colonisation of australia essay

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The spanish, the british, later explorations, european settlement.

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This article discusses the history of Australia from the arrival of European explorers in the 16th century to the present. For a more detailed discussion of Aboriginal culture , see Australian Aboriginal peoples .

Australia to 1900

Early exploration and colonization, early contacts and approaches.

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Prior to documented history, travelers from Asia may have reached Australia. China’s control of South Asian waters could have extended to a landing in Australia in the early 15th century. Likewise, Muslim voyagers who visited and settled in Southeast Asia came within 300 miles (480 km) of Australia, and adventure, wind, or current might have carried some individuals the extra distance. Both Arab and Chinese documents tell of a southern land, but with such inaccuracy that they scarcely clarify the argument. Makassarese seamen certainly fished off Arnhem Land , in the Northern Territory , from the late 18th century and may have done so for generations.

The quest for wealth and knowledge might logically have pulled the Portuguese to Australian shores; the assumption has some evidential support, including a reference indicating that Melville Island, off the northern coast, supplied slaves. Certainly the Portuguese debated the issue of a terra australis incognita (Latin: “unknown southern land”)—an issue in European thought in ancient times and revived from the 12th century onward. The so-called Dieppe maps present a landmass, “Java la Grande,” that some scholarship (gaining strength in the early 21st century) has long seen as evidence of a Portuguese discovery of the Australian landmass, 1528 being one likely year.

Viceroys of Spain’s American empire regularly sought new lands. One such expedition , from Peru in 1567, commanded by Álvaro de Mendaña , discovered the Solomon Islands . Excited by finding gold, Mendaña hoped that he had found the great southern land and that Spain would colonize there. In 1595 Mendaña sailed again but failed to rediscover the Solomons. One of his officers was Pedro Fernández de Quirós , a man of the Counter-Reformation who wanted Roman Catholicism to prevail in the southland, the existence of which he was certain. Quirós won the backing of King Philip III for an expedition under his own command. It left Callao, Peru, in December 1605 and reached the New Hebrides . Quirós named the island group Australia del Espirítu Santo , and he celebrated with elaborate ritual. He (and some later Roman Catholic historians) saw this as the discovery of the southern land. But Quirós’s exultation was brief; troubles forced his return to Latin America. The other ship of the expedition, under Luis de Torres , went on to sail through the Torres Strait but almost certainly failed to sight Australia; and all Quirós’s fervour failed to persuade Spanish officialdom to mount another expedition.

Oceanic exploration

Late in 1605 Willem Jansz (Janszoon) of Amsterdam sailed aboard the Duyfken from Bantam in the Dutch East Indies in search of New Guinea . He reached the Torres Strait a few weeks before Torres and named what was later to prove part of the Australian coast—Cape Keer-Weer, on the western side of Cape York Peninsula . More significantly, from 1611 some Dutch ships sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to Java inevitably carried too far east and touched Australia: the first and most famous was Dirck Hartog ’s Eendracht , from which men landed and left a memorial at Shark Bay , Western Australia , October 25–27, 1616. Pieter Nuyts explored almost 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of the southern coast in 1626–27, and other Dutchmen added to knowledge of the north and west.

Most important of all was the work of Abel Tasman , who won such respect as a seaman in the Dutch East Indies that in 1642 Gov.-Gen. Anthony van Diemen of the Indies commissioned him to explore southward. In November–December, having made a great circuit of the seas, Tasman sighted the west coast and anchored off the southeast coast of what he called Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). He then explored the island of New Zealand before returning to Batavia, on Java. A second expedition of 1644 contributed to knowledge of Australia’s northern coast; the Dutch named the new landmass New Holland.

The Netherlands spent little more effort in exploration, and the other great Protestant power in Europe, England, took over the role. In 1688 the English buccaneer William Dampier relaxed on New Holland’s northwestern coast. On returning to England, he published his Voyages and persuaded the Admiralty to back another venture. He traversed the western coast for 1,000 miles (1699–1700) and reported more fully than any previous explorer, but he did so in terms so critical of the land and its people that another hiatus resulted.

The middle decades of the 18th century saw much writing about the curiosities and possible commercial value of the southern seas and terra australis incognita . This was not restricted to Great Britain, but it had especial vigour there. The British government showed its interest by backing several voyages. Hopes flourished for a mighty empire of commerce in the eastern seas.

This was the background for the three voyages of Captain James Cook on behalf of the British Admiralty. The first, that of the HMS Endeavour , left England in August 1768 and had its climax on April 20, 1770, when a crewman sighted southeastern Australia. Cook landed several times, most notably at Botany Bay and at Possession Island in the north, where on August 23 he claimed the land, naming it New South Wales . Cook’s later voyages (1772–75 and 1776–79) were to other areas in the Pacific, but they were both symptom and cause of strengthening British interest in the eastern seas.

Cook’s voyages led to settlement but did not complete the exploration of the Australian coasts. Marion Dufresne of France skirted Tasmania in 1772, seeing more than had Tasman. The count de La Pérouse , another French explorer, made no actual discoveries in Australia but visited Botany Bay early in 1788. In 1791 the British navigator George Vancouver traversed and described the southern shores discovered by Pieter Nuyts years before. The French explorer Joseph-Antoine Raymond de Bruni, chevalier d’Entrecasteaux, also did significant work, especially in southern Tasmania.

Two Britons— George Bass , a naval surgeon, and Matthew Flinders , a naval officer—were the most famous postsettlement explorers. Together they entered some harbours on the coast near Botany Bay in 1795 and 1796. Bass ventured farther south in 1797–98, pushing around Cape Everard to Western Port . Flinders was in that region early in 1798, charting the Furneaux Islands. Late that year Flinders and Bass circumnavigated Tasmania in the Norfolk , establishing that it was an island and making further discoveries. Several other navigators, including merchantmen, filled out knowledge of the Bass Strait area; most notable was the discovery of Port Phillip in 1802.

Meanwhile Flinders had returned home and in 1801 was appointed to command an expedition that would circumnavigate Australia and virtually complete the charting of the continent . Over the next three years Flinders proved equal to this task. Above all, he left no doubt that the Australian continent was a single landmass. Appropriately, Flinders urged that the name Australia replace New Holland, and this change received official backing from 1817.

France sponsored an expedition, similar in intent to Flinders’s, at the same time. Under Nicolas Baudin , it gave French names to many features (including “Terre Napoléon” for the southern coast) and gathered much information but did little new exploration. It was on the northern coast, from Arnhem Land to Cape York Peninsula , that more exploration was needed. Two Admiralty expeditions—under Phillip Parker King (1817–22) and John Clements Wickham (1838–39)—filled this gap.

The British government determined on settling New South Wales in 1786, and colonization began early in 1788. The motives for this move have become a matter of some controversy. The traditional view is that Britain thereby sought to relieve the pressure upon its prisons —a pressure intensified by the loss of its American colonies , which until that time had accepted transported felons. This view is supported by the fact that convicts went to the settlement from the outset and that official statements put this first among the colony’s intended purposes. But some historians have argued that this glossed a scheme to provide a bastion for British sea power in the eastern seas. Some have seen a purely strategic purpose in settlement, but others have postulated an intent to use the colony as a springboard for economic exploitation of the area. It is very likely that the government had some interest in all these factors.

Whatever the deeper motivation, plans went ahead, with Lord Sydney (Thomas Townshend), secretary of state for home affairs, as the guiding authority. Arthur Phillip was commander of the expedition; he was to take possession of the whole territory from Cape York to Tasmania , westward as far as 135° and eastward to include adjacent islands. Phillip’s power was to be near absolute within his domain. The British government planned to develop the region’s economy by employing convict labour on government farms, while former convicts would subsist on their own small plots.

The First Fleet sailed on May 13, 1787, with 11 vessels, including 6 transports, aboard which were about 730 convicts (570 men and 160 women). More than 250 free persons accompanied the convicts, chiefly marines of various rank. The fleet reached Botany Bay on January 19–20, 1788. Crisis threatened at once. The Botany Bay area had poor soil and little water, and the harbour itself was inferior . Phillip therefore sailed northward on January 21 and entered a superb harbour, Port Jackson , which Cook had marked but not explored. He moved the fleet there; the flag was hoisted on January 26 and the formalities of government begun on February 7. Sydney Cove, the focus of settlement, was deep within Port Jackson, on the southern side; around it was to grow the city of Sydney .

Phillip at once established an outstation at Norfolk Island . Its history was to be checkered; settlement was abandoned in 1813 and revived in 1825 to provide a jail for convicts who misbehaved in Australia. (It served a new purpose from 1856 as a home for the descendants of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty , by then too numerous for Pitcairn Island .)

Phillip remained as governor until December 1792, seeing New South Wales through its darkest days. The land was indifferent, disease and pests abounded, few convicts proved able labourers, and Aboriginal people were often hostile. The nadir came in autumn 1790 as supplies shrank; the arrival of a second fleet brought hundreds of sickly convicts but also the means of survival.

Colonial Period of Australia’s History Essay

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Claiming that the history of Australia is unique would be pointless since the specifics of cultural, economic and political development of any state has a range of specific features, which stem from the state’s identity and predetermine the uniqueness of the patterns of historical development (Allen 1989).

However, in case of Australia, the evolution of the continent should be considered unique both compared to the rest of the continents and on its own merits, judging by the traditional patterns occurring in the history of every single state. When talking about the uniqueness of the Australian evolution, one traditionally mentions its colonial stage of development, i.e., the point at which the state was used as a prison for political convicts (Aveling 1979).

Though colonial Australia is traditionally represented as the location for the European convicts to serve their sentence, whereas little light is shed on the conflict between the local people and the colonialists, the armed resistance of the latter to the forces of the United Kingdom and other states is also represented in a range of ways, starting from the attempt at pointing at the failures of the colonists in their diplomatic endeavours (Reynolds 1989) to depicting the deplorable state of the Australian women in the realm of the chauvinist environment and the first attempts at introducing the feminist principles into the realm of the Australian culture.

Despite the numerous differences in the approaches towards describing the colonist era of the Australian history, the works by Reynolds and the collection of works compiled by Quartly share a range of common ideas regarding the environment, in which the Australian policies were shaping and the changes that the state was yet to undergo, as well as the effects that these changes would have on Australians’ social life, economics and culture.

Reynolds’ work has several strengths, the key one being its accuracy and an impressive overview of rather broad evidence concerning the Australian colonial society. Reynolds seems to be sympathetic towards the native Australians, yet he does not shy away from mentioning the mistakes that both sides made when the process of colonization was taking place.

Nevertheless, some of the details of Reynolds’ book do not leave room for doubts regarding his opinion on the issue; for example, the very title of the paper sets the mod for the interpretation of the colonial period, with the British people being called “invaders” (Reynolds 1996, p. 4).

It is worth noting that Reynolds asks the question that seems to have slipped out of Quartly’s work: in contrast to Quartly, Reynolds considers the actions of the white Australians – or the lack thereof, to be more exact – from an ethical standpoint. Herein lies the key weakness of the paper: Reynolds tries to be objective, yet fails for the most part.

As it has been stressed above, Quartly provides an entirely different way of looking at the situation in colonial Australia. While Quartly dos not exactly deviate from discussing the political dilemmas, such as the confrontation between the native Australians and the British invaders, she, nevertheless, manages to make a very strong statement about the origin, evolution, and influence of the Australian feminism (Quartly, Janson and Grimshaw 1995, p. 43).

It is remarkable that both authors seem to be making very similar arguments concerning the effects that the tactics of Great Britain had on the Australian society, mentioning the fact that the regulations, which the British colonies provided as the basis for the Australian state policy to be based on (Crowley 1973), triggered considerable negative consequences for the local population.

More to the point, both authors make it clear that the very idea of turning Australia into a political prison and using it as a venue for the prisoners to be sent to to serve their lifetime sentence, from an ethical perspective, was a very controversial solution at the very least. Also, the layout of the historical facts, which Quartly has included in his works, seems to be very close to the one that Reynolds uses in his research.

Nevertheless, Quartly takes an entirely different approach in his paper as he starts considering the positive effects that the Australian colonial society had on gender issues. Herein the strength of Quartly’s paper lies.

Instead of searching for the solution to the ethically dubious conflict between the native population of Australia and the colonists, the author provides an overview of the positive and the negative effects that the political changes in question triggered in the Australian society. It should be noted, though, that, unlike Reynolds, Quartly focuses on the people inhabiting the Australian colonies (Quartly, Janson and Grimshaw 1995, p. 118).

The results that both types of research list provide a lot of food for thoughts. On the one hand, the era of colonial Australia has affected the residents negatively, leaving them to witness economic desolation of the state and the experience of political repressions, as well as the fact that their land was used as the place for convicts to serve their sentence.

On the other hand, the feminist movement, which started in the Australian colonies for women, seems to have made a great impact on the feminism movements all over the world, triggering the further evolution of the emancipist ideas.

On the other hand, the unique culture of the Australian people was gradually being destroyed and replaced by the culture of the British colonists, as Reynolds explains, Representing the Australian colonial society in their unique way, the two sources provide a fairly decent overview of the socio-cultural and economic dilemmas of the Australian society.

It goes without saying that Australia’s evolution as a state, both in terms of its economics and culture, differed greatly from the rest of the states not only because of Australia’s geographical isolation, but also as a result of the colonial politics of Great Britain, which used Australia as the location for its political prisoners and the new lands to be explored as the possible place for the expansion of the colonies. Because of the ambiguity of the situation, various ways of looking at the conflict between the residents and the colonialists exist.

Reynolds, for example, prefers to focus on the race aspect of the conflict, as well as the ethical dilemmas that the confrontation between the Local Black population and the White colonists predisposed. Quartly, in his turn, preferred to provide an overview of the ambiguous gender situation, which the conflict between the Australians and the colonists prompted.

Nevertheless, the two authors come up with similar conclusions concerning the political problems, which Australia was facing at the time. While the perspective, from which the two authors considered the Australian society and the effects of the colonies on the latter, they seem to provide similar considerations on the effects that the British colonies have had on the development of the Australian economy and politics.

Reference List

Allen, M. (1989). Fresh evidence, new witnesses. Adelaide: Wakefield Press.

Aveling, M. (1979). Westralian voices . Wedlands, W.A: University of Western Australia Press.

Crowley, F. K. (1973). A documentary history of Australia: colonial Australia . Melbourne, AU: Nelson.

Quartly, M., Janson, S. and Grimshaw, P. (1995). Freedom bound I: documents on women in colonial Australia . St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen &​ Unwin.

Reynolds, H. (1995). Dispossession: Black Australians and white invaders (Australian Experience series). St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen &​ Unwin.

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The Colonization of Australia

How did the continent become home to British convicts?

• Lithograph of the First Fleet entering Port Jackson in 1788, by Edmund Le Bihan. Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Australia’s unique English-speaking culture seems so ingrained in the modern day that it’s easy to forget just how bizarre and far-fetched the idea of its colonization once seemed. Australia’s distance from England provoked doubt, derision, and ridicule at the idea of its colonization—and yet it eventually succeeded to such a degree that the far-flung penal colony grew beyond self-sufficiency to eventual independence. The colonization of Australia is an unlikely story, written in the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of thousands of British-born convicts and Aboriginal Australians. 

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It was the reign of King George III, and crime rates were soaring. Those born into England’s working class were expected to start working long days in perilous sweatshops at the age of six; it’s no wonder many of them turned to a life of crime. The British justice system had once punished most offenses by hanging, and so had little need for prisons. However, that practice was falling out of favor, and what few privately-owned penitentiaries existed in England were filling up. Prisoners had previously been transported to work on plantations in the Americas, but with the United States’ burgeoning independence, that was no longer an option. The House of Commons convened a committee to hear options and, in 1786, voted Australia the most suitable location for prisoners, and Seven Years’ War Navy veteran Arthur Phillip the most suitable captain—to be declared governor after their arrival.

The Australian coast had already been partially mapped, mostly by Captain James Cook on his 1770 expedition, but no one in Britain knew what lay beyond its immediate shores. Australia had been occupied by diverse groups of Aboriginal people, who first arrived by boat from the islands of Southeast Asia, for at least 50,000 years by that time. To the British legislature, however, Australia, which had a population of at least 300,000, lacked a Christian culture and therefore was as good as empty. There was no talk of reconnaissance.

The First Fleet of 11 ships bore over 700 prisoners to Australia; 48 of them never made it. The average convict was a rural tradesman between the ages of 16 and 35. The youngest was a nine-year-old boy, and the oldest was an 82-year-old woman. Most of them had been convicted of theft, burglary, or highway robbery. The voyage was poorly provisioned, the ships rife with pests, and the pests rife with typhus. But finally, on January 19, 1778, the First Fleet sailed into Australia’s Botany Bay. 

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Captain Cook’s log, which had reported long, unbroken stretches of fertile grassland, was wrong. Eucalyptus trees huddled together on the shores, while the space between them was overgrown with thick, tangled brush. Forming a self-sufficient, agrarian community here would be difficult, even with the intended regular arrival of supplies. On a brief northward expedition, Phillip found land more arable, water more potable, and a harbor more suitable just a few miles from the landing site. He called the area Sydney Cove. 

The convicts disembarked and received work details; most of the labor in those early days went toward building houses for officers and tilling farmland. The fertile soil around Sydney Cove, while preferable to that of Botany Bay, was concentrated in small, separate patches; clearing the brush and trees to expand it proceeded slowly. Phillip was forced to pare down rations repeatedly, until officers and convicts were getting the same amounts of food.

Absent the promised provisions, Phillip sent a group of convicts and officers to nearby Norfolk Island to try farming there, but they fared no better. He dispatched his flagship, Sirius , to Cape Town in South Africa twice for resupply; she never returned from the second voyage. Many convicts had sold their clothes in exchange for parts of the officer’s rations. Some swiped salt pork and peas from food stores or vegetable gardens, an offense punishable by hanging. Finally, in June of 1790, the Lady Juliana  arrived with the long-awaited supplies, along with more convicts’ mouths to feed. The original supply ship, the Guardian , had struck an iceberg and sank. From then on, ships laden with food and convicts appeared more regularly; over 160,000 prisoners would be transported by the time the practice ended in 1868.

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Relations with Aboriginal people were relatively peaceful in the early years of the colony, despite the devastating effects of smallpox and influenza on the Eora population. Some Aboriginal people even helped guide European explorers, probing Australia’s inland on both surveying and naturalistic expeditions. Phillip encouraged friendship and free trade, and punished convicts who lashed out at the Indigenous population. And they often did, especially as the colony expanded inland and convicts stole Aboriginal people’s tools to sell as souvenirs. Conflict with the Darug people in 1795 resulted in raids that destroyed many of the settlers’ crops in the first of the Australian frontier wars. 

Governor Phillip returned to England in 1792, bringing with him two Aboriginal friends, Woollarawarre Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne. The colony he left behind had survived years of famine and was well on its way to self-sufficiency. He had a series of ineffectual successors, allowing New South Wales Corps officers to claim power for themselves and briefly rule the colony as a military junta. Much would change, however, with the arrival of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1810.

Macquarie set precedents for the future of Australia in many ways. He believed in equal treatment for emancipists—freed convicts—and gave many of them jobs in his government. He offered land grants to attract rich Europeans to the colony. Macquarie hired city planners to lay out the streets of Sydney, and commissioned public buildings, banks, and hospitals. In 1813, he issued the very first unique Australian currency, paying contractors in punched-out Spanish dollars. Macquarie was Australia’s last autocratic governor; two years after his resignation in 1821, New South Wales formed its very first Legislative Council under imperial supervision.

For all the goodwill he extended toward emancipists, Macquarie had none for Aboriginal Australians. By April of 1816, skirmishes with the Darug had escalated into an all-out war, involving the Eora, Dharawal, and Gandangara peoples. Under Macquarie’s orders to punish and exile the Dharawal, Captain James Wallis and his party of 37 grenadiers found and attacked one of their camps near the town of Appin. They killed at least 14 people in the massacre, including the elderly and children. The following month, Macquarie issued a proclamation in the Sydney Gazette  encouraging settlers to attack any Aboriginal people who refused to vacate their land, providing them with government support.

Policies of family separation also emerged during the 19th century. 1869’s Aboriginal Protection Act in Victoria established a government board with the authority to regulate many aspects of Aboriginal people’s lives, including their employment, residence, and custody of children. Similar policies would follow later in other regions. Government agents, mostly targeting mixed-race children, would remove them from their homes and parents, sometimes with the use or threat of force. Many children were sent to boarding schools or foster homes, where they were severely punished for acknowledging their own culture or speaking their native language. Although it began earlier, forcible removal of Aboriginal children peaked after 1910, and continued in some parts of Australia into the 1970s. 

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So the colonization of Australia proceeded; settlers and soldiers violently pushed Aboriginal people from their land across the six colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania. Wealthy Europeans received grants of rural land, urban planners laid out the streets of new cities, and contractors built them. Prospector Edward Hargraves’ discovery of gold sparked a rush , bringing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the colonies. Industry developed around Australian wool, which became the colonies’ top export. All the while, Australia’s free population grew. Each colony formed its own legislature and elected officials. 

With the exception of a depression in the 1890s, Australia’s economy boomed throughout the 19th century. But with high customs restricting trade between them, representatives of the six colonies agreed tentatively to a constitutional convention and, eventually, a federation in 1890. Delegates from the Australian colonies eventually presented their case before the British government, and Australia officially declared its independence on January 1, 1901. 

In just over a century, the unlikely, agrarian penal colony on the shores of Botany Bay had grown into a fully independent, urbanized nation, and had done so without going to war with its sovereign. Still, it had been no easy task; colonial expansion killed hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal Australians, while their children were stolen and forced to assimilate. The modern Australian government has begun to recognize historical wrongdoings; as of 2022, all six Australian states had redress programs for survivors of the child removal policy. Many convicts had died on the journey over, others starved in the famine years, and those who survived built the nation under forced labor. From their experiences emerged a national identity that is still part of Australian culture today.

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Study Guide : Australia (1750-1918): The Impact of early colonisation on Indigenous people

• The Impact of early colonisation on Indigenous people
• Myall Creek Massacre
• The Path to Federation
• Living & working conditions in Australia (1900)
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INDIGENOUS CULTURE

Their cultures had developed over 60,000 years, making Indigenous Australians the custodians of the world’s most ancient living culture. Each group lived in close relationship with the land and had custody over their own traditional country. In 1770, during his first Pacific voyage, Lieutenant James Cook claimed possession of the east coast of Australia for the British Crown. Upon his return to Britain, Cook’s reports inspired the establishment of a penal colony in the newly claimed territory. 

The new settlement was designed to alleviate overcrowding in British prisons, expand the Empire, assert Britain’s claim to the territory against other colonial powers, and establish a British base in the global South. 

In 1788, two years after the decision to colonise Australia was made, Captain Arthur Phillip and 1,500 convicts, crew, marines and civilians arrived.

Source :Information taken from Australians together website    http://www.australianstogether.org.au/stories/detail/colonisation

Dispossession and Government Control : Aboriginal History

The original version of the ground-breaking Indigenous rights documentary Our Generation . Winner "Best Campaign Film" at London International Documentary Festival 2011. For more information, visit: www.ourgeneration.org.au

Migration Impacts

• The Changing face of Australia You can also download this document by clicking on the title

The impact of early colonisation effects on Indigenous People : White Australia has a Black History

First australians : episode 1 - they have come to stay, first australians : episode 2 - her will to survive, the first australians : episode 3 - freedom for our lifetime, the impact of early colonisation on indigenous people : 1778 - 1900.

It is estimated that between 1788 and 1900, the Indigenous population of Australia was reduced by 90%.

Three main reasons for this dramatic population decline were:

• The introduction of new diseases
• Settler acquisition of Indigenous lands
• Direct and violent conflict with the colonisers.

Source : Australians together

http://www.australianstogether.org.au/stories/detail/colonisation

The impact of early colonisation on Indigenous People : Disease

The most immediate consequence of colonisation was a wave of epidemic diseases including smallpox, measles and influenza, which spread ahead of the settlement frontier and annihilated many Indigenous communities.

Governor Phillip reported that smallpox had killed half of the Indigenous people in the Sydney region within fourteen months of the arrival of the First Fleet.

The impact of early colonisation effects on Indigenous People : Sexual abuse and exploitation

The sexual abuse and exploitation of Indigenous girls and women also introduced venereal disease to Indigenous people in epidemic proportions.

The impact of early colonisation effects on Indigenous People : Dispossession

The expansion of British settlements, including the establishment of colonies in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Adelaide,  Moreton  Bay (Brisbane) and Port Phillip (Melbourne), resulted in competition over land and resources, and quickly lead to violence.

“The Government is fast disposing of the land occupied by the natives from time immemorial. In addition to which settlers under the sanction of government may establish themselves in any part of this extensive territory and since the introduction of the numerous flocks and herds. . . a serious loss has been sustained by the natives without an equivalent being rendered. Their territory is not only invaded, but their game is driven back, their marnong and other valuable roots are eaten by the white man's sheep and their deprivation, abuse and miseries are daily increasing.”

Francis Tuckfield, Wesleyan Missionary, 1837

The impact of early colonisation effects on Indigenous People : Violence

 It is important to recognise that throughout the colonisation process, Indigenous Australians continually resisted the infringement of their rights to their lands, and its impact on their cultures and communities.

It is estimated that at least 20,000 Aboriginal people were killed as a direct result of colonial violence during this era of shared Australian history. Between 2,000- 2,500 settler deaths resulted from frontier conflict during the same period.

• Historical records do document numerous occasions on which Indigenous people were hunted and brutally murdered .
• Massacres of Indigenous people often took the form of mass shootings or driving groups of people off cliffs.
• There are also numerous accounts of colonists offering Indigenous people food laced with arsenic and other poisons.

AUSTRALIAN MIGRATION : The Colonial era (1788-1900)

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The colonisation of this land we now call Australia had a devastating impact on First Nations people, who have lived on this continent for thousands of years.

Prior to British settlement, more than 500 First Nations groups inhabited the continent we now call Australia, approximately 750,000 people in total. [1]  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures developed over 60,000 years, making First Nations Peoples the custodians of the world’s oldest living culture. Each group lived in close relationship with the land and had custodianship of their Country.

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Convicts and the Colonisation of Australia, 1788-1868

The white European's colonisation of Australia provides a very revealing chapter in Britain's empire building history. Uncharacteristically for a British punishment, penal transportation involved mass exile, coerced labour, invasion, dispossession and genocide. This combination of convict stain and colonisation was so inglorious that for decades the history was not written. Instead, Australia was characterised as born by the Gold Rush and a working man’s paradise ensued, as if by magic. More recently, the 'History Wars' exposed a huge unease within Australia about how to think of its penal past. A focus on negative aspects was denigrated as the "black armband" view of the nation’s history, inviting the retort of "white blindfold" for those accentuating the positive. Grey did not come into it. The reality is that this history is full of contradictions. What follows is a brief and contestable account of Australia in the era of Transportation.

Convict Colonies

There were two major convict colonies: New South Wales (1788-1840) and Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania, 1803-1853). Eventually, Swan River (Western Australia) would become a third penal colony when the failing settlement requested an injection of convict labourers (1850-1868). The country of origin, colonial distribution and gender breakdown of convicts are given in the adjacent figure.

The premier site in convict Australia was Sydney, NSW. The First Fleet sailed into Botany Bay on the 18th January 1788 but quickly assessed conditions as unsuitable and shifted north to Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) on 26th January, now marked as Australia Day/Invasion Day, depending upon perspective. A satellite colony was also established over 1,000 miles away at Norfolk Island, both for strategic imperial reasons and increasingly as a food basket in an attempt to overcome insipient famine in the early years at Sydney Cove.

In Van Diemen’s Land, a second major convict colony followed at Sullivans Cove (Hobart) with a further outpost at Patersonia (Launceston) in the north of the island. An initial complement of convicts was sent in 1804 but convicts did not start to arrive regularly in Hobart until 1818, by which time the colony had its own Lieutenant Governor (from 1813).

Other, smaller, convict establishments developed across the continent. NSW then stretched along the eastern coast of Australia encompassing territories that would later become the modern-day states of Queensland and Victoria, and smaller convict establishments were developed at Moreton Bay (now Brisbane), and at Port Phillip (now Melbourne) effectively from 1835. While the latter is sometimes seen as ‘convict-free’, it received convicts landed via Sydney and directly received convict ‘Exiles’ between 1846-50. [This was an experiment whereby a convict who had completed part of their sentence in a British prison was then granted a Conditional Pardon or Ticket-of-Leave and sent to the colony.]

Moreton Bay functioned as a place of ‘secondary punishment’. Colonial reoffending could be punished with transportation, and several such dedicated penal settlements were dotted around the colonies. They came to include Norfolk Island (resettled for this purpose in 1825), Newcastle (1804), Port Macquarie (1821), Macquarie Harbour (1822) Maria Island (1825, later a Probation Station), the latter two replaced by the iconic Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula (1830). There were many experiments and penal innovations made in the Australian convict colonies, and of particular note is the Point Puer establishment at Port Arthur for the reformation of criminal boys, marking a fundamental shift in the conceptualisation of juvenile offenders and in the rehabilitation of criminals.

South Australia (1834-) received no convicts directly. However, there was a Newgate connection as the colony’s development was shaped by the ‘art of colonisation’ enunciated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, politician and scoundrel imprisoned for the Shrigley abduction. The territories (Northern, and Australian Capital) gained independent existences much later.

Convict Workers

Three-quarters of convicts were transported for non-violent property crimes, more than half exiled for their first offence, at least according to the Convict Indents . The proportion of first offenders changed over time with alterations in English law which increasingly punished recidivism.

Convicts arrived in the colonies having experienced a multiplicity of trades consistent with the diversity of labour markets in the United Kingdom. Between them they had been employed at thousands of different jobs. Several predominated: labourers, farm labourers and farm servants, ploughmen, grooms, shoemakers and tailors, butchers, cooks and housemaids, to name a few (Meredith and Oxley, 2015). There were over 1000 shepherds, immediately useful to a sheep run.

In the colonies, all convicts had to work. Convicts appear in the 1828 NSW Census in very familiar roles, as labourers, servants, farm servants, ploughmen, shoemakers, shepherds, stockmen, constables and wives. Note that even under sentence convicts edged towards greater independence and control over their own labour, including who they worked for doing what, as they secured Tickets-of-Leave, Conditional (sometimes Absolute) Pardons, and at the conclusion of their sentences Certificates of Freedom. In the same census, Ticket holders and Emancipists - who could pick their employment - were engaged in the same mix of jobs as the convicts, suggesting a fairly well-functioning convict labour market: had they been inappropriately allocated, you would expect them to shift when they could (Nicholas, 1988).

Other sections on Transportation as punishment and VDL Labour Contracts outline how labour allocation and management evolved, from a surprisingly free and flexible labour system in the early decades of NSW, with much Government employment, to more formal systems of assignment to mainly private employers and private companies. It was in VDL where the most disciplinary arrangements were imposed, with punitive gang labour a prerequisite to progressive release into the labour market. Each revision of the convict labour system was intended to crank up of the deterrence value of transportation by emphasising coercion, without slipping into something that might actually be deemed slavery.

Being Coerced

Convicts were coerced workers and coercion invited resistance. There were clear patterns of convict protest ranging from union-style action to more subtle malingering. The colonial discipline to which they were subjected criminalised behaviour that amongst free workers would prompt mild rebuke, putting convicts at greater risk of amassing colonial sentences (‘status crimes’). They were subject to onerous physical punishment, like the lash, part artefact of the naval context of transportation, later practice favouring further detention and solitary confinement. But they were also offered incentives. In particular, they were extraordinarily well fed, with the convict ration delivering daily calories more than twice those English labourers hoped to receive. Canny employers offered even more. Over time, allowing convicts to earn remission revealed itself as the most powerful labour management tool of all.

Becoming Free

The First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788. Within a year convicts were becoming free as sentences started to expire. Within five years, 85% of this cohort were emancipated, and once emancipated they could qualify for land grants. At its heart, convict society contained this central dynamic driving it towards freedom and normality. Most of those transported would spend far more of their lives at liberty than in chains, real or metaphorical. And for much of the time, freedom meant working for good wages.

Much was done with this liberty. There was money to be had, and ways of spending it. The society convicts and emancipists created was highly urban. If not for the power of the colonial government to direct convict labour to rural employment, very few colonists would ever have ventured into the bush. Towns offered work, housing, and pleasures – amusements, gambling – and access to sex, with or without marriage.

It should be observed that Australia’s richest man – ever – was ex-convict Samuel Terry , the ‘Botany Bay Rothschild’. Tapping in to the urban consumer culture by importing goods and running pubs were both highly successful ways of accumulating wealth and Terry and his wife Rosetta Pracey successfully exploited both strategies. When Thomas Bigge came to town in 1820 he heard that Terry held 1,450 head of cattle, 3,800 sheep, 19,000 acres of NSW, and that he supplied more mortgages than the Bank of New South Wales (of which he was one of the largest shareholders). At his death in 1838 he was worth 3.39% of the colony’s gross domestic product, the equivalent today of over $24 billion (Rubenstein, 2004).

Terry was not alone in forging a fortune, but it was certainly easier for a convict to make good in the early years of NSW than in the later phases.

Blokes & Shealaghs

When penal transportation was conceived as the major alternative to England’s reliance on the death penalty for the punishment of felonies, roughly 40% of indictments at the Old Bailey were against women. The ratio dropped precipitously over the course of transportation to Australia (Feeley and Little, 1991).

This made the convict colonies strikingly masculine. The bulk of the penal population were men and boys. Convict women constituted only 15% of the total transportees and at times the ratio of male arrivals to females was nearly 10 to 1 (in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars). Those that controlled them – the marines, seamen, and civil officers – were, with only rare exception, universally male. Moreover, convicts and emancipists dominated the white colonial population for decades as free immigrants were slow to show up.

Mitigation was only found among ‘the currency’, the colonial born children of Europeans. Yet, constrained by the small number of women, their numbers were insufficient to counteract the ongoing masculinity of new arrivals. Attempts were made to bolster the immigration of free women, and Government migration schemes delivered a much more even balance. However, these were matched by the unassisted, which were again mainly male. Colonial Australia’s white population smelt largely of testosterone.

Empire & Sexual Opportunity

The masculinity of colonial society framed a discourse in which ‘God’s police’ – good wives and little children – became the solution to social ills of raucous male behaviour, and inappropriate sexual activity (Summers 1975; Reid 2007). Many men but few women constrained opportunities for heterosexuality and there was much official fretting over the (illegal) sexual alternatives of homosexuality and bestiality, and a little less disquiet over the consequences in terms of violence against women, especially indigenous women. Conversely, did women leverage their scarcity value? They could exploit the market through prostitution, or have their pick of men, and a decent number of women ‘married up’ into the ranks of those who governed them.

There was something of an irony here, in emphasising family as a solution, as the woman shortage meant most men could never marry a white woman. Only a few married Aboriginal women, as did Jonathan Goldspink when he and Margaret Read wed, pictured. Denying men legitimate family can be seen as one of the defining features of transportation as punishment.

Bigge Changes

The Bigge Report of 1822 is notable for resetting the nature of convict Australia. It signalled a significant reduction in the British state subsidy and provided a blue-print for colonial self-sufficiency. The new agenda promoted the private sector and fostered an export-based economy supplying wool to Britain, making good use of a mainly male population. Wealthy immigrants were to be attracted with large land grants and free convict labour. Places of secondary punishment were to be established for discipling the large coerced workforce. For Britain, this was win-win: it reduced cost, and increased terror, deterring crime at home and setting the scene that would allow wholesale retrenchment of the death penalty in the following decade; and wool from Australia supported an important British industry.

The creation of Australia as a sheep-run took a little time, but it worked, based on monied men, merinos, convict shepherds, and a lot of land – a very big lot of land. Pickings of grass were thin on Australian soil, and it took 6 acres to support one sheep. The land grab that ensued brought intensified conflict with Australia’s First Nations.

Black & White

Aboriginal Australians perhaps numbered over one million in 1787 (Butlin 1986). They possessed a very long-standing claim to the land. Theirs is Deep History. Habitation of the continent stretches back at least 40,000 years, the world's oldest outside Africa. European visitors were awed by indigenous land management, creating ‘’The Biggest Estate on Earth’’ (Gammage, 2011).

Without war or treaty the great continent of Eastern Australia was claimed for Britain in 1770 by Captain James Cook, with unending ramifications. The European evaluation that the land could be put to better economic use was justification enough in contemporary British politico-legal thought. The status of the Aboriginal Nations was left undefined, opening the door to the legal fiction of ‘terra nullius’ meaning Australia was No Man’s Land before British occupation. Native title was not recognised in law until the Mabo Judgement of 1992.

British imperial expansion meant invasion to the indigenous peoples in Australia. The invaders brought with them deadly diseases, especially smallpox – accidentally or possibly deliberately; individual renegades – bushrangers and sealers – guilty of violence, abduction and sexual slavery; cloven footed animals that would support economic growth but deplete the environment and disrupt traditional food supplies; and a voracious appetite for Aboriginal land. What accommodation had been reached between some of the Aboriginal First Nations and the Europeans in the early years was shattered when the penal settlements transformed into pastoral capitalist economies from the 1830s swallowing vast tracks of land. (Karskens; Boyce). What ensued were massacres and Black Wars, inherently uneven conflicts (the ‘black armband’ view of Australian history) or the peaceful European settlement of largely empty lands (the ‘white blindfold’ account).

Convict Colonisers

The role of convicts in dispossession is complex. Some convict absconders integrated into Aboriginal society, while bands of convict bushrangers are known to have formed working alliances. Sexual relations sometimes meant local women exploiting new options; at other times (more frequently?), it meant men exploiting them. Infamously, in VDL Aboriginal women were either forcibly taken by sealers or exchanged as part of negotiations with Aboriginal groups and were subjected to sexual slavery. Most of Tasmania’s current Aboriginal population traces descent from mixed unions. The perceived threat of miscegenation later created the opportunity of assimilation, becoming formal policy in the 20th century.

Convict attitudes to locals readily turned negative. In New South Wales Aboriginal peoples were rewarded for returning runaway convicts. There and in Van Diemen’s Land runaways often clashed with indigenous Australians over food resources. When a party of Tasmanian Aborigines were temporarily housed in the bottom level of the convict barracks at Macquarie Harbour the convicts urinated through the floorboards on them. When Aboriginal hunters took sheep that replaced kangaroos, convict shepherds anticipated the punishment their loss of flock entailed. Violence erupted.

Frontier Violence

Much colonial conflict was between Aboriginal Australians and convict and former convict stockmen operating beyond the frontiers of settlement in lands illegally occupied by the Squattocracy, the richest and most powerful political group in the country (McMichael, 1984). Stolen land had to be ‘cleared’, and they didn’t mean trees. This was the eviction by various means of long-term inhabitants, of people who used land in a very different way, and it was rarely accomplished in a single act. What was created was a venue for violence.

Responsibility for colonial violence rested at multiple levels. Individual actors were clearly culpable, but so were private employers who formally or informally sanctioned brutality. The latter had an acute and unwavering belief in the validity of their newly if often illegally acquired property rights, and the legitimacy of any action that guaranteed them. The Squatters’ newspaper made their position clear. The Sydney Herald responded vehemently when the state prosecuted the alleged perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, urging the jury to acquit. It engaged in ‘fake news’, accusing the government of failing to protect white settlers under threat from ferocious savages with ‘wandering and predatory habits’ (‘The Blacks’, The Sydney Herald, 5/10/1838 p.3). This was a complete red herring, as ‘Waterloo’ Creek was an entirely unprovoked attack on an unsuspecting gathering of Aboriginal men, women and children (Milliss 1994). Chillingly, the paper told colonists, when besieged ‘protect yourselves – SHOOT THEM DEAD’ (Wed 14 Nov 1838 p.2).

The Colonial State & Genocide

The colonial state had a duty of care and, as in the case of Myall Creek did act to prosecute under the auspices of new Governor George Gipps. They persevered to a second trial that convicted and executed seven men – ‘judicial murder’ in the eyes of the Squatters. Notably, prosecution of whites for killing Aborigines was not repeated.

In other respects, the state appears the architect. Genocide – a contested term (Kociumbas 2004) – takes various forms and several are to be found in VDL. Four of the nine Tasmanian Aboriginal nations were engaged in the Black War, forcing pastoralists off indigenous homelands that had become the colony’s Settled Districts. The Colonial Government responded with money, men and martial law. The VDL Black Line comprised 2,000 soldiers, settlers and convicts – ‘the largest force ever assembled against Aborigines anywhere in Australia’ – and was a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing, sweeping the country to capture and corral the island’s warring peoples. Ryan has argued that this was an Imperial strategy used elsewhere in the British Empire, and that it succeeded in ending the war (Ryan, 2013). The job was completed by the ‘Friendly Mission’ of George Augusts Robinson, who negotiated with the remaining Tasmanian people to relocate to Flinders Island (Lawson 2014).

Colonial states also created Native Police forces that patrolled and ‘dispersed’ Aboriginal people. Convicts were recruited into these and other roving parties. Analysis of recruits reveals that many had prior military experience suggesting that the colonial government used convicts with appropriate skills as part of its attempt to ‘pacify’ the frontier. Recent work implicates the Native Police and estimates state sponsored frontier killings in Queensland alone tallied over 65,000 people, between 22-26% of the pre-contact population (Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted–Jensen, 2014).

Treatment of indigenous people can be seen to vary in accordance with their economic value to local employers. Aborigines were most at risk when viewed as obstacles to progress. In places where their labour could be utilised – particularly as stockmen, or domestic servants – violence against Aboriginal people was to some degree constrained, and those who regularly employed Aborigines were less likely to participate in killing (Palmer, 2000).

With the smaller numbers, official policy evolved to ‘protect’ Aborigines on designated reserves and stations run by missionaries – ‘smoothing the pillow of the dying race’, as Daisy Bates later put it. This led easily into assimilation policy which from 1937 involved the systematic removal of light-skinned Aboriginal children to be brought up white – the Stolen Generations.

Real gains were slow in coming. Inclusion in the census population returns, equal wages – for some, any wages – land rights, enquiries into Black Deaths in Custody and Stolen Generations, all had to wait until later in the 20th century.

It was in the 21st century that symbolic action was taken. This was in response to recommendations made by the 1997 National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families, and in a context of growing public pressure. On 13 February 2008, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, led the Parliament in finally saying 'Sorry' . Lorraine Peeters, one of the Stolen Generations, responded graciously presenting the gift of a glass coolamon created by the Balgo artist, Bai Bai Napangardi. Inside was a message of appreciation for the apology. Together these two acts were designed to forge a pathway towards Reconciliation of the Nations.

Just as once the convict stain prevented navel-gazing, the conquest of Aboriginal Nations provides a profound and lasting scar on society that has often been more comfortable to ignore. It is a sign of maturity that such difficult issues are now being confronted. A grand narrative of spectacular economic growth does not drown out Black History: it was predicated upon it.

Convict Australia is a story of sharp contrasts. The colonial cocktail mixed coercion with freedom, deprivation with opportunity, a state that was both strong and weak, economic miracle with calamity, black with white. Colonists annihilated property rights and simultaneously lauded them. A self-styled civilised nation justified genocide. All this resulted from penal policy, but that policy was also at the service of British imperial ambitions, especially against the French. The British government had landed some 160,000 criminals in Australia’s convict colonies, and commenced a process that dispossessed perhaps one million indigenous people. Persisting consequences across the centuries make Australia’s colonial history a live political topic.

Further Information

• Butlin, N.G., ‘Contours of the Australian Economy 1788-1860’, Australian Economic History Review 26.2 (1986). Butlin’s estimate was a population of 1.1 million, with a possible range between 880,000 and 1,320,000 (p.107).
• Evans, Raymond and Ørsted–Jensen, Robert, 'I Cannot Say the Numbers that Were Killed': Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier (2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2467836 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2467836
• Feeley, Malcolm M. and Deborah L. Little, ‘The vanishing female: The decline of women in the criminal process, 1687-1912’, Law & Society Review 25.4 (1991)
• Gammage, Bill, The Biggest Estate on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2011)
• Kociumbas, Jan, ‘Genocide and modernity in colonial Australia, 1788-1850’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society (Berghan Books, 2004)
• Lawson, Tom, The Last Man: A British genocide in Tasmania (I.B. Tauris, 2014)
• McMichael, Philip, Settlers and the Agrarian Question (Cambridge University Press, 1984)
• Meredith, David and Deborah Oxley, ‘The convict economy’, in Simon Ville and Glenn Withers (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Millis, Roger, Waterloo Creek (UNSW Press, 1994)
• Nicholas, Stephen (ed.), Convict Workers (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
• Palmer, Alison, Colonial Genocide (Crawford House Publishing, 2000)
• Reid, Kirsty, Gender, Crime and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2007)
• Rubenstein, William D., The all-time Australian 200 rich list (Allen & Unwin, 2004)
• Ryan, Lyndall, ‘The Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land: Success or failure?’, Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013)
• Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police (Pelican, 1975)

Author Credits

This page was written by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Deborah Oxley, with additional contributions by other members of the Digital Panopticon project team.

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Colonisation 1788 - 1890

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1. ATTENDANT CARE

Initial invasion and colonisation (1788 to 1890).

The arrival of Lieutenant James Cook, and then Arthur Phillip in 1788, marked the beginning of ‘white settlement’.

From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was taken over by British colonists on the premise that the land belonged to no-one (‘terra nullius’).

The history of Aboriginal dispossession is central to understanding contemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations. Colonial takeover was premised on the assumption that European culture was superior to all others, and that Europeans could define the world in their terms. A colony could be established by persuading the indigenous inhabitants to submit themselves to its overlordship; by purchasing from those inhabitants the right to settle part or parts of it; by unilateral possession, on the basis of first discovery and effective occupation.

Possession of Australia was declared on the basis of unilateral possession. The land was defined as terra nullius, or wasteland, because Cook and Banks considered there were few 'natives' along the coast. They apparently deduced that there would be fewer or none inland. Their observations were soon proven incorrect. The governors of the first settlements soon found that Aboriginal people lived inland, and had special territories and associations with land on a spiritual and inheritance basis. Nonetheless, they did not amend the terms of British sovereignty.

In the first hundred years there was no consensus about the basis of British sovereignty . “ Deaths in Custody Australia’s colonisation resulted in a drastic decline in the Aboriginal population. Estimates of how many Indigenous people lived in Australia at the time of European settlement vary from 300,000 to 1 million. Estimates of the number of Indigenous people who died in frontier conflict also vary widely. While the exact number of Indigenous deaths is unknown, many Indigenous men, women and children died of introduced diseases to which they had no resistance such as smallpox, influenza and measles. Many also died in random killings, punitive expeditions and organised massacres.

Source: Face the facts p 45

U. Secret Country Extract 3: Empty land (2 min 36 sec)

The Frontier War

The pattern documented at and around Port Jackson - of initial friendly contact, followed by open conflict , reduction in the size of the Aboriginal population and then acceptance of and dependence on the whites by any survivors - was repeated time and time again as the frontier spread across the continent.

Many past histories made it appear as if the Aboriginals simply 'faded away' before white occupation. However, this was not the case. While some Aboriginal people accepted or adjusted to white occupation and some sought to survive as best they could by adapting to the new conditions, many others fought to retain their land and their culture.

Due to the nature of Aboriginal society, resistance took the form of guerrilla warfare - individuals or small groups of settlers were ambushed, isolated settlements attacked, crops, buildings and countryside burnt. In south-eastern New South Wales this type of resistance, organised by people such as Pemulwy around Sydney and Windradyne of the Wiradjuri around Bathurst, continued into the 1820s.

As white settlers moved further away from the centre of government, random shootings of Aboriginals and massacres of groups of men, women and children were common. The most infamous massacre in New South Wales occurred at Myall Creek station in 1838. Twenty-eight Aboriginals were murdered in cold blood by stockmen. The murderers were eventually tried and some were hanged - an unprecedented event which caused an outcry in the white community. Sometimes Aboriginal water- holes were poisoned, or Aboriginal people given flour, sugar or damper mixed with arsenic.

These practices, common in the 19th century, continued into the first half of the 20th century in some parts of Australia. Because of the 'moving frontier' and the different reactions of Aboriginal people to white settlement, the nature of the relationship that existed between black and white was not the same in all parts of the State at anyone time. The fight varied in intensity at different places and at different times.

Source: Aboriginal Australia Aboriginal People of NSW

Significant dates and events

1787 - Before departing England, Phillip’s instructions of 17 April 1787 included the following: You are to endeavour by every possible means to open intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all out subjects to line in amity and kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their occupation, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence. (Historical Records of New South Wales, Sydney 1889) These instructions were not followed. The notion of Terra Nullius was created. The great southland was considered wasteland, unoccupied, and belonging to no one. Despite common belief, there was immediate resistance by Indigenous peoples. Amongst its human cargo, the First Fleet brought with it many illnesses. Diseases indigenous to Aboriginal people appear to have been few. Dental disease was relatively rare; smallpox, influenza, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, leprosy and syphilis were unknown.

1789 - a disease akin to smallpox decimated the Eora people. Governor Phillip wrote of this incident: It is not possible to determine the number of natives who were carried off by this fatal order, it must be great; and judging from the information of the natives now living with us, and who had recovered from the disorder before he was taken, one-half of those who inhabit this part of the country died; and as the native always retired from where the disorder appeared, and which some must have carried with them, it must have been spread to a considerable distance, as well inland as along the coast. We have seen traces of it wherever we have been (13 February 1790) The plague spread quickly throughout the inland Aboriginal population, leaving anywhere from 20% to 75% of those infected dead. As well as small pox there was an epidemic of venereal disease. None of the Eora people showed any sign of venereal disease when the British arrived in 1788, but by 1791 many were infected. It is most likely that the infection was spread by some of the sailors and convicts who had sexual relations with Aboriginal women. The disease then spread through the communities, causing painful sores, illness, sterility and even death. Collins described the extent of the infection: At one time, about the year 1791, there was not one of the natives, man, woman, or child, that came near us, but was covered with it. It raged violently among them…

1795 - an outbreak of measles spread amongst the Eora, particularly affecting the Kamergal (Cammeraigal) who lived on Sydney Harbour’s North Shore

1802 - Van Diemans Land (now known as Tasmania) was settled. In 1804 settlers were authorised to ‘shoot aborigines’ in response to their resistance.

1814 - Governor Macquarie established a native institution at Parramatta to’ civilise, educate and foster habits of industry and decency in the natives’. This institution was closed in 1820 after Koori people withdrew their children.

1824 - Martial law is proclaimed in Bathurst to quell the Wiradjuri resistance to the white settlers.

1834 - Five thousand men lined up across the breadth of Van Diemans Land and walked the length of the island to force the Aborigines into the Tasman Peninsula. The Aborigines were forced to Flinders Island, where many died. The remainder were moved to Cape Barren Island.

1834 - The Pinjarra massacre in Western Australia is said to have wiped out an entire tribe. The official death count was only fourteen.

1835 - The Myall Creek Massacre in NSW the first of the massacres where (white) offenders were punished under law. 28 Aboriginal people were shot and burnt, mainly women and children.

1835 - A treaty was made between John Batman and the Aboriginal people in 1835. There was an exchange of goods and blankets for 250,000 Ha of land. This treaty was never recognised by the authorities. (Some say that this was because the Governor would not recognise a treaty made in the absence of a declared war, others say it was because you cannot make a treaty with natives who are lower on the evolutionary ladder than you).

1837 - the British select committee finds that the treatment of Australian Aboriginals is very poor. A ’Protector of Aborigines’ was recommended to be appointed.

1848 - NSW sent troopers to Queensland to ‘open the land for settlement and kill natives’.

1863 - Labourers from the Pacific Islands were brought to Queensland.

1863 - The first international sporting team from Australia goes to England to play Cricket. The team was Aboriginal, it is said that the Australian side won the tour. In the same year 150 Aboriginal people were killed in the Kimberly Region for resisting arrest.

1876 - Tasmania’s Truganini dies.

Source: Australian Museum

More dates : Australian Human Rights Commission The history of the separation Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families

READING: 1. Aboriginal people in NSW

• Reading 1B First contacts
• Reading 1C The Frontier War
• Reading 1D Under the Act

Aboriginal Australia Aboriginal People of NSW Produced by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission 1997 (c) Commonwealth of Australia 1997 ISBN 0 664 10152 0

"It is important that we understand the legacy of Australia' s history, as it helps to explain the deep sense of injustice felt by Aboriginal people, their disadvantaged status today and their current attitudes towards non-Aboriginal people and society...."

READING: 2 The Legacy of History: National Report Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

• Reading 2B : The Dispossession of Aboriginal People
• Reading 2C : Frontier Period: Diseases and Violence
• Reading 2D : Police
• Reading 2E : Aboriginal People and the Law

READING 3: Jack McPhee & Edward Eyre

The famous explorer Edward Eyre set out to explain why Aborigines attacked frontier settlers. He gave seven reasons. EJ. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of discovery etc. , 2 vol., London, 1845

• Reading 3B : Edward Eyre

READING 102: Upper Hunter History of Aboriginal and European contact: Part A

READING 102B : First contact in the Upper Hunter Valley READING 102C : The Trial of Lieutenant Nathaniel Lowe READING 102D : The Impact of dispossession READING 102E : Caroona and St Heliers READING 102F : St Clair (Mount Olive), Caroona and the Aborigines Inland Mission

Video Clip D: First Australians Ep1 NSW Resistance 1790s (4 min 2 sec)

See: SBS On Demand for full video 1Hour 10 mins

They Have Come to Sta y - This landmark series chronicles the birth of contemporary Australia as never told before, from the perspective of its first people. It explores what unfolds when the oldest living culture in the world is overrun by the world's greatest empire, and depicts the true stories of individuals - both black and white. The story begins in 1788 in Sydney with the friendship between an Englishmen, Governor Phillip, and a warrior, Bennelong.

Video Clip E: Bingara Massacre 1838 (7 min 42 sec)

Myall Creek Massacre involved the killing of up to 30 unarmed Indigenous Australians by ten white Europeans and one black African on 10 June 1838 at the Myall Creek near Bingara in northern New South Wales. After two trials, seven of the 11 colonists involved in the killings were found guilty of murder and hanged.

Video Clip F: First Australians Ep5 WA Jandamarra 1890s (4 min 28 sec)

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The British Colonization of Australia: An Exposé of the Models, Impacts and Pertinent Questions

2018, Decolonizing Through a Peace and Conflict Studies Lens

By adopting the purview of Peace and Conflict Studies and the expository approach of historical archaeology of colonialism, this paper succeeds in enumerating the models the British used to establish and perpetuate colonial violence on the Indigenous Australians, and the traumatizing impacts the violence is exerting on them. The sole essence of the paper is not only to re-establish that the British colonization of Australia was deliberate, just as the heinous models they used. Most essentially, the paper identifies the following institutions: Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), the UN and challenges them to move from their current inert condemnation of colonial violence and adopt effective, concrete and practical frameworks that will “overthrow” the Australian colonial violence. Their sincere disposition and uncompromised commitment to this cause is important and imperative. In conclusion, the paper poses some pertinent questions to prove that colonialism is a dispensable evil.

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We reexamine the fraught question of colonial genocide in Australia and conclude that the worst of Australia's values were formed in the crucible of racism, a sense of superiority deriving from Britain's class obsessed hierarchy, a sense that has now transferred to the environment, for which specism is the enabler and ecocide is the consequence. The impact of British power on Aboriginals was calibrated and ruthless, but we are now asked to question British 'intent', that there was no documented intention by Britain to commit genocide. This is a further example of 'reframing'. Mass killing almost never has a written order. It is unlikely, and highly self-incriminating, that a Government would issue instructions for carrying out deliberate murder. Nevertheless, ethnically targeted mass killing-racial destruction-is usually the expected result of some official policy or reactive social behaviour within a policy context. We are asked by some politicians and historians to absolve or reject Britain's role in colonial genocide because there is no evidence of written orders from the British Government that authorises mass killing. Others argue, if mistakes were made, that the past should remain in the past. We are further asked by some (such as Windschuttle and other denialists) to dismiss any allegations of mass killing because there is no body of legal evidence (that is, case histories) to support such a charge. Instead, we are exhorted to consider violence against Aboriginals, if we accept it at all, as the aberrational excesses of a few settlers at the lawless frontier; or if we reluctantly accept that targeted racial violence and Aboriginal antipathy did occur, we are encouraged to play it down as 'a black armband' view of history that is unhelpful in the myths we prefer to create for ourselves.

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Aboriginality survives the long history of a violent colonial project. In the contemporary space an Aboriginal resistance and survival struggle continues. However, the colonial project also continues. The state still has assimilation agendas, intent upon the removal of Aboriginal peoples from traditional lands and the absorption of Aboriginality into a ‘white Australia’. Colonising acts of violence, both past and present, have been read as being beneficial to Aboriginal communities, saving them from their violent selves. A comprehensive analysis of the sources of Aboriginal community violence from a diversity of Aboriginal perspectives is rarely made by the mass media or given space for communication and conversation. The Howard government’s intervention into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities is supported by the current Rudd government, and remains largely immune from a critical gaze at its underlying impulses.

Much of Australian history is in the form of ‘myth’. The absence of case law makes the investigation of massacres more difficult. Many university history faculties discourage such conflict studies as unnecessarily negative, preferring to focus on ‘race relations’. The debate gave rise to the ‘history wars’ and a repudiation of the ‘black armband view’ of history. This paper contends that a culture of denialism has perpetuated some of the dysfunctional behaviours that drove violent Aboriginal depopulation.There is evidence that Australia is in a late stage Lemkinian genocidal process.

The nature of colonialism is examined in this comparison of British colonial policy in Ireland and Canada toward Indigenous people. The histories and realities of Indigenous peoples’ experiences of colonizing violence are not adequately addressed by the dominant approaches of the democratic peace theory’s universalist neoliberal technocratic values, expectations, and assumptions (see Mac Ginty, 2013). PACS scholars and practitioners need new interpretive frames to make sense of the impact and consequences of colonialism and the intent of genocidal destruction across different colonial contexts in order to understand the deep roots of conflict (economic exploitation, internalization of oppression, racist ideology), and how we should go about critical and emancipatory peace building, theory building, and practice. The study of colonialism is required to understand conflict milieus characterized by structural violence in order to create a justpeace (see Lederach, 1997) that includes re...

Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Should it be accountable? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?

Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?

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• العَرَبِيَّة

Depictions of Aboriginal People in Colonial Australian Art: Settler and unsettling narratives in the works of Robert Dowling

Art journal 48, brook andrew: ethical portraits and ghost-scapes, raising the flag of modernism: ben nicholson’s 1938, military objectives: some reflections on the forgotten second world war artist louis duffy, edgar degas’s portrait of a woman, two new attributions: a tocqué and a bellotto in melbourne, the melbourne finding of moses: steps towards a new attribution, recent acquisitions, balenciaga’s sandals, dennis nona’s baidam – shark constellation, ron mueck’s two women, boyd webb’s wakatipu, margaret preston’s shoalhaven gorge, new south wales, amédée ozenfant’s nature morte, carlo bugatti’s chair, from the snail room, maurice denis’s amour suite, japanese horse stable, lanvin’s dress and necklace, materialbyproduct’s outfit comprising couture excesses, bill viola’s “ocean without a shore”, publication details, publication details for art bulletin of victoria 48.

The near absence of Indigenous people in mid-nineteenth-century colonial painting has been one of the most potent assertions of continued settler presence in Australia. This invisibility reinforced the myth of terra nullius and rendered further colonial expansionism picturesque. Many colonial artists were reluctant to insinuate the original owners into the landscape, thereby avoiding complicated issues of dispossession, resistance and guilt. Remarkably, the oeuvre of Robert Dowling is distinguished by his depiction of Aboriginal people, not as background figures but as subjects, conspicuously interacting with Europeans, which opened up new mythologising possibilities. Robert Dowling’s commissioned portraits and history paintings of the nineteenth century engage with the Indigenous population, yet the resultant works cannot be innocent of the impact of colonisation in south-east Australia. Masters George, William, and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aborigine Jamie Ware (fig. 1), Tasmanian Aborigines (fig. 2) and Early effort – art in Australia (fig. 3) reflect Dowling’s sometimes didactic, ambiguous and oppositional views and his representations of Aboriginal people can be described as a move from apparent harmony to memorial and, finally, to unchallenged ascendancy.

Dowling produced a number of portraits of Aboriginal people while living in Tasmania and in the Western District of Victoria during the 1850s. Masters George, William, and Miss Harriet Ware with the Aborigine Jamie Ware is a compelling image of interracial coexistence, a rarity in much nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian art history. However, this apparently uncomplicated depiction of Aboriginal–European relations is strangely at odds with the world outside the painting.

Commissioned by the Ware family and painted from life, the portrait has a vitality and integrity born of truth. Its most distinctive feature is the strong relationship between the Aboriginal and European sitters. The eldest Ware child, George, sits at the symbolic head of the group, his brother William is to his left and sister Harriet and the Mopor man Jamie to his right. The close relationship between Harriet and Jamie is obvious and the absence of the children’s parents implies the trust that Jamie was afforded and cements his surrogate position within the family unit. 1 The authors thank John Jones for providing documentation of Jamie Ware’s death certificate. The title of the painting that is the focus of this article has evolved as recognition of Jamie Ware’s identity and acceptance within the Ware family have come to light as a result of Jones’s research. Originally, the work’s ascribed title referred to Jamie as ‘the Aboriginal servant’, followed by ‘the Aborigine Jamie Ware’, indicative of his separateness from the Ware family (see John Jones, ‘The Ware family of Koort-Koort-Nong, Minjah and Yalla-y-Poora in the Western District of Victoria and their patronage of the artists Robert Dowling and Eugène von Guérard’, National Gallery of Australia, 1997, unpaginated).

There is a shared feeling of conviviality and warmth in the painting that is impossible to dismiss. The work is not a projected vision of interracial cohabitation but one that was real, lived and clearly treasured. This painting had remained in the hands of Ware descendants until it was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria in 2007. Honoured by his continued recognition and identification through many generations, Jamie was profoundly respected by the Ware family.

To begin to understand this painting, we must consider both the artist and the family who commissioned the work as well as the period in which it was painted. The connection between the Dowlings and the Wares was strong: as the first Baptists in Van Diemen’s Land, the two families were instrumental in establishing the earliest Baptist churches. 2 See Laurence F. Rowston, Baptists in Van Diemen’s Land: The Story of Tasmania’s First Baptist Church, the Hobart Town Particular Baptist Chapel, Harrington Street, 1835–1886, Baptist Union of Tasmania, Launceston, 1985, p. 1. The Dowlings and the Wares had also been associated previously through their churches in England. The four eldest Ware children and their parents, Jeremiah (1793–1878) and Mary Ware (c.1789–1858), arrived in Van Diemen’s Land aboard the Lusitania on 25 April 1823. Eleven years later, Robert Dowling and his parents arrived in the southern colony.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the three Ware brothers, Jeremiah (1818–1859), Joseph (1820–1894) and John (1827–1891), were pivotal in the early development of the Western District. Having lived in Tasmania during the Black War of the 1820s and 1830s, the Wares would have witnessed the atrocities committed by fellow colonials against Aboriginal people. Similarly, the post-contact violence in the Victorian Western District was also bloody and distressing, as G. A. Robinson recorded in his journal on 27 May 1841:

The settlers at the Bay spoke of the settlers up the country dropping the natives as coolly as if they were speaking of dropping cows. Indeed, the doctrine is being promulgated that they are not human, or hardly so and thereby inculcating the principle that killing them is no murder … Mr Pilleau said, thereby, they would the sooner get rid of them. And he himself seemed inclined to the doctrine. He said, and others have said – and said it to me – that there would never be peace until they was extirpated. 3 Gary Presland (ed.), ‘Journals of G. A. Robinson: May to August 1841’, Ministry for Conservation, Melbourne, 1980, p. 26.

Dowling’s portrait, however, attempts to counter such caustic agendas by presenting Christianity as a possible means through which Aboriginal people and Europeans could live together. The pervasive religious subtext of this intimate portrait is thus unsurprising. George Ware, seated in the centre of the four and holding a staff, is depicted as both the spiritual and moral leader of the group. The Biblical significance of the staff locates Dowling’s portrait within Protestant Christian values and traditions that emerged in England during the late eighteenth century. The heavy symbolism continues with the branch that Jamie holds, which is emblematic of Christian faith, friendship, and peace. Jamie’s inclusion within the family is represented as both physical and spiritual, and the sitters’ shared faith is a fundamental cohesive element of the work.

Undoubtedly for Dowling, Christianity was vitally important and informed his personal attitudes towards Anglo–Aboriginal relations. As the son of a Baptist minister, Dowling would have been exposed to the dissenting Christian views that led to the Slavery Abolition Act introduced by the British Parliament in 1833. Beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, groups of concerned citizens began a long campaign to alter public opinion regarding the slave trade. This cause was championed by various Protestant churches and exemplified by published sermons such as Reverend Robert Hawker’s ‘The Injustice of the African Slave Trade, Proved, from Principles of Natural Equality’ that actively positioned Christian morality as a central tenet of the Abolition movement. 4 The Monthly Review, vol. LXXXX, London, Mar. 1789, pp. 284–5 commented: ‘As it has been carried on, it seems a most iniquitous branch of commerce, stained with cruelty and blood; at which humanity shudders, and which Christianity condemns … We heartily wish success to all who plead the cause of our much-injured fellow creatures; and that the sale of this very sensible discourse be fully equal to the wishes of its author, as he generously gives the profits arising from it to promote a good design’. As this passage suggests, the profits generated by this publication and another by John Bidlake went to the local Plymouth committee for the abolition of slavery (see also J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade 1787–1807, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995, p. 99.) Hawker, a friend of Reverend Henry Dowling, was an influential figure who died the year the artist was born. Robert Hawker Dowling was named in his honour.

Themes of Christian morality feature prominently in the works of English artists such as William Redmore Bigg in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the second painting the artist presented at the Royal Academy, A lady and her children relieving a cottager (fig. 4), Bigg depicts a mother, accompanied by her children and an African servant, extending generosity towards the family in need. Through this work Bigg deals with a number of themes relevant to Dowling’s Ware family portrait. In her examination of Bigg’s work, Beth Fowkes Tobin states:

By placing the figure of the black servant in the context of Christian charity, Bigg was underscoring the link between abolition, charity, and Christian duty. His painting shares with eighteenth-century religious revivalism of both Wesleyan and Evangelical Anglican varieties a concern with ‘the duty of Christian charity’ – doing good works based in a desire to imitate Jesus’ acts of charity. 5 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Painting, Duke University Press, London, 1999, pp. 52–3.

Having left England at the age of seven, it is not possible that Robert Dowling would have remembered or even viewed paintings such as A lady and her children . However, it does provide a useful example of the theological and social environment in which his father was raised and the young artist nurtured. Such Christian ideals were prominent in Australian society and were not restricted to those associated with the Baptist Church. As early as March 1856 Melbourne’s Argus clearly decried the position of the Indigenous population in south-east Australia:

We assert that under present circumstances this country has been shamelessly stolen from the blacks We have made them outcasts on their own land, and are rapidly consigning them to entire annihilation. There are but few of them left, comparatively. This is what we would do for that few. We would feed and clothe every one of them . We would have local establishments constituted great centres for their concentration. We would give them medical assistance, protection and advice. We would educate them if we could – Christianise them too, letting the meat-cask, the flour-barrel and the sugar-bag wait heavily upon the Bible. 6 The Argus, 17 Mar. 1856, pp. 4–5.

Despite the violence committed against Victorian Aboriginal people by Europeans, Aboriginal workers were common in the Western District, often indentured as stockmen and labourers. Central to their employers’ success, they frequently became close to these families. 7 See Richard Broome, ‘Aboriginal workers on south-eastern frontiers’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 103, p. 213. James Dawson of Kangatong station is the best-known pastoralist to have built a lasting professional and personal relationship with Kaawirn Kuunawarn (or King David) of the Kirrae Wurrung people of the Western District (fig. 5). 8 Eugène von Guérard recorded the skill and pride of Dawson’s Indigenous workers in Cutting out the cattle, Kangatong, 1855, now in the Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria. After extended association with Aboriginal people and issues, in 1881 Dawson published a text, Australian Aborigines , recording the Aboriginal languages and customs of a number of Western District language groups. The strength of this text comes from Dawson’s ability to discuss both pre- and post-contact experiences with his Aboriginal informants in their own language. 9 See Jan Crichett, ‘Introduction to the facsimile edition’, in James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia, George Robertson, Melbourne, 1881, unpaginated. Certainly, Dawson was a great defender of Aboriginal culture and did not see the need to ‘Christianise’ Aboriginal people. Rather, he respected the differences between the cultures:

And even, in censuring customs and practices which we may regard as repugnant to our notions and usages, we should bear in mind that these may appear right and virtuous from the stand-point of the aborigines, and that they have received the sanction of use and wont for many ages. If our habits, manners, and morals were investigated and commented upon by an intelligent black, what would be his verdict on them? 10 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines, pp. iv–v. Dawson lists baby farming, gambling, the marriage market and slavery as examples of English society’s faults.

In the mid nineteenth century, as Robinson recorded in his journal, many believed Aboriginal people and their culture would simply disappear, replaced by the advancing British Empire. Attempting to contradict this prevalent misconception through his inclusion of Jamie Ware in the family portrait, Dowling illustrates the existence of the Mopor people in the Western District and suggests a possible model of cohabitation.

The success of this cultural model demands that Aboriginal people accept the terms of reference and its inherent asymmetrical balance of power. Returning to the symbolism of the broken branch and the staff in the Ware family portrait, this relationship takes a tangible form. Jamie sits in a relaxed pose in front of the monumental trunk that shelters the four subjects and holds a branch that lacks the authority of the staff held by George. Indeed, the relationship between the sitters is about access to power within the family structure and, by extension, to the land. Furthermore, the painting implies that harmony is only possible if European occupation and Christian morality are accepted. While Dowling contends that Christianity can lead to equality, the distorted power dynamic suggests that shared space is clearly not the same as equal space.

With its positing of Christianity as a solution for the continuing post-contact violence against the original owners, the painting asserts the then strongly held belief in the benefits and necessity of religious and social assimilation. Although not yet legislated in official government policy, assimilation was an onerous and punishing expectation enforced upon Aboriginal people in mid-nineteenth-century Australia. To a European audience Jamie’s clothing demonstrates his outward modelling and internalisation of European values, but more importantly, it tacitly represents the rejection of his Aboriginal heritage. Assimilation, however, was hardly a choice and began to exact its destruction of customary Aboriginal society.

Nevertheless, Dowling’s portrait of the Ware family is a marked break from the trope of the noble savage that was commonly depicted in early nineteenth-century Australian painting. 11 Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station, 1855–56, in the National Gallery of Australia collection is a more sombre and stratified image of interracial coexistence. But to suggest that the process of assimilation was complete or absolute is to refuse Jamie agency in the colonial environment. Applying the term ‘voyager’ to Aboriginal people, Richard Broome argues that

Colonialism is also strangely creative as well as being destructive … Many [Aboriginal people] have voyaged into the new cross-cultural world, exploring the possibilities and flexibilities of the Aboriginal-European interface to create new cultural forms. 12 Richard Broome, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p. 121.

This hybridity has political power and to deny Jamie Ware’s right to engage with European culture is to force him into the reductive essentialist role of the noble savage. In considering such issues, the problematic nature of colonial representations of Aboriginal people becomes clear. A work such as Dowling’s Ware family portrait gives no voice to the sitter, but rather, speaks volumes about the European culture that produced it. While ostensibly a beacon of interracial accord, the painting’s loveliness gives it a humanitarian gloss that only barely covers the post-contact brutalisation of Aboriginal people in south-east Australia. Further still, it represents the origins of wider and firmly entrenched policies of dispossession, dispersal and removal of children from their parents, beginning with the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act of 1869. 13 The removal of Aboriginal children from their families continued until the 1960s. The work is ultimately a plea for the forced assimilation of Aboriginal people into white society and the deep psychological, societal and linguistic damage to Aboriginal culture caused by such ingrained racist beliefs has been too long ignored.

Dowling’s Tasmanian Aborigines (fig. 2) breaks from the idealism implicit in the Ware family portrait and presents a mythologised and popular representation of Aboriginality. Depicted both seated and standing and attired in animal skins, Dowling’s subjects appear at ease in the lush green landscape that surrounds them. Yet this work has an entombing effect and is a lamentation on the passing of the Indigenous population of Tasmania. The long shadows imply that death lurks at the margins, poised at any moment to engulf the Aboriginal subjects and the dead tree trunk reinforces this sepulchral reading. Operating under the still current and incorrect belief that his Tasmanian Aboriginal subjects were the last remaining members of that race, Dowling produced a number of works intended to memorialise a culture. Dowling revisited this theme repeatedly between 1856 and 1860, grappling with its challenges, working through and never quite realising his unknowable objective. Two similar works exist in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. That these works were considered by Dowling to be of national significance is emphasised by his donation of the latter to the people of Tasmania after his departure for England in 1857.

The process of removing Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors to Flinders Island in the early 1830s supported the commonly held myth of a dying race. This absence also meant that Dowling’s contact with Tasmanian Indigenous people was minimal. Further, it appears Dowling’s interactions with Aboriginal people only started once he moved from Van Diemen’s Land to Victoria in the 1850s. Instead, Dowling based the faces of the Aboriginal subjects in his paintings on the graphite and watercolour drawings by Thomas Bock who had been commissioned to undertake the portraits by Lady Franklin, the wife of Sir John Franklin, the governor of Van Diemen’s Land, 1836–43. Bock took great care to reproduce accurately the faces and record the names of the Aboriginal people he painted, which implies a high level of cross-cultural engagement and authenticity (figs 6 & 7).

In contrast, Dowling’s active appropriation results in a painting mired as much in history as in fiction. The work is based on an actual group of Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors who were brought together during the Black War. As the Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough notes:

Tasmanian Aboriginal people, particularly from 1824 to 1830, were forced to form alliances with other tribes/bands due to greatly reduced numbers. The pastiche that Dowling painted in part reflects and refers to Conciliation , 1840, Benjamin Duterrau’s (1767–1851) grand history painting in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It truthfully depicts the members of Robinson’s party who came from various parts of Tasmania, and had surrendered to him or determined to join his group, to survive and/or work towards a conciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. 14 The authors thank Julie Gough for this vital information communicated by email, 22 Sept. 2008.

Numerous interventions into the work, both cultural and artistic, wrench it from and dilute its historical roots (fig. 3). Looking backwards, it cuts across time and space, splicing Aboriginal heads onto European bodies. 15 See Julie Dowling, ‘Robert Dowling’s Group of natives of Tasmania’, Art & Australia, vol. 39, no. 2, p. 235. A close examination of the Bock originals reveals the deletion of scarification and body markings in the Dowling paintings. Different clans and language groups are bound together in a colonially induced, stage-managed montage set in a generic landscape. While revealing colonial policies of removal, the work is a pastiche of Aboriginality that recycles familiar post-Enlightenment tropes of Aboriginal people such as the noble savage for a European audience.

This imagined vision of primordial Van Diemen’s Land fuses Aboriginal people to the landscape, though their presence is symbolic rather than actual. This is achieved by portraying them as unknowable and marginal figures inhabiting an exotic landscape inseparable from the natural attributes of the continent alongside the flora and fauna. 16 See Rod Macneil, ‘Time after time: Temporal frontiers and boundaries in colonial images of the Australian landscape’, in Lynette Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European Encounters in Settler Societies, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, pp. 48–9. For a nineteenth-century European audience this was acknowledged and understood as the opposite of Western civilization. This archaic representation has long served to legitimise the cruel treatment of Aboriginal people as pests well in the nineteenth and twentieth century, contributing to the damaging declaration of terra nullius that initially justified the invasion and rapid colonisation of Australia under international law. 17 For further reading on definitions of terra nullius and international law, see Lewis P. Hinchman & Sandra K. Hinchman, ‘Australia’s judicial revolution: Aboriginal Land Rights and the transformation of liberalism’, Polity, vol. 31, no. 1, Autumn 1998, esp. pp. 29–30; Macneil, p. 55.

Dowling was known as the first Australian-trained painter to make good in the colonies of Victoria and Tasmania. His success and that of the colony as a whole was largely dependent on Aboriginal people’s dispossession. As an emigrant artist Dowling unconsciously played a role in the continuing colonial project and indirectly augmented the harmful and erroneous belief that Aboriginal people and their culture would disappear. Reporting on an exhibition of Dowling’s works in March 1857, the Cornwall Chronicle declared:

Such works of art as these become more valuable with age, even now these must be looked upon as historical paintings, of the primitive state of society in these colonies, banished by the light and progress of civilization. 18 Cornwall Chronicle, Launceston, 18 Mar. 1857, p. 5.

Writing about a similar painting, Group of natives of Tasmania , 1860, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Badimaya artist Julie Dowling argues: ‘Dowling recorded the Tasmanian Aboriginals to legitimise the theory of white supremacy for posterity’. 19 Dowling, p. 234. But in light of Robert Dowling’s religious inclinations, this theory needs to be re-evaluated. Tasmanian Aborigines is distinguished by the artist’s recording of all but one of the subjects’ names on the reverse of the canvas. Transcribed from Bock’s originals, this identification acknowledges the sitter’s humanity. As Tobin makes clear, ‘portraits imply an empowered subject. However delicate and complex the negations among sitter, artist, and patron, portraits are of somebody: an individual with a name, a family, and a home’. 20 Tobin, p. 17. Despite the problematic montage of Tasmanian Aboriginal people from different cultural and linguistic specificities, there is an acknowledgement of their suffering.

Yet Dowling’s good intentions and particular sensitivity are ultimately undone by an overarching cultural conceit. Once in England, Dowling perpetuated mythologised ideologies of colonial interracial relations in the second work he successfully submitted to the Royal Academy, Early effort – art in Australia . In this nostalgic and fictitious portrayal of Dowling’s own experience, three generations of British settlers gather to the right of the canvas behind a young boy, possibly the artist as a child, at an easel in the centre. To the left, with backs turned, a smaller group of Aboriginal people pose for the youthful painter and assembled crowd; they have been made a spectacle for colonial consumption. The subjects, purported to be Tasmanian, are nothing more than Aboriginal archetypes, deprived of individuality and specificity. The group hold boomerangs, which Tasmanian Aboriginal people did not manufacture, and their hair and attire is more in keeping with mainland Aboriginal people.

A curious work, Early effort was designed to inflect the painter’s technical virtuosity rather than engender some emotional response based in truth. It reinforces the familiar colonial discourse of control and denial invoking and celebrating its imperialist core. Recent infrared analysis has found that the spear of the principal Aboriginal figure was initially held out in a proud gesture between the two groups of people. This was later reworked by the artist so that the spear is held closer to the body and the space between the two groups becomes more pronounced. Although this revision was perhaps undertaken to address issues of composition, the spear and its attendant connotations of male power and virility is necessarily disempowered.

Discussing nineteenth-century photographic representations of Aboriginal subjects, Margaret Maynard writes that notions of English masculinity insisted that: ‘In the battle between the races, which whites necessarily must win, the presence of the black man is required to represent not just an equal but a worthy opponent even in defeat’. 21 Margaret Maynard, ‘Staging masculinity: Late nineteenth-century photographs of Indigenous men’, Journal of Australian Studies, issue 66, 2000, p. 132.

While the depiction of shields, boomerangs and spears in colonial painting and photography functioned symbolically as a means to underscore an Aboriginal man’s potency, they were in fact disenfranchised from this weaponry. One explanation is that the Black War, which raged relentlessly throughout Van Diemen’s Land, was all too familiar in the minds of many people and neutralising this latent threat was an important part of the myth-making role of the colonial painter. The Aboriginal population had to remain tractable for the viability of the colony.

The pacifying and placatory objective is implicit in Early effort . Unable to move or speak, the sequestered Aboriginal group facing away from the viewer is imprisoned within the painting’s own historicity. Colonial pictures such as this confirmed the supremacy of British rule and Aboriginal servitude, and reinforced one of the most enduring myths about Australia – that its settlement was peaceful. Yet, before the 1850s, and particularly from 1824 to 1831 in Van Dieman’s Land, many Aboriginal groups in south-east Australia waged bloody and protracted guerilla warfare over contested land. The word ‘settlement’, with its connotations of uncomplicated inevitability, disables any kind of moral judgement and dissolves it from political and historical interrogation. It also silences any resistance narratives. History shows that the Europeans did not clearly outmatch Aboriginal people until the 1870s when breech-loading repeating rifles made the colonisers victorious, 22 Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance 1785–1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, p. 40. a full one hundred years after Cook claimed the east coast in the name of King George III.

Synchronous with this conflict was the accelerated decline in Aboriginal populations through intolerance to introduced diseases. When Robert Dowling arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1834, the Aboriginal population of the small colony had been reduced to only a few hundred through violence and illness. This was a stark contrast to the many thousands of people estimated only thirty years earlier when the colony was established in 1803. 23 Figures regarding the Aboriginal population of Tasmania vary. McGrath estimates the Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land was between 3000 and 4000 (p. 309). It was widely believed that Aboriginal people would naturally die out because they were at the lowest evolutionary stage. Over time, their unnatural disappearance endorsed this distorted Darwinian theory of natural selection and, through its perpetual recitation, this myth came to stand as a hegemonic truth in Australian history.

Certainly, Dowling’s representations of Aboriginal people act as records of the colonist paradigm. Painted to assert the importance of Christianity in the colonisation of Australia, the Ware family portrait remains an injudicious symbol of racial harmony. It reflects the hope Dowling held for amity between races, but tragically, calls for the assimilation of Aboriginal people to achieve this. Tasmanian Aborigines naturalises and absolves rather than challenges charges of genocide. The general ignorance of the British towards Aboriginal people and their suffering is manifested in Early effort . With their backs turned, the Aboriginal subjects are not people, but rather, symbols in a colonial discourse that ultimately denies them any form of agency. Pervasive in all three works is a lack of understanding regarding Aboriginal people and their cultures that overshadows Dowling’s best intentions, leaving us with lasting records of the history of colonisation.

Humphrey Clegg , Assistant Curator, Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria and Stephen Gilchrist , Curator, Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Victoria (in 2008)

1     The authors thank John Jones for providing documentation of Jamie Ware’s death certificate. The title of the painting that is the focus of this article has evolved as recognition of Jamie Ware’s identity and acceptance within the Ware family have come to light as a result of Jones’s research. Originally, the work’s ascribed title referred to Jamie as ‘the Aboriginal servant’, followed by ‘the Aborigine Jamie Ware’, indicative of his separateness from the Ware family (see John Jones, ‘The Ware family of Koort-Koort-Nong, Minjah and Yalla-y-Poora in the Western District of Victoria and their patronage of the artists Robert Dowling and Eugène von Guérard’, National Gallery of Australia, 1997, unpaginated).

2     See Laurence F. Rowston, Baptists in Van Diemen’s Land: The Story of Tasmania’s First Baptist Church, the Hobart Town Particular Baptist Chapel, Harrington Street, 1835–1886 , Baptist Union of Tasmania, Launceston, 1985, p. 1. The Dowlings and the Wares had also been associated previously through their churches in England.

3     Gary Presland (ed.), ‘Journals of G. A. Robinson: May to August 1841’, Ministry for Conservation, Melbourne, 1980, p. 26.

4     The Monthly Review , vol. LXXXX, London, Mar. 1789, pp. 284–5 commented: ‘As it has been carried on, it seems a most iniquitous branch of commerce, stained with cruelty and blood; at which humanity shudders, and which Christianity condemns … We heartily wish success to all who plead the cause of our much-injured fellow creatures; and that the sale of this very sensible discourse be fully equal to the wishes of its author, as he generously gives the profits arising from it to promote a good design’. As this passage suggests, the profits generated by this publication and another by John Bidlake went to the local Plymouth committee for the abolition of slavery (see also J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade 1787–1807 , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1995, p. 99.)

5     Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth Century British Painting , Duke University Press, London, 1999, pp. 52–3.

6     The Argus , 17 Mar. 1856, pp. 4–5.

7     See Richard Broome, ‘Aboriginal workers on south-eastern frontiers’, Australian Historical Studies , vol. 26, no. 103, p. 213.

8     Eugène von Guérard recorded the skill and pride of Dawson’s Indigenous workers in Cutting out the cattle, Kangatong , 1855, now in the Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria.

9     See Jan Crichett, ‘Introduction to the facsimile edition’, in James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia , George Robertson, Melbourne, 1881, unpaginated.

10     James Dawson, Australian Aborigines , pp. iv–v. Dawson lists baby farming, gambling, the marriage market and slavery as examples of English society’s faults.

11     Mrs Adolphus Sceales with Black Jimmie on Merrang Station , 1855–56, in the National Gallery of Australia collection is a more sombre and stratified image of interracial coexistence.

12     Richard Broome, ‘Victoria’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995, p. 121.

13     The removal of Aboriginal children from their families continued until the 1960s.

14     The authors thank Julie Gough for this vital information communicated by email, 22 Sept. 2008.

15     See Julie Dowling, ‘Robert Dowling’s Group of natives of Tasmania’, Art & Australia , vol. 39, no. 2, p. 235. A close examination of the Bock originals reveals the deletion of scarification and body markings in the Dowling paintings.

16     See Rod Macneil, ‘Time after time: Temporal frontiers and boundaries in colonial images of the Australian landscape’, in Lynette Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous–European Encounters in Settler Societies , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, pp. 48–9.

17     For further reading on definitions of terra nullius and international law, see Lewis P. Hinchman & Sandra K. Hinchman, ‘Australia’s judicial revolution: Aboriginal Land Rights and the transformation of liberalism’, Polity , vol. 31, no. 1, Autumn 1998, esp. pp. 29–30; Macneil, p. 55.

18     Cornwall Chronicle , Launceston, 18 Mar. 1857, p. 5.

19     Dowling, p. 234.

20     Tobin, p. 17.

21     Margaret Maynard, ‘Staging masculinity: Late nineteenth-century photographs of Indigenous men’, Journal of Australian Studies , issue 66, 2000, p. 132.

22     Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance 1785–1980 , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982, p. 40.

23     Figures regarding the Aboriginal population of Tasmania vary. McGrath estimates the Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land was between 3000 and 4000 (p. 309).

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Resistance + Colonisation

Danie Mellor, Mamu/Ngadjon peoples, Of dreams the parting 2007, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2008

eternal adjective without beginning or end; lasting forever; always existing perpetual; ceaseless enduring; immutable

‘All Aboriginal art is political because it is a statement of cultural survival.’

Gary Foley, 1984, broadcast on The Point (television series), NITV 2020

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are fierce protectors of their people, culture and Country. The resolute defiance of the early Indigenous warriors and Elders who resisted the colonisation of Australia is what inspires present-day activists, agitators and leaders at the forefront of recognition and change. Australia has a shared history, but Indigenous experience has for too long been contested or denied—a situation that artists have helped to expose and change.

For many First Nations artists whose culture, language, Country and family have been taken from them since first contact, the ongoing effects of violent frontier encounters and government policies forcing their integration, assimilation or removal have been important subject matters for their works. Their art highlights the social and political injustices of the past and present. Artists have mined archives and used the official writings of governments and colonists to reveal the hidden histories of their deliberate acts of incursion, theft and massacres, bearing witness to and telling the truth of Australia’s history.

Judy Watson

‘Blue is the colour of memory and is associated with water; it washes over me. Waanyi people are known as running-water people because of the inherent quality of the water in their country.’ Judy Watson, 2007 Source: Artist statement, 2007

Judy Watson was born in Mundubbera, Queensland, in 1959 and spent time exploring her great-grandmother's Waanyi Country in northwest Queensland. This link is central to her art practice.

Watson seeks the hidden histories and impressions of Aboriginal women’s experiences. Past presence on the landscape is sought through the rubbings, incisions and engravings on Country, which she reveals subtly.

Blue is an important colour to Watson and a key part of her work. It’s also the colour of the coloniser, in uniforms and flags—another subject frequently used in her work.

In stake 2010, Watson uses bright white to highlight three ambiguous shapes on a base of iridescent blue pigment wash. The work can be read in different ways; from an Aboriginal or coloniser perspective.

The work signifies the military and the open wounds inflicted on Aboriginal people. It is a strong counter-reference to the colonial experience through the expression of Aboriginal connection to Country, culture and presence in landscape.

Judy Watson, stake 2010, the Wesfarmers Collection, Perth © Judy Watson/Copyright Agency, 2022

Look at the colours and mark-making in Watson's work. Can you identify what she is conveying?

Consider the environments that are special to you—your home, school, local park or playground. What memories do these places hold for you?

Make a series of rubbings that record the textures of your environment. Start by placing paper over the object then turn your pencil horizontally and shade/pencil over the texture.

Create a series of made and natural objects. Use different colours, or even natural colours.

Danie Mellor​

‘Cut from travelling trunks, the Balan Bigin/shields (Jirrbal/Mamu dialect) in this series reference and symbolise voyages, arrivals, departures, moving on, presence, displacement and even adventure. Shaped and sculpted to echo the shape and size of rainforest shields from the Atherton Tablelands area, they recall a time in memory, authenticated by their apparent age. The appearance and form relate to the projected identity of those who dressed in a particular way for photographic portraits ... the Victorian and buttoned dresses that women in our family wore, for instance, speak of a westernised persona, which seemed incongruent in some ways given they were Indigenous women. This dovetails with the notion of identity and matrilineal heritage in this context: the shield in rainforest culture is seen as a feminine object.’ Danie Mellor, 2007 Source: Artist statement, 2007

Danie Mellor, born 1971 in Mackay, is from the Mamu and Ngadjon peoples of the Atherton Tablelands in Northern Queensland and also has Scottish heritage. Mellor explores the impact colonisation has had on the landscape and he observes the intersection of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultural perspectives and experiences in Australia’s shared post-settlement history. Mellor’s own cultural Ancestry is a mix of these tensions.

Mellor reclaims rusty old metal travelling trunks to repurpose them as metal shields in Of dreams the parting 2007. Travelling trunks carry the objects, clothes and personal items for the person/people moving from one part of the globe to the other. The colonisers were afforded the luxury of transporting their worlds with them in these travelling trunks as they arrived in the new land of terra nullius. Shields symbolise identity and protection as well as kinship and pride. The symbolism of the trunk is dislocation and passage.

What can you see in Mellor’s work Of dreams the parting?

How have the suitcases been transformed?

In what situations do people use shields? What do you think shields symbolise?

Why might Mellor have transformed these suitcases in this way?

What story is Mellor telling us and why is this important?

Can you think of a time when you have overcome a challenge in your life, big or small? Create your own work of art centred around a symbol that represents this journey for you.

Julie Gough

'This artwork contains part of me and my family. We come from Aboriginal people removed from Country and family in Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1800s ... I have a list of 209 children, including one of my Ancestors and her two sisters, compiled over the past decade ... ‘This artwork consists of unfinished tea-tree spears held within the framework of an old chair whose legs are burnt … The chair holds the children captive, but together, united ... These spears are raw tea tree sticks ... each has a section peeled away … where I have burnt the name of one of these lost children ... of about one-third of the children I am seeking.’ Julie Gough, 2008 Source: Artist statement, 2008

Julie Gough is a Trawlwoolway artist born in 1965 in Nipaluna/Hobart in lutruwita/Tasmania. She is interested in why Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania in 1856. First a penal colony in 1803, it was firmly established by the British by 1824, despite Aboriginal people being present.

Gough uses found and constructed objects and narratives of historical events. Some Tasmanian Aboriginal children living with non-Aboriginal people before 1840 2008 juxtaposes the seatless historical European chair, unable to be grounded and transforming its use as container, and 83 tea tree spears each with the name of a stolen Aboriginal child burnt into it, bunched together and restricted.

Like a detective, Gough trawled through archives and oral histories, uncovering accounts that lead to truth-telling. As she explores her genealogy, Gough invites the viewer to understand our continuing role in, and proximity to, unresolved national stories—narratives of memory, time, absence, relocation and representation.

Julie Gough, Trawlwoolway people, Some Tasmanian Aboriginal children living with non-Aboriginal people before 1840 , 2008, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2008 © Julie Gough/Copyright Agency, 2022

What do you notice about Gough's work?

In Gough’s work of art, the legs of the chair do not meet the ground, what could this symbolise?  What does the title of this work mean in relation to the objects Gough has repurposed?

Investigate a hidden history you might not have learned in school about the First Nations people of your region. You might centre your research on how First Nations people have resisted colonisation. Create a poetic response on what you uncover.

Michael Cook

‘ Undiscovered is a photographic project that reflects upon European settlement in Australia. This moment was presented in history as the discovery of Australia, despite the fact Aboriginal peoples had been living here for thousands of years. ‘The new British settlers had no idea of the basis and meaning of Aboriginal culture prior to their arrival. Aboriginal peoples were seen as inferior, with no education or organisation; their knowledge and experience of the land was ignored. ‘ Undiscovered is a contemporary look at European settlement in Australia, a land already populated by its original peoples.’ Michael Cook, 2010 Source: Artist statement, 2010

Michael Cook is a Bidjara artist of southwest Queensland. As a photo media artist who explores identity, he restages colonial views of history and re-imagines a contemporary reality for Aboriginal people.

The Undiscovered 2010 is seen through the eyes of a young Aboriginal woman reflecting on the British invasion of Australia.

In Undiscovered #3 2010, we see the recurring Aboriginal man, his role reversed. Accompanied by a kangaroo at the shore, he is dressed as a British coloniser and holds a musket as he stands on a ladder. The central idea is: what if the British, instead of completely and summarily dismissing Aboriginal people, took a more open approach to them, their culture and their knowledge systems?

By depicting Aboriginal people in roles diametrically opposed to those we are accustomed to, Cook ensures his work is recognised as an Aboriginal dialogue and an Aboriginal voice is ever-present. He says, ‘This is an important work—it will live on when I’m gone’.

Michael Cook, Bidjara People, Undiscovered #3 2010, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 2010 © the artist and This Is No Fantasy

Look at the figure of the man in the painting. What do you notice about him? What clothing is he wearing? Why might he be holding a musket and standing on a ladder by the ocean?

Is Cook thinking, dreaming or remembering something in this work?

What do you think the term undiscovered means to the artist?

Through his art, Cook challenges perspectives on Australia’s foundations. Tell a story in the form of an art piece that challenges the dominant narratives you’ve learnt about a topic.

Explore themes

Ancestors + creators, country + constellations, community + family, culture + ceremony, trade + influence, innovation + identity.

The National Gallery acknowledges the First Peoples of this land and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country

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(page 125) p. 125 Conclusion

• Published: May 2012
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In the ‘Conclusion’ Australia's history is summarized: it's distinction as the last inhabitable continent to be explored by Europeans; the British foundation of the six colonies; the maritime economy; the export of raw materials; the establishment of democracy after 1852; 20th- and 21st-century economic development and military engagements; the role of the United States in Australian foreign policy; the historical and changing status of Aborigines; and the transformation from the ‘White Australia Policy’ to a multiculturalism that embraces Asia and the rest of the world.

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Settler-Colonial Continuity and the Ongoing Suffering of Indigenous Australians

Central to the discourse of contemporary indigenous affairs is the notion that settler-colonialism is an unfortunate historical event that has since ceased. Such assumptions fail to recognise the enduring settler-colonial structures that continue to shape the oppression of modern indigenous Australians. It is precisely this notion that this essay seeks to deconstruct. The present essay will argue that the experience of indigenous Australians has been shaped throughout history, and continues to be shaped in the present by what will be referred to as the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination.’In making this argument, the basic precepts of settler-colonial theory will first be sketched, in which it will be contended that the concept of settler-colonialism is best viewed as a continuous structure aimed at expropriating and maintaining control over land, rather than as a concluded genocidal event that exists only in the history books. Tracing Australian settler-colonialism in chronological stages, the argument will then follow that by denying sovereignty to the ‘uncivilised native’ in the pre-colonial stages, the ‘civilised settler’ eliminates the native first in a notional sense within international law discourse, thus justifying the subsequent colonial advancement into the ‘discovered’ territory. This notional elimination manifested in a particularly potent form in Australia – by designating the entire continent as ‘uninhabited land’, British colonial authorities essentially eliminated indigenous Australians under international law as if they had never existed in the first place – thus bypassing the legal requirement of treaty-making. It shall then be argued that the frontier era, characterised by overt violence and forced spatial segregation, can be best understood as the first stage of actual elimination aimed at clearing the native from his land. It will then be submitted that assimilationism continued this structural process of elimination by removing the growing population of ‘half-caste’ children from their tribes and recategorizing them within white settler-society.

Turning to the present, it will be contended that elimination persists in the form of a culturally-coded definition of indigeneity which renders the majority of indigenous Australians, mostly those in urban areas, to be too extensively assimilated into the settler-society to be eligible for native title rights. Finally, it will be argued that these enduring settler-colonial structures have shaped the ongoing dispossession, erosion of identity and subsequent inequalities in health and social wellbeing metrics that characterise the experience of modern indigenous Australians. By drawing a clear link between the experience of indigenous Australians and the historical continuities of settler-colonial logic, this paper permits a greater understanding of the root causes of ongoing problems faced by indigenous Australians.  

At the outset, it is first necessary to outline the basic features of settler-colonial theory. Unlike other forms of colonialism that rely on preserving the colonised society for resource extraction and economic exploitation, the economic imperative of settler-colonialism lies in the land itself and the use to which it can be put, thus requiring permanence (Wolfe 2006: 395). Settler permanence presupposes both the notional and actual elimination of indigenous societies in order to establish its own legitimate claim to the land. Under this ‘logic of elimination’, settler-colonialism proceeds in identifiable stages with the purpose of eliminating the ‘native’ as a sovereign identity and suppressing the significance of prior and current Indigenous presence (Evans 2009: 9). It is important to acknowledge that whilst on the one hand, the settler-colonial logic seeks the total elimination of the native, and the native correspondingly seeks to repulse the settler from his lands on the other, the intentions of neither side are ever completely fulfilled (Veracini 2014: 311). Thus, rather than a concluded historical event, the structure of settler-colonialism should be viewed as an enduring binary relationship of shifting balances in which the settler always possesses some degree of ascendancy (Wolfe 1994: 94). As settler-colonialism persistently seeks its own transcendence by declaring itself a thing of the past, it is important not to fall victim to its logic by accepting that colonialization is a concluded historical event (Wolfe 2013: 285). As will be shown, the utility of interpreting Australian colonialism through this lens is considerable as it reveals the ongoing binary between settler and native and the way in which this continues to shape modern indigenous affairs.

For indigenous Australians, their deprivation of sovereignty is the fundamental feature of their relationship to settler-society, a deprivation that constituted the foundational justification for British colonisation. Thus, it is first necessary to demonstrate how this elimination of indigenous Australians as a sovereign identity was first manufactured within international law discourse before colonisation could proceed. The importance of grounding the denial of indigenous sovereignty on international law foundations was centred around the desire of European powers to enjoy exclusive rights to a particular colony over that of other European powers by claiming legitimate entitlement to the territory through the processes of international law (Evans 2009: 19). Indeed, recent critical legal scholarship has revealed the colonial origins of the doctrine of sovereignty itself – international law’s key component. Rather than arising autochthonously in Europe as a governing principle of relations amongst European powers, evidence points to the doctrine of sovereignty as being developed as an exclusionary principle applied against non-European societies to facilitate Europe’s expansionist ambitions (Anghie 2006: 741). Early international legal texts emphasized the uncivilised nature and evident ‘lack of reason’ of non-European societies, evinced by their radical cultural difference and resistance to European encroachment, as the principal basis for deeming them non-sovereign and correspondingly distinguishing European societies as civilised, and thus deserving of sovereignty (Evans 2009: 16). As such, on account of the supposed ‘uncivilised’ nature of non-European societies, European expansion into their territory was purportedly justified. Viewed in this way, the doctrine of sovereignty serves as the theoretical or ‘inchoate’ stage of settler-colonialism in which the ‘uncivilised’ natives who inhabited the territories so desired by European powers were notionally eliminated within the discourses of international law.

In the case of Australia, the denial of sovereignty to indigenous peoples was particularly potent, as British authorities deemed indigenous Australians to be too primitive to consider their land properly inhabited. It will be demonstrated that this represented a particularly aggressive form of discursive elimination and erected the operational boundaries of actual elimination that was to follow. Drawing on Captain Cook’s observations of sparsely populated coastal regions devoid of European-style farming practices, British colonial authorities deemed Australia to be uninhabited, a characterisation that flies in the face of what we now know of the considerable complexity of pre-contact indigenous societies (Pascoe 2018: 15). Under the ‘doctrine of discovery’ – developed as a concomitant to colonialism in order to prevent conflict between rivalling European powers – acquiring territory by deeming it uninhabited or ‘ terra nullius’ was one of three ways that new territory could be lawfully acquired (Banner 2005: 96). The other two modes were through direct conquest, which required a declaration of war, or the transfer or ‘cession’ of land by its inhabitants, usually enacted by a treaty. On this point, it is significant to note that the acquisition of territory by the latter two mechanisms does not alter the customary laws that ground indigenous societies in their cultural practice, whereas a designation of terra nullius immediately furnishes the land with the laws of England and renders indigenous landless in their own land (Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd 1971: 141). Thus, not only were Aborigines subjected to foreign laws that dismantled their own system of customary law, but on account of their lack of a right of occupancy, their mass murder by colonists was frequently justified on the basis of safeguarding colonial investments in crops and livestock (Wolfe 1994: 102). Consequently, the colonisation of Australia stands out as a clear exception to the common colonial practice of treaty-making with natives, which in other contexts provided a basis for redress and tentative coexistence (Banner, 2005: 96). Thus, by drawing on a uniquely sharp application of the binary between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ societies under international law, British colonists bypassed the administrative inconveniences associated with recognising prior ownership and set the trajectory of indigenous suffering that was to follow.

It shall now be argued that the transition from notional elimination within international law to the actual elimination of the frontier period, characterised by homicidal belligerence and subsequent segregation of survivors onto reserves, was the critical stage of elimination in which indigenous peoples were removed from their land in order to render it available for the establishment of settler-colonial society. During these incursions spanning 1788 to the mid-1850s, uneasy coexistence between settlers and natives within a given locality would inevitably descend into violent confrontations as the encroachment of an aggressive pastoral economy inevitably depleted indigenous food sources and disrupted their way of life (Evans 2009: 8). For example, in response to indigenous resistance efforts to defend their hunting grounds in western New South Wales, Governor Brisbane’s declaration of martial law in 1824 resulted in the slaughter of countless indigenous peoples in the Bathurst Plains (Mar and Edmonds 2013: 345). Whilst the state apparatus often aided and abetted such instances of annihilation, the main instrumentality that reduced indigenous numbers were the land-ravenous hordes of agriculturalists and stockmen seeking to penetrate into unclaimed territory and ‘protect’ their livelihood from indigenous interference (Wolfe 2006: 391). Here, the market forces of the international economy – drawing on colonial land and labour for raw materials – combined with the desire of Europe’s landless peasant classes to establish a livelihood for themselves, come into focus as the principal driving forces of settler-colonialism (Wolfe 2006: 392). The basic fact that those remaining indigenous survivors who avoided slaughter and the wilful spread of European diseases were confined onto ‘protection’ reserves from the 1850s onwards, rather than being outright slaughtered, further validates the argument that settler-colonialism’s primary motive is to vacate and exclude indigenous presence from the land in order to render it available for economic use, rather than to commit outright racialized genocide as an end in itself (Wolfe 1994: 100). In this regard, conservative historians such as Keith Windschuttle who seek to forge a link between the responsibility to address the present suffering of indigenous communities and the capacity to empirically ‘prove’ the extent of systematic frontier genocide completely miss the point that settler-colonialism is not premised on the genocidal mass-murder of indigenous Australians along lines of racial superiority in and of itself (Evans 2009: 12). Rather, the culpability of settler-society in the suffering of indigenous Australians can be sufficiently established by acknowledging the bare fact that the violent confrontations of the initial frontier period were merely the first of a series of eliminatory stages to move and then keep indigenous peoples off their land – the combined effect of these eliminatory stages resulting in the reduction of the pre-contact indigenous population by almost 90% by 1900 (Harris 2003: 91). In these initial stages of elimination, the binary between settler and native, discursively engineered under international law, is maximally visible in the conspicuous removal of indigenous peoples from their land.

As the completion of geographical invasion signalled the end of the frontier, the logic of elimination turned inward to assimilate indigenous Australians into settler society which, despite being couched in humanitarian rhetoric, was equally as eliminatory as the previous stages of violence and segregation. For settler-colonialism, this strategic shift from exclusion to inclusion was a necessary progression for two central reasons. First, the sexual exploitation of indigenous women by white men during the frontier period proved to be a particularly refractory element of settler-colonialism, giving rise to the ‘half-caste menace’ who, being almost invariably reared by their maternal kin, were counted as indigenous (Wolfe 1994: 100). Since, unlike genetics, identity and consciousness are mathematically indivisible, the prospect of an exponentially expanding race of settler-native offspring who identified as indigenous posed a substantial ideological threat to settler-society’s claim to be the legitimate occupants of Australia (Wolfe 1994: 114). Second, the requirement for settler-state legitimacy within an increasingly humanitarian global climate rendered indiscriminate killings an impractical solution to reduce indigenous numbers (Haebich 2015: 21). Thus, the forced assimilation of settler-native offspring constituted a form of administrative elimination which, at a stroke, exterminated countless indigenous children ‘as indigenous’ and recategorized them within white settler-society. This initially came in the form of Victorian legislation in 1886, providing for a new racial biopolitics in which the Board for the Protection of Aborigines in Victoria (and similar state boards in later years) were given the power to determine the identity of Aborigines on the basis of blood quanta, essentially deeming those who possessed any degree of white heritage as ‘half-caste’ and evicting them from indigenous reserves (Mar and Edmonds 2013: 356). This signalled the beginning of almost 80 years of systematic state-licensed child abduction and forced assimilation under the pretext of child welfare. However, child welfare was of limited practical concern to the relevant state authorities, who commonly cited ‘being aboriginal’ as a sufficient reason for a child’s removal (Read 1999: 30). By the 1960s, an estimated one-in-six indigenous children had been forcibly removed from their families (Read 1999: 67). The untold suffering of these victims reflects the reality of the indigenous experience under settler-colonialism’s enduring logic, being the oppressed party of the settler-native binary.

Turning to the present, the genetic blood logic of the assimilationist era can be traced to the present emphasis on indigeneity and cultural authenticity as a formula for modern elimination. It will be argued that this current form of elimination mobilises the strategies of both inclusion and exclusion by conceding repatriation in the realm of welfare, whilst simultaneously marshalling a culturally-exclusive concept of indigeneity in order to eliminate the vast majority of indigenous Australians from the reckoning of land rights. The settler-colonial concession to accord limited land rights reflects the considerable gains made by indigenous political mobilisation and organised resistance. Importantly, such concessions do not contradict settler-colonialism’s central logic of elimination. Rather, they reinforce the notion that because total elimination can never truly be accomplished, the binary relationship between settler and native is an enduring one, constituted by shifting balances and degrees of inequality which, despite invariably lending ascendency to the settler, can indeed be influenced through organised resistance (Wolfe 1994: 124). The decades-long campaign for indigenous land rights culminated in the High Court’s decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2 ) (1992), which conceded that the doctrine of terra nullius did not apply to Australia, instead recognising that indigenous peoples had prior rights to the land under ‘native title’. This was shortly followed by the Native Title Act, which prescribed the eligibility criteria for such native title rights (1993 Cth). Despite being heralded by some as a turning-point in the historical continuity of settler-colonialism, Wolfe argues that the Act reinforces the logic of elimination by conceding native title only to those who can prove a ‘traditional connection’ with the claimed land (1994: 122). In this way, the Act shifts the burden of history from the fact of expropriation to the character of the expropriated, eliminating from the definition of indigeneity those who have already been removed from, and lost connection with, their land – that being a substantial majority of indigenous Australians (Wolfe 1994: 122). Correspondingly, where territory is not involved, the settler-colonial state has sought to reconstitute indigenous affairs internally as a depoliticised branch of welfare bureaucracy, providing substantial funding to social, healthcare and education programs. This, as Veracini argues, represents an assimilationist strategy aimed at reducing the perception of the primary settler-native divide to the status of the many divisions in our modern ‘multiculturalist’ society, thus protecting the territorial basis of Australian settler-colonialism (Veracini 2007: 281). Thus, by historicising the fundamental settler-native divide through assimilationist welfare concessions, whilst simultaneously excluding the overwhelming majority of indigenous Australians from land rights by marshalling a culturalist criteria for indigeneity that only those least affected by settler-colonialism’s destruction can satisfy, these parallel strategies continue to uphold the logic of elimination and protect settler-Australia’s claim as the territorial sovereign.

In light of the structural continuity of elimination from pre-colonial international law to the present, we are in position to understand that the experience of indigenous Australians as a collective is being continuously moulded by the enduring structures of settler-colonialism. The modern indigenous experience of oppression centres on their denial of sovereignty and the state-sanctioned regulation of their identity. Maddison argues that the ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’ requirements inherent in the aforementioned definition of indigeneity perpetuate a hierarchy that denies indigeneity to urban indigenous people (Maddison 2013: 292). Indeed, the structural violence that such forms of contemporary settler-colonialism produce quite often spill over into public discourse and the media, dispossessing indigenous Australians of their sense of identity. As a brief example, an article by prominent conservative media figure Andrew Bolt was the subject of a discrimination lawsuit in 2009 (Van Der Walle  2018: 49). His argument centred on the notion that light-skinned aboriginals in urban areas who identified as indigenous for the purpose of obtaining welfare benefits could not possibly be ‘authentic’ enough to obtain such benefits (Van Der Walle 2018: 49). The consequences of delimiting indigenous identity in this way are not minor. It has been widely established that possessing a poor sense of cultural identity for indigenous Australians leads to poorer mental health outcomes, as does poor cultural association to higher rates of criminal recidivism (Shepherd 2018: 6). More broadly, the ongoing repercussions of territorial dispossession cannot be understated. Crotty argues that the associated social, cultural, spiritual and economic repercussions of territorial dispossession are impossible to divorce from the fact that indigenous Australians currently have the worst life expectancy of any indigenous population globally and are proportionately the most incarcerated peoples on the planet (Crotty 2018: 36). In sum, so long as settler-colonialism persists, the fundamental binary between settler and native will always be a relationship of inequality and ongoing structural oppression.

To conclude, it has been strongly contended here that the past and present suffering of indigenous Australians is attributable to a singular eliminatory logic inherent to settler-colonialism. As the economic use to which colonial Australia could be put required settler permanence, the central purpose of this logic throughout the course of Australian history has been to eliminate indigenous Australians as a sovereign identity and expropriate their land. Viewing settler-colonialism as an ongoing structure brings the notional elimination of indigenous Australians in international law sharply into focus as the chronological starting-point of present indigenous suffering, from which a series of clearly identifiable stages of elimination throughout Australia’s history progressed. It has been the aim of this paper to expose settler-colonialism as an ongoing structural process for two central reasons. Firstly, acknowledging settler-colonialism’s enduring logic substantially enhances the extent to which the inequality, persecution and erosion of identity faced by contemporary indigenous Australians can be fully understood. Secondly, acknowledging settler-colonialism as an ongoing process permits a framework aimed at addressing inequality and the erosion of indigenous identity to be defined in terms of a parallel and ongoing movement of organised resistance that features indigenous perspectives, beliefs and practices.

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Evans, J. (2009) ‘Where Lawlessness is Law: The Settler-Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 30(1): 3-22.

Haebich, A. (2015) ‘Neoliberalism, Settler Colonialism and the History of Indigenous Child Removal in Australia’ Australian Indigenous Law Review 19(1): 20-31.

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Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Australia: Challenges to the Settler State’s Pursuit of Transitional Justice
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• Suffering and Dependence: How Colonialist Discourse Denies African Statehood
• Decolonising World Politics: Anti-Colonial Movements Beyond the Nation-State
• Frantz Fanon and the Inefficacy of Anti-colonial Violence
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