Rights for Aborigines

Bain Attwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'We cannot help but wonder why it has taken the white Australians just on 200 years to recognise us as a race of people' Bill Onus, 1967Aboriginal people were the original landowners in Australia, yet this was easily forgotten by Europeans settling this old continent. Labelled as a primitive and dying race, by the end of the nineteenth century most Aborigines were denied the right to vote, to determine where their families would live and to maintain their cultural traditions.In this groundbreaking work, Bain Attwood charts a century-long struggle for rights for Aborigines in Australia. He tracks the ever-shifting perceptions of race and history and how these impacted on the ideals and goals of campaigners for rights for indigenous people. He looks at prominent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners and what motivated their involvement in key incidents and movements. Drawing on oral and documentary sources, he investigates how they found enough common ground to fight together for justice and equality for Aboriginal people. Rights for Aborigines illuminates questions of race, history, political and social rights that are central to our understanding of relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Part I
Blacks

1
My father’s country

On 24 March 1886 several Kulin men from Coranderrk Aboriginal station travelled to Melbourne. They went ‘to bid good-bye’ to the former Premier or Chief Secretary, Graham Berry, who was soon to leave Victoria to become the colony’s agent-general in London. As a journalist reporting their deputation noted, these men had ‘given the Aborigines [Protection] Board and the Government a good deal of trouble’ in recent years. They were accompanied by one of their champions, Anne Bon, a humanitarian who had consistently helped them present their demands to government. On this occasion she spoke on their behalf. In keeping with indigenous tradition, Bon linked together the past, the present and the future. She told a story of an earlier occasion, in 1863, when men from Coranderrk had presented the Governor with an address to the Queen, but also reminded everyone that these people were ‘the aboriginal owners of the soil’ and pointed out to the new chief secretary, Alfred Deakin, that ‘there was yet plenty for him to do’.¹

The Kulin then presented an address and gifts to Berry. The address, like nearly all of their petitions since 1875, had been ‘dictated’ by William Barak. He was the Woiworung ngurungaeta or headman whose people, part of the broader grouping, the Kulin, were the traditional owners of the land where Coranderrk lay. Speaking for his people and the land, as he had the customary right to do, Barak acknowledged Berry’s help: ‘We have come to see you’, he explained, ‘because you have done a great deal of work for the aborigines … You do all that thing when we were in trouble, when the board … wanted to drive us off the land. We came to you and told you our trouble, and you gave us the land for our own as long as we live … and the people all very thankful.’ To commemorate the fact that Berry was now leaving ‘this country’, they presented him with gifts so he would ‘keep remembering the natives’, just as they would remember him for ‘doing good to Coranderrk’. The presents included boomerangs, a waddy, a shield, a spear-thrower and spears, firesticks, a rushwork basket and a digging stick, but also an album of portraits of the people of Coranderrk.²

For their deputation to the retiring Victorian premier in March 1886 these Kulin men wore their ‘Sunday best’, spoke English and carried an address in a form common to British parliamentary democracy. This photograph also suggests at least one element of the cultural continuity underpinning such protest. Holding a spear, the Woiworung headman, William Barak, is in the centre of this studio portrait and he is flanked by his two ‘speakers’, Tommy Bamfield to his left and Robert Wandin to his right. (COURTESY LA TROBE PICTURE COLLECTION, STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA, H141267)

In one way or another, the Kulin regarded their address, the presents and the ceremony as an expression of their identity as the indigenous people and in particular their historical relationship to place. Their address had been prepared by a headman and signed only by those men who had the traditional authority to speak for this land; Barak signed as the ‘Chief of the Yarra Yarra Tribe’ and all the other signatories used their indigenous names rather than their European ones. Nearly all the presents they bestowed upon Berry had been crafted by men and women on the station and were symbols of their aboriginal identity. The ceremony they performed in presenting the address and gifts to Berry similarly had its genesis in precolonial times. Once performed in order to negotiate relationships between aboriginal groups, they re-enacted it in this colonial context, just as they had done many times since the invasion of their lands. It was a ritual that expressed their understanding of a reciprocal relationship between themselves, as the original landowners, and Berry, as the government. This cultural practice was also intrinsically historical in another way since it sought to remember, and thereby mark the past, in order to influence the course of future events. It was part of a political strategy that the Kulin had been pursuing for some years. They attempted to engage the interest of white settlers by revealing something of their history and culture, hoping to convince them of the justice of their political claims.³

Sites of protest

This approach had borne fruit with Berry. He recognised that these people were ‘the original owners of the soil’ and so emphasised that they ‘should be treated with the greatest kindness and consideration’. Berry’s successors, like the majority of settlers, were much less sympathetic. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, they were championing Australian nationalism and casting Aborigines like Barak as the last of his people. They distinguished these ‘pure blacks’ from any of their descendants, whom they called ‘half-castes’, thereby denying the latter’s Aboriginality and their rights as aborigines. Several months after this ceremony, Deakin’s government introduced legislation that redefined Aborigines on the basis of this so-called racial difference. This paved the way for breaking up Coranderrk and other such Aboriginal communities and once more drove Aboriginal people from their homelands. This chapter tells the story of the battle the Kulin waged to hold onto their land and govern themselves at Coranderrk during the 1870s and 1880s.⁴

‘Promised land’

Coranderrk is the first example of sustained indigenous protest in Australia.⁵ This is hardly surprising. As a consequence of the invasion of their traditional lands that began in 1834–35, the population of the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria, estimated to number 10000 at this time,⁶ had plummeted to less than 2000 by 1863; they had been completely dispossessed of their lands by pastoral invasion, their classical culture had been torn asunder,⁷ and they had been pushed to the fringes of the settler society. Yet, by the mid 1860s, most of the survivors lived on small reserves like Coranderrk, which were known as missions or stations, where they were taught by missionaries. There, they learned humanitarian and liberal political precepts, which gave them the means to protest their plight.

Coranderrk was located near Healesville, about 60 kilometres northeast of Melbourne. It was founded in 1863 by John Green, a Scottish Presbyterian lay preacher who had arrived in Victoria with his wife Mary in 1857, and the Woiworung, on whose traditional country the reserve was, and the Taungurong (both of whom belonged to the larger grouping known as the Kulin). The role of aborigines in founding settlements like Coranderrk was by no means unusual. There are many instances in southeastern Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century when they took the initiative in requesting land and choosing the sites.

The Kulin had long wanted land reserved for their use. In 1843 Billibellary, a Woiworung headman and a signatory to a treaty the Kulin had made in 1835 with John Batman’s Port Phillip Association (but which was rejected by the imperial and colonial governments), approached William Thomas, an assistant protector of aborigines for the Port Phillip District: ‘If Yarra blackfellows had a country on the Yarra … they would stop and cultivate the ground’. Over the next several years the Kulin made further such requests. In January 1849 one man asked Thomas ‘where were they to go, why not give them a station’, and the following month another came to beg ‘for a country to locate themselves on’. Thomas told the Woiworung and Bunurong that they might soon be granted this as the result of what he called ‘Earl Grey’s humane despatch’. In December 1847 the Secretary of State for the British Colonies had observed that ‘the question of reserves for natives [was] an important one’. Land, Earl Grey had insisted, should be reserved, ‘sufficient to allow of the natives being maintained upon it’. Two months later he forwarded a proposal to Sir Charles Fitzroy, the Governor of New South Wales, recommending the ‘setting apart of small tracts of Land … to be cultivated either by them or for their advantage … affording also sites of Schools’.⁸

The New South Wales government not only ignored Earl Grey’s directive but also abandoned the Port Phillip Protectorate, which it had established in 1839. Thomas, however, remained sympathetic to the Kulin’s aspirations. Throughout the following decade, as the Guardian of the Aborigines for Victoria, he tried to obtain land for them. For their part, the Kulin no doubt continued to remember Earl Grey’s proposal for reservations of land for aborigines. In February 1859, one of Billibellary’s sons, Simon Wonga, arranged for a group of Taungurong men to meet Thomas and seek his assistance to gain land ‘in their country’. Acting as a spokesperson and interpreter, Wonga persuaded Thomas that the Taungurong would ‘sit down’ on the land and work it. The following month Thomas, Wonga, his brother and five Taungurong men formed a deputation to wait on the Commissioner of Lands and Survey, Charles Duffy, and the Surveyor General, C.W. Ligar. Thomas and the Woiworung presented the Taungurong’s demand for land on the Acheron River, stating that they would use the land for hunting and gathering as well as cultivation. Duffy was sympathetic. He ordered the land to be surveyed and undertook to grant the reserve and provide other assistance if the site proved suitable. Two days later, the Taungurong left Melbourne for the Acheron and began to settle there. Thomas later recalled that the Taungurong’s deputation had succeeded ‘thro’ Wonga’s diplomacy’. For several years the young man had been following in the footsteps of his late father, ‘bent … on improving the condition of his race’ by getting land for them.⁹

In 1860 Wonga waited upon Thomas to make representations for his own people. The Guardian had secured some land for the Woiworung some years before but Wonga admonished him. He was a ‘good man’ but ‘blackfellow no tell you to look out that one country’. Wonga wanted Thomas to get land ‘like you get ‘em Goulburn blacks’, that is, land ‘where Blackfellows like’. Subsequently, Wonga, Barak, Thomas and Green formed a deputation to the secretary of the newly formed Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines, Robert Brough Smyth, to request some land the Woiworung headmen wanted for their people at Yering in the Yarra Ranges.¹⁰

The Kulin’s demands for land had been shaped by their historical experience of colonisation. The theft of their land, the decimation of their kin and the disrespect for their cultural beliefs and practices had forced them to come to terms with the colonial order. This was especially true of the Woiworung and the Bunurong people. Many of their men and women had worked for pastoralists and other settlers; their young men had been heavily recruited to form a native police corps between 1837 and 1839 and 1842 and 1852; and their children had attended mission schools conducted by George Langhorne in Melbourne between 1837 and 1839, Thomas at Narre Narre Warren station between 1840 and 1843, and Baptists at Merri Creek in 1846–47. For some time, they had wanted land they could farm themselves and the opportunity for their children to learn reading and writing, one of the principal sources of agency and power in the white man’s society.

By the late 1850s, colonial politicians were more willing to consider these demands. There had been a resurgence of the humanitarianism that had enjoyed considerable power, at least in Britain, from the mid 1830s to the mid 1840s. The Kulin’s most recent requests for land had followed a select committee inquiry into Aboriginal conditions, which had been established in October 1858. Thomas McCombie and other humanitarians believed that whites were superior to aborigines and that ‘the higher races of mankind’ had a duty to colonise ‘the waste places of the earth’ such as Australia. They also assumed that ‘the onward march of the white man’, which they regarded as the course of history, could not and should not be arrested. However, unlike most settlers, these humanitarians acknowledged ‘the great fact’ that the aborigines were the ‘original possessors’ and the whites were ‘intruders’ who had ‘shamelessly stolen’ their land. They also recognised that the ‘hostile invasion’ had deprived the aborigines of ‘their former mode of existence’ and almost ‘exterminated’ them. As such, they contended, the aborigines had an ‘inalienable’ right to obtain ‘the necessaries and comforts of life’. Indeed, they asserted that ‘the very first charge’ upon colonial government should be ‘due compensation or provision’ for the ‘original occupant[s]’ of the land. At the same time, these humanitarians recommended that aborigines should be segregated from whites and concentrated on reserves of land, to be supervised by missionaries who would ‘christianise and civilise’ them so they could become useful to ‘the state and themselves’. This approach was sanctioned by the select committee and later the Central Board, which was established in 1860 and supported the founding of several stations, including Coranderrk.¹¹

While there can be no question about the terms upon which humanitarians called for reserves, it is more difficult to decipher the indigenous people’s discourse since their calls for land were usually mediated by agents such as Thomas. Nevertheless, as Diane Barwick and Heather Goodall have argued, it seems clear that aboriginal claimants like the Kulin sought land for several reasons. They wanted it as an economic and social base but they also wanted land, in their own country, for traditional cultural reasons. In their petitioning they adeptly represented their demands in the languages of humanitarianism—they called for the land ‘of their fathers’—and liberal capitalism—they asserted that they would work it ‘like white men’.¹²

Securing land proved an enormous battle for the Kulin, however. At Acheron River the Taungurong were thwarted by local settlers, who had leases to most of the reserved land, and the government, which was slow to grant money. In August 1860, after they had cleared and fenced the land, erected huts and planted crops, the Central Board ordered the superintendent, Robert Hickson, to move them to another reserve, Mohican. Most of the Taungurong refused to go. ‘The Goulburn blacks have waited twice upon me’, Thomas reported angrily to the Board, ‘complaining that they have been ordered to remove from the land they had settled on and selected, which I had promised them ever should be theirs’. Thomas believed they would never accept this: ‘they say “that is not the Country they selected, it is cold and the blackfellows soon die there”’. A few days later the Guardian received information that they ‘were so disgusted and disappointed at leaving the reserve and all they had done on it’ that they had left en masse ‘in disappointment and passion’. Settlers had immediately destroyed the Taungurong’s huts, fences and crops. Thomas was enraged. ‘This, the fate of Aboriginal industry’, he told the Board, ‘is enough to deter Aborigines from ever having confidence in promises held out to them’. The new settlement at Mohican, he predicted, would ‘prove an utter failure—not thro’ any act of the Aborigines, but through being forced miles from the spot they cherished and which I assured them Government would most sacredly retain for them’.¹³

The Woiworung fared little better. Reserves were settled but they were not properly gazetted by government or they were revoked because of settlers’ incurs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Blacks
• Part II: Whites
• Part III: Citizenship
• Part IV: Land
• Part V: Power
• Notes
• Bibliographical notes
• Index