'The Failure of Aboriginal Separatism' : Melbourne Indymedia

The policy of separatism has been the dominant one ever since the first missionaries set up special settlements for Aboriginal people in the 1820s. Later in the nineteenth century, state-funded Aboriginal reserves took over many of the mission sites, replacing churchmen with government bureaucrats, but retaining the same policy. Today, separatism is still on the policy agenda, but it now appears under the guise of land rights, a treaty and an Aboriginal state.

The early missionaries justified separating Aboriginal people from British colonists on the grounds of saving them from violence. Research of my own, published in a series of articles in Quadrant from October to December 2000, has shown that this behaviour was characteristic of a number of well-known missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, what my work has also found is that when you examine the evidence, most of their claims are highly suspect. These missionaries took any rumour about violence towards Aborigines, no matter how unreliable or vague, and propagated it without checking its accuracy. Why would they do such a thing? They wanted to show the need for their own institutions. By portraying colonial society as awash with violence towards the blacks, they justified their policy of separating Aborigines from white society. They wanted their missions to appear as havens in a heartless world. This fulfilled the Protestant evangelical theology on which their actions were based: the everyday, material world was full of evil and corruption and the only road to salvation for Aborigines lay in a closed religious community. Here they could be kept apart from the modern world and separated from white society.

The rumours and myths disseminated by the first missionaries have coloured the whole record of Aboriginal-European relations in Australia's early colonial history. Much of this mythology informs the book by Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, a history of those humanitarians and missionaries in Australia who over the past two centuries have taken the Aboriginal side and who have tried to change the behaviour of their fellow Europeans. One important documentary source for Reynolds is the letters and papers of Rev Lancelot Threlkeld, who ran a mission at Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, in the early nineteenth century. Throughout his tenure, Threlkeld reported lurid tales of barbaric acts by colonists against the natives, including a "war of extirpation" he claimed had broken out in New South Wales in the mid-1820s, all of which Reynolds faithfully reproduces.

However, Threlkeld's contemporaries were not so gullible. Whenever these reports appeared, the NSW Supreme Court judge, Sir William Burton, wrote asking him the source of his evidence. Threlkeld's replies to Burton are full of evasions and dissembling. In most cases, he concedes he has no direct evidence.

He was at times caught lying, such as when he accused stockmen on Stuart Donaldson's Beardy Plains run in New England of poisoning local Aborigines with rum laced with prussic acid. "They died about the place like rats," he said. Donaldson replied that not only were no Aborigines killed, but the men named were not employed at Beardy Plains and Donaldson never even had a run in the district. Threlkeld himself later conceded his claims were "not substantiated". All of this is in Threlkeld's letters and papers, which Reynolds cites as evidence for many of his other points. But nowhere does he mention the embarrassing fact that Justice Burton and others caught Threlkeld lying, time and again.

I should point out that Burton did not question these stories because he was a friend of those who did violence to Aborigines. He was the judge who sentenced to death seven of the eleven white stockmen responsible for the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838, one of the few genuine mass killings of Aborigines of the period.

Despite the flimsy basis of the evidence about the violent predisposition of the British colonists of this era, the policy of separatism has dominated white thinking about Aborigines ever since. It justified not only the missions in the nineteenth century but also the system of state-sponsored Aboriginal reserves from 1897 until the 1970s. Some of you might remember the media and political campaign over Palm Island in 1971. This was an Aboriginal reserve off the coast of Townsville run like a jail. Its inmates had committed no crimes but were forbidden to leave. Young people could only marry with the consent of the superintendent. Palm Island breached almost every known principle of human rights and freedom. It was far worse than anything the American Civil Rights Movement had exposed in the USA. It was legalised white racism. It was part of the policy of separatism that underlay the Aboriginal reserves.

One of those responsible for Palm Island was the Reverend Ernest Gribble. He had earlier been in Western Australia and was the missionary who reported the story of the Forrest River "massacre" in the Kimberley district in 1926. As the Perth journalist, Rod Moran, has shown in his 1999 book Massacre Myth, Gribble was an emotionally disturbed man who fabricated most of the evidence on which the claims of a massacre were made. But Gribble is another of the heroes of Reynolds' book, This Whispering in Our Hearts. Reynolds treats him simply as a whistle-blower about violence towards Aborigines and fails to discuss his role in Aboriginal policy. After Forrest River, Gribble returned to North Queensland where he was appointed chaplain of the Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement. For the next 26 years, he worked with a succession of secular superintendents to entrench the penal regime that so offended public opinion when it was finally exposed in 1971. In other words, the longest-serving official on Palm Island, the one constant figure who did more than anyone else to make it a site of such overbearing racism, was Rev. Ernest Gribble. In his homage to Gribble's career in This Whispering in Our Hearts, Reynolds fails to even mention in passing that he spent more than a quarter of his life on Palm Island.

The truth is that the greatest crime that white Australians have committed against the Aborigines was to lock them up for almost 150 years, from the 1830s to the 1970s, on missions and reserves. But this was all done by people who claimed to be their friends, by those claiming to be the saviours of the Aborigines. Instead, they were incarcerating them in a system that robbed them of ambition, esteem and hope. It is the outback relics of the system of missions and reserves, now euphemistically labelled "remote communities", that today produce the shocking statistics of Aboriginal morbidity and limited life expectation that are such a national disgrace. In short, throughout our history, the people who have claimed to be the greatest friends of the Aborigines have really been their greatest enemies. And this is still true today.

In his book Aboriginal Sovereignty, Reynolds has summarised all the ideas that white radicals have put forward in the last twenty years. They want an Aboriginal state, governed by Aboriginal culture and laws, with traditional structures of society and political authority. This is all dressed up in the romantic garb of indigenous rights, cultural regeneration and the politics of the international "first peoples" movement. But in reality, it is just an updated version of the separatist policies of the nineteenth-century missionaries. It is a proposal to segregate Aborigines in both political and cultural terms from the rest of Australia. Although some Aboriginal leaders have swallowed this line, it is yet another program in which white activists tell blacks what to do.

There is, however, another ideal that has been lost in all of this: that of integration. In Australia in the 1960s, black activists and white students toured the countryside, emulating the American civil rights movement in denouncing segregation, whether it was in the workforce, hotel bars or municipal swimming pools. However, in the following decade, intellectual and political circles swept aside the concept of integration on the grounds that it was a racist form of assimilation and that black power and black autonomy were the only ways to go.

Nonetheless, despite all the talk in the media, in parliament and in the courts about land rights, sovereignty and treaties, assimilation has continued, behind the scenes, year after year. The 1996 Census revealed just how far it has come. In 1996, 73 per cent of the total indigenous population of 386,000 lived in what the Census defined as "major urban" or "other urban" centres, principally in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Darwin, Townsville and Cairns. Moreover, in these urban areas, very few Aborigines live in exclusively Aboriginal communities or ghettoes. Most are now spread throughout the suburbs. In Sydney in 1996, for instance, there were 236 people living in the highly-publicised black community of Eveleigh Street, Redfern, while there were two thousand Aborigines in Liverpool, twelve hundred in Fairfield, eleven hundred in Parramatta, one thousand in Marrickville and one thousand in Bankstown. There are more Aborigines living in the suburbs of Sydney (34,000) than in the whole state of Western Australia outside Perth (32,000). The greatest concentration of Aborigines is still in the Northern Territory where 27 per cent of the population is indigenous but, even here, the total Aboriginal population outside Darwin is only 37,000, that is, barely more than the Sydney suburbs.

This geographical distribution is confirmed by the social and cultural statistics. In 1996, in 54 per cent of Aboriginal households, one of the adults was married to, or cohabiting with, a non-Aboriginal person. When asked about their religion, 71 per cent of Aborigines professed Christianity. Of the total indigenous population, adherents of traditional Aboriginal religion accounted for a mere 2.06 per cent, that is, a total of only 7,952 individuals. The beliefs of these 7,900 people form the basis of the current romantic movement for the restitution of Aboriginal culture, despite the fact that 98 per cent of Aborigines do not share them.

In short, despite the efforts of our white intellectual elites, the great majority of Aborigines have already voted with their feet. The majority of Aborigines have demonstrated they are not interested in the goals defined for them by white historians, clergymen, politicians, rock stars, judges and journalists. Instead of an Aboriginal state or treaty, instead of customary laws and traditional culture, most of them simply want to live like the rest of us. The assimilation of the great majority of the Aboriginal population is an accomplished fact. No one, however, should hold their breath waiting for our academic historians to discuss this. It goes against the grain of everything they've told us. It demonstrates, yet again, how profoundly mistaken they've been about the relations between black and white people in the history of this country.

Just reading -- Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Black Deaths in Custody

National Report

Volume 2

It is clear in the findings that Aboriginal people face far more controls from the State than non-Aboriginal people.

A view obvious to anyone with exerience in Aboriginal communities.

On the one hand Aboriginal people have a "welfare mentality" on the other they have failed in their "separate development". Talk about wanting it both ways.

There has never been separate development. And the deliberately dysfunctional state of Aboriginal communities is a historic reality.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2601315.stm

Non-Aboriginal people leave small towns for the city in droves. But face far less bigotry.

It's a non-article, with the academic credibility of a White Power poster.

----------------------------

Windshuttle has been shown to be a pompous revisionist windbag with dodgy methodology on numerous occasions. How this old goat could consider himself qualified to speak on behalf of Aboriginal Australians and to presume to know what they want is something else again. Here's one rebuttal.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Aboriginal history: a few facts
August 25, 2003

Keith Windschuttle's take on Tasmanian Aboriginal history is dangerous and wrong, writes Robert Manne.

Within 30 years of the British arrival in Tasmania, almost exactly 200 years ago, the near-complete extinction of the indigenous people had occurred. Ever since the 1830s civilised opinion has regarded Tasmania as the site of one of the greatest tragedies in the history of British colonialism. At least in Australia, this view is now under challenge. Late last year Keith Windschuttle published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. It claimed that in the story of the empire, Tasmania was probably the place where "the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed".

Windschuttle claimed that in Tasmania only 118 Aborigines had been killed, a little over half the number of British settlers who had died violent deaths at Aboriginal hands. Such clashes arose, he claimed, not because, as all previous historians had believed, the Aborigines were defending their lands from intruders, but because of the pleasure these savage people took in the act of murder and because they had come to covet British "consumer goods".

Windschuttle attributed the large number of Aboriginal deaths, almost entirely, to introduced diseases, to the brutal disregard of Aboriginal men for their women, whom they wantonly sold into prostitution, and the maladaptation to their environment of a people so primitive that their survival for 35,000 years could rationally be explained only by an extended period of good luck.

The most unsettling aspect of the publication of Fabrication was the enthusiasm with which it was greeted by the right, including by the Prime Minister, who awarded Windschuttle a Centenary Medal for services to history. Geoffrey Blainey described Fabrication as "one of the most important and devastating books written on Australian history in recent years". There was clearly something about the song Windschuttle was singing that was both familiar and appealing to certain ears.

After the reception of Fabrication two things seemed clear to me. If Windschuttle's interpretation of the dispossession came to be widely accepted then all prospect for reconciliation - that is to say for a history that indigenous and non-indigenous Australians might share - was dead. And if the flaws in Windschuttle's interpretation were ever to be understood it could only be through the publication of a non-polemical, accessible and scholarly book, written by those who knew, through their different expertise, that what Windschuttle had produced was not a genuine history, but plausible, counterfeit coin. Whitewash, which was launched on Saturday at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, is the result of these two thoughts.

To demonstrate the falsity of Fabrication, let me consider what contributors to Whitewash show about just one of Windschuttle's most famous claims, namely that in Tasmania only 118 Aborigines were deliberately killed.

The first problem with this figure is that the scholar on whom Windschuttle is almost entirely reliant, Brian Plomley, made it absolutely clear that he believed no even remotely reliable total of Aboriginal killings could ever be reached. The reason, according to Plomley, was simple. The written record had one great "defect"; "it was concerned only with attacks by Aborigines on British settlers" and not with British attacks on Aborigines. Plomley was aware, in particular, that an unknowable number of Aborigines had been killed by stock keepers, sealers, timber cutters and escaped convicts, who had no reason to report their killings and good reason not to do so.

Windschuttle apparently believes that in Tasmania a death unreported or unrecorded is a death that did not occur. By use of a similar methodology, it would be possible to prove that virtually no sexual abuse of children occurred in Western societies before the 1970s.

There is a second reason why Windschuttle's figure cannot be taken seriously. Assume, for the sake of argument, that every time a settler shot an Aborigine some record was made. Still no remotely accurate figure of Aboriginal killings could be produced. The reason is straightforward. As Henry Reynolds points out, in violent encounters between the British and the Aborigines, while some Aborigines died on the spot, others merely suffered wounds. There is obviously no way of knowing now the ratio of wounded to killed. It is, of course, certain that a sizeable proportion of the wounded subsequently died. No settler would ever have known.

There is a third reason for rejecting Windschuttle's pseudo-precision about the 118 dead. If anyone claims to be able to arrive at an exact number of Aboriginal killings, at the very least it can be asked of them that they have examined all the published and unpublished sources that exist. Windschuttle has not, even remotely, done this work. According to James Boyce, of the 30 books on Van Diemen's Land published between 1803 and 1834, Windschuttle has consulted at most five, more likely three. Moreover he has examined almost none of the unpublished diaries or collections of letters available to scholars where records of killings or attitudes to Aborigines are likely to be found. Given his claim to omniscience, this failure to do the basic research is simply scandalous.

There is, moreover, a systemic bias in his work that distorts his calculations. As Phillip Tardiff shows in the case of the killings at Risdon Cove, and as Ian McFarlane shows in regard to the massacre at Cape Grim, where there are disagreements between witnesses to Aboriginal deaths, Windschuttle invariably accepts the witnesses who supply the lower figure, even where their evidence is less plausible, or where they have far greater motive to lie.

By now I hope it is clear that Windschuttle's claim - about Tasmania as the place where, in the history of British colonialism, the least indigenous blood was shed - is fatally flawed. Yet what must be stressed is that this is only one of a dozen or more issues of equal importance that are exposed by the writers in Whitewash.

When the editing of Whitewash was complete, I handed the manuscript to John Hirst, the pre-eminent political historian of Australia from foundation to Federation. I handed it to him with a certain trepidation because, I think it fair to say, he is now a historian of somewhat conservative disposition. He responded to my request for a comment on Windschuttle with the following words: "The best essays in this book provide a complete refutation of his central claims."

I know that Whitewash will not convince those ideologues for whom Windschuttle has become a champion in a broader cultural war. I hope, however, for the sake of the nation, that it will convince those many open-minded conservative Australians, who might initially have been misled by the self-confidence of Windschuttle's prose and the chorus of right-wing praise.

I hope they might even come to see that his book about the tragedy in Tasmania is not only one of the most pitiless ever written about the Australian experience but also one of the most empirically absurd.

Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University and the editor of Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Black Inc, 2003).