“I'm
astounded at the comment [from
the Prime Minister]…..
"It
indicates to me a very shallow understanding of the arrival of the
First Fleet and the impact of that on Aboriginal Australia.
"It's
a very selfish comment. He said nothing about the arrival of that
fleet on the Aboriginal owners who own the place.
"There's
no empathy there at all. He's turning it inward. It's all about
self-praise and aggrandisement of white fella colonisation.
"It's
so shallow in that it doesn't involve inclusion or diversity.
"I
just think he's very lightweight when it comes to understanding
Australian history and Aboriginal perspectives about the British
colonisation of the country.”
[Former
Australian of the Year. Northern Territory Treaty Commissioner and
ANU Professor of Law,
Michael
Dodson
AM,
a proud Yawuru man, quoted in ABC
News
online, 22.01.21]
An example of how Australian colonial history was re-written
In 1803 the first British soldiers and convicts landed in Van Diemen's Land and in 1824 it became a separate colony to New South Wales.
By then the colonial population of the island numbered est. 11,967 souls and a population explosion had begun which expanded across more of the land.
Between 1825 and 1831 - when the British-European population had almost tripled - Aboriginal resistance to invasion and occupation of their country increased, with 219 colonists and 260 Aboriginals reported killed. [Nicholas Clements, 2014]
Though the reality is that Aboriginal deaths were likely considerably higher as this number may not have counted all men, women and children gratuitously murdered, as it is believed that few so-called 'reprisal' incidents were officially recorded at the time they occurred. [Hobart Town Gazette December 3, 1823; Ryan, 1996:86-88; Bonwick, 1870:99, Hobart Town Gazette May 5, 1827; Colonial Times May 11, 1827; George 2002:13, Lee 1927:41; AOT VDL 5/1 No.2, 14/1/28 in SciencePo, 5 March 2008]
However, contemporary colonial history often tried to paint a different picture......
 |
Legend reads: "Why Massa Gubernor", said Black Jack. "You Profflamation all gammon.
"How blackfellow read him eh? He no learn him read book."
"Read that then", said the Governor, pointing to the picture.' |
“Images
are treacherous; labels more so. As it happens, Governor Davey’s
Proclamation to the Aborigines 1816 had nothing to do with Governor
Davey. It does not date from 1816. And it is not really a
proclamation. It was commissioned by Lieutenant Governor Sir George
Arthur; in 1830, around one hundred copies were published by the
government printer in Hobart, placed on wooden boards, and
disseminated. The misattribution dates from its re-discovery in the
1860s and might be explained in two ways. First, by setting the date
back almost a generation, the notion that the British colony was
founded on the principle of the rule of law is thereby promoted.
Law
always needs some mythic retrospectivity to shore up its legitimacy—a
penal colony established by dispossession and maintained by violence
over whites and blacks alike, especially. The violence and chaos that
mark the birth of any new legal order thus become cloaked in a myth
that emphasizes instead its inevitability, its order,
and its naturalness. By the 1860s, it surely served the interests of
Tasmania’s free settlers to inject the rule of law into their
narrative of legitimate settlement, as early as possible.
Secondly,
Thomas Davey cuts a more attractive figure as author of the Proclamation
than Sir George Arthur. As governor, Davey had protested in 1814 his
“utter indignation and abhorrence” about the kidnapping of
Aboriginal children. But Governor Arthur was an altogether more
paradoxical figure, a man who oscillated wildly between expressions
of concern for the Aborigines and military campaigns against them;
between inciting white settlers to kill Tasmania’s first
inhabitants and expressing outrage when they did. He was a man who
combined eruptions
of extreme action with outbursts of remorseful reflection. Above all,
as the man behind the notorious Black Line, the dragnet which
attempted to corral like cattle the Aboriginal population of the
whole island, Arthur symbolizes a way of thinking about the original
Tasmanians that “would be laughable were it not so criminally
tragic.” Such a background surely taints and complicates the
promise of the
rule of law.
The
cartoon was suggested and apparently drawn by Arthur’s
Surveyor-General George Frankland, and he in turn was inspired by
Aboriginal bark paintings.....
The
paradox that this drawing raises lies in the difficulty of squaring
“the real wishes of the government,” as the Proclamation presents
it, with the “the actual state of things” in Van Diemen’s Land.
At the very same time that Governor Arthur’s Proclamation
elaborated an expansive commitment to the rule of law, he was
extending martial law throughout Tasmania. Martial law had initially
been declared in 1828 in the face of Aboriginal resistance to colonial
settlement. In February of 1830,
a reward of five pounds was proclaimed for the capture of adult
Aborigines (two pounds for a child), describing them as “a horde of
[s]avages” consumed by “revengeful feelings.” In October of
1830, faced by “continued repetitions of the most wanton and
sanguinary acts of violence and outrage,” Arthur extended martial
law to “every part of this Island.” On October 7, “the [white]
community . . . en masse”
was to spread out like a human chain across the whole island and, by
moving forward, herd the Black or Aboriginal Natives on to Tasman’s
Peninsula where they could be penned in once and for all.
Yet
martial law had always been understood as involving the suspension of
the rule of law. In 1829, the brutal murder of an Aboriginal woman
was deemed by the Solicitor-General to be beyond the reach of the
common law precisely because it fell under the very broad rubric of
“necessary operations against the enemies.” Subject to “an
active and extended system of Military operations against the Natives
generally” and until the “cessation of hostilities,” Aboriginal
Tasmanians were specifically placed outside the rule of law. The
Black Line, a dismal and notorious folly, led to the capture of a
grand total of two Aborigines and the shooting of two more, but it
was powerfully evocative of the colonial government’s attitude
towards them…."
[Desmond
Manderson
(January 2013) in NYLS Law Review, Vol 57, Issue 1, “THE
LAW OF THE IMAGE AND THE IMAGE OF THE LAW”,
pp.
157-158]
