Hi David,

I'm a bit sceptical about oral accounts of people being stopped from speaking their languages: I suspect that these are retro-explanations for people not using their languages, explanations which satisfy the present-day narrative.

Your suggestion: "The pre-Darwin scientific consensus was that Aborigines were not human but another species so killing them was not the same as killing humans. Missionaries taking their cue from the Bible thought that Aborigines were descended from Adam and Eve and were fully human. Missionaries were able to save some Aborigines from slaughter.... "

is perhaps not accurate: the rights of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers to use the land as they always had done was recognised from the outset: " .... the right to occupy or enjoy ..... " and was written into pastoral leases, at least in South Australia, from 1851. The law still stands. Aboriginal people were declared to be British subjects from the outset, although clearly this was difficult to apply for people out beyond settlement. If anything, courts were pretty lenient towards Aboriginal offences, for example, wife-killing: no Aboriginal man was hanged (the automatic penalty for whites) for killing their wives - it was conceded that this was a cultural practice: so men usually did five or six years instead, sometimes much less. The last Aboriginal executed in SA was hanged in 1862; the last white in 1964.

When voting was available for any male over 21, that right was extended to Aboriginal men, at least here in South Australia. When the vote was extended to women in South Australia over 21 in 1894, Aboriginal women could vote as well.

So the story is much more complex than a simple 'perception of non-human status etc.' Colonial authorities were caught in a morass of differing cultural practices, impractical policies and unexpected realities on the ground. The

[TBC]

[continued]

one-man 'Department', the 'Aborigines' Department' here in SA, i.e. the Protector, was going flat out to get rations to up to 75 depots, to give out boats and guns and oversee land leases to Aboriginal people, escorting Aboriginal people to hospital and hostels when they came to town, getting people out of jail and issuing free passes to people on public transport. They weren't angels, I suppose, but they didn't spend their waking hours plotting how to destroy Aboriginal people, quite the reverse.

And the missionaries - those most practical of people - were in the forefront of innovation, by the way.

Cheers,

Joe

PS. I think that's my fourth post :(

Dear Joe,

You wrote: " the rights of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers to use the land as they always had done was recognised from the outset: " .... the right to occupy or enjoy ..... " and was written into pastoral leases, at least in South Australia, from 1851. The law still stands."

You are right. It has been written into the law. However, being written into law means little unless the law is enforced. In general pastoral leases were pretty much the same as ownership since local authorities almost invariably followed the wishes of the leaseholder. In most cases the Aborigines were kept off the leaseholder's land unless they were working as stockmen or in other functions.

Hi David,

Pastoralists have needed, and used, Aboriginal labour from the beginning. This is one reason why, so often, they offered to host ration stations: able-bodied men (women were usually looking after children) couldn't get rations, so they had to either hunt or fish or gather food, OR work for the local pastoralist. One pastoralist kept a ration depot going for nearly forty years.

If anything, the ration system 'drove' people off the land, from the earliest days: they could still use the land as customary, but preferred getting rations. So what happens to land on which nobody has hunted or gathered for decades ? It gets turned from pastoral land to farm land.

As for being driven off pastoral properties, apart from the note in the first paragraph, there do not seem to be verifiable records of that happening, at least in SA. Of course, out beyond the remit of the government (and missionaries), who knows what was happening ? But asseritur gratis, negatur gratis: assertions need evidence. Perhaps the Protector knew more than only what turned up in his correspondence, but again: assertion needs evidence.

There was one case in 1876 when a missionary complained that a new pastoralist was going to drive Aboriginal people off his property, Cowarie. The Protector reminded that bloke of the section in his lease document and a little while later, Cowarie was hosting a ration station.

That was SA. Queensland didn't have anything like a ration system for many decades - during droughts, people used to come across the border to ration depots in SA. The SA Protector complained to the Queensland Chief Protector about the cost of it, in about 1897 during that eight-year drought.

Someone should write a paper about the impact of ration depots during droughts on Aboriginal population.

And of course, Queensland seems to have had a far more violent history than SA. What went on out beyond government control needs renewed documentation and forensic explorations, to support assertions of massacres and brutality.

Joe

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Religion and Myth

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In « The Oxford Companion to World Mythology » (2005), David Leeming, who holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, writes :

« All cultures and religions have sacred stories that the common sense of people in other cultures and religions recognize as myths … All of these stories are definable as myths because they contain events that contradict both our intellectual and physical experience of reality. But since stories of the ancient Hebrews and Jesus are central to “our” monotheistic religions, we tend to resist labelling them as myths. Religious people have always assumed that their sacred stories are both unique and different from myths. Not only the rabbi, the imam, and the priest, but the Hindu holy man, the Navajo shaman, and the Dogon animist will invariably say that the stories of his or her religion are in many cases historical and certainly the vessels of eternal truth …

Twentieth-century Western totalitarianism in its various forms owed much to the messianic and utopian aspects central to the Judeo-Christian tradition and created de facto religious systems, complete with ritual and dogma to support the artificially created myths in question. Communism, dominated by the “trinity” of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, promised a utopia based on a communal bonding that would not have surprised or offended early Christians. Military parades before the assembled leaders on the balcony above Red Square took on the aura of religious ritual. In China the cult of Mao included myths of leader’s almost superhuman intellectual and physical power. In Hitler’s Germany, too, the Führer was glorified as a culture hero, and the justification for German dominance owed much to ancient myths such as those contained in the “Niebelungenlied” and the operas of Wagner. In mass meetings surrounded by the mythic symbols of national symbolism the Hitler Youth expressed devotion to their hero in a style that suggested religious fanaticism rather than political loyalty. »

That some of us place our faith in these myths, for whatever reason, is a personal matter. We are free to do so.

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If you see - as I do - religion as the “elephant” studied by the “six blind men“: a psychologist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, an evolutionist a philosopher, an ethicist, a historian (sorry, that makes seven) , who all can agree that there indeed is a phenomenon called religion but have no idea what it actually is, what is its purpose or why it is there at all, then you can add the comparative literalist David Leeming as the eighth “blind man”.