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A journal of sorts to record Jonathan Sturm's (and others') thoughts and observations on things worth thinking About. Feedback welcome, but be aware that unless you prominently say you want your communication kept private, I may publish it. |
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Tuesday, 4 October 2005
Liberty looks like taking a nosedive in Australia with proposed laws that could see "terror suspects" detained for up to 14 days without legal representation, or an appearance in a court of law. Upon release, they will have no legal recourse against their jailers, or accusers. Most State leaders seem inclined to agree that tougher laws are needed. The Git remembers just such a law in South Africa, used to jail dissidents indefinitely simply by rearresting those jailed immediately they were released. While that made South Africa "a pariah among nations", it seems that in the rush to prosecute the war on terror, terrorism will become a tool of the nation's police forces. All for our own good, of course.
Mark Frank has taken The Git to task for his recently writing:
The UK writer Anthony Campbell in his review of Henry Gee's In Search of Deep Time concludes:
"When white settlers arrived in Tasmania they regarded the Stone Age inhabitants as animals and hunted them down to extinction."
Mark's email:
"Deep Time" arrived this morning. I got a secondhand copy from Amazon for the cost of the postage. There is a single sentence in the 200 page book which reads:
"When white settlers reached Tasmania, they considered the stone-age Aborigines as animals and hunted them down." He is using it as one of three examples to illustrate the propensity for mutual destruction among human beings.
There is no mention of extinction or how many of the settlers did this. So I guess, as long as some while settlers behaved this way, then the sentence is theoretically true.
My main point still stands. The book was published in 2000 so it must have been written in the late 90's, before publication of Windschuttle's book. To criticise Gee, who is not a historian, for not having anticipated Windschuttle by going to Tasmania to check out the original documentation to verify a single sentence in his book is daft.
It looks like Mark is entirely correct that Anthony Campbell put his own words in Henry Gee's mouth. It is true that I took Gee to task for not knowing that the Tasmanian Aborigines were not extinct, but this was based not on his being a palaeontologist alone, nor even on Windschuttle's book.
The last thirty years, or so, has seen a renaissance of Aboriginal consciousness and accommodation by Australian and other governments to Aboriginal demands. One result has been a partially successful program of return of Aboriginal remains into Aboriginal custody, both those who died in historical times, and fossils of those who have been dead for many thousands of years. This has been attended by considerable protest from scientists, palaeontologists as well as anthropologists. The dismay of scientists so brutally deprived of their research material has been well-reported in the pages of Nature, the publication for which Henry Gee is a senior editor. The Git is not a subscriber, so he cannot quote.
The main thrust of The Git's writing was not so much to take Gee to task, but a veritable flood of misinformation that is heavily distorted by particular ideological biases, often self-contradictory. The Git's main targets are known within Australia as the Black Armband Brigade. However, they are not the only historians to have written about the Aborigines, and the continued existence of Tasmanian Aboriginals has hardly been a State Secret. Tom Haydon's 1978 film The Last Tasmanian was widely viewed in the UK, and funnily enough included footage of the descendants of the "extinct" Tasmanians, victims of "the swiftest and most complete genocide in history" according to the film. The "last Tasmanian" of the film, Truganini, was survived by several other full blood Aborigines who were living on Kangaroo Island and the last died on the Centenary of white settlement, 1888, more than a decade after Truganini.
When The Last Tasmanian was showing, Michael Mansell (a Tasmanian Aborigine), was widely quoted as saying: "We are the only race of people on Earth who have to daily justify our existence". A decade later, he made world headlines when he led a delegation of Tasmanian Aborigines to Libya for a meeting with President Gaddafi to enlist his help as the world's leading terrorist. Mansell apparently believed that the Tasmanian State Government would bow to pressure from the Aboriginal community if it believed there was an imminent terrorist threat!
But the Git is far more interested in early colonial history than rehashing recent history. Before some interesting quotes, consider the following definitions from the OED:
Genocide: The deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group.
Exterminate: To destroy utterly, put an end to... species, races, populations, sects, etc...
First, some thoughts on early relations with the Aborigines.
From L. R. Hiatt's Arguments About Aborigines, Cambridge University Press 1996:
Yet parts of Tench's account would have pleased Rousseau very well indeed. One of the earliest injuries inflicted on the Aborigines was the pilfering of their spears and fishing gear by convicts, who sold them to sailors with access to the artefact trade. It was not long before potential thieves began receiving some of the coveted objects between the ribs.
Faced with deteriorating relationships, Governor Phillip issued a proclamation forbidding the sale of native goods. He also decided to capture some of the natives in order to convince them the colonists intended no harm. On the last day of 1788 a truly noble savage named Arabanoo was seized by the marines on Manly beach and delivered to Government House, where he remained as the governor's guest until he died from smallpox five months later. The following is from Tench's obituary:
Although of a gentle and placable temper, we early discovered that he was impatient of indignity, and allowed of no superiority on our part. He knew that he was in our power; but the independence of his mind never forsook him. If the slightest insult were offered to him, he would return it with interest.
A few months after Arabanoo's capture, fifteen convicts were flogged for allegedly setting out to plunder a native encampment at Botany Bay. The reason for the punishment was communicated to Arabanoo, who was brought along to witness it. He was not impressed; instead of expressing gratitude to the authorities, he evinced only disgust and terror. When a large group of Aborigines was assembled two years later to watch the lashing of a convict caught in the act of stealing fishing tackle, all reacted with abhorrence to the brutishness of the spectacle. One of the women went so far as to snatch a stick and menace the flogger.
From Geoffrey Blainey's A Land Half Won, Macmillan 1980:
... Perhaps at first they thought the visitors were black men who had completely painted their exposed flesh, in the Aboriginal style, with white pipeclay.
A young Englishman travelling in Sturt's expedition to central Australia records how, at a waterhole on a hot evening of February 1845, the Aboriginals were surprised to discover that the leg of his trousers covered a white ankle. He then allowed them to unlace his boot and to take off his sock. The white foot was fascinating and even perplexing.
The first wish of some Aboriginals who saw white men for the first time was to blacken the white faces. When the French expedition visited the eastern coast of Tasmania in 1802, an Aboriginal woman produced apiece of charcoal from a woven rush-bag, crushed it in her hands, and painted the faces of two Frenchmen in a manner which suggested that black was beautiful.
Aboriginals tried to explain to each other the origins of these white-skinned intruders. Inevitably they looked to the past, because when they were puzzled they appealed to history perhaps as much as the Englishmen appealed to history. Whereas Englishmen tended to see the Aboriginals as relics of an early stage in the history of mankind, many Aboriginals who first saw white-skinned men were inclined to greet them as the returning spirits of their own dead relatives.
In Victoria the Jajowurrong tribe of the Loddon Valley actually chose, to describe a white man, the same word which they had traditionally used to designate a spirit which had been released from the body by death. Since many of the white settlers had come across the sea from Tasmania, these Victorian Aboriginals quickly deduced that Tasmania must be the land to which the spirit of the Aboriginals flew after death.
In thinking that the white men were the reborn spirits of their own folk, Aboriginals were building on their knowledge that a white skin was appropriate for birth or rebirth. Nearly all their own babies had cream or white skin at birth. It was therefore logical that one of their resurrected ancestors should appear in a white skin.
From The Reverend Robert Knopwood's diary:
Thursday, 21 [June 1804]. A.M. I breakfasted with Mr. Lord and Humphrys. At 5 p.m. Mr. Collins returnd in the white cutter from Betseys Island, &c. He went to the River Houin [Huon], and report it to be by far the most eligible situation for a settlement; the great supply of fresh water, good land, and trees, and the anchorage safe and good. He see many of the natives, and was conducted to the town by some of them, where there were About 20 families; he stayd all night with them. They were all very friendly; he see 3 of their cattermerans, or small boats made of bark, that will hold About 6 of them.
These accounts are considerably different to: "When white settlers arrived in Tasmania they regarded the Stone Age inhabitants as animals and hunted them down to extinction." Indeed, the Governor's instructions were to "conciliate [the Aborigines'] affections and live in harmony with them. How this objective was to be achieved while simultaneously appropriating their homelands was never discussed."
Relations with the Tasmanian Aborigines deteriorated when they commenced killing isolated settlers. Usually, these were shepherds who lived alone in huts, and being convicts, were without guns. The Aborigines set fire to the roof of the hut and speared the shepherd when he made his exit. More rarely, they also attacked isolated homesteads, though this was considerably more dangerous since they were more likely to be armed, albeit with muzzle-loading guns.
It would have been a foolhardy Governor who failed to do something to protect the settlers and convicts. In the event, it wasn't a pogrom to exterminate them, but a roundup to convey the troublesome Aborigines to a place for their own safety. While some settlers were taking matters into their own hands and retaliating against the depredations of the Aborigines, this was neither at the orders of government, nor to government's liking.
It must be appreciated that many of the colonists were free settlers and of those, a considerable number had a religious bent. Like most Europeans of the Victorian era they considered the Aborigines to be somewhat akin to children in their intellectual capacities, but they also believed that the Aborigines were fellow members of the human race. Therefore, so the argument went, they were capable of progress -- of becoming civilised. To that end, they financed missionaries to civilise the Aborigines. It's true that while a considerable number of the convicts were political prisoners and thus members of gentler society, many more were truly the dregs of English society. Hobart maintained an unenviable reputation as a city of vice for many decades after the emancipation of its criminal element. Many of the gentlefolk were members of the Aborigines' Protection Society, a peculiar institution if their inclination had been to "regard the Stone Age inhabitants as animals and hunt them down to extinction!" On the other hand, it would hardly be surprising if hardened criminals murdered Aboriginal competitors out of hand.
T. H. Huxley, the pre-eminent authority on Darwin's theory of evolution had visited Australia as a young man and seen Aborigines at first hand. In the opening section of his 1888 essay, The Struggle for Existence: A Programme, Huxley divided humanity into "ethical man", the member of society or citizen, and "non-ethical man", the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom. The latter, being merely an animal, fought out the struggle for existence to the bitter end. He appropriated whatever took his fancy and, if he could, killed anyone who got in his way. In such circumstances the weak and stupid went to the wall, while the strong and cunning survived. Civilisation is an attempt to moderate the struggle for existence by imposing a code of ethics on human behaviour, limiting the freedom of action of each man so that he does not interfere with the freedom of action of others. When men substituted mutual peace for the war of each against all, they created society out of anarchy. It is difficult to reconcile Huxley's view with the early accounts of relations with the Aborigines.
Tasmania's so-called Black War commenced in 1830, some 27 years after the penal colony was founded. Most of the indigenous Tasmanians were by then already dead. Not through violence alone, but mainly white men's disease. Neither side would have known about Pasteur's germ theory of disease which was still some decades away. It seems absurd to compare the one Australian State where "the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed" to the invasion of the Americas by the Spanish, or Hitler's extermination of the Jews in World War II. In Hispaniola, a million, or more Taino were slaughtered by the Spaniards in pursuit of gold, slaves and territory; as many as 7,000 in one particular encounter. Note that 7,000 is equal to the highest estimate for Tasmanian Aboriginal population prior to white settlement. The Git notes acerbically that Jared Diamond in Collapse has the aboriginal population of Hispaniola as "around half a million".
In Whitewash, Robert Manne's rejoinder to Windschuttle's Fabrication, the claim is made that Windschuttle was attacking the indigenous people of Australia. It's difficult to reconcile this view with Windschuttle's meticulous dissection of the numbers of Aboriginals killed according to Black Armband historians such as Ryan, Reynolds, Plomley and Robson. For them to equate the death of dogs and horses as Aboriginal deaths seems peculiarly contemptuous. As well, Windschuttle shows how these historians have deliberately misquoted primary sources to make it appear that there was a deliberate policy of genocide. How can demonstrating historians' lies possibly be construed as an attack on the indigenous people of Australia? Apart from Reynolds' rather belated, not to mention half-hearted, claim to aboriginality, the historians in question seem to be middle-class whites of that particular leftist bent that leads to a claim of being working-class. It seems to The Git that asserting the Tasmanian Aborigines to be an extinct species is an attack. In 1978 Mansell pasted a poster over that for the film The Last Tasmanian that said: "Racist! This film denies Tasmanian Aborigines their Land Rights."
It does equally little good to belittle the plight of the Tasmanian Aborigines as it does to exaggerate it. Nor does it seem conducive to better relations between blacks and whites by showing contempt for Aboriginal descendants. Given that the present Tasmanian Aboriginal population is some 12,000, or so, the main weapon in their demise might well have been white men's penises, rather than slaughter by guns.
We know from contemporary accounts that the Tasmanian Aborigines had sold some of their women to the sealers; not all of the women had been stolen. We know that the Aborigines relished the whites' flour and sugar, and that they very much appreciated the superiority of steel over stone tools. The reason for the raids on the isolated shepherds seems more likely to have been the acquisition of those goodies than they were to repossess the land. We know that Aboriginal men, the hunters, consumed most of what they hunted, and the women received only the residue they deigned to leave.
We also know that the colony was chronically short of women. Hobart was notorious for its convicts' homosexual practises on that account. Perhaps, The Git speculates, these circumstances led to the Aboriginal women preferring the company of white men whose attraction was ready access to grit-free wheat flour, sugar and more efficient tools. As poor as life with the rejects of English society might seem from our modern perspective, it might well have been preferable to life in the bush with men who were unable to provide luxuries the whites took for granted. Those white men, far from regarding the Aboriginal women as animals and hunting them down to extinction, are the ancestors of the current Tasmanian Aborigines.
Whitewash by Robert Manne, Black 2003. A collection of essays in response to Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History. The response is inadequate in that it fails to deal directly with Windschuttle's main thesis: the fabrication of, and deliberate misquotation of, historical data. It does point out that those Australians of a right-wing inclination were gratified by the book. This leads The Git to the conclusion that Whitewash's authors believe history ought to be for the gratification of left-wing ideologues. They point out, correctly, that Windschuttle's table does not take into account the number of unknown deaths of Aborigines at the hands of the whites. They do not explain how distorting the numbers of known deaths improves our understanding. They are by definition unknown.
A Land Half Won, Geoffrey Blainey, Macmillan 1980. This is the complement to Blainey's Triumph of the Nomads. Where Triumph dealt with the history of the Aborigines, this book deals with the white settlers of Australia. While other histories have a mainly political slant, Blainey's deals with the forces of economics, environment and the technologies that influenced the colonies' development. As is usual with Blainey's writing, it's an excellent read for those who find themselves bored witless by academic prose.
Arguments About Aborigines, L. R. Hiatt, Cambridge University Press 1996. This rather specialised book reviews the controversies in British anthropology from its formation in the 19thC to the present. A good introductory text for those interested in Aboriginal ethnography.
Hobart Town Diary, Robert Knopwood, The Banks Society 2005. The Reverend Knopwood's diary from 15 February 1804 to 28 February 1805. Apart from a brief introduction and a few pages of endnotes, this is as stated. For the specialist.
The Git's sister-in-law came across a reference to one of her father's relatives in the Tasmanian Police Gazette. Thomas Porte, a policeman at Franklin, is referred to in the left hand column. His whereabouts following his absconding are unknown. The right hand column refers to Benjamin Donaldson, though it fails to mention that he is extinct.
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Thoughts for the week:
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. -- Ayn Rand
-oOo-
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right. -- Mahatma Gandhi
-oOo-
Hatred can be overcome only by love. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Current Listening:
John Cale -- Vintage Violence
John Cale -- The Academy in Peril
JJ Cale -- To Tulsa and Back
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