Cultural Amnesia In Queensland: A Bicentenary Missed
In December, 1824, NSW Governor Thomas Brisbane Arrived at Moreton Bay
He came to inspect the new Moreton Bay Penal Colony he was largely responsible for establishing.
The Queensland state government ignored its own 200th birthday. Jubilees like this were high-profile in the recent past. The year-long celebrations of the centenary of Australian Federation in 2001 was a brilliantly enriching exercise.
These events were the conception of what would become Queensland and its capital, Brisbane.
Thanks to local history groups, there were two low-profile events :
The Queensland State Government is ignoring the milestone, believing it to be a political hot potato. This is cowardice and will only result in cultural amnesia. It undermines the culture of both Aborigines and British-descent Australians. Multiculturalism is used to justify this but it is adding to the destruction of Australian culture and leading people away from these issues. The result is materialistic, banal pursuits and shallow celebrations, such as New Year’s Day and consumerist Christmases, rather than engaging in a creative cultural evolution. We have overloaded ourselves with issues. A fascinating history and the most interesting of learnings is being forgotten.
Lest We Forget
That the Australian national project exceeds all expectations is beyond doubt. What member of the squattocracy could have imagined our towering cities? It is compelling and irresistible and every Australian, including the descendants of Aborigines, today enjoy its fruits. Sadly, those fruits are very unfairly distributed.
Reckoning With The Past
There is now a good record of the conflicts between Aborigines and the British. Here, I want to look at the numerous accounts that the earliest interactions between Indigenous people and the new arrivals started off amicably, in order to investigate how it went wrong, why and what we can learn from it, if anything.
There were some good relations with the Aborigines even after it was apparent the colonists had come to stay. For example, there was a free exchange (gifting) of fish and fodder for blankets and haircuts at the Pilot Station a Pulan Pulan, now known as Amity on Stradbroke Island. Official orders for government stores from Sydney and Macquarie included provisions to keep this exchange up. Similar exchanges occurred in the early days of old Sydney Town.
However, when the settlers’ first crop of corn ripened, ready for harvest, the Aborigines helped themselves to it (Mamie O’Keefe, The Moreton Bay penal settlement. 1974). This angered the colonists and relations deteriorated from there on. There were other clash points such as competition for the best dwelling locations and how individuals conducted themselves. Records show relations with the ‘croppers’ (farmer/convicts) were much better than with the ‘diamonds’ (soldiers) as the Aborigines called them. ( Quandamoooka p. 7 Redlands Coast Timelines.) However, let’s investigate just one of these points — agriculture — for hindsight that we might gain from.
Agriculture As a Crucible
Why was agriculture a crucible in relations between Aborigines and the British? Agriculture increases the supply of food per square meter, so why didn’t it HELP relations?
Nature provides for hunter-gatherers. The Aborigines were healthy and robust according to accounts of the colonists themselves. They were living well, within the limitations of the environment and their technology. There were about 800,000 of them across the continent. There are many accounts from the colonists that they were content and wanted for little.
Even so, the Aborigines were nomadic because they knew the pickings would get slim if they didn’t. Over thousands of years, they also learnt how to alter the environment to increase their supply of food. For example, they used fire to clear woodland and broaden fields to increase the population of their prey; kangaroos.
The British were in an unfamiliar land trying to feed themselves in the way they were accustomed, in order to establish all the advantages of an agricultural settlement. They often very nearly starved. It didn’t take much for competition over resources to ensue and deteriorate into a fight, especially as the British population increased.
Altering the environment with burning techniques is one thing, but, it is another matter to grow a monocrop of corn in neat rows. Is it fair to say the Aborigines didn’t stop to think of how much work it took the settlers to plant a crop?
In history, the Agricultural Revolution only took hold where multiple conditions made it easy; moderate climate and fertile river plains at crossroads of diverse human groups. The Australian continent didn’t (and does’nt) have those conditions in much abundance. Agriculture brought hardship, social stratification and power over the environment and neighboring tribes. It enabled planning and development. Intercontinental transport only ended Australia’s isolation nearly eight millennia after the earliest civlizations arose in Mesopotamia. Finally it became a crossroad of sorts. When the British arrived in Australia, it was the meeting of a stone age people and the first civilization on the cusp of the industrial revolution. They couldn’t have been more different in development. In some ways it is remarkable it went as well as it did, compared to earlier clashes, such as the Mongols in Europe.
Lessons From History
However, the British were intent on expanding their Empire. The modern expression of this is economic growth. One can understand the fire they must have had in their bellies when looking at their achievement today. John Batman and John Pascoe Falkner (his business rival in the Port Phillip Association, who out-lived Batman and did far more to establish Melbourne) would look in disbelief at the sheer enormity of Melbourne. But it is equal to the unrelenting, frenzied drive they had to build, build, build. That drive is alive today in those who wield the most influence amongst our policy-makers.
Two hundred years ago, the British presumptuously expected to ‘bring civilization to the Aborigines’, which, as we can see today, they did — at great cost to them and the natural environment. The transformation of the continent is extraordinary, I don’t think there is a soul who would want to turn the clock back and live without the conveniences and life-saving science and technology we have now. But by revisiting the past, what can we learn from it, that we can put into practice today?
The plot of James Cameron’s 2009 movie exemplifies the history of colonization repeating itself.
In 2154, Earth suffers from resource exhaustion and ecological collapse. The Resources Development Administration (RDA) mines the valuable mineral unobtanium on Pandora, a lush habitable moon orbiting a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora, whose atmosphere is inhospitable to humans, is inhabited by the Na’vi, 10-foot-tall (3.0 m), blue-skinned, sapient humanoids that live in harmony with nature.
It is encouraging to see Hollywood blockbusters with plot lines like this. More than ever before movies have overpopulation and environmental collapse in their theme: Kingsman (2014) and Inferno (2016), to name just two.
Principles of Good Trade
History shows us that in our interactions with other people and groups of people, to be successful in producing an outcome of mutual benefit, we need to identify the needs that can be met. Trade has long served this purpose and seen enormous advances and development for the groups involved. Sometimes those exchanges have been very lop-sided, but all things being equal, free trade done fairly has been good for humanity.
What were the needs of the Aborigines? There weren’t many. Nearly 100 years before the First Fleet arrived, Makasar fishermen from Sulawesi (Indonesia) were visiting the coast Arnhem Land to collect sea cucumbers. The National Museum Australia documents this as Aborigines doing ‘ Trade with the Makasar ‘, but if they had anything the Makasar wanted, there is no mention of it. There was interaction, because the Makasar spent five months on the beaches fishing, gutting, cooking and drying the sea cucumbers for transport to later trade with the Chinese, who valued them as food and an aphrodisiac. The Aborigines gained some language, calico, tobacco, pipes and more importantly metal blades, but there appears to be nothing the Makasars took with them when they departed except sea cucumbers. Some say small pox was also introduced via this route. Perhaps the local tribes allowed the visitors to fish and in return, the Makasar maintained good relations with gifts.
The British also coveted the resources the Aborigines had and similarly sought to maintain good relations by gift-swapping. However, as they were here to stay and didn’t know the land, the Aborigines had something they initially and temporarily valued; a food supply. The Aborigines’ daily catch of fish and game was appreciated. Today, we appreciate their intricate knowledge of Australia’s ecology far better and it is rightly portrayed as something that was overlooked. However, it has yet to penetrate mainstream economics. The Aborigines’ sustainable lifestyle is sometimes touted as the paragon of virtue. This assumes they had the technical means to overuse their environment, but chose not to do it. Of course they didn’t. They were constrained by both their technology and environment. However, today we have that technology and we have a choice. So far, we have chosen to exceed the continent’s carrying capacity, as evidenced by the deteriorating State of the Environment (2023) and we continue to do so. The lauding of Aboriginal ecological knowledge is just so much sustainababble.
There is clear evidence that the British appreciated how strong and healthy the Aborigines were and that is was because they knew how to harvest the land so well. Official records of the aristocratic class show this and convicts knew it, too. William Buckley, a British convict, lived with the Wallarranga tribe near present day Barwon Heads, Victoria, from 1803 to 1835. Buckley learnt from the Wallarranga how to fish and hunt and live well off the land — well enough to live alone for long periods. He assimilated, learnt their language and forgot English. Nevertheless, Buckley abandoned that existence and reassimilated into colonial life when John Batman arrived at Port Phillip. The pull of civilization is irresistible.
Sadly, testimonies, such as The Adventures of William Buckley, are few and far between. Many convicts absconded into the bush and re-emerged after months living with Aborigines and yet only a few stories have survived. ( The runaway convicts of Moreton Bay, by Mamie O’Keefe, 1976.)
Incidentally, I grew up spending weekends at Barwon Heads. I have only just learnt it was just a few kilometers from William Buckley’s cave where he spent so much time. I’m astounded at how little I know my own culture and history and how rich it is. My family wasn’t exceptional and neither is Australian society, it seems, but we are unique (as all peoples are) and we should relish our culture.
To the British, the Aborigines were sitting on a golden egg, naive to its full potential, just as the Na’vi Home Tree sat on a big fat deposit of Unobtainium. The Nauru Islanders sat on a huge pot of phosphate, sold it, became the wealthiest per capita citizens in the world for a brief period and are now among the sickest, most obese people in the Pacific. Today, indigenous tribes sit on valuable mineral reserves in Western New Guinea. These are cautionary tales.
The vast developmental gap between the British and Aborigines presented huge challenges for trade. But they did find some; haircuts and blankets were popular. Haircuts were popular because nits and lice were a great irritation to the Aborigines. They also found that many agricultural crops were popular, including corn and (sadly) sugar, flour and rum.
The settlers didn’t teach the Aborigines how to produce scissors, blankets and crops because there wasn’t time.
The Moreton Bay settlement was initially a penal colony for the worst offenders. British aristocrats exploited, criminalized and conscripted their working class into the business of building up the Empire. Today, economic growth is powered by the same selfish opportunism of the richest elites and the poorest elite aspirants. Both feed the wealth pump. Both are impatient for ever more.
Agriculture was a crucible between Aborigines and the British rather than a catalyst for good trade because of impatience. It was the nexus of material struggle because of impatience.
Steady As She Goes
We now live in a world of abundance, but many still struggle because we have a distribution problem. We also have an unhealthy, lineal production — consumption — pollution pattern that undermines our abundance. We are impatient for gratification and impatient with Nature’s regenerative processes.
Hindsight is instructive and yet ignorance of the limited natural carrying capacity of this land seems to be as widespread now as it was two hundred years ago. The limits to growth are apparent from the damage economic growth is doing to our beautiful continent and people. When will the economy ever be big enough? If we slow down we will find contentment in stability. Curb your selfish opportunism and look for mutually beneficial ways forward. When growth is a qualitative creature rather than a quantitative animal, we see more benefits.
Originally published at http://equanimity.blog on January 7, 2025.
