|
THE
COMBATANTS IN the so-called ‘History
Wars’ have been denouncing each other
for about a decade. The main issue is
the handling of black–white relations
in histories of Australia. There are tangential
disputes about the policies of the National
Museum and the worth of the historian
Manning Clark and his writings, but these
are not germane to this article. On the
left, television historians, journalists
and politicians are concerned to levy
blame for terrible acts of European greed
and brutality and to bestow praise for
acts of Aboriginal resistance; while right-ists
emphasise the white settlers’ and
authorities’ normally good intentions
and the small amount of blood shed by
comparison with the histories of North
and South America, and of Africa. The
leading protagonists in both camps have
generally been formed by Marxism and retain
that absolutist faith that nothing happens
by accident, thereby permitting simple
assignments of good and evil.
The History Wars have occurred in a context
of wide-spread European and Aboriginal
disillusionment with the movements towards
reconciliation and Aboriginal betterment.
Significantly, neither major party pressed
these causes in the 2004 federal election,
presumably because there were no votes
in them. I think Australia is not alone
in this development, but I cannot pursue
that here; except to observe that a generational
shift from expressive to instrumental
politics may be occurring. Meanwhile,
there is evidence of widespread unobtrusive
settlement of persons claiming Aboriginal
descent into the urban European–Asian
community, a process that all sides choose
to ignore.
No one knows how many people lived on
the Australian mainland and Van Diemen’s
Land in 1788. Rightists assert that the
numbers were low — about 500,000
on the main-land, and 3000–4000 in
Tasmania. Leftists talk of totals in the
millions on the mainland, and 7000–8000
in Van Diemen’s Land. Scholars independent
of the History Wars guess at 750,000 and
3500. What is indisputable is that the
1788 populations fell disastrously within
about two generations of the white invasion
of each particular district. Some among
the blame-layers invoke genocide, wrongly
in my view, except perhaps in Queensland.
Rightists dispute the reality or size
of some alleged ‘massacres’,
but acknowledge others and casual killings
involving the deaths of hundreds of people,
while stressing the efforts of the colonial
and imperial authorities to prevent violence
and punish perpetrators. The seemingly
frequent intertribal battles that resulted
in deaths and injuries are under-investigated
by all parties. In 1844 Chief Protector
Robinson saw the scattered bones of Gipps-land
adults and children slaughtered by the
Omeo people, one of the worst such killings.
The controversialists refer in passing
to the impact of disease, but do not pursue
it; partly, I suspect, because disease
does not yield easy certainties in the
blame contest. About twenty years ago,
the smallpox epidemics among Aborigines
of 1789 and the late 1820s were alleged
to have been deliberately spread, but
that claim is now discredited — which
is not to say that both outbreaks did
not have terrible effects.
Many of the questions about the collapse
of the Abori- ginal population cannot
be answered at present because of lack
of evidence: those isolated, unrecorded
shootings by half-demented convict shepherds,
for example, which come to us in hearsay
accusations. Even so, the swift, massive
fall in Aboriginal numbers, by thousands,
had it been effected mainly by guns and
alleged poisons, would have left much
more Aboriginal testimony, private records
and official paper to survive to the present.
We must look elsewhere to account for
this calamity.
The
search has barely begun. We are still
unsure about the questions we should ask
and how to formulate them.We could start
with the health status of the population
before 1788, guided by Professor John
Goldsmid’s The Deadly Legacy
(1988) and Dr Stephen Webb’s splendid
pioneering work Palaeopathology of
Aboriginal Australians (1995). The
want of pathological and linguistic evidence
on the endemic or epidemic presence of
the crowd infections of Asia and Europe
implies that Australia was free of smallpox,
Yersinia pestis, pulmonary tuberculosis
and other respiratory illnesses, probably
most of the sexually transmitted diseases
(particularly syphilis), measles and other
childhood infections. Most likely, there
were yaws and various salmonella strains,
now known to live in some native snakes,
lizards, marsupials and birds.
Leptospira forms known in Asia
might well have come across with Aboriginal
immigrants, and been extended by reintroductions
from Indonesia and Papua. Trachoma, transmitted
by bush flies, may also have been endemic.
Ticks and tick-fever, Murray Valley encephalitis,
transmitted by native mosquitoes, Q fever,
associated with bandicoots among other
animals, were probably endemic, as were
scabies, body lice and diarrhoea, linked
to dogs that had arrived at least 4000
years before, although the Tasmanian head
lice must have been there earlier. Many
Aboriginal languages, I am told, have
words for itch, ‘upset stomach’
and ‘pain in the head’. Wattle
bark was widely observed by early settlers
in the treatment of diarrhoea, and three
delicately trephined pre-contact skulls
are known from northern Australia and
New South Wales. There is also a skull
from northern Australia showing branding,
possibly suggesting that what we understand
as insanity was known and punished in
prehistoric times.
It is also probable, I am told, that influenza
strains and ticks could have been imported
by birds arriving from the northern hemisphere
via Asia and harvested by Aborigines.
Sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis
and particularly smallpox were, in all
likelihood, sporadically spread in northern
Australia as part of what is now accepted
as much more regular contact with Indonesia
and Papua during at least the last 400
years. The smallpox possibly moved slowly
south, reaching Port Jackson in 1789,
with another less virulent variety in
the Murray–Darling system in the
1820s and 1830s, succeeded by a devastating
outbreak imported into the Kimberley region
by Malay fishermen in 1866 and spreading
further south among tribal people to Geraldton
and the east Pilbara. Australians may
have escaped persistent, recurring epidemics
of these pathogens by their small seasonally
nomadic groupings distributed across vast
distances. These assumptions imply smaller
rather than larger populations through
time. Pre-European Australia may not have
been Hygeia’s domain, but it was
safer than the colony it became.
The European occupation invalidated Aboriginal
existence. The newcomers excluded natives
from appropriated rivers and waterholes,
grazing land that carried bush food, vantage
points and landscapes intrinsic to creation
myths and life rituals. Europeans proclaimed
an all-powerful, supernatural order embodied
in almost unattainable perquisites: manifest
power over life and death; and the possession
of animals, wagons, utensils, writing,
clothes, clocks and guns. Tracking excepted,
traditional Aboriginal skills and rituals
became obsolescent and stigmatised. The
limited bush-food supplies were quickly
supplanted by flour, fatty meats, salt,
sugar, tea and tobacco. Alcohol became
a stand-by, acquired in a semi-monetarised
economy by casual labour, theft, and male
and female prostitution. Kinship systems
were disrupted by the degradation of Aboriginal
females and children, and by half-caste
births. Mortality hitherto explicable
in terms of sorcery, warfare, accident
and old age now struck in bewildering
new forms at all ages.
Many white observers reported near-universal
black infanticide. The practice, usually
involving strangulation with wet sand,
had probably been common since pre-contact
times as a means of population management
in a hunter–gatherer society living
on the margins. Observers in Victoria
in the 1850s, and Queensland in the 1870s
and 1880s, also noticed a cessation of
births. This calamity could only have
been deepened by the spread of introduced
sexually transmitted diseases and by wildfire
pulmonary tuberculosis and influenza when
the pandemic of 1837 reached eastern Australia,
together with malnutrition and low birth
weights associated with malnutrition ensuing
from the loss of hunting and gathering
grounds and from the trade in native game
for rum.
In 1839, a few years after white settlement,
Aborigines in and around Adelaide were
still deemed ‘healthy’. By 1860
a Protector reported them dying from ‘lung
diseases, skin disease, bronchitis, colds’.
‘All,’ he said, were much weakened
by ‘dissipated habits’, despite
being given ‘ample food’. Measles
was first identified in the white community
of Sydney in 1834, but might not have
become endemic until the 1850s. By 1875
it was rife. For example, among Aborigines
on Framlingham Mission in Victoria, fifty-eight
inhabitants got it, and twenty survived.
Two
sets of information seem to me to be under-utilised.
The first is Letters from Victorian
Pioneers (1898). In 1853 Governor
La Trobe envisaged writing an account
of his colony. He distributed a questionnaire
among pioneer land-takers enquiring about
the dates and circumstances of their occupancies,
the numbers of natives they observed,
their relations with them, and Aboriginal
customs and beliefs. He received at least
fifty-eight replies, which remained unpublished
until 1898. The respondents and other
observers estimated that there were 11,500
people in the Port Phillip district in
the 1830s when the Europeans began to
settle. In 1848 Chief Protector Robinson
calculated that there were 5000 blacks.
Two years later, Protector Thomas counted
3224.
La Trobe’s respondents offer several
explanations for this debacle. Dr Thomson,
newly established as a squatter at Geelong
in 1836, had William Buckley — the
white man who had lived with the local
Corio Aborigines for thirty years, fought
in their battles and spoken their language
— muster the natives and give each
a blanket. Buckley collected 279 people.
By March 1854, thirty-four adults and
two toddlers remained. Thomson attributed
the decrease to ‘drinking and exposure
to all weathers bringing on pulmonary
complaints’. In 1843 one tribe at
Ledcourt in the Wimmera had numbered ‘over
100’, according to squatter John
Carfrae; in 1853–54 they were thirty.
Among the deceased was Neptune Melgorarainur
(Light of the Mountain), the leader of
his people, who died during a binge on
spirits.
Peter Snodgrass, of the Mount Alexander
district, told La Trobe that the decline
in Aboriginal numbers began with the smallpox
that broke out before white settlement
and continued as a result of ‘other
diseases’. But in 1839 Protector
Robinson heard Snodgrass boast in a gun
shop that he intended to ‘give these
blackfellows another peppering’.
My count of Aborigines observed by La
Trobe’s respondents at early encounters,
of murder victims and of those surviving
in 1853–54 is tenuous: many blacks
would have avoided early contact while
they could; there were unreported killings
on all sides; Gippsland is under-represented;
some respondents, as we know from Snodgrass,
were shifty with the truth. Other known
murderers do not appear to have answered
the questionnaire. William Kirk was one
of them. He took land in the Grampians
district. His servants used guns on the
natives and abducted women. Chief Protector
Robinson arrived, silenced the guns and
led the Aborigines to return to what turned
out to be their ceremonial place. Kirk,
apparently, had built his huts on this
well-watered area, which was forbidden
to blacks. With Robinson’s encouragement,
they performed a ‘corrobery’
on this ground, despite disruptions from
the mocking, foul-mouthed Kirkites. The
Whyte brothers on the Wannon River held
women and children as sex slaves and shot
fifty-one Aborigines after they murdered
a shepherd and stole sheep. William Bird,
another land-taker, and his men closed
access to a permanent spring and an adjacent,
semi-permanent village on the Hopkins
River and taught the women to answer to
‘fuckemall’ and ‘white
cunt’.
Despite my caveats, here is my estimate
for the 1830s and early 1840s: a total
of approximately 7000 people. All the
estimates give higher figures for males
than for females. Traditional society
was harder for women: skeletal materials
usually show higher rates of nutritional
deprivation among females and similar
disparities in the distribution of cranial
injuries. White shootings reversed that
disparity. In 1853–54 the Aboriginal
people in much the same districts totalled
about 926. Recorded murders of Aborigines
by blacks and whites amounted to about
556; murders of whites by blacks to about
nine. Many of the black killings occurred
in tribal fights, which may have intensified
as whites took the best ceremonial and
food-gathering places, abducted women
and supplied tomahawks. In 1852 Protector
Thomas told La Trobe that the Yarra tribe
around Melbourne had been reduced to thirty-nine,
and the Western Port people to fifty-nine.
The Yarra group had two births between
1850 and 1853; both babies were killed
by blacks within a month. The Western
Port groups had none. Of the eighteen
deaths among the adults, eight were caused
by murder, two were the result of the
hanging of the indigenous murderers, and
three followed ‘almost perpetual
drunkenness’. Only five died naturally,
Thomas thought (‘by visitation of
God’).
Edward Curr was a Victorian squatter with
wide experience of eastern Australia.
In the 1880s he embarked on a questionnaire
project similar to La Trobe’s, but
this time he attempted to cover the continent.
By 1886–67 he had received at least
352 replies. These he chose to print in
full or in part. The originals appear
to have been lost. Only thirty-one contain
population estimates for both arrival
and response dates. Seventeen of those
from central and northern Queensland amount
to about 25,800 people at first intrusion,
down to 12,000 in the 1850s and 1860s,
and to 6340 in the late 1870s and early
1880s. After the arrival of whites, the
Doora people at Mt Remarkable in South
Australia were typically estimated between
fifty and a hundred in 1849; there were
eight of them in 1880. Around the Toorowotto
Swamp, on the Wilcannia–Darling River,
there were about 200 souls at the time
of white settlement around 1861; by 1871
there were 150; by 1879, sixty. Twelve
correspondents around the country noted
that infanticide had become ‘normal’.
Another correspondent answered Curr’s
question whether the tribe contained any
old people by remarking that ‘fully
half of the adults remaining look old,
but actually the old are few’. This
shrinkage of ages must have been deeply
corrosive of Aboriginal social structures.
The Reverend George Taplin was a missionary
to the Narranjeri on the Lower Murray.
In 1849 they were said to number 800 warriors,
suggesting a population of around 1800.
Taplin, between 1859 and 1869, had watched
consumption cause twenty-five out of fifty
adult Narrinyeri deaths. He also noted
that the decline often set in after accidents
and wounds, which, in his view, explained
the frequency of this otherwise unaccountable
disease among people who showed no family
diathesis. Of 101 deaths at all ages in
the 1860s, thirty-six were of infants;
mainly, he said, as a result of ‘exposure’.
Superintendent Hammond of Poonindie Mission,
also in South Australia, reported twenty
‘pulmonary’ deaths among sixty
‘subjects’ in 1856–67.
They had not ‘exhibited that resistance
... usual … in more vigorous ...
constitutions ... Their weakness’
had come from the ‘far more stimulating’
sugar, suet and rice supplied by the mission.
During his near thirty years as a missionary,
Taplin saw Narranjeri, by his diagnoses,
die from apoplexy, cataract, diarrhoea,
dysentery, epilepsy, anal fistula, hydrocephalus,
acute and chronic hepatitis, hydatids
on the liver, hydrothorax, influenza,
nephritis, acute and chronic ophthalmia,
phrenitis (inflammation of the brain),
pneumonia, porrigo (ringworm etc.), ranula
(cysts on the underside of the tongue),
acute and chronic rheumatism, sunstroke,
syphilis, sore throat, toothache, tabes
mesenterica and pulmonary tuberculosis.
The striking thing about this list, tuberculosis,
syphilis and possibly hydatids apart,
is the predominance of probably indigenous
illnesses, rampaging amid concentration
and despair.
Taplin also noted ‘several cases
of lunacy’, unusual among the respondents.
They ‘were treated kindly by the
tribe’. By the 1880s Sydney and Brisbane
lunatic asylums had admitted twenty-four
male and eight female alcoholic Aborigines,
usually on transfer from gaols where they
had become ‘melancholia’ cases,
also suffering ‘bronchitis and rheumatic
fever’ ‘brought on’ by
‘intemperance’. Manning reported
‘mania’ to be their ‘prevailing
disorder as might be expected in dark-skinned
race’, together with ‘turbulence’
and ‘violence’. They did not,
like whites, display ‘monomania’
or suffer ‘delusions’, but they
did have ‘vivid hallucinations of
sight and hearing’. To the asylum
officers’ relief, they ‘did
not last long’ because their ‘filthy
and degraded habits’ brought on a
‘marasmus’ accompanied by ‘that
peculiar form of melancholia known as
nostalgia’ (then an uncommon word
in this context). Back in the 1830s observers
had noticed something like ‘homesickness’
in the ailing Vandemonians who had been
transferred to Flinders Island. Two of
the Sydney lunatics were described as
‘the last of their tribes’.
This sort of remark, now disparaged as
sentimental, nonetheless conveyed reality:
Aborigines were by the 1880s truly ‘a
dying race’.
Much of the disputation in the History
Wars has focused on single events or brief
time sequences. I have tried in this article
to expand our view of the evidence. Other
developments pertinent to that wider interaction
of marginal humans’ life chances
and their rulers’ racial beliefs
and health policies should include drought
and economic collapse, especially in New
South Wales in the 1840s, eastern Australia
in the mid-1860s and mid-1870s, and central
and eastern Australia in the 1890s and
again in 1918–20 and during the Depression
of the 1930s. Hard times fed white indifference.
The History Warriors could never be accused
of that, but the last generation’s
expressive politics, which fuelled this
war, may be fading. This might allow a
more searching, inclusive and useful historiography
to emerge.
|
