anniversary of European settlement, Aborigines held a protest meeting in Sydney and issued a pamphlet, Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights, written by J.T. Patten and W. Ferguson, the president and secretary of the Aborigines Progressive Association.
The 26th of January, 1938, is not a day of rejoicing for Australia’s Aborigines; it is a day of mourning. This festival of 150 years’ so-called ‘progress’ in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country. We, representing the Aborigines, now ask you, the reader of this appeal, to pause in the midst of your sesqui-centenary rejoicings and ask yourself honestly whether your ‘conscience’ is clear in regard to the treatment of the Australian blacks by the Australian whites during the period of 150 years’ history which you celebrate?
The Old Australians
You are the New Australians, but we are the Old Australians. We have in our arteries the blood of the Original Australians, who have lived in this land for many thousands of years. You came here only recently, and you took our land away from us by force. You have almost exterminated our people, but there are enough of us remaining to expose the humbug of your claim, as white Australians, to be a civilised, progressive, kindly and humane nation. By your cruelty and callousness towards the Aborigines you stand condemned in the eyes of the civilised world.
Plain Speaking
These are hard words, but we ask you to face the truth of our accusations. If you would openly admit that the purpose of your Aborigines Legislation has been, and now is, to exterminate the Aborigines completely so that not a trace of them or of their descendants remains, we could describe you as brutal, but honest. But you dare not admit openly that your hope and wish is for our death! You hypocritically claim that you are trying to ‘protect’ us; but your modern policy of ‘protection’ (so-called) is killing us off just as surely as the pioneer policy of giving us poisoned damper and shooting us down like dingoes!
We do not ask for your charity; we do not ask you to study us as scientific freaks. Above all, we do not ask for your ‘protection.’ No, thanks! We have had 150 years of that! We ask only for justice, decency and fair play. Is this too much to ask? Surely your minds and hearts are not so callous that you will refuse to reconsider your policy of degrading and humiliating and exterminating Old Australia’s Aborigines?
NEW AUSTRALIANS
The migrants to Australia came overwhelmingly from England, Scotland and Ireland and here they and their children became British Australians. After World War II the Labor government decided to boost population with a large-scale migration program. In 1945 Arthur Calwell, the minister for immigration, indicated his willingness to look outside Britain for migrants. He urged Australians to call the new non-British migrants New Australians rather than ‘wogs’ or ‘dagos’. But Calwell remained a firm believer in the White Australia policy.
Apart from schemes of organized and assisted British migration, the door to Australia is always open within the limits of our existing legislation to people from the various dominions, the United States of America, and from European continental countries who are sound in health and who will not become a charge on the community, to come here and make their homes. The Australian people must help newcomers to become assimilated. We have been too prone in the past to ostracize those of alien birth and then blame them for segregating themselves and forming foreign communities. It is we, not they, who are generally responsible for this condition of affairs. Fortunately, we have only three areas in Australia where non-British migrants have tended to congregate in considerable numbers. One of these is in Shepparton, Victoria, the second is the Leeton-Griffith irrigation area of New South Wales, and the third is on the northern cane-fields of Queensland. That these people can be absorbed into our community life in the course of one generation is proved by the fact that the Australian-born children of most foreign-born parents have played their part in the fighting services in the defence of Australia in this war and regard themselves as Australian, having equal citizen rights, and bearing equal national responsibilities with every other Australian.
In the United States of America, residence, and not nationality, determines liability for service in the armed forces. Because of United States law, many draftees who were born in enemy countries were sent to fight for the defence of this country in the South-West Pacific Area. In our terminology, they would have been regarded as ‘enemy aliens’, but by their residence in the United States of America they earned the right to be treated on the same basis as loyal American citizens, and we have to thank them for the part they played in association with our own armed forces and other members of Allied units in saving this country from invasion. It may be well for Australia closely to examine this American attitude, and decide whether this may not be the proper way to treat and assimilate the newcomer.
Unfortunately, campaigns are fostered in this country from time to time on racial and religious grounds by persons who have ulterior motives to serve. The activities of such people cannot be too strongly condemned. They are anti-Australian and anti-Christian, and make not for national unity and national well-being but for the creation of discord and bitterness that is harmful to Australians at home and abroad.
FIRST AUSTRALIANS
Anthropologists played an important role in changing Australian attitudes to Aborigines in the years after World War II. In 1952 the husband and wife team Ronald and Catherine Berndt published a little book The First Australians, which was one of the first uses of this term for the Aborigines. The book was dedicated to their teacher Professor A.P. Elkin, who in 1938 had written The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them. This is from the introduction to the Berndts’ book.
Let us try to understand and appreciate these First Australians – people who were so admirably adjusted to the environment with which we now, at times, find ourselves in conflict: whose cultures were, and in some places still are, vivid living realities, splashed with brilliant colouring, virile, meaningful: people possessed of a religious zeal and a faith in life, a faith in the essential goodness and significance of their own way – the Aboriginal Way. But this Way was so patterned that its possessors found it hard to combat the alien invader; and it was based on premises contrary to those of the European – a different Way, involving different criteria and values. It had simply developed along different lines from ours – different in kind, not in quality nor in degree. Moreover it was, and is, contemporary: not an ancient survival, arrested in development, nor radically confined through mental retardation.
It is this point which we are apt to forget, as our Western European culture, with its complex organization and its stress on technology and wealth, spreads across the face of the earth, laying waste or absorbing other ideologies and patterns of life. We are apt to forget, too, that other peoples have developed through the centuries, adjusting themselves to their peculiar environment, evolving their own answers to the problems of existence, and finding in them satisfaction and meaning within the framework of human reference.
Through trying to understand the behaviour of others, such as the Australian Aborigines, we come closer to understanding ourselves. Here is a way of life built up by one group of people: what value have they found in it, what satisfaction, what happiness?
And although the Aborigines are people physically different from us, who possess a culture dissimilar to our own, yet with all that they are human beings with the same basic urges, desires, and requirements as ourselves.
THE AUSTRALIAN FAMILY
In 1967 the Liberal government of Harold Holt began to allow migration from Asia, and in 1973 the Whitlam Labor government set aside race as a factor in migration policy. Labor’s Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, promoted a new vision of a multicultural Australia.
The image we manage to convey of ourselves still seems to range from the bushwacker to the sportsman to the slick city businessman. Where is the Maltese process worker, the Finnish carpenter, the Italian concrete layer, the Yugoslav miner or – dare I say it – the Indian scientist? Where do these people belong, in all honesty, if not in today’s composite Australian image? Are they to be non-people – despite their economic contribution to our well-being – because they do not happen to fit the largely American-oriented stereotypes of our entertainment industry? It would seem a mark of national maturity to be able to identify firstly what is essential and distinctive about one’s own land and its people, and then to portray it consistently with insight and sympathy.
It is a fact that Australia is now one of the most cosmopolitan societies on earth. It is time that all Australians were encouraged to develop a better understanding of what this implies.
To the average Australian, whether ‘old’ or ‘new’, terms like ‘assimilation’, ‘integration’, ‘homogeneous’ or ‘pluralistic’ society are probably meaningless. The concept I prefer, the ‘family of the nation’, is one that ought to convey an immediate and concrete image to all. In a family the overall attachment to the common good need not impose a sameness on the outlook or activity of each member, nor need these members deny their individuality and distinctiveness in order to seek a superficial and unnatural conformity.
We might well ask ourselves: what is the Australian way of life? The life styles and values of the suburban housewife in Moonee Ponds, the Italian travel agent in Carlton, the Turkish car factory worker, the Slavic Orthodox priest, or the Aboriginal at Lake Tyers? It is all too easy to overlook the pre-existence in this land of the original Australians, millennia before the advent of us ‘white ethnics’. Any theory that fails to accord these people an equal place in the family of our nation is out of the question today and in the future. Likewise other ethnic groups introduced to this land by our migration programs may not be denied an equal place in our future society.
My vision of our society in the year 2000 foreshadows a greatly increasing social complexity, in which the dynamic interaction between the diverse ethnic components will be producing new national initiatives, stimulating new artistic endeavours, and ensuring great strength in diversity.
REBUILD YOUR CONVICT SHIPS
Aboriginal protest became more radical in the 1960s and 1970s. Some Aborigines began to claim that only they had a right to be here. This point of view was put in a lively, humorous way in the Aboriginal musical Bran New Dae (1990), written by Jimmy Chi. The show was created and first performed in Broome, on the north-west coast of Western Australia, an old multicultural community with a population that includes Chinese, Japanese, Aborigines and Europeans. This is one of its songs, ‘Nothing I would rather be’.
WILLIE: There’s nothing I would rather be
than to be an Aborigine
and watch you take my precious land away.
For nothing gives me greater joy than to
watch you fill each girl and boy
with superficial existential shit.
[Chorus dance on from the side.]
CHORUS: Now you may think I’m cheeky
but I’d be satisfied
to rebuild your convict ships
and sail you on the tide.
WILLIE: I love the way you give me God
and of course the mining board
for this of course I thank the lord each day.
I’m glad you say that land rights wrong
then you should go where you belong
and leave me to just keep on keeping on.
WILLIE AND CHORUS: Now you may think I’m cheeky
but I’d be satisfied
to rebuild your convict ships
and sail you on the tide.
FEMALE AUSTRALIANS
In 1994 four historians argued that women had a different history in Australia from that of men, something the history books had overlooked. This is from the introduction to Creating a Nation by Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly.
The creation of nations has traditionally been seen as men’s business. In the fomenting of revolutions, the forging of new political orders and the fashioning of national identities, men have positioned themselves as the main players. We wish to challenge this view of history, by asserting the agency and creativity of women in the process of national generation. Whether in giving birth to babies, or in refusing to do so, in sustaining families and multicultural communities, creating wealth, shaping a maternalist welfare state or in inscribing the meanings of our experience in culture, women have clearly been major actors in the colonial and national dramas. This book explores the myriad ways in which both women and men, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, have contributed to the economic, political and cultural life of the separate colonies and then the nation.
Nationalist mythologies have always been gendered: in Australia the self-conscious elaboration of the national identity has involved the celebration of a particular style of white masculinity embodied in the Australian bushman and updated in such films as The Man from Snowy River and Crocodile Dundee – a style that was often explicitly defined in opposition to a feminine domesticity and forms of masculine behaviour that were similarly stigmatised and stereotyped. Furthermore, to the extent that nationalism involved an assertion of the rights of man against a demeaning imperial domination, it could come into conflict with a feminist interest in the rights of woman. Australian national stereotypes and mythologising have more recently come to be seen as inappropriate to the variety of cultural traditions and identities deriving from Europe, South America and Asia, which have become influential in Australia, largely since World War II. The tension between the recognition and assertion of sexual, racial and cultural differences, on the one hand, and the assimilationist drive of the nation state with its enshrining of one law and one way of life, on the other, is a major theme of our history.
ALL AUSTRALIANS
In 1991 the Commonwealth Parliament established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to work towards bringing Australians and Aboriginal Australians closer together by the time of the anniversary of Federation in 2001. The Declaration for Reconciliation was written by the novelist David Malouf and the Aboriginal scholar and activist Jackie Huggins. It was subsequently amended. The passage referring to the ‘gift of one another’s presence’ was dropped and the Government did not accept the statement of apology.
Declaration for Reconciliation
Speaking with one voice, we the people of Australia, of many origins as we are, make a commitment to go on together recognising the gift of one another’s presence.
We value the unique status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the original owners and custodians of traditional lands and waters.
We respect and recognise continuing customary laws, beliefs and traditions.
And through the land and its first peoples, we may taste this spirituality and rejoice in its grandeur.
We acknowledge this land was colonised without the consent of the original inhabitants.
Our nation must have the courage to own the truth, to heal the wounds of its past so that we can move on together at peace with ourselves.
And so we take this step: as one part of the nation expresses its sorrow and profoundly regrets the injustices of the past, so the other part accepts the apology and forgives.
Our new journey then begins. We must learn our shared history, walk together and grow together to enrich our understanding.
We desire a future where all Australians enjoy equal rights and share opportunities and responsibilities according to their aspirations.
And so, we pledge ourselves to stop injustice, address disadvantage and respect the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to determine their own destinies.
Therefore, we stand proud as a united Australia that respects this land of ours, values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and provides justice and equity for all.