W.E.H. Stanner

W.E.H. Stanner

• Publisher: La Trobe University Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781921870187
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Australische & ozeanische Geschichte

One of Australia's finest essayists, the first to cut through 'the great Australian silence' to convey the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture to settler Australians

'The most literate and persuasive of all contributions on Australia's Indigenous people' —Marcia Langton

W.E.H. Stanner's words changed Australia. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale', regarding the fate of First Nations people, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change.

The pieces collected here span Stanner's career as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Stanner's writings remain relevant in a time of reckoning with white Australia's injustices against Aboriginal people and the path to reconciliation.

With an introduction by Robert Manne

'Bill Stanner was a superb essayist with a wonderful turn of phrase and ever fresh prose. He always had important things to say, which have not lost their relevance. It is wonderful that they will now be available to a new and larger audience.' —Henry Reynolds

'Stanner's essays still hold their own among this country's finest writings on matters black and white.' —Noel Pearson

The Boyer Lectures:
After the Dreaming (1968)

LOOKING BACK

The subject of these lectures will be ourselves and the Aborigines and in particular the new relations which have been growing up between us over the last thirty years. The changes from former times have been so great that some people speak confidently of a ‘revolution’. I will find cause later to ask if that judgment is justified and if indeed the revolution has yet arrived, but for a particular reason the first thing I want to do is to look back a long way to the first five years of Australian history. It was over that period that there came into existence between the two races a basic structure of relations which ever since has formed a part of the continuing anatomy of Australian life. It is of course a much-told story, but I think it will withstand another telling, this time in seven brief chapters.

The first chapter starts with the landing in January, 1788, and covers a few weeks only. Phillip, the Governor, brings with him a hopeful theory of human affairs: that an offer of friendship and trust will bring friendship and trust in return. He hopes to coax the Aborigines into close relations with the settlement and to give them ‘a high opinion of their new guests’ (the words are his) by refraining from any show or use of superior force. For a while the theory seems to work: a writer of the time speaks of a stage of ‘cautious friendship’. But things go wrong before a month is out and it is plain that the policy of ‘amity and trust’ is miscarrying.

The second chapter opens with the Aborigines holding aloof. The encounters of black and white are ‘neither frequent nor cordial’, and the background is one of nasty or violent incidents. No one has any clear idea what is the matter.

Phillip and other officers suspect the convicts and to a lesser extent the Aborigines, but not themselves or the fact and design of the colony. By the end of May the rift is so wide that Phillip feels he must force a confrontation in order to explain how much he disapproves of harm being done to the Aborigines, and how many good things he wants to do for them.

In the third chapter, which covers the period from May to October in the first year, we find him going around trying—without a word of the language—to convey his good intent. His failure is complete, and by the end of October, with the violence continuing and a real fear growing within the settlement, he reverses his first policy. He now thinks it ‘absolutely necessary’ (again the words are his) to force the Aborigines to keep at a greater distance. He responds to fresh Aboriginal violence by sending out a firing party. Whether they kill or wound anyone we do not know, but he succeeds in his purpose: not one Aborigine comes near them for months.

The fourth chapter opens towards the end of 1788. Within the settlement affairs have become desperately bad. Starvation seems not far away. Phillip seems to conclude that he has made a mistake and now decides that it is ‘absolutely necessary’ (his words again) to force the Aborigines in to the settlement, not away from it, and makes a plan to kidnap some of them. His own disclosed motive is to make them see the advantages of joining their lives with those of the settlers. Another man, Watkin Tench—someone has called him ‘that liberal and candid mind’—discloses a second motive—to find out through them what resources the country has that might prolong the colony’s weakening vitality.

Our fourth chapter, then, is mainly the story of a second turnabout, a rather crazy story of three kidnaps—of Arabanoo, Colby and Benelong. The first, the gentle, confused Arabanoo, dies within the settlement from smallpox, and Phillip feels ‘utterly defeated’, but six months later he tries again with Colby and Benelong. Colby, a wily fellow, escapes after a week. Benelong, a bouncing, ebullient man, and a bit of a rogue, escapes after five months.

The first three of Phillip’s policies are now in ruins. He has gained nothing, and lost something—that is, all chance now of winning Aborig inal confidence, because Colby and Benelong have spread their tales—of what, we do not know, but certainly including a warning that behind any soft-seeming approach there is the possibility of sudden force and treachery. Phillip himself seems empty of ideas and divided between two half-expressed feelings: a falling confidence in the Aborigines, and a rising fear of them.

For month after month there are no significant relations until the fift h chapter opens in September, 1790, when Phillip—brave, magnanimous and good-hearted as ever, but, we must now conclude, rash and rather wrong-headed—very nearly meets his death by a spear thrown during a chance encounter with Benelong and some 200 other Aborigines at Manly Cove. A study of the background and conduct of this affair shows the Governor to have made one mistake after another. After almost three years’ experience it is obvious that he had learned nothing of Aboriginal mentality or tendency.

We thus come to the sixth, the climactic chapter, at the end of 1790. Three themes are now starting to weave themselves together in a way that will have a signal bearing on Australian history.

Something breaks in the fabric of native life around Port Jackson, and from every side the Aborigines, unforced, begin to flock into the settlement. Phillip can now write: ‘from this time on our intercourse with the Aborigines, though partially interrupted, was never broken off.’ The break is one that never mends and will eventually reach right across the continent in every direction. Within the settlement the worst of the troubles seems to be over. A second theme thus comes into view: the colonists no longer need to know if the Aborigines can help; they can get along by themselves. The history of indifference thus begins and with it a dark and sombre third theme. At the end of 1790 Phillip’s personal huntsman, a convict named M’Entire, is speared at Botany Bay. He is a villainous man, and almost everyone knows or suspects it—some of the colonists and the Aborigines certainly do.

The murder puts Phillip in a great passion. He throws away all his earlier scruples. He wants blood—anyone’s blood, except that of women and children. At first he demands ten heads, and two live captives whom he will then hang ‘in the presence of as many of their countrymen as can be collected after having explained the cause of such a punishment’, no doubt by signs, for no one yet has a sentence of the language. At the suggestion of a squeamish officer Phillip makes it not ten heads, but six persons, to be captured or shot; if captive, two will hang; the rest will be gaoled for a time at Norfolk Island, the place set aside for the very worst of the convict desperadoes. So, carrying axes to lop the heads and bags to hold them, the punitive party (the first in our history) goes out, not once, but twice, ten days apart, but on both occasions the enterprise is fumbled and collapses in failure.

There can be no doubt that the affair leaves Phillip damaged in credit. He has shown himself an easy victim of pique, whose nerve and judgment can both go wrong at the same time, who reacts quite disproportionately to cause, and who, having been given ample time to cool, for a second time goes well beyond the edge of intent to commit judicial murder. Perhaps he continues to stand, in the frame of his relations with the colonists, as one historian has described him—as a man who ‘with grace, dignity, industry and great self-control had won the battle for survival’, but in the frame of his relations with the Aborigines there is now a different cut to his jib, and at least one young officer of his command sees it. In the whole of his record with the Aborigines there is little that suggests wisdom or even a great deal of commonsense, and half a dozen episodes reveal him as a rather eyeless, uninventive man.

The M’Entire affair happens at the very time when the Aborigines, in the main, are doing exactly what he has most wanted them to do under his three policies, that is, thronging into Sydney. But it is a Sydney that now neither needs nor fears them and exactly then Phillip is least like the man history reputes him to have been.

He still has two more years to serve as Governor. Over that period, which is our seventh chapter, he seems to pass beyond consideration of native policy. At all events we hear little about it from him, but others tell us a fragment or two of what is happening to the Aborigines. One writes that ‘a great many of them have taken up their abode entirely among us’ and another that ‘every gentleman’s house was now become a resting or sleeping place for some every night; whenever they were pressed for hunger, they had recourse immediately to our quarters’. It is the denouement of the policies of amity and trust, forcing away, and forcing in. The streets of Sydney are filling with the dispossessed, the homeless, the powerless and the poverty-stricken from all over the County of Cumberland and, before long, from places beyond.

The story tails away without a clear, sharp finish, so I suppose I cannot do better than to allow the historians, who know how to handle such things, to have the last word. From this time on, according to one of them, ‘the native question sank into unimportance’, which I understand to mean that no one bothered any more about it. According to another, the Aborigines became a ‘melancholy footnote to Australian history’ and, to yet another, ‘a codicil to the Australian story’.

I have thought it worthwhile to retell this old tale from a particular point of view because more recent history suggests that the native question is rising into great importance, the melancholy footnote is turning into a whole chapter of Australian history, and the codicil is becoming a major theme in the Australian story. It has been my good fortune to have had something to do with that process over the last thirty years from a time when one could still go out in Australian space and, in so doing, in a certain sense go back in time so as to see the living reality of the things that occurred immediately after Phillip’s seventh chapter. The clothes were modern, the body different-seeming, but the skeleton was the same. The fundamental structure of racial relations was as near to that of the early 1800s as made no difference.

This part of what I have to say will therefore to some extent be a personal history but it is sometimes useful to look at a piece of history—the development of attitudes and relations since the 1930s— through the eyes of someone who took part. What participant or bystander saw, felt, thought, or said at the time can help to put past happenings in a proper light. That must be my excuse for the element of personal reminiscence.

In 1932 I went to a remote place in the Northern Territory to study some little known tribes. It was a broken-down settlement which might well have been the Illawarra or the Hawkesbury of a hundred years or so before. There was an exiguous scatter of farmers, cattlemen and miners with leaseholds over lands still lived on by the remnants of the local tribes, which nevertheless still felt that they had an ancient and unbroken title to the lands.

On the outskirts of the settlement there were a few groups of ‘myalls’ (bush natives) who were as wild as hawks, timid and daring by turns, with scarcely a word of English, and in two minds what to do: drawn towards the settlement because the break in the tribal structure had reached them too, but unreconciled to the prospect of a sedentary life. Some of them were being tempted in, others pushed away, as the need, fear or expediency of the Europeans dictated in almost Phillipian stops and starts. There was bad blood, frequent fighting, and much talk of sorcery and poison, between the bush and the sedentary groups, and no love between any of them and the Europeans, so that cautious friendship alternated with covert or open hostility. In the space of a couple of years two Europeans in the vicinity were speared to death, and several Aborigines were killed or wounded by others of their own kind.

No one liked to walk alone too far from habitation except along the main tracks. In the settlement itself there was extreme poverty: I had never supposed that men could live so hard and think it worthwhile to battle on; everything was run-down and ramshackle; there was not a doctor, a teacher, a school, a store, or a church within a hundred miles. The Aborigines were looked on and used almost as free goods of nature. For such work as they did they were given a little payment in kind. It was a sort of peonage. I do not think there was a single element in the whole system of life—land, food, shelter, jobs, pay, the safety of women and children, even access to and protection by the law—in which they were not at great disadvantage, and without remedy. The dominance of European interests was total, unquestioned, and inexpressibly self-centred. Here, only thirty-six years ago, was the still living reality of ‘the codicil to the Australian story’.

How did people regard such conditions at the time? It is an interesting question if the answer is given without anachronism. I suppose the first thing is: how well and widely known such conditions were. The authorities in the Northern Territory were certainly well-informed; indeed, they had warned me what to expect, at least in general. I would say the facts were the open knowledge of the countryside. I would not say that anyone actually approved but, just as plainly, no one with the exception of the devoted mission societies thought very much could be done, or had a visibly high impulse to try. That was certainly true of the law. The police turned a blind eye, and they were the local Protectors of Aborigines. My own personal response seems to have been mixed. I remember recoiling in dismay from the poverty, neglect, ill-health, ill-use and exploitation. But let me pause. It is easy to trade on memory, and I said there was to be no anachronism; so I have to say ‘I think I remember’; but I could not prove that I remember aright. But I have some letters and reports which I wrote at the time. They help to bridge the gap a little, but not wholly. The letters are filled with sympathy for the plight of the natives, with respect for their quality of mind and social personality, and with real affection for several who had become personal friends. But they show very much the same attitudes towards the bushmen I had met, many of whom also had befriended me. It is clear that I gave a lot of weight in the scales of judgment to the hardship, loneliness and privation of their lives, and to their unyielding struggle to keep going. The reports are rather different. Somehow, in them, I seem to have managed to draw a screen over at least the worst things of that frontier. There is no obvious sign of trying to put a good face on things; no indication of saving the eyes or ears of those to whom I was reporting; no palpable effort to write, as it were, for history; but on the other hand a very interesting absence of declamation. The tone of my comments is rather reminiscent of the flat, emotionless remark that Spencer and Gillen had made thirty years earlier when they said that ‘… taking all things into account, the black fellow has not perhaps any particular reason to be grateful to the white man’. Apparently what lay before my eyes seemed to me a natural and inevitable part of the Australian scene, one that could possibly be palliated, but not ever changed in any fundamental way.

Of course personal limitations, training, and narrow concerns explain a lot of this. In particular, the interests of anthropology as it was at that time certainly had much to do with it. I was steeped in the outlook of Spencer and Gillen, but not long since, under the influence of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, I had been taught to turn my back on the speculative reconstruction of the origins and development of primitive institutions, and to have interest only in their living actuality. The young anthropologist now wanted to understand what was then being called the ‘functional system’ of social life, how institutions help to maintain each other, and contribute to the whole process of human society. We were beginning to speak about ‘social structure’, the system of enduring relations between persons and groups. Where a society was breaking down (as with most of the Aborigines) we thought it our task to salvage pieces of information and from them try to work out the traditional social forms. Such were my interests. They help to explain why an interest in ‘living actuality’ scarcely extended to the actual life-conditions of the Aborigines, and why in referring to those conditions I did so in a sidelong way and in anything but a firebrand’s words. But it will hardly do as a sufficient explanation. What was missing was the idea that a major development of Aboriginal economic, social and political life from its broken down state was a thinkable possibility. How slowly this idea came to all of us.

Aboriginal affairs had begun to cause a certain public concern in the middle of the 1920s, because of a series of clashes and atrocities. There had been several inquiries from which authority did not emerge at all well. Our international reputation, which had never been very good, went farther downhill. Humanitarians, mainly in the cities, pressed the authorities hard, and their tracts and pamphlets today make interesting reading: all they ask for are palliatives, better protection, better health measures, better conditions of employment. Few people could think beyond ‘protection’ and ‘segregation’.

Judged by the way in which today’s demonstrations go, ours were mild and decorous affairs—beardless too, that is, middle-aged and elderly; youth then could not be dragged to the barricades. They were vigorous for their time but Governments scarcely responded; indeed, in the Northern Territory, as late as 1933, after there had been several murders, including that of a policeman, there was immediate talk— official talk—of sending a punitive party to Arnhem Land to ‘teach the Aborigines a lesson’. Public indignation prevented that from happening because now almost everyone sensed that the era of an eye for an eye had come to an end. Some sort of new spirit was in the making, but it did not discern at all well where to go. A really clear breakthrough did not come until 1934 when A.P. Elkin and others spoke in downright words of the need for a change from the negative policy of protection and segregation—which, anyway, was obviously failing—to a positive policy. There are many names which deserve honourable mention from this decade—Bleakley, Duguid, Warren, Albrecht, Love, Strehlow, Thomson, Piddington—far too many for me to list on this occasion. Men and women from all walks and levels of life made their lasting contributions.

I should like to make two things as plain as I can. It had not been up to this time a matter of people looking without being able to see: far from it; many had seen, described, and analysed extremely well what was the case; the public documents after 1926 are full of really excellent accounts of Australia. Secondly, the idea of a ‘positive’ policy had not come out of the blue. Many people had been working up to a change of perspective, especially after a meeting of the Association for the Protection of Native Races in 1931. What was radical and startling was the putting into words of the first notion of a ‘positive’ policy, obvious and unadventurous as it may seem now.

If we could have foreseen in the 1930s what an inch by inch affair the acceptance of the new outlook would turn out to be, we might all have felt despair. My own higher education in the snail’s-pace of change began in 1934. I went overland to central Australia and was there in time to see part of the rush to the gold-strike at Tennant Creek. In a small way it mu...