Aboriginal Australians: A History since 1788

Abstract

The urban populations were here to stay. Since the 1970s self-identification and its implications have become critical in the suburbs as much to other Aborigines as to everyone else. The 1976 Land Rights Act (NT), and the Mabo, Yorta Yorta and Wik cases are dealt with extensively and fairly and will be an excellent starting point for further study. Describing Noel Pearson as on the Left on land rights, but on the Right when claiming that welfare dependency had reached 'genocidai proportions', illustrates how the old left-right dichotomy can be a decidedly unhelpful tool of analysis in Indigenous affairs, though ideologues of every persuasion try to make it so.

Aboriginal Australians: A History since 1788 by Richard Broome, vi + 400 pp, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2010, Fourth edition, ISBN 9781742370514 (pbk), $35.00.

The first part of the book, now 30 years old, shows signs of age. Broome quotes Memmi and Fanon; Aboriginal warriors are 'brave' while Army officers merely 'ape' the gentry of England in building villas and estates. Aboriginal women are not given much credit for initiating or continuing love matches with the settlers, mere 'targets for the men's libidos'. When squatters were infuriated by Aboriginal sheep theft, we are reminded that this was the same emotion felt by Indigenous owners when pushed off their land.

All these are interesting facets of changing Indigenous historiography rather than an approach to be condemned: most of us wrote like this in the 1980s, with, I hope, good reason. But later research has revealed many local differences, or other aspects of well known events, which can now be explored. Fred Cahir in his Black Gold (ANU E Press, 2012) found that one of the most significant aspects of the Victorian goldrushes was the way in which the dispossessed people took economic advantage of the many thousands of not necessarily hostile whites in the clan lands. Rachel Perkins' first instalment of the SBS series First Australians stressed the ongoing constructive relationship between the Suttor family and Windradyne, and later Wiradjuri people, to juxtapose beside the Bathurst massacres of 1824. Of course, Broome is often attentive to these changing attitudes as well as to the new research findings. On page 17 he notes that the Bass Strait sealers 'generally mistreated' their women. On page 71, in what may have been a paragraph inserted later, he writes 'However, it was never that simple. Some women forged a life with the men to whom they bore children and they refused to be rescued. ... When sealing became unsustainable ... they showed the white sealer men how to live off the land, and to fashion a new industry of catching mutton birds'. Indeed. A fair judgement of the northern pastoral industry from 2013 would be that uncontrolled, sporadic and deadly violence was very much more common that most Australian realise, but also that the safe havens where fugitives from murdering pastoralists could rush to were also more common.

It is true that we have not, by any means, heard the last word on frontier killings, mission and reserve administrative violence, or the numbers of stolen children (all still, to a greater or lesser extent, underestimated) but rather than continue to revise old editions, I think it would better now to start again. Any new approach surely will have to be comparative, not just to the old war-horses of Canada and New Zealand, but will consider colonisation in South America and the Pacific. Conversely, there will be greater reference to local area studies like Goodall and Cadzow's powerful Rivers and Resilience (UNSW Press, 2009), in making allowance for the idea that most Aboriginal people were everywhere, and all the time, though generally unobserved: not resistors, not victims, not agents, not heroes, not turncoats - just people getting on with their lives as best they could. Thirdly, a new history will confront urban history. Most Aborigines now live in the big cities. More than historians realised, they never left, rather, numbers began to increase since at least the 1920s. We need to see the changes historically: the Redfern riots of the 1970s can be said to parallel the disturbances in country towns for most of the twentieth century as thousands of the homeless, jobless or evicted moved from unsafe towns to what they thought were safe towns. Swelling numbers of town campers ensured that the new havens quickly became unsafe, and the moves continued. By 1960 welfare rations were becoming scarce, jobs evaporating and rural health declining. The capital cities were the last hope: Aboriginal numbers in favoured suburbs skyrocketed, and state governments and police reacted in the way that the town councils had always done. The urban populations were here to stay.

Since the 1970s self-identification and its implications have become critical in the suburbs as much to other Aborigines as to everyone else. The last times when Aboriginal people could identify with each other in a friendly fashion irrespective, or ignorant, of clan affiliations while keeping their identity secret from urban whites, was about 1980. The last time in the schools was perhaps 1969, when the Aboriginal Study Grants Scheme began to identify Aboriginal children, often with adverse consequences from other students and staff. Today, who identifies and on what basis, and from what time and from which family, is the central urban question upon which all other historical discussion turns. And the cities are where most Aboriginal people live.

Nevertheless Broome's study will remain important. He is right not to pull any punches when he writes 'Life under Aborigines Protection Boards could be like a police state, although most Boards never had sufficient resources to achieve their full power.' He traces the foundations of the Legal, Housing and Health Services and is not afraid to spell out where Aboriginal greed, as well as inexperience sometimes brought individual associations to ruin. The 1976 Land Rights Act (NT), and the Mabo, Yorta Yorta and Wik cases are dealt with extensively and fairly and will be an excellent starting point for further study. Sometimes his enthusiasms get the better of him: while Sir William Deane is 'that great Australian', his greatest invective is reserved for John Howard. This is distracting, given that presumably one aim of the book is to win over the doubters. Howard himself confessed to being 'an artefact of who I am and the time in which I grew up'; moreover Broome constantly stresses, and rightly, the long and ineradicable years of physical and mental colonisation from which nobody, on either side, could easily escape.

There are a few issues that I take issue with. I do not agree with Broome's summation of the cattle industry as not one of slavery (according to a definition of an African American scholar) but arguably 'colonised labour'. He quotes the Berndts' End of an Era (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987), without coming to what seems to me to be the necessary conclusion that on some of the Vestey stations at least, life was worse than slavery: it was virtually unendurable both physically and emotionally. That some retired ringers may still look back at 'cattle times' with affection is beside the point - so do some East Germans long for the old days; moreover, women who did not work with cattle (and in the Northern Territory there were many) had a very much rougher time of it when confined to the stations. Describing Noel Pearson as on the Left on land rights, but on the Right when claiming that welfare dependency had reached 'genocidai proportions', illustrates how the old left-right dichotomy can be a decidedly unhelpful tool of analysis in Indigenous affairs, though ideologues of every persuasion try to make it so. The book, completed a year after Rudd's apology, ends on what has turned out to be an unwarrantedly hopeful note. The abuse that Aboriginal children, as well as tens of thousands of others, suffered as revealed in the 'Forgotten Australians' report only makes more painful the absence of financial compensation. 'We're stuck with each other and we're stuck with our history' writes Bunurong historian Bruce Pascoe. That seems to be a better summary from the viewpoint of 2013.

The book, rather than simply, in parts, showing its age, reveals the changing times and circumstances in which Indigenous history is interpreted. Broome, one of the country's foremost historians of Aboriginal Australia, has produced an important and enduring work.

Peter Read

University of Sydney