In 1788, the First Fleet landed in Port Jackson to commence the process of claiming and colonising the land that had, until that time, been unequivocally occupied by Aboriginal communities for tens of thousands of years.
If the colonists differed in their responses to the land (see 4.1), they had no doubt about one thing—it belonged to them. The question of how to deal with the people who already lived on the land was considered just one of the many practical questions that went along with the establishment of a colony, alongside how to clear the trees and when to sow crops.
The colonists’ initial perceptions of, and contact with, the Aboriginal people set the tone for the decades of conflict and dispossession that were to follow.
In contrast with the Utopian vision of a continent inhabited by multi-cultural groups of beautiful princesses (who conveniently gave themselves up to be sex slaves—see 4.1), Europeans’ first descriptions of the indigenous people of the antipodes were unflattering.
Carstensz reported that the inhabitants of the coast around the Gulf of Carpentaria were “the most wretched and poorest creatures that I have ever seen in my age or time”. (Day, 1996: 17)
The account of the Englishman Dampier of his travels to the north-west coast of New Holland were to have a lasting effect on the preconceptions with which several generations of future colonists and explorers were to view the Aboriginal people. He wrote, in A New Voyage Round The World (published in 1697):
The inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world. The Hodmadods [Hottentots] of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs and c. as the Hodmadods have: And setting aside their Humane Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.
(Masefield, 1906: 453)
Joseph Banks’ journal entries recording the first sighting of Aboriginal people by the crew of the Endeavour indicate the impact of Dampier’s views upon the later generation:
April 22 1770
In the morn we stood with the land near enough to discern 5 people who appeard through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built upon Dampiers account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men. - Since we have been on the coast we have not observd those large fires which we so frequently saw in the Islands and New Zealand made by the natives in order to clear the ground for cultivation; we thence concluded not much in favour of our future friends.
(Banks, 1771)
The feeling was mutual. The first sight of the white invaders did not seem to overly impress the locals.
Some odd things were happening on shore as the Endeavour approached. One group of natives, about a dozen in all, went up on a rise to watch, and when the vessel’s boat came near they beckoned the sailors to come ashore. On the other hand, no notice at all was taken of the Endeavour herself. There she was, 160 feet long, with her high masts and her great sails, and when she passed within a quarter of a mile of some fishermen in four canoes they did not even bother to look up.
(Moorehead, 1966: 134)
Manning Clark, ever the dramatist, reports it rather differently, claiming that the ship’s arrival was greeted “by the horrifying howls of the Aboriginal women who lived in that place. The howl contained in it a prophecy of doom”. (1963: 11)
At any rate, Cook’s first attempt, later that day, at landing on the great southern continent was marked by immediate hostility:
April 28
... They remaind resolute so a musquet was fird over them, the Effect of which was that the Youngest of the two dropd a bundle of lances on the rocks ... he however snatched them up again and both renewd their threats and opposition. A Musquet loaded with small shot was now fird at the Eldest of the two ... it struck him on the legs but he minded it very little so another was immediately fird at him ... (Banks, 1771)
The crew of the Endeavour attempted to engage several times with the local people in the journey along the north east coast. In some places, they attempted to trade, in others to be friendly, in yet others the crew forced its way ashore or attacked with firearms. Throughout, they remained puzzled as to why they could not purchase so much as a few fish or weapons from these “brutes”:
These people seemd to have no Idea of traffick nor could we teach them; indeed it seemd that we had no one thing on which they set a value equal to induce them to part with the smallest trifle.
(Banks, 1771)
Cook, refuting Dampier’s observations, also reflected, rather romantically perhaps, on this lack of interest in the white visitors’ precious goods:
They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but with the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition: the earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary for life ... they seem to set no value upon anything we gave them, not would they ever part with anything of their own.
(Moorehead, 1966: 150)
Many years later, First Fleet diarist Watkin Tench made a similar observation, even after the colony had made contact with some of the indigenous people, and enticed (or kidnapped) a few into the settlement:
The result, however, of our repeated endeavours to induce them to come among us has been such as to confirm me in an opinion that they either fear or despise us too much to be anxious for a closer connection. (1789: 51)
Later still, when Tench had become much more weary of the landscape, he wrote of his inability to understand how Aboriginal people could survive in their environment, let alone enjoy themselves:
To comprehend the reasons which induce an Indian to perform many of the offices of life is difficult; to pronounce that which could lead him to wander amidst these dreary wilds baffles penetration. (1789: 191)
Thus violence, misunderstanding and incomprehension marked the first contacts between the white invaders and the indigenous inhabitants. It created a unique legal and political relationship that was to influence the development of the country, and the attitudes of its people, black and white, to the land and land ownership.
However baffled the first waves of colonists might have been at the capacity of the Aborigines to thrive on the land (which appeared to be defeating all attempts to “civilise” it) they were in no doubt about their legal governance of the country, and of the subjugation of the indigenous population to England. Phillip formally claimed the land for the Crown on 13 February 1788, at a ceremony in which George III was declared rightful sovereign of the realm. At that moment, if not before, the colonists were assured that the land was theirs to settle, to develop, and to own. In order to cement its hold on the land, the colony had to begin to deal with the problem of its inhabitants, who had to be unequivocally displaced.
Unlike the colonisation of England’s other continental conquests, North America (which had just become an independent state) and Canada, the English simply assumed power, and ownership, without a formal (or even informal) declaration of conquest. In New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi (however it may have been later betrayed) dealt with the Maori peoples as a warring nation worthy of a legal treaty.
The situation in New South Wales was totally different, and placed the issue of land ownership, and the status of armed conflict between the races, on a unique footing.
The legal situation was clear from the beginning. Australia was a colony of settlement not of conquest. The common law arrived with the First Fleet; the Aborigines became instant subjects of the King, amenable to, and in theory protected by, that law. They could be murdered, outlawed or made subject to martial law but they could not be treated as enemies of the state.
(Reynolds, 1987: 4)
The Aboriginal people may have been “subjects of the King”, but their complex social and cultural lives were utterly misunderstood by the colonisers. This misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, was of direct benefit to the colonial aspirations of England. The assumption of terra nullius, and the continued misconceptions about Aboriginal people as timid, disorganised, and inept users of the land’s resources, supported the move to occupy the land and eliminate its inhabitants.
Paul Carter has argued that the colonists believed that the Aboriginal people had no formal languages or any concept of the country as a whole, and that this belief, among others, was used to support the logic of invasion.
This is the context in which to understand the widely disseminated view among early colonists that the Aborigines possessed no language, no grammar, no syntax and no generalizing vocabulary. For the implication of this deficiency was that the Aborigines not only could not defend their rights (could not argue their land claims) but did not even, in any recognizable sense, possess the land they occupied ... Seeing that he did not classify it, did not distinguish it from other places, seeing he did not even seem to know ‘it’ as a ‘place’, could he be said to understand the notion of possession at all? And, if his grasp were so tenuous, so local, so incapable of generalization, then it was hardly a crime to take possession of it. The Whites did not, in this sense, possess the Aborigine’s country, any more than they spoke his language. They possessed a country of which the Aborigine was unaware. To talk of contracts and boundaries to an Aborigine was to talk a foreign language. Logically, then, possession could go ahead without consultation. (1987: 61 and 64)
The Aboriginal people in various regions were not quite so easily persuaded by this logic, although the resistance they mounted has remained unremarked in official Australian history until quite recently. Yet Reynolds and others have clearly documented the unofficial war of resistance mounted by the Aboriginal people in various parts of the country, and the violent dispossession which spread across the continent. Reynolds has popularly established this as a “frontier” war lasting into the 1920s, in which he estimates several thousand people died. Rowley noted decades ago that “sporadic guerilla resistance (generally regarded and often dealt with as ‘treachery’) of the Aborigines’ early attempts to use the new situation for their own purposes were generally followed by their complete subjection to the settler”. (1970a: 17)
Both these historians, and others including Clark and Day, trace the political and social conditions of contemporary Aboriginal Australia to the conditions and legal ownership of land established by the First Fleet and in the early decades of the colony.
Lawyer and former Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, in a 1987 speech on the issue of legislating land and electoral rights, claimed that this legacy has not just damaged the Aboriginal community, but the nation as a legal entity.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia was flawed from the beginning by its references to the Aborigines of Australia. The Federation itself was founded on the assumption that the Aborigines would, quite literally, disappear ... The belief that the Aborigines were a dying race, that any perceived problem would, like them, simply disappear, was pervasive and, indeed, it was deemed progressive ... The elimination of the Aborigines, by assimilation or other means, envisaged by even the most enlightened of the Federation generation, did not occur. The Aboriginal people failed to disappear. The approach of Australians in general to the Aboriginal people is the preeminent example of institutionalised procrastination in all constitutional matters in Australia. (1997: 1 and 2)
Indeed, this belief in the inevitable disappearance of the Aboriginal people informed the work of later Australian poets as disparate as the Jindyworobak movement (see 4.2) and the critic who most virulently attacked them, A.D. Hope. Hope wrote in his review of Roland Robinson’s collection of Aboriginal songs: “The aboriginal view of the world is passing away. It cannot be grafted onto our civilisation. The Feathered Serpent is a remarkable achievement, but it serves to remind us of something we have lost beyond all possible recall”. (1974: 86)
In the 1990s, the clarification of central issues of land ownership has become one of the most divisive debates in contemporary Australian life. This debate encompasses many seminal political and cultural issues throughout the centuries since colonisation: claiming and settlement of land; access to resources; displacement of indigenous communities; removal of Aboriginal children from their homes; the push for assimilation; the achievement of the right to vote; and claims on the ownership and control of the land which is so central to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultural identity.
The concept of terra nullius has been questioned repeatedly over the decades, never more strongly than by the elder Kim Beazley in 1961:
In any land policy, for God’s sake, let us get over the great Australian historical assumption that you must make a decision about the lands as if there was no one living on them.
(Whitlam, 1997: 8)
In 1992, the High Court handed down its decision on the Mabo case which rejected the concept of terra nullius, while the Keating Government’s Native Title Act passed into law in late 1993, in the midst of a widespread national movement for reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. The debates on land ownership were revived in late 1996, when the High Court’s Wik verdict found that the grant of pastoral leases did not necessarily extinguish native title, setting the ground for the mass public debates of 1997 and 1998, and the move by the Howard Government to try to settle land rights issues for once and for all through legislation.
The fact that these debates have loomed so large in the public mind, and initiated such tremendous community involvement and concern (on all sides) is an indication of the centrality of these issues to the Australian consciousness. The pursuit of land rights claims by Aboriginal communities, is an indication of the intrinsic importance of land ownership to the life of the community, and also its perceived link to the stability and well-being of existing Aboriginal communities, and Australia in general. Patrick Dodson, Chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation throughout much of this virulent debate, claimed in a landmark speech to the National Press Club:
What we do in our time will be the inheritance of our children and grandchildren. We are shaping and moulding our image in the community of nations. Our place in the world. Our sense of place. We are defining our common identity as Australians, and the terms and conditions to share this country. Reconciliation is a fundamental issue of nationhood ... Security of title and tenure is the first step to achieving housing, employment, health, educational opportunity, empowerment leading to positive social and economic change. Land is a foundational issue for every Australian, black or white ... At that moment [the Mabo ruling] our nationhood, our moral community, our common law, has become interwoven with the act of native title. A just and fair resolution of native title has become the ultimate test of Australian justice, of Australian decency, and of our national leadership. (1997)
Just as these processes and issues have been a constant presence in the history of the nation, it is a legacy clearly evident in the poetry of Oodgeroo, Davis, Fogarty, Murray, Wright and Cataldi. These poets, through their disparate voices, have concerned themselves not just with descriptions of the land, but with recognition of the importance of these issues in the public consciousness of the country. Significantly, several of them have specifically concerned themselves with related issues, highlighted by Dodson, of poverty and alienation, the direct and indirect results of the colonisation process.
A century after Cook’s landing, poet Kevin Gilbert described the situation poignantly in his book Living Black:
The European invasion quickly destroyed the balance between Aboriginal and nature as the land was taken and the ecology altered by the introduction of cattle and sheep. Nomadic hunting became impossible and as the physical conditions of Aboriginal life altered so sickness increased especially as the Aborigines had no resistance to the diseases introduced by the Europeans. The loss of land meant the loss of a metaphysics, too, because the two were inextricable ... It is my thesis that Aboriginal Australia underwent a rape of the soul so profound that the blight continues in the minds of most blacks today. (1977: 2 and 3)