‘I Succeeded Once: The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula 1839-40′ by Marie Hansen Fels

There is a somewhat elegaic, wistful tone to this book, hinted at by its title. It is a quote from the journal of Assistant Protector William Thomas as he was about to re-locate his Protectorate for the second time in three years under official instructions.  He had been forced to shift from the Mornington Peninsula in 1840 to Nerre Nerre Warren, then forced again to shift to Merri Creek in 1843.  There were many reasons that he had failed, he said, but there was one time when he could have been said to have succeeded- and that was at Arthurs Seat between 1839 and 1840.

In the Afterword to the book, the author admits that there is “no conclusion, no grand summing-up” in her work.  She evokes the late Greg Dening, who taught that “the historical effort was to understand and to explain: not to judge, not to label, not to take sides.” (p. 397).  In many ways, it would have been helpful to have her afterword as a preface, because I found myself somewhat puzzled about what this book actually is. It is part of ANU’s Aboriginal History Monograph series, which presents “studies on particular themes or regions, or a series of articles on single subjects of contemporary interest.”  In this case, it focuses minutely on a relatively small area of land, over mainly a one-year period, although it does spill out of this chronological limit at times.

The book won the ‘Best Community Research, Register, Records’ category of the Victorian Community History Awards in 2011. The typographic layout of the book is more suited to a records-based document than a narrative history: it has the appearance of a work-book or training manual, and the headings and boxed biographies of individual aboriginal people feel as if they are the product of a word-processor rather than a commercial print layout.   It is thoroughly commendable that the book is available free as a download through ANU e-press here.  I suspect that I might have felt short-changed had I paid $29.95 for a print-on-demand copy (although, admittedly that is not a high price).   The rather thin covers of my book are already curling.

But the value of this book lies in its contents, not the layout.   As a Melburnian, and one who holidays on the Mornington peninsula side of the bay (rather than the “other”, western side), it was as if my January canvas of caravans and holiday houses had been stripped back to another, earlier frontier time.  Names were familiar, but distorted (like Moody Yallock for what I assume is now Mordialloc, and Kullurk for Coolart).  Although I was of course aware of McCrae Homestead, it had never occurred to me that there were other pastoralists down on the peninsula as well. I hadn’t thought of my caravan site down at Capel Sound as part of a squatter’s run, but I think that I sensed, just a little, an older history of the peninsula when I was down at Balcombe Creek a month or two back.

Her book is, as she admits, a contrarian view to the prevailing orthodoxies of confrontation, massacres and victimhood.  Instead, hers is a story of an “amiable, intimate, non-violent coexistence”, but this is not explained by the facile “our lot were a peaceful lot” with “mild and inoffensive” men. Instead, she argues:

That there was no conflict at all on the Mornington Peninsula is to be explained in the same terms as conflict is explained in other regions of Victoria, that is, in terms of individual leaders, of social and political agendas of groups, of the tone of relationships between both Indigenous and European. (p.177)

And this is what her book is- an exploration of the tone of relationships between Assistant Protector William Thomas and the squatter farmers of the Mornington Peninsula, and the men and women of the Bunurong people who ranged over it as their traditional lands.  Just as she did in her earlier book Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District, Fels delineates, names and gives a life trajectory and agency to aboriginal people who otherwise remain as the shadowy ‘other’. In text boxes headed with the variations of their names- both aboriginal and conferred-  (e.g. Nunupton/Nunuptune/Nalnuptune/Naluptune/Nunnapaton/Nunupthen/Namapton/Billy Langhorne/Mr Langhorne p. 266), you sense the white informants grappling with unfamiliar sounds, trying to render them into writing and to somehow capture individuals within a bureaucratic report and a census system.  She traces the appearance of individuals at different locations throughout the district as recorded in musters, reports and official letters, their family connections, and their all-too-often premature deaths.

She brings Assistant Protector William Thomas to life for us as well.  The Protectorate scheme was devised in Britain in response to humanitarian concern over the decimation (a term that under-estimates) of indigenous people across the empire.  The Protectors were greeted by many settlers with disdain and derision, and by humanitarians with frustration and annoyance at their various shortcomings.  Rather than being mobile, single men able to follow tribes ranging across country, they were family men operating on a model of establishing a mission in a central location.  I’ve mentioned Robinson before here and here, and Sievewright here.   Assistant Protect William Thomas was a family man as well, and shared with his fellow protectors the curse of execrable handwriting, although the depth and range of his private and public writings has been invaluable for historians (especially now that someone else has grappled with the handwriting!)

And so we see Thomas trying (not always successfully) to enforce Sunday observance; we see his powerlessness to stop a raiding party; the pettiness of Protector Robinson and the futility of railing against bureaucracy, and his sense of bewilderment and sinking disappointment as he returns to the Peninsula after the enforced and much-resented shift to Narre Narre Warren, only to find the peninsula deserted.

Although the focus of the book is on 1839-40, this one year did not happen in isolation.  Actions which took place in this focal year had antecedents, and when the Bunurong men took off on a raiding party towards Gippsland, it was yet another episode in a long-running distrust between the two nations that long predated white settlement.  She works hard to uncover the context and rationale for this feud, exploring a number of hypotheses that take her beyond tribal and cultural factors into a consideration of geological and archaeological evidence of sedimentation, inundation and earthquakes in millenia past.

Moreover, there had been contact between the Bunurong people and white sealers and timber gatherers along the coast and the Bass Strait islands in the decades before Fawkner/Batman claimed possession of the district.  Fels devotes a considerable amount of time tracing the kidnapping of particular individuals, both men and women, who ended up in the Bass Strait Islands, South Australia and even Western Australia,  far from Bunurong country.  This is important: as we speak, there are competing custodial claims from the Boonwurrung Foundation and the Bunurong Land Council based on the status and identity of Louisa Briggs, one of several women abducted.  The contentiousness of such issues is highlighted by the heavily censored and blacked-out reports generated by archaeologists and ethnographers as part of this twenty-first century dispute.

There is a sense, too, of the clock ticking over several of the sites that she describes here.   A footnote questions the expertise of the author of the archaeological report for the Martha Cove development, and a planning permit has been granted on a mission site, extended to 2013, for a Holiday Resort incorporating a winery, function centre, restaurant, hotel, camping park and golf driving range. Another mission site has been identified on private property, but she does not disclose the location.

This is not a ‘straight’ narrative history.  She rebuts a number of local history myths, and she challenges other written histories, for example Bruce Pascoe’s The Convincing Ground.   There is not a smooth narrative flow and it is certainly no coffee table book (and I’m sure was never intended to be).  It is history with its sleeves rolled up.

Seeing my city with new eyes

One of the things about being away for any considerable length of time is the way that you view your own home once you return.  I came home to a house that was cleaner than I left it (ah, the joy of adult children!) and a recently-planted garden that is not only still alive but growing like topsy! But today was the first time that I’ve been into Melbourne itself, and I felt as if I were seeing it after a long absence.

It’s a beautiful clear, sunny but cold winter day today, and the city absolutely sparkled.  I don’t know if I just fluked it, but the trains both to and from the city were clean, warm and with little graffiti.  I had been opposed to the proposal to remove seats from the trains to provide more standing room, but having now used public transport in Toronto, Boston, New York and London, the carriages did seem particularly cluttered with seats.  There was little rubbish on the stations- in fact, our streets generally seem clean in comparison with streets in the cities above.   The underground stations in particular seemed light and modern. The trains were on time, the trams were predictable only in their unpredictability.

It’s the infrequency of our public transport that’s the sticking point.  Other cities do not have the same emphasis on time- in fact, you were often hardpressed to find a clock- because trains arrived so often that it didn’t really matter if you missed this one, because the next would soon arrive.  Not so for us here in Melbourne- 20 minutes is too long between day time services.  It seems that every tram and bus stop has a disconsolate little clutch of would-be passengers, stepping out onto the street, craning to see if something -anything- is coming.

And Melbourne itself: look- the Darebin and Merri creeks are running high! That sparse and artificial planting on the banks of the Merri, beside the over-engineered bike path, is looking a little better.  People have moved into the high-rise opposite Heidelberg station (although I’m still cross that it dominates the hill as much as it does).

I read in this morning’s paper that they’re thinking of moving the statue of  Bunjil the eagle in order to, no doubt, build yet another high-rise in Docklands. Other than Colonial/Telstra/Etihad stadium (which I always make a point of calling ‘Docklands Stadium’ on principle) I’ve only been down to Docklands once, and it seemed a particularly godforsaken place.

I noticed, too, that the building on the old CUB site is finally going up as well. This is the one that is planned to have an image of William Barak on it.

Artists impression of the finished building

I really don’t know quite what to think of these modern representations of aboriginal presence.  Appropriation? Acknowledgment? Tacky? Reverential? Is the CUB building a fitting juxtaposition to the Shrine of Remembrance at the other end of Swanston St/St. Kilda Rd?  Or an ironic one?

Most of all today, I noticed our beautiful, big bowl of sky.  Yes, I know that it’s the same sky,but somehow it seems bigger here. I think that I must be glad to be home.

‘Settler Sovereignty’ by Lisa Ford

Lisa Ford ‘Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia 1788-1836′

2010 , 210 p & notes (86p)

I’m starting to think that a good gauge for my response to a book is the resounding slap of the book as I close it, and the whispered “Well done!” or “You beauty!”  that accompanies it.  That’s how I finished Tom Griffiths’ Hunters and Collectors, and it was my response as I finished Lisa Ford’s Settler Sovereignty as well.  I’m not alone: obviously the judges of the 2010 NSW Premier’s History Award felt the same way.

I was lent this book an embarrassingly long time ago, and I have been eyeballing it rather guiltily for some time.  Any of you who follow this blog chronologically may have noticed a  preponderance of reviews of books related to Aborigines in Port Phillip over recent months.  I have been writing a paper that looks at Judge Willis and the Aboriginal cases that came before his court, and I kept deferring reading Ford’s book until I’d finished because the 1836 cut-off in the book’s title was too early for the case I was examining.  How wrong I was: I would have gained so much from this book had I read it earlier.  Ah well.

In this book Ford takes Georgia (in America) and New South Wales as two exemplars of the development of what she calls “perfect settler sovereignty”. By this she means that,  in claiming the territory of the indigenous people who were there before them, white settler governments claimed sovereignty and legal jurisdiction over them as well.  There’s shades here of  Fran in the ABC series The Librarians voicing the same assertion-  “Our Country: Our Rules.”  This had not always been the case.  Both colonies, up until the 1830s, had tolerated plurality through a combination of dependence on native expertise,  uncertainty, impotence, silence  and ‘leaving them to their own business’. But in both colonies this was to change, at much the same time and based on much the same rationales.

We might raise a quizzical eyebrow at this combination of Georgia and New South Wales.  Traditionally Canada, Australia and New Zealand have been linked together as imperial triplets on the basis of their shared relationship with the Colonial Office, especially after the American Revolution sent America off onto a different trajectory.   Certainly during Willis’ time,  Australian judges were viewed as rather suspect if they referred to American law, and they took every occasion to declare their fidelity to British justice.  However, recent work has begun considering American legal conditions alongside those of Canada/Australia/New Zealand e.g. John Weaver’s The Great Land Rush, Peter Karsten’s Between Law and Custom: ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora and James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth.

In both Georgia and New South Wales, settlers did not seek to govern through indigenous hierarchies (as they did in India), and in both places indigenous people occupied arable or pasture land.  Farming did not proceed through the forcible co-option of indigenous labour, although it did run on imported free, indentured or slave labour.  But there were differences too: Georgia was surrounded by other powers (Spain, France, the Creek and Cherokee Indians), and Georgia used slavery.  There was a multiplicity of treaties in Georgia, and none in New South Wales beyond Batman’s quickly disowned ‘treaty’.  And yet, both Georgia and NSW passed similar declarations in 1830 and 1836 that abandoned the legal pluralism that both had exhibited previously, ruling that indigenous violence fell within the jurisdiction of settler courts.  They used the same legal arguments at the same time, and it is this historical congruence that Lisa Ford sets out to explore.  Her approach is strongly based in legal history and court cases, and this is the lens through which she views the world.

By linking two apparently dissimilar colonies like this, she runs the risk of leaving scholars of one or the other societies bemused.  It’s a testament to her writing that, even though the New South Wales cases were far more familiar to me, I feel that I understood the Georgian cases as well and the parallels she was drawing.  But was there something particularly special about Georgia and New South Wales, or could she have chosen any other American state  and drawn the same connections? I’m not in a position to say. Or, indeed was New South Wales the best Australian example? Henry Reynolds in his review of this book in the Australian Book Review in April 2010 thought that Georgia and Tasmania would have been a better pair for comparison because both societies took up expulsion as a way of solving the ‘problem’ of their indigenous populations.  But I think that Ford is looking not so much at the outcomes of legal actions, as the philosophy behind the legal interventions.

For the most part, her chapters are organised thematically- e.g. pluralism as policy (Ch.2); indigenous jurisdiction and spatial order (Ch. 3); legality and lawlessness (Ch. 4) etc.  She starts each with a general introduction,  examines Georgia, then New South Wales, then draws parallels and distinctions between the two.  This pattern is broken at Chapter 6 where the narrative splits into two separate streams, with what she has identified as a seminal case in each colony.  Chapter 6 focuses on a case in Georgia  while  Chapter 7 looks at the case of Lego’me in New South Wales, tried and found guilty for a particularly petty robbery (of a pipe, no less!)  as part of a more general clampdown on Aboriginal ‘lawbreaking’.  In chapter 8 she then returns to the pattern of  intertwined chapters to discuss the way that 1830 in Georgia and 1835 in New South Wales marked a turning point in settler sovereignty. In both colonies, the claim of settler ‘ownership’ of territory was now offered without question as the rationale for the extension of settler law over indigenous people .   In relation to New South Wales, she goes on to explore the way that this rationale fed into R v Murrell, which has long been viewed as the touchstone case on which all subsequent legal policy in Australia has been based.

She points out that this shift was not restricted to Georgia and New South Wales alone.  Instead it was part of the post-Napoleonic era trend of formalizing or eroding legal pluralism world-wide, including in Europe itself.   She recognizes that by ending with the great cases of the 1830s, she is creating “historical closure where there was none historically” (p.204)- and this is exactly the point at which my own work with Judge Willis fits in.

This is a beautifully written book.  It has a very disciplined chapter structure- an introduction, an argument (clearly bifurcated into the parallel Georgian and New South Wales scenarios) and succinct and thought provoking conclusions.  Fairly conventionally academic, perhaps, but certainly clear. She obviously enjoys language, images and words- she rolls words around, rejoicing in alliteration, repetition and nuance.  We see it where  she describes the imperial network of bureaucrats as they “moved about the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans with Vattel and Blackstone under their arms” (p.4), and the settlers as “savvy masters of the discourses and politics of settler jurisdiction…eager for its bounties and wary of its gaze” (p. 84).

I’ll leave the last part to her.  She is describing how the flexible pre-1820s plurality that had governed settler/indigenous relations began to chafe against hardening notions of sovereignty:

Again and again, troubled executives and their law officers tried to perfect settler sovereignty by bringing indigenous-settler conflict within the bounds of settler law.  Again and again, they tried at the very least to preserve order in their towns and on the roads that connected them.  Again and again, they were thwarted by indigenous people, by frontier settlers or by local magistrates…The period described here, then, is one of plurality in transition, when a new vision of perfect sovereignty emerged from long-practiced and institutionally entrenched pluralism. (p. 120)

‘This Whispering in our Hearts’ by Henry Reynolds

1998, 251 p.& notes

The title of this book is taken from a speech delivered by Richard Windeyer as part of a 5-night debate carried out  in September 1842.  Henry Reynolds describes the speech, called ‘On the Rights of the Aborigines of Australia’, as “perhaps the most sustained and intellectually powerful attack on Aboriginal rights ever mounted in early colonial Australia.” (p.20).  Certainly it was felt at the time that Windeyer’s speech for the negative side had carried the day:

…we believe it to be the unanimous opinion of the members, that the speech of Mr Windeyer, for the negative, was the most argumentative and logical… He distinctly proved not only that the Blacks have no right to the soil of Australia for want of settled occupancy and cultivation; but that they have no right even to the kangaroos more than we have, the game laws of England agreeing precisely with the great law of nature, that wild animals not confined by enclosure are not, and cannot be the property of any man. (Sydney Morning Herald 12 Sept 1842)

And yet, after denouncing traditional Aboriginal society, and insisting that they had no claim on the land, Windeyer admitted at the end of his speech

How is it that our minds are not satisfied? …What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts? (cited in Reynolds p. 21)

It’s an evocative term- the whispering at the bottom of our heart- and yet the fact that it was Richard Windeyer who voiced it is but one of the many complexities and contradictions that arise when trying to tease out of nuances of public utterances about Aborigines in the early decades of settlement in Australia.  Reynolds, perhaps, does not highlight the context of the speech sufficiently – i.e. it was argued as part of a debate where one often argues against one’s own beliefs.  Still, it’s hard to pin down Windeyer’s politics,  as it is with many of these 1830s and 40s public men.   Richard Windeyer was a parliamentarian and barrister: he had been at the meeting that established the Aborigines Protection Society in 1838 and yet he had defended the white stockmen in the Myall Creek trials (although there is a limit to what one can deduce from courtroom advocacy).  What are we to make of his position if  his head was telling him one thing and his heart another? In the final analysis, which one matters more?

In this book Henry Reynolds looks at three periods of white humanitarianism: the 1830s and 40s; the 1880s and the period 1926-34.  He deals with a small number of individuals in each period: George Augustus Robinson and Lancelot Threlkeld, Louis Giustiniani and Robert Lyon in the first period; John Gribble and David Carley in the second; and son Ernest Gribble and Mary Bennett in the third.

My interest in reading this book was mainly on his first period, and in many ways the people he considers in this section are the most difficult to reconcile with our own ideas of humanitarianism today.   Like the settlers whose actions they deplored, these humanitarians were likewise steeped in  ethos of colonisation, albeit for different purposes:

It was not that they were against the establishment of British colonies.  They spoke themselves of spiritual empires.  They were zealous to evangelize the pagan, to save the souls of Aborigines and other indigenous people.  They firmly believed they should both civilize and Christianise or at least radically change local cultures. The missionary could be more overbearing, more interfering, more insensitive than frontier settlers and stockmen.  And they were characteristically profoundly self-righteous, often with the fixed stare and intense focus of the convert. (p. 33)

Some writers- for example Lindsey Arkley- would be surprised to find George Augustus Robinson featured here, and Robinson’s role and motivation continues to be contested territory among historians.  Importantly, Reynolds charts the differences between 1830-40 humanitarianism and the humanitarianism of the 1880s.  A much changed intellectual climate and two generations of colonization meant that by the 1880s there was no longer any assertion of racial equality based on the biblical notion of shared descent and common blood.  It was taken for granted that Aborigines were members of an inferior race, and many assumed that they would eventually die out.  The horror of shedding blood, so prominent during the 1830s, had moderated and it was now seen as a regrettable, but unavoidable accompaniment to colonization.  Colonization and development were now a justification in themselves.  (p. 112, 113)

Reynolds reminds us that there have always been humanitarians- people who were willing to raise their voices and inured themselves to the abuse and obloquy  that they attracted.  But he also reminds us that these humanitarians of the past were for the most part unsuccessful:

… Australians of today who find comfort in the history of the humanitarian crusade should reflect that the protesters had little influence on events. Their assertions, however cogent, their moral appeal however persuasive, were largely ignored. Arguments forcefully put in the 1830s required restating in the 1930s. Many are still relevant today.  What the humanitarian story shows is that an alternative agenda was aired, a more humane course projected, was listened to, understood and then comprehensively rejected, often with derision  (p. 249)

The little moral force that they could exert often depended on overseas support- the Anti-Slavery society, the Aborigines Protections Society and various Colonial Office pressure groups in the 19th century and the League of Nations in the twentieth.   Access to the press  was crucial and skillfully used by many of these humanitarians: a sobering thought in our Wikileaks days.

And finally, and most importantly when looking at the 1830-40 period, our idea of what humanitarianism looks like is different.  We tend to shuffle away and distance ourselves from the “fixed stare and the intense focus” of such men (used intentionally), and there are statements in their rhetoric that send alarm bells ringing in our heads.  We would do well to remember:

The humanitarians were often paternalistic/maternalistic and shared many of the ideas that were current in their generation.  Some of them undoubtedly were racists in the way we understand that term now.  They were people of their period.  But if inquiry and understanding stops there we miss the passion for justice, the anger about cruelty and indifference which drove humanitarians along lonely, thankless and unpopular paths (p.251)

‘The hated Protector’ by Lindsey Arkley

2000, 469 p. & notes

Lindsey Arkley The hated Protector: The story of Charles Wightman Sievwright Protector of Aborigines 1839-42. Mentone Vic, Orbit Press, 2000.

Charles Sievwright is an ‘interesting’ man from 170 years distance, and was certainly controversial and combative at the time.  This biography of Sievwright examines his time in the Port Phillip District as Assistant Protector for Aborigines in the western district of Victoria between 1839-1842.  Lindsey Arkley, the author, also wrote Sievwright’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

The Aboriginal Protectorates were an experimental measure, urged on the Colonial Office  in London by the evangelical pressure groups concerned about the treatment of indigenous subjects throughout the empire.   They were established as a secular adjunct to the church missionary system and comprised a Chief Protector and several Assistant Protectors. They were given the remit to firstly, protect indigenous people from settler cruelty and secondly, assist the church-based missionaries in converting Aborigines from a wandering and barbaric state into sedentary,  ‘civilized’ Christians.   The inland areas of the  Port Phillip District had only been recently exposed to widespread settler incursion, and it was rather optimistically hoped in London that this could herald a new and better approach.  It was an experiment imposed on Governor Gipps in Sydney and his local superintendent in Melbourne, Charles LaTrobe, and in the absence of any clear vision of how it would work in practice, George Augustus Robinson was appointed Chief Protector on the basis of his work in Van Diemen’s Land.  Unlike the other Assistant Protectors who were school teachers, Charles Sievwright had a military background and used his admittedly rather impressive patronage ties to get the position after some rather dubious gambling problems back in Europe.

It was a position fraught with tension, ambiguities and contradictions, even without the added complication of the deeply flawed individuals who were chosen to fill the roles.  Chief Protector Robinson was variously jealous, ambitious, inefficient, blustering, out of his depth and conflicted, and the Assistant Protectors soon began fighting both with Robinson and among themselves over lack of supplies, perceived lack of support, ambiguous instructions and – importantly for Sievwright- rumours of sexual impropriety.   In Sievwright’s Port Phillip career, and in his subsequent dismissal, these rumours of sexual misconduct including domestic violence, attempted seduction of other Protectors’ wives and most damaging of all, incest with his own daughter bubbled underneath all his interactions with his superiors, other bureaucrats, and the white settlers who resented his presence in prime grazing territory.

This is a very long biography at over 400 pages dealing mainly with three years of Sievwright’s career in Port Phillip, although the ‘before’ and ‘after’ are dealt with in the opening and closing chapters.  Arkley has drawn heavily on official correspondence, particularly the letters written to, from and by La Trobe and the local bureaucracy and the resultant reports between and by Gipps and the Colonial Office.    This is territory that I have been likewise wading through with my own research, and seeing how Arkley has dealt with it has made me more reflective about its value and limitations as a genre and source.  He has published much of this information in a much more accessible form than the originals, and been punctilious in his footnoting, but there is so much of it and often over so little.   This is something that I have likewise struggled with, in both a narrative and methodological sense.   Arkley reproduces the texts and has placed  the ‘controversy of the moment’ (and there were many!) within its context, but much of this is ‘he said/he said’ reportage.

Arkley started each chapter- and there are (too) many at 35 of them- with a few brief, interest-arousing observations but these are fairly general, often rejoicing in coincidence and juxtaposition and not always particularly relevant to the chapter.   In Arkley’s telling there are clearcut baddies- “Flogger” Fyans, Robinson, and the duplicitous La Trobe and Gipps- and one senses that Arkley’s purpose is largely to rescue Sievwright’s reputation from their clutches.

But in doing so, there is no scholarly discussion of the protectorate system and its ambiguities and no exploration of the meaning of the sexual scandal and its relationship with the other grounds given for Sievwright’s dismissal.  Perhaps this was not Arkley’s intention: I see in the blurbs that the book was embraced by local historians and Arkley himself works as a journalist.  Other historians have picked up on Arkley’s work- in particular Alan Lester and Fay Dussart in their article “Masculinity, ‘race’ and families in the colonies: protecting Aborigines in the early 19th century” [1] who thank him directly in their Acknowledgments.  I’m sure that Kirsten McKenzie [2] would do much with  Arkley’s work on Sievwright as well.

Is it valid to critique a book for what it doesn’t do, and perhaps even had no intention of ever doing? I’m not sure.  After all,  we stand on the shoulders of other researchers, and there is certainly value in Arkley’s collection and reproduction of much of the archival material on Sievwright.  His footnoting is excellent, and I’ve been able to find many of the sources he cites.  But at times I found myself wary of his clear attempt to promote and rehabilitate Sievwright’s reputation, and found myself having to read against Arkley’s text for much of the time and wanting to prod him a bit further.  Sometimes a bit of ambiguity and scepticism is not a bad thing.

Notes:

[1] Alan Lester and Fay Dussart ‘Masculinity, ‘race’ and families in the colonies:  protecting Aborigines in the early 19th century’ Gender Place and Culture, vol 16, no 1, 2009 pp.  65-76

[2] Kirsten McKenzie Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town 1820-1850 Carlton Victoria, Melbourne University Press, 2004

Also:

Ian D. Clark The Hated Protector: The Story of Charles Wightman Sievwright Protector of Aborigines 1839-42 [Book Review]  Aboriginal History, Vol. 24, 2000: 305-313.

169th Anniversary

If you go into Melbourne on Thursday 20th January at 12.00  and head up to the corner of Bowen and Franklin Streets, you’ll see the 169th anniversary of the hanging of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheener.  These commemorations have been conducted for several years now- in fact, the Lord Mayor Robert Doyle spoke at the 2009 commemoration.

I’ve heard it said that once a blog starts to cannibalise itself, then the end is nigh- I hope this is not the case.  But just this once I’ll refer you back to an earlier post that I wrote on this anniversary two years ago and a post on images of Tunnerminnerwait in  the Robert Dowling exhibition at the Geelong Gallery and later National Gallery of Australia last year.

The smile in this image – so unusual amongst depictions of Aboriginal people at the time- is explored by Leonie Stevens in her article ‘The Phenomenal Coolness of Tunnerminnerwait’ published in the Victorian Historical Journal, Vol 81, Number 1, June 2010.  If you belong to a library that has access to Informit, then it’s well worth following up.

Abstract: There have been numerous historical constructions of Tunnerminnerwait, alias Cape Grim Jack, who was publicly executed along with his friend, Maulboyheener in Melbourne in January 1842.  This paper revisits the documentary record and historicizing of the two young Tasmanians, and asks, were they victims of colonial indifference, freedom fighters, or simply wild Tasmanians enacting the final stages of the Black Wars?

The commemorations on 20th January that have been held over several years now certainly claims them as freedom fighters, but I’m not particularly comfortable with that characterization.  I concur with Stevens that they were defiant, independent actors, and her article highlights the difficulty in ascribing any one motive to their actions when dealing with  such a partial and complex historical record.  For me the connotation of politicized, communal action denoted by 20th century term ‘freedom fighter’ does not ring true for a small group of Aboriginal people cast adrift from their country and tribal structure and utter strangers to the land they found themselves in.

I’m puzzled, too, by the recommendation to mercy by the jury: a recommendation that  that was not supported by Judge Willis and disregarded by the colonial authorities.  The Van Diemens Land Blacks encapsulated the two huge and very sharp anxieties of the frontier- blacks AND bushrangers rolled into one- yet there was obviously some disquiet about the death penalty among the jurors at least.  Nonetheless,   large crowds witnessed the execution outside the jail but here too, we can only guess at what motivated them to come out in such numbers:   curiosity? sense of occasion? 19th century popular culture? crowd behaviour?-  close to the spot where the commemoration on 20th January will take place.

Postscript:

And here it was:

Corner Bowen and Franklin Streets, Melbourne

What's a demo without good old Joe Toscano?

Up Franklin Street on the way to the Vic Market

‘Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853′ by Marie Hansen Fels

1988, 227 p. plus appendices and notes

In her book, Marie Fels warns of a number of ethnocentric blindnesses and misconceptions, and I’m afraid that I’m guilty of at least three of them.  The first, she says, is to simply not see the presence of the Native Police and I’m certainly guilty of this.  I’ve been aware of them in my reading on Port Phillip, but hadn’t particularly considered what they might be doing there.  Then I noted that Jan Critchett attributed the turning point in aboriginal/settler “collisions” to their skill in pursuit and this notion fed, I suppose into my second misconception- that the Port Phillip Native Police Corps, like the Queensland Native Police Corps which was later modelled on it, was responsible for atrocities against aboriginal people.  And this, in turn, reflects my third ethnocentricity: the assumption that the act of joining the Native Police Corps was a form of treachery, undertaken only by marginal men who would be ostracized by their tribesmen because of their involvement .

Instead, Fels argues, the men who joined the Native Police Corps were leaders of clans or their heirs.  They willingly joined with Europeans in policing work: policing in its pre-Peelite manifestation as ‘keeping the peace’ rather than ‘upholding the law’, and certainly more than just tracking.

Joining the Native Police Corps is best seen as a strategy in the direction of sharing power and authority in the Port Phillip District, in the changed environment of the powerful and permanent European presence.  Besides the material things that police could see they would get, an opportunity was put before them of becoming men of standing within their transformed world.  They took it, and furthermore, they used it.  They bent it back, exploiting their acquired prestige and influence to operate within traditional group politics, to such effect that while the Corps was in existence, these men were the powerbrokers… Being a native policeman was a state of dual consciousness and divided loyalty; it appears not to have been a matter of rejecting Aboriginality, but rather of learning to live in two different worlds (p. 87)

The men of the Native Police Corps were proud of their uniforms and they kept them in immaculate condition; they craved guns but rarely used them “on the side”;  they were able to read the nuances in status between white settlers, and they operated in a number of roles including escorting,  taking messages, guarding, search and rescue and a highly visible ceremonial role within white society.

Although men of  the Warwoorong and Bunerong tribes (her spelling) from around Melbourne initially formed the heart of the unit, they were not just 20 troopers drawn solely from those tribes, as it has been described in the past.  Instead she has identified over 140 individuals drawn from various tribes across Victoria- even, though to a lesser extent, from the Gippsland tribes who were the traditional enemies of the Warwoorong/Bunerong federation.  One of her appendices gives the biographical details of five such men, and she refers to the full 114 page version of the appendix that she attached to her thesis,  available at the University of Melbourne, which covers the other men.

Good men and true?  Dana, their commandant certainly thought so, and was staunch in his defence of his men.  For there were, and are, rumours that the Native Police Corps itself was involved in the slaughter of aboriginal people- indeed the Native Police themselves bragged of it.  Here Fels, likewise, springs to their defence, drawing on statistics about ammunition and weaponry to undercut the claims of multiple shootings; querying the motives of men who made the reports to La Trobe,  issuing cautions about the reliability of any Aboriginal evidence, and challenging the ready acceptance of Aboriginal reports of ‘many’ being killed.  While this may be true, it is an argument that must be balm to Windschuttle et. al who query the statistics over white atrocities as well.  Is there an ethical responsibility in using a line of argument that could be picked up and used to make a contrary, and possibly abhorrent point?  Or is there an intellectual responsibility NOT to resile from an argument out of fear that this might occur?   The line between challenging misconceptions and inaccuracies on the one hand, and defensiveness on the other  is a narrow one, and at times I felt that she over-reached a little.  But even she admitted her uneasiness about reports of the Native Police Corps in Gippsland, the territory of their enemies far from the reach of authority, and her credibility was strengthened by her caution here.

Top of the list of her acknowledgments is Greg Dening, and the book is dedicated to him.  I can see his influence here, in the way that she walks around an episode, reading against the record, stepping away and  reminding us:

Always the first question to be asked when examining the action of the Corps is ‘What was the nature of the traditional relationship?’ (p. 157)

I feel that the typesetting of her book did her a disservice, though.  The book is a densely woven argument and more white space would have given her reader a little more oxygen.  At times she launched into examination of an episode without warning and I’d screech to a halt wondering “Hold on- do I know about this? Has she talked about this earlier?” only to read on for a couple of paragraphs to realize that I’d been dropped into an episode for some close-up scrutiny.

In her introduction she stakes her claim:

Part of the task of the historian is to recognize that the issues which kindle interest and shape enquiry do emerge from the cultural present, but the written end-product succeeds or fails according to how well the historian has understood and explained the past on its own terms. (p. 5)

This book challenges our conceptions of the role of the Native Police Corps and its meaning for its participants and those who encountered it at the time.  I’ll leave the last word with her in her own closing paragraph, because it’s a strong argument:

To recognize that they were the victims of the European takeover of their land is one thing; to write a history of the origins and growth of the contemporary sense of oppression is another; but to impose the attitudes of the present on the evidence of the past is ahistorical, producing the effect of leaving out of our histories the evidence of creative and adaptive Aboriginal strategies such as this one- becoming a native policeman. (p. 227)

‘A distant field of murder’ by Jan Critchett

Critchett, Jan ‘A distant field of murder’: Western District Frontiers 1834-1848, Carlton Vic. Melbourne University Press, 1990, 219 p.

As you can tell from the title, Critchett’s book focuses on a specific district of Victoria over the short period of 14 years between 1834-1848.   For the aboriginal tribes of the Western district, it was  14 years of tumultuous and catastrophic change.  But even this 14 year period was just a small part of the life of Hissing Swan or Kaawirn Kuunawarn, the tribal man with whom this book starts and finishes.  Hissing Swan was born around 1822 and died in 1890 of a broken heart when he was moved from Framlingham mission when it was selected for closure. It was the second dispossession he had faced.  As the mission record shows:

“Old David (Hissing Swan) dead.  Idea of leaving home killed him; buried Thursday.” (p.192)

This book focusses on the Western District of Victoria, which under the Squatting Act was known as Portland Bay.  It was a huge territory that stretched from west of the Werribee River across to the South Australia border, with a line up to the Murray River. Of course, this was a white-man’s division for the purposes of administrative convenience.  The area of Portland Bay took in many clans and tribal groups, and a large part of this book is devoted to her appendices listing the different groups and individuals that Robinson and other missionaries and observers had counted in the district during the early days- a difficult task given the vagaries of pronunciation and orthography.   This might be seen as another attempt at head-counting, but I think that it’s more than this.  In the same way that she starts and finishes her book with an individual, named, person, this enumeration of  small, family groups is a way of giving a human identity and empirical presence to what was more often portrayed by white settlers as a brooding, shifting, often invisible presence. Settlement, as she notes, can take one of three forms-  slow expansion; a leapfrogging rush; then infilling of the vacant spaces between settlements.  In the second phase, white settlers moved into the district, often bringing with them their Aboriginal ‘boys’ from other areas.  The whites were largely oblivious to the clan boundaries they were crossing, but the aborigines who accompanied them were well aware of the boundary infringements they were committing.

By choosing to focus on the period 1834-1848 she takes in the period prior to the quasi-official ‘settlement’ of Victoria.  The aboriginal people of the Portland District had had long contact with white whalers and sealers, and Henty’s settlement in Portland predated the settlement of Melbourne.  She estimates that the chillingly-named Convincing Ground massacre probably took place around 1833 or 1834, but it was the influx of pastoralists after 1835 that heralded the greatest change.

There was a war in the Western District, she claims, but there were no great battles.  Instead, as she points out, the frontier was a personalized space:

The frontier was in fact a very local phenomenon, the disputed area being the very land each settler lived upon.  The enemy was not on the other side of neutral ground.  The frontier was represented by the woman who lived near by and was shared by her Aboriginal partner with a European or Europeans.  It was the group living down beside the creek or river, it was the ‘boy’ used as guide for exploring parties or for doing jobs now and then.  The ‘other side of the frontier’ was just down the yard or as close as the bed shared with an Aboriginal woman. (p. 23)

Although the white settler characterized clashes with Aboriginal people as “aggression”, “depredation” and “outrage”, most of the killings of whites involved prior violence or disputes over women, and often involved Aborigines known to them.  They were most often killed by blows to the head, rather than guns, suggesting that their Aboriginal attackers had been able to get close to them.   The nature of Aboriginal behaviour changed over time- groups combined forces, they used guerilla tactics, they took sheep and drove them long distances. The killings of aborigines most often involved Europeans seeking to recover their property, generally forming a small hunting party themselves, sometimes accompanied by a JP or the native police.

She sees 1842 as the turning point.  It was the worst year for inter-racial conflict and it was the year that white state power was most effectively demonstrated to the aborigines, partially through the hangings that took place then, but even more significantly through the deployment of the Border Police and especially the Native Police during that year.  As she notes:

In the end the Aborigines were dealt with on their own terms.  It was not necessary to have a large military force.  The enemy was really a series of enemies, each being a relatively small group of people.  They could be dealt with one by one or even simultaneously by a small number of individuals, providing they could follow the Aborigines to their camping places, normally inaccessible to Europeans.  Once a Native Police force was established the end of Aboriginal resistance was a possibility. (p 158)

Although 1842 was the turning point, the winter of 1843 was the worst period for ‘collisions’ between the Native Police and local aborigines, and even white authorities were uneasy about the lurid tales that the Native Police themselves told of their exploits.

There is much to be gained from a close-grained analysis of Aboriginal/White interaction based on a particular geographic region-  I know that Jim Belshaw has adopted this approach.  I think that her emphasis on the degree of contact, indeed sometimes intimacy, on the frontier is important.  This is a beautifully written history.  Its rather oblique chapter headings use quotations from the archive, and it is clearly structured without feeling contrived and constrained.  There are people here behind the numbers.

There is the hint in her work of an alternative ‘what-if’ history that shimmers just out of sight- the runs that were abandoned and remained empty because no settlers could withstand the violence; Gipps’ angry but unfulfilled threat to turn the whole district into an Aboriginal reserve and cancel all squatting licences-  but as Critchett points out, change was inevitable.  The murnong grass was no longer available because the sheep had eaten it; Aboriginal groups could no longer fire the grass to encourage its growth;  they were excluded from their waterholes, and had abandoned their permanent winter housing there.  Tribal and clan boundaries were weakened.  The district, as she says, was an extended convincing ground, and by 1848 when she draws her story to a close, the Aborigines had been convinced.

‘Memoirs recorded at Geelong by Foster Fyans’ ed. Phillip L Brown

“What is the use of a book, ” thought Alice “without pictures and conversations?”  I’m with you, Alice.  I  certainly wasn’t expecting conversations in Foster Fyan’s memoirs, and I very much appreciated the maps and illustrations.

Foster Fyans is well known in Geelong as the first police magistrate there (1837-40), then he became Crown Land Commissioner in the district.  The area just out of Geelong known as Fyansford is named after him, and there’s a Fyans Street in Geelong itself.  After visiting Geelong a fortnight ago for the Robert Dowling exhibition I seem to be rather Geelong-conscious at the moment, and I’ve been reading Fyans’ memoirs for a paper that I’ll be giving much later in the year.

As his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography suggests, there is not much known about his early life beyond that he was Irish and brought up by an uncle.  In these memoirs he springs from the page as a fully-formed army man, in charge of taking bringing a band of recruits to Portsmouth.  From the start he portrays army life full of masculine humour, eating and drinking, marching and high-jinks- almost a dead ringer for Lydia Bennett’s Mr Wickham and his mates.   His description of the Peninsular War likewise emphasizes life amongst his fellow soldiers, with more distress ascribed to the illness that swept through the camps rather than actual combat.  Then off to India for several years where again, life revolved around hunting and carousing and little mention of actual soldiering.  After a short time in Cape Colony (more parties and shooting), he arrived in Sydney where he spent a short, restless, lonely time before reporting to his regiment and joining his fellow soldiers at Parramatta.  Although he attended Government House, the jocular hail-fellow tone falters here, as the realities of convict settlement and official responsibilities become more apparent to him.  He is sent to the high-security  Norfolk Island where he eventually becomes Acting Commandant, and from there as commandant to Moreton Bay (now Brisbane) which was also a penal settlement at the time.  While  in Moreton Bay he oversaw the rescue of  Eliza Fraser.   His response to the convicts probably reflects the contradictions thrown up by the system- an uneasy wariness of violence that runs just below the surface co-existing with close day-to-day proximity with men not so different from oneself.

From there he was sent as Police Magistrate to Geelong, which is about fifty miles from Melbourne and rich pastoral land.  His memoirs become even quieter at this stage.  He spends quite a bit of time describing an expedition to the port settlement of  Portland, the first recognized land journey between the two settlements.  With only two mounted police and the surveyor Mr Smythe and no maps, they set off in what seemed to be atrocious weather, greeted each morning by the “flying jackass” (kookaburra), the “chanticleer of Australia”.   By 1840 he had been appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands, responsible for maintaining order among the squatters and investigating clashes between the settlers and the displaced aboriginal groups.  Here is a sad litany of violence,  where he mainly sides with the settlers in sympathy for what they perceive as needless stock loss. Like the settlers he is critical of the Aboriginal Protectors and the nearby mission station that he feels only attracts more aborigines to the area and imbues them with a misplaced sense of inviolability.

What started out as a military romp has become a nomadic police-like existence, accompanied mainly by his aboriginal “boy” Bon Jon (the purpose for my reading these memoirs).  It has become much quieter and more isolated.  Perhaps it’s the memoirist running out of puff too, because the memoirs stop abruptly in the bush in 1842.

The editor has written an introduction, where he describes the provenance of the manuscript and the various branches of the Fyans family tree, then gives a brief summary of the content of the memoirs.  I always enjoy hearing about how a manuscript comes to be published. The original, scrawled across five hundred foolscap pages had been typed up by Fyans’ great grand-son and it was donated by his descendants to the State Library of Victoria in 1962.   Although Fyans himself did not divide it into chapters, he did create sections by inserting a page with rough headings for the pages that follow. The  editor has created chapter headings and provided notes  at the end of each chapter.  These rather dour and punctilious annotations to the entries, which are painstaking in their detail, remind the reader of the fallibilities of memory and chronology, and the infelicities that arise when a raconteur is  telling a good story.

I think that it’s almost certain that anyone working exhaustively on an archive of memoirs, diaries or letters comes to build some sort of a relationship (albeit completely one-sided) with the author.  The editor, P. L. Brown (who also wrote the ADB entry) seems rather disenchanted by the many inconsistencies and errors he found

Fyan’s reminiscences had to be checked in order to assess their worth as historical material. This checking disclosed considerable and frequent divergence between actual and remembered events, and made it clear that the text, unless fully annotated, must be more entertaining than instructive. Hence the presentation of archives, both British and Australian, from the latter of which Fyans emerges as an energetic, conscientious public servant, rather let down by his rambling old self, who nevertheless conveys the authentic atmosphere of his historical period, and told few stories which lacked a germ of truth (p. xv)

The memoirs themselves ended abruptly, and the notes themselves end with the transcription of assorted letters and returns, and further details about wills and inheritances.  I found myself wishing that P.L. Brown had returned at this point to round out the picture somewhat and to help me, as reader, to bid farewell to Fyans.  After all, he’d been a rollicking companion for the first 100 pages or so, and despite infelicities and distortions in his retelling, he sure had a story to tell- Spain, India, Cape Colony and Australia- as did many of those peripatetic colonial civil servants.

Robert Dowling, Tasmanian Son of Empire.

If you put your skates on, you’ll catch the Robert Dowling, Tasmanian Son of Empire exhibition at the Geelong Art Gallery. But be quick- it finishes on 11 July.  There’s a beautiful NGA site about the exhibition here-  go have a look, it’s a stunning site and almost as good as being there.

Robert Dowling was born in 1827 in Colchester in England, the son of a Baptist preacher.  In 1834 he arrived in Tasmania with his parents, who followed their older sons who had emigrated to the colonies some time earlier.  This Evangelical background is important because it influenced the subjects he painted  for the rest of his life.  He was apprenticed as a saddle-maker but did not follow his trade. Instead he set himself up as a painter of commissioned portraits.  He travelled between Hobart and Launceston painting portraits of many prominent figures and personal friends, including John West the Congregationalist minister and other leading Evangelicals.  In 1854 he shifted across to Port Phillip in the hope of capitalizing on the post-Gold Rush prosperity.  However he found it difficult to gain patronage in Melbourne, so he shifted down to Geelong closer to his extended family, and where he was commissioned to paint portraits by the wealthy Western District pastoralists.

In every exhibition, there’s usually one painting that you linger in front of, and often return to in order to scrutinize it more closely.  For me, it was this painting: Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station

The catalogue described this as a ‘mourning painting’.  The exhibition catalogue (a beautifully presented book by John Jones) tells me that  Adlophus Sceales died in 1855, leaving a young widow Jane and two young daughters.  Mrs Sceales commissioned the work, and how I wish that I could eavesdrop on the conversation between subject and artist when the painting was being planned!  The riderless horses remind me of the military funeral tradition, but I assume that they were portrayed because he must have loved riding, perhaps with the two dogs shown.  I wonder whose decision it was to include Jimmie, and what his clothes and stance indicate about his role on the station- it looks very formal attire, befitting a manservant for an Englishman.  The emptiness of the picture is striking: the house is not shown, only the stables and it looks rather bleak, empty and cold. The daughters are completely absent.

This was one of several paintings that show Aboriginal people in the Western Districts, sometimes in family groupings, and at other times in close proximity to the settler families with whom they lived.

These are the children of his brother-in-law’s family and I’m struck by the easy pose of the little girl draped innocently ( but not entirely appropriately to our eyes today) over the young  aboriginal man.  What does it say about his role in the family? He’s obviously much older than the children- does he have a carer role?

In 1857 Dowling travelled to London to study art, sponsored by the good citizens of Tasmania. He stayed there for nearly thirty years, improving his technique to be sure, and acting almost as a conduit of empire.   He made copies of British paintings for an antipodean audience- a portrait of Queen Victoria, for example was sent back to the colonies as an  important official painting. He sent images of empire home, and he brought images of the colony to the metropole. On the other side of the world, he worked up the paintings of Van Diemen’s Land aborigines painted by the ex-convict artist Thomas Bock, who had possibly instructed Dowling in painting many years earlier.  Bock had died by this time, and Dowling copied Bock’s paintings and inserted them into a range of landscape settings in grand History Paintings.  He made multiple copies, with the same central figures in different groupings and with different backgrounds.

Click on the NGV website about the Dowling exhibition for a zoomable close-up and explanation of the painting.

And, true to form, I can find six degrees of separation (even fewer!) from Judge Willis and this painting.  The smiling figure on the right hand side is Tunnerminnerwait, also known as Cape Grim Jack, who was one of the Van Diemen’s Land blacks who accompanied Protector Robinson across Bass  Strait. He was sentenced to death by Judge Willis and executed in January 1842.  If you have access to academic journals at all, there’s an excellent essay by Leonie Stevens in the June 2010 Victorian Historical Journal called “The Phenomenal Coolness of Tunnerminnerwait” ( a rather phenomenally cool title for the article, too!)

In a world where a few snatched bars of “Kookaburra Sits on the Old Gum Tree” can lead to a lawsuit, we might raise our eyebrows at Dowling’s appropriation of Bock’s images in this way. Here’s Bock’s version of Tunnerminnerwait on the left, and Woureddy on the right. You’ll be able to easily locate them in Dowling’s picture above.

Dowling’s re-presentations of Bock’s images found their way to the Ethnological Society of Britain and the Royal Academy where they fed the interest in anthropology and primitive societies.  Although these paintings were created in London, using sketches from Bock’s originals and they eventually found their way back to Australia as part of the swirl of cultural artefacts throughout the Empire.

Dowling returned to Australia in 1884 and set up a studio in Melbourne.  He returned to England two years later with the intention of packing up and moving permanently back to the colonies, but died suddenly.  As Jones points out, it’s interesting to speculate how he would have responded artistically to the Australian Impressionists and their take on Australian landscapes.

References

Jones, John.  Robert Dowling, Tasmanian son of Empire, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia c 2010

Stevens, Leonie  “The Phenomenal Coolness of Tunnerminnerwait” Victorian Historical Journal, Vol 8, No 1 June 2010 pp.18-40.