While early observers such as Tench and Grey wrote detailed observations of the lives of the Aboriginal communities with which they came in contact, the colonial fascination with the indigenous people soon turned to either racist contempt (on the part of those who had a vested interest in clearing the land of its inhabitants) or patronising sentimentality.
Some clearly voiced the missionary zeal with which some colonists approached the Aboriginal people, including Charles Tompson Jnr, whose ‘Elegies’ (1) includes a description of the early Black Town settlement near Sydney, “formed [he wrote, by way of introduction] by the Government some years since, for the purpose of civilising the aboriginal Natives of Australia, and teaching them the arts of agriculture ... it is much to be lamented that the poor heathen possessors were allowed to desert the Establishment”.
Although Tompson does name the Aboriginal people as “possessors”, his poem is concerned with their ‘unenlightened state’ and the role of the colonists in leading the “heathen” to salvation.
However, his description of the deserted township is a clear example of the threat the landscape seemed to pose to the new colony, and of the desire to ‘civilize’ the inhabitants of the land as an extension of the desire to ‘civilize’ the land itself:
Ill-fated Hamlet! round thy dull domain
Lone Silence holds her melancholy reign;
This lowly structure, where each Sabbath press’d
A pious group, by strangers is possessed;
Thy once fair dawning beauties all are gone,
Thy gardens fallow lie, with weeds o’ergrown,
Wild flow’rs and spindling grass alone are seen
Where cornfield wav’d their undulating green,
Dark vines along the untrod footpaths creep,
And all the desert Landscape seems to weep.
The poem is filled with pathos, and images associated with the Aboriginal people are those of the unproductive (“fallow”, “weeds o’er grown”, and “spindling”), the tragic (“melancholy”, “lowly”, “gone”, “untrod”) or the wild unknown (“wild”, “dark vines”, “creep”, and a landscape which manages to be overgrown as well as being a “desert”). The so-called civilising influence, now gone, is mourned as “pious”, with “fair dawning beauties” and “undulating green” similar to the English landscape with which Tompson was obviously more comfortable. A modern understanding of the importance of such settlements in the process of cultural disintegration and removal of children from their families gives the Elegy a more sinister and tragic tone than Tompson could ever mean to evoke.
Henry Kendall (1839—1882) was one of the first major colonial poets to attempt a poem on an ‘Aboriginal theme’ in ‘The Last of His Tribe’ (2) which concludes with the stanza:
Will he go in his sleep to these desolate lands,
Like a chief, to the rest of his race,
With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,
And gleams like a dream in his face—
Like a marvellous dream in his face?
‘The Last of His Tribe’ introduces several of the central ideas that informed the response of white Australian poets to the land and the dispossessed.
As Hodge and Mishra observe, “Most White representations and constructions of Aborigines take place within terms of what is ultimately a single discoursive regime, whose primary function is to sustain the foundation myth”. (1991: 26)
Kendall reflects the romanticised view of the Aboriginal people as one tribe of noble, yet primitive, warriors (“He dreams of the hunts of yore/And of foes that he sought, and of fights that he fought”) in language that is more suited to an Arthurian epic. This is the conqueror's view of the vanquished foe, traced with a little regret.
As Day points out, the adaptation of Darwin’s evolution theories, first published in The Origin of Species in 1859 (The Descent of Man followed in 1871) was used as an ideological support of the colonisation process, “with Social Darwinism suggesting that societies were engaged like species in a competition in which the fittest would eventually triumph. This tended to absolve Australians of any qualms they might have had about the dispossession of the Aborigines which was seen as being sadly inevitable, as the apparently inexorable extinction of the Aboriginal remnants seemed to confirm. Social Darwinism provided Australians with a new strand to their claim to the moral proprietorship of the continent.” (Day, 1996: 211)
But as we can see from Tompson’s poem, and from early responses to the Aboriginal communities which came into contact with the first waves of European settlers, the nostalgia with which many colonists viewed the apparently inevitable decline of the indigenous population pre-dates Darwin, and the later transposition of his theories onto social structures and processes.
Bernard Smith argues in his classic 1960 text European Vision and the South Pacific that exploring and then colonising the South Pacific brought Enlightenment Europe face to face with the Romantic Savage, and the process of interaction was crucial to the development and widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism. Likewise, the flora and fauna of Australia, like that of the Galapagos, prompted questioning about its origins and unique qualities which supported the work of three friends: Charles Darwin, Joseph Dalton Hooker (who wrote of the origins and evolution of The Flora of Tasmania, published the same month as The Origin of Species), and Thomas Henry Huxley (whose work in classifying marine life led him to inescapable conclusions about evolutionary theory, which he later championed).
In the colonial mind, however, Social Darwinism simply replaced terra nullius as the pseudo-scientific (rather than pseudo-legal) moral ground for dispossession.
Interestingly, Charles Darwin himself wrote in 1836 that the Aboriginal people he met on his brief visit were, “good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented”. (Moorehead, 1966: 160)
The impact of Social Darwinism can be traced through many later Aboriginalist writers, and I would argue that it is through the work of Judith Wright that the pervading sense of nostalgia for the supposed passing of the indigenous race is exposed and that thread is broken. Wright’s work (discussed later, in 4.3) enabled later poets to approach the theme of the Aboriginal dispossession without the influence of Social Darwinism, should they choose to do so. I would further argue that there are few who have managed to take up that challenge, without resort to the intonations of Aboriginalism.