True Girt

The Unauthorised History of Australia, Volume 2

David Hunt

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781925435320
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Australische & ozeanische Geschichte

In this side-splitting sequel to his best-selling history, David Hunt takes us to the Australian frontier. This was the Wild South, home to hardy pioneers, gun-slinging bushrangers, directionally challenged explorers, nervous indigenous people, Caroline Chisholm and sheep. Lots of sheep.

First there was Girt. Now comes... True Girt

True Girt introduces Thomas Davey, the hard-drinking Tasmanian governor who invented the Blow My Skull cocktail, and Captain Moonlite, Australia's most famous LGBTI bushranger. Meet William Nicholson, the Melbourne hipster who gave Australia the steam-powered coffee roaster and the world the secret ballot. And say hello to Harry, the first camel used in Australian exploration, who shot dead his owner, the explorer John Horrocks.

Learn how Truganini's death inspired the Martian invasion of Earth. Discover the role of Hall and Oates in the Myall Creek Massacre. And be reminded why you should never ever smoke with the Wild Colonial Boy and Mad Dan Morgan.

If Manning Clark and Bill Bryson were left on a desert island with only one pen, they would write True Girt.

'An engaging, witty and utterly irreverent take on Australian history.' —Graeme Simsion, author of The Rosie Project

'Astounding, gruesome and frequently hilarious, True Girt is riveting from beginning to end.' —Nick Earls

1
Notes from a small island

Two heads are better than one.

John Heywood, The Proverbs of John Heywood, 1546

THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE

THE APPLE DOESN’T FALL FAR FROM THE TREE IN THE Apple Isle, an isolated speck in our southmost seas where the genetic distance between any two people is relative. Inbreeding is a popular island pastime and Tasmania, to this day, remains a popular island.

Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was officially known until 1856, was certainly popular with Charles Darwin.¹ When the HMS Beagle docked at Hobart in 1836, the aspiring young naturalist-cumgeologist happily collected 133 different kinds of insect and an unknown number of boring rocks. He enjoyed the climate, which reminded him of Britain’s (i.e. cold, wet and miserable), and the society of the island’s gentry, marvelling that Hobart was sophisticated enough to host “a Fancy Dress Ball at which 113 were present in costumes”. He would also, no doubt, have admired the Vandemonians’ famed enthusiasm for cousindry.²

Darwin’s study of island life during the Beagle’s five-year voyage led him to write in his notebook, “animals on separate islands ought to become different if kept long enough apart with slightly differing circumstances”. When he was not busy riding or eating the giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands, he noticed that tortoises on one arid outcrop had longer necks and limbs than those on more fertile isles. He later concluded they had incrementally changed over time to better access the island’s sparse vegetation.³

Darwin’s musings on islands and tortoises eventually gave rise to the Theory of Evolution, set out in his 1859 blockbuster, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. On the Origin of Species, as it was known after Darwin hired a decent editor, popularised the idea that species evolved over time through a process of natural selection – that is, individuals better suited to the environment were more likely to survive and to pass on their beneficial traits to future generations.

Inbreeding is more prevalent on islands, and genetic diversity accordingly lower, as descent from a small founding population and isolation from the wider world reduces the likelihood of hooking up with someone who isn’t a relative. Iceland, for example, is full of tall, blond, sexy people because most Icelanders are descended from a small group of migratory tall, blond, sexy people.⁴ There has been little further immigration to Iceland over the centuries because most people don’t want to freeze on an isolated volcanic rock while being made to feel short, swarthy and unattractive.

Island life is also more likely to experience population bottlenecks – sharp population declines caused by environmental events or human activity. Island-dwellers simply have nowhere else to go when a fire rages across their island or bad men with guns chase them. Population bottlenecks further reduce genetic diversity.

As diversity reduces, risk of disease increases. The Tasmanian devil, one of the world’s most bad-tempered, foul-smelling and inbred animals, is a case in point. Devils are so genetically similar that, since 1996, a transmissible cancer called devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) has more than halved their population. When a devil is bitten by one of its carcinogenic brethren, its immune system doesn’t identify the cancer as coming from a foreign body. Inbreeding-acquired DFTD threatens to make devils extinct in the wild by 2024.⁵

Island life, with all of its quirks and anachronisms, also fascinated Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection before Darwin published his, but the fact that he was not an independently wealthy gentleman who owned a country house with a swan-encrusted ornamental lake and hedge maze meant Darwin got all the glory. Wallace’s Island Life considered how isolation could preserve animals such as Mauritius’s dodo and New Zealand’s moa, but left them totally unprepared for contact with dogs, pigs and hungry sailors and/or Māori, which rapidly population-bottlenecked them into extinction.

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, shows the susceptibility of island life to outside invaders. The thylacine was out-competed on mainland Australia by the dingo, but clung on in the southern isle until the white man brought guns, dogs and an intense dislike of all things that ate his sheep to Tasmania, with the last known thylacine checking out in 1936. The Tasmanian emu didn’t eat sheep but lasted only until the 1850s because the white man and his dogs liked supersized drumsticks.⁶

Darwin moved on from islands and tortoises in 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this work, Darwin stated his long-held belief that man and ape shared a common ancestor, which pissed off the churches and honest Godfearing folk. He also argued that the male desire to excel was driven by female choosiness in selecting a mate (sexual selection) and that men choosing bigger and better weapons and tools over the years had caused them to “become superior to woman”, which, unsurprisingly, pissed off a lot of women. Darwin also challenged the dominant view of the time that the human races were separate species, which pissed off the Confederate Americans, who argued that it was their inalienable right to own black folk who picked cotton for free.⁷

Darwin’s view that all men were of the same species didn’t mean he believed all men were equal. He wrote of an evolutionary break “between the negro or Australian and the gorilla” and, applying natural selection to whole societies, concluded, “At some future point, not distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”

While Darwin was saddened by the thought of the inevitable extinction of “the savage races”, the same cannot be said of one of his cousins whom he didn’t marry, Francis Galton.

Galton made Darwin look like an intellectual tortoise, and not one of the fun-to-ride-and-eat ones. A genius of the first order, Galton was the father of historiometry, conceived the statistical concepts of correlation and standard deviation, pioneered the use of scientific questionnaires and surveys, devised the first weather map, invented the composite photograph and ultrasonic dog whistle, and developed the fingerprint classification system still used by hot American actresses whom we are expected to believe have nothing better to do than hang around crime scenes and conduct ballistic experiments on pig carcasses in basement laboratories.

Galton, when not making the world a better place, used his spare time to invent eugenics, which he regarded as the natural extension of evolutionary theory. He believed that the government should give gentlemen of high rank money to marry women of high rank in order to produce children who would inherit their high rank, money, clearly superior genes and, ultimately, the earth. “Inferior” people and their unwanted genes should be bred out of existence by confining them to monasteries or other places where heterosexual sex was at worst discouraged and at best impossible. As there were not enough monasteries to store the world’s black people in, Galton proposed immigration to displace them.

Nineteenth-century Australian politicians and pastoralists seized on the writings of Darwin, Wallace and Galton to mount the case that the Tasmanian Aborigines were a small population of inbred, savage, maladapted, disease-prone, uncompetitive, simple island folk who got what was coming to them, evolutionarily and eugenically speaking.

In recent years, Keith Windschuttle has given this argument a new twist – the Tasmanian Aborigines were a small population of inbred, savage, maladapted, disease-prone, uncompetitive, simple island folk who got what was coming to them, without us giving it to them.⁸

Hang on a minute … who were these Tasmanian Aborigines? Hadn’t Charles Darwin written in 1836, just thirty-three years after white settlement of the island, “Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population”?

FIG. 1: THE DESCENT OF WINDSCHUTTLE

THE NATIVE POPULATION

The native population would have been taken aback by Darwin’s conclusions as to their non-existence, as they’d been happily natively populating Tasmania for at least 34,000 years before Darwin mounted his first tortoise.

The Tasmanian Aborigines were rudely cut off from their mainland cousins about 10,000 years ago, when rising sea levels left Tasmania well and truly girt. Millennia of forced separation produced noticeable differences between the new islanders and their northern kin, with the former being generally shorter, rounder-faced and ruddier in hue. The Tasmanian men, some of whom were redheads, sported afros, which they conditioned into dreadlocks with grease and ochre, while the women shaved or cropped their hair.

François Péron, a one-eyed French trainee zoologist who had joined the 1801–02 Nicolas Baudin v Matthew Flinders Race Around New Holland after a failed affair, reported that the bodies of native Tasmanian women were disfigured by incisions and raised scars. He attributed this to domestic violence, although he never witnessed physical conflict between the sexes during his Vandemonian sojourn. Windschuttle, in his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, cites Péron when arguing that the Tasmanian Aborigines were world champion wife-beaters whose savage treatment of their women hastened their inevitable extinction. In contrast, Captain Cook and other early observers of traditional Tasmanian life noted that the bodies of the men bore similar markings, concluding that the scars on both men and women were ritualistic in nature.

Admittedly, Germaine Greer would have something to say about traditional Tasmanian gender relations.⁹ Early French visitors to the island’s shores reported that the men occasionally stirred to hunt kangaroos and wallabies, and sometimes each other, but otherwise spent their days playing with their kids, eating and taking long afternoon naps. The women caught possums and shellfish, hunted muttonbirds and seals, gathered plants, constructed huts and canoes, wove baskets, carried their children and possessions when moving to new hunting grounds, and slaved over a hot campfire every day, feeding the menfolk before themselves.¹⁰

The Tasmanian Aborigines, like their continental counterparts, lived in small family groups. There were several such groups to a tribe, sharing a language, cultural practices, spiritual beliefs and seasonal patterns of migration to gather food and resources. Unlike the mainlanders, some southern Tasmanian Aborigines lived for much of the year in well-constructed permanent huts. They had even got around to inventing the door, which would have thrown a serious spike into the wheels of terra nullius had the British taken any interest in Tasmanian architecture before the southern Tasmanian Aborigines ...