The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights

A documentary history

Bain Attwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000248173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights is the first book of its kind. Not only does it tell the history of the political struggle for Aboriginal rights in all parts of Australia; it does so almost entirely through a selection of historical documents created by the Aboriginal campaigners themselves, many of which have never been published. It presents Aboriginal perspectives of their dispossession and their long and continuing fight to overcome this. In charting the story of Aboriginal political activity from its beginnings on Flinders Island in the 1830s to the fight over native title today, this book aims to help Australians better understand both the continuities and the changes in Aboriginal politics over the last 150 years: in the leadership of the Aboriginal political struggle, the objectives of these campaigners for rights for Aborigines, their aspirations, the sources of their programmes for change, their methods of protest, and the outcomes of their protest. Through the words of Aboriginal activists, across 150 years, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights charts the relationship between political involvement and Aboriginal identity.

1
The nineteenth century

Indigenous politics in the nineteenth century mostly consisted of the straggles of Aboriginal communities fighting to be granted or to retain reserve lands, and battling to govern themselves or be treated fairly and justly by colonial governments and their officers.

Flinders Island

The history of Aboriginal political activity begins in the late 1830s on Flinders Island. Between 1831 and 1834, following a bitterly fought war of resistance against the invasion of their lands which had begun in the mid-1820s,¹ Aborigines had been induced by the colonial government’s emissary, conciliator George Augustus Robinson—perhaps by means of a verbal treaty²— to surrender to him and abandon the main island of Van Diemen’s Land in exchange for safe conduct to Flinders Island where the Aborigines understood they would enjoy a sanctuary and the benefits of civilisation’ and Christianity as recompense for the loss of their country.³

Very soon, however, Aborigines found that they had been led to have false hopes. The food and living conditions at the Aboriginal Establishment, called Wybalenna (‘black man’s houses’), were poor, and many of the one hundred or so survivors died while others suffered from malnutrition and disease. They also faced a strict daily routine through which they were supposed to adopt the central tenets of Christianity and the standards of European civilisation. After Robinson’s departure in 1838 to assume the role of Chief Protector to the Aborigines of the Port Phillip District, the Aborigines at Wybalenna were to experience a succession of unsympathetic commanders, such as Henry Jeanneret.⁴

Although this turn of events often provoked despair among the Aborigines at Wybalenna, younger men and women used their new skills to fight their oppression. These included literacy, as evidenced by the Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, a manuscript newspaper founded by Robinson ‘to promote Christianity civilisation and Learning amongst the Aboriginal Inhabitants at Flinders Island’ and ‘be a brief but accurate register of events of the colony Moral and religious’ (I).⁵ Protests were led by Walter George Arthur, his wife Mary, and Thomas Bruny, among others. Arthur had been separated from his kin before he had learned much of his own culture and language and grew up among colonists, spending a few years in a orphan school in Hobart before being sent to Flinders Island in 1835. He formed a close association with Robinson, leaving the island in 1839 with Robinson and returning in 1842. The protest leaders became committed Christians who were, in the words of one historian, ‘confident, even self righteous’, embracing ‘civilisation’ and critical of ‘traditional culture’.⁶ As a consequence, they drew on several sources in their protest, most of all the humanitarian principles espoused by Robinson and missionaries such as George Walker, who had been influenced by the anti-slavery crusade of English evangelicals and philanthropists. Their protest culminated in 1845–47 (2–5), particularly with a petition to Queen Victoria (3) in which they claimed the colonial government had broken the promises it had entered into when they agreed to go to Flinders Island.

Coranderrk

Aborigines in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales— or Victoria as it became in 1851—were similarly affected by sweeping dispossession of land, frontier violence and, more especially, introduced diseases which caused their numbers to plummet from as many as 85 000 to only a few thousand by the 1850s.⁷ The loss of their land provoked appeals to missionaries such as Revd Francis Tuckfield, who reported in 1840:

And with regard to those tribes who occasionally visit us … they seem to be acquainted (at least to a considerable extent) with the relative possessions of the Black & White populations— They are conscious of what is going on — they are driven from this favoured haunt & from their other favoured haunts & threatened if they do not leave immediately they will be lodged in gaol or shot. It is to the Missionaries they come with their tales of woe & their language is— “Willyou not select for us also a portion of land?”. “Mycountry all gone, gone… The White men have stolen it”.⁸

The devastating mortality rates also provoked despair among the traditional landowners. In 1843, a Woiworung elder and signatory to a treaty with John Batman in 1835,⁹ headman Billibellary, commented to one of the assistant protectors, William Thomas, that no good have them Pickaninneys now, no country for blackfellows like long time ago’. Yet, he also added, ‘if Yarra blackfellows had a country on the Yarra … they would stop on it and cultivate the ground’.¹⁰

The plight of Aborigines in Victoria worsened with the gold rushes of the 1850s but, by the end of that decade, a humanitarian resurgence resulted in the appointment of a select committee in 1858 ‘to inquire into the present condition of the Aborigines of this colony, and the best means of alleviating their absolute wants’.¹¹ Humanitarians, who had been influential in the 1830s and 1840s, believed that Europeans were superior to Aborigines and had a duty ‘to colonise the waste places of the earth’ (such as Australia), but they also acknowledged ‘the great fact’ that Aborigines were the ‘original possessors’ and Europeans were ‘intruders’ whose ‘hostile invasion’ had deprived the indigenes of ‘their former mode of existence’ and almost ‘exterminated’ them. Accordingly, they believed that Aborigines had an ‘inalienable’ right to obtain ‘the necessaries and comforts of life’ and had a ‘claim’ upon the colonisers; in fact, ‘the very first charge’ upon colonial government, they argued, should be ‘due compensation or provision’ for the Aborigines.¹² As in Van Diemen’s Land, these humanitarians also recommended that Aborigines should be concentrated on reserves of land where they could be supervised by missionaries who would ‘Christianise and civilise’ them so they would become useful to ‘the state and themselves’. This approach was sanctioned by the Select Committee and later adopted by the government which appointed a Central Board for the Protection of the Aborigines.¹³

Before the Select Committee reported, however, several Woiworung and Taungurong men waited upon the Guardian of Aborigines, William Thomas, who petitioned the government on their behalf (6). Government acceded to the request for land on the Acheron River and soon Taungurong Aborigines were, in Thomas’ words, ‘wending their way to their Goshen (Promised Land)’.¹⁴ However, the strength of their determination was sorely tested when their hunger for land was thwarted on the Acheron and elsewhere (7) until, in 1863, they and the Woiworung were finally granted land at another traditional site on the Yarra River, a place they named Coranderrk. A month or so later they attended a birthday levee for Queen Victoria (8), and the gazettal of the reserve and a subsequent message from the Queen guaranteeing her ‘interest’ in ‘their advancement and welfare’ seem to have established a strong belief that the reserve was the gift of the Queen and the Governor, to be theirs in perpetuity¹⁵

The reserve’s first decade was one of considerable progress, encouraged by the management of John Green and the leadership of Simon Wonga, William Barak and Tommy Bamfield, whose forebears had been ngmmgaeta or headmen, and who thus had inherited their traditional authority.¹⁶ Yet the Aborigines remained ‘anxious and uncertain respecting the tenure of their land’, nervous ‘they may be turned away at any time’.¹⁷ In the mid-1870s their worst fears were realised when the Board for the Protection of Aborigines won greater control over the management of the reserve, forced Green to resign his position as manager, and attempted to close Coranderrk and move its inhabitants to another reserve. This began more than a decade of ‘rebellion’ by the Aborigines, who resented the loss of Green, the authoritarianism of his successors— Hugh Halliday, Revd W.P. Strickland and William Goodall—and the Board’s heavy-handed intervention, and were angered by the threat of banishment.

Their campaign of protest was a relatively sophisticated one. For example, they used their literacy skills to follow colonial politics in the press and write letters to the editors of daily newspapers (12) and to government ministers (14); they formed deputations to wait upon sympathetic ministers such as Chief Secretary Graham Berry (13) and other politicians (11); and they sought the support of humanitanans such as Anne Bon. Their protests were often stardingly effective. The Victorian government was forced to hold two major inquiries—the first, in 1877, to inquire generally into policy on Aborigines and the second, in 1881, to inquire specifically into Coranderrk, at which Coranderrk Aborigines gave evidence and presented a petition (10).¹⁸

Maloga

In sparsely settled districts of neighbouring New South Wales Aborigines continued to have access to their traditional lands, but in other places they had been thoroughly dispossessed as early as the 1830s and were resettled on missions.¹⁹ On one of these, Maloga, founded on the Murray River near Echuca in 1874 by Daniel and Janet Matthews and the Aborigines Protection Association,²⁰ Aborigines were, in 1881, to petition the Governor of New South Wales for land in much the same terms as the Woiworung and Taungurong had sought a reserve in 1859 (15); in this they were undoubtedly encouraged by William Barak who was visiting at the time and by other Coranderrk Aborigines who had begun to return to their traditional homelands.²¹

By 1883, land had been reserved adjacent to Maloga—the Cummeragunja Reserve— but Aborigines were expressing their desire to have their own blocks of land and, according to Matthews and others, they were becoming more and more rebellious,²² probably because they were now very well aware of the looming dispossession of the Coranderrk Aborigines. In 1887, a year after new legislation had been passed in Victoria— the purpose of which was to force Aborigines of mixed descent off the reserves and disperse them into the general community— a deputation presented the Governor with a petition requesting family blocks for ‘the former occupiers of the land’ and invoking the Queen’s authority (16). Several months later two Maloga men petitioned their local Member of Parliament in similar terms for grants of land. (17); one of these men was William Cooper, who, many decades later, was to become the leader of one of the first major Aboriginal political organisations in Australia.²³ In other areas, too, Aborigines were seeking blocks. For example, a few years later, Aborigines seeking land near Sydney joined forces with Matthews— whose authoritarian control was being rejected at Cummeragunja and who now contemplated founding another mission— to petition the New South Wales Premier for land (18)²⁴

Poonindie, Point McLeay and Point Pearce

In South Australia, as in New South Wales, government took little interest in Aborigines beyond the early decades of conflict and dispossession on the pastoral frontier, and responsibility for their welfare was principally, if inadequately, assumed by philanthropists, church bodies and missionary organisations. For example, in 1850, an Anglican archdeacon, Mathew Hale, founded Poonindie on the southern Eyre Peninsula, north of Port Lincoln, and in 1859 George Taplin, employed by the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, established a mission at Point McLeay on a traditional site on the shores of Lake Alexandrina, known by Aborigines as Raukkan (‘the ancient way’). Other missions were also begun in the south of the colony— for example, Point Pearce in 1868—as they were in the north, by the Anglican and Lutheran churches.²⁵

Here, as in Victoria and New South Wales, many of these missions enjoyed an early period of growth and even prosperit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 The nineteenth century
• Part 2 1920s–1950s
• Part 3 1950s–1970s
• Part 4 1970s–1998
• Sources: documents and illustrations
• Index