School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBroken promises: Aboriginal education in south-eastern Australia, 1837-1937( 2008)This thesis is a comparative study of the education of Aboriginal children from 1837-1937 in the colonies (later states) of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, which together form the south-eastern, and most heavily settled, portion of the Australian continent. It explores early missionary education, the consolidation of colonial authorities' control over schools and the shift to government-run education and training for Aboriginal children of mixed-descent in particular, as part of wider ‘assimilation’ programs. It also pays attention to Aboriginal responses to, protests about, and demands for education throughout this period of rapid change. The thesis demonstrates that missionary, colonial and government attempts to educate Aboriginal people in the south-east constituted an attempt to transform Aboriginal people's subjectivity to suit various aims: for conversion to Christianity, for colonial control, or for training for ‘useful’ purposes. The thesis argues, however, that these attempts constituted a ‘broken promise’ to Aboriginal people. The promise was, that once educated, Aboriginal people might join and participate in colonial society. Instead, they were relegated to its economic and geographical fringes, dispossessed as settlers spread across their land and accorded only liminal positions in the settler-colonies and later, states of the Australian Commonwealth. Temporally, this thesis is bound by two government reports which were influential in the development of colonial and state governance of Aboriginal people. The first is the 1837 British Parliament's Select Committee on Aborigines: British Settlements report; the second, published exactly one hundred years later, is the Australian intergovernmental Aboriginal Welfare Initial Conference of State Aboriginal Authorities of 1937. The thesis also makes use of extensive missionary and government archival material from the south-east. As the first multi-state Aboriginal education history, this thesis offers new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-Aboriginal relations in Australia as well as interrogating the reasons for the chasm between rhetoric and reality in Aboriginal welfare policy. It places this study within a broader transimperial and transnational framework of colonialism, empire and the emergence of the modern nation-state, demonstrating that the education of Aboriginal children was not a single project with a single aim. Rather, it constituted a multitude of approaches, sometimes disparate, formed in response to a broad rubric of colonisation and empire as well as local specificities and situations. In doing this, the thesis engages with the significant methodological challenge of historicising post-contact Aboriginal education, an aspect of the colonial project which was, for Aboriginal people in the south-east, both destructive and empowering, sometimes simultaneously.
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ItemShadows on the landscape: memorial aspects of the Great Ocean Road( 1999)Victoria's commemorative landscape is made up of a series of natural and constructed features comprising roads, bridges, memorial sculptures, avenues of honour, coastal fortifications and military memorabilia, yet their memorializing function is largely unrecognized by the general population. Some of these memorials have been linked with the scenic landscape and have become privileged as tourist sites. Their original meanings, however, have been blurred by twentieth century progress. This thesis examines one component of Australia's memorial landscape, the Great Ocean Road in South West Victoria, and questions whether there is a parallel between the Western concept of a memorial landscape and the notions of spirituality in the land which are a primary component of the belief structure of indigenous peoples. This leads to an examination of the local geographical landscape in relation to Aboriginal massacre sites, and a questioning of the congruence between such sites and the now memorialized battlefields of World War 1. Chapter One deals with the history of the Great Ocean Road and traces its development and construction from 1916 to 1932. Chapter Two examines the place of the Great Ocean Road in the overall scheme of post World War 1 memorialization, and questions why its original function has been so little recognized by the community. Chapter Three looks at the complex relationships between the physical and spiritual elements of the land as perceived by Aboriginal culture, investigates the Aboriginal massacre sites within close proximity to the Great Ocean Road, and questions why no memorials have been raised to Aborigines who died defending their land. The theoretical base of the thesis is supported by the notion that landscape is socially and culturally determined, and that place can be invested with spiritual potency. Finally, it is argued that for a place to retain its spiritual strength, regardless of the culture, the spiritual content must be recognized, ritualized and constantly refreshed within the culture.
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ItemColonizing concepts of Aboriginal rights in land in Port Phillip and South Australia in the 1830s( 2002)At a time when Anglo-Australian law purports to recognize Indigenous systems of land ownership through the doctrine of 'native title', it is pertinent to examine previous discourses of 'recognition' and their impact within the process of colonization. As Patrick Wolfe points out, the uncompensated Indigenous owner presents a discomforting obstacle to non-Indigenous claims over land and national belonging in Australia. Dealing with the 'problem' of the uncompensated Indigenous owner was therefore an important element of the colonization process in colonies of settlement such as South Australia and Port Phillip. While Some resolution of the outstanding 'rights of the Aborigines' was necessary for the completion of colonization, to enable the colonizers to 'settle', it also threatened to undo or prevent colonization, demanding a return of the resources appropriated during colonization. Through the techniques observed in this thesis, colonizers constantly balanced these two actions. Deborah Bird Rose describes these twin operations as the left and right hands of conquest: …the right hand of conquest is conceptualised as beneficent: it brings productivity, growth and civilisation where these had not existed before, transforming nature into culture.. . Indigenous Australia was not, and is not now, a series of absences ... The task of the left hand of conquest is to erase all this specit1c life. The left hand creates the tabula rasa which the right hand will then transform into growth and civilisation ... Finally, there is inevitably a great disjunction between the concept of progress, and the practice of destruction. There are many strategies whereby the right hand can deny what the left hand is doing. This thesis observes three discourses through which colonizers managed this dual task of ‘protectin’ Aboriginal rights and peoples while also appropriating Aboriginal lands - discourses of legal rights, econOl11ic concepts of ‘property’ and humanitarian obligation. The very delineation of these three discourses operated as an exercise of power by which colonizers c1aiIned to 'manage' Aboriginal rights in land while excluding Indigenous voices. The lines of distinction between these discourses - between 'ancient occupation' and 'proprietary right to the Soil, between 'a plain and sacred right' and 'some portion of their own land, - were the points at which colonizers strategically denied Indigenous systems of law as sovereign entities and Indigenous people as land-owning subjects.
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ItemSticking to the land: a history of exclusion on Kangaroo Island, 1827-1996( 1996)In 1827, English ex-sailor Nathaniel Walles (Nat) Thomas and Aboriginal Tasmanian Betty were living at Antechamber Bay, in what later became the Hundred of Dudley, Kangaroo Island. They were among the several pre-colonial settlers who had come through the Bass Strait opened up by sealing and whaling industries from the turn of the nineteenth century. When the South Australia Company landed on Kangaroo Island in 1836, there were approximately five Tasmanian Aboriginal men and eight European men, some of whom, like Nat, had small farms of crops and stock. Nat and Betty appear to have been the only parents within this population of 1836 and the only Kangaroo Island pre-colonists to whom the descendants can trace their genealogies today. Their two surviving children, Mary born 1833 and Hannah born c.1839, married South Australia Company settlers; Mary married William Seymour in 1849 and Hannah married Thomas Simpson in 1860. Mary and William remained living near Nat Thomas at Antechamber Bay with their son and two daughters. William worked as a third keeper at the near-by Sturt Lighthouse, Cape Willoughby from 1852-1858. By 1885, however, Mary, by then widowed, moved to Penneshaw. There her son Joseph, a stone-mason, was married and had three daughters, whilst her eldest daughter Emma was married to local labourer Frank Barrett and had four sons and two daughters. The year they married, Hannah and Thomas took up a small lease of land near Penneshaw, known pre-1883 as Hog Bay, and Thomas, previously a Lincolnshire butcher, became the district postmaster. They had seven surviving sons and three daughters. At the age of nineteen, their eldest son, Nathaniel, inherited fifty-one acres of freehold land from his grandfather on his death in 1879. He and his brothers William, Thomas and Stephen worked on increasing this holding and, by 1893, were partners in over eleven thousand acres of land spanning south from Antechamber Bay to Cape Hart. Stephen Simpson also owned one hundred and eighty acres of suburban blocks in Sapphiretown, a township further west, and a forty acre section in Penneshaw where he lived. Nathaniel was a Justice of the Peace and he and his brothers Thomas and William councillors for the District of Dudly. The Simpsons had become an established family; they had houses, land and positions of influence. They could not, however, marry into the other established families. The colonial pastoralist families who had taken up leases on the Hundred of Dudley, predominantly in the 1850’s and 60’s found the pre-colonial descendants unacceptable on the grounds of their Aboriginal ancestry. Having met the colonial families on every other front- acreage, power and respectability-marriage; the mixing of black and white blood, proved the ultimate boundary the pre-colonial descendants could not penetrate. Chapter two discusses the marital frontier between colonised and coloniser, a barrier which was suppressed in daily and mundane interaction but tacitly expressed in forbidden or broken engagements. As one colonial descendant explained, “no-one would make a fuss until you start [sic] to talk of marrying one’. It was not that the second and particularly third or filial pre-colonial looked black; it was that they carried a contaminant gene. Interviews with colonial descendants expose that there was fear that mixed blood would create the “throw-back”. Far less fantastic, however, was the feat that marriage into an Aboriginal pre-colonial descendant family would lead to their own exclusion. While blood expresses the basic contamination, however, it only operates within a place. When the third and filial generation of pre-colonial descendants left Kangaroo Island for the mainland, where their ancestry was not known, they were able to marry. It is, therefore, evident that race is defined not only genetically, but by place, a notion more fully developed in the discussions of pre-colonial descendants ownership and loss of land in chapter one.
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ItemBrushing against the grain: excavating for aboriginal-European interaction on the colonial frontier in Western Victoria, Australia( 2000)This thesis demonstrates the possibility and value of a postcolonial archaeology of the contact period in Australia. To date, the major obstacle confronting Australian contact archaeology has been the inability to systematically locate contact sites. In order to overcome this difficultly, a model for contact period site location is developed for the pastoral frontier of western Victoria. Outstations (shepherd’s huts) are presented as a crucial resource for archaeologists seeking windows into the early contact period. These humble structures were the locus of a wide variety of Aboriginal-European interactions, ranging from violence to friendship, and functioned as a tangible incarnation of the frontier. Excavation of one of these structures (Campbell’s Outstation) is described with results confirming the presence of Aboriginal people around this structure during contact times. These results are compared with the excavations at two other frontier sites – a fringe camp (Carr’s Plain Mound) and a refuge site (Kinghorn 12 Stone Hut Site). Residue analysis of glass artefacts from all three sites furnishes details of indigenous technological and subsistence practices previously inaccessible to archaeological research. These analyses also provide the methodological breakthrough to authenticate the Aboriginality of these sites. The results of these analyses indicate the need for a reorientation in the ways archaeologists in Australia have approached the Aboriginal manufacture and utilisation of glass artefacts. Contact archaeologists must face the fact that many Aboriginal glass artefacts are no more than non-retouched shards. As such, it is argued that a whole range of sites previously unconsidered may well be Aboriginal sites of the contact period. The analysis of these three sites demonstrates the unique ability of archaeology to penetrate beyond the epistemological limit of the historical record and access aspects of the colonised’s life that are rarely if ever preserved. In particular, archaeological research forcefully highlights the need to consider ‘everyday resistance’ in our rewriting of the Australian past. Archaeology, it is suggested, can play a crucial role in the postcolonial endeavour to retrieve the effaced voice of the subaltern.
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ItemGood men and true: the Aboriginal police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853( 1986)Good men and true is the phrase used by the Commandant of the 1842 Corps of Native Police in summing up for Superintendent LaTrobe the outcome of the first experimental expedition of the Corps to the Western District. It is the age-old Service accolade, bespeaking praise and affection and pride in the troops under the command. This is a history of those men. Since Stanner wrote over twenty years ago that the Aborigines had been left out of Australian history, much has been written about them. Perhaps impelled by emergent black nationalism, maybe running parallel with it, this generation of writing about the Australian past has been useful and necessary in raising Australian consciousness to the extent necessary to take seriously the Aboriginal part of our joint past. To a large extent though, it has been an ethnocentric discussion of white behaviour towards Aborigines producing the Aboriginal people as subjects who seem to stand stock still, as one reviewer has said, and allow things to happen to them. It has produced the cultural perception of past and dead Aboriginal people as mainly victims, or in a few exceptional cases as heroic figures of resistance. Broome's observation about one chapter in one book is capable of general extension - we have replaced an earlier historical falsehood of a non-violent frontier with a new stereotype of a violent one. It could be added - with clearly defined and allocated roles, and moral evaluation thrown in for good measure. There is much truth in these histories, but even taken together, they do not encompass truth: they do not take account of positive Aboriginal choices. Our models of explanation, Stanner wrote, have been based either on the dramatic secondary causes - violence, disease, neglect, prejudice, or on the structure of Aboriginal society or both, but they have not taken into account Aboriginal initiatives towards European society, their curiosity, their zest for living, their choices, their creations. This study concerns itself with one of their choices - it is a history of co-operation, an Aboriginal success story. Why it has not been told before is puzzling: a cursory glance at the secondary section of the Bibliography (which is select, noting only those works which specifically mention the Corps) is sufficient to demonstrate a widespread awareness in the past of the Native Police Corps of the Port Phillip District. Yet out of all those passing mentions, it could scarcely be said that our knowledge has been advanced; five attempts only have been made to constitute the Corps as a subject of knowledge, and none to understand the men. Spender's question must at least be asked here, though it cannot be answered - "Why do we know so little about ... blacks for example, and why is so much of what we do know about them false, negative or derogatory. Who has made this knowledge, on what basis, and for what reasons?” Shades of Foucault. The explanatory processes used by white historians (which black historians reject) still draw their inspiration from Elkin's work. The story of Aboriginal co-operation in policing resembles to some extent the adaptive response which Elkin has described as intelligent parasitism. It was more though than that. Parasitism, however intelligent might well be an accurate description of the actions of men who choose a way of life for what they can get out of it, and abandon it when they get a better offer; or simply abandon it when its attractions dim, but it does not come anywhere near explaining in this particular instance the evident bonds of affection and loyalty which developed between the men who joined and their European officers. In this story, feelings matter. The Government's initial aim in setting up a Native Police Corps in the Port Phillip District was two-fold: it wanted a policing force to deal with bushrangers, and at the same time, it hoped to "civilise" the men of the Corps. In this work, the civilising aim is ignored, except in so far as it was expressed in regulations for living, though it may be noted in passing that the Corps was described as the only success of all the Government's policy initiatives with regard to Aboriginal people. But success in European terms is not the issue. This enquiry is directed at the terms of existence for the men themselves; it seeks to tell the story of their choice, and to understand and explain it. The story and the explanation both turn around the dual consciousness of being Aboriginal and being a policeman.
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ItemThe Aboriginal response to white settlement in the Port Phillip district, 1835-1850( 1979)The nature of the Aboriginal response to Europeans in the first years of the settlement in the Port Phillip District has not been sufficiently investigated by historians. We know very little of the ways Aborigines perceived whites. This is not merely because few European contemporaries were interested to record the attitudes of blacks towards whites, but also because this lack of interest has been continued, and has influenced historians to direct study to other fields. Recently, however, works relating to interracial relations in other states have guided the search for understanding the past from the Aboriginal point of view - the 'other side of the frontier'. There are many issues and interests that have sparked this search, and probably the one most important motivation for this has been the ascendancy of black leaders who have offered their version of the past. Perhaps because of this, historical study has concentrated on interracial tensions in the early years of European-Aboriginal contact. However, in Victoria, the Aboriginal response to whites entailed peaceful adaptation and cultural resistance. Aborigines did not instantly recognize Europeans as enemies, and traditional foes were still hated and feared, far more than the newcomers. These traditional foes were Aborigines of hostile or unknown tribes. In this study, I have also been concerned to explain the dramatic population decline among the Aborigines in the years to 1850, as this, also, resulted from Aboriginal responses to whites. White settlement caused disease, depression, increased intertribal warfare, as well as interracial violence. Conflict between blacks and whites was only a minor factor in this depopulation, and it was not recognized as a cause by the Aborigines. According to them, intertribal hostility was the most immediate cause of death; but the white occupation of Victoria must be seen as the cause of the despair that led Aborigines to dispose of their newly-born children rather than raise families. Death, disease and infant mortality worked together to halve the Aboriginal population in the fifteen years to 1850; death and despair later led to the destruction of much of the Aboriginal cultural heritage and social cohesion. I have attempted to reconstruct the nature of Aboriginal population, society and culture at the time of first white settlement, in order to review the extent of change introduced by whites. Although the population dramatically changed in size and distribution, many of the social rules and religious beliefs of the Aborigines were maintained and some were possibly strengthened. This was a magnificent achievement given the pressure and degree of white influence. Most Aborigines peacefully rejected white values, maintaining their own beliefs, and changing only those aspects of their culture which did not intimidate their conceptions of the world. Few Aborigines adopted white values in the period to 1850, although in later years the reduced and disintegrated population came to accept many European principles, having lost many of their own. Whites were recognized as cultural enemies, and for the most part, white ways of thinking were rejected; but the Port Phillip District Aborigines did not regard whites as mortal enemies, for they were only hostile towards few whites, and directed their hatred towards those Aborigines who were strangers to them. For this reason, the Aboriginal resistance offered to whites was predominantly peaceful, a battle of the mind and not of the body.