Re: Sick and tired of Indian racism
- From: offtotx@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 14:36:40 -0000
Racism and resistance in Australian history: the white invasion
Jerome Small
In 1788, British capitalism arrived on Australian shores.
The rulers of Britain were clawing ahead of their European rivals.
They had traded millions of Africans into slavery in plantations from
Jamaica to Virginia. Increasingly, they were pushing English villagers
off their land and into the cities to work in their new factories. And
in 1788, having lost their highly profitable American colonies in a
revolutionary war, Britain's rulers were establishing a new empire.
The full force of this social system was turned against the Aboriginal
peoples of Australia - maybe a million people, speaking over 300
languages. These people had never known private property or profit -
let alone the laws, jails and wars that serve to keep some people rich
and the rest in our place.
The first invasion force landed in January, 1788. By the end of the
year, Governor Phillip was unleashing armed expeditions against the
Blacks. And within a few years, all-out war was being waged as
Aboriginal people resisted being reduced to beggars in their own
country.
Hawkesbury River. He took part in attacks that destroyed the Lane CoveFrom 1790, Pemulwuy led raids around Sydney, as far north as the
settlement on the north shore of Sydney Harbour, and briefly captured
Parramatta. At one stage 60 soldiers were sent out "to destroy all
[Aboriginal people] they could meet and drive them utterly from the
Hawkesbury".
Not all white encroachments resulted in immediate conflict. Historian
Heather Goodall records that on the Macleay River in New South Wales,
"the first European invaders were cedar-cutters, seeking individual
trees, and their goals were initially in little conflict with Koori
land use". There are many stories of Aboriginal people offering to
share their food and resources with the newcomers, and being shocked
that the invaders were not prepared to do the same. And there are
cases of escaped convicts living with Aboriginal people. William
Buckley lived with the people around modern Melbourne for over 30
years after escaping from the penal colony at Sorrento in 1803.
Perhaps the people of the land and the newcomers dumped here could
have worked out how to coexist, given time and goodwill. But the needs
of Australian capitalism would allow neither. In the 1820s, a
lucrative market for wool opened up in Britain. The slow encroachment
of the invaders became a wholesale land grab. Aboriginal people living
on their land couldn't turn a profit for Australian and British
capitalists. Sheep, however, could. The result was conflict on an
enormous scale. Governor Macquarie declared martial law to crush the
Wiradjuri resistance around Bathurst in 1824. And as Heather Goodall
records, there was "generalised warfare along the frontier from Port
Phillip to the Darling Downs and beyond into Queensland from 1835 to
1842".
The pastoral industry was the main engine of Australian capitalism
from the 1820s until the 1890s. The cost of this rapid expansion of
the capitalist system was unspeakable atrocities against the
Aboriginal population.
John Batman is celebrated as one of the founders of Melbourne,
arriving in 1835 with sheep from Tasmania. Less well known is how he
had expanded his Tasmanian holdings. In 1829 Batman was granted 2000
acres for taking part in an armed expedition against Aboriginal people
in north-east Tasmania. He recorded in his journal how his party laid
an ambush for a camp of Aboriginal people, killing 15 or 16 of them.
Two wounded men were captured, along with a woman and a child. But
Batman "found it quite impossible that the Two former could walk... I
was obliged therefore to shoot them."
Batman was also an enthusiastic participant in the notorious "Black
Line" of 1830, an attempt to crush Aboriginal resistance by forming a
line of armed men across the east of Tasmania. The Solicitor-General
of Tasmania instructed: "capture them if you can, but if you cannot,
destroy them."
Similar methods were used by the Henty brothers, who had established a
sheep run at Portland, in Victoria's Western District, in 1834. There
is evidence in Victorian government files that the Henty's fed
poisoned damper to men, women and children.
Another Western District squatter, Neil Black, observed in 1839 that,
in order to take up a sheep run in Western Victoria, it was necessary
to "slaughter natives right and left". Black wrote to his partner: "A
few days since I found a Grave into which about 20 must have been
thrown. A settler taking up a new country is obliged to act towards
them in this manner or abandon it."
It was the need of pastoral capitalists to justify this slaughter, not
some "racial" or "cultural" gulf between black and white, that lay
behind the vicious racism that grew deep roots in Australian society.
In 1830 a massive slave revolt had taken over the island of Jamaica.
Though the uprising was crushed, Britain's rulers feared that further
revolts could threaten much of the empire. So a new "humanitarian"
regime took over the colonial office. Slavery was abolished, and a new
concern was expressed for the welfare of Australian Aborigines.
However, this concern was not to interfere with the rapid expansion of
Australian capitalism. The result was a system of "protection" for
Aboriginal people that attempted to control every aspect of their
lives, and allowed their extermination to continue. When William
Thomas, Assistant Protector of Aborigines around Melbourne and Western
Port, was appointed to his post in 1839 he counted only 207 Aboriginal
people in the whole district. After 14 years of "protection", the
total was less than a hundred.
But even in the midst of frontier violence, ordinary people could show
sympathy with Aboriginal people.
In 1841 five armed Aboriginal people were involved in an altercation
with white sealers near Cape Paterson, in Victoria. Two sealers were
killed. Yet when the Blacks were brought to trial, the jury acquitted
the three women in the party and, though they found the two Aboriginal
men guilty of murder, they strongly recommended mercy. It was the
colonial elite - the judge to the Governor - who overturned this
recommendation.
Bob and Jack, Tunnerminnerwait and Peevay, were hanged in Melbourne in
January 1842. But the hangman made the rope too short. Instead of
dying quickly, the men "twisted and writhed convulsively in a manner
that horrified even the most hardened", as the huge crowd which had
gathered to witness the execution fled in horror.
Ordinary people might be revolted at the sight of the life being
strangled out of Aboriginal resistance to invasion. But for the men of
the Melbourne Club - since the 1830s an exclusive rich man's club at
the top end of Collins Street - the preservation and enlargement of
their vast fortunes demanded more of the same.
The Melbourne Club was the base for Robert O'Hara Burke in 1860 prior
to his disastrous expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Burke came
from a family of Protestant land-owners in Ireland and had made a name
for himself as a strike-breaking chief of police in Castlemaine,
Victoria. He was appointed leader of the Victorian Exploring
Expedition, designed in part to open up Australia's north to
exploitation by Victorian pastoralists.
The expedition ended in disaster, with Burke and six others dead. As
Burke lay dying of starvation at Coopers Creek, a group of Aboriginal
people tried to save his life. As his entry in the Australian
Dictionary of Biography records, Burke "had been born and bred a
member of the ruling race in a conquered country and could not bring
himself to associate with natives. When they arrived in his camp,
bearing gifts of fish, he behaved like an officer of the Irish
constabulary plagued by the peasantry, and fired at them." To this
day, a picture of Burke hangs in the Melbourne Club as a hero of
Australia's ruling class - a man who clung to racism even at the cost
of his own life.
Though the Burke and Wills expedition failed, it spurred on the
invasion of Australia's north. It was profits from cattle rather than
wool which saw the Aboriginal people of the north destroyed or
enslaved. Typical was Frank Jardine, sponsored by the Queensland
government to drive cattle up to Cape York in 1864. Jardine claimed to
have personally killed 47 people on this trip, each one marked by a
notch on his carbine rifle. The total death toll was over 200.
So by the time the Australian colonies were a hundred years old, three
great waves of invasion had crashed over Aboriginal people. Convicts
to secure Australia for the British Empire, and sheep and cattle to
fill the bank accounts of the capitalists, occupied the land that
Aboriginal people had cared for over countless thousands of years.
None of us can unmake history. But we can learn from it, to help shape
the present and the future, and we can see the parallels with today.
Australian capitalism no longer needs the wholesale slaughter of the
frontier, but Aboriginal people can still be killed with impunity by
the forces of the state - as the murder of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm
Island demonstrates.
Australian capitalism still has no interest in having strong, healthy
Aboriginal communities living on their land. Now mining companies have
joined pastoralists in having a billion-dollar interest in shoving
Aboriginal people off their land. And as events in the Northern
Territory show, governments are still punishing Aboriginal people,
still stealing their land, and still calling this "protection".
Aboriginal people are still dying up to 20 years earlier than the rest
of us - in Victoria, where the genocide was most effective, just as
much as in the Northern Territory. And they are still demanding
justice and recognition that every inch of this country is stolen
Aboriginal land. And the question comes up for the rest of us - which
side are we on?
On Oct 18, 2:31 am, Just this guy... <x...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Enough excuses, deal with the abuse.
If not I think the rest of the
cricketing world should boycott
India until steps are taken by
Indian authorities to combat
racist abuse.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Sick and tired of White Racism
- From: Kunal
- Re: Sick and tired of White Racism
- References:
- Sick and tired of Indian racism
- From: Just this guy . . .
- Sick and tired of Indian racism
- Prev by Date: Re: Once again on the use of the follow-on
- Next by Date: Re: Racism to the average Indian
- Previous by thread: Sick and tired of Indian racism
- Next by thread: Re: Sick and tired of White Racism
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
