Terrible Hard Biscuits

A reader in Aboriginal history

Valerie Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000319484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

'A fine beginning for those intent on understanding the colonial past that shaped black and white Australia.' - Richard Broome, author of Aboriginal Australians Terrible Hard Biscuits introduces the main themes in the history of Aboriginal Australia: the complexity of Aboriginal-European relations since 1788, how Aboriginal identity and cultures survived invasion, dispossession and dislocation, and how indigenous Australians have survived to take their place in today's society.Each essay in Terrible Hard Biscuits has been chosen for the clarity of its writing and for its depth of understanding. The Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal authors range across Australia's post-invasion history and their accounts focus on the more traditionally oriented communities in remote areas as well as on urban and fringe dwellers.For twenty years the journal Aboriginal History has attracted the best writing on Australia's Aboriginal past. Each essay in Terrible Hard Biscuits was selected from this journal to provide essential reading for students of Aboriginal studies and Australian studies. The chronological and geographic range of the contents will prove invaluable in surveying a crucial element of Australia's past - and present.

1

Perspectives of the past: an introduction

ISABEL MCBRYDE

Son of Mine
(to Denis)

What can I tell you, son of mine?

I could tell you of heart break, hatred blind,

I could tell of crimes that shame mankind,

Of brutal wrong and deeds malign,

Of rape and murder, son of mine;

But I’ll tell instead of brave and fine

When lives of black and white entwine,

And men in brotherhood combine—

This I would tell you, son of mine.

Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) (1970)

This poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal for her son, and Judith Wrigh’s moving gift to her friend and sister poet—‘Two Dreamtimes’ (for Kath Walker)—are important statements on Aboriginal history They were written in the early 1970s when historians and Aboriginal activists were just awakening to the importance of this hidden domain of Australian history The poets had long known it.

My shadow-sister, I sing to you

from my place with my righteous kin,

to where you stand with the Koori dead,

‘Trust none—not even poets.’

The knife’s between us. I turn it round,

the handle to your side,

the weapon made from your country’s bones.

I have no right to take it.

But both of us die as our dreamtime dies.

I don’t know what to give you

for your gay stories, your sad eyes,

but that, and a poem, sister.

last three stanzas of ‘Two Dreamtimes’, Judith Wright (1973)

Read discusses dispersals in NSW, pp. 205–10.

What do we mean by ‘Aboriginal history’? To what part of our national past, or its historiography, could these fine poems be keys? Aboriginal history is an until recently neglected area of Australian historical research. It encompasses the narratives and explanation of all those complex interactions between indigenous peoples and Europeans or others during the last three of what is often unhelpfully referred to as ‘contact history’, But it is not only concerned with colonial encounters. It also includes accounts of the lives of Aboriginal communities in that period, life stories of families and individuals in their own countries. They do not just exist in terms of their response to European stimuli. These life stories may reflect the world of the more traditionally oriented communities in remote areas, or that of the urban and fringe dwellers. For all Aborigines it was a world of intense cultural transformation, of dispossession, in many areas marked by marginalising dislocation and harsh treatment, even death in ‘dispersals’ or the savage reprisals that could follow attempts to defend country or family (Hercus and Sutton 1986; Rose 1991; Wright 1981).

So Aboriginal history deals with diverse events, and historical processes of variable scale. It also involves cross-cultural perspectives with many different layers of human behaviour and experience. Beyond these, therefore, there lies the challenge of making the historical account of these experiences comprehensible to others of different cultural backgrounds. Readers and writers may hold different world views, as may writers and subjects, and foster different concerns and aims in presenting historical accounts, whether written or oral. For Aboriginal history may be written by Aboriginal historians, or by non-Aboriginal historians; their perspectives and insights inevitably will differ, as they did in the encounters that may be the subject of their historical study The cross-cultural perspective renders complex both the events of the past and their construction in historical narrative and explanation.

Robert Utley, historian of the Indian frontier of the American west, points to a Zuni kachina, which for him can symbolise the history of white-Indian contact: the lack of understanding of each other’s cultural values. A kachina is a doll-like figure, used in Pueblo Indians’ ceremonial life as a representation of certain important concepts or beliefs. This particular Zuni kachina ‘… comes out of the underworld fastened back to back with a person from an alien world. The deformity condemned the two to an eternity of physical union in which neither could ever see or understand the other’ (Udey 1984:xix). This is a powerful metaphor for Indian-white relations, for that ‘process of two thoughtworlds that at the time were more often than not mutually unintelligible: c… five hundred years of talking past each other, of mutual incomprehension’ (Martin 1979:158). It could be extended, I would argue, to the complexities of attempting cross-cultural history, of understanding its events and actors.

This collection of readings from the journal Aboriginal History illustrates not only important aspects of the history of Aboriginal people in the two centuries since European settlement, but also the complexities of researching and writing that history.

Scott Robinson’s analysis of the Tent Embassy begins on p. 241.

The journal Aboriginal History was founded in the mid-1970s, following initiatives by historian Niel Gunson of the Australian National University, supported by colleagues including Diane Barwick, Peter Corris, Bob Reece and Peter Grimshaw. All were driven by awareness that a significant area of Australian history was totally neglected, rendering our national histories but partial accounts. The debates over Aboriginal people’s status and conditions in the period of the ‘Embassy movement’ and the events of 1972 sharpened this academic resolve. They also gave it a sense of urgency and strengthened their conviction that rigorous historical research into the past could contribute not only to understanding the present but also to guiding decisions on the future. Niel Gunson took to heart Charlie Perkins’ comment, ‘You’re a historian aren’t you, do something about Aboriginal history in this country’. Gunson wrote, ‘from that moment the idea of a journal of Aboriginal history was born’ (Gunson 1994).

For discussion by Aboriginal people of this subject see p. 9.

Yet at the time some senior historians and anthropologists expressed concern. They saw a danger in journal for Aboriginal history It might foster a divisive sense of a ‘two nations’ split within Australian society, or it might marginalise Aboriginal history These concerns, of course, reflect strands of debate in national issues that have continued through the last two decades. However, accepting such concerns, support for the journal was general, and with the backing of the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific Studies it was formally established; the first issue appeared in 1977. Diane Barwick and Bob Reece were its first editors, and Niel Gunson chaired an editorial board that was multidisciplinary, reflecting the many fields whose integration seemed essential to an understanding of Aboriginal history Most members of that original board are still active researchers, some still board members; Diane Barwick, until her sudden death in 1986, was a dynamic editor for the journal. Both the editorial board and contributors include Aboriginal researchers.

That Aboriginal history can be referred to as a recent element in Australian historical studies raises many questions, not only about historians’ perception of significant research questions, but about the nature of Australian society over the last two centuries, perceptions of national identity, attitudes to those of other races or with unusual backgrounds, and the history of the dispossession of Australia’s indigenous peoples. This neglect by historians has been surveyed by both Mulvaney (1958), and Stanner in his powerful contribution to volume 1 of Aboriginal’ History, ‘The history of indifference thus begins’ (1976; see also 1977). Answering these questions outlined above and assessing their influence are beyond the scope of this short introduction, but in raising them one may tease out the intellectual milieux in which the European record of Aboriginal peoples since colonial settlement was constructed. One may thus understand why the record seems to have passed through certain phases: the Aborigines as part of the natural history of the continent; a fascinating anthropological relict population of humankind’s ‘early childhood’ with a stone age culture to be recorded rapidly before it inevitably disappeared before the advancing tide of civilised progress; total concern to natural science. So the text books and general histories of the 1940s and 1950s tell us little of Aboriginal people from the late nineteenth century, of their contribution to rural life, to the development of the pastoral industry or their independent communities on reserve lands soon to be resumed in changes of policy in the 1920s and 1930s, or of the subsequent resettlement and dispersal of families and communities or the removal of their children (Read 1981; 1984). The chapters by Ryan, Goodall, Read, and Johnson and Markus may provide many readers with insights into aspects of our history of which we are appallingly ignorant.

Heather Goodall describes the loss of NSW reserve lands, p. 169.

These aspects we may think of as ‘hidden histories’, to appropriate the term used by Deborah Bird Rose to entitle her account of accompanying senior members of local groups through the sites and countries of Aboriginal-white interaction in the pastoral north (Rose 1991). These hidden histories present to us the realities of what was happening in so many parts of remote, and not so remote, Australia; realities that were not generally known. Yet they have deeply influenced the present, as careful reading of these chapters reveals. ‘The knife’s between us.’

See Scott Robinson’s chapter, especially pp. 243–6.

In the 1970s this bland historical indifference changed. Again understanding the determinants of this process could only come from researching wider issues; changing social attitudes; and new forces in Australian cultural history focussed on Aboriginal culture (but not Aboriginal people?) and new movements in art and literature. Their articulation with the Green environmental movement, and with the growing concern for conservation of Aboriginal sites opens up further fascinating themes for research by cultural historians. (For a Arnold 1992.) Not that Aboriginal people were passive witnesses of such trends. Many raised active voices of protest and demand. Historical research has shown us clearly that this also was not new (if rarely known among the wider community), as the chapters of this book demonstrate. Documentation of the validity of the majority of the activists’ claims was already emerging in the historical studies of Stanner, and in Rowley’s wide-ranging social research in rural areas, which resulted in his important (1970) volume, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, the first of a trilogy (see also Reece 1982:6–7).

Bob Reece discusses ‘resistance’ histories, pp. 30–4.

The 1970s saw the beginning of systematic historical research on Aboriginal-European contact by Australian historians led by Corris, Reece, Reynolds, Hartwig, and some anthropologists, especially Diane Barwick. Much of this work concentrated on race relations, and the colonial encounter, exposing the violence of Australia’s frontier and its dispossession of Aboriginal people. Certainly it has a share of ‘crimes that shame mankind’. This cannot be denied. Yet the accounts often resound with polemic, with overtones of guilt and the burden of the colonial past carried by the post-colonial dominant majority This may be at the expense of valid historical interpretation (Reece 1979; Stanner 1969; cf. Prucha 1976). Curiously, it can at times contrast sharply with the more positive record that comes from Aboriginal writers recounting the same harsh events; they often stress the themes of initiative, courage and cultural survival. Recently Aboriginal researchers Ysola Best, commenting on imbalance in historical accounts and the lack of Aboriginal perspectives, regretted the historians’ concentratio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ introduction
• 1 Perspectives of the past: an introduction
• 2 Who owns the past? Aborigines as captives of the archives
• 3 Inventing Aborigines
• 4 Exchange in southeastern Australia: an ethnohistorical perspective
• 5 Adelaide as an Aboriginal landscape
• 6 The struggle for recognition: part-Aborigines in Bass Strait in the nineteenth century
• 7 Coming in? The Yanyuwa as a case study in the geography of contact history
• 8 Land in our own country: the Aboriginal land rights movement in southeastern Australia, 1860–1914
• 9 ‘A rape of the soul so profound’: some reflections on the dispersal policy in New South Wales
• 10 Growing up in Queensland
• 11 Resettlement and caring for the country: the Anmatyerre experience
• 12 The Aboriginal embassy: an account of the protests of 1972
• Endnotes
• Index