Essays on Aboriginalism

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Professor Emeritus Brian Roberts has lived half his life in South Africa and half in Australia. An agricultural ecologist by profession, he has a passion for sustainable land use while his highly developed social conscience has led to decades of research into tribal peoples rights and responsibilities. Recognised as ‘The Father of Landcare’ he was awarded the Order of Australia in 1998, having earlier won the South African Community Service Medal for his work in rural soil conservation. He was the founding president of the Soil and Water Conservation Association of Australia, Organising Chairman of the Ninth International Rangeland Congress and has held professorships at three universities.

Professor Roberts chaired the Lower Balonne Advisory Committee on water sharing, the Queensland Rural Fires Council, the Queensland Freshwater MAC and the Nathan Dam Community Committee on Dawson River Water Supplies. As a senior member of the Cape York Peninsula Land Use Strategy and convenor of CSIRO’s Water Quality Joint Venture team in North Queensland as Adjunct in Environmental Studies at James Cook University, he contributed to mainstream and Indigenous community conservation projects. He is a member of the National Conservation Advisory Committee and the Queensland Sheep and Wool Research Committee. Much of his recent writing has been published in Quadrant Online. He is the author of 13 books, many book chapters and numerous journal articles since 1956. As a member of ANU’s Fundamental Questions program he produced the seminal paper ‘Land Ethics: A necessary addition to Australian Values’ (1984).

ESSAYS ON ABORIGINALISM

DR BRIAN ROBERTS

Dedicated to my wife, Margaret, whose resilience as home-maker, despite difficult health conditions, has grounded our family since 1956.

PREFACE

The term Aboriginalism is used here in a similar way to Judaism, Socialism or Capitalism. It is in essence a system governed by principles grounded in First Peoples’ values. Aboriginalism is a global phenomenon exhibited in many geographical regions, usually where climate and topography are not conducive to modern agriculture. In many cases, the societies displaying Aboriginalism have involuntarily contracted from more extensive original homelands, to their present locations. In other cases they involuntarily occupy locations reserved for Aboriginal people by the nationstate.

Aboriginality, i.e. being Aboriginal, cannot be studied or assessed in isolation, if it is to be properly understood as a subset of the Human Sciences. It is in the way that Aboriginality differs from other group identities, that its strengths and weaknesses are best evaluated and it is at the inter-cultural interface, that Aboriginality is best compared with other societal constructs.

The United Nations has produced a Declaration of Indigenous Rights, which acts as a touchstone for governments worldwide when they’re confronted with Indigenous claims to land, human rights and autonomy. In the present compilation of essays, Aboriginalism in its Australian context, is analysed as a subset of a modern multicultural nation state. These essays were written over a period of two years and were constructed as stand-alone pieces for journal publication. For this reason, the essays don’t flow as a cohesive and sequential thought pattern but rather they attempt to unpack the societal impact of a range of Aboriginal-related topics.

Some Australian readers will wonder at the extent of South African material included in this essay collection. I believe that it is useful for Australian Aborigines to also view their situation through the African lens, if only to appreciate the comparative differences and similarities. This relativity also makes a change from the usual Australian comparison with the New Zealand and Canadian indigenes.

Some repetition of certain concepts is inevitable in a collection of stand-alone journal articles, so the author apologises up front if repetition irks some readers. However, it is hoped that these essays can be useful to secondary and tertiary teachers in their Humanities classes, since together they provide a nuanced range of liberal, conservative and Indigenous views on Australian race relations.

Since much of the original thinking on Australian Indigenous policy and principle stems from Noel Pearson, his writings are repeatedly referred to. Pearson however, is not judged as having all the answers, so he is challenged on a number of issues. As a knowledgeable ideas man, Pearson’s well-articulated proposals carry more gravitas than those of any of his colleagues, with the possible exception of Marcia Langton.

The essays are grouped into six arbitrary subject areas, although logical sequencing within each part is problematic, it is hoped that this contribution will provide alternative views in the present debate on Indigenous Futures.

Brian Roberts

Cairns 2016

PART ONE

HISTORY & ORIGINS

FIRST CONTACT: A Historical Assessment

The Australian narrative of first contact between Indigenous people and exotic visitors has been described in many different ways: friendly, tentative, fierce and variations of these descriptions. Before revisiting the local contacts in Cape York, Western Australia, Tasmania and Botany Bay, it is instructive to compare these early encounters with those which predated the British by several centuries (Cummins, 2009). [see p.9]

The Phoenicians

A good starting point is the Phoenicians who are said to have circumnavigated Africa around 600 BC. They’d become a seafaring nation from about 1400 BC and can claim the title of the first maritime explorers the world had known. The earliest civilisations of Mesopotamia, then Egypt and Samaria, were followed by Assyria and Greece. If the Old Testament is correct, the Phoenicians may well have also reached the shores of India at a very early date. They were not primarily navigators, rather they were traders seeking to open up new markets along their new-found sea routes. Unlike later expeditionary forces, the Phoenicians were not empire-builders seeking to conquer new lands for their king, but came as commercial emissaries offering manufactured goods to more primitive peoples who lacked advanced technology. As a result, their first contacts were largely peaceful, which cannot be said for many successive seekers pursuing wealth and even human resources.

The Romans to Britannia

After several centuries of more localised maritime adventure, largely in the Mediterranean region, one of the next major contact zones was the Roman invasion of Britain in 55 BC. It must have been clear to the Celtic tribesmen that the vast fleet of ships was no ordinary trading mission. Julius Caesar had organised the loading of 10,000 legionnaires and 500 cavalry. He had conquered Gaul (France) and it was from there that his centurions had learned of the mystical Britannia, where semi-naked tribesmen rode horses and used small wickerwork chariots. This mystical island was said to be inhabited by primitive hairy people who fought among themselves as clans, each with their own king. As the Iron Age expanded to Britain, an increasing number of European clans of Celtic origin, migrated to Britain until fierce competition for arable land developed. So the Celts, Picts, Angels, Saxons and Gaelic clans, became warring factions. Some had become actively engaged in supporting the Gallic tribes against Caesar on the continent. (Well do I remember my 1948 Latin text book titled ‘Caesar’s Gallic Wars’ – a chronicle of continuous strife.)

The Romans had heard of these bizarre blue-painted, wild-haired tribesmen with their javelins, daggers and long flat swords. Their feral reputation and untamable nature had gone before them, so when Caesar’s men arrived for a second time in 54 BC they had 800 ships and 40,000 legionnaires whose linked armour could easily overcome the naked Celtic tribesmen. The legions soon overcame the palisaded hilltop forts of the Celts but Caesar left their king in charge provided they paid tribute to Rome by way of annual taxes. This went on for nearly a hundred years until Emperor Claudius again invaded with a huge force, ruthlessly conquered the locals and took over their tin and iron mines together with their grain supplies. Over the next 400 years modern-day England was created.

In the process of Romanising the country, the mystical Druids were hunted down and eliminated, Queen Boudicca and her tribesmen were killed or enslaved, and the sacred groves of their religion were chopped down for timber. So began what the Romans saw as the civilisation of the British Isles, starting with roads, cities, ship-yards and a vast trading network with Europe and the Mediterranean. Over time, the local tribes became more educated, more technologically advanced and more productive in their agriculture and mining. At the same time their animistic religion, centred on sites such as Stonehenge, were replaced by the coming of Christianity via Ireland and the new monasteries. It is often asked how long it might have taken the tribesmen of Britannia to become a truly civilised nation if the Romans had not contributed their significant leap forward.

The Norsemen, Vikings, Columbus and Cortez

After the Roman excursions to Britain, the next major explorations were those of the Norsemen and Vikings from about 860AD. Rather than militant raiders, these Scandinavians were usually farmers seeking new land in Greenland, Scotland and Vinland (North-Eastern North America). Then in 1492 Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, followed by Cortez in 1519 who came up against Montezuma’s Incas.

The first circumnavigation of the globe, completed in 1521, was the Magellan/Elcano three-year voyage. From 1539 De Soto travelled up the Mississippi and De Orellano explored the Amazon and by 1606 the English had entered Virginia.

The Dutch in the East Indies

Australia becomes known to the world when it is ‘discovered’ by the Dutch in 1623, unaware that the Aborigines had been here for at least 50,000 years. This discovery is actually predated by the Spaniard De Torres who sailed further South than his predecessors in search of the Unknown Southland. De Torres was the first European to enter the strait which now bears his name, between New Guinea and Australia. The Spanish would keep this shortcut to the Philippines secret for the next 150 years. It was the Dutch, under Willelm Janszoon in his Dutch East India Company (VOC) ship the ‘Duyfken’ in 1605 who first made contact with the natives of Australia at Cape Keerweer (Turn again) on the West coast of Cape York, North of present-day Weipa. This first encounter was hostile, with Aborigines preventing the Dutch from landing to take on water and fresh food. Janszoon returned to Holland unimpressed by this featureless hostile place.

Then in 1623, the Dutch Jan Carstensz re-traced much of Janszoon’s route and made landfall on the same coast as his predecessor. He left us the very first recorded description of the local inhabitants of Western Cape York. It is important to note that Carstensz’ instructions from the VOC were to bring back [preferably] young boys or girls who could be ‘broken in’, possibly for use as interpreters. But Carstensz was a slave hunter, not an explorer in the normal sense. At first he tried to entice the Aborigines out of the coastal forest by leaving pieces of iron and strings of beads on a stick, but the Aborigines didn’t respond. A few days later two parties of men went ashore in the ship’s boats. This time the armed blacks showed no fear and touched the muskets of the Dutch, trying to remove them from the men’s shoulders. The English translation of Carstensz’s report reads: ‘Our men accordingly diverted their attention by showing them the iron and beads, and espying vantage, seized one of the blacks by a string which he wore around his neck and carried him off to the pinnace (long boat). The blacks who remained on the beach, set up dreadful howls. These natives are coal-black with lean bodies and [are] stark-naked, having twisted baskets or nets around their heads. In hair and figure, they are like the blacks of the Coromandel (Indian) coast, but they seem to be less cunning, bold and evil-natured than the blacks of the Western extremity of Nova Guinea (today’s Irian Jaya).’

Joseph Cummins in his book ‘First Encounters’ (2009) adds a note of caution to readers’ assessment of Carstensz as a mariner of his day (1620’s): ‘He comes across in his journals as an ugly figure, with far more than his share of the racism of his age.’ Marching inland he and his men ‘found great quantities of diverse human bones from which it may be concluded that the blacks [of the area] are man-eaters who do not spare each other when driven by hunger.’ (Cummins maintains that Carstensz thought he was in New Guinea and that the Aborigines were head-hunters.) Two hundred Aborigines gathered and attacked the Dutchmen, who shot one of the attackers. The Aborigines fled and Carstensz was able to inspect one of their deserted huts and to report that: ‘The natives are utter barbarians…It may safely be concluded that they are poor and abject wretches.’ He then adds for the record: ‘In all the places we have landed we have treated the blacks or savages with especial kindness, offering them [trinkets], hoping that by so doing, to get their friendship. But in spite of all our kindness and semblance, the blacks received us as enemies everywhere, so that in most places our landings were attended with great peril.’

Next on the Australian contact scene was Dirk Hartog, also of the VOC, but this time coming ashore at the other side of the Unknown Southland, at Shark bay on the coast of Western Australia. Hartog and his successor Francois Pelsaert (1629) liked to refer to this continent as New Holland for it was the last landfall before reaching their East Indies capital Batavia (today’s Jakarta). After a series of murders among the shipwrecked Dutch on the Abrolhos Islands, fifty miles off the mainland, Pelsaert rowed forty-eight survivors to the WA coast in search of water and food. They spied eight black men who fled as soon as the Dutchmen with muskets came near them. Eventually the Dutchmen found water and crayfish, then rowed all the way to their kinsmen in Batavia. (While working in Indonesia in the 1980’s, I was fascinated to find a Dutch castle on the island of Sulawesi which so closely resembled the Cape Town castle built by Jan Van Riebeeck in 1653, that it seemed probable that both were designed by the same Dutch architect.)

Next came Abel Tasman, also of the VOC, who made the first serious attempt to map New Holland, leaving Batavia in early 1642 and sailing West to Mauritius, Tasman then veered so far South that icebergs became a major threat to his small ships. Turning North, he eventually came in sight of what he named Van Diemen’s Land after the head of the VOC. Later he was honoured by it being re-named Tasmania. While Tasman was the first European to set eyes on Tasmania, he didn’t come across any Aborigines, who’d been there for 10,000 years. He’d heard what seemed to be human sounds, but no contact was made with the Tasmanians until the French arrived and skirmished with the locals in 1772. What impressed Tasman most was the enormous size of the local trees, but having noted the rugged nature of Van Diemen’s Land, he sailed East for two weeks before becoming the first European to set eyes on New Zealand. Travelling up the West coast of South Island he came to the gap between the South and North Islands. He anchored at a beach in the gap and was met by thirteen Maori warriors in a giant canoe. ‘These people apparently sought our friendship,’ recorded Tasman, unaware that he was the first White to contact Polynesian seafarers who’d been in Maoriland for over 400 years. Before long, the Dutch invitation to come aboard their ship was declined. Instead, the Maori, in a double-prowed outrigger, rammed the Dutch ship’s longboat and killed three of the newcomers, leading Tasman to name the place Murderer’s Bay, known later as Cook Strait.

In assessing Tasman’s encounter, Cummins describes this as ‘a classic first contact clash between two cultures. The Maori recognised the large ship with armed men as an obvious invading force and saw fit to attack without warning’. The Dutch, although they did intend to take over the islands and named them New Zealand (or Nieu Zeeland), were not planning an early attack, only an assessment of the land’s potential for trade. Tasman returned to Holland, reporting that there was not much to be found in Tasmania and that the New Zealand natives were unusually fierce. He made no report on the Unknown Southland as such.

The French in Asia

Although Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, was not involved in the discovery of Australia, his arrival from France in 1768 on the shores of Tahiti is recorded as one of the more important contacts between Pacific Islanders and Europeans. These islands had been settled by the Polynesian voyagers sometime between 300 and 800 AD. The land, vegetation, mountains, streams and particularly the people, were the most beautiful Bougainville’s 400 sailors had seen in all their travels. As soon as the French had anchored, their ships were surrounded by a fleet of naked young women in canoes. These Pacific Venuses boarded the ships and nimbly climbed the rigging, leaving Bougainville wondering however he would be able to keep his men at work. He noted the lighter skin colour of these people and how different they were from the darker and larger ‘savages’ he’d met elsewhere. He was so besotted with these beautiful peaceful people that he never got to know many other home truths about Tahitian society – incest, infanticide, a strict caste system and enslavement of their neighbours. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before pick-pocketing, petty theft and demand for food, iron, glass and fabric, led to a souring of relations. Bougainville was not to know that the Tahitian population of 50,000 was to drop to 16,000 in the next 30 years as a result of venereal disease, smallpox, typhus and influenza, aggravated by alcohol-fuelled violence. His Garden of Eden was no more.

It is worth noting that this Tahitian experience seemed like living proof of the ‘Noble Savage’ concept, first put forward by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1750. In essence, this theory postulates that: ‘men and women living in utopian primitive societies [are] protected by their innocence’ (Cummins). Rousseau believed that man in his natural Edenic state was good, but that he had been corrupted by civilisation through its religion, money, property and materialism generally. In the end, it was European diseases rather than the trappings of modernity, which ended the noble innocence.

Cook’s British Endeavour

Finally we come to the contact of James Cook with the Aborigines, leaving aside the great incursions into South America by the Spaniards and Portuguese. While Australians are all aware of Cook’s journey up the East coast of their continent, his meetings with the Maori are less well known here. In mid 1769 Cook’s ‘Endeavour’ anchored in Mercury Bay on New Zealand’s North Island. He had brought scientists from London’s Royal Society to record the passage of the planet Venus as it passed before the sun. The sightings would be from the nearby island of Tahiti where Cook had set up the scientists’ camp.

The Maori of the North Island had originally paddled from the Polynesian Islands several centuries before, but had never seen ships as large as the Endeavour. A young Maori boy named Te Horeta lived long enough to tell the story of first contact with Whites in the next century. The ship, he said, was taken for a massive bird or even a floating island. The Maori elders decided that it had come from the Spirit World, an impression which seemed to be confirmed by the whiteness of the people who came ashore. The warriors watched the landing party warily, while the children fled into the forest. The white skin, fair hair and blue eyes of the newcomers fascinated the Maori, who offered Cook’s men fish and roots which were ravenously eaten by the sailors. Cook offered them salt meat in return, but the Maori spat it out. Te Horeta recalled: ‘the meat’s saltiness ripped our throats.’ (Which is also probably why many sailors preferred to catch bilge rats!)

When a sailor brought down a flying bird with his gun, the Maori were astounded, but when one of them ‘stole’ a seaman’s coat without giving anything in return, he was shot dead. The Maori then understood the power of firearms but didn’t blame the sailor, because the warrior had stolen the coat and offered nothing in return. The Maori left, but Te Horeta was invited to stay on board and be examined very closely before being given an iron nail as his special gift from the Whites. He was to treasure it for the rest of his long life.

After recording the passage of Venus, Cook set sail for what he was really interested in, searching for the Southern