Defending Australian History

Robert Murray has been a freelance journalist and independent historian since 1981. He is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books on aspects of Australian history – most recently The Making of Australia – A Concise History (Rosenberg. Publishing) He has been a prolific contributor of articles on history to magazines and newspapers, especially Quadrant, The Australian and The Age and also to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Amongst his earlier books are The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties and 150 Years of Spring Street: Victorian Government, 1850s to 21st Century. Robert Murray addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 22 September

DEFENDING AUSTRALIAN HISTORY 

ROBERT MURRAY

I am billing this talk “Defending Australian History”.  It needs defending.  My book The Making of Australia – A Concise History is not meant to be partisan, however.  It is intended only as a simple digest of Australian history – in just over 300 pages – from 60,000 years ago until the election of the Abbott Government last year. I wrote it because I wanted to and thought I could and that it could even be useful.

I like to think of it as cutting through the clutter of a huge amount of history written over the last 30 or 40 years. You will appreciate that in doing that, that there is not enough room to go into all the many arguments about aspects of our past. Even less can I jam it all into this talk.

I hope, though, that this approach, simply telling it like it is, or as it seems to me, will help correct many of the more doleful views that abound. Many of you will have noticed that a sour spin on Australian, if not all, history is now common. In this talk, I’ll take the liberty of being a bit more opinionated about that than in the book.

The book covers, Menzies, Whitlam etc. but tonight I’ll be concentrating on more formative times, so prepare for a time machine going back a couple of centuries, long before any of us or our parents were born.

A lot of the underlying discomfort is about the colonial nature of our origins. People no longer feel at ease with the British Empire or Commonwealth in the way they would have prior to the 1960s. They find the whole concept of empires to be demeaning and exploitative. Whether it is or was so is a very big story. I will not try to deal with it here, except to say that until World War I empire was a common way of governing the world and had been for centuries, going back to Rome and ancient China and even earlier. It existed – and like most things was a mixture of good and ill. Would India, for example, be better or worse off without the British? It is an impossible question to answer.

I’ll start off with and briefly summarise the white side of the early Australian story. It’s easier. The indigenous side is a real mess and I’ll have to cut it particularly short or I’d be here until the weekend.

The convict system was a big success. This is not just my view but the impression an average observer – I would like to think – would get from the record, such as it is.

Some 150,000 convicts were transported to Australia, around 80,000 of them to New South Wales which then included Victoria and Queensland, 60,000 to Tasmania when it was known as Van Diemen’s Land and 10,000 to Western Australia. About two-thirds were English and most of others Irish. They were males by a proportion of about five to one. They included 3000-4000 political prisoners. They arrived in New South Wales between 1788 and 1840 and close to half that lot in a busy period between 1825-35. The Van Diemen’s Land convicts arrived between 1803 and 1853, about half of them in the 1840s, after transportation to the eastern mainland ceased. Those to Western Australia arrived between 1850 and 1868, after the gold rush ended such deterrent value as Van Diemen’s Land still had.

I mention those figures to give to some idea of the timing and scale of convictism, as many people seem unsure about it. With so many involved, it can be misleading to generalise but I’ll have a go. There wasn’t much more crime in the so-called “thieves colony” than anywhere else, especially if we exclude theft of livestock. The process can be described as “normalisation”, the term used in the Puritan colonies of America after the first generation establishment period there.

The bad press mainly comes from the small percentage of convicts sentenced to severe punishment for offences committed in Australia. They went to “secondary” prisons, as they were called, such as Morton Bay on the site of the future Brisbane and Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania. These could be brutal places, depending a bit on the commandant and the convicts. The novel For the Term of His Natural Life is a vivid classic of the convict’s life when everything went wrong. And it has been a huge seller.

Most of the convicts, though, had been petty thieves and brawlers who were sentenced to seven years transportation, or more serious ones to fourteen years or life. Seven-year sentences amounted to four years as, if reasonably behaved by then, the prisoners were granted a ticket of leave, a form of parole and could work for wages and do pretty much as they wished within the colony. Most of another year would already have been spent between arrest and trial and being shipped here.

Some were unlucky or boisterous enough to be assigned in the colony to road or clearing gangs, but most were sent to work on farms – sometimes hard and dull but usually healthy work, far from harm’s way and great training to be a future bush worker or farmer.

Up to the mid-1820s, on being emancipated, that is freed, they were given a land grant of about 50 acres or 20-odd hectares which they were meant to turn into farms to grow food for themselves and the colony generally. Some in time established successful farming families. Others, as usually with small farm settlement, gave up or sold out. Any reasonably useful person could get a job once free, usually at better pay than they could expect at home. Many did return home, often working their way on ships.

The picture handed down to us is, however, not all flattering. Though there were many distinguished exceptions, most ex-convicts seem to have been rough, foul-mouthed, drink-loving, quarrelsome men who were nevertheless moderately honest and useful. Personal improvement was more marked for the women, rough as they often were on arrival. The demand for their hand was enormous in colonies with a preponderance of men. Some were snapped up by soldiers and officials, even in respectable marriages, or by successful ex-convicts. The improved morale helped make them good mothers. Many a London street girl of, say, the 1790s died 50 or 60 years later as the grand old matriarch of a big colonial family. One, for example, had 300 descendants when she died at Wollongong in the 1860s and there are now about ten thousand of them, including Kevin Rudd.

Writers on the convict years nearly always described the Australian-born generation as a huge improvement on their parents, usually honest and useful, especially in the bush, if occasionally quarrelsome and what some today would call bogans. These “currency lads” and “lasses”, or “natives” spoke with a distinctive slightly nasal and flat “colonial” accent by the 1820s or so, perhaps earlier.

The shortage of women and prevalence of venereal disease limited family formation by convicts, but nevertheless most seem to have married and often had lots of descendants. On some rough estimates, about 20 per cent of Australians today, especially from  families established before 1939, have at least one convict ancestor. In New South Wales, on more rough guesstimating, it is at least 30 per cent and in Tasmania a healthy majority.

When I went to live in Sydney in the mid-1950s, I noticed that few people spoke about their ancestry in the way that was common then in Victoria and Queensland. We can guess at the reason. The records of the 1828 census were locked up in the Chief Secretary’s office until 1968, repeat, 1968. It is like a Domesday Book of how the residents of the time came to Australia and the property they had.

The system became tougher in the mid-1820s. London decided life was too good here for exile to be a deterrent to crime. This was the time of the great grazing expansion into the inland and arrivals from that time were mostly assigned to bush work with graziers on distant pastoral runs. They became the first generation of shepherds, shearers and bullockies. In time, some became cocky farmers or squatters themselves, or perhaps village blacksmiths or publicans. Most would have lived to benefit from the gold rushes of the 1850s.

Federation is another aspect that bothers modern Australians. Many are decidedly grumpy about it. Teachers tell me it is a real bind to teach, as the kids find it boring. They would rather a revolution or the verbal flourishes and add-ons about freedom of the American Constitution. I have to say I think Federation was and has been a great success.

The system works better than any conceivable alternative could. The people have rejected nearly all attempts to amend the constitution that was negotiated so carefully, if tediously, in the 1890s by middle-aged chaps in suits. Our constitutional fathers had the benefit of a hundred years experience of the American Constitution, the oldest written one, and so could avoid many potential traps.

The hankering persists, though, for an Australian revolution and/or for a unitary system of government, with one national government and about twenty regions instead of the states. This notion goes back a long way and is still around. But 170 years or so after it was first raised it has still to get serious traction as a public issue.

Another grumble here is the state boundaries. Gough Whitlam used to say that they were irrational and drawn up by a Downing Street clerk in London. That is wrong. They were drawn up locally, in line with people’s wishes at the time, plus geography. The New South Wales parliament was the chief author.

Our military history still bothers some people as “colonial” too. There’s a summary in the book and I hope it will assist readers with the innumerable public discussions we are going to have over the next twelve months for the centenaries of World War 1 and Gallipoli and the half-century mark since the Vietnam commitment. I make the point, however, that – isolated and lightly populated – Australia has never had many real choices in defence matters other than to stick with great and powerful friends – unless you are a pacifist or nearly so.

White Australia is another perceived cause of shame. I will offer a little context. It was not too unreasonable for the small, newly independent and united society of four million people that Australia was in 1901 to want a cautious immigration policy. It was based on economic more than racial grounds – though the two are not easily untangled – and was in a region where the cheapish labour of Chinese and Indian so-called “coolies” was prevalent and memories of the American Civil War lingered.

Once adopted it was not easily undone – economic slumps and wars in the first half of the twentieth century saw to that, followed by the postwar immigration boom. Australia could hardly have promoted cheap passages for immigration in, say, India or Pakistan in the way it did in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s.

Nevertheless, White Australia became a hard, unhelpful dogma. It was an embarrassment by the time the Menzies, Holt, Whitlam and Fraser governments gradually ended it. But not too much righteousness about the past: Australia is still not open slather. Non-white immigrants are still largely limited to those who fit in culturally and economically. It was always an immigration restriction policy. Attempts today to present it as being used to oppress Aborigines are wrong, though common.

As I said earlier, discussion of the indigenous side of early Australian history is mess. There has been a lot of good stuff written and screened – and a lot not so good. Goodies versus baddies cliches, innuendo, under-educated guesstimates, inflated death tolls, acrimonious name calling, misleading fiction and defensive dogmas are only some of its troubles. Pious generalities about dispossession and maltreatment abound, along with the usual lazy left versus right division.

Major questions, especially relating to disease and health of Aborigines, have been poorly recorded or written about and after 200 years are still only vaguely understood. We have little detailed knowledge of the numbers of people living in each region, in 1788 or even now.

A lot of Australians now seemed frightened of the whole subject. Others just switch off. Others again are dogmatically assertive on very little knowledge. Yet it is an important story, like any other big story full of intricacy and contradiction, drama, disasters, courage, tragedy, compassion and initiative, of good things and bad. It needs more impartial care in the telling, precision where the available information allows it and candid acknowledgment of the difficulties when it does not.

In the book I have integrated – and it seems to be for the first time – the indigenous side of the story into the mainstream white one. I worked principally from secondary or more accessible primary sources. However, a comprehensive book on what is often glibly called dispossession is still badly needed.

To start at the beginning – invasion or settlement? One is in black armband or white blindfold country straight away. Neither word is ideal. Colonise is probably best. Settlement is a bit cosy for us whites but it does get the essential idea that to much of the world over thousands of years, not just the British in 1788, the land is meant to be cultivated and have permanent buildings.

There are arguments for invasion, but to most people now it implies a D-Day or Gallipoli landing on hostile beach. The first Australia Day was just not like that. The indigenous people didn’t know what was happening – one of their grandsons said they thought the weird newcomers must be possums, climbing up the ship masts as some did. But they soon worked it out. Within a year or so they became quite friendly with the First Fleeters and often visited the little Sydney township.

It was not so different in the other sites of eventual major towns and cities. The Kulin people of the Melbourne region were well disposed, for example. Indeed, race relations in the first 50 years of the Australian colonies were relatively harmonious. The next 50 years, however, saw quite a lot of violent conflict. I’m dealing here with what can be gleaned from the records. They are voluminous but still inadequate. Whether they tell the whole truth is another aspect, which I’ll deal with later.

The overwhelming impression I get is that fighting was usually over property and perceived ill-treatment of blacks by whites. The Aborigines seemed on balance to welcome the whites – who brought the benefits of modernity – but in a wary, apprehensive, prickly, sometimes ambivalent way. They sound like real people to me.

It could be that the limited white-black conflict in the first 50 years, excluding Tasmania, brought fewer not more black deaths. The old tribal ways were often lethal, with death used for punishments and  various forms of fighting with other indigenous groups. This seemed – there is not much evidence – to lessen under white influence.

The Aborigines had, on balance, the upper hand in these early years – when it was needed. Until about 1850 there were few horses in Australia and white guns were limited to muskets, cumbersome long-barrelled rifles or pistols. All were single shot. The soldiers were mostly on foot until the mid-1820s. Muskets were accurate only for about 50 metres, unreliable in even damp weather and required experience to use effectively. When conflict quickened in 1838, some whites were still using swords.

The grazing parties of the wool boom that began about 1820 used slow moving bullock drays to reach their distant stations, with many of the men on foot. The Aborigines had the advantage of knowing their own country intimately, every inch of it and having in their spears and waddies weapons just as lethal as the squatter’s muskets.  However, I have never seen any record of Aborigines in southern Australia trying to stop a grazing party from travelling, except for specific reasons such as alleged interference with women. This contrasts sharply with so-called “foreign” Aborigines from outside their own country, who in tribal times would be killed immediately on entering unless they complied with traditional ritual.

In the early years, the main events of violent conflict were in the Nepean-Hawkesbury valley to the west of Sydney, an early development for intensive farming, in the 1790s and mid-1800s; then in the Bathurst-Mudgee district in 1824 after grazing commenced beyond the Blue Mountains; and in the Hunter Valley a couple of years later.

Otherwise, there was not much racial conflict recorded until 1838, by which time graziers had spread over much of the south-east of the continent and the southwestern corner. There was quite a lot between 1838 and 1845, after which again there was not much in these areas. Newly independent Queensland experienced quite a lot in the 1860 to 1890s period as the pastoral frontier moved north and it lingered into the twentieth century in the Northern Territory and far north west.

Tasmania had its own problems, mainly between 1823 and 1830, when farming and grazing spread from the Hobart and Launceston enclaves into the grassy central highlands. This was the period of the so-called “Black Wars”.

In the south of Australia at least – in areas where most people live today – I do not get much impression of a battle for land or freedom. Again, I stress, based on the records. There was genuine competition to use the land in the Hawkesbury-Nepean valley and to some extent on the Hunter, but not much in the vastness beyond.

Elsewhere, racial conflict was usually over property and perceived bad behaviour by whites towards Aborigines, especially over not paying for work done or misuse of the women. Has much changed?

The common allegation of white “land grabbing” is misleading. The government granted much of the land nearer Sydney and more so in Tasmania to settlers for a small fee until 1831. After that, the government sold it to raise funds for immigration and what they called internal improvement. The new landholders were meant to both usefully employ convicts and grow food and wool to feed the colony and provide an export. Settlement beyond these limits was illegal, but whites and their livestock flooded in regardless and “squatters”, as they were called, had to lease it after 1836. Melbourne began life as an illegal settlement of boat people.

Generally, except for the very small areas farmed intensively, the land was meant to be shared with the traditional owners, the local Aborigines. Pastoral leases made this explicit after 1848. The official view seemed to be that there was such a vast area of undeveloped or virtually uninhabited land that there was more than enough for everybody.  Until 1838, the reports to Sydney and London by the Commissioners for Crown Land, the administering officials in the back-blocks depict a generally harmonious atmosphere. Several fairly hostile years followed and the reasons can only be estimated.

One is that there was bad drought. Even in earlier times near Sydney, drought and racial conflict seemed to come together. Another was said at the time to be that Aborigines generally became over-confident that the government could and would look after them. This was especially so following the prosecution and hanging of several convicts after the atrocious massacre of 28 inoffensive blacks up towards the Queensland border near today’s Inverell. Yet another is the perhaps overbearing scale, aggression and likely permanence of the grazing takeover in southern Australia as it reached a climax.

In Victoria, severe conflict developed when graziers spread at that time beyond the relatively friendly Kulin lands into the far south-west and Gippsland. The indigenous people there seemed, for whatever reason, more hostile than those nearer Melbourne. When drovers and bullockies began streaming down the Murray and Murrumbidgee with stock and goods for Adelaide, local indigenous people seemed to perceive a cornucopia of desired goods. A bad fight with overlanders, with 30 or more Aboriginal deaths, broke out near Mildura in 1841.

However, the overall context at this time was not so much of the indigenous people defending their land, as of them wanting a share of the goods and livestock the newcomers brought.

Sheep and cattle stealing – to use a pejorative term in the absence of a neutral one – was the main cause of conflict. There did not seem to be much of it before 1838, after which there was a lot. My impression for what it is worth is that Aborigines learned it from the convicts. The records until then express much more concern about the thieving behaviour of runaway convicts, of whom there were many, than they do about Aborigines.

The Aborigines seemed to love, if not crave, mutton, beef, flour and tea once they got the taste. We must be careful, too, of talking about the Aborigines as if they were one. Some accounts suggest it was more a case of sheep stealing gangs, black – but also sometimes white or mixed – rather than tribal decisions. It was also a handy way for the Aborigines to get their own back on squatters who they felt did not play the game.

Things on the southern frontier settled down by the mid-1840s and Aborigines again integrated their life into that of the stations on their country, learned some English and adopted some European ways. Whether this should be billed as accepting defeat or sensible modernising is a matter of opinion.

The role of the Native Police is important. These were mounted police forces comprised of armed Aborigines under white officers. The first was established in Port Phillip district, as Victoria then was, in the late 1830s but was not fully operational until 1842. It had the support of the Kulin leadership and was regarded as having had a big role in subduing fighting. As a general rule, it worked well in Kulin country. In the Gunditjmarra lands of the southwest it was more controversial and involved in one big massacre. It was also involved in bad conflict in Gippsland against the Kurnai, who were traditionally bitter enemies of the Kulin. However, the extent of this violence is contested.

It was the main rural police force in early rural Victoria and arrested its share of whites as well as blacks.

Sydney established a similar Native Police in 1848 to patrol the grazing expansion into Queensland. After the Victorian success, it seemed a good idea at the time for policing the vast grassy expanses of the north. But the record was not good. The big problem was that it was comprised of Aborigines from districts remote from those it was policing. Aborigines were usually much more frightened of “foreign” Aborigines than of whites and the Queensland Native Police earned a reputation for serious violence and murder.

“Stock taking”, so to speak, was still a big issue there and behind much of the trouble. However, there were a few real land wars – defence of territory against apparent invaders – in parts of the far north. The records of the north generally are skimpy, so it is not easy to write about.

By this time, fire-arm technology was developing rapidly, with long range, repeater rifles, unlike the old-fashioned musketeer used in the south. The northern squatters and their men also had lots of horses. The indigenous population seemed to be much bigger in the north too.

How big was the Aboriginal population and what happened to it? They had no statistics, so it can only be estimated. Historians would probably settle today for about three-quarters of a million people in 1788. About 5,000 of these lived in the Sydney region. By 1933 the number identifying as Aborigines had fallen to 74,000 nationally, after which it started rising again. However, it is believed many genetically and culturally mixed people did not officially identify as Aborigines, so the real number on today’s definitions would have been much larger. Today the all-up number is heading back towards that of 1788.

The biggest killer was smallpox, which hit in three disastrous epidemics, in the 1780s, the 1820s and in the 1860s. The first two appear to have been continent-wide and the last confined to the north and northwest. The first two epidemics are estimated to have killed about half the total indigenous population at the time. It is now fairly generally believed that visiting Trepang fishermen from Sulawesi in Indonesia brought the disease. This is another big question, but there is only a remote possibility that the smallpox came from the Sydney settlement.

Areas with a long history of smallpox, such as Britain, Europe and Java, develop a collective resistance but it can be calamitous in its impact on a “greenfield” population without this resistance, whether indigenous Australians or Sulawesis.

More population decline came from venereal disease. Tribal Aborigines normally lent their women to visitors, in exchange for gifts. It was a custom that worked for an isolated population but disastrous when the modern world crashed in. Gonorrhoea gums up a woman’s reproductive tubes while syphilis in mothers weakens babies.

Anglo-Celtic whites certainly introduced VD, though visiting seamen no doubt were also implicated, probably including the Indonesian fishermen. It became disastrously common among the Aborigines and gravely limited their reproduction. The tribal custom of lending wives to visitors must have worked well in isolation, but was disastrous when the world crashed in.

Other common diseases such as measles, bronchitis and TB also caused a huge Aboriginal death toll, especially when the white population of the inland increased from the 1830s. They had to learn simple things whites take for granted, such as not wearing wet European clothes and the importance of sanitation when not regularly moving camp. It is not clear how far Aboriginal immunity to disease due to genetic isolation was a problem, other than with smallpox.

How much can the record be trusted? This is the essence of the rancour in recent decades over history wars, black armbands etc. We have a fairly good idea that some killings of Aborigines were not reported or the numbers reported minimised. But, also, that a vast number of probably fictional or wildly exaggerated stories spread in later times about indigenous massacres. Many still circulate, without ever getting onto the printed page.

It is a minefield for historians. Nobody really knows. The black armband school of writing generally exaggerates the extent of unrecorded killing, in my opinion. Some of it is fiction and does not pretend to be otherwise. There is some hairy as well as more sensible non-fiction. Popular writers often quote academic sources that have problems and some of them are pretty hairy.

I’ll take as an example Henry Reynolds, who is the best known, most respected and moderate of the black armband school. Now retired and 75, he was a Tasmanian teacher who became an academic historian at James Cook University in Townsville, with a special interest in Aboriginal history.

His earlier books – not so much the later ones – are a good read and a good introduction to the subject of “what happened to the Aborigines when the whites came”. He has been an exceptionally good publicist for his cause. More than anybody, he has brought it to centre stage as part of the national story.

Earlier historians were inclined to steer clear of the subject, other than perhaps with a few generalities. This was more because it is so difficult rather than out a desire to cover up. Unlike the white side of the story, there are few satisfactory written records. There has been a lot of anthropology over many years about the tribal cultures, but not until recent decades much recorded about the cultural interface.

Reynolds, however, presents it in a goodies and baddies way, mainly as Aborigines defending their land against incoming cattle and sheep men. I don’t know how he and others like him can see so clearly into the nineteenth century Aboriginal mind. He sees it all, too, in a very North Queensland way, understandable given his Townsville background but this was the worst area of all for racial conflict.

Reynolds also does not adequately cover the Native Police question. He tends to come over as if exposing the old cover-up but he does not say much that is really new, as much as under-publicised. The main massacre incidents are all described, for example, in the Menzies era edition of the Australian Encyclopaedia produced with Menzies Government funding.

Reynolds and the black armband people generally either ignore or are tokenistic about the diseases, tribal violence, small families and other causes of Aboriginal population decline. They go for the bang-bang, squatter-bashing side of it.

Reynolds has estimated a national figure of 20,000 Aborigines killed by white violence since 1788, half of them in Queensland. There isn’t time to go into the battle of the death toll figures and the problems with various estimates. But Reynolds’ figure, while plausible, has acquired an authority it doesn’t deserve. You could just as easily calculate 5,000 or even fewer Aborigines killed by whites over 150 years, while deep black armbanders have gone as high as 100,000 dead.

The black armband people usually concentrate on Queensland, which had the most and more recent violence, or Tasmania, where the distinctive Tasmanian race died out, in the full descent sense, in 1876. I don’t find even Henry Reynolds very convincing about other states.

I’ll finish with the famous history wars. They were actually about very little, but illustrative.

On one side, Keith Windschuttle wrote in Quadrant magazine and later spoke out complaining of, for example, an alleged massacre near Bathurst in 1824, where soldiers and graziers after a shoot-out supposedly killed about a hundred or more indigenous people by throwing them over a waterfall. The National Museum presented this as true. Windschuttle – and others – have rejected the story as an old-time bush furphy that has no substantiating evidence. The official figure for Bathurst district in 1824 was seven whites killed. There was no official figure for indigenous dead, but fourteen has been suggested.

Windschuttle next published the first of a planned three-volume planned series on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. This was only – I repeat only – about Tasmania. He found that the record could substantiate only about 120 to 150 Aborigines being killed by whites in the Black Wars of the 1820s. Henry Reynolds had put it at about twice that, allowing for unrecorded killing. Lyndall Ryan in The Aboriginal Tasmanians accepted a similar figure to Reynolds but speculatively doubled it to account for the rapid decline in indigenous population of that time.

Windschuttle examined Ryan’s sources, as given in her footnotes, and claimed several references were dodgy and didn’t support what she said they did. You can imagine how touchy this ground is for academic historians. The bile this storm in a boiling billycan aroused was astonishng, indeed unforgettable. So I hope you’ll be a bit forgiving if I have stepped on toes in this talk.