This edition published in 2019

First published in 2006

Copyright © Josephine Flood 2006

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This book is dedicated to the Aboriginal people
of Australia, who for the last 50 years have
been generously and patiently teaching me
about their traditional life, culture and history.
 CONTENTS

Preface

Notes on terminology

1 EXPLORATION
European discovery of Australia

2 COLONISATION
Early Sydney

3 CONFRONTATION
Early Tasmania and Victoria

4 DEPOPULATION
A century of struggle (1820s–1920s)

5 TRADITION
Indigenous life at first contact

6 ORIGINS
The last 65,000 years

7 ASSIMILATION
A time of trouble (1930s–1970s)

8 RESURGENCE
The story continues
Appendix: Places to visit, festivals and tours to experience Australian
Indigenous culture
Abbreviations to the notes
Notes
Further reading
Index
 Preface

The Original Australians tells the story of Australian Aboriginal history and
culture from their distant beginnings to the present day. As an archaeologist,
my aim is to try to explain what happened in the past and place traditional
Australian indigenous societies into their global context. My mission is to
present an accurate, objective, informative account of this continent’s first
inhabitants. Australia is a country where, for archaeologists, the ancient past
and the present converge, for it is here that people survived through major
climatic changes, suffered huge loss and pain as a result of European
colonisation, and, almost against the odds, managed to maintain their
cultural identity, now recognised and respected throughout the world. The
resilience of Australia’s Aboriginal people is one of the great human stories
of all time.
During a 50-year-long career as an archaeologist in Australia, I have
excavated ice-age caves, searched the landscape for ancient campsites and
recorded rock paintings and their meanings. In that time, I have worked
with many Aboriginal people especially in the Northern Territory and
admire and respect them. They have suffered much, yet have survived,
bridging the gap between their culture and history and the contemporary
world.
Of course, the Aboriginal story has not finished, and I bring it up to the
present, covering current issues and hopes for the future. The most difficult
section of this book to write has been the story of the last two centuries, for
recent history has become extremely polarised. In the 1980s, a critical view
of Australian history arose among a younger band of historians in reaction
to an earlier self-congratulatory approach. Henry Reynolds’ book The Other
Side of the Frontier pioneered this new direction of ‘committed history’.
Reynolds’ strong sympathy for Aboriginal victims led to him and his
followers being dubbed ‘black armband’ historians by Geoffrey Blainey, a
distinguished historian of the older school. Blainey’s book Triumph of the
Nomads is an extremely positive portrayal of traditional Aboriginal society,
but by 1993 he considered historical writing in Australia had ‘swung from a
position that had been too favourable, too self-congratulatory, to an
opposite extreme that [was] even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.’
Blainey agreed that ‘the treatment of Aborigines was often lamentable’ but
was disturbed by ‘mischievous statements that the Aborigines’ numbers
were drastically reduced primarily by slaughter. In fact, diseases were the
great killer by a very large margin.’ (One reason I wrote this book was to
evaluate this claim.) In 2002, Sydney historian Keith Windschuttle
published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1, Van Diemen’s Land
1803–1847 and sparked off what are known as the ‘History Wars’ between
left- and right-leaning historians. Much heat and personal invective
surround questions such as exact casualty figures, which both sides concede
can never be accurately known. One positive result of all this verbal
violence has been that it has made some historians re-evaluate earlier work;
but sadly a genre of revisionist history has developed that ignores proven
facts to build a false history of warfare and genocide, which hinders rather
than helps the path to reconciliation. Many of the general public now have
no idea what to believe, which is why in this book I concentrate on
generally agreed facts and how we know what we know.
This book, like my previous ones, has been written in response to a
specific request, this time from overseas friends planning their first visit and
wanting an introduction to indigenous Australia. I searched the bookshops
but found nothing suitable that dealt with both the past and the present. My
goal in writing, therefore, is to provide an up-to-date account that answers
the most commonly asked questions about the First Australians.
My target audience is the general public, especially those who would like
to try to understand Australian Aboriginal society from a wide perspective,
whether their interest lies in origins, traditional life and art or more recent
history. I have also written for those readers who, like me, grew up
elsewhere and didn’t study Australian history at school. Some may say that
only Aborigines should write about Aboriginal Australia, but the reality is
that the interests of the few indigenous historians or archaeologists usually
lie in other areas, such as oral history and autobiography. Inevitably, my
viewpoint is different and I tell the story from an outsider’s perspective,
based on research, knowledge and experience gained in Aboriginal studies
since I emigrated to Australia in 1963.
My first step was to ask family and friends in Australia, Britain and the
United States for lists of questions. Replies were equally divided between
past and present, leading me on a fascinating seven-year-long detective
hunt. After several false starts I almost gave up the concept, until I recalled
the words of Goobalathaldin (Dick Roughsey) round a campfire in Cape
York: ‘I want to hear the whole story.’ ‘Where shall I begin?’ I asked.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ he replied. In previous books on Australian
archaeology and rock art I had taken the ‘beginning’ as the moment, some
65,000 years ago, when the first human footprint appeared on an Australian
beach. This time Aboriginal society is revealed to the reader as it was
gradually discovered by the outside world. My tale therefore begins with
first contact between foreigners and Aborigines.
My interests lie in the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’ of history. As polar
explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard said, ‘The best stories are not what people
do, but why they do it.’ I therefore seek to understand both white and black
motives for past actions, such as why Aboriginal responses to outsiders
were so varied or why a treaty was made with the indigenous people of
New Zealand but not Australia. Of course, causes of past events must be
seen in the context of their time, not through the lens of the twenty-first
century. We must constantly remind ourselves of the first explorers’ and
colonists’ total ignorance about Aboriginal society. Only very slowly did
understanding improve. In Australia the discipline of anthropology is barely
a century old and archaeology is even younger. While this book summarises
modern understanding about traditional Aboriginal Australia, it seeks to
explain past events in their own context rather than with the benefit of
hindsight.
Amalgamation of my questioners’ interests produced a list of key topics:

• Where did the First Australians come from?

• What are their genetic origins?
• Did they all speak the same language and is it related to any other
language?
• What impact have Aborigines had on the Australian environment?
• Did Aboriginal hunting cause the extinction of Australia’s megafauna?
• Was traditional Aboriginal life idyllic?
• Did the First Australians have a religion or shamans?
• How much violence was there in traditional society?
• Why did Australian Aborigines not become gardeners or farmers?
• Are there any Aboriginal people living a traditional, hunter-gatherer life
left?
• Why did Captain Cook believe Australia to be ownerless?
• Why were treaties not made with Australian Aborigines?
• Who introduced smallpox into Australia?
• Was conflict or imported new disease the main factor in Aboriginal
depopulation?
• Did the colonists attempt genocide?
• How have government policies of protection, integration and self-
determination worked?
• Were Aboriginal children ‘stolen’? If so, why and with what result?
• What are land rights?
• What are the problems in modern Aboriginal communities?
• What do Aboriginal people want?
• How can indigenous culture best be viewed?
• How can indigenous culture best be experienced?

This is an extremely challenging list. My attempted ‘answers’ are based

on evidence ranging from rock paintings to DNA, First Fleet diaries to
Aboriginal web sites. Sources include indigenous communities,
archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, ethnographers, historians,
journalists and government officials, and I am most grateful for the
overwhelmingly positive responses I have received to my many requests for
information and comment. Inevitably, such a book has to be selective but I
have tried to give a representative account. In the story of the colonial
period, most attention is given to the best-documented accounts of the first
three decades of interaction in the Sydney region and Tasmania.
As an archaeologist, my approach is an evidence-based examination of
culture and history in search of the ‘truth’. When doing my PhD at the
Australian National University in the early 1970s, my inspirational
supervisor was Rhys Jones, who came from Wales to Australia to address
‘the problem of the Tasmanians’. The mysteries he wanted to solve were:
‘Where did they come from? How did they cross Bass Strait? How did they
survive? Why did they stop eating fish?’ He answered those questions and
inspired others like me to tackle similar challenging topics on the mainland.
Others who encouraged me throughout my career have been Professor John
Mulvaney and erstwhile Director of the Australian Heritage Commission,
Max Bourke, and, above all, Professor Jack Golson, who accepted me as a
PhD candidate when I had three children under the age of four.
My interpretations are assessed in terms of how well they account for all
the evidence, not whether they can be proved to be true in any absolute
sense. Scientific methods are used but it is seldom possible to confirm or
refute hypotheses with the same certainty as in the hard sciences.
Discovering what happened in the past is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with
most of the pieces missing and no picture on the box as a guide. The
archaeologist is both a detective and a scavenger, hunting among historical
documents and field evidence. Archaeologists are today’s explorers,
whether excavating ice-age caves or investigating a nineteenth-century
massacre site. As historian Sir Keith Hancock said, ‘There is only one way
to do history, with boots on your feet and a pack on your back.’ The
geography behind history is essential to our understanding of events and
place, whether ancient or modern.
References to primary sources and further evidence are provided in the
notes. Consultation on the book has been carried out with various
colleagues and with the friends and family members who originally asked
the questions. I have also inevitably been influenced by my own
experiences of outback Aboriginal Australia. I have spent many weeks in
remote regions of Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, New
South Wales and the Northern Territory, where a week staying in the
dysfunctional government settlement of Papunya in 1980 was an
unforgettable, searing experience. More recently, I have enjoyed six field
seasons working with the Wardaman people in the Victoria River region,
excavating rock-shelters, photographing rock paintings and recording their
stories in Wardaman language as well as English. They insisted that these
expeditions were always in the school holidays, so that the children could
visit the sites and be taught about bush foods, how to hunt kangaroos,
echidnas and goannas, and how to catch young freshwater crocodiles in the
billabong for lunch!
For the first edition of this book, particular thanks are due to Nigel
Peacock, Ursula Fraser and Barbara Roscoe, who gave me invaluable
comments on my first draft. I much appreciate the useful feedback I
received at the next stage of preparing the manuscript from Val Attenbrow,
Richard Broome, Frank Fenner, Alan Frost, Campbell Macknight, Betty
Meehan, Rod Moran, Eleanor Robin, Lyndall Ryan, Peter Sutton and Mike
Westaway. In addition, the final draft of the whole text was checked by
historian Campbell Macknight and anthropologist Peter Sutton.
I would like to thank Elizabeth Weiss of Allen & Unwin in Sydney for
her encouragement, wise advice and meticulous editing, along with Tessa
Feggans and Lu Sierra. Furthermore, I would particularly like to thank
Elizabeth and Allen & Unwin for asking me in 2018 to do a new edition to
take account of new archaeological discoveries and to update my last
chapter on the present situation. It has been twelve years since publication
of the first edition, and much has happened over that period. Very many
thanks to Chris Clarkson of the University of Queensland for checking my
revised chapter on Origins, and to archaeologists Bruno David, Peter Veth,
Jo McDonald, Val Attenbrow and many others for earlier helpful
comments. The most difficult part for me to write has been the last chapter
to bring the story up to the present, and here I particularly appreciate help
from Michael Dillon of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy
Research at the the Australian National University and historian Eleanor
Robin.
It is hoped that this book is both factually accurate and observant of
indigenous sensitivities, but I apologise in advance for any errors or
problems. Feedback on the book would be most welcome to my email
address <josephinemflood@aol.com>.
 NOTES ON
TERMINOLOGY

Over the last four decades, terminology in Australian Aboriginal studies has
been constantly changing. Today two distinct groups of indigenous
Australians are officially recognised—the people of the Torres Strait Islands
and the Aboriginal people of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Each has
their own flag, which is flown at official functions across the nation. The
term ‘indigenous’ is used to describe people who originally, before
intermarriage with newcomers from overseas, had no other race history
except from the country in which they live. Nowadays the term ‘Indigenous
Australians’ is used to embrace both Aboriginal Australians and Torres
Strait Islanders.
‘Aboriginal people’ or ‘Aborigines’ (always capitalised) are terms used
in Australia to distinguish mainlanders from the people of Torres Strait. I
follow correct grammatical forms in using Aborigine/s as a noun and
Aboriginal as an adjective. (‘Aboriginals’ is considered more politically
correct, but some Aboriginal people have told me they don’t like being just
an adjective!) Regional names such as Murris or Kooris applied by
contemporary Aboriginal groups to themselves are inappropriate to describe
the whole of Australia or the deep past. The term ‘Aborigines’ includes
people of variously mixed ancestry; when it is necessary to distinguish
between people of mixed and of non-mixed descent, the latter are called
people of full Aboriginal descent. Terms such as ‘half-caste’ are only
included if they are part of a quotation from a historical source.
The term ‘Nation’ is now preferred to ‘tribe’ and Australia’s Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander peoples are frequently known as ‘First Nations’.
 For the sake of clarity, the term ‘prehistory’ is retained for the period
before records were written down; in Australia this is ‘pre-contact’, usually
taken as pre-1770, the date of Captain Cook’s first visit to Australia.
History relies on documentary and recorded oral evidence, whereas
prehistory is reconstruction based primarily on archaeological evidence.
This does not in any way imply that societies without writing were inferior
or that history is more important than prehistory. In 1988 the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
resolved to use ‘history’ to refer to the Aboriginal past before written
records as well as post-contact, but this has proved confusing and has not
been widely adopted; for example, the respected journal Aboriginal History
deals only with post-contact history.
I have had some difficulty in finding a term for the modern ‘non-
indigenous’ people of Australia. It is unsatisfactory to define people by
what they are not, but Australia has become such a multiracial society that
no racial description is appropriate. I therefore use the terms mainstream or
dominant society, as well as non-indigenous people. Anglo-Australians is
also used in a broad sense to denote non-indigenous people, where their
racial origins are not important to the story.
 1

EXPLORATION
European discovery of Australia

Few things are as intriguing as a question mark on a map. For more than a
thousand years, mystery surrounded the possible existence of a great,
unknown continent in the southern hemisphere. Greek and Roman
philosophers argued for it and first-century geographer Ptolemy sketched a
huge landmass in the southern ocean. Ptolemy saw an unknown southern
land—Terra Australis Incognita—as necessary to balance the lands of the
northern hemisphere, and later cartographers agreed.
It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that European merchant adventurers
reached the remote island continent.1 The Renaissance was a time of
discovery, of charting unknown lands in search of riches and, ultimately,
empire. European ocean travel became possible through advances in
shipbuilding and navigation.2 Superpowers Spain and Portugal struggled for
global control, and in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas the Pope divided the
non-Christian world between them. In the Pacific the line of demarcation
followed the line of longitude 129 degrees East of Greenwich, bisecting
Australia and now forming the Western Australian border. Portugal thus
‘acquired’ what is now Western Australia, and Spain the rest of the
continent. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach the Australian
region and by 1516 had built a fortified trading post in Timor, only 460 km
(285 miles) north of the Kimberley coast.3

Dutch encounters and the first kidnappings

The first recorded encounters between outsiders and Australian Aborigines
involved the Dutch, whose merchant fleet reached the East Indies, as the
Malay Archipelago was called, in 1596. The Dutch East India Company
(Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) established its headquarters
in Batavia (Jakarta) on Java in 1619. Trade with the Spice Islands, where
nutmeg and cloves were available, helped turn Holland into the wealthiest
country of its time, and the Dutch replaced the Portuguese as masters of the
eastern seas. Exploration of New Holland, as the Dutch named northern and
western Australia, was motivated by the search for trade goods, especially
gold, silver, sandalwood and above all nutmeg, a small sack of which had a
60,000 per cent mark-up in Europe and could set a merchant adventurer up
for life.4
Indigenous Australians gave their first Dutch visitors a hostile reception
in 1606, when Willem Jansz sailed his ship Duyfken down the western edge
of Cape York Peninsula, reaching a place he called Cape Keerweer (‘Turn-
Again’). His journal is lost, but fragmentary reports tell us his brief landfall
(near modern Weipa) was marred by violence from naked ‘savage, cruel,
black barbarians’.
Later that year, Spaniard Luis Vaes de Torres sailed through the narrow
strait between New Guinea and Australia now called Torres Strait. He spent
weeks negotiating innumerable reefs and islands, where he kidnapped
‘twenty persons’. The hostages reached the Philippines but nothing is
known of what happened to them there. This kidnapping was the first of
several aimed at training interpreters for use as intermediaries.
The VOC’s instructions to Jan Carstensz, the captain of the Pera, before
his 1623 voyage were to kidnap ‘some full-grown persons but especially
young boys and girls, to the end that the latter may be brought up here
[Batavia] and turned to useful purpose in … their own country’.5
 European voyages of discovery.

Carstensz and other voyagers were still searching for the fabled islands of
gold, which, according to Marco Polo’s fantasies, lay south of Java. They
were doomed to disappointment. After sailing down Cape York, Carstensz
reported:
This is the most arid and barren region that could be found anywhere on the earth. The
inhabitants, too, are the most wretched and poorest creatures that I have ever seen … as there are
 no large trees anywhere on this coast, they have no boats or canoes … These men are … of tall
stature and very lean to look at … they are quite black and stark naked, some of them having their
faces painted red and others white, with feathers stuck through the lower part of the nose … with
twisted nets round their heads.6

Carstensz’s first encounter with Aborigines, on 18 April 1623 near the

Edward River, began well when they were met by many inquisitive people,
some armed and some unarmed, who ‘showed no fear and were so bold as
to touch the muskets of our men … while they wanted to have whatever
they could make use of’. Sadly, peace was shattered when the Dutch
kidnapped a man, the sailors were attacked, and one Aborigine was shot.
Two weeks later, a second man was seized and another was shot. Two
hundred men brandishing spears opposed the next landing. When one was
wounded, he was seized as a captive, but died soon afterwards.
Until the English invention in the mid-eighteenth century of an accurate
chronometer, mariners had no means of establishing their longitude. Errors
in navigation, and the prevailing westerly winds, blew some Dutch ships
onto the dangerous shoals of Western Australia. In 1629, a large Dutch ship,
the Batavia, was shipwrecked in the Houtman Abrolhos islands off the
western coast. Fellow Dutch survivors murdered 125 of the shipwrecked
passengers. The Dutch rescue party from Java responded by executing eight
of the perpetrators and exiling two of them on the adjacent coast. These two
murderers were Europe’s first living ‘gift’ to Australia.
In 1642, Dutchman Abel Tasman headed further south in search of the
elusive southern continent and became the first European to set foot on the
island of Tasmania, which he named Van Diemen’s Land. Dense clouds of
smoke told him the island was inhabited. The men who went ashore found a
tall tree with notches freshly cut up its trunk. ‘They measured the shape of
the steps and found each were fully five feet [150 cm] from one another so
that they presumed here were very tall people or these people by some
means must know how to climb up trees.’7 In fact, the Tasmanians proved
to be small people with good tree-climbing skills.

Dampier
In January 1688, Englishman William Dampier, a literate buccaneer, spent
two months in King Sound near Derby in the Kimberley (northwestern
Australia) with his shipmates, repairing their beached trading ship, the
Cygnet. Dampier, an acute observer, kept detailed notes preserved in
waterproof bamboo cylinders sealed with wax. His vivid account was both
successful and influential. In 1699, Dampier commanded a British naval
expedition to explore the region further in the Roebuck. He voyaged along
the western coast from Shark Bay to Roebuck Bay just south of Broome
and produced another book.
Dampier paints a grim picture of the arid northwest and its naked people:
The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the world. The Hodmadods
[Hottentots of Africa] … for wealth are gentlemen to these. They have no houses, or skin
garments, sheep, poultry, fruits of the earth … They are tall, straight-bodied and thin, with small,
long limbs. They have great heads, round foreheads and great brows. Their eyelids are always half
closed, to keep the flies out of their eyes … They have great bottle noses, pretty full lips and wide
mouths. The two fore-teeth of their upper-jaw are wanting in all of them, men and women, old
and young … Nor have they any beards … Their hair is black, short and curled like that of the
Negroes, and not long and lank like the common Indians. The colour of their skins … is coal-
black like that of the Negroes of Guinea. They have no sort of clothes but a piece of the rind of a
tree, tied like a girdle about their waists, and a handful of long grass, or three or four small green
boughs full of leaves thrust under their girdle, to cover their nakedness … They had such bad
eyes, that they could not see us till we came close to them.8

This is important evidence that pre-contact Australia was no paradise.

Eye ailments were especially prevalent among desert Aborigines, and
trachoma, a contagious inflammation of the eyelids, is still a chronic
disease, often leading to blindness. Indeed, in the Western Desert language,
the words for ‘old’ and ‘blind’ are interchangeable. This is also the first
mention of Australian bush flies. Dampier complained that ‘no fanning will
keep them from coming to one’s face; and without the assistance of both
hands to keep them off, they will creep into one’s nostrils and mouth too’.
(This is clear evidence that flies have always existed in Australia, long
before the arrival of cows, sheep and pigs with the early white settlers, who
have sometimes been blamed for their introduction.)
Lack of the two front teeth indicates tooth avulsion, a widespread
initiation ritual in Australia. More puzzling is the mention of men’s lack of
beards, for in the Kimberley and elsewhere older men usually sported
beards, although sometimes they shaved them with a sharp shell or stone
‘knife’. The people’s main food was fish, caught in stone fish traps. Similar
traps are still used by Bardi people as the most efficient way of harvesting
fish. Dampier also remarked on other key aspects of Aboriginal life—small-
scale societies, close communal living and the habit of sharing all procured
food:
They have no houses but lie in the open air without any covering … they live in companies of
twenty or thirty men, women and children together. Their only food is a small sort of fish, which
they get by making wares [weirs or traps] of stone across little coves … Every tide brings in the
small fish … at low-water they seek cockles, mussels and periwinkles. There are very few of
these shellfish … At their places of abode … the old people … and tender infants await their
return; and what providence has bestowed on them they presently broil on the coals and eat it in
common … Whether they get little or much, every one has his part … When they have eaten, they
lie down till the next low-water, and then all who are able march out, be it night or day, rain or
shine … They must attend the wares or else they must fast.9

When Dampier first anchored, ‘seeing men walking on the shore, we

presently sent a canoe to get some acquaintance with them, for we were in
hopes to get some provision among them. But the inhabitants, seeing our
boat coming, ran away and hid themselves. We searched three days in hopes
to find their houses, but found none. Yet we saw many places where they
had made fires.’ Later they went over to an island, where they found 40
men, women and children. At first, they were threatened with spears, but no
violence ensued. Surprisingly, on this coast Aborigines had no visible
watercraft. Dampier’s crew saw ‘a drove of these men swimming from one
island to another’. They picked up four and gave them boiled rice, turtle
and fish. ‘They greedily devoured what we gave them, but took no notice of
the ship or anything in it, and when they were set on land again, they ran
away as fast as they could … Nor did they seem to admire anything we
had.’ Fear, shyness, lack of curiosity and indifference to foreign goods—
except food and weapons—characterised most first encounters between
Aborigines and outsiders.
Another incident involved the first European attempt to persuade
Aborigines to work for them. The task was to carry small barrels of
freshwater from earthern wells down to the boats. Dampier gave the men
some old clothes, filled the casks and put a barrel on each man’s shoulders,
but nothing happened: ‘all the signs we could make were to no purpose, for
they stood like statues without motion, and grinned like so many monkeys,
staring one upon another. For these poor creatures do not seem accustomed
to carrying burdens … So we were forced to carry our water ourselves.
They very fairly put the clothes off again, and laid them down as if clothes
were only for working in.’10
 A chasm of misunderstandings yawns here. Aborigines saw trade as
exchange of artefacts not of labour—they laid down the clothes because
they did not want them, and they had no concept or words for ‘work’.
Aboriginal men did not carry burdens, except their weapons, so that their
hands were free for hunting—the women carried household items and small
children when moving camp.
Dampier’s account is especially valuable in showing us the rigours of
traditional life in a harsh, arid environment. Although he could not
understand their language, the scarcity of food and lack of watercraft was
clear enough. By the time of colonisation, however, the Bardi were using
mangrove rafts to hunt turtle and dugong with long fishing spears.

Further Dutch voyages

Dampier’s books rekindled Dutch suspicions of British intentions in New
Holland, so in 1705 three ships commanded by Maarten van Delft set out
for northern Australia. They visited Arnhem Land and Bathurst and
Melville Islands, home of the Tiwi people. There was prolonged contact
with Aborigines and they reported that the people:
possess nothing which is of value … and have … only a stone which is ground and made to serve
as a hatchet. They have no habitations, either houses or huts; and feed on fish which they catch
with harpoons of wood, and also by means of nets, putting out to sea in small canoes, made of the
bark of trees … Some of them had marks on their body, apparently cut or carved … Their diet
seems to consist of fish, and a few roots and vegetables … No one was able to understand their
language.11

The crew of Jean Etienne Gonzal’s ship Rijder in 1756 have the dubious
distinction of being the first Europeans to introduce alcohol into Australia.
The liquor was arrack, a strong spirit made from fermented palm juices,
which Cape York Aborigines reportedly enjoyed and made ‘merry and even
struck up a kind of a chant’.12 Despite their genuine interest in the region,
the Dutch neither claimed nor settled it.

The Macassans
Dugout sailing canoes were first introduced to tropical Australia by
Macassans—Indonesian fishermen, who made lengthy annual visits but
never settled on Australian soil. From around 1720, trade through the Dutch
port of Makassar in Sulawesi included increasing quantities of trepang
(bêchedemer or sea cucumber), which was sold to China.13 In Australia’s
shallow tropical waters these worm-like, cucumber-sized animals were
abundant, a food that neither Europeans nor Aborigines ate but one which
was prized by the Chinese as a delicacy and aphrodisiac. Indonesian beds
had been exhausted by 1720, and so the exploitation of Australian trepang
began. The trepang were caught by Macassan fishermen along 1100 km
(700 miles) of Australian coast from the Kimberley to the eastern Gulf of
Carpentaria. The trepang-bearing western coast they called Kayu Jawa and
that to the east Marege (pronounced Ma-rey-geh). The Macassans called
themselves, and were known to Aborigines as, Mangkasara—Makasar
people from the southwest corner of Sulawesi. They had a long and proud
history and had been officially Muslim since the early seventeenth century.
Their voyages to Australia were carefully regulated with formal contracts
and sailing passes.14 The Macassans used praus—wooden sailing ships that
had rectangular sails raised on a demountable tripod-mast and were guided
with two rudders hanging from a beam across the stern. Similar praus
carried goods and people throughout the Malay Archipelago.
Tropical Australia’s climate is monsoonal, with a wet season from
December to February and a dry season from June to September. When the
monsoon winds began to blow from the northwest in November or
December, praus sailed the 2000 km (1250 miles) from Makassar to
Australia. The ships left carrying weapons but no cargoes and, after five
months of fishing, headed north again, laden with dried trepang, beeswax
and tortoiseshell, when the winds blew from the southeast in late April to
May.
Macassan camps are identifiable from shards of red pottery, green glass
from square-necked gin bottles, bronze coins and tall, feathery, imported
tamarind trees. Camps were located on easily defended islands or
promontories and were furnished with stone fireplaces, huge metal boiling-
down cauldrons, smoke-houses and wells for drinking-water. Some of these
items appear in Aboriginal rock paintings.
In February 1803, while circumnavigating Australia, Matthew Flinders
came across eleven Macassan praus off Arnhem Land. With his Malay cook
translating, Flinders talked with Pobasso, the commander, who told him
there were 60 praus in their fleet, crewed by over a thousand men.15 He
described how ‘they get the trepang in from 3 to 8 fathoms water [5–14 m,
18–48 ft]; and where it is abundant, a man will bring up eight or ten at a
time.’ They were also caught by net or spear. Trepang were first cured by
boiling. They were then gutted, cooked again (with mangrove-bark to give
flavour and colour), dried in the sun, and smoked. After this, they would
keep almost indefinitely. The end-product, according to naturalist Alfred
Wallace, resembled ‘sausages which have been rolled in mud and then
thrown up the chimney’.16
Relations between Macassans and local Aborigines varied; Dutch records
testify to hostility and some Macassan deaths at Aboriginal hands, and
Pobasso himself had been speared in the knee and issued strong warnings
‘to beware of the natives’. Yet at times relations were friendly and there was
cohabitation (one prau captain fathered nine children by three Aboriginal
women). Some Aboriginal men even travelled overseas by prau and by
1876 seventeen were living in Makassar.
Arnhem Landers adopted hundreds of Makasar words, including their
name for white people—‘balanda’, derived from ‘Hollander’, as the Dutch
were known in the East Indies. They acquired new songs, ceremonies and
art forms, including wooden sculpture, ‘Van Dyke’-style goatee beards,
long pipes for smoking imported tobacco and small dugout sailing canoes,
which the Macassans kept on deck and used for trawling for trepang.
Macassans called these ‘lepa-lepa’, which became ‘lippa-lippa’ in Arnhem
Land. Aborigines obtained them through exchange or by salvage from the
many praus wrecked on the coast, but eventually made their own, using
metal tools acquired from Macassans and later from the British. They also
incorporated Macassan items into ritual life and some ceremonies
apparently referred to new, introduced diseases, such as smallpox (see
chapter 4) and syphilis.17
Arnhem Land stands out as the major exception to the general rule that
Aboriginal culture was one of the most conservative on earth. Had there
been cultural dynamism we would have seen variations in economic mode
such as occurred in the Americas, major revisions of art styles, the
production of textiles and pottery, and much more extensive trading with
the outside world. The Yolngu of Arnhem Land, unlike any other
Aboriginal Australians, had made adjustments so that new things were
adopted and new people were given a place in their cosmology. In contrast
with this hot-bed of innovation, indigenous artefacts reported by the earliest
visitors to Cape York and the Kimberley are closely matched by those of
three centuries later, suggesting greater cultural conservatism and far less
contact with the outside world.

Captain Cook
The primary aim of Lieutenant (later Captain) James Cook’s 1768–71
voyage in the Endeavour was scientific—he was to sail to the Society
Islands (Tahiti) to observe the transit of Venus on 3 June 1769. His task
completed, Cook opened his secret, sealed orders. They confirmed that he
should try to find the supposed great southern continent thought to lie far
south between New Holland and Cape Horn. Besieged by young Tahitians
wanting to accompany him, Cook took a priest called Tupaia as an
interpreter. He searched the South Pacific and circumnavigated New
Zealand, proving conclusively that the ‘land of the long white cloud’ was
not the northern tip of an undiscovered southern continent. Tupaia’s
presence was invaluable in establishing good relations with Maori warriors,
with whom he conversed with ease. (Close similarities between Tahitian
and Maori are demonstrated in comparative word lists compiled by Joseph
Banks—later Sir Joseph—the expedition’s chief naturalist.)18
From New Zealand, Cook wanted to return by way of Cape Horn
because:
by this route we should have been able to prove the existence or non-existence of a Southern
Continent which yet remains doubtful; but … the condition of the ship … was not thought
sufficient for such an undertaking … It was therefore resolved … to steer to the westward until
we fall in with the East coast of New Holland and then to follow … the direction it may take until
we arrive at its northern extremity.19

Believing himself a failure for having missed the southern continent,

Cook set sail for the unexplored eastern coast of the island of New Holland
(Australia). Ironically, New Holland proved to be the only inhabitable
continent-sized island in the southern hemisphere, but it was not until
Cook’s second voyage in 1772 that, by a thorough criss-cross search of the
15,000 km wide (10,000 mile wide) South Pacific, he finally disposed of
the myth of the southern isles of gold.
On 19 April 1770, Endeavour’s crew sighted the ‘gentle sloping hills …
clothed with trees of no mean size’ of the southeastern corner of Australia.
Sailing northwards up the coast, they saw a number of ‘natives of a very
dark or black colour’ and several ‘smokes’—fires lit either by lightning or
Aboriginal hunters.20 The fires were too large and sporadic to have been
smoke signals lit to alert neighbours. Traditional enmity between
neighbouring tribes makes it unlikely that they warned of a ship’s arrival by
prearranged signals and on landing Cook met no organised resistance.
Aborigines lived in small groups that seldom combined against mutual
enemies.
On 29 April, in search of freshwater, the Endeavour entered the large bay
of Gamay, which Cook later named Botany Bay because of the innumerable
plants collected there by botanists Banks and Daniel Solander. The tall ship
with its great sails passed within 400 m (¼ mile) of fishermen in four
canoes and provoked a most unexpected reaction—apparent indifference.
The fishermen did not even look up. Then, when the ship anchored close
inshore, a naked woman carrying wood appeared with three children. ‘She
often looked at the ship,’ Banks recounts, ‘but expressed neither surprise
nor concern. Soon after this she lighted a fire and the four canoes came in
from the fishing; the people landed, hauled up their boats and began to
dress their dinner, to all appearance totally unmoved by us.’ So huge and
alien was the Endeavour that it probably seemed a mirage or monster, and
by ignoring it they conceivably hoped it might disappear. The Englishmen
thought them so peaceful that they expected their landing to be unopposed,
but when two boats carrying 30 men approached the shore the Aborigines
clearly recognised them as humans rather than spirits, and all ‘made off
except two men who seemed resolved to oppose our landing’. Cook spoke
to them but ‘neither us nor Tupaia could understand one word they said’.
We then threw them some nails, beads, etc ashore which they took up and seemed not ill pleased
in so much that I thought that they beckoned to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken,
for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fired a musket
between the two, which had no other effect but to make them retire back where the bundles of
their darts [spears] lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us which caused my firing a
second musket load with small shot, and although some of the shot struck the man, yet it had no
other effect than to make him lay hold of a shield … to defend himself.
Immediately after this we landed, which we had no sooner done than they throwed two darts at
us, this obliged me to fire a third shot, soon after which they both made off … Mr Banks being of
the opinion that the darts were poisoned, made me cautious how I advanced into the woods. We
found there a few small huts made of the bark of trees in one of which were four or five small
children with whom we left some strings of beads etc … Three canoes lay upon the beach the
worst I think I ever saw, they were about 12 or 14 feet [3.6 or 4.2 m] long made of one piece of
 the bark of a tree drawn or tied up at each end and the middle kept open by means of pieces of
sticks by way of thwarts.21

Cook felt that firing overhead or at the legs from 40 yards (36 m) could
do little harm, and Banks justified it because ‘we suspected their lances
[spears] to be poisoned from the quantity of gum which was about their
points’. (Aborigines did sometimes put poison on spear-tips to cause
infection in a wound; spearheads were dipped in a putrid corpse before use
in fighting or smeared with grass-tree gum or milky mangrove juice. Even
when no poison was used, victims often died of tetanus.)22 In southeastern
Australia, Aborigines had lived so long in isolation that intruders from an
outside world were probably inconceivable. They mounted a courageous
opposition against the strange white beings and the thunderous noise of
their magical sticks, but the English were very surprised that they fled
leaving their children behind. During their eight days at Botany Bay, Cook
and Tupaia kept trying to communicate and ‘form some connections with
the natives’, but ‘we could neither by words nor actions prevail upon them
to come near us’, ‘they all fled at my approach’ and ‘all they seemed to
want was for us to be gone’. Others found that, ‘they had not so much as
touched the things we had left in their huts’. Banks reported that, ‘Upon
every other occasion both there and everywhere else they behaved alike,
shunning us and giving up any part of the country which we landed upon at
once.’ Cook judged Aborigines to be a ‘timorous and inoffensive race’
compared with Maori and their great war canoes carrying a hundred men,
fortified hilltop settlements, war dances, tattooing and elaborate dress.
Relations had varied, but often Maori warriors had paddled canoes out to
the Endeavour and traded fish for cloth and beads. In Cook’s view:
The natives [of Australia] do not appear to be numerous, neither do they seem to live in large
bodies but dispersed in small parties along by the waterside; those I saw were about as tall as
Europeans, of a very dark brown colour but not black, nor had they woolly frizzled hair, but black
and lank much like ours. No sort of clothing or ornaments were ever seen by any of us … Some
we saw that had their faces and bodies painted with a sort of white paint or pigment.23

Sailing northwards, Cook later wrote ‘this eastern side is not that barren
and miserable country that Dampier and others have described the western
side to be’. He observed smoke all the way up the coast, and then became
acquainted with Aborigines at Endeavour River (near modern Cooktown,
Queensland), where Endeavour was beached for seven weeks after being
holed and almost lost on the Great Barrier Reef. It took three weeks for
Aboriginal men to approach the beached ship. Friendly contact was finally
established and over twelve consecutive days eight meetings occurred. The
first involved giving presents such as cloth, nails, beads and a small fish.
The fish was greeted ‘with the greatest joy imaginable’, and the next day
the gift was reciprocated. The only presents that were valued were food
items, and trouble arose only when eight Aborigines who had ventured on
board the Endeavour asked for two of several large turtles lying on deck.
Their request was refused and attempts to remove turtles were thwarted,
whereupon they leapt into their canoe, went ashore and set fire to the grass
upwind of the tents and fishing-nets. Warning shots were fired but no one
was hurt, the fire was put out, peace overtures were made and they were
invited onto the ship again, but ‘could not be prevailed upon to come on
board’. The moral Banks drew from this incident was not that food should
be shared out generously, but that firebreaks should be burnt before pitching
camp, observing, ‘I had little idea of the fury with which the grass burnt in
this hot climate, nor of the difficulty of extinguishing it when once
lighted.’24
Artist Sydney Parkinson was struck by the ‘diminutive’ size of north
coast Aborigines. Banks measured some men and found them ‘in general
about 5 feet 6 inches [168 cm] in height and very slender; one we measured
5 feet 2 [157 cm] and another 5 feet 9 [175 cm], but he was far taller than
any of his fellows’. Their skin colour was described as ‘chocolate’, and hair
as ‘straight in some and curled in others; they always wore it cropped close
round their heads; it was of the same consistence with our hair, by no means
woolly or curled like that of Negroes. [Cropping of the hair and beard was
done by singeing.] Their eyes were in many lively and their teeth even and
good; of them they had complete sets, by no means wanting two of their
foreteeth as Dampier’s New Hollanders did.’25
Men had raised cicatrices on arms and thighs and bodies painted in red
and white lines with white circles around the eyes. Some wore shell
necklaces, string armlets, waist-belts made of human hair or kangaroo-skin
and impressive nose ornaments of long bird bones ‘as thick as a man’s
finger’ worn through the pierced septum. They carried spears tipped with
sharpened wooden points or stingray barbs. They had spear-throwers but no
bows and arrows, which were used in New Guinea and the Torres Strait
Islands but nowhere on the mainland. ‘One man who had a bow and a
bundle of arrows’ was observed by Cook on Possession Island 11 km (7
miles) off the tip of Cape York, but they were the first Cook had seen.

1. SPEARS, SPEAR-THROWERS AND SHIELDS

The main Aboriginal weapon was the spear. Spear length varied from
1.5 to 5 m (5–18 ft) and the weight from 50 grams to 1.8 kilograms (2
oz–4 lb). Longer spears were used for fighting, shorter ones to hunt
game such as kangaroos and emus (one of the large flightless birds of
Australia). Spears could kill at 27 m (90 ft). Plain wooden javelins
with sharp, fire-hardened tips served for hunting and fighting.
Tasmanians used nothing else, but mainlanders developed many
elaborate types. Some spears had barbs cut in the shaft while others
had detachable heads. The notorious ‘death’ or ‘war’ spears of
southeastern Australia had rows of a dozen or more sharp pieces of
stone set in resin on the shaft to cause maximum tissue damage and
make dislodgement difficult. Shafts were made of wood, reed,
bamboo or grass-tree (Xanthorrhoea) stalks and detachable heads
were fixed with sinews or resin.
Some spears were used with a spear-thrower or ‘woomera’ (the
name comes from the Sydney Darug language). This resembles the
atlatl of North America, and both probably originated in Asia.
Woomeras have shaped wooden shafts 45–150 cm (18–60 inches)
long, with a short peg or hook at the butt end. This fits into a hole in
the end of the spear. Woomeras add extra force to the thrower’s arm
by keeping it in touch with the spear for longer and increasing
leverage. When the spear shaft is given a flick with the forefinger as it
is thrown with a woomera, it rotates in flight, giving greater accuracy.
The projectile force of a spear propelled in this way far exceeds that
of the bow and arrow, but is less accurate. In Central Australia,
woomeras are multipurpose implements used for hurling spears,
kindling fire or disembowelling game with the sharp stone chisel set
in resin on one end. The maximum distance travelled by hand-thrown
javelins is 60 m (200 ft) but ultra-light spears thrown by a woomera
have covered 180 m (600 ft).
 Spear shields were designed to deflect barbed spears thrown in
battle, whereas narrow parrying shields with handles cut in the dense
hardwood were for defence against clubs in individual combat. Outer
surfaces were incised with stone or tooth implements or painted with
ochre, charcoal, pipeclay, blood or fats. Geometric and figurative
motifs were combined in designs identifying the shield’s owner.
Southeastern Australian shields boasted the most intricate carving and
greatest motif range. Styles varied, the most spectacular being the
huge, painted shields of northern Queensland (see the Queensland,
South Australian or Australian Museums). Shields were used over
most of Australia, except Tasmania, and toy shields were made for
young boys to practise with.
In August 1770 at Botany Bay, Joseph Banks noted in his journal
that the bark of many trees had been cut into shield shapes and prised
up with stone wedges but not removed, ‘which shews that these
people certainly know how much thicker and stronger bark becomes
by being suffered to remain upon the tree some time after it is cut
round.’

Physical similarities between all east coast Aborigines led Cook and
Banks to assume (wrongly) that they all spoke the same ‘New-Holland
language’. The language, of which they recorded brief word lists at
Endeavour River, was Guugu Yimithirr. Here the word ‘kangaroo’ first
entered the English language. Cook and Banks thought it a generic name for
any macropod (long-footed marsupial), whereas it applies only to large
black kangaroos, for each species has a different name in Guugu Yimithirr,
as in all other Aboriginal languages. (The story that the true meaning of
kangaroo is ‘I don’t know’ is apocryphal.) Cook observed that New
Hollanders ‘are a different people and speak a different language’ from
New Guineans, since there seemed to be no contact or ‘commerce’ between
the two.26 The only clear cultural difference noticed between northern and
southern Australians was in watercraft, for southerners fished from small,
fragile bark vessels, whereas north of the Whitsunday Islands outrigger
canoes able to carry four people were used—narrow, roughly hollowed-out
tree trunks about 3 m (10 ft) long with a single or double outrigger to
prevent them overturning.
 Describing Australian Aborigines presented a challenge. The primitivist
school of thought had taught observers to assess indigenous people against
their own background; there were no longer inbred assumptions of
European superiority. In the mid-eighteenth century, the notion of ‘the noble
savage’—naturally virtuous and innocent native people—had been
advanced by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
His concept of Arcadia, an earthly paradise inhabited by happy, healthy,
beautiful people whose every want was supplied by bountiful nature, was
just a theory until the first French and British ships visited Tahiti and
discovered its apparent reality.
The Tahitians’ ‘soft primitivism’, which was much admired by Banks,
was later found to encompass licentiousness, infanticide and human
sacrifice. Cook was more impressed by the ‘hard primitivism’ of Maori
warriors, with their elaborately tattooed faces, even if they did feast on their
slain enemies, and of ‘New Hollanders’, such as the two who so
courageously opposed his landing, although vastly outnumbered. Both
Banks and Cook appreciated the contentment, self-sufficiency and Spartan
simplicity of Aboriginal life; as Cook expressed it in apparent deliberate
contradiction of Dampier:
the natives of New-Holland … may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth,
but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans … They live in a tranquillity which is
not disturbed by the inequality of condition: The earth and sea … furnishes them with all things
necessary for life … they live in a warm and fine climate, … so that they have very little need of
clothing … they seemed to set no value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part
with any thing of their own … this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with
all the necessarys of life and that they have no superfluities.27

Sir Joseph Banks, a wealthy Londoner whose opinion was to be far more
influential, concluded that New Hollanders were ‘the most uncivilised
savages perhaps in the world’. A major factor in this judgment was the
nudity of Aboriginal women as well as men, for even the women of Tierra
del Fuego wore a ‘flap of seal skin’ over their ‘privities’. Cook judged
Fuegians rather than Australian Aborigines as ‘perhaps as miserable a set of
people as are this day upon earth’. He described them as ‘a little ugly half
starved beardless race, … almost naked’, and found it ‘distressing to see
them stand trembling and naked on the deck’. Cook was struck by Fuegian
suffering from cold even in the middle of summer, something he did not
witness in Australia. Similarly Charles Darwin, who met both Aborigines
and Fuegians in the 1830s, classed the ‘shivering tribes’ of Fuegians as ‘the
most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld … The Australian,
in the simplicity of the arts of life, comes nearest the Fuegian’. From these
views came the concept that these societies in ‘the uttermost parts of the
earth’ were living representatives of the oldest phase of human
development.28

The question of consent

On 22 August 1770, Cook landed on Possession Island off Cape York.
we saw a number of people … we expected that they would have opposed our landing but as we
approached the shore they all made off … the Eastern coast from the latitude of 38° South … to
this place I am confident was never seen or visited by any European before us, and … I now once
more hoisted English Colours and in the name of His Majesty King George the Third took
possession of the whole Eastern Coast … by the name of New South Wales.29

This claim only gave the English preliminary title, and settlement in 1788
gave actual possession of just the region occupied by the colonists—the
Sydney Basin. The name New South Wales came from the resemblance of
eastern Australia’s wooded hills, headlands and beaches to the south coast
of Wales.
The Admiralty’s instructions to Cook were:
You are also with the consent of the natives to take possession of convenient situations in the
country in the name of the King of Great Britain or, if you find the country uninhabited, take
possession for his Majesty by setting up proper marks and inscriptions, as first discoverers and
possessors.30

The problem was that these instructions referred to mythical isles of gold
inhabited by civilised people able to negotiate treaties. The ‘natives’ Cook
met were not. He could not seek their consent in the absence of any
common language and his interpreter, Tupaia, could not understand the
Australians, which was not surprising as about 300 separate languages were
spoken in Aboriginal Australia, all unrelated to any in the outside world.31
No signs of houses, villages, fields, domesticated animals, cultivation nor
any system of land ownership or government were apparent, in contrast
with the complex agricultural societies and large populations of Tahiti and
New Zealand. Banks described Aborigines as ‘wandering like the Arabs
from place to place’ and their huts as ‘framed with less art or rather less
industry than any habitations of human beings probably that the world can
show’.32
Cook was also frustrated in following the Admiralty’s instructions by the
Aboriginal tendency to ‘make off’ when strangers appeared and the lack of
leaders with whom to negotiate, unlike New Zealand where chiefs were
identifiable by their special garb. The new land seemed to be sparsely
populated by small nomadic groups; Banks said they never saw more than
‘thirty or forty [persons] together’.33 He decided the land was ‘thinly
inhabited’ and that the unseen interior was probably ‘totally uninhabited’, in
view of a lack of smoke far inland and the apparent scarcity of animal life
or ‘wild produce’ away from the sea coast. Banks therefore argued that
because there was no cultivation on the coast, there was none inland, and
that people could not exist inland without cultivation.34

Bands and tribes

Cultural anthropologists have identified a broad pattern of development in
human societies from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, while
acknowledging some exceptions, variations and overlap between
categories.35 Australian societies were all of the band variety, characterised
by small group size and nomadism—regular mobility and the lack of any
permanent single base of residence. Aboriginal nomadism, however, was
highly restricted geographically, except in the most arid regions. This is in
stark contrast with nomads such as the Kurds, who moved between Turkey
and China over time.
A band is a residential group of people that live and forage together. The
‘Pygmies’ and the San People of Africa, the Inuit and Fuegians have
comparable band-type societies. Australian bands comprised one or more
extended families but composition was fluid. Core members were close
relatives by birth or marriage but individuals were extremely mobile and the
band’s size and membership varied with food resources and personal
circumstances. Band numbers ranged from 8 to 70 persons but were usually
between 14 and 33, with an average of 25.36 Each band had its own ‘range’
(the area from which it won its living) but with permission could forage
more widely in a neighbouring band’s territory. Bands were land-using
‘residence groups’, whereas ‘clans’ were ‘country groups’ with a common
identity, often based on claimed descent from a single Ancestral Being.
Each clan held a defined ‘estate’, generally identified by a focal point such
as a waterhole.37
The next major stage of social organisation is the tribe or regional
linguistic grouping, usually distinguished by numbers in the hundreds. A
‘tribe’ is what anthropologists call a set of people sharing a common
linguistic identification and hence a common identification with the area
with which that language is traditionally identified. There are direct links
between particular tracts of country and particular languages that were
planted in the landscape by Ancestral Beings. For example, the Wardaman
people of the Northern Territory are not Wardaman because of the language
they speak, but because they are linked through their parents to places in
which their language was installed in the era of creation. The 600 or so
Australian tribes were primarily loose linguistic groupings that bore little
relation to classic tribes with their fixed settlements, such as villages in
New Guinea. Aboriginal Australia had neither fixed settlements nor
political units in the form of villages, nor did tribal members act
collectively as a social, economic or military unit. There was no racial
solidarity and tribesmen did not regularly fight together against invaders.
Australian societies are therefore classed as primarily of band rather than
tribal type.
Some anthropologists now argue that the term ‘tribe’ is inadequate to
express the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal social organisation.
Many indigenous Australians disagree. Belonging to a particular ‘tribe’ or
‘nation’ (strictly a group of tribes) has become central to the identity of
Aboriginal people, who use the terms proudly to indicate their origins and
ancestral territory or ‘country’. Traditional Australian tribes numbered from
25 to several thousand persons with a mean size of 450.38

Were treaties possible?

Australia is the only continent where no treaties were made between
colonists and prior occupants, because the unique characteristics of its
indigenous society made negotiated agreements impossible. Even had the
communication problem been overcome, a separate treaty would have been
required with each tribe or even each clan. Cook’s critics forget that
traditional Aboriginal Australia was never united. Elsewhere the British did
make treaties, for example the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand in 1840.
Like the Aborigines, in Cook’s time the Maori did not read or write. The
major differences were that all Maori spoke the same language and their
society was of the chiefdom type, with a developed tribal organisation
governing thousands of subsistence gardeners living in villages and fortified
hill-forts. Maori warrior bands fought organised battles against newcomers
but were also prepared to sell land to foreigners.39
Similarly, treaties were successfully made with tribal chiefs in North
America, where the culture and structures of intertribal councils were not
unlike European ones. One striking difference between early American and
Australian history is that stories of the American frontier abound with
names of tribes and great tribal federations, whereas early Australian
history lacks named groups.

Terra nullius
In the eighteenth century, the three recognised ways of acquiring legal
sovereignty were by conquest, cession or occupation of land that was
ownerless. The American colonies were mainly acquired by conquest or
cession, but in 1770 Australia was regarded as ‘common land’ occupied
only by ‘wandering tribes’.
Politicians at the time were strongly influenced by the 1690 doctrine of
John Locke that: ‘As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates,
and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does,
as it were, inclose it from the Common.’40 If a man improves common land
‘for the benefit of life’, it becomes his inalienable property. The much-
quoted 1760 opinion of Swiss international law writer, Emerich de Vattel,
was that:
Nations, incapable by the smallness of their numbers to people the whole, cannot exclusively
appropriate to themselves more land than they have occasion for, and which they are unable to
settle and cultivate. Their removing their habitations through these immense regions, cannot be
taken for a true and legal possession; and the people of Europe, too closely pent up, finding land
of which these nations are in no particular want, and of which they make no actual and constant
use, may lawfully possess it, and establish colonies there.41

De Vattel did not sanction total dispossession of indigenous people but

argued that colonists had a limited right to land: they could take possession
of ‘a part’ of the country but should confine themselves ‘within just
bounds’.
Since there was no sign of any chiefs or private land ownership, the
claim that Australia was common land was not as unreasonable then as it
may seem to us now. Elsewhere British colonies were planted in places
where indigenous people understood, and defended, the concept of
property. In America, Africa, India, the East Indies and New Zealand
colonists encountered societies of gardeners and farmers who had houses,
villages, fences and cultivated plots of land. Such evidence of prior
ownership was clear and could not be ignored. Newcomers adjusted their
views according to the level of development they observed.
The British followed the conventions adopted by European nations over
the previous two centuries for legally acquiring unowned land, or terra
nullius. This Latin phrase translates as ‘nobody’s land’, and was actually
not used with regard to the colonisation of Australia until the later twentieth
century.42 In legal terms, terra nullius means ‘land over which no previous
sovereignty has been exercised’ or more simply ‘land of no sovereign
power’. It does not mean ‘uninhabited’.
The clearest statement of the three possibilities for treating newly
discovered lands is in Dutch navigator Willem Schouten’s codicil to Abel
Tasman’s Instructions of 1641.
1. With a friendly sovereign power, make a treaty [as Tasman did in Japan and tried to do in
Tonga].
2. With an unfriendly sovereign power, declare them an enemy [as Tasman did in New Zealand
when the Maori attacked him].
3. In lands manifesting no sovereign power or visible government, whether uninhabited or not
uninhabited, claim the land for the Dutch State [e.g. Tasman claimed Van Diemen’s Land for
the Dutch State as a sovereign power, not for the VOC, which was not a sovereign power].43

Cook’s decision not to negotiate a treaty but to claim the land for the
British Crown under the right of terra nullius was therefore not illegal by
the terms of the day, or ‘Captain Cook’s mistake’, as one school textbook
labels it. Cook never used the term; as leading historian Alan Frost says,
‘had the British not seen New South Wales to be terra nullius, then I
believe they would have negotiated for the right to settle the Botany Bay
area’.44
Later, in 1889, the Privy Council confirmed that ‘from the outset’ the law
of England was New South Wales law, because the colony ‘consisted of a
tract of territory practically unoccupied, without settled inhabitants or
settled law, at the time when it was peacefully annexed to the British
dominions’.45
The urge to explore is a basic human instinct. Only Australia’s
remoteness and adverse reports from all its early visitors preserved it long
after Europeans had colonised all other inhabitable continents. In the age of
maritime expansion, Australian hunter-gatherers had no hope of permanent
reprieve from intrusion by more developed nations. Throughout much of
human history invasion, warfare and violence have been the norm. Thomas
Hobbes in 1651 defined ‘a state of nature’ as ‘a state of war’, in which
existence must be one of ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; And
the life of Man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. European countries
suffered endless invasions, and even sea-girt Britain endured innumerable
incursions over 7000 years from Neolithic hunters, megalith builders, Celts,
Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Normans. Almost none of this
immigration was peaceful.
Fortunately, by 1788 the rule of law was firmly established in Europe. As
Frost points out:
Cook and Banks were percipient, tolerant of racial and cultural difference, and empathetic to a
remarkable degree … If any group of Europeans of this time might have adjusted their
perceptions and modes of procedure to accommodate the fact of the Aborigines, it was this one;
the Aborigines were simply too un-European for them to comprehend truly.46

The question of cultivation

‘We see this country in the pure state of nature, the industry of man has had
nothing to do with any part of it,’ Cook exclaimed.47 Some now describe
Aborigines as ‘cultivators’ because of their regular burning of the landscape
for hunting, to keep paths open and to provide new, sweeter grass to attract
game (see chapter 6). Burning had a huge impact on Australian vegetation
but was not cultivation in the usual sense of the word. In Aboriginal
Australia there was no sign of animal or plant domestication nor of
horticulture or agriculture in the normal sense of these terms.
Australia is drier and flatter, with generally shallower soil and less
biomass than any other inhabited continent, with the world’s most
unpredictable climate. Lack of food production in arid regions did not
surprise early voyagers, but the absence of gardens, crops or domesticated
animals on the fertile east coast was a puzzle. Why weren’t pigs, chickens
or gardening imported from Australia’s near neighbours in the Torres Strait
or New Guinea? Arnhem Landers adopted many other elements from
outsiders—shell fishhooks, painted skulls and various art designs, cults and
rituals, so why not animal husbandry and cultivation? Some Aborigines
while trading with Torres Strait Islanders encountered vegetable plots,
banana and coconut trees, and pigs but didn’t import any species or adopt
their neighbours’ gardening techniques. Aboriginal men of the tropics were
selective in what they adopted from their northern neighbours. Useful
items, such as harpoons and fishhooks, were acquired and later copied,
together with exotic ceremonial drums and masks. One reason why
horticulture was not imported may simply be that digging was considered
women’s work, but it was men rather than women who saw taro, yams and
coconuts being cultivated on Torres Strait islands.
Australian soils and climate permit modern agriculture and were
amenable to Stone Age horticulture. At least ten plants domesticated in
Southeast Asia are also endemic in northern and Central Australia, where
they were used but not cultivated. These include taro, arrowroot, yams, wild
rice, native millet, two fruit and three nut trees, including the macadamia,
with its large nuts.48
Some animals and birds could also have been domesticated. Candidates
were koalas, wombats, kangaroos, wallabies, pelicans, brush turkeys,
cassowaries, emus, ducks and geese, but none are herd animals, none
furnish milk or, while alive, any other useful product like wool, hair or
horns, and none could be used for riding, pulling or carrying loads. The
nearest the Aborigines came to animal domestication was when rainforest
people tethered cassowary chicks for a few days until tamed. The young
birds then roamed the camp until large and fat enough to provide a feast.
But they were not kept for breeding, presumably because adult birds are
large and very aggressive, with lethal talons.49
Were Aborigines too well furnished with food to bother about producing
more? No, for anthropologist Jon Altman’s research has shown that the
influential concept that hunter-gatherers were ‘the original affluent society’
with abundant food and leisure time is a myth, even in the richest
environments. The mistaken idea that Australian hunter-gatherers needed
only about four hours per day to feed themselves came from a brief, flawed
1948 study in Arnhem Land: the all-adult group was unrepresentative, and
the study didn’t cover the seasonal cycle, with its lean as well as good
times. Even in the relatively rich environment of coastal Arnhem Land,
archaeologists Rhys Jones and Betty Meehan found during a year living
with Gidjingali people that Aborigines needed far more than five hours each
per day to produce the minimum food to survive (estimated at 2000 calories
per day per capita) for a group that included young children and old people
as well as active food collectors. Nor was the food supply reliable; in the
year of the study a single freshwater flood almost wiped out the shellfish
along 12 km (7 miles) of coast, a resource that the previous year had been a
major food. The uncertainty of survival, the unremitting labour of the food
quest and frequent hunger cast serious doubts on nostalgic concepts of a
lost utopia.50
There was a strict division of labour in food-collecting. In Arnhem Land,
men hunted animals, large fish and birds, and women gathered plant foods
and shellfish. Over the seasonal cycle, men and women contributed roughly
equal amounts of calories to the diet, but the women’s provision of
carbohydrates—from the collection of vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts—
involved far longer hours of work than the men’s hunting, which provided
protein. The calorific return per woman-hour collecting bush food over four
months in different seasons ranged from 115 to 276 calories, averaging only
181. Food was shared according to a strict formula, but during the wet
season, the lean period for vegetable foods, or when hunters came home
empty-handed, there was hunger in the camp.
In spite of occasional food shortages, tribal Aborigines saw nature as
their garden, a resource that didn’t need cultivation or improvement. An
Arnhem Lander once said, as she watched a Fijian missionary digging his
vegetable plot, ‘You people go to all that trouble, working and planting
seeds, but we don’t have to do that. All these things are there for us, the
Ancestral Beings left them for us … we just have to go and collect the food
when it is ripe.’51
Why did food production not develop in the more fertile, well-watered
southeast, now a breadbasket for the world? Australia was an ‘unlucky
country’ in its prehistoric flora, fauna and thin soils, but there are species
that could have been domesticated. Only two of the world’s 56 large-seeded
grass species—native millet (Panicum decompositum) and pigweed or
purslane (Portulaca oleracea)—are native to Australia and their grain size
is only 13 mg, against 40 mg for the heaviest grains elsewhere. Yet
Australian millet belongs to the same genus as broomcorn millet, a staple of
early Chinese farming.
In semiarid and arid Australia, seeds were widely harvested but never
cultivated. Millet was reaped with kidney-shaped stone knives and gathered
when the seed was full but the grass still green. The grass was then stacked
in small heaps and the seeds left to dry and ripen. When the seeds were ripe,
the grass was threshed so that the seeds all fell in one place. This system
cleverly overcame the problem of wild cereal seeds ripening at different
times. When explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell travelled down the Darling
River in July 1835, he observed that, ‘the grass has been pulled … and piled
in hayricks, so that the aspect of the desert was softened into the agreeable
semblance of a hayfield … we found the ricks, or hay-cocks, extending for
miles.’52
The grass was later threshed by hand to separate seed from stalks. Then,
if not eaten immediately, seeds were stored in pits, kangaroo-skin bags or
large wooden dishes. In Central Australia, in the 1870s, 1000 kg (1 ton) of
seed was stored in seventeen wooden dishes each about 150 cm long by 30
cm (5 ft long × 1 ft) deep, probably to feed participants at an initiation
ceremony.53 Women ground seeds into flour on millstones and baked loaves
of unleavened ‘bread’ in the campfire. Processing was extremely time-
consuming. Each kilogram (2 pounds) of native flour cost 5–8 hours of a
woman’s labour (3 hours’ harvesting time and 2–5 hours for processing,
depending on the species). Seed-processing was women’s work, but men
did some reaping. It is no wonder that English bread and flour proved such
powerful magnets, drawing Aboriginal people into towns and away from
traditional life. Another problem with a diet based on stone-ground flour
was that grit from the millstones caused severe wear on teeth, leading to
chronic periodontal disease. All the adult skeletons found at the prehistoric
burial site of Kow Swamp, Victoria, had first molars so worn that the roots
were exposed and worn halfway down.54
Some other foods were managed, for example, permanent traps were
built to catch eels and other fish and the tops of yam tubers (Microseris
lanceolata) were sometimes left in the ground ‘so that the yam would grow
again’, as tropical Aborigines explained.55 Some fruits such as Solanum
centrale (desert raisins) and wild figs were stored for later use, particularly
to feed ceremonial gatherings, but the heat and predation by dingoes (the
wild dog of Australia), termites and locusts made most food storage
impractical. Instead, desert Aborigines developed ‘living larders’ or ‘game
reserves’ as last resorts in times of drought. They drove kangaroos into
‘oases’ with permanent water and broke their legs to keep them there. In the
colonial period the same method was used: sheep were stolen, driven into
the bush and their legs broken to keep the meat fresh until needed.
All such measures involved management, not production, of food
resources. Worldwide, agriculture developed roughly simultaneously
around 10,000 years ago, a time of major post-glacial climatic change.56
Temperatures rose everywhere, and food supplies improved. Greater
availability of plants and animals led to higher human population numbers,
while rising seas displaced people into already inhabited areas. These
changes increased population densities so that in some regions they
eventually exceeded levels that could be sustained by hunting and gathering
alone. Significantly, the change from collection to production of food
occurred only in particularly fertile parts of the world, as they were the first
to become overpopulated. As the saying goes, ‘necessity is the mother of
invention’. Domestication of plants and animals increased food supplies by
ten- to a hundredfold.
Some have argued that agriculture is the natural end point to which all
societies evolve, and Australia’s slowness in this respect was due to the lack
of animals and plants suitable for domestication. Others maintain that food
production is by no means inevitable. In Australia, pressures for
domestication were outweighed by those against, especially extreme
religious conservatism, which was diametrically opposed to change.
Ceremonies were performed for the maintenance of food plants and animals
but Aboriginal beliefs strictly opposed the concept of actual food
production. Taboos and totemism (spiritual linkages between people and the
natural universe) forbid modification of the environment, for there is a
strong belief in the interrelatedness of all living things. Likewise, storage of
food for future private consumption is incompatible with the ubiquitous
practice of sharing, and the use of food surpluses to support large
ceremonial gatherings.

Conservatism
Conservatism, or at least a very slow rate of change, is normal in human
societies but seems exceptional to us because we live in a period of
constant, rapid development. Aboriginal society is renowned for its cultural
conservatism—the long-term continuity of specific traditions. There was
great pressure against innovation. Central Australian artists consistently
stated that artistic motifs did not change and were reproduced exactly as
they always had been since the Dreaming or Dreamtime, the era when
Ancestral Beings created the landscape and all living things. The Law
established in the Dreaming must continue forever unchanged. The Creative
Ancestors told of in myths instituted a way of life that they introduced to
humans, and because they themselves are believed to be eternal, so are the
patterns of life they brought into being. The traditional Central Australian
artistic repertoire is largely unchanged from the ice age.
Throughout Australian prehistory, basic forms of technology, religion and
economy remained the same. For instance, the rite of cremation has endured
for over 40,000 years. The pattern of life set by the first Australians more
than 60 millennia ago proved exceptionally successful and long-lasting. In
Tasmania, isolated from the rest of the world for the last 14,000 years,
change was minimal. Mainland Australia saw more innovations but no
major ones, such as the development of pottery or the use of metals. Some
developments were indigenous while others, such as fishhooks, diffused
from Asia. Modern non-indigenous commentators tend to emphasise
change in Aboriginal society, as change is equated with dynamism and
progress in Western eyes. Aboriginal people disagree—they are proud of
their conservatism and justifiably boast of having the world’s longest
continuing art tradition, oldest enduring religion and most ancient living
culture. Traditional indigenous belief maintains that Aboriginal society has
remained essentially unchanged since its beginning in the Dreaming.

Nomadism
Early European settlers regarded Australian Aborigines as nomads
—‘peoples who live in no fixed place but wander periodically according to
the seasonal availability of food … [and] usually live in small bands that
spend anything from a few days to a few weeks in a vicinity, moving within
a loosely defined territory.’57 This belief led to the idea that Aborigines had
no ownership of land and could readily move elsewhere when the incomers
wanted to settle their traditional hunting grounds
 In fact, each tribe had its own ‘country’, language and separate identity
and a deep sense of belonging to their particular piece of land. They would
sometimes venture further afield for trade, intertribal gatherings or, with
permission, to exploit a particular food resource in another tribe’s territory,
but their regular seasonal round was regulated by a deep knowledge of the
resources within their own tribal area.

2. A LACK OF COCONUT TREES

The absence of coconut trees in Australia puzzled Cook. Neither he
nor Flinders saw a single one. Why, they wondered, were coconut
trees absent from Australia but flourishing on the coasts of the Torres
Strait islands and Pacific Islands? Coconuts were extremely scarce
but not entirely absent at the time of European settlement. Close
examination of the Queensland coast in the mid-nineteenth century
did reveal some tall, old coconut trees on remote Russell Island,
southeast of Cairns, which probably germinated from buoyant,
drifting nuts. ‘It is obvious to anyone who walks the beaches,
particularly of the east coast,’ says Australian coconut expert, Mike
Foale, ‘that coconut seeds arrive fairly frequently, and that some of
the seeds are capable of establishing palms.’a
Aboriginal languages of northeast Queensland had names for the
coconut, and coconut fruits were traded between Torres Strait
Islanders and Cape York Aborigines, yet no coconut palms grew in
inhabited pre-colonial Australia. Why not? Hungry foragers
consumed nuts washed up on beaches, thankful for the ease of
collecting this nutritious, tasty food. Others competing for the prized
meal were white-tailed rats (Uromys caudimaculatus) that could gnaw
through the husk. A seedling also yields a quick meal for human or
rodent from its residual kernel and spongy ‘apple’ but is destroyed in
the process. Young trees were eaten by termites. Even mature coconut
trees died after Aborigines harvested the succulent growing bud or
‘heart of palm’. The same thing happened to several native species,
such as ‘cabbage palms’ (Livistonia sp.).
Fruits are still washed up on the beach and eaten, but not planted,
by Arnhem Landers. The direction of prevailing currents means that
 relatively few coconuts wash up on Australia’s northern shores but
they are plentiful in northeastern Queensland where, in the mid-
twentieth century, anthropologists reported that Aborigines had learnt
to plant them. Foale suggests that ‘but for the presence of Aboriginal
food-gatherers and the foraging white-tailed rat, the coconut would
have been well established on at least the most favourable tropical
shores of the Australian northeast before European settlement’.
Now coconut palms have become widespread and successful in
Australia and on the northeast coast many coconut groves thrive
without any management.

Tribal territories varied enormously in resources and hence in area and

population density. In Australia’s deserts, where food and water were
scarce, people were constantly on the move, seldom camping for more than
a few nights at each waterhole, but within their own tribal territory. In
contrast, some groups in rich coastal environments were almost totally
sedentary. Others were ‘semi-sedentary’, such as the inland fishermen of
western Victoria, who spent around two months each autumn tending traps
to exploit the annual downriver migration of eels to their marine breeding
grounds. Such seasonally resident, ‘semi-sedentary’ people had no home
base and moved perhaps six times a year in the course of a regular seasonal
round. Other semi-sedentary Aborigines lived along the banks of
Australia’s largest river, the Murray, where the arid hinterland limited most
excursions to a 20 km wide (12 mile wide) corridor, the maximum distance
hunter-gatherers could readily walk carrying a skin waterbag. It is no
coincidence that these people developed the continent’s most structured and
hierarchical societies and the closest approach to tribal councils for conflict
resolution.

A sparse population
Aboriginal population density was greatest in environments that were rich
in food, such as coasts, estuaries, large rivers and lakes. It is important,
therefore, that, even after spending several weeks on the east coast, Cook
and Banks considered Australia ‘thinly inhabited’.
 Much subsequent research has shown their judgment to be correct,
although the size of the pre-contact Aboriginal population is inevitably
uncertain. For the first 50 years, European settlement was confined to the
coastal fringe. Often the only sign of Aboriginal presence was smoke from
distant fires, and estimating numbers inland was impossible. In the 1920s,
anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown was asked to assess the Aboriginal
population in 1788. Using figures collected in the early 1800s, he concluded
in the 1930 Australian Yearbook that ‘the available evidence points to the
original population of Australia having been certainly over 250,000, and
quite possibly, or even probably, over 300,000’.
This figure of 300,000 doubled earlier estimates. It also fitted well with
anthropologist Norman Tindale’s identification of 600 tribes in Australia,
with a mean of 450 members each. If Radcliffe-Brown’s estimate is roughly
right, it means that numbers declined from around 300,000 in 1788 to
roughly 60,000 in 1921, a drop of 80 per cent. The major cause was the
deadly impact of new diseases on people with no prior immunity.
Epidemics of smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis killed most sufferers,
and venereal diseases virtually sterilised a generation. Another factor was
the devastating effect of alcohol. Modern historians emphasise violence on
the frontier as responsible for Aboriginal depopulation, while barely
mentioning disease. However, historian Henry Reynolds’ estimate of
20,000 Australian Aboriginal deaths in a century of frontier conflict
accounts for only 8 per cent of their population decline. The vast majority
of the 20,000 were men, whereas what matters most for population
maintenance is female fertility.58
Some have put the Aboriginal population in 1788 much higher.
Economic historian Noel Butlin estimated it as over a million, but
archaeologist Keryn Kefous showed that his calculations involved incorrect
assumptions concerning different environments’ carrying capacity (the
number of people an area of land can support). Butlin used maximum
figures but actual hunter-gatherer population density is much lower because
of droughts and uneven, unreliable resources. Most researchers now
consider Radcliffe-Brown’s figure too low but Butlin’s far too high. A
realistic estimate for Aboriginal population size in 1788 is half or, at most,
three-quarters of a million.59
Europeans found traces of Aboriginal presence wherever they went in the
7.4 million km2 (3 million sq. miles) of a country almost the same size as
the continental United States. A prehistoric population of half a million
would have averaged one person to fifteen km2 (6 sq. miles) across the
continent, although density varied widely according to local resources,
climate and topography. Australian environments range from tropical
rainforests to alpine peaks and from rich coastal and riverine shores to
waterless deserts. Only one in ten Aborigines lived in the arid zone in the
central third of the continent, which receives only 120–250 mm (5–10
inches) of rain a year. Western Desert people averaged one person to 150–
200 km2 (58–77 sq. miles).
Population was highest in the Murray and Darling River valleys and on
the tropical coast of Arnhem Land, where it reached two people per km2
(per ½ sq. mile). This density approaches that of coastal New Guineans who
live by hunting, gathering and low intensity slash-and-burn agriculture, but
their horticulturalists, who practise intensive shifting cultivation of sweet
potato and taro in the central highlands, live at much higher densities (4–10
people per km2). New Guinea has only a tenth of Australia’s land area but
agriculture raised its pre-colonial indigenous population to about one
million.60

In short, European explorers found on Australia’s shores a naked,

‘wandering’ people fishing, hunting and gathering with stone-age
implements. Nakedness was equated with primitiveness, as was the lack of
houses, villages, cultivation or any apparent system of chiefs, government
or land tenure. In Europe, uncultivated land was regarded as ownerless,
common land that could be legally colonised and settled without a treaty
with the nomadic inhabitants. Australia’s apparent lack of tradeable
commodities and its vast distance from the European superpowers meant
that it was the last inhabited continent to be colonised, but colonisation
became inevitable once its splendid harbours and seemingly infinite supply
of usable land were discovered.
 2

COLONISATION
Early Sydney

Colonisation of such a remote land as Australia after only one visit was a
remarkably bold venture that almost ended in disaster for the British. The
primary motivation was the sudden need to find an alternative place to house
convicts. British society was based on the sanctity of private property, but
theft was rife and the prisons were consequently overflowing. Until 1776,
convicts were transported to colonies in North America, where they were
indentured to plantation owners as labourers. The successful revolt of these
colonies and their subsequent independence as the United States of America
largely ended this practice, and New Zealand was never considered as an
alternative because of the Maoris’ extreme hostility. Pending another
solution, convicted felons were kept in floating prison-hulks on the River
Thames. Banks suggested Botany Bay as an alternative and, after much
debate, in 1786 Lord Sydney (after whom Sydney would be named)
announced King George III’s decision to send a fleet the following year.
Eleven ships were to transport 717 convicts, mainly Londoners convicted of
minor theft, and 290 seamen, soldiers and officers.
A cheaper solution than sending ships 19,000 km (12,000 miles) across
the world was to build new gaols in Britain, but Australia had other
attractions. Britain needed a port of call between the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, and Norfolk Island was a promising source of timber for masts and
flax for sailcloth. Ports and tradeable items were the focus of early
colonisation; it was not until the nineteenth century that unexplored country
was valued for its own sake.
Captain Arthur Phillip, a naval officer, was appointed the first governor.
His instructions were:
To endeavour by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate
their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of
our subjects shall wantonly destroy them … it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such
offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence.1

Phillip was equally keen to have no ‘dispute with the natives, a few of
which I shall endeavour to persuade to settle near us, and who I mean to
furnish with everything that can tend to civilise them, and to give them a
high opinion of their new guests’. Importantly, the British perceived
themselves not as invaders but as guests, albeit uninvited ones, and their
mission not as dispossession but as acquisition of a strategic port and
peaceful establishment of a small colony among the natives.

New arrivals
After a gruelling eight-month voyage from Portsmouth, the First Fleet
reached Australia and sailed into Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. Around
40 armed Eora people on the southern shore rattled their spears and shouted
‘warra, warra’, meaning ‘go away’—the first Eora words ever spoken to the
colonists.2 Phillip avoided an encounter by instead landing, unarmed, on the
northern side where there were only six men. According to eyewitness
Watkin Tench, a captain of the marines,
An officer in the boat made signs of a want of water … The natives directly comprehended what he
wanted, and pointed to a spot where water could be procured. The Indians [Aborigines], though
timorous, showed no signs of resentment at the Governor’s going on shore. An interview
commenced, in which the conduct of both parties pleased each other … the natives … seemed
highly entertained with their new acquaintance, from whom they condescended to accept of a
looking glass, some beads, and other toys.3

While at Botany Bay, David Collins, the colony’s judge-advocate,

commented: ‘the natives had hitherto conducted themselves sociably and
peaceably toward all the parties of our officers and people … and by no
means seemed to regard them as enemies or invaders of their country and
tranquillity.’4
Early meetings were marked by nervousness on both sides. When
surgeon-general John White came upon an armed group, he decided to
demonstrate the power of his gun. Borrowing a wooden shield, he fired his
pistol at it. Panic ensued at the loud bang and the hole the invisible missile
left. Fortunately, White calmed things down by turning to that universal
language—music. Rapidly he whistled the catchy tune we know as ‘We
won’t get home till morning’. Aborigines are great mimics and soon fear
turned to laughter and singing.5
Watkin Tench was perhaps the most sensitive newcomer. On his first walk
on the beach he took along a little English boy. Holding the lad’s hand,
Tench strolled along until they met a dozen naked Aboriginal men. Both
parties were armed, but Tench, seeing the interest aroused by the boy,
opened his shirt to display his dazzling white skin. An elder came close and
‘with great gentleness laid his hand on the child’s hat and afterwards felt his
clothes, muttering to himself all the while’.6
Aborigines were puzzled about the newcomers’ gender and took them for
women, as they lacked beards. They poked at marines’ trousers until
Lieutenant Philip King ordered one to undo his fly, whereupon ‘they made a
great shout of admiration’. King was a young officer with a laddish interest
in the opposite sex:
We saw a great number of women and girls, with infant children on their shoulders … all in puris
naturalibus, not so much as a fig-leaf. Those natives who were around the boats … made us
understand their persons were at our service. However, I declined this mark of their hospitality but
showed a handkerchief, which I offered to one of the women … she suffered me to apply the
handkerchief where Eve did the fig leaf; the natives then set up another very great shout.7
 The Sydney Region.

King’s rejection of the Aboriginal men’s offer led to the first of

innumerable misunderstandings. The widespread Aboriginal custom of
offering wives to visitors was a sign of friendship. Acceptance imposed
obligations for reciprocal services or future gifts; rejection may have
signalled the mission was an unfriendly one.
Botany Bay proved an unsatisfactory site for the colony. There was no
trace of the fast-flowing stream or ‘vast quantities of grass’ reported by
Cook and Banks, who had visited during a wet autumn, which they mistook
for a dry season under the false impression that the whole east coast had the
same climate. So much was strange about Australia: seasons reversed, four-
legged animals that hopped, trees that shed bark rather than leaves and no
familiar animals apart from a dog—the dingo—that howled like a wolf.
Deciding to look for a better place, on 21 January Phillip set out to explore
Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) about 20 km (12 miles) to the north, which
Cook had passed but not investigated.
As they sailed up the coast, Aborigines again shouted, ‘warra, warra’.
Then on entering Sydney Harbour, they passed a small bay where twenty
men ‘waded into the water unarmed, received what was offered them, and
examined the boats … their confidence and manly behaviour made me give
the name Manly Cove to this place’.8
They found to their delight ‘the finest harbour in the world’, with deep
water right up to the rocky shore, so that the ships could be moored to large
trees. A site was chosen for the settlement at the head of Sydney Cove, the
small bay called ‘Warran’ by the Aborigines (now known as Circular Quay)
immediately west of where the Opera House now stands. It was ‘near the run
of freshwater, which stole silently along through a very thick wood’, and
‘every man stepped from the boat literally into a wood’, according to
Collins. Much tree-felling was necessary before camp could be established.
Contemporary accounts and pictures show thick forest around the harbour
except in a very few places, which occasioned special comment. Captain
John Hunter, Phillip’s second-in-command, wrote that in one place ‘the trees
stand very wide of one another, and have no underwood; in short, the woods
… resemble a deer park’—the result of Aboriginal burning. Such
‘parklands’ were rare, open areas in a wilderness of ‘immensely large trees’,
‘sour grass’ and a ‘jumble of rocks and thick woods’.9
On 26 January 1788 (Australia’s national day but now a subject of
controversy), the British flag was raised at Sydney Cove, and the land
became a ‘settled colony’ and a dominion of the Crown. Under common law,
all those born in dominions were British subjects; Aborigines therefore
became British subjects but lost any proprietary rights in the land they
inhabited. Upon annexation of the colony, ultimate title to all land was
vested in the Crown.
What did Aborigines think of the new arrivals—huge floating objects and
white-skinned people with strange things on their heads, bodies and feet?
Eora people called the ships ‘buruwang’, meaning island, because they
thought they were floating islands, and that sailors climbing up the rigging
were devils or possums.10 On closer view, white people were seen as
ancestral spirits returning from the dead, for white was the colour of death.
Eora believed the spirits of the dead travelled out to sea. White people
coming from the ocean were therefore returning spirits. (Eora had no
oceangoing craft nor any idea that other inhabited countries existed.) They
believed that on death the spirit left the body. Unless correct rituals were
performed, spirits might linger in their tribal territory, but normally they
returned to the land of the dead, variously located in the sky, beyond the
horizon or on a distant but visible island. This was a logical belief for a
society with a small, geographically isolated population, as Professor Eliade,
expert on comparative religions, explains:11
Owing to the Australian kinship system everybody is—or can be—related to everybody else. If a
friendly stranger approaches a camp, he is always finally recognised as being related to someone of
the group. Consequently, for the Australians, only one ‘world’ and only one ‘human society’ exist.
The unknown regions outside familiar lands do not belong to the ‘world’—just as unfriendly or
mysterious foreigners do not belong to the community of men, for they may be ghosts, demonic
beings, or monsters.

Fortunately for the British, they were regarded as ghosts rather than
monsters, and by a lucky chance Phillip had one of his front teeth missing.
Lack of a right front tooth distinguished initiated Eora men; when Phillip
showed them he, too, lacked that tooth, ‘it occasioned a general clamour and
I thought gave me some little merit in their opinion’.12 This belief sheltered
the new arrivals from the normal hostility towards strangers.

Lapérouse
On 26 January, as the last British ships were leaving Botany Bay for Sydney
Cove, two French ships unexpectedly arrived. The French commander, Jean-
François de Lapérouse, had instructions to treat native people well during his
voyage of discovery, but was understandably nervous after Samoans had
massacred twelve of his crew. The French built a stockade around their camp
and in early February were ‘obliged to fire on the natives … to keep them
quiet’.13 Later French officers informed Phillip: ‘the natives are exceedingly
troublesome … whenever they meet an unarmed man they attack him.’
Frenchmen who had been attacked told a British sailor:
The natives before had been very friendly to them and at this time one of the boats was aground
and when they came down to murder them the French supposed their intent was to assist them with
launching the boat … upwards of 500 stones was thrown in the first shower. The French
immediately discharged a volley of small arms at them and it is supposed above 20 of the natives
must have been killed—several of the French were also wounded … afterwards some hints
dropped that it was one of their sailors had behaved very ill to some of the natives.14

The nature of the French ill-behaviour is unknown, for after their ships
left early in March 1788, they vanished. The wreckage of their ships was
found on Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Islands in 1826. The French legacy was
that Botany Bay Aborigines became extremely aggressive towards the
colonists.15

The first year

There are over 24 eyewitness accounts of race relations during the
settlement’s first five years, although they are all from the colonists’, rather
than an indigenous, perspective. Especially valuable sources are Governor
Phillip, David Collins, John Hunter, Watkin Tench, lieutenants William
Bradley and Philip Gidley King, surgeon George Worgan and midshipman
Newton Fowell. Detailed observations from the first fifteen months are
particularly important as they are a record of Aboriginal life before
Aborigines suffered the ravages of smallpox and other new diseases. It was
also a period when Aborigines were regarded and treated as individuals. All
primary sources agree that fairly good relations existed between black and
white.
Only three days after the British landed at Sydney Cove, local Aborigines
were dancing with the newcomers. When surveying the harbour, Bradley’s
party was welcomed ashore by unarmed men who showed them a good
landing place and greeted their arrival with excited shouting and capering.
Bradley continues—‘these people mixed with ours and all hands danced
together’.16 The dancers were all men, for women were kept at a distance
and guarded by an armed man—clearly these women were not being offered
to the young sailors. Bradley, an accomplished artist, later painted the scene.
One threesome shows an Aborigine in classic dancing position with knees
wide, holding hands with a sailor in blue and a red-coated soldier. The next
day, there was more dancing with another group, followed by hair-combing
‘with which they were much pleased’. Later, haircuts were requested and
given with scissors, and, as confidence grew, men allowed their beards to be
shaved with ‘cut-throat’ razors.
Most early interaction occurred while sailors were fishing and officers
were out surveying the harbour. Some of the fishermen shared their netted
catch, and found Aborigines ‘very thankful’. Sometimes Aboriginal men
helped haul in the seine—huge vertical fishing nets—and received a fair
share of the catch, but there were some violent incidents and two boats were
pelted with stones. On 21 February, the first Aborigines approached the
settlement by canoe and were given some fish. Next day 20 to 30 men came
back and landed on nearby Garden Island, where they made off with two
shovels, ‘but not without their skin being well peppered with small shot’.
Midshipman Hill had ordered marines to load bird-shot rather than ball
ammunition and to fire only at their legs.17
After this, Aborigines kept away for more than a year. They particularly
feared marines with their long-barrelled muskets that they termed
‘gerubber’—the name for a firestick.18 At Botany Bay one man ‘was bold
enough to go up to a soldier and feel his gun, and felt the point of the
bayonet, looked very serious and gave a significant Hum’.19 Marines’ bright
red jackets with white cross-straps were probably interpreted as fighting
men’s garb, for many Botany Bay warriors were painted with similar
diagonal white stripes.20 Although Aborigines avoided the soldiers and
settlement, in July 1788 one group took up residence in a nearby cove. These
people were ‘visited by large parties of the convicts of both sexes … where
they danced and sang with apparent good humour … but none of them
would venture back with their visitors’.21 In the early years there were few
sexual contacts, because both societies found the other ugly and alien.
Aborigines apparently disliked whites’ ‘weak blue eyes and thin noses’; one
description characterises Europeans as ‘those whose noses walk first’.22
They also prevented an escaped Madagascan convict, ‘Black Caesar’, from
joining them. For their part, the newcomers were repelled by the foul-
smelling fish oil that Aborigines smeared on their bodies to ward off
mosquitoes.
In the mid-winter of 1788, Phillip reported:
The natives have ever been treated with the greatest humility and attention … every means shall be
used to reconcile them to live amongst us and to teach them the advantages they will reap from
cultivating the land, which will enable them to support themselves at this season of the year, when
fish are so scarce that many of them perish from hunger … every possible means shall be used to
… render their situation more comfortable. At present I think it is inferior to that of the beasts of
the field.23

The British were anxious for peace and friendship. As Collins expressed
it: ‘It was much to be regretted, that none of them would place a confidence
to reside among us; as in such case, by an exchange of languages, they
would have found that we had the most friendly intention toward them, and
that we would ourselves punish any injury they might sustain from our
people.’
 Aborigines were ‘far more numerous’ than Phillip expected, and in 1788
he estimated the coastal population between Botany and Broken bays as
1500 people, spread over 2000 km2 (770 sq. miles). This gives a population
density of about one person to 1.3 km2 (½ sq. mile) of coast or 2 km2 (¾ sq.
mile) of the wooded hinterland with its scarcer food resources.24 Nine
named bands lived around Sydney Harbour, which the British called ‘tribes’.
Each band had between six and ten small canoes, and 67 canoes were
observed on the harbour on one day in 1788. In the same year, 49 beached
canoes and 212 armed men were encountered at Botany Bay, but no violence
ensued.

Winter food shortages

Almost every confrontation in the early years was about food. Aborigines
seemed perpetually hungry and understandably sought a share of whatever
fish were caught. Fish were their summer staple, yet even in summer were
not particularly plentiful. Tench commented: ‘the universal voice of all
professed fishermen is that they never fished in a country where success was
so precarious and uncertain.’ Winter was worse; as Worgan said: ‘since the
approach of winter, the fish have become scarce.’ This scarcity has often
been blamed on British overfishing, but fish supplies in the harbour always
decline in winter, because shallow-water fish move into deeper water in the
colder months.25 In June 1788, Collins noted, ‘The cold weather which we
had at this time of year was observed to affect our fishing, and the natives
themselves appeared to be in great want. An old man belonging to them was
found on the beach of one of the coves, almost starved to death.’ In winter
(from June to September), 10 of 35 edible plants became unavailable. The
main winter food was ‘fern root’, the thin starchy rhizomes, eaten raw or
roasted, of ferns or native bracken, although the latter were woody and
unpalatable.26
Scarcity of kangaroos and other game was widely remarked in early
accounts and in the 1840s by Mahroot, then the last surviving Aborigine of
unmixed race in Botany Bay. Mahroot reported that a shortage of animals
meant local Aborigines had no skin cloaks, so blankets and jackets were
stolen ‘to keep them warm in winter’.27
Winter was a time of relative hardship for most hunter-gatherers in
temperate Australia. All early observers described Aborigines as ‘spare’,
‘thin’ or ‘emaciated’, especially at the end of winter. Tench measured many
Eora men and found them ‘more diminutive and slighter made, especially
about the thighs and legs, than the Europeans … Baneelon [Bennelong], who
towered above the majority of his countrymen, stood barely 5 feet 8 inches
[172 cm] high.’28
For its part, the infant colony was anything but self-sufficient. Gardens
were planted around each cottage and there were vegetables by spring 1788
and fruits by 1790, but there were over a thousand mouths to feed. When the
first crops failed, the settlement was threatened with starvation. Phillip
therefore ordered more fertile land to be cleared on the upper Parramatta
River and the resulting small harvest just kept the colonists alive until the
first supply ship, the Justinian, arrived in June 1790.

Conflict
In 1788, three Aborigines were killed by convicts, while one soldier and
seven convicts received fatal spear wounds. Some Eora attacks were revenge
for theft, as when two convict rush-cutters stole a canoe. Another murder of
two convicts was probably provoked by a different convict’s earlier knifing
of an Aborigine who had stolen some of his possessions. In a 1791 letter a
convict commented: ‘The natives are pretty peaceable here—but if they
catch any of our people in the woods, they will kill them.’29
On 4 October 1788, a convict strayed from a herb-gathering party and was
murdered and ‘mutilated in a shocking manner’ in a seemingly unprovoked
attack. Then, on 24 October, several Aborigines threw spears at another
convict building a fence. The governor immediately went there with an
armed party, ‘where some of them being heard among the bushes, they were
fired at; it having now become absolutely necessary to compel them to keep
at a greater distance from the settlement.’30 No one was killed but it is
unclear whether anyone was injured. This change in racial relations clearly
troubled Phillip’s conscience and he admitted: ‘it is not possible to punish
them without punishing the innocent with the guilty.’ Yet, his first duties
were to protect his own people and to maintain authority. The settlers were
ever fearful of being attacked, although most fears proved groundless. For
instance, on 18 December, terrified messengers reported ‘two thousand’
warriors at the brick kilns, but those sent to repulse the attack found only 50,
who fled into the woods after convicts pointed their spades at them like
guns.
Phillip hoped to ‘persuade a family to live with us’, but by October 1788
wrote: ‘the natives still refuse to come amongst us … I now doubt whether it
will be possible to get any of these people to remain with us, in order to get
their language.’ In December, Phillip’s determination to establish
communication led to the drastic action of kidnapping. The first to be
kidnapped was Arabanoo, who quickly picked up English and became a
great favourite, deciding to stay at Government House and frequently dining
at the governor’s table.

Disaster
In April 1789, a smallpox epidemic struck:
Early in the month … the people whose business called them down to the harbour daily reported
that they found, either in excavations of the rock, or lying upon the beaches and points of the
different coves … the bodies of many of the wretched natives of this country. The cause of this
mortality remained unknown until a family was brought up [to the settlement], and the disorder
pronounced [by doctors] to have been the smallpox … That it was the smallpox there was scarcely
a doubt; for the person seized with it was affected exactly as Europeans are who have that disorder;
and on many that had recovered from it we saw traces, in some the ravages of it on the face.31

An empty house was prepared for the rescued family where they were
given nursing care. Arabanoo nursed two victims, only to die of smallpox
himself on 18 May. He was buried in the governor’s garden, ‘much regretted
by everyone’, according to sailor Newton Fowell, ‘as it was supposed he
would have been of infinite service in reconciling the natives to us’. It seems
the desire for reconciliation goes back to the very beginning of race relations
in Australia.
Only two out of six sufferers brought back into Sydney Town survived—
an eight-year-old boy, Nanbaree, and a girl of about fourteen, Abaroo (later
corrected to Boorong). Both children were adopted, rapidly learnt English
and became useful go-betweens, but later Boorong went back to the bush
when she wanted a husband.
The epidemic was certainly smallpox and killed over half the Eora.
Mortality was up to 95 per cent in some bands; only three survived out of the
50-strong Cadigal. The disease was so disastrous that the dead went
unburied. As Hunter reported:
 It was truly shocking to go around the coves of this harbour, which were formerly so much
frequented by the natives, where in the caves of the rocks, which used to shelter whole families in
bad weather, were now to be seen men, women and children lying dead. As we had never seen any
of these people who had been in the slightest degree marked with the smallpox, we had reason to
suppose that they had never before now been affected by it.32

The only colonist affected was an indigenous North American sailor, who
succumbed after visiting Aboriginal child sufferers.33 Most of the British
were immune, either through prior infection or variolation, the precursor of
vaccination. Variolation involved inoculation by incision or injection of pus
or scabs from smallpox patients.34
Aborigines were demoralised by the mysterious disease that killed blacks
but spared whites, as if whites had such strong magic they were invincible.
Aboriginal numbers declined drastically, especially the number of women,
for smallpox killed 10 per cent more women than men. It caused almost
certain death to pregnant women, a fatality rate of at least two-thirds among
the under-fives and up to a third among the rest. This led to fewer children
and a significant drop in the ratio of women to men. The first official counts
of the mainland Aboriginal population in the 1840s revealed very low
numbers of children and a general preponderance of men, and all the
pockmarked survivors observed were male.

Hunger and kidnapping

By late 1789, Phillip’s need for interpreters ‘to reconcile [the Aborigines] to
live amongst us’ was becoming urgent. The colonists’ chronic food shortage
was another factor, according to Tench: ‘Intercourse with the natives, for the
purpose of knowing whether or not the country possessed any resources, by
which life might be prolonged, as well as on other accounts, becoming every
day more desirable, the governor resolved to make prisoners of two more of
them.’ On 23 November, Bennelong and Colbee were seized as they came to
take fish offered at Manly Cove. Bennelong, aged about 30, was from the
Wangal band whose territory was Darling Harbour westwards to Parramatta;
and the rather older Colbee was from Cadigal, whose land stretched from the
southern harbour entrance to Sydney Cove.
Phillip gave instructions ‘to treat them indulgently and guard them
strictly’. Bennelong and Colbee had both survived smallpox and bore its
scars; Tench commented, ‘Colbee’s face was very thickly imprinted with the
marks of it’. Both had huge appetites: ‘Twelve pounds [5.4 kg] of fish does
but little towards satisfying them for one meal.’ This was when the colony
was threatened with starvation because the only supply ship had been
wrecked at Norfolk Island, the Second Fleet had not yet arrived, and
colonists’ weekly food rations were reduced to 2 lb (900 g) dried pork and
rice and 2.5 lb (1.1 kg) flour, a diet supplemented by rats, crows and fish.
Colbee escaped in December but Bennelong remained for another five
months. Tench recounts:
Our friend Bennelong, during this season of scarcity, was as well taken care of as our desperate
circumstances would allow … Had he penetrated our state, perhaps he might have given his
countrymen such a description of our diminished numbers and diminished strength as would have
emboldened them to become troublesome. Every expedient was used to keep him in ignorance …
but the ration of a week was insufficient to have kept him for a day. The deficiency was supplied
by fish, whenever it could be procured, and a little Indian corn [maize].35

These measures to hide the colony’s weakness from Bennelong remind us

of the newcomers’ almost total ignorance about the Aborigines. They feared
an army of warriors might attack the tiny, unfortified settlement, for they did
not know that the Aboriginal population was low, dispersed and fragmented
into small bands. Colonists therefore tended to overreact to any imagined
threat.

The governor is speared

Bennelong escaped on 3 May 1790 and was not seen again until 7
September, when a party went ashore at Manly Cove and found many Eora
on the beach feasting on a dead whale ‘in the most disgusting state of
putrefaction’. The feasters rushed to pick up their spears but Nanbaree
explained the visitors were friendly. Then Bennelong came to the water’s
edge. He was barely recognisable, being ‘so greatly emaciated’, with a long
beard. He had also acquired a large scar over one eye and a spear wound
through his upper arm.36 Colbee joined them and Bennelong inquired after
the governor. He asked for metal hatchets but there were none so he was
given other small gifts, including hair clippers that he immediately began to
use. This was reciprocated with some chunks of whale blubber, the largest
for the governor. Bennelong sent word that he would return to the settlement
if the governor would come to meet him at Manly. As it happened, Phillip
was in another boat not far away and eagerly accepted Bennelong’s
invitation.
The story of Phillip’s spearing has often been told but new information
was discovered in 1998, when Sydney’s Mitchell Library purchased
previously unknown letters from Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse to his father.
Waterhouse was one of only four eyewitnesses, the others being Collins, a
sailor and Phillip himself. It now seems clear that Bennelong masterminded
a payback spearing, presumably as revenge for his kidnapping. Bennelong
chose the time and place by inviting Phillip to Manly Cove. Phillip landed
and walked up the beach to greet Bennelong, unarmed except for his pistol.
Bennelong and Colbee were also unarmed but directed nineteen other
warriors into a semicircle round the governor. Bennelong handled an
unusually long barbed spear, then put it down on the ground, from where the
assailant, Willemering, picked it up with his toes, fixed it to a spear-thrower
and threw it with great force at Phillip. The spear hit near his collarbone and
came out behind the shoulder blade. As Bennelong, Colbee and Willemering
ran off, Phillip staggered back towards the boat dragging the 3m-long (12-
foot-long) spear. Waterhouse tried to break off the shaft and eventually
succeeded but not before he was slightly wounded by a flight of spears
thrown at the fleeing men. Only one sailor’s musket would fire but
miraculously they escaped. Phillip was bleeding heavily but gave explicit
orders ‘to prevent any of the natives being fired on’. In two hours they
rowed back to Sydney Cove, a surgeon extracted the wooden point, and in
six weeks Phillip had fully recovered.
Was the aim to kill? Almost certainly not. Willemering had an
uninterrupted view and was only 20 yards (18 m) away from Phillip, who
was approaching him with hands outstretched in a gesture of friendship. The
spearing did not result from Willemering’s fear or misunderstanding, for we
now know that he was a ‘koradgee’ or ‘clever man’ from the Carigal band to
the north. Bringing a ‘clever man’ to do the spearing with a special wooden
spear has all the hallmarks of ritual punishment, whereby victims are
wounded in a formal peace-making ceremony. Moreover, Bennelong was
remarkably confident of Phillip’s recovery.37

‘Coming in’
To his credit, Phillip ordered no reprisals, and a week later Bennelong
returned to the settlement and a peace conference was held. Two days later
Phillip was rowed across the harbour to pay a friendly return visit to
Bennelong’s camp, and on 8 October Bennelong returned to Government
House. King reported that Bennelong ‘sits at table with the governor, whom
he calls “beanga”, or father, and the governor calls him “doorow”, or son’. A
brick house, 12 feet square (13 m2), with a tiled roof was built for him on his
chosen spot—now Bennelong Point, site of the Opera House. Although
superior to most Sydney dwellings and one of the first brick buildings in
Australia, the house did not appeal to Bennelong, but was much used as a
meeting place. ‘Neither he nor his family will live in it,’ a contemporary
observed. ‘They will sometimes stay in the place for a day, then make a fire
on the outside of it … they prefer living in the woods.’
When Bennelong returned, other Aborigines began to come into the
settlement, probably driven by hunger at winter’s end. As Hunter recounted,
‘Whenever they were pressed for hunger, they had immediate recourse to
our quarters, where they generally got their bellies filled.’ A year later,
Sydney resident George Thompson commented ‘the people can scarcely
keep them out of their houses in daytime’. European food, especially bread,
must have seemed like a gift from the gods—good, tasty, filling fare
obtainable without any effort. Begging became rife; ‘hungry’ and ‘bread’
were the first English words Aboriginal children learnt. The settlement
provided both food and relative safety. As Collins remarked in 1793: ‘their
attachment to us must be considered as an indication of their not receiving
any ill treatment from us.’ The following year ‘two female natives, wishing
to withdraw from the cruelty which they, with others of their sex,
experienced from their countrymen, were allowed to embark [for Norfolk
Island] … and were consigned to the care of the lieutenant-governor’.
Inevitably, at Government House Bennelong was also introduced to
alcohol. Wine was scarce and imported rum was the main alcoholic drink
available—beer was too expensive to transport and was not produced in
Australia until 1795. Aboriginal introduction to alcohol was therefore
anything but gentle. Arabanoo had treated liquor ‘with disgust and
abhorrence’, but Bennelong acquired a taste for it, although it did not
become a problem till the end of his life. He also became reasonably
proficient in English. Only one man, Lieutenant William Dawes, learnt much
of the Eora language and compiled a vocabulary, aided by an Aboriginal girl,
Patyegarang. (His researches may have gone a trifle further, for some
language of love appears in his phrasebook.)
Gradually it became clear that Aboriginal languages were very different
from Indo-European ones and even from each other. When Phillip, Tench,
Dawes and Eora guides Colbee and Bola-deree went inland on a five-day
exploration expedition in 1791, they were surprised to discover that
Aborigines who lived in such close proximity were unfamiliar with each
other’s country and spoke different dialects. Collins was amazed that ‘People
living at the distance of only 50 or 60 miles (80–95 km) should call the sun
and moon by different names’. Similarly, Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John
Macarthur, the founder of Australia’s merino wool industry, wrote from
Parramatta in 1791 that ‘the natives visit us every day, more or less. We can
learn nothing from them respecting the interior part of the country. It seems
they are as much unacquainted with it as ourselves. All their knowledge and
pursuits are confined to that of procuring for themselves a bare
subsistence.’38
When Phillip returned to England in 1792, Bennelong and his young
kinsman Yemmerrawanyea accompanied him, and were presented to King
George III. Bennelong stayed in England until 1795 but Yemmerrawanyea
died there in 1794. Bennelong’s health also suffered from the British climate
and on 2 January 1813, only eight years after his return, he died an alcoholic
who no longer fitted well into either Aboriginal or white society.
Like Bennelong, the Eora came to rely on the settlement for their survival.
By winter 1791 they had become fringe-dwelling beggars, enjoying settlers’
bread, tobacco and rum, which they called ‘tumble-down’. Brawling,
drunken Aborigines provided a regular, pitiful spectacle, as contemporary art
attests. Both in town and on board visiting ships, prostitution of Aboriginal
women became a standard means of obtaining food, alcohol, tobacco,
blankets and clothes. At this stage there was no money in the colony, so
payment in rum was normal currency, leading to inevitable alcoholism and
degradation. Interaction soon led to the birth of mixed-race babies and the
spread of venereal disease (see chapter 4).

Violence
If a convict stole a chicken he was flogged, and if he stole a sheep he was
hanged, but Aborigines were not. Indigenous people were free British
subjects with (in theory) the full protection of British law. Aborigines
speared any convicts caught straggling in the bush, but for three years Phillip
strictly forbade any retaliatory expeditions. Indeed, when sixteen convict
brick-makers set out in March 1789 armed with stakes to avenge the death of
a comrade killed by Aborigines, not only was one killed and seven wounded,
but they were each sentenced to 150 lashes. The governor had them severely
flogged in front of Arabanoo, who was meant to be impressed by British
justice but instead expressed terror and disgust.39 Many convicts hated
Aborigines as a result, a hatred that bore bitter fruit when they gained their
freedom. The other component in this explosive mixture was the Marine
Corps, as the marines hated convicts and Aborigines alike.
Phillip tried to keep relations amicable, but on 9 December 1790 his
convict huntsman, McEntire, was mortally wounded. McEntire was one of
only three convicts allowed to keep a musket to shoot wild game for the
officers’ tables. Bennelong and other Aborigines regarded McEntire ‘with
dread and hatred’, probably because of his sour disposition, misdeeds in the
bush and killing of kangaroos and a dingo.
McEntire had gone with three others to hunt at Botany Bay; they were
resting in a hide, waiting for game to emerge for a twilight drink, when they
heard rustling. Five Aborigines, armed with spears, were creeping up. When
McEntire saw one was clean-shaven and with short hair, a sure sign of a visit
to the Sydney Cove barber, he said, ‘Don’t be afraid, I know them’, laid
down his gun, stepped forward and spoke to them in Eora. He accompanied
them a hundred yards (90 m), ‘talking familiarly all the while’, but then the
beardless man jumped up on a fallen tree and used his spear-thrower to
launch a ‘death spear’ at McEntire, lodging it in his side. Death spears were
meant to kill. Jagged pieces of stone were fastened in two long rows of barbs
on the spearhead. When surgeons extracted it, most of the barbs were torn
off and stayed inside his body, and he died six weeks later.
The culprit was a young man with a cast in his left eye, identified by
Colbee and others as Pemulwuy of the Bidjigal band from Botany Bay.
(Pemulwuy is one of the few names of which the meaning is known—‘man
of the earth’.)40
When McEntire was speared in this seemingly unprovoked attack, Phillip
ordered an avenging party to:
make a severe example of that tribe. At the same time the governor strictly forbids (under pain of
the severest punishments), any soldier or other person not expressly ordered out for that purpose
 ever to fire on any native, except in his own defence, or to molest him in any shape, or to take
away any spears or other articles … The natives will be made severe examples of whenever any
man is wounded by them, but that will be done in a manner which may satisfy them that it is a
punishment inflicted on them for their own bad behaviour.41

Some Aborigines agreed with this policy. Phillip recounts that

‘Bennelong, Colbee and two or three others now lived at Sydney three or
four days in the week, and they all repeatedly desired those natives might be
killed who threw spears’. They also agreed with reprisal on a group, because
this was also the Aboriginal way. Phillip decided on a punitive expedition to
bring in ten Bidjigal adult men or their heads.
Phillip’s justification for punitive action was that by this time ‘no less than
seventeen of our people had either been killed or wounded by the natives’
and it was time to teach them a lesson. The problem with such reprisals is
that often the innocent rather than the guilty suffer, and in disproportionate
numbers, and the vast gulf between the two societies meant that the ‘lessons’
Europeans tried to teach were simply not understood. Others strongly
disapproved of Phillip’s plan. Dawes initially refused to go, and Tench
successfully negotiated for the proposed number of captives to be reduced to
six. The party of 50 red-coated soldiers assembled on the barracks square to
beating drums, but the reprisal expedition was predictably unsuccessful.
Phillip could scarcely have expected any other outcome, for he had led
enough exploratory expeditions to know the difficulty of finding any
Aborigines with their superb bush skills. As his secretary, Collins, later
explained:
There was little probability that such a party would be able so unexpectedly to fall in with the
people they were sent to punish … The very circumstance, however, of a party being armed and
detached purposely to punish the man and his companions who wounded McEntire, was likely to
have a good effect, as it was well known to several natives, who were at this time in the town of
Sydney, that this was the intention.42

It seems the noisy, colourful parade and body bags were just a show of
force, equivalent to Aboriginal rattling of spears to frighten enemies. This is
important, as revisionist historians often allude to Phillip’s punishment
expedition with body bags as if it was a serious part of the so-called
‘invasion’, without mentioning that Phillip knew it had no chance of
succeeding and was merely a show of force to impress Aborigines who were
living in the town of Sydney and would spread the word to the local tribes. It
may be that Phillip realised that his own life had been spared by the use of a
relatively benign wooden-barbed spear, whereas McEntire was deliberately
murdered with a stone-armed one.
Bennelong often sought British assistance to attack his enemies: ‘Indeed
from the first day he was able to make himself understood, he was desirous
to have all the tribe of Camaraigal killed.’ To combat ever-present dangers of
attack, Aborigines rapidly sought terrier or spaniel puppies, and soon ‘not a
family was without one or more of these little watch-dogs, which they
considered as invaluable guardians during the night’.43 English dogs were
used as watchdogs and for hunting whereas dingoes, which occasionally
were seen accompanying an Aboriginal group in the bush, were never truly
domesticated. Dingoes were acquired as puppies but usually returned to the
wild to mate.
Collins’ verdict was that Aboriginal men were ‘revengeful, jealous,
courageous and cunning … the management of the spear and the shield,
dexterity in throwing … clubs, agility in either attacking or defending, and a
display of the constancy with which they endure pain, appearing to rank first
among their concerns in life’. He deplored their constant violence and
‘savage mode of living, where the supply of food was often precarious, their
comforts not to be called such, and their lives perpetually in danger’.
The only Aboriginal death caused by soldiers during the first three years
of settlement occurred on 28 December 1790. According to Collins, Bigon—
a constant companion of Bennelong—and two other Aborigines wounded a
convict-gardener, who had caught them stealing potatoes, a serious offence
in a hungry colony. Seven marines were sent after the three potato thieves
with orders to shoot only if attacked, but when they found the group
encamped there was a fight. One of the Aborigines, Bangai, threw his club
and the soldiers opened fire. The men ran off but Bangai was badly wounded
and later bled to death.44
During the first 35 months, fewer than a dozen Aborigines had died from
conflict with the newcomers, and these, except Bangai, were all killed by
convicts. There are several reasons for such a low death rate on both sides.
Initially Aboriginal attacks were confined to payback killings and British
violence was held in check by official policy and the severe punishment of
anyone who harmed a native. However, the settlers had not yet intruded far
onto Aboriginal lands.
By late 1790, many Eora lived in town and a few dined regularly with the
governor. Theft was the main problem—Aborigines took metal axes, clothes
and food, and convicts stole artefacts to sell to visiting ships as souvenirs.
Floggings of convicts for such thefts were viewed on at least two occasions
by Aboriginal people. Their reaction to British justice was horror, for
floggings were much bloodier than the traditional Aboriginal punishment of
ritual spearing in the thigh. On the first occasion, Arabanoo was reduced to
tears. On the second, ‘there was not one of them that did not testify strong
abhorrence of the punishment and equal sympathy with the sufferer’. The
victim of the theft of her fishing lines, Colbee’s wife Daringa cried and
Bennelong’s wife Barangaroo, ‘kindling into anger, snatched a stick and
menaced the executioner’.

Aboriginal treatment of women

While inhuman treatment of convicts upset Aborigines, the brutal violence
with which the women were treated by local Aboriginal men horrified the
British officers. Tench observed:
The women are in all respects treated with savage barbarity … When an Indian [Aborigine] is
provoked by a woman, he either spears her or knocks her down on the spot. On this occasion he
always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club or any other weapon … Colbee,
who was certainly in other respects a good tempered merry fellow, made no scruples of treating
Daringa, who was a gentle creature, thus. Baneelon [Bennelong] did the same to Barangaroo.45

Some violence was witnessed firsthand. Love and war seemed to be

Bennelong’s ‘favourite pursuits’. When asked about a wound on his hand,
Bennelong ‘laughed and owned that it was received in carrying off a lady of
another tribe by force. “I was dragging her away: she cried aloud and stuck
her teeth in me.” “And what did you do then?” “I knocked her down, and
beat her till she was insensible, and covered with blood.”’ Early chroniclers
record dozens of similar examples of Aboriginal men’s violence towards
women, whether from their own or other tribes. Elizabeth Macarthur
described Aboriginal women as ‘slaves to their husbands’.46
Some children were also neglected or victimised. ‘We often heard of
children being injured by fire,’ Collins said; ‘never were women so
inattentive to their young as these’. (At night children slept between two
small fires and often rolled into them.) Young children were sometimes
victims of payback killings, since vengeance was exacted on any relatives of
supposed wrongdoers. For instance, a young girl, Gonanggoolie, was
deliberately killed in a reprisal raid. Then in 1796 ‘a little native girl,
between six and seven years of age, who for some time had lived at the
governor’s house, [was] most inhumanly murdered by two of her savage
countrymen’. She was an orphan and had ‘become a great favourite with her
protectors. This, and her being a native of the country near Broken Bay,
excited the jealousy of some of the natives who lived at or about Sydney,
which manifested itself in their putting her to death in the most cruel
manner.’ Her mutilated body was found ‘speared in several places and with
both the arms cut off’.47
Australian Aboriginal society must be one of the few societies to have
virtually no rituals of courtship or marriage, although customs varied
regionally. Marriage was usually outside one’s own group but was not
necessarily marriage by capture (see chapter 5). A more formal wedding
ceremony was observed near Sydney in 1819, when the bridegroom first
daubed the young woman with spit and ochre and the couple withdrew from
the crowd. He then stood her against a tree and knocked out her two front
teeth by setting a small hardwood stick against them and hitting the stick
hard with a stone axe. The bride bore this without a single cry and it seems
the procedure was normal practice.48 Collins observed that, ‘We have known
several instances of very young girls having been much and shamefully
abused by the males.’ Even in the case of ‘marriage’, ‘the prelude to love in
this country … is violence, of the most brutal nature’. The women are:
unfortunate victims of lust and cruelty. The poor wretch is stolen … being first stupefied with
blows inflicted with clubs and wooden swords, on the head, back and shoulders, every one of
which is followed by a stream of blood, she is dragged through the woods by one arm … The
ravisher … conveys his prize to his own party, where a scene ensues too shocking to relate. This
outrage is so constantly the practice among them, that even the children make it a game.

Collins, Dawes and others were horrified. They found even unmarried
girls ‘bore on their heads the traces of the superiority of the males … We
have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn
heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.’
While some of these may have come from funerals, where it was customary
for women to beat their heads until blood ran, it is clear from many
eyewitness accounts that violence towards women was endemic in
Aboriginal society, as in many other hunter-gatherer groups.49
Monogamy prevailed among younger men but older, more powerful men
usually had two or more wives. Polygyny led to raids to acquire women,
who were then sometimes abused by husbands and older wives. Britons
made their disapproval clear, but violence continued and in 1797 Collins
wrote: ‘every endeavour to civilise these people proved fruitless … A young
woman, the wife of a man named Ye-ra-ni-be, both of whom had been
brought up in the settlement from their childhood, was cruelly murdered at
the brick-fields by her husband.’50
Increasing knowledge rapidly destroyed illusions of a pre-colonial Utopia.
Gradually, in the face of reality, Rousseau’s romantic concept of the ‘noble
savage’ was abandoned; changing attitudes are revealed both in written
accounts and in pictures, which began with idealised, classical figures and
ended in caricature.51

Spiritual life
Race relations improved during 1791. Perhaps as a gesture of reconciliation,
some Britons were invited to Bennelong Point in late February to witness a
‘corroboree’—a word from the Sydney language that means a performance
of music and dance. It began soon after dark by the light of several small
campfires. The singer was accompanied by clap sticks and the dancing was
‘truly wild and savage, yet in many parts there appeared order and
regularity’. Men performed distinctive dance movements in formation: ‘One
of the most striking was that of placing their feet very wide apart and by an
extraordinary exertion of the muscles of the thighs and legs, moving the
knees in a trembling and very surprising manner, such as none of us could
imitate.’
Earlier an initiation ceremony was held at nearby Farm Cove. Collins
witnessed this and another in 1795 and published detailed descriptions of
rituals culminating in tooth avulsion.52 Otherwise, colonists learnt little of
spiritual life and thought Aborigines had no religion, although placement of
artefacts in graves implied a belief in an afterlife. At Port Jackson, young
people who died were interred but elders were cremated.
December 1791 saw Australia’s first cross-cultural funeral—that of a fine
young man, Ballooderry, who succumbed to a fever despite desperate
attempts to save him by white and black healers alike. He was buried in the
governor’s garden near the shore. His body was wrapped in an English
jacket and blanket instead of traditional paperbark and then laid in his canoe
together with spears, a spear-thrower and his waistband of woven hair. As
the canoe was carried to the grave, Ballooderry’s father threw two spears
towards a watching group of Aboriginal women and children, a sign that the
death would be avenged. (Sorcery was believed to cause all natural deaths
except in the very young or old.) Red-coated marines beat a drum tattoo as
the canoe was interred. The body was placed on its right side with the head
towards the northwest, and shrubs were cut down so that ‘the sun might look
at it as he passed’.53 Spectators were enjoined not to speak the name of the
deceased but refer to him as the ‘nameless one’, a universal taboo in
Aboriginal Australia which continues today in some but not all traditional
communities.

British expansion
The need to make the infant colony self-sufficient led in mid-1791 to the
grant of arable land beyond Parramatta to 37 convicts who had served their
time. This took settlement into the land of the Darug or ‘woods tribe’, who
occupied the undulating Cumberland Plain between Parramatta and the Blue
Mountains. The Darug reacted violently to the newcomers and soon set fire
to a settler’s hut. Soldiers were then dispatched to guard each settlement
until all lands were cleared of timber. Yet the death toll remained low—by
December 1792, when Phillip departed for England, only one more
European and one more Aborigine had been killed.
Governor Phillip’s first task had been to establish a viable settlement, and
after five years the new colony was thriving. In a letter in October 1792
convict James Lacey wrote: ‘The convicts … are much better off than the
labouring people in England, few of them being without a garden, pigs,
poultry etc etc.’ Phillip also kept interracial conflict low, but failed to
persuade Aborigines to take up any form of labour. Some barter did develop,
with Aborigines trading fish and artefacts for food.
Phillip’s successor, John Hunter (1795–1800), was also a naval officer, as
the British Government still regarded its Australian penal colonies, Sydney
Cove and Norfolk Island, as maritime settlements. Sydney’s potential as a
trading port was beginning to be realised, and an ocean-fishing industry
developed. Some Aborigines, such as Mahroot, obtained work in the
whaling industry. Whales and seals then abounded on Australia’s eastern
coast and the first whale was caught in November 1791. A master whaler
‘declared that he saw more sperm whales in one day off the Pigeon House
[south of Sydney] than he had seen in six years’ fishing on the coast of
Brazil’.54 a 53 km (32 mile) track joined Sydney to the Hawkesbury River
(‘Derrubbin’). By mid-1795, there were 546 farms, growing maize and
wheat, spread over 50 km (30 miles) on both banks.

Frontier conflict
Until Hunter became governor in 1795, the colony was run by its principal
army officer, Major Francis Grose, who was succeeded by Captain William
Paterson. Their focus was on land rather than sea, and they encouraged
major expansion inland. By 1794,

3. CORROBOREE
Dancing is important in Aboriginal life and ‘play-about’ corroborees
of song and dance were held by the campfire most nights. Traditional
dance was segregated by gender and generation. Men danced directly
in front of the singers, women in a line or group behind the men or in
the shadows. In traditional communities, women still dance with
young children on their shoulders. Babies soon learn to cling to their
mothers’ hair as they sit, asleep or awake, astride her neck.
Women’s dance is noted for its graceful hand and leg movements.
Women seldom lift their feet fully from the ground, but move up and
down on heel and toe, gliding one toe in front of the other foot or
sliding or shuffling in jerks forwards and sideways, keeping the feet
together.
Men’s dance is often much more vigorous and dramatic, with
continuous running, hopping, leaping and turning in time with the beat
of clap sticks or ‘drumming’ on skins folded across the knees. There is
much rhythmic knee, foot, arm and body movement and stamping.
Children learn to dance by copying adults, and when boys are
becoming proficient, elders have commented that their ‘knees are
talking’ as Aboriginal male dancing emphasises stamping, trembling
and outward movement of the knees. Often dancers act out the story of
a contemporary or mythological event or imitate a successful hunt
with wonderfully realistic miming of animals and birds.
 A public non-segregated corroboree by firelight was often the
prelude to a sacred ritual the following day. Men’s sacred corroborees
are particularly elaborate and usually involve lengthy body painting,
making of large, decorated headdresses and sometimes preparation of
a painting or sand-sculpture on the dancing ground. Before
ceremonies, hours are spent on body decoration, applying special
designs with paint made from pigment mixed with water. White comes
from pipe-clay, lime or crushed gypsum rock, black from charcoal, and
red, yellow and brown from ochre. Designs denote the relationship of
individuals to their kin group. Body decoration ranges from simple
daubing to complex, finely drawn geometric designs. When the
ceremony is completed, all such ground paintings, sculptures and body
decorations are obliterated.
The great initiation, increase and fertility ceremonies were usually
held in early spring or at the end of the wet season in the tropical
north. Sacred corroborees were held in daylight in a restricted area,
from which women were strictly excluded. Women had their own
secret corroborees, involving body decoration, dance and singing, in a
secluded place away from the camp. Spectators were only allowed at
public rituals.

When Hunter first saw these fertile river flats, he exclaimed ‘these low
banks appear to have been ploughed up, as if a vast herd of swine had been
living on them … we put ashore … and found the wild yam in considerable
quantities, but in general very small, not larger than a walnut’. Evidently
Aboriginal women had been digging for tubers of daisy ‘yams’, for, although
small, these were an Aboriginal staple—as important a food as potatoes were
for colonists.55 The daisy yam grounds belonged to the Darug. Their diet
consisted of eels, fish, crayfish, mussels, ducks, emus, kangaroos, possums,
honey, bracken roots and, above all, tubers.
When the yam grounds were cleared and ploughed by settlers, ‘open war
… commenced between the natives and the settlers’. It was Australia’s first
conflict over land. In Sydney, blacks and whites had shared the sea’s
resources but the rich alluvial river flats could not be shared so easily and
conflict became inevitable.56
 Settlers were vulnerable because their farms were backed by thickly
wooded country, which provided perfect cover for raiders. Aborigines
plundered huts and stripped fields, carrying corncobs away in blankets and
fishing nets. In response, armed watchmen fired on them, with reprisals on
both sides following each incident. It was a fairly even contest, for
Aborigines could kill with death spears at 27 m (90 ft) and throw three or
four spears in the time it took to reload a musket. Most Hawkesbury settlers
were unarmed former convicts but from 1795 soldiers were stationed there
to protect them, and were effective but ruthless. It was a lawless frontier of
which the Parramatta magistrate wrote, ‘It would be impossible to describe
the scenes of villainy and infamy that pass at the Hawkesbury.’57 The death
toll between 1794 and 1800 was 26 whites and up to 200 Aborigines.58
Pemulwuy, murderer of McEntire, became notorious for raids, violence
and arson. He headed every party that robbed maize grounds or burnt
wheatfields. Arson was another Aboriginal weapon, which drove farmers out
by torching their thatched wattle- and-daub huts and destroying their crops.
By the time Governor King (1800–06) succeeded Hunter, a price had been
put on Pemulwuy’s head. In 1802 King wrote: ‘The natives about Sydney
and Hawkesbury continued as domesticated as ever, and reprobated
[deplored] the conduct of the natives in the neighbourhood of Parramatta and
Toongabbie, who were irritated [stirred up] by an active, daring leader
named Pemulwuy.’59
Loss of life among Pemulwuy’s band was high, but violence continued
until late 1802 when he was shot by soldiers. Some fellow tribesmen, who
had been expelled from Parramatta because of Pemulwuy’s misdeeds, asked
that his head be carried to the governor and they be allowed to return to the
town. This was done, and Pemulwuy’s head was forwarded in a barrel to
London for research. King ordered that no other Aborigines should be
harmed. Today Pemulwuy is acclaimed as the first hero of the resistance but
he was also regarded by parties on both sides as an impediment to peace and
friendship. Relative quiet followed Pemulwuy’s death, although his son,
Tedbury, carried on hostilities for some time. By no means all Eora had
fought; some worked for the governor or farmers, or as guides for the
soldiers.60 Some Aborigines were given land, some became fully integrated
into white society, some married settlers and several groups had land
allocated to them. King also agreed to Aboriginal requests that no more
settlements be made on the lower Hawkesbury River.61
 In 1802 King issued a proclamation reminding colonists that any ‘instance
of injustice or wanton cruelty towards the natives will be punished with the
utmost severity of the law’ but that ‘the settler is not to suffer his property to
be invaded, or his existence endangered by them’.62 His predecessor, Hunter,
had taken the unprecedented step in 1799 of having five Hawkesbury
farmers arrested and charged with murder for the barbarous slaughter of two
Aboriginal youths as revenge for killing a settler. The men were found guilty
but the court could not agree on a sentence and wrote to England for advice;
a change of governor intervened and eventually the men were pardoned.
Although Aborigines were classed as British subjects, their legal position
differed from that of the convicts. The problem was that the concepts behind
British law and the trial system were completely alien to their way of
thinking, and they could not swear upon the Bible before giving evidence.
Legal opinion held: ‘The natives of this country (generally speaking) are at
present incapable of being brought before a Criminal Court, either as
criminals or as evidence … the only mode at present, when they deserve it,
is to pursue and inflict such punishment as they may merit.’63

Bungaree’s circumnavigation of Australia

Bungaree, an elder from Broken Bay who was skilled at hunting, fishing and
boating, became the first Aborigine to circumnavigate Australia when he
accompanied Matthew Flinders on his 1801–03 voyage of exploration.
Nanbaree also came on the first half of this voyage. Their demanding role
was to strip off and then in the nude approach armed warriors to negotiate
for the visitors to get freshwater. This was not easy, as the other groups did
not understand the Eora language. Fortunately, Flinders found the
Aborigines he met timid and usually friendly. Indeed, when two of the ship’s
company became lost Aborigines took them to their camp, fed them on roast
duck, and conducted them back to the ship in safety. There was only one
indigenous fatality on the voyage. When an officer was speared after a
misunderstanding, the captain responded with a reprisal attack in which one
Aborigine was shot.64 Torres Strait Islanders in sailing canoes gave the
strangers a different reception—they were keen to trade their bows and
arrows, coconuts, plantains and water in bamboo containers for metal axes.65
 4. BOOMERANGS
A boomerang is a bent or curved thin hardwood missile. Returning
boomerangs sweep in a near-circular arc of up to 50 m (160 ft) radius
and were used to kill birds or drive them into nets set across
flightways. Straight-flight, non-returning boomerangs were used for
hunting and fighting. Hunting boomerangs have a range of up to 200
m (650 ft) and were thrown at possums, gliders, flying-foxes (fruit
bats), goannas, bandicoots, flocks of pigeons, ducks or cockatoos, and
even soaring wedge-tailed eagles, whose feathers were prized for
ceremonial decoration. Fighting boomerangs were heavier and longer
with a shallower curve and sharper edges. They were thrown through
the air, ricocheted from the ground or used as clubs or ‘swords’.
Boomerangs were also used for digging, fire-making, cutting and as
clap sticks. Boomerangs can be C-, V- or occasionally X-shaped. Some
were painted or finely carved.
A boomerang actually flies, its sophisticated aerodynamics
exploiting an ingenious combination of lift and spin. Its design
employs the same principle as an aeroplane wing, with a curved upper
and flat lower surface. A straight-flight boomerang is launched in a
horizontal position, but the returning variety is near-vertical when
thrown with a wrist-flick, so that most of the lift directs it sideways to
the thrower. This allows it to spin and cut through the air at an oblique
angle, generating lift. Because of its spin, the upper part of the wing
cuts through the air more quickly than the lower part, generating more
lift. This creates a turning force on the boomerang, which starts to
follow a circular path, rather like a spinning gyroscope. Its flight path
continues to curve until it returns to the point from which it was
thrown.
The word ‘boomerang’ comes from the language of the Tharawal
people south of Botany Bay. Returning boomerangs were first seen in
action in a formal Aboriginal fight beside Sydney Harbour in 1804,
where Britons were ‘justly astonished at the dexterity and incredible
force with which a bent, edged waddy [club] resembling slightly a
Turkish scimitar was thrown by Bungary [Bungaree]’.a
Boomerangs probably developed as a modification of throwing-
sticks, use of straight-flyers leading to the discovery of returning
 types. The oldest Australian boomerangs were excavated from a
10,000-year-old layer in Wyrie Swamp peat-bog, South Australia, and
are now displayed in the South Australian Museum in Adelaide and
the National Museum of Australia, Canberra. The nine boomerangs are
thin and light with wingspans of only 29–50 cm (11–19 inches), the
arms joining in a sharp elbow with one end twisted up slightly and the
other down. Their curvature, lateral twist, smallness and lightness are
classic properties of returners.
Returning boomerangs have turned up at archaeological sites as far
apart as India and Arizona and were evidently independently invented.
The oldest known boomerang—about 23,000 years old and carved
from mammoth tusk—comes from a cave in Oblazowa Rock in
southern Poland. Wildfowling with returning boomerangs is pictured
in Egyptian tombs and wall-paintings. Others were used until quite
recently in India to hunt partridge and small deer, and by Hopi Indians
to hunt hares.b

Culture clash
Lachlan Macquarie, who was governor from 1810 to 1821, instituted an
annual charitable feast and gift day to benefit Aborigines and in 1815
founded a school for Aboriginal children, the Native Institution at
Parramatta. Pupils aged 3–15 were taught Christianity, reading, writing,
arithmetic, agriculture, craft and domestic skills. Some children had
difficulty with arithmetic, for most Aboriginal languages have no numbers
beyond three or four. However, this schooling demonstrated Aboriginal
intelligence, for the daughter of Yarramundi, Maria Lock, came first among
100 white and twenty Aboriginal children in an 1819 public examination.66
She later married a white man and acquired her own land grant. The Native
Institution was transferred from Parramatta to more remote Blacktown in
1822, but closed for want of pupils in 1829.
Macquarie tried hard to convert Aboriginal men into farmers. In 1815 he
settled sixteen Aboriginal families, including Bungaree and his family, on
land on Sydney Harbour, providing them with a boat, huts, gardens, pigs,
rations, clothes and a convict labourer. This proved largely abortive—the
families stripped the huts of saleable items, and ate, sold or lost the pigs, but
used the boat to sell fish in Sydney Town.
Compliant Aboriginal leaders were given brass ‘king plates’ to hang
round their necks, such as the breastplate given to Bungaree, which read
‘Boongaree—Chief of the Broken Bay tribe—1815’. Later, Macquarie gave
Bungaree a general’s uniform, complete with plumed cocked hat, and he
acquired another brass plate proclaiming him ‘King of Sydney Cove’. He
became well-known, as he was rowed out to visiting ships to exact his
‘king’s tax’, but after all the display he and his followers would go fishing,
exchange their catch for rum and tobacco and then row back across the
harbour to their camp on the northern shore. In this way Bungaree kept his
people together and free from white supervision. Alcohol took its toll and he
was seen in the Government Domain ‘in a state of perfect nudity, with the
exception of his old cocked hat, graced with a red feather’.67 He fell ill in
1830, was cared for in Sydney Hospital, and then by a Catholic priest, and
died among his own people on Garden Island.
In 1816 Macquarie granted Colbee and another man, Narragingy, 12 ha
(30 acres) of land on Richmond Road in recognition of their ‘recent good
conduct’. Others joined them and the area became known as ‘Black Town’,
now a Sydney suburb. This was the first formal land grant made to
indigenous Australians.68 However, in the same year there was a spate of
murders and robberies in the Cowpastures settlement area around Appin, 75
km (47 miles) south of Sydney, culminating in the ‘Appin Massacre’. (The
Cowpastures were named after cattle escaped from their pastures in Sydney
which ended up in the lush Appin region to the south.) The area had been
settled and farmed in 1811 and the skirmishes between Aborigines and
settlers were usually over stolen crops. The killing of settlers, their wives
and children led Governor Macquarie to order a military reprisal raid in
which about fourteen Aborigines, including women and children, were killed
on 17 April when driven over the gorge of the Cataract River.69
In order to try to prevent further interracial violence, Macquarie then
made the following proclamation:

• Armed Aborigines are forbidden from coming ‘within one mile of any
town, village or farm’.
• Aboriginal punishment duels and fights are banned as ‘a barbarous custom
repugnant to British Laws’.
• Peaceful, unarmed Aborigines wishing to place themselves under the
protection of the British Government are issued with certificates that
protect them from injury.70

From 1817 to 1825 the Sydney Gazette reported only nine cases of
interracial violence in New South Wales, none of which occurred in the
Sydney region. Indeed, visitors commented on Sydney’s relaxed race
relations in contrast with the armed Aborigines encountered outside the
towns.
Whites were perplexed by what they saw as the paradoxes of Aboriginal
character. As Reverend Samuel Leigh exclaimed:
What an anomalous race of beings! Shrewd and intelligent, yet not possessing even the first
rudiments of civilisation; utterly ignorant of all the principles of art or science, yet able to obtain a
ready livelihood where a civilised man would perish; knowing nothing of any metal, possessed of
no mechanical tool and yet able to formulate weapons of a most formidable description … looked
down upon as the lowest in the scale of humanity, yet proudly bearing themselves, and condemning
the drudgery of the men who despise them.71

Popular opinion agreed with the colony’s judge during Macquarie’s time,
Barron Field, who wrote that in contrast with Maori and South Sea islanders,
Aborigines had ‘no aptitude for civilisation’. Nevertheless, the British found
them good-natured, friendly, cheerful, healthy people with a great sense of
humour. They were also brave and stoical, apparently inured to discomfort
and pain.72

Two societies could hardly have differed more than Georgian England and
Aboriginal Australia. English society was based on the Christian work ethic
and the sanctity of private property, whereas Aborigines saw no value in
work except the food quest and believed in the sanctity of communal
property. Each society tried to make the other change. Aborigines expected
Europeans to share their food and other goods; Europeans tried to instil
principles of private ownership and regular work into Aborigines. Instead of
mingling, they lived uneasily side by side, and, as the pastoral frontier
spread, there was accommodation and cooperation but inevitably conflict.
 3

CONFRONTATION
Early Tasmania and Victoria

In 1772, over a hundred years after Abel Tasman’s visit, Frenchman Marion
Dufresne also visited Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as it was later
called. Dufresne espoused Rousseau’s belief in the ‘noble savage … in an
intermediate state between the primitive and the civilised’.1 Dufresne
believed all people shared a common humanity and ‘would send naked
Frenchmen on shore whenever naked inhabitants were encountered … and
then present gifts to show that the inhabitants of “civilised” France were
greeting the noble savages of the South Seas in peace and friendship’.2
Alas, these good intentions ended in tragedy. When Dufresne’s ships
reached Tasmania, two cutters were rowed towards Aborigines on the
beach. The women and children immediately ‘took refuge in the woods’,
but a man made welcoming signs, whereupon two sailor volunteers stripped
and swam ashore. There they were presented with a firebrand, a customary
way of receiving strangers. Chevalier Duclesmeur, who was second-in-
command, wrote:
Our men accepted it and gave a mirror to the old man. His astonishment and that of the other
savages showed incomprehension as one after another saw themselves in it. The colour of the two
sailors did not surprise them less and after they had examined them closely they put down their
 spears and danced before them. This reception was such as to give confidence and M. Marion
determined on landing … they appeared greatly alarmed at the arrival of a third boat and made all
sorts of menacing demonstrations to prevent a landing … The savages rained on us a shower of
spears and stones, one of which wounded M. Marion … We discharged several shots at them and
at once they took to flight uttering frightened cries.3

Crozet, Dufresne’s lieutenant, later reported that several Aboriginal men

were wounded and one killed. Dufresne survived this encounter but met his
end in New Zealand where, with 25 of his crew, he was killed and eaten by
Maori warriors. When Crozet recounted their experiences, Rousseau was
horrified, exclaiming: ‘Is it that the good Children of Nature can really be
so wicked?’4
Two more French exploratory expeditions followed—Bruny
d’Entrecasteaux (and naturalist Jacques de Labillardière) in 1792–93 and
Nicolas Baudin in 1802, who was accompanied by zoologist François
Péron, the first man to call himself an anthropologist. There were no further
hostilities and these explorers described Tasmanians as shy, cheerful people
living in family groups and subsisting largely on shellfish. The
d’Entrecasteaux expedition had the most prolonged, friendly contact, and a
black member of the crew quickly became a favourite. Aborigines were
puzzled that all their visitors were men—Europeans were as strange to them
as Martians would be to us. The first sight of a sailing ship occasioned
much amazement, and we know that mainlanders later speculated whether
they were huge birds, trees growing in the sea, or drifting islands.5 The
Frenchmen took a goat and a monkey ashore ‘to see what effect the sight of
them would have upon the natives’. The Aboriginal reaction was to treat
them like the other strange humans and ‘they solemnly invited them to sit
down beside them’. On Baudin’s expedition, a Tasmanian was presented
with his first bottle of ‘grog’ (alcohol, actually arrack); startled by the
brightness of the glass, he threw it into the sea. Later, glass became prized
for cutting.6
 Tasmania has a temperate marine climate and is
ecologically varied, with a cool, windy, oceanic western
coast, a subalpine mountain core, temperate rainforest in the
southwest and a dry temperate eastern half. Its area is
67,800 km2 (26,172 sq. miles)—about the size of Ireland.
Tasmania lies between latitudes 40 and 44 degrees south, in
the teeth of southern gales circling the globe known as the
‘Roaring Forties’. It has thousands of lakes and its
mountains rise to 1617 m (5307 ft) and are snow-covered in
 winter. Yearly rainfall in the west averages 3.75 m (150
inches).

5. FIRE-MAKING
Tasmanians carried firebrands, but could they kindle fire? The
necessary materials for fire-making—flint and iron pyrite—were
available in Tasmania and several explorers found baskets containing
‘a stone they strike fire with and tinder made of bark’. These
materials require the percussion method (see below), which was also
used on the mainland.a
The evidence of George Augustus Robinson, who led the 1829–34
Friendly Mission to Tasmanian Aborigines, suggests that the
knowledge of how to make fire may have been lost. By then no one
still kindled fire, but in 1830 Robinson ‘obtained a stone from one of
the Brune [Bruny] natives with which they … strike fire. It has the
resemblance of a flint; … they call it “my.rer”’. Words for firestone
differ from those for ordinary stone.b On the west coast, Robinson
recounted that ‘as the chief always carried a lighted torch I asked
them what they did when their fire went out. They said if their fire
went out … they were compelled to eat the kangaroo raw and to walk
about and look for another mob and get fire of[f] them. They must
give fire and sometimes they would fight afterwards.’ Fire was the
most valued Aboriginal possession, and had to be given whenever
requested, even if the request came from traditional enemies.c
Elsewhere in Australia, fire was produced by the drilling method or
the percussion method. In the Cooktown region, Banks described the
drilling method as follows:
They get fire very expeditiously with two pieces of stick … the one must be round
and 8 or 9 inches [20 or 23 cm] long and both it and the other should be dry and
soft; the round one they sharpen a little at one end and pressing it upon the other
turn it round with the palms of their hands … often shifting their hands up and
running them down quick to make the pressure as hard as possible; … they will get
fire in less than two minutes and when once possessed of the smallest spark,
increase [it] in a manner truly wonderful.d
 The drilling method of twirling a round-ended stick in a depression
in a wooden base was used in northern Australia, but elsewhere
rubbing hardwood against softwood in a sawing motion was more
common. Some desert Aborigines still demonstrate this method. They
find a piece of dry softwood, split it lengthways, place the split facing
upwards and put some kindling such as dry kangaroo dung into it.
Then one man holds the branch down by putting a foot firmly on each
end and another rubs crossways on the split wood, usually with the
sharp edge of a hardwood spear-thrower. Rapid sawing soon heats the
wood and the kindling begins to smoulder in about half a minute.
Once the kindling is aglow, dried grasses are added and a few puffs of
breath produce a flame. Sometimes a piece of hardwood is used on a
grooved softwood shield. Grass-tree stems provide ideal softwood in
southeastern Australia.
In the percussion method, a piece of flint is embedded in dried
grass, furry bark or emu feathers, and struck with iron pyrite until a
spark ignites the tinder. It is then gently blown, placed in more
kindling and held in the wind until it is all alight. Percussion is the
world’s earliest method of kindling a flame, and was used in
Tasmania, southern Australia, Tierra del Fuego, the Solomon Islands,
British Columbia and the Arctic.e

Tasmanian society
Tasmanians seemed generally healthy, although explorers commented on
the protruding bellies of both adults and children, probably caused by
malnutrition. They were covered with vermin but seemed free of disease
apart from some skin complaints. One blind woman was encountered, and
two people with congenital defects—a dislocated hip and a hunchback: ‘the
most curious, inquisitive and busy man amongst them was a little deformed
hump-backed fellow, he expressed great joy by laughing, shouting and
jumping.’7
When Labillardière met a group of 42 people, he found a healthy ratio of
children to adults—7 men, 8 women, and 27 children. Elsewhere he
encountered a group of 48, comprising 14 women, 10 men and 24 children,
eating a meal of shellfish around seven fires.8 Both sexes wore shell and
fibre necklaces and were decorated with raised cicatrices in patterns of lines
and circles on their shoulders, chests, arms, backs, stomachs and buttocks.
Circles represented the sun and moon, for ‘The cicatrice of the sun and
moon is intended to remove inflammation … Some of those cicatrices are 3
and 4 inches [7–10 cm] in diameter.’9
In spite of the cold, wet climate, most went naked except for the mixture
of animal fat, charcoal and ochre covering their heads, faces and bodies. No
cloaks were worn, although one woman ‘wore a kangaroo skin … for the
convenience of carrying [a] child’. Cremation of the dead was usual but
some of the deceased were interred or placed erect in hollow trees. Péron
recorded a recent Aboriginal cremation site. Burnt human bones of several
individuals were wrapped in bark, weighed down with stones and placed in
a ‘wigwam’ of bark-sheets decorated with linear designs similar to body
markings.10
Similarities with mainland Aborigines were nudity, skin colour and the
custom of wearing the bones of deceased kin around the neck as tokens of
affection. They also shared the mainland habit of standing with one leg
braced on the other. One difference was the Tasmanians’ generally peaceful
nature—when Labillardière discovered someone had reconnoitred their
campsite overnight but left them unharmed, he wrote: ‘Where else in this
part of the world [the Pacific] could we have escaped attack and possible
massacre under similar conditions?’
Tasmanians were small in stature, men averaging 160 cm (5 ft 3 inches)
and women 152 cm (5 ft). The French described their hair as ‘woolly’ or
‘frizzy’ as it was tightly curled and springy, resembling that of New
Guineans rather than mainland Aborigines. Uniquely in Australia,
distinctive hairstyles distinguished different tribes. West-coast people
shaved their heads into monk-like tonsures, northern men wore ringlets and
northern women cropped their hair very short, leaving only a narrow ring
round the skull.11
Although curly hair, small stature and dark skin characterised
Tasmanians, analysis of DNA and physical form shows they are related to
mainlanders. The differences that emerged after 14 millennia of isolation
are due to genetic drift (accidental loss of lineages).12
The most striking thing about Aboriginal Tasmania was what was
missing. They had no dogs because dingoes only reached the mainland long
after the formation of Bass Strait at the end of the ice age, which totally
isolated Tasmania from the outside world.13 The Tasmanians’ only weapons
were spears, clubs and stones, which could be thrown 100 m (330 ft). They
had hand-held stone tools for chopping, cutting and scraping, but did not
develop hafted axes or grinding technology. Their equipment amounted to
roughly fifteen items, a clear contrast to the adjacent mainland, which had
four times as many, or the tropical north, which had eight times the number.
Tasmanian equipment is the basic Australian tool kit, the irreducible
minimum for nomads’ long-term survival. Except when there was a glut of
seals or muttonbirds, they ‘rarely remain two days in the same place’.
Women used digging sticks and collecting bags and sometimes wore skin
capes. Men had spears, clubs, stone chopping tools for heavy-duty cutting
and scrapers for butchering carcasses. Other artefacts were canoe-rafts,
necklaces, waterbags and possum-skin pouches for carrying firestones and
ochre. Unmodified items used opportunistically included shells as drinking
cups, wooden wedges for prising shellfish off rocks, rolled bark as
firesticks, and rocks for pounding vegetables or smashing bones to extract
marrow.
Tasmanians used seaweed for water containers, made baskets from grass
and rolled grass ropes for climbing trees to obtain possums and honey. Both
sexes climbed trees, sometimes with a stone chopper for cutting toeholds
balanced on the head. Tasmanians in the west and south developed
watercraft to cross rivers and estuaries and reach nearer islands. Canoe-rafts
were about 4.5 m (15 ft) long by 1 m (3 ft) wide, made of three sausage-
shaped rolls of rushes, paperbark or stringy-bark bound with a network of
bark fibre and grass string. Fire was carried on a bed of clay. These frail
craft carried 2–6 men, who stood and propelled them with long poles. When
too deep for punting, people swam alongside, pushing the raft forward.
Craft were quickly made and performed well in rough water. They resemble
Maori ‘mokihi’—small canoes made from reeds and flax stalks.
Independently, similar problems of crossing icy, fast-flowing rivers gave
rise to similar solutions.
Buoyancy was a problem: ‘When saturated, the bark had a density
similar to water, so that buoyancy depended on air cavities trapped within
the bark itself. The rate of saturation meant that after a few hours, a craft
tended to lose its rigidity and thus to wallow like a bundle of kelp in the
sea.’14 Nevertheless, prehistoric camps on Maatsuyker Island reveal that
over the last 500 years Aborigines journeyed 10 km (6 miles) offshore to
hunt seals and nesting muttonbirds. Similarly, archaeologist Sandra
Bowdler has shown that Hunter Island, 6 km (4 miles) off northwestern
Tasmania, has been visited for 2500 years. Large islands (greater than 90
km2/35 sq. miles) less than 4 km (2.5 miles) away were permanently
inhabited. Smaller ones up to 8 km (5 miles) offshore were visited
seasonally. Islands involving single water crossings of 13–15 km (8–9
miles) were never visited. Long voyages across open sea were extremely
dangerous. Daring Aboriginal men voyaged to offshore islands to spear
seal, but ‘many hundred natives have been lost on those occasions’.15

Social organisation
In spite of rapid depopulation, Tasmania’s social structure was still in place
during the Friendly Expeditions of George Augustus Robinson in 1829–34.
Robinson became fairly fluent in the two main languages (western and
eastern) and his two teenage sons often accompanied him and developed
useful language skills. (Unfortunately from what Robinson recorded of the
languages, modern linguists have been unable to reconstruct them.)16
Tasmanian society exemplifies basic Aboriginal social organisation. The
smallest social unit was a ‘hearth group’, a family who cooked and camped
round a fire and shared a hut. Each hut accommodated an extended family.
Hearth groups averaged seven people, and groups of seven or eight huts
housed a whole band in wintertime.
The band was the land-using unit. Leaders were mature men who were
distinguished as hunters and warriors. Rhys Jones estimated Tasmanian
bands on average originally included 40–50 individuals belonging to about
ten families. Each band had hunting rights to their own ‘country’, often
centred on an important food-collecting zone such as an estuary and
bounded by mountains or other landmarks. It also foraged widely, with
permission, on the territory of other bands.
Bands occasionally met to share seasonally abundant foods, hold
ceremonies and arrange marriages. Women married men from outside their
own band but usually within the same tribe. Wars were fought between
tribes over such issues as broken trade agreements regarding the supply of
ochre. People were highly mobile and the seasonal round involved
travelling 160–500 km (100–300 miles). Band territories combined coastal
and inland areas and each occupied 500–800 km2 (200–300 sq. miles). One-
third of Tasmania (the western mountains and temperate rainforests) was
unoccupied at British settlement. Jones estimated average population
density in inhabited regions to be one person per 10–12 km2 (4–5 sq.
miles); for inland tribes it was one person per 20 km2 (8 sq. miles) and for
richer coastal areas one person per 6 km2 (21/3 sq. miles). There were
markedly fewer people in Tasmania than in similar temperate coastal
environments on the mainland. Archaeologist Harry Lourandos compared
Aboriginal population density on the Tasmanian coast with that on the
western Victorian coast and found the Victorian density significantly
higher: one person per 2 km2 (⅘ sq. mile). Likewise, inland densities in
Victoria’s Western District were twice those of inland Tasmania.17

Population size and disease

The only detailed analyses of pre-contact indigenous population numbers in
Tasmania are by Plomley and Jones, who each calculated the pre-
colonisation number of bands and multiplied it by average band size.
Plomley arrived at 3990 (57 bands averaging 70 people each) and Jones’s
figures were 2800–4250 (70–85 bands with 40–50 people each).18 Historian
Keith Windschuttle has suggested that Jones overestimated the number of
bands (Jones allowed for an extra 30 unnamed bands in the Midlands
region) and that Plomley set the average size of a band too high, since those
observed by French explorers were smaller. (Duclesmeur noted in 1772 that
the inhabitants seemed to ‘live in troupes of 50 to 60 men and women
altogether’.) Windschuttle, using Jones’s lower figures and disregarding
Duclesmeur’s higher estimates, concluded: ‘Fifty bands at an average of
forty members per band equals 2000 people. Given the generosity of the
assumptions involved in this estimate, we should thus regard the total pre-
colonial Aboriginal population of Tasmania as less than 2000.’19 Jones’s
most recent estimate was 3000–5000. This figure resulted from two
different calculations—one from the number and size of bands and the other
by multiplying the number of tribes (nine) by their average size on the
mainland (350–500 people).20
A strong oral tradition indicates that a catastrophic epidemic occurred
even before British settlement. Robert Clark, a teacher at Wybalenna
Aboriginal Establishment, reported that Aborigines told him they were
originally ‘more numerous than the white people were aware of’ but ‘their
numbers were very much thinned by a sudden attack of disease which was
general among the entire population previous to the arrival of the English,
entire tribes of natives having been swept off’.21 Before 1803, disease
would have come from sailors or early sealers, for sealing began in late
1798. If so, it was probably influenza, which had a disastrous effect on
people with no prior immunity, as smallpox never reached Tasmania.
Corroboration of depopulation through disease in the northeast comes
from Robinson: ‘from observations made during this [1831] journey
combined with the testimony of the natives themselves, I ascertained
beyond a doubt, that many of those districts which had been formerly
peopled by the Aborigines are now unoccupied; the once resident tribes
being utterly extinct, a fact which was evinced by the dense overgrown
[unburnt] underwood.’22 The northeast was far from settled districts and the
sealers’ depredations affected the numbers of women but not of men, so
new diseases would seem to be the primary cause of depopulation.
Jones’s higher estimate of 5000 may therefore be most realistic for pre-
colonisation Tasmanian numbers. A population of 5000 fits well with
ethnographic evidence, is plausible compared with mainland densities in
similar environments and readily explains the Tasmanians’ rapid near-
extinction under the dual impact of incomers’ germs and guns.23

Marriage
Tasmanian men were monogamous. Only two exceptions are known, both
special cases. One man had two wives because when his first wife became
dangerously ill she was left behind to die. Her husband married again but
she recovered, so ‘he continued them both’. The second was a ‘chieftain,
too old to fight’, who needed the care of two women. The two wives
‘agreed together admirably well’ and both outlived their husband. One later
became lame, so she lived by a river and ‘subsisted on kelp and herbs’.24
In Tasmania, both sexes married in their late teens. A woman was
regarded as her husband’s property and was taken to his territory. On the
death of a spouse, women remarried quickly and the new partner took over
responsibility for children from the earlier union. There was no marriage
ceremony and ‘courtship’ often involved violence. The French explorers
lamented that Aboriginal women were ‘often the victims of the brutality of
their tyrants’. Robinson personally witnessed men forcing women to their
beds by stabbing them with sharp sticks or stone knives. For instance, in
1830 he wrote: ‘Mannerlelargenner had cut Tencotemainner with a knife
because she would not stop with him … Tonight was another scene of
confusion, the men running after the women with knives in their hands and
the women running away.’25 Murder of women was frequent. A jealous
man named Nappelarleyer killed ‘quite a young girl’; the murderer was then
himself killed.26 In another incident, a man named Montpeliatter murdered
a ‘tall, fine young woman’ because she rejected his advances.27 At
seventeen, Truganini (also Trugernanner) was married against her will to
Woorrady, twenty years her senior, when his first wife died. Robinson
commented that ‘though highly averse to her suitor … she is fearful to
betray her feelings by a word or a look … This arises out of the fear of
offending and a dread apprehension for its consequences.’28 Truganini’s
fears were well grounded, as Woorrady told Robinson:
plenty of mothers and fathers kill their daughters on account of their attachment to men whom
they dislike and to prevent their marriage. He knew a mother kill her daughter whilst sitting at the
fire by jabbing a spear through her body, in at her back and out at her belly … The lover hearing
of it watched an opportunity when the men were away hunting, and went and killed the mother.
The natives form very strong attachments and they bear implacable enmity to their foes.29

Rock art
Aboriginal Tasmania had both the world’s smallest toolkit and its simplest,
scarcest rock art. Only about 30 linear motifs, mainly circles and cupules
(small cup-shaped hollows pecked or drilled and abraded from the rock
surface), occur in its engraving sites. One site has only circles. The style is
very similar to the mainland’s ice-age Panaramittee tradition, and similarly
includes ‘tracks’ (footprints of humans, birds, macropods and other fauna),
although these are very rare. The only pigmented art that has been
discovered are a few red ochre patches and hand-stencils in three ice-age
caves; some hand-prints in yellow ochre in a cave at Louisa Bay; and a few
hand-stencils, fingerprints and tally marks (a series of short parallel strokes)
in other caves in the southwest. Unlike the mainland, no figurative,
representational motifs exist. By the 1700s, Tasmanians no longer made
engravings and were unaware of their meaning, but they drew circles and
lines inside their bark huts and by the 1830s were adding figurative Western
motifs such as dogs, bullock-teams and boats.30

Beliefs
Like mainlanders, Tasmanians believed in supernatural beings. Woorrady
told how Lal.ler put his hand on the ground and created kangaroos that
came out and ran away. Drome.mer.deen.ne arose from the sea and made
kangaroo-rats and now is the bright southern star Canopus. According to
Woorrady, ‘Moi.nee and Drome.mer.deen.ne fight in the heavens and that
Moi.nee tumbled down at Louisa Bay and dwelt on the land, that his wife
came after him and dwelt in the sea, and … the Moi.nee children came
down in the rain and went into the wife’s womb and that afterwards they
had plenty of children.’ Moi.nee ‘cut the ground and made the rivers, cut
the land and made the islands’. When he died he turned into a large rock
and still stands at Coxes Bight in Louisa Bay. Other Ancestral Beings came
with the west wind or took animal form, like Tarner, the boomer kangaroo,
who sat down and made all the lagoons.31
One creation story was current throughout Tasmania. It told how Moi.nee
made the first man, Parlevar, who had a tail but no joints in his legs, so
could not sit down. Another spirit saw his plight and cut off his tail, cured
the wound with grease and made joints to his knees. He told Parlevar to sit
down, which he did, declaring it ‘very good’. By 1831 when Woorrady and
others told these stories much had been lost, but enough survives to show
that Tasmanians’ mythical beings resembled those of the mainlanders. They
created humans, fire, the landscape and all living creatures and then were
transformed into huge rocks or stars. Tasmanians’ fire myth refers to two
men in the sky—the stars known as Castor and Pollux—who made fire by
rubbing their hands together and threw it down to men who were initially
fearful but later returned and made a fire with wood. This resembles a fire
story from Victoria.32
Some indisputable ceremonial sites exist. In the Bay of Fires, two lines of
flat stones resembling a paved path lie above charcoal that has been
radiocarbon-dated to 750 years ago. Such stone arrangements are common
in mainland Australia and were used during initiation ceremonies.33 Other
links with mainland culture are art, dance and song. There were prolonged
mourning songs but also light, secular airs. The women sang very sweetly
and Labillardière compared their songs to those of ‘the Arabs of Asia
Minor. Two of them frequently sang the same air together; but the one
constantly a third above the other, forming this harmony with the greatest
exactness.’ For their part, Aborigines loved Robinson’s flute music, but
when a Frenchman played his violin they put their fingers in their ears.
The basic belief system of Aboriginal Australia known as the Dreaming
clearly existed long before Tasmania was isolated. This shows that the
Dreaming is of ice-age antiquity, not a mere 1500 years as has sometimes
been claimed.34

Artefacts
European explorers regarded Aborigines as ‘children of nature’.
Tasmanians even lived in the base of hollow trees: ‘Many of their largest
trees were converted into more comfortable habitations [than windbreaks].
These had their trunks hollowed out by fire, to the height of 6 or 7 feet [1.8
or 2.1 m]; and the hearths, made of clay, to contain the fire in the middle,
leaving room for four or five persons to sit round it.’35
Tasmania is the coldest, windiest part of Australia, yet, unlike
mainlanders in their voluminous skin cloaks, its inhabitants almost never
wore protective clothing. Early visitors concluded that Tasmanians were on
the lowest rung of the ‘chain of being’, a now-discredited view that later
formed the basis of Social Darwinist belief that Tasmanians were the
missing link between apes and humans.36
People entered Tasmania across the land bridge exposed by the low sea
level between 43,000 and 14,000 years ago.37 The oldest excavated site is
Warreen Cave in the southwest, where the earliest occupation dates to about
40,000 years ago. Ice-age Tasmanians lived within sight of glaciers in
limestone caves, where they left hand-stencils on the walls. They hunted
wallabies and developed trading networks. Use-polish on bone points
indicated skin-working. It seems Tasmanians ‘sewed’ skins together just as
early as contemporary reindeer hunters in the northern hemisphere. (Bone
points were eyeless awls rather than needles, so there was no true ‘sewing’
in Aboriginal Australia.)38 Ice-age hunters tightly targeted slow-moving
wallabies on alpine grasslands until impenetrable temperate rainforest
invaded the region and drove their prey and them out.39
Why didn’t the Tasmanians eat fish?
Total isolation of a few thousand people for 14 millennia explains the
ensuing simplification of culture and the loss of some useful arts.
Archaeological evidence shows that about 3500 years ago Tasmanians
stopped eating fish and making bone tools. The key site is Rocky Cape
Cave, where the lower layers contain the bones of 31 different fish species
—rocky-reef fish caught in baited box traps and estuarine fish from tidal-
traps—but which are then absent from more recent occupied layers.40 Bone
tools vanished at the same time as scaled fish, probably because they were
used to spear or gut them.
Whenever offered fish, whether raw or cooked, Tasmanians rejected it
with cries of horror. Why they stopped eating fish is an unsolved mystery.
Did they deliberately switch from fish to seals, a fattier, higher-energy
food? As archaeologist Harry Allen said, ‘Had the Tasmanians the service
of a consultant nutritionist, they would probably have been advised to give
up fishing and concentrate their energies on more profitable foods. There is
evidence … that this is just what they did.’ A climate shift about 3500 years
ago to cooler, drier conditions led to increased Aboriginal burning of
rainforest margins and expansion into uninhabited areas such as the west
coast, with greater access to sealing grounds.41 Yet why not eat both fish
and seals? Especially when seals were hunted-out on sites, such as West
Point, that were then abandoned.
Clearly there was a strong taboo against eating scaled fish, which
Tasmanians regarded as non-food. Hostile tribesmen taunted Aborigines
accompanying Robinson that he would ‘feed them on fish, and mimicked
the pulling up of the fish with a line’. (When an Arnhem Land fisherman
was told about coastal people who did not eat fish, he exclaimed ‘Silly
bugger, eh?’)42
Food taboos were observed at certain times, such as initiation or
pregnancy, but the Tasmanian taboo on fish was unique and lasted for 3500
years. No previously advanced explanation is convincing, but I believe that
the total ban on fish followed a major poisoning event remembered ever
since. Fish are prone to natural toxins. Ciguatera, a poison that occurs
naturally in algae and plankton, enters the food chain and may build up to
lethal doses in larger fish.43
 Ciguatera poisoning causes more human illness than any other toxicity
from seafood. On tropical and subtropical islands, 10,000 to 50,000
individuals are affected annually, with 10–12 per cent mortality. Captain
Cook suffered mild poisoning twice in 1774 in Vanuatu, probably from red
bass. On the 1748 British naval expedition to Mauritius, 1500 men died
from ciguatera poisoning. It is not possible to detect the poison before
eating the fish, which appear healthy, and cooking does not remove the
toxin. No immunity develops after an attack and the second time much less
toxin is required to produce symptoms. There is no vaccine or antidote.
High-risk fish species live in tropical waters, but were they also around
temperate Tasmania? One of the species most often identified as carrying
the greatest risk of ciguatera poisoning was also identified in the early
layers of Rocky Cape Cave—the wrasse. A rocky-reef species, wrasses
were caught in baited box traps and are still common in Tasmanian waters
today. Wrasse was the most abundant species in Tasmanian prehistoric
deposits until 3500 years ago, when fishing abruptly ceased. Toxic fish are
often confined to a small area and toxicity varies seasonally, but it seems
that 3500 years ago Tasmanian fishermen suffered such severe poisoning
that no Aboriginal Tasmanian ever risked eating fish again. The Aboriginal
custom of sharing all food means that a single meal could wipe out a whole
band. News of such a calamity would have spread quickly, leading to the
universal taboo.
Significantly, the only other widespread, long-term Aboriginal food
taboo concerns toxin-prone shellfish. The coastal Nyungar people of
southwest Australia never consumed shellfish although they ate scaled
fish.44 Like Tasmanians, Nyungar were extremely isolated, the southwest
being a remote ‘oasis’ in the corner of a vast arid expanse. Although
furnished with a long, rich coastline, Nyungar obtained most food from the
land. They lacked watercraft, nets and fishhooks and abhorred all shellfish,
in spite of plentiful, accessible oyster beds, which were much appreciated
by British colonists.
Could oral traditions sustaining taboos survive three millennia?
Aboriginal Australia has many myths about Ancestral Beings turning
peninsulas into islands (for example, Kangaroo Island, South Australia)—a
probable reflection of a post-glacial sea level rise completed 6500 years
ago. Detailed, localised accounts of volcanic eruptions lasted even longer.
On the Atherton Tableland, the Ngadyandyi have stories apparently vividly
explaining the origin of volcanic crater-lakes, although the last eruption
occurred more than 10,000 years ago. They recount that two newly initiated
men broke a taboo and angered the Rainbow Serpent. As a result, ‘the
camping-place began to change, the earth under the camp roaring like
thunder. The wind started to blow down, as if a cyclone were coming. The
camping-place began to twist and crack … there was in the sky a red cloud,
of a hue never seen before. The people tried to run from side to side but
were swallowed by a crack which opened in the ground.’45

Survival
Demographers maintain that 500 is the critical size for a viable population.
By 1802, when Flinders landed on Kangaroo Island, no people survived but
only kangaroos so tame that ‘the poor animals suffered themselves to be …
knocked on the head with sticks’.46 At contact, the much larger island of
Tasmania was still inhabited. Controversially, Jones suggested that, because
of ‘the trauma which the severance of the Bassian bridge delivered to the
society’, Tasmanian culture was on a downward trajectory:
slowly but surely there was a simplification in the tool kit, a diminution in the range of foods
eaten, perhaps a squeezing of intellectuality … The world’s longest isolation, the world’s simplest
technology. Were 4000 people enough to propel forever the cultural inheritance of Late
Pleistocene Australia? … were they in fact doomed—doomed to a slow strangulation of the
mind?47

The opposing, more popular view is that Tasmanian society was dynamic
and branching out in new directions. The evidence for this is the invention
of boats, the recolonisation of Hunter Island and the increasing use of new
stone sources from distant quarries. The trigger for these new initiatives
was probably the change to a drier climate 3500 years ago, which led to
increased burning and expansion into previously unoccupied regions.

Sealers and whalers

The first sustained foreign impact on Tasmania came from sealers, who
from 1798 hunted each summer in Bass Strait and down the eastern coast.
By 1800, British and American companies were dropping groups of 10–15
men on uninhabited islands for the sealing season from November till May.
Soon these sealers began coming ashore on Tasmania’s northern and eastern
coasts for repairs and fresh food. A few hundred sealers came each year,
their visits coinciding with Aboriginal migrations to the coast for seals,
shellfish, birds and eggs in summer. At first Tasmanians were cautious of
the newcomers but soon began to exchange kangaroo skins for tobacco,
flour, tea and hunting dogs. Aborigines incorporated this unfamiliar animal
into their society with extraordinary speed, even though building an
affectionate relationship with a tame animal was something totally strange.
Tasmanians proved outstanding at training dogs and used them effectively
for hunting, besieging settlers’ huts and guarding their own camps. The
dogs were greyhounds and deerhounds that proved superb at chasing and
bailing-up large kangaroos, significantly increasing Aboriginal hunting
capabilities. Previously, catching a kangaroo often involved a foot-chase of
10 km (6 miles) or more.48
Desperate for one of these status symbols and hunting aids, a group of
west coast Aborigines traded a fourteen-year-old girl to the Macquarie
Harbour pilot in exchange for a dog.49 Ironically, when the same people
later had more dogs than women, they offered Robinson dogs in exchange
for an Aboriginal woman in his party, but he refused.50 By 1832, Aboriginal
groups contained more dogs than people. When the remaining 26 members
of the central tribes walked through the streets of Hobart to Government
House to the strains of a brass band later that year, they had over a hundred
dogs with them.51

Trade, raids and disputes over women

The first recorded Aboriginal raid for a ‘white woman’ ended in laughter.
On Baudin’s 1802 expedition,
Thirteen natives attacked our gallant carpenters, Horville and Buron, and as the latter had a pretty
face they mistook him for a woman. Eight of them led him away into the wood, while the rest hit
Horville on the shoulders with their lances to prevent him from rescuing his companion, whom
they examined and then released with great roars of laughter when they saw he was a man.52

Aboriginal men often lent or traded their women for white men’s goods.
Each spring, the northeast tribe gathered at strategic points along the coast.
When the sealers arrived, a ceremonial dance was held and arrangements
were made for women to accompany sealers to the islands for the season.
Sometimes Aboriginal men also went along. Some women came from the
host band, while others were abducted from other bands and exchanged
with sealers for dogs and foreign food. Some women, such as Walyer, went
willingly. Walyer, known as the Aboriginal ‘Amazon’, stood 1.8 m (6 feet)
tall and is now regarded as a hero of the resistance, but as a girl her back
was broken by an Aboriginal man who was trying to kill her with a club. To
escape his threats, she later joined sealers in Bass Strait.53 Other women
were sold but strongly resisted. A woman called Mary told Robinson that
she had been exchanged ‘for a bag of flour and potatoes’ but refused to go
and had to be carried off bound hand and foot.54
At first, Aboriginal women were taken by sealers primarily because of
their seal-hunting and food-providing skills—in the cold waters it was
women who captured seals from the rocks, and crayfish, abalone and other
shellfish from the ocean depths. Shellfish, crayfish and seals were major
foods in Tasmania. Women were excellent swimmers and could stay
underwater a long time. First they stood on a rock and sang a special song,
then swam out to capture seals by lying on the rocks beside them, imitating
their movements and eventually clubbing them to death. Women also dived
to depths of 4 m (13 ft) to collect food. Fronds of giant kelp were used as
underwater ‘ropes’ to get down to the ocean-floor, where they levered shells
off the rocks with small wooden wedges and put them into rush-baskets
suspended from their necks. Crayfish were grabbed from under rocks and
thrown up onto shore.55
In the six years from 1800 to 1806 sealers collected over 100,000 seal
skins, but by 1810 seal numbers had been depleted so severely that
companies moved elsewhere. About 30 independent sealers remained; most
were renegade sailors, escaped convicts or ex-convicts and some had been
there since the 1790s.
Sealers were known as ‘banditti of the straits’, but most treated
Aboriginal women reasonably well because they valued their labour as well
as sexual services.56 When Robinson arrived in 1830 and tried to remove
the women to his newly established Aboriginal settlement, he encountered
strong resistance from the women as well as sealers. After he forcibly took
fourteen women to marry his Aboriginal men, the sealers delegated James
Munro to plead with the governor for their return. Munro’s own wife had
been taken and he was left alone on his island to care for their three
children. Sealers argued that their Aboriginal wives wanted to stay with
their husbands and children rather than marry strangers. Governor Arthur
took the sealers’ side and sent a letter ordering Robinson to return some of
the women. He also suggested authorising sealers to become official
‘conciliators’ of the Aborigines.
This threat to his authority was too much for Robinson, who immediately
began recording shocking stories he claimed Munro had told him of
atrocities committed by sealers on Aboriginal women. The sudden
appearance of such tales precisely when he wanted to blacken the sealers’
reputation is highly suspicious and it seems inconceivable that Munro
would have told Robinson such self-incriminating stories. The final reason
for rejecting these lurid tales as untrue is their uncanny resemblance to a
volume of horror stories by Bartolemé de las Casas, intended to condemn
Spaniards in the Americas.57 These stories made Spanish conquistadors a
byword for cruelty but have now been discredited—las Casas either
invented the incidents or drew them from the Old Testament and other early
sources.58 They all have similar features—seizing children and killing them
before their mothers’ eyes, cutting flesh off living people and making them
eat it, feeding people to dogs, cutting off victims’ hands, cannibalism,
emasculation, rape, ripping open pregnant women or burning people alive.
Plomley, who edited Robinson’s papers, expressed scepticism about these
atrocities in lengthy annotations. It is also significant that no such tales were
reported to Archdeacon Broughton’s 1830 committee of inquiry into
violence towards Tasmanians. Abduction and ill-treatment of Aborigines
certainly occurred, and over the past couple of decades, historians and
archaeologists have been forensically examining the records and burial sites
across Australia to establish the facts on this highly contentious issue.59
Raids by sealers for women severely depleted Aboriginal numbers—by
1830 only three women survived in northeast Tasmania among 72 men.
Women also suffered frequent violence at the hands of their own people; as
Péron observed in 1802: ‘among the older women … one could see in all of
them something of the apprehension and dejection which misfortune and
slavery stamp on the faces of all those beings who wear the yoke.
Moreover, nearly all were covered with scars, shameful evidence of the ill-
treatment of their ferocious spouses.’ (The context makes clear that Péron
was describing scars caused by haphazard injury not by ritual scarification.)
Similarly, in an 1820s history, Jeffreys wrote: ‘The author had several
opportunities of learning from the females that their husbands act towards
them with considerable harshness and tyranny.’60 No wonder that a ‘young
girl’ and three ‘young women’ chose to swim across the icy Arthur River
and join Robinson’s party rather than stay with their own band.61
Another hazard for women was venereal disease. From 1804, whaling
ships periodically visited southern Tasmania. In 1822 a temporary whaling
station opened at Port Davey and others followed. At Bruny Island and
elsewhere young Aboriginal women frequented the whaling camps, trading
their favours for bread, flour, tea and tobacco. By 1820 there were sealing
camps on Cape Barren, King, Hunter and Kangaroo islands, where about 50
sealers and a hundred Aboriginal women and their children lived.62

The arrival of the colonists

In 1798, in the same year that sealers first arrived, George Bass and
Matthew Flinders circumnavigated Tasmania, proving it to be separated
from the mainland by a stormy channel 240 km (150 miles) wide. Whoever
controlled Bass Strait effectively controlled the sea lane from Europe to
Sydney, and so Governor King, worried about the intentions of French
explorers such as Baudin, decided to place a settlement there. Their first
attempt at establishing a colony on Bass Strait—in 1803 at Port Phillip Bay,
now Melbourne—failed because of ‘troublesome’ Aborigines and the
selection of a poor site. The commandant, David Collins, decided to
establish a permanent colony in Tasmania instead. A small settlement had
already been set up by Lieutenant John Bowen east of the Derwent River in
the southeast in September 1803.63
When Bowen arrived in southern Tasmania, all was quiet initially. When
the party landed, the local band vanished but later ‘a solitary savage, armed
with a spear … entered the camp, and was cordially greeted … By his
gestures they inferred that he discharged them from their trespass. He then
turned towards the woods, and when they attempted to follow, he placed
himself in the attitude of menace, and poised his spear.’64 Bowen’s attitude
was clear: ‘I have not seen a single native yet, but some of the people found
them … they appeared very shy and have since retired entirely from us … I
have not made any search after them, thinking myself well off if I never see
them again.’65 However there was soon trouble over food, when Aborigines
tried to prevent the settlers taking oysters and kangaroos, which were
staples for Tasmanians and the newcomers alike.
At 2 p.m. on 3 May 1804 the new settlement under Collins at Sullivan’s
Cove (later Hobart) heard a cannon shot from Risdon Cove 10 km (6 miles)
away. According to the testimony of former convict Edward White before
Broughton’s committee 26 years later:
He was hoeing new ground near a creek; saw 300 of the Natives come down in a circular form,
and a flock of kangaroos hemmed in between them, there were men, women and children; ‘they
looked at me with all their eyes’, I went down to the creek, and reported them to some soldiers,
and then went back to my work; the natives did not threaten me … the Natives did not attack the
soldiers; … they had no spears with them, only waddies [clubs]; they were hunting; the soldiers
came down from their own camp to the creek to attack the Natives; … the firing commenced
about 11 o’clock; there were a great many of the Natives slaughtered and wounded; I don’t know
how many; some of their bones were sent in two casks to Port Jackson … they did not know there
was a white man in the country when they came down to Risdon.66

The violent overreaction by Risdon’s outnumbered defenders against

peaceful kangaroo-hunters was deplored by the governor and contemporary
historians. It was first called a ‘massacre’ by James Bonwick in 1870, while
W.C. Wentworth in 1822 called it ‘a murderous discharge of grapeshot’ and
John West in 1852 ‘a severe collision’. These nineteenth-century historians
were under no illusions about its seriousness and significance.
It is unclear whether the cannon fired a blank to intimidate the
Aborigines or if it was filled with grapeshot. A 1978 archaeological survey
of the site with a metal detector turned up no grapeshot or bullets,67 but it is
a difficult terrain of small hills and valleys, as I saw for myself in the 1980s.
Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, but a similar
survey of Pinjarra battlefield in Western Australia revealed both shot and
some bones of the dead (see chapter 4). It is also unclear what the death toll
was. Minimum estimates come from the young acting commandant,
Lieutenant Moore, and David Collins, who put casualties at three killed and
some wounded. Since then the number killed has grown to 50 or even 100
unarmed, bough-waving, singing hunters mown down by a drunken
lieutenant.68 Historian Phillip Tardif’s account, based on a meticulous
reading of the sources and a very detailed knowledge of the site, concludes
that ‘We will never know for sure how many were killed or wounded that
day. Certainly it was more than two or three. Probably it was fewer than
fifty. Somewhere in between lies the “great many” spoken of by Edward
White, whose poignant testimony remains for me the most credible
description of this sorry episode.’69 The Risdon Cove massacre has become
a founding story in Tasmanian history and the site is now Aboriginal land.
Four days after the Risdon incident Aborigines made a reprisal attack on
working convicts, and two months later Risdon was abandoned, as Hobart
provided greater security.
Another settlement, under William Paterson, was established in the north
in 1804, and Aboriginal resistance was encountered immediately, perhaps
due to prior contact with sealers. Eighty armed Aborigines confronted
Paterson’s party and tried to throw a sentry into the sea. In retaliation one
Aborigine was shot. Harassment of the newcomers continued, and they
were driven up the Tamar River to the site of modern Launceston in 1806.

Coexistence
In the south, Aborigines and settlers coexisted relatively peacefully until the
arrival in 1807 of 700 new, mainly ex-convict settlers. This influx
intensified the conflict over kangaroos and access to new provisions.
Aboriginal craving for settlers’ food and tobacco was ‘regular and
irresistible’, according to Robinson, who described the Big River tribe of
central Tasmania as ‘passionately fond’ of bread and sugar: ‘flour is their
object, also tea, sugar and blankets … they cannot do without these’.
Similarly, when visiting the Port Davey people in the remote southwest,
Robinson found their desire for tea was ‘one of the chief sources of
attraction in directing their migrations to those places or abodes where they
think they can procure it’.
Apart from honey from native, stingless bees, Australian flora provides
few sweet foods, so the craving for sugar is understandable. Western foods
had the great advantages of being ready to use, easily carried and storable;
Robinson came upon pits lined with bark ready to store plundered flour.
Teapots and kettles were taken to make tea and clay pipes to smoke stolen
tobacco. Although there was no shortage of native food, Tasmanian hunters
closed in on the settlements and became dependent on British goods.70
Inland resources were possums, wombats, echidnas, kangaroos and
especially wallabies, which were caught by head-high nooses suspended
across their trackways. (Red-necked wallabies provided 90 per cent of ice-
age Tasmanians’ food.) Coasts furnished shellfish, seals, swans’ eggs and
muttonbirds. Tasmanians had enough meat and, in contrast to the mainland
where the spearing of sheep and cattle was rife, raiders usually left
introduced animals alone. What they lacked were any native tobacco or
grains to grind into flour.71
Soon Aborigines were offering their women and it was ‘well understood’
that women would visit stockmen in exchange for provisions. Settlers were
in great need of labourers, and if adult Aborigines had been prepared to
work for wages or supplies, the two societies could have coexisted
peacefully for a time. Aboriginal children were occasionally loaned as
labour but this was rare. There is no evidence of the widespread
‘kidnapping’ claimed by some historians. Only 26 very young children
lived in settlers’ homes.72 In 1819 the governor ordered all such children be
sent to the Orphan School in Hobart. Twelve were there in 1820 but most
went back to the bush on reaching puberty.73
By 1814, there were almost 2000 Europeans in Tasmania. Tasmanians
tolerated the newcomers’ presence and the few violent incidents were
payback for the wrongdoing of individuals. Most violence towards
Aborigines came from sealers, whalers and escaped convicts who became
bushrangers—bandits who hid in the bush and stole from settlers at
gunpoint. However, bushrangers never exceeded twenty in number and
were no match for Aborigines, who befriended some and killed others.
Gradually, widespread exchange of goods developed. When Captain
Kelly circumnavigated Tasmania in the summer of 1815–16, he saw a ‘large
mob’ of natives on the northeast coast. He bartered with seal meat and in
ten days acquired kangaroo and seal skins worth £180 in Hobart. Trade
concluded with mass dancing.74
The Hobart Town Gazette of 25 April 1818 reported: ‘Notwithstanding
the hostility which has so long prevailed in the breasts of the natives of this
island towards Europeans, we now perceive with heartfelt satisfaction the
hatred in some measure gradually subsiding. Several of them are to be seen
about this town and its environs, who obtain subsistence from the charitable
and well-disposed.’ There were so few problems that in 1824 Governor
Sorell made no mention of ‘the natives’ in his final report.

Free settlers
Sadly, this period of relatively peaceful coexistence ended when the British
Government encouraged free settlers with capital to occupy ‘empty’
territory. Between 1817 and 1824, British numbers increased sixfold and all
grassland and open forest in the central river valleys was settled, although
very little of this land was enclosed. Prohibitively expensive wooden fences
or hawthorn hedges were unnecessary on sheep farms and were uncommon
until much later.
By 1824, ‘settled districts’ occupied 15 per cent of Tasmania. They
included very little of the 1600 km (1000 miles) of coastline but many
kangaroo hunting grounds.75
Pastoral expansion caused many problems. Foremost was the Aboriginal
loss of land and game. One Aborigine recounted: ‘When I returned to my
country I went hunting but did not kill one head of game. The white men
make their dogs wander, and kill all of the game, and they only want the
skins.’76
Ever-increasing Aboriginal addiction to tobacco, tea, sugar, molasses,
bread and flour also caused conflict. As a tribal Aborigine captured while
robbing a hut and interviewed by Governor Arthur (with Robinson
interpreting) explained: ‘when the tribe attacked the hut it was in order to
obtain food, and such articles as the whites had introduced amongst them,
and which now instead of being luxuries as formerly, had become
necessities, which they could not any other way procure.’77
The coveted goods were obtained by charity, cohabitation, prostitution or
theft. ‘Tame mobs’ developed and in November 1824 about 60 Aborigines
entered Hobart in search of provisions and blankets. The governor rapidly
provided these and they settled on the riverbank opposite the town. Two
years later the group decamped after two of their number were hanged for
the murder of settlers. Violence had been instigated by a mainland
Aborigine, Musquito, transported from Sydney to Norfolk Island in 1805
for murder and later freed to work as a stockman in Tasmania. Musquito
spurned manual labour and when the authorities refused to repatriate him to
Sydney, he and a Tasmanian Aborigine, Black Jack, killed seven settlers
over nine months before they were captured, tried by jury and hanged.78
Conflict increased after 1824 and Aborigines used fire to destroy huts
and crops. Tasmanian spears were only effective to 30 m (100 ft) and rarely
delivered fatal wounds; clubs were used to finish victims off. Musket-balls
were more lethal but until 1850 the only available guns were heavy,
unreliable, slow muzzle-loading muskets. Settlers could fire perhaps one
round a minute, fully trained soldiers up to three. Muskets were accurate at
50 m (160 ft) but had only 50 per cent accuracy at 150 m (500 ft). British
army tests in 1831 revealed a misfire rate of one in every six, usually due to
wet powder or maladjusted flints. In wet conditions misfires increased to
three in four.79
At first Tasmanians feared guns, believing them magic weapons that
killed without visible missiles, akin to ‘thunder and lightning’.80 By the
1820s they had learnt to leap for cover in the second or two between the
flash in the pan as gunpowder ignited and the actual discharge. Once a gun
was fired, its owner was at their mercy while reloading, and misfiring
caused much derision. Nonetheless, Aborigines valued guns for shooting
birds and occasionally stole them.
Hostilities produced several black heroes, including Walyer, who learnt
to shoot on Bass Strait islands. In 1828 she returned from the islands to lead
the Emu Bay people. Robinson described Walyer standing on a hill ordering
her band (seven men, a boy and another woman) to attack the whites,
taunting them in English to come out of their huts and fight. Her opinion of
them was not high—she once said that she liked a white man as much as
she did a black snake.81 Walyer died from influenza in 1831.
Aborigines would watch remote huts for days until the opportunity arose
for a raid, then disappear into the bush without trace. It was not a regular or
true guerilla war, but a series of hit-and-run attacks on stockmen’s huts for
food. As Governor Arthur lamented: ‘The species of warfare which we are
carrying on with them is of the most distressing nature; they suddenly
appear, commit some act of outrage and then as suddenly vanish: if pursued
it seems impossible to surround and capture them.’ In Robinson’s words, ‘it
was a futile battle with a shadow’.82 Settlers, according to contemporary
historian James Calder, were ‘no match for the blacks in bush fighting,
either in defensive or offensive operations’. Similarly, convict Jorgen
Jorgensen, leader of one of the roving parties sent to capture Aborigines,
wrote that blacks ‘consider themselves our superiors in the art of warfare,
save their fear of our firearms’.83
Both sides were on foot because horses were scarce in Tasmania and
much of the country was too rough for them. Life for stockmen and
shepherds was nearly as basic as for Aborigines. Almost total self-
sufficiency was needed. Dwellings were simple one-roomed wooden huts
with shingle or thatched roofs. There was constant fear of attack by
Aborigines, who threw firesticks onto the roof and speared anyone
emerging from the burning building. Help was non-existent; there were no
police, soldiers or doctors outside the few towns. Food supplies came from
far away so any losses were extremely serious. Because of the fear of
attack, many settlers and shepherds in remote areas abandoned their
holdings.

The Cape Grim massacre

Initially, the European population was overwhelmingly made up of young
males, leading to some conflict over Aboriginal women. The 1826 grant to
the Van Diemen’s Land Company to graze sheep in the remote, lawless
northwest brought ex-convicts there. When shepherds lured Aboriginal
women into a hut and tried to molest them, their menfolk retaliated by
spearing a shepherd in the thigh, the whites shot a man dead, and
Aborigines responded by driving 118 sheep over a cliff. In February 1828 a
reprisal took place. Robinson was asked to investigate rumours of a mass
killing and visited Cape Grim in mid-1830. He took evidence from two of
the white perpetrators and some Aboriginal women living with sealers on
Robbins Island and visited the site twice, once with one of the murderers.
Robinson put the death toll at 30:
On the occasion of the massacre a tribe of natives, consisting principally of women and children,
had come to the [Doughboy] islands. Providence had favoured them with fine weather … They
swam across, leaving their children at the rocks in the care of the elderly people. They had
prepared their supply of [mutton] birds, had tied them with grass, had towed them on shore, and
the whole tribe was seated round their fires partaking of their hard-earned fare, when down rushed
the band of fierce barbarians thirsting for the blood of these unprotected and unoffending people.
They fled, leaving their provision. Some rushed into the sea, others scrambled round the cliff and
what remained the monsters put to death. Those poor creatures who had sought shelter in the cleft
of the rock they forced to the brink of an awful precipice, massacred them all and threw their
bodies down the precipice … I went to the foot of the cliff where the bodies had been thrown
down and saw several human bones, some of which I brought with me, and a piece of the bloody
cliff. As the tide was flowing I hastened from this Golgotha.84

Armed with this account, I went to see the site for myself in the 1980s
and found Robinson’s story plausible. The most reliable account of the
Cape Grim massacre comes from historian Ian McFarlane, who has
conducted detailed archival research, consulted with scholars and local
observers, made many visits to the site and applied the most rigorous
analysis of the evidence to reach his conclusion that Robinson’s account is
reasonably accurate. Robinson was no fabricator, although, as Plomley
noted, he tended to exaggerate violence towards the ‘poor, hapless souls’ he
was trying to save and to hide Aboriginal killing of whites. In 1831
Robinson made clear his expedition journals were for publication, which
explains his lurid description of the ‘Golgotha’ of Cape Grim.85

Reserves
As the white death toll mounted, pressure increased on the governor to keep
Aborigines out of the settled districts. Arthur believed Tasmania could be
shared between the two races. In 1827 he wrote that he intended ‘to settle
the Aborigines in some remote quarter of the island, which should be
strictly reserved for them, and to supply them with food and clothing, and
afford them protection from injuries by the stock-keepers’.86 The
northeastern coast was ‘the best sheltered and warmest part of the island,
and remote from the settled district’. It was also rich in native food but
thinly inhabited. British settlement did not spread there till the 1860s and
even today much of the northeast is thickly forested, wilderness country.
Arthur understood that keeping Aborigines in even a large reserve was
counter to their traditional life, but felt that ‘it is but justice to make the
attempt’.87 After eight years in the Americas, Arthur’s model was the
reserves created there and in 1827 he sought a suitable ‘ambassador’ to
explain his proposal.88 The problem was that Aborigines fled at the sight of
soldiers, making consultation difficult.

Martial law and the ‘Black Line’

During the first quarter of 1828, sixteen settlers were killed and twelve were
wounded in 48 violent incidents. To try to prevent further bloodshed, Arthur
issued a proclamation on 15 April aimed at achieving ‘a temporary
separation of the coloured from the British population of this territory’ by
keeping the ‘formidable and troublesome’ natives out of settled areas. Even
by this time the settled districts occupied only 30 per cent of the island, but
Arthur was not aware that moving into another tribe’s country was
anathema to Aboriginal people. Troops were stationed at five places around
the perimeter of the settled districts, which Aborigines could only traverse
if their leaders applied for a ‘pass’. Trespassing natives were ‘to be
persuaded to retire beyond the prescribed limits’ or captured ‘without force’
and ‘treated with the utmost humanity and compassion’. Arthur had picture-
boards explaining government policy placed on trees along the frontier. His
proclamation included planning ‘a negotiation with certain chiefs of
aboriginal tribes’, but he also wrote to the Colonial Office explaining that
the ‘spirit of dissension amongst the tribes’ was such that his plan could not
‘possibly be accomplished’.89 Arthur’s pessimism was justified—there was
much intertribal feuding and many Aborigines were unwilling to move into
the territory of a different tribe. Aboriginal women were more flexible,
because on marriage they moved to their husband’s country. On the later
Friendly Mission, Aboriginal women were the main negotiators and
succeeded in persuading remaining tribespeople to go to a single island
reserve.
In spring 1828, Aboriginal attacks increased fourfold from the previous
spring. The last straw was the murder of two British women and their two
young children. The press greeted this with such outrage that Arthur was
forced to take the extreme measure of declaring martial law—‘law imposed
upon an area by military forces when civil authority has broken down’.
Martial law meant soldiers could arrest or shoot on sight any Aborigines
found in settled districts. This measure had been used for six months in
1816 to rid Tasmania of bushrangers, but now it took over three years to
achieve peace. The explicit aim was ‘to inspire them with terror’ as ‘the
only effectual means of security for the future’.90 The goal was to make
settled districts safe, not to annihilate all Aboriginal Tasmanians.
The British thought there were about 2000 Aborigines in the settled
districts, whereas the number was probably nearer 200. While soldiers
scoured the region to capture them, the attacks on settlers intensified.
Drastic measures were needed, and in February 1830 a bounty was
introduced of £5 for every adult captured alive and £2 per child. When this
also failed to halt British deaths, Arthur mounted a full-scale military
offensive to end the conflict.91 The result was the ‘Black Line’—an attempt
to drive all Aborigines out of the settled districts onto the narrow-necked
Tasman Peninsula in the southeast. Every able-bodied white man was
recruited, resulting in a line of 2200 moving abreast for seven weeks, but
the sweep resulted only in the shooting of two Aborigines and the capture
of an old man and a crippled boy. The white death rate exceeded the black,
for five troopers were accidentally shot by ‘friendly fire’.
The Black Line has usually been judged an expensive failure, but such a
massive display of manpower and firearms achieved the desired effect. One
Aboriginal woman, who found herself inside the line, described long rows
of soldiers firing muskets, ‘plenty of horsemen, plenty of soldiers, plenty of
big fires on the hills’.92 Aborigines did not know it was a unique operation,
far too costly to repeat, and it convinced them to consider a negotiated
peace.
In 39 months of martial law, 89 British were killed and twice that number
injured. The Aboriginal death toll is uncertain but, as Reynolds says, ‘there
is a tendency among writers sympathetic to the Aborigines to exaggerate
the numbers killed in order to emphasise the brutality of the colonial
encounter. While this habit is understandable, it greatly inflates the capacity
of the colonists and generally underestimates the ability of the
Aborigines.’93 The much-quoted figure of 4:1 Aboriginal to white deaths in
Tasmania is based on exceedingly shaky estimates of the Aboriginal
population and unwarranted assumptions that all Aborigines subsequently
‘unaccounted for’ had been killed by white men rather than by other
Aborigines or disease.94
Three detailed, independent casualty estimates have been made by
Plomley, Windschuttle and lay scholar H.A. Willis. The latter has produced
the most reliable tally, using plausibility criteria he believes are just as
stringent as those employed by Windschuttle, but a wider set of sources of
information. Willis found sixteen possible incidents in which more than five
Aborigines lost their lives. During the first two decades of settlement,
Europeans took more lives than did Aborigines. In the eight-year period
from 1824 to 1831, the so-called Black War, Willis estimates about 163
Aboriginal and 172 settler casualties, whereas Windschuttle suggested that
during the period more than twice as many whites were killed as blacks.
Overall, Reynolds found in 1995 that approximately the same number of
Aborigines and Europeans lost their lives in frontier conflict.95 Similarly,
Willis counted about the same number (188) of Aborigines and Europeans
killed in the whole 1803–34 period, but when ‘dubious’ cases are added, his
figures are 198 European casualties and 333 Aboriginal. In other words,
during the first three decades of contact, one and a half times as many
Aborigines died as Europeans.
What we don’t know is how many Aboriginal deaths at white hands went
unreported. Tasmania’s difficult terrain and the superiority of spears over
muskets makes Aboriginal success in this frontier conflict believable,
however, and historian Lyndall Ryan prefers the name Tasmanian War to
Black War. (The term ‘Black War’ was only coined by journalist Henry
Melville in 1835, five years after the conflict was over.) There are vast
tracts of mountain and forest into which hunters could vanish and live well
on plentiful native foods. In the 1820s and 1830s there was abundant game;
Robinson’s parties carried no guns but lived off the land. Europeans quickly
realised pursuit was pointless because of the rugged bush of temperate
rainforest and horizontal scrub in the southwest, which presents a serious
challenge to modern bush-walkers.

The ‘Friendly Mission’

Arthur regarded the conflict as a ‘heavy calamity’ and kept trying to
achieve a negotiated settlement. In 1828 some Bruny Islanders visited
Hobart, and Arthur set up a ration depot for them on their island. In March
1829 he advertised for ‘a steady person of good character … who will take
an interest in effecting an intercourse with this unfortunate race’. George
Augustus Robinson was appointed at the age of 41. He held evangelical
beliefs and a ‘missionary desire’ to improve the Aboriginal lot, ‘especially
as [he] entertained an impression that this race would ultimately and at no
distant period become extinct’. Robinson’s motto was amicus humani
generis—friend of the human race. He saw his mission as ‘the cause of
God’: he must ‘civilise the Aborigines’, who had to be ‘taught to labour’.
They would have to ‘hoe the ground, to plant potatoes, to catch fish, to
assist in building their huts etc’. He planned to keep the children in a
dormitory ‘separate from the rest of the tribe’.96 These ideas derived from
mainland missions, but Robinson’s first task was to bring Aborigines in
from the bush.
On his seven expeditions Robinson collected 151 Aborigines. No force
was used, but his Aboriginal guides persuaded people that ‘coming in’ was
in their own best interest. On every expedition there were more Aborigines
than white men. Three women, Truganini and Pagerly, both eighteen-year-
olds, and Drayduric (or Dray), aged 30, carried out most negotiations. Later,
Truganini explained why she had helped the conciliation mission: ‘Mr
Robinson was a good man and could speak our language, and I said I would
go with him and help him.’ It was ‘the best thing to do … I hoped we would
save all my people that were left’. Living near Hobart, she said, ‘I knew it
was no use my people trying to kill all the white people now, there were so
many of them always coming in big boats.’ Truganini told Aborigines they
met that ‘our people were all being killed and it was no use fighting any
more, and Mr Robinson was our friend, and would take us all to a good
place’.97 Tragically, what no one anticipated was the fatal impact of foreign
germs. Half the captured Aborigines died from pulmonary complaints
before reaching their island refuge, some within just a few days of first
contact with whites.
One family, the Lanneys, continued living in the northwest but in 1841
began ‘a remarkably persevering and daring system of attacks on an
outlying shepherd’s hut’. The hut was cleared out on 6 July, restocked, and
robbed again on 13, 14, 19 and 20 July. Company men then set up a spring-
loaded gun to go off when the door was opened. It fired on the next raid on
23 July but only scared the intruders, who dropped their booty. The gun was
re-set on 24 July, and on 25 July the raiders ‘carried off amongst other
things the spring gun’!98 They later gave themselves up because they said
they were lonely. They were taken to Flinders Island, where by 1847 five
out of seven Lanneys had died from disease.

Disease and depopulation

The attraction of regular supplies of food and tobacco was important in
persuading Aborigines to ‘come in’. By 1833 about 220 were on Flinders
Island at the Aboriginal Establishment of Wybalenna (meaning Black
Men’s Houses). Promises of food, clothing and safety were kept, and
Robinson turned it into the prototype of the multipurpose institution—
welfare settlement, hospital, training centre, school, church, agricultural
institution, ration-depot, pensioners’ home and prison—that later
proliferated on the mainland.99
By 1847, only 46 Tasmanians survived at Wybalenna. They were taken
by ship to Oyster Cove ex-convict station 30 km (19 miles) south of Hobart.
Truganini died in 1876, but others of mixed race survived on the Bass Strait
islands and elsewhere, and in the 2001 census 17,442 people in Tasmania
identified as indigenous. This number had grown to 19,625 in the 2011
census and to 23,572 in 2016. (Much of this increase is due to a greater rate
of self-identification, which brings pride in indigenous identity and benefits
such as Aboriginal scholarships under the Abstudy scheme.)
Why was the Aboriginal death toll so high? Flinders Island’s climate was
not unhealthy and a doctor there said it was more salubrious than mainland
Tasmania. Between 1833 and 1837 only one of 70 convicts died, but 40
Aborigines succumbed, although provided with the same food as the
convicts and the services of a doctor. Change of diet led to some ill health;
the daily adult ration was 1 lb (450 g) of salt-meat, 1.5 lb (675 g) of flour,
plus cabbage, turnip, tea, sugar and tobacco. Fresh meat was regularly
provided only after 1839 when the Mission acquired sheep and pigs. An
1839 Board of Inquiry identified as a major problem the refusal of
Aborigines to do any gardening or other work to help grow food. At
Wybalenna convicts, not Aborigines, worked the native garden as well as
their own plots.
Cooking was also a problem, for Aborigines boiled salt meat and
vegetables together, reducing the nutritional value. Imported supplies were
supplemented by native food, for Flinders Island is 200 km (125 miles) in
circumference and well endowed with bush ‘tucker’. Aborigines went on
regular, long, hunting expeditions for wallabies, eggs, shellfish, muttonbirds
and seals. Half the Aboriginal community was ‘frequently absent on
hunting excursions for weeks together’, and during nine months in 1839 at
least a quarter was continually absent.100
Robert Hughes described Wybalenna as ‘a benign concentration camp’
but Reynolds argued that it was the ‘best equipped and most lavishly staffed
Aboriginal institution in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century’.
Aborigines were free to roam the island. Their children were more
regimented, being forced to wash and attend school and women were
expected to attend sewing, cooking and literacy classes, but no Aborigines
were forced to work or subjected to physical punishment, and the men spent
their time playing marbles, cricket and rounders. Frequent corroborees were
held and animated singing and dancing continued until midnight, the
women dancing clothed but the men naked. Traditional dances included
clever imitations of emus, kangaroos and crows and one in which ‘the men
represented the attack of a Tasmanian “tiger” [thylacine], wounded after
being supposed to have destroyed some of their children’. Others such as
the horse or bread-making dance were new inventions.101
Aborigines refused to ‘work like prisoners’, and would only erect
fencing, shear sheep, clear forest land, harvest crops or build roads when
paid to do so. Marriage was encouraged, but those Robinson arranged
seldom lasted. When four Aboriginal ‘sealing women’ were wed, within a
week all had ‘separated from their husbands’ and declared they ‘intended
taking dogs and going into the bush’. There ‘nightly appointments’ with
convicts took place, rewarded with tea, sugar and tobacco. Women could
charge highly for sexual favours, for convicts were in their power—one
word to the commandant about such illegal ‘fraternisation’ and the
offending convict was flogged and deported to a penal settlement. Jealousy
and fighting caused frequent disruption.102
One criticism is that evangelical Christianity was ‘rammed down their
throats’. An unforeseen result was that Christian doctrine, with its message
that all people are equal before God, was seized upon by young activists,
who used it effectively. In 1846 they sent a petition to Queen Victoria from
the ‘free Aborigines Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land now living upon
Flinders Island’, aimed at ridding themselves of an unpopular
superintendent. The petition succeeded but also led to the less popular move
back to mainland Tasmania. Indeed, the Tasmanians were keen to move to
Victoria, but when Robinson took fifteen for a visit to Melbourne in 1839,
five absconded, looted shepherds’ huts, wounded four stock-keepers and
murdered two whalers. The two Aboriginal men involved confessed and
were hanged in 1841 and Truganini and her female companions were sent
back to Flinders Island.103
The catastrophic death rate was due to new diseases, particularly
pulmonary and sexually transmitted ones. When Robinson reached Bruny
Island in 1829 he found only nineteen Aborigines survived from the
southeast tribe that six years earlier was 160-strong.104
The apparently low level of syphilis puzzled historian Lyndall Ryan,
since it ‘was noted among the stock-keepers and sealers’. An explanation
comes from Baudin in 1802, who noticed that Aborigines ‘seem to be
subject to a type of yaws, for several had ulcerated legs. We discern no trace
of smallpox on their faces or bodies, and they are possibly fortunate enough
as well not to know syphilis.’ This ‘yaws’ was the temperate form,
treponarid, which gave Aborigines cross-immunity from venereal syphilis
but not from gonorrhoea or chlamydia. Doctors attributed only two
Aboriginal deaths at Wybalenna and Oyster Cove to syphilis. If treponarid
was endemic in Tasmania, the disease must pre-date islanders’ isolation
14,000 years ago.105
The effects of the disruption of traditional Aboriginal society, sterilisation
by gonorrhoea, infanticide, abortion and the kidnapping of women were
very clear by 1830—there were almost no Aboriginal children. The first
band Robinson met in 1830 comprised twenty adults, two adolescents and
only four children. By comparison, at the time of contact there would have
been as many children as adults in a normal band. Only about 30 children
were among the 200 Aborigines Robinson took to Wybalenna. By 1835
there were 56 men, 50 women and only fourteen children, for there were
very few births and most babies died in infancy. Of the nine women at
Oyster Cove in 1869, only two had ever given birth and all babies had died.
Truganini, Dray and Pagerly had all been ‘afflicted with a loathsome
disorder which they had contracted during their cohabitation with the
whalers at Adventure Bay’.106
Venereal disease sterilised and chest complaints—influenza, pneumonia
and tuberculosis—killed. In 1829, nine of the southwest tribe died from
respiratory disease, which also accounted for most of the 132 deaths during
Wybalenna’s sixteen-year existence. There were flu epidemics in 1837,
1839 and 1847. Sadly, Robinson’s last ‘gift’ to the settlement was lethal
Spanish influenza which he contracted in Melbourne in January 1839 and
from which eight Aborigines at Wybalenna died. Flu is an airborne virus;
once inhaled, it easily leads to pneumonia, the major cause of influenza
deaths.107
Aboriginal mortality on Flinders Island was comparable to that during
the first fifteen years at many mainland missions, such as Poonindie, South
Australia, and Fraser Island, Queensland. Virulent new germs, the change to
a largely Western diet, a sedentary life and wearing clothes without
adopting Western hygiene proved fatal. The coup de grâce was delivered by
alcohol, which became a major problem once survivors moved to Oyster
Cove. Until the 1820s, alcohol was scarce in Tasmania and the first
inebriated Aborigine was not seen there till 1823. Some Aboriginal women
living with sealers became alcoholics, but hunters who plundered stock-
keepers’ huts took the food but left the rum. Paradoxically, Central
Tasmania was the one part of Australia with a ready source of alcohol—the
sap of Eucalyptus gunnii or ‘cider gum’. If fermented, this sweet, honey-
like liquid is mildly intoxicating. Robinson saw Aborigines tapping the
trees to make the sap run, sucking it up through reeds.108

The question of treaties

No treaties were ever made between any government and Aboriginal
Australians, but their feasibility is still under discussion. Governor Arthur,
remorseful about Aboriginal dispossession, wrote: ‘On the first occupation
of Tasmania, it was a great oversight that a treaty was not … made with the
natives and such compensation given to the chiefs as they would have
deemed a fair equivalent for what they surrendered.’109
Similarly, the Executive Council wondered in 1831 whether, as in the
United States, ‘some treaty could not be made with these people, by which
their chiefs should engage for the tribes not to pass certain lines of
demarcation … and … allow a European agent to reside with or accompany
each tribe.’ The difficulty was to persuade each side to adhere to a treaty,
for Arthur feared there was little likelihood of Aborigines or European ‘riff-
raff’ abiding by the rules.110

6. GRAVE-ROBBING
Unfortunately, the fascination of early scientists with Tasmanian
origins led to the shameful mutilation of the corpse of William
Lanney—the last ‘full-blood’ Tasmanian man, who died of cholera in
Hobart on 3 March 1869, aged 35. Born in 1834, he was the youngest
of the Lanney brothers, survived Wybalenna, was repatriated to
Oyster Cove and went to sea as a whaler in 1851. As soon as he died,
Lanney’s white friends persuaded the governor to save his remains
from scientists’ clutches. His corpse was placed in the hospital
morgue under guard, but that evening Doctor Crowther, a member of
the Royal College of Surgeons, tricked the guard, unlocked the
morgue and removed Lanney’s head. Chief hospital surgeon, Dr
George Stokell, a leading member of the Royal Society of Tasmania,
discovered the theft and cut off the hands and feet. Rumours spread
 and mourners at the funeral demanded the coffin be opened. Cries of
horror greeted the sight of Lanney’s mutilated body but nothing could
be done. The coffin was sealed, covered with a Union Jack, some
flowers and a possum skin, and escorted to the cemetery by a large
crowd of Lanney’s shipmates and other friends.
Incredibly, more was to follow. In the dead of night, Stokell and
other Royal Society members crept to the grave, dug up the body,
removed it to the morgue, mutilated it yet further and then reburied it
in a different cemetery. Crowther was also bent on grave-robbing but
found an empty coffin. Furious, he went to the morgue and broke
down the door with an axe to find only a few particles of flesh. There
was an outcry from the press and a public inquiry was held. Crowther
lost his post but Stokell was supported by the governor and got away
with his crime. He even flaunted a tobacco pouch made of Lanney’s
skin. The hands and feet were later found in the Royal Society’s
premises but Lanney’s head was never located.
Truganini was terrified that she, too, would be ‘cut up’, but when
she died in 1876, she was buried secretly by the government at
midnight, only to suffer a different fate. Two years later her grave was
dug up and her body acquired by the Royal Society Museum in
Hobart, where it was displayed from 1904 to 1947. In 1974 the
Tasmanian Aboriginal community successfully applied for the return
of her remains. In spite of massive public support, the Tasmanian
Museum trustees were reluctant to part with the body, and it took
special legislation in 1975 to obtain it. The remains were then kept in
Reserve Bank vaults until cremation on 30 April 1976 and the ashes
scattered on D’Entrecasteaux Channel the following day. Truganini
was finally at rest, a century after her death. More recently, Michael
Mansell of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has succeeded in
repatriating Crowther’s collection of Aboriginal remains from
Britain.a

Would treaties have worked? Realistically, no. First, Aborigines would

not give up territory to newcomers. The concept of selling land was totally
alien. Second, communication problems made real understanding
impossible. Third, Aboriginal society did not include the idea of a chief
representing one or more bands; instead decisions were reached through
consensus. Thus a separate treaty would have been needed with each of
Tasmania’s bands. Finally, Aborigines would not have welcomed a white
agent living among them.

Batman’s treaty
Were fair, meaningful treaties possible anywhere in Australia? The only
treaty ever attempted was in Port Phillip (now port of Victoria) in 1835 by
settler John Batman on behalf of a group of Van Diemen’s Land speculators
seeking access to grazing pastures across Bass Strait, and possibly
influenced by growing British humanitarian concern reflected in the
abolition of slavery in 1833. Batman had a mixed record on race relations—
he offered his services to Arthur as a conciliator, but earlier participated in
bounty-hunting parties of settlers and police. In 1830 Batman used his
‘tame’ Sydney blacks to track Aborigines to their camp, where they fired at
sleeping figures and captured two men, a woman and a child, but shot the
men when their wounds held up the party’s progress. In 1835 Batman sailed
to the mainland to obtain land, and tried to legitimise his land acquisition by
a private treaty.
Batman negotiated his ‘treaty’ in just one day.111 On 6 June he set out ‘to
find the natives’. After walking 13 km (8 miles), Batman wrote, ‘we fell in
with … a family: one chief, his wife and three children’. After giving them
presents, they were escorted a further 13 km to some huts, where they met
‘eight men all armed with spears’ and then the families. ‘In all, the tribe
consists of forty-five men, women and children … Each of the principal
chiefs has two wives and several children.’ By calling every adult man a
‘chief’, Batman identified eight ‘chiefs’ in this one band. Usually there was
just one informal leader in each band. The two Sydney Aborigines
negotiated and Batman tells how ‘After a full explanation of what my
object was, I purchased two large tracts of land from them—about 600,000
acres [nearly 250,000 ha] … and delivered over to them blankets, knives,
looking glasses, tomahawks, beads, scissors, flour etc. etc., as payment for
the land; and also agreed to give them a tribute or rent yearly. The
parchment the eight chiefs signed this afternoon … giving me full
possession of the tracts of land.’ The next day Batman handed over the
remaining tribute, marks were made on a tree by a Sydney Aborigine and a
‘principal chief’, Batman was given two possum-skin ‘cloaks or royal
mantles’ and departed.
The deeds granted land to Batman and his heirs ‘for ever’ to ‘occupy and
possess’ and ‘place thereon sheep and cattle’. There was no word about
Aboriginal access or hunting rights. What did this Aboriginal clan think the
treaty meant? Perhaps that Batman was initiating the ‘tanderrum’ ritual, in
which temporary access to land was granted after a ritual exchange of
gifts.112
Batman paid his tribute on the first anniversary, but on 26 August 1835
Governor Bourke declared the so-called treaty void and against the rights of
the Crown. Aborigines had a ‘right of occupancy’ but could not grant land
to others. Nor did the government recognise ‘in them any right to alienate to
private adventurers the Land of the Colony’.

Effects of Batman’s treaty

Gift exchange was continued through the governor and then by Aboriginal
Protectors. Relations were initially facilitated by escaped convict William
Buckley, who acted as interpreter. Buckley was a soldier transported to Port
Phillip Bay in 1803 for receiving a roll of stolen cloth. He escaped and was
starving when adopted by Wathaurong people, who regarded him as a
reincarnated leader. In his reminiscences, Buckley recorded:
They have a belief, that when they die, they go to some place or other, and are there made white
men, and that they then return to this world again for another existence … In cases where they
have killed white men, it has generally been because they imagined them to have been originally
enemies, or belonging to tribes with whom they were hostile.113

These beliefs help to explain unpredictable Aboriginal reactions to white

strangers; some shipwrecked sailors received great kindness, others were
killed on sight. Buckley totally assimilated and lived as a hunter-gatherer
for over 30 years before hearing of a ship’s arrival and surrendering to a
surveyor. He proved his identity from initials tattooed on his arm and his
unusual height (193 cm or 6 ft 4 inches), was pardoned and had to relearn
English. Significantly, Buckley said Batman’s treaty ‘could not have been,
because … they have no chiefs claiming or possessing any superior right
over the soil; theirs only being as the heads of families’.
 At the founding of Melbourne in 1835, Buckley told 200 assembled
Aborigines in their own language that the government would ‘feed and
clothe and care for them’ as long as they stayed ‘peaceable and well-
behaved’. Unfortunately, 1836 witnessed an influx of new settlers and
foreign germs. The killers were a major flu epidemic, typhus and syphilis,
which Buckley described as ‘new to the natives’, for previously ‘they had
no such disorder’. By 1840 the Medical Officer reported ‘great Aboriginal
mortality’.

Tragically, Victorians—like Tasmanians—had become victims of global

colonisation. Even had effective treaties been negotiated, nothing could
have saved the First Australians from the microbes European explorers,
sealers and settlers inadvertently carried with them. Most deaths came not
from guns but the new germs brought by the newcomers. It was clearly not
genocide. Robinson’s Friendly Mission, despite its benevolent intentions,
spelt disaster for most of those he contacted. Aborigines with no prior
immunity often succumbed to ‘pulmonary disease’ simply by standing
downwind of a European. Tasmania’s small population had withstood the
rigours of the ice age and 14,000 years of total isolation from the outside
world only to be struck down by invisible invaders.
The islanders with their spears and bush skills proved a good match for
foreign soldiers but they had no defence against the new germs. Only
gradually did the survivors build up some immunity and Tasmanians were
only saved by a dozen or so mixed-race survivors primarily living on the
Bass Strait islands. Mainlanders had more room to move to avoid contact
with the strange newcomers, but, as in Tasmania, the lure of the new often
proved an irresistible, but fatal, attraction.
 4

DEPOPULATION
A century of struggle (1820s–1920s)

In Sydney in 1812, colonists were suffering the extremes of Australia’s

climate. Three 15 m (50 ft) Hawkesbury River floods had swept away their
crops, followed by severe drought. It was time to break out from the Sydney
basin. The Blue Mountains dominated the western skyline, 65 km (40
miles) inland. Named for the blue haze of oil droplets from Eucalyptus
trees, the sandstone range rises to 1360 m (4462 ft). The only options were
to cross the mountain barrier or abandon the essential port of Sydney
harbour, but the latter was never seriously considered, even by later
humanitarians deploring colonisation’s dire effects on Aborigines. Had the
British withdrawn, other colonists, such as the French, would certainly have
stepped into the vacuum straightaway, for it was the age of global
colonisation.
The British still didn’t know if the inland was inhabited. Was smoke on
the ranges from Aboriginal burning or natural bushfires? Various
exploratory expeditions followed streams up long mountain valleys but
ended below waterfalls boxed in by high cliffs. Some escaping convicts
optimistically believed China lay beyond the mountains but starved to death
in a labyrinth of box canyons and dense scrub, in vain attempts to reach
their goal.1

The settlement of Australia.

The mountain barrier was not finally breached until 1813, when explorers
Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth followed the ridges rather than the
thickly wooded valleys and used packhorses to venture further than
previous parties on foot. They did not take Aboriginal guides as Blaxland
found ‘very little information can be obtained from any tribe out of their
own district’. After three weeks they reached the top and gazed over
boundless, rolling grasslands. A road was built by the end of 1814, which
the modern highway and railway still follow. Soon Aboriginal war parties
were also using it for lightning raids on other tribes or government ration-
depots.2
Wiradjuri country
The reason for the move westwards was to improve Sydney’s food supply
with more pasture land and arable land to grow wheat. It was not an
invasion and began peacefully. In 1815 Governor Macquarie visited the
new settlement of Bathurst on Macquarie River 150 km (93 miles) west of
Sydney. Several local Aborigines visited his camp, ‘very handsome, good
looking young men … clothed with mantles made of the skin of possums
which were very neatly sewn together and the outside of the skins were
carved in a remarkably neat manner.’ Macquarie exchanged clothes, metal
axes and ‘yellow cloth’ for a skin cloak. Those he met were Wiradjuri
people. This large tribe numbered perhaps 3000 people, thinly spread over
97,000 km2 (37,000 sq. miles) of central New South Wales. In the 1820s,
500–600 Aborigines inhabited the Bathurst region—a density of one person
to 35–41 km2 (13–16 sq. miles), a similar population to that of other New
South Wales tablelands.3
Unfortunately, settlement around Bathurst displaced a Wiradjuri group
that adjacent groups were unable or unwilling to absorb. As other
Aborigines explained: ‘It was their country, and the water belonged to them,
and if it was taken away they could not go to another country, for they
would be killed.’4
Fear and amazement marked Aborigines’ first encounters with horsemen,
for no one had ridden an animal in Australia before colonisation. A horse
with its huge teeth, feathery tail and shining feet striking sparks from the
ground was bad enough, but when the rider dismounted and the creature
seemed to split in half, they were terrified.5
Macquarie avoided too-rapid expansion. By 1820 he had let only 114
whites move west and neither side felt threatened. Harmony prevailed until
his governorship ended; the British Colonial Office began encouraging
emigration and settlers flooded inland. The number of whites grew tenfold
and farmers spread across 20,000 km2 (7700 sq. miles) of Wiradjuri
country.

Conflict
The impact was serious. Native seed-bearing grasses were trampled by
cloven hooves. Kangaroos and possums were shot for settlers’ cooking
pots. Prime riverbank locations were taken over and huts and stockyards
built on flat, treeless areas, including sacred initiation grounds invisible to
white eyes. Tension built during the drought of 1822–24. In 1822,
Aborigines attacked a farm and later fatally speared a shepherd. Raids on
flocks and homesteads increased and by 1824 some farms had been
abandoned.6
A young, muscular Wiradjuri warrior, Windradyne or ‘Saturday’, 182 cm
(6 ft) tall and ‘of noble appearance and piercing eye’, led a hundred fighters
in raids to kill or disperse sheep and cattle, spear any shepherds that
resisted, and rob the huts. Settlers responded by calling for military
protection and arming their shepherds. On 8 January 1824 the Sydney
Gazette reported Windradyne’s capture, which involved six white men who
‘had actually to break a musket over his body before he yielded, which he
did at length with broken ribs’. The commandant of Bathurst military camp
displayed Windradyne in chains to try to ‘teach the natives a lesson’, but,
when released a month later, Windradyne moved freely around town.
Ironically, a white man’s gift to Windradyne precipitated further violence.
Settlers had established riverbank market gardens to grow vegetables for
sale. When a gardener dug up some potatoes and showed Windradyne and
his family how to cook them, they liked them so much that next day a large
armed group returned for more. The gardener called for help, spears were
thrown, shots were fired and several Aborigines were killed or wounded.
Revenge attacks followed. On 24 May, three shepherds were killed and
the first hut was burnt—Millah-Murrah, inadvertently built on a ceremonial
ground. Then four more shepherds were speared or incinerated in their huts.
Seven deaths within three days were too much for the white community—
they called for military help. Fear ruled the countryside and no one, black or
white, was prepared to go out alone.
Windradyne and his 50 men continued their raids. Then, on 31 May, a
stockman was speared through the arm but escaped to a neighbouring
property, where the overseer formed a posse of six mounted stockmen.
Frustrated by failure to find the perpetrators, when they came across an
Aboriginal family group, they opened fire, killing three women.7
Reaction in Sydney, which regarded itself as a law-abiding, humane,
Christian society, was outrage, the Sydney Gazette’s editor deploring the
murder of ‘poor inoffending creatures’. Eventually, five of the six
murderers were charged with manslaughter and were sent to Sydney for
trial but acquitted. Some of the issues were that contemporary British law
did not admit evidence from non-Christians and required the names of the
victims. Even if Aboriginal witnesses were available, there were strong
taboos on naming the recently dead. The law was later changed to try to
overcome these problems.

Martial law in New South Wales

By August 1824, fifteen to twenty stockmen had been killed and continuing
violence led Governor Brisbane to declare martial law in the Bathurst
region.8 The garrison was increased to 75 foot-soldiers, but no mounted
troops, as had been requested. Brisbane pointed out that ‘infantry have no
chance of success’ against the Wiradjuri, but cavalry arrived only in mid-
1825.9 Brisbane declared his intention to protect innocent Aborigines,
especially women and children, and wisely ensured that magistrates
accompanied each military expedition. In early September 1824, four
parties of foot-soldiers, each led by a magistrate, set out to try to arrest the
assailants of three stockmen. According to magistrate George Ranken’s
report, ‘none of us succeeded in seeing the enemy’. They did succeed in
keeping Aborigines ‘in a constant state of alarm’, and soon leaders came
into Bathurst asking for peace. In December, martial law was repealed, and
Brisbane reported ‘during the four months that martial law prevailed, not
one outrage was committed under it, neither was a life sacrificed or even
blood spilt’.10 However, in September sixteen men of a distant Mudgee clan
were killed by stockmen in skirmishes following a Wiradjuri attack that
killed two of their number.11
Three vague stories of ‘massacres’ surfaced many years later.12 Reverend
Threlkeld of Lake Macquarie Mission claimed in the 1850s that he was told
by a visiting Bathurst magistrate that in 1824 ‘a large number’ of
Aborigines had been ‘driven into a swamp … and mounted police rode
round and round and shot them off indiscriminately until they were all
destroyed’. This story is almost certainly untrue—there were no mounted
police in Bathurst until 1825, when hostilities were long over. Threlkeld
may have fabricated massacre stories to support his dire need of funds for
his mission.13
 In 1887, William Suttor, grandson of humanitarian settler, George Suttor,
retold family stories, including one of a massacre when soldiers placed food
‘within musket range’ of an Aboriginal camp. ‘Unsuspectingly they did
come, principally women and children. As they gathered up the white man’s
presents they were shot down by a brutal volley.’14 This also seems
unlikely, since on their abortive 1824 expeditions soldiers found no
Aboriginal camps. Both stories may have been white inventions to save
face for the soldiers’ failure even to see any Aborigines, who had plenty of
rugged forest ranges in which to hide from the redcoats.
Finally, in 1962, amateur historian Percy Gresser wrote in the Bathurst
Times of a massacre at Bells Falls Gorge, a spectacular local landmark.
Historian David Roberts decided to write his postgraduate thesis on this
massacre, only to find no evidence it had ever happened. Roberts also
discovered that Gresser had subsequently decided that all Aborigines
escaped the soldiers in 1824.15
Nevertheless, Wiradjuri Mary Coe’s book about these events was used as
a school textbook. Journalist Bruce Elder’s account in his influential book
Blood on the Wattle has been taken at face value by many Wiradjuri people,
such as tennis champion Evonne Goolagong-Cawley, who recounts (in the
second edition) her shock when she learnt for the first time of this massacre
of her people. Similarly, in the 1980s a large display in the National
Museum of Australia featured it as a massacre site, quoting the words of a
modern Wiradjuri elder: ‘this is a place of great sadness. Our people still
hear the echoes of the women and children who died here.’16 Fortunately
the Museum agreed to replace this display after I and several other
researchers pointed out that the Bells Falls massacre never took place.
Sadly, such myths hinder rather than help the cause of reconciliation,
because they unnecessarily increase black anger about supposed white
brutality.

Accommodation with settlers

Windradyne jauntily turned up at the annual charitable Governor’s feast in
Parramatta in December 1824 leading 260 Wiradjuri men, women and
children. Martial law was lifted and Windradyne was presented with an
olive branch and a straw hat labelled ‘peace’. Unfortunately, in 1830 the
Wiradjuri were hit by Australia’s second smallpox epidemic. Mortality was
terrible and one in three died, but some accepted the offer of vaccination
and were saved.
Later Windradyne was wounded in the knee in an intertribal battle and
taken to Bathurst hospital, only to cast off his bandages and return to his
friend George Suttor’s property Brucedale, where he succumbed to
gangrene. In the 1950s a plaque to his memory was erected, describing him
as ‘first a terror but later a friend to the settlers’.17
The tragedy is that history would have been very different, had all settlers
been as enlightened as eighteen-year-old Suttor, who established good
relations with local tribesmen and learnt their language. (A major problem
was that both sides found the other’s language so difficult that it was
extremely hard to learn unless you were a child or a gifted linguist.) The
story is told that:
In 1824 Suttor invited a Wiradjuri man named Penneegrah to help him find his way around the
rough country between Bathurst and Mudgee. Suttor and Penneegrah were visiting an outlying hut
when they encountered a war party led by Windradyne. Recognising him, Suttor addressed him as
one leader to another. They spoke together in friendship and, despite his burning anger,
Windradyne took a polite farewell and left them in peace. Although the war was pursued with a
vengeance, Brucedale was spared.18

Suttor and other humanitarian settlers shared the land with the
Aborigines. It was accommodation rather than confrontation. Aboriginal
people in the settled regions were still effectively dispossessed of their land
but in return for their labour were given medical help, food, shelter and
security. Many settlers managed to build good relations with Aborigines,
outstanding examples being the Wills family in Victoria, the Murrays of
Yarralumla in the Canberra region, the Duracks in the Kimberley and the
Gunns in the Northern Territory.19

The rolling frontier

The frontier moved inexorably westwards. In almost every year of the
1830s an area the size of Ireland was taken over by pastoralists. By 1840,
an arc of unfenced sheep-runs spread across a huge area of grasslands on
the far side of the mountains. These stages of contact were reproduced all
over the continent. At first there was Aboriginal ‘shock of the new’,
curiosity, and a developing eagerness to taste new foods and possess new
tools, then the inevitable misunderstandings. Aborigines regarded all native
creatures as their property and thought the settlers’ new animals were theirs
to hunt.
Hostility grew as they realised the newcomers were there to stay; then
came a few years of resistance and sporadic violence, the ravages of savage
reprisals and introduced diseases and the final crumbling of traditional
Aboriginal ways of life. Tribes were unable to retreat because of hostile
neighbouring groups or to survive on the shrunken remains of their hunting
grounds, and the only option was to ‘come in’ to new settlements. The best
they could hope for was to live in their own tribal territory in a camp
attached to the station of a friendly pastoralist who fed the whole group in
return for labour; the worst was death or degradation in a camp on town
fringes, exposed to alcohol, prostitution and disease.
The two societies were so different that clashes were almost inevitable,
even when there was initial goodwill on both sides. Because of the
Aboriginal system of delayed retribution for perceived wrongs, they
acquired a reputation for ‘treachery’. One incident in 1805 on a new farm
on the Hawkesbury River illustrates the problem: ‘A native, while in the act
of eating with one of the settlers and his labouring man, had scarce ended
his meal before he took an opportunity of seizing the settler’s musket and
powder, and by a yell summoning his companions, who instantly put the
unfortunate settler to death.’20
A typical chain of events leading to frontier violence was:
A stockholder … erects his hut and stockyard. A day or two after his first arrival one or two
blacks drop in, they are well received and entertained, get some meat and damper fare offered …
in a week or so the whole tribe is domesticated with the squatter … Soon however they see an ox
killed, cut up and prepared for eating and they eat part of him themselves. That evening out of
curiosity they kill one for themselves … The blacks are remonstrated with, they then proceed to
spear some every day. The squatter at length takes up arms, the blacks spear him or any of his
stockmen when they find them with their backs turned and war commences and often continues
for months and years.21

A succession of governors found it impossible to control the exodus of

new settlers from Sydney and in 1840 Governor Gipps granted temporary
leases to ‘squatters’, people who took sheep or cattle beyond the limits of
land ownership and claimed a run on Crown land by dint of possession. It
was likewise impossible to maintain the rule of law and curb squatters’
excesses. The settlers encountered armed Aboriginal resistance of varying
intensity and duration.

Casualty rates
‘It is now a popular (but not universal) conception that Australian frontiers
were violent places where whites slaughtered Aborigines indiscriminately,’
wrote respected historian Richard Broome in 1994. He was commenting on
the 1990s Koorie Heritage Trust’s exhibition in Melbourne. (‘Koorie’ or
‘Koori’ is a name widely adopted by southeastern Aborigines, meaning
‘people’ in Eora.) I, too, saw this exhibition and was surprised to learn
‘several thousand’ Aborigines died in massacres in Victoria and ‘many
thousands more died beyond prying eyes’. This is patently untrue. Even
figures on the exhibition’s massacre map contradicted these extravagant
claims, and the actions of missionaries, protectors and humanitarian settlers
meant that unreported killings were few.22
In Broome’s latest estimate, about 1000 blacks and 80 whites died in
frontier conflict in Victoria between 1835 and 1850. This gives a ratio of
twelve black to every one white death. It is a sound estimate, based on
much detailed research by himself and others.23 Historian Ian Clark counted
430 black casualties in the Western District, and in eastern Victoria there
were only a few European but 450 or more Aboriginal casualties, many
resulting from raids by Kulin troopers on their traditional enemies, the
Kurnai of Gippsland. Add an unknown number of ‘war dead’ from the
Murray Valley and the northeast, plus deaths of wounded Aborigines, and
the figure of 1000 is realistic. The figure of 450 deaths in Gippsland comes
from a private letter written in 1846 by young squatter Henry Meyrick
home to his relatives in England:
The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted
down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever
they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland …
but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging … For myself, if I
caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a
wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them
indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very
shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that no
less than 450 have been murdered altogether.24
 Meyrick’s estimate has great weight, as he admitted to the same base
attitudes in himself and was privy to the secrets of other squatters.
Other southeastern regions were far more peaceful. Settler Edward Curr,
a reliable observer and author of a major study on Aborigines, thought only
2 of 120 Bangerang deaths in a decade in the Murray River valley were due
to white violence and none to alcohol. Yet Bangerang numbers dropped
from 200 to 80 in that time due to new diseases.25
In the tablelands and highlands of the southeast, the subject of my
doctorate, my thorough search of historical records revealed no loss of
Aboriginal life from guns, but over 90 per cent mortality through new
diseases, even excluding smallpox, which never penetrated the Canberra or
Cooma regions.26
Reynolds estimates that continent-wide between 1788 and 1928 (the date
of the last known massacre—Coniston, Northern Territory) a total of 2000–
2500 non-indigenous people (Europeans, Chinese and Pacific Islanders)
were killed in frontier conflict and 20,000 Aborigines. Precise numbers will
never be known because records are fragmentary and some deaths went
unreported. The figure of 20,000 (averaging almost 150 Aboriginal
casualties per year) is based on an estimated average ratio of black to white
deaths of 10:1.27
Detailed regional studies in progress should clarify Reynolds’
‘guesstimate’. The struggle was most intense in northern New South Wales
in the 1840s and Queensland in the 1860s–1870s. Self-governing colonies
came into being one by one—South Australia and Western Australia in
1836, Victoria in 1851, Tasmania and Queensland in 1859. Each colony had
its own parliament, able to legislate concerning its indigenous people. As
the parliaments of frontier colonies such as Queensland were settler-
dominated, it was sometimes convenient to turn a blind eye towards
violence against Aborigines. Historian Neville Green enumerated the deaths
of 30 settlers and 121 Aborigines in Western Australia in violent encounters
between 1826 and 1852, a rate of 4:1 black deaths.28 Victoria’s rate of 12:1
Aboriginal casualties may be due to intense competition for the rich lands
in the west and the unbridled operations of its native police in the east.
Ironically the colony with the lowest black death rate (3:2) is Tasmania,
notorious for its supposed genocide.
After 1850, Aboriginal casualties increased when colonists acquired two
efficient new weapons—breech-loading, multi-shot rifles and six-shot
revolvers. The new guns were much faster firing and more accurate than
their predecessors. This greater firepower explains the much higher
Aboriginal casualties in Queensland than elsewhere.

7. NATIVE POLICE
Many Aboriginal deaths in Queensland were actually at black rather
than white hands, because of the operation for 40 years of native
mounted police, who took few, if any, prisoners. Conflict in Australia
was always small-scale. There were no citizens’ militias, and
colonists only prevailed when supported by ‘native police’—armed
and mounted Aboriginal trackers. It was a leading humanitarian,
Alexander Maconochie, who in the 1830s suggested a native police
force and recommended that Aborigines be recruited as constables, on
the precedent of successful native Sepoy troops in India. The aims
were to uphold law and order on the frontier and promote
employment and discipline for Aboriginal troopers, whose families
were to be established in villages and educated to become settled
farmers. Native police came into being in Melbourne in 1842.a
The aim was for Aboriginal troopers to operate in districts far away
from their own country, so that they had no kinship links with frontier
tribes. The force was intended to combine skills of black and white
and be impartial, treating Aborigines as British subjects who, like
armed bushrangers, were defying the law. The original intake of 22
Aboriginal volunteers was made up of heads or sons of heads of clans
around Melbourne. They joined to extend their black power by
tapping into white power. Joining gave them access to rations, a
uniform, a gun and a horse, and there was nothing Aboriginal men
took to more enthusiastically than riding.
The Victorian force operated only from 1842 to 1853. In northern
New South Wales a native police force was set up in 1848, with just
fourteen Aboriginal men from the west of the colony. When
Queensland became a separate colony in 1859, the force was
transferred to the new colony’s control and renamed the Native
Mounted Police or, more familiarly, Black Police. Initially it had 22
white officers and sergeants and 120 Aboriginal troopers (200 by the
 1870s). Until disbanded in 1900, this ‘foreign legion’ of armed and
mounted native mercenaries terrorised their Aboriginal fellows in
Queensland.
In Queensland, punishment expeditions were often carried out by
unaccompanied armed black troopers who tracked a group into the
bush, discarded their uniforms but not their rifles, crept up,
surrounded the camp and ‘dispersed’ men, women and children in
wholesale massacre. Killing Aboriginal women and children was
justified, said a black policeman in 1857, because, ‘Suppose you
don’t kill piccaninnies [children], in time they become warriors and
kill you. If you kill the women no more piccaninnies are born.’b
A native police force was also formed in 1884 at Alice Springs in
what later became the Northern Territory, but after several atrocities
under its notorious commander William Willshire, who was tried for
murder in 1891 but acquitted, the force was disarmed and used only
for tracking. South Australia, Queensland (after 1900) and Western
Australia used armed black trackers on occasion, particularly to help
find and kill Aboriginal outlaws.

Most of Queensland was settled after the introduction of the new

weapons and Queensland accounts for half of Reynolds’ estimated
Aboriginal ‘war dead’. About a third of all Aborigines lived in Queensland,
which covers almost a quarter of the continent. They lived mainly on the
coastal fringes, and put up particularly strong resistance to white
encroachment, perhaps because they were used to repelling foreign
intruders from their shores. Until detailed research is done, the ratio of
indigenous to non-indigenous deaths on the Queensland frontier will be
unknown, but a tally of 5:1 is attested to by squatter G.S. Lang, who wrote
in 1865:
The blacks … driven to sheer desperation … kill far more white men than is generally imagined. I
have known 32 killed, in one small district, in about two years … The blacks are mercilessly shot
down in turn … 156 blacks having been killed in the same district in the same time; and the
blacks take revenge upon all, murdering even those who are kindest to them, until the cruelties
practised on both sides are so atrocious as to be almost incredible.29
Massacres
From the early 1970s, most historians have portrayed Aborigines as victims
of frontier conflict, while largely ignoring the impact of new diseases.30
Passionate advocacy of the Aboriginal cause by Bill Stanner, Charles
Rowley, Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and Marcia Langton deserves much
credit for a marked increase in public sympathy towards Aborigines, but
has led to overemphasis on violence in Australia’s past and in some cases
total neglect of the disastrous effect of introduced diseases. In the lead-up to
the 1988 bicentenary, several popular accounts of massacres appeared, full
of lurid, invented details. An even more sensational account was published
in 2000 by expatriate journalist Phillip Knightley, who wrote: ‘It remains
one of the mysteries of history that Australia was able to get away with a
racist policy that included segregation and dispossession and bordered on
slavery and genocide.’31
Knightley’s mystery is easily solved; Australia was able to get away with
a policy that ‘bordered on slavery and genocide’ because there was no such
policy. This is not to deny the terrible bloodshed on the frontier and the
suffering and dispossession of Australia’s Aboriginal people. It is a tragic
story that needs no exaggeration, as a 2005 meticulously researched book
about the Gulf Country of northern Australia vividly brings home. In this
remote region the infamous coast track linking Queensland to the Darwin
region and Kimberley goldfields saw a devastating collision between
Aborigines and pastoralists, drovers and prospectors. In the first decade of
contact this lawless frontier was a perpetual hell, lacking police,
missionaries or any effective protectors of Aborigines. Coupled with this
lack of restraint, the Gulf region attracted some of the dregs of colonial
society, spelling disaster for many Aboriginal groups. Until a police station
was opened at Booroloola in 1886, on the coast track five Europeans were
killed by Aboriginal spears but the Aboriginal death toll was over 300. This
gives a ratio of 60:1 Aboriginal deaths. Many of those who were not
gunned down fell victim to starvation or kidnapping: ‘Aboriginal people
had to contend not only with the abuse of their women, dispossession, and
the prospect of being shot on sight, but also with the kidnapping of young
girls and boys.’32
Seven of Australia’s most notorious and well-researched massacres are
summarised below, including the four Knightley described (Pinjarra,
Waterloo Creek, Forrest River and Coniston), to illustrate the range and
character of such ‘collisions’. One is found to have been a myth, another to
have been a battle rather than a massacre, but the rest are shameful events,
where whites massacred defenceless Aborigines or engaged in massive
reprisals for the murder of whites. In only one case were the murderers
brought to justice.

Battle of Pinjarra, Western Australia (1834)

In Western Australia there was a tragic battle at Pinjarra in 1834, in which
15–35 Pinjarup were killed by an expedition of mounted police led by
Governor Stirling, whose aim was to arrest some Aborigines who had
murdered a soldier. Military historian John Connor sees Pinjarra as a battle
rather than a massacre, since the Pinjarup were armed and opened
hostilities. The Aborigines got the better of the initial encounter, for when
five mounted police rode into their camp, three were unhorsed and one later
died of a spear wound to his head. The Pinjarup could then have easily
escaped, but chose to stay and fight, taking heavy casualties until Stirling
ordered a ceasefire.33

Waterloo Creek, New South Wales (1838)

By the late 1830s, young settlers had taken up all prime grazing land
northwest of Sydney. Kamilaroi people retaliated by spearing five stockmen
and stampeding cattle. Settlers appealed for protection and a mounted
police force of five officers and twenty men was dispatched to the Gwydir
region under the infamous Major Nunn, who had been instructed to ‘use
[his] utmost exertion to suppress these outrages’. This he did during a 53-
day campaign in early 1838. Fifteen Aborigines were arrested but all were
released, except one who was shot when escaping and one who was
retained as a guide.
For the next three weeks, Nunn’s party sighted no Aborigines, until they
were suddenly attacked. A corporal was wounded and four or five fleeing
Kamilaroi were shot dead in retaliation. The mounted police set off down
the valley in pursuit, each armed with musket, sword and pistols. Two hours
later they found their quarry at Waterloo Creek and massacred them. As the
secretary of state for the colonies later wrote to Governor Gipps: ‘The worst
feature of the case was … the renewal of the pursuit of the Blacks … the
object of capturing offenders was entirely lost sight of, and shots were fired
at men, who were apparently only guilty of jumping into the water to
escape an armed pursuit.’34 Historian Lyndall Ryan has recently re-
examined the evidence and considers eyewitness Sergeant Lee’s estimate of
40–50 killed in this massacre the most reliable.

Myall Creek, New South Wales (1838)

After Major Nunn left the Gwydir region in 1838, the Gwydir settlers felt
unprotected from Aboriginal raids. A posse of nine ex-convict stockmen
and one native-born station manager rode out to finish Nunn’s reprisals by
‘hunting some blacks’. On 9 June 1838, the vigilantes rode into Myall
Creek station and forcibly removed the resident group of Kwaimbal
Aborigines to a nearby stockyard, where they shot and hacked to death 28
people. Their victims were mainly women and children, as most of the men
were away for the day cutting bark for a neighbouring property. The
murderers tried to burn the bodies, but there was a white witness and when
the station overseer returned, he was so sickened by the carnage that he
wrote to the local magistrate. Governor Gipps ordered a full investigation,
which resulted in eleven men being tried. Gipps saw himself as a bastion of
British law in a regrettably lawless colonial society. The case was
prosecuted by John Hubert Plunkett, Attorney-General of New South
Wales, an unsung hero of the early civil rights movement. Determined that
justice should be done, when the jury took just fifteen minutes to acquit all
eleven, Gipps and Plunkett managed to get a second trial of seven of the
men, who were finally found guilty and, in spite of many public protests,
they were hanged on 18 December 1838. The men’s defence was that they
did not know it was illegal to kill Aborigines, as it was so common on the
frontier. Prior to this, few settlers had been tried for killing Aborigines and
only one had been hanged for the crime (John Kirkby at Newcastle in
1820).35

Hornet Bank, Queensland (1857)

Queensland black police under their young white officers carried out
massive reprisal raids each time whites were killed. A notorious Aboriginal
massacre of settlers took place at Hornet Bank station, northwest of
Brisbane, where eleven people were butchered—Mrs Fraser, seven of her
nine children, the tutor and two shepherds. Mrs Fraser and her two eldest
daughters were raped before being killed. Motives for the attack were
revenge for the rape of Aboriginal women by the Fraser boys; Mrs Fraser
had repeatedly asked the officer of the native police to reprove her sons ‘for
forcibly taking the young maidens’.
One fourteen year old was badly injured but escaped, and the eldest son,
Billy, mad with grief, returned, vowing to destroy the whole Yeeman tribe.
Public outrage was such that frontier ‘rough justice’ took over, and within a
year Billy, the native police and posses of squatters and non-local black
hands had killed over 150 Aboriginal people.36

Cullinlaringo, Queensland (1861)

The worst massacre of whites in Australian frontier history occasioned
similar punitive action, and again the number of those shot in retribution
dwarfed the number of whites killed. The nineteen victims belonged to the
family of humanitarian settler Horatio Wills, who only two weeks earlier
had driven his flocks from Victoria to establish Cullinlaringo station west of
Rockhampton. When their camp was attacked, all were slaughtered: eleven
men, three women and five children, including babies, clubbed to death.
The murders were not provoked by the Wills family—they were unarmed
apart from one revolver and believed in befriending Aborigines—but they
presented an easy target in revenge for earlier ‘dispersal’ raids by native
police.37

Forrest River, Western Australia (1926)

In each area, violence usually lasted only a few years, for then the frontier
moved on. The last regions to be settled by pastoralists were the Northern
Territory and the Kimberley.
One of the most notorious massacres was the supposed mass killing of
Aborigines by a police patrol near Forrest River in the Kimberley. It began
when a police patrol was sent out to move Aborigines from Nulla Nulla
station southwest of Wyndham, which was going broke through cattle-
spearing. On 23 May 1926, they came across a ceremonial assembly at
Durragee Hill, where about 250 Aborigines were gathered. Shots were fired
by an Aboriginal police tracker and three Aboriginal men were slightly
wounded. (One of those shot later testified at the Royal Commission and
did not mention any fatalities.) As the Aborigines fled, they heard further
shots when the constable shot 31 camp dogs involved in stock-killing. Two
days later the police were shown the naked body of pastoralist Frederick
Hay, who had been speared by an Aborigine named Lumbia in a dispute
over cattle-killing. A large police party under two young constables, Denis
Regan and James St Jack, was sent out on 1 June to arrest Lumbia. They
brought him in for trial on 4 July, along with 30 potential witnesses. Then,
on 30 July, Reverend Gribble, superintendent of Forrest River Mission,
reported rumours of murders by the police party. Gribble’s widely
publicised claims aroused outrage in national and international newspapers
and led to the appointment of a royal commission—a government-
appointed inquiry in which court rules of evidence do not apply.
Unfortunately, it was a deeply flawed affair. The sole Commissioner,
George Wood, conceded that, ‘If I cannot get direct evidence I shall have to
depend on hearsay.’ There was plenty of that, but no evidence anyone had
been killed or was even missing. Wood formally admitted that ‘no evidence
had been adduced before the Commission that would justify a prosecution
on a charge of murder’, yet he made ‘an unqualified finding of guilt’. His
verdict was that the police patrol had murdered eleven Aborigines during
their pursuit of Lumbia. The police were then supposed to have cremated
the bodies at three separate locations. There was not a shred of evidence for
this finding, but it was exactly what the outside world wanted to hear.38
The two policemen were arrested, charged with murder and gaoled for
two months, but at the committal hearing the prosecution could not make
even a prima facie case that anyone had been murdered. The constables
were released, and no evidence has surfaced in the 80 years since their
discharge to give the accusations any further credibility.
The committal proceedings have been disregarded by influential writers
such as Reynolds, Rowley, Elder, Knightley, Shaw and the Encyclopaedia
of Aboriginal Australia, which presents as fact that ‘eleven Aboriginal
people had been shot and their bodies burnt (other estimates suggest 100 or
more)’. The Encyclopaedia wrongly describes the police as being ‘tried for
murder but acquitted’—it never came to a trial for there was no case to
answer. Nor were the police ‘then promoted’.39
 In his 1999 book Massacre Myth, Western Australian journalist Rod
Moran argues that this alleged massacre never happened. Moran became
involved from the Australian tradition of giving people a ‘fair go’, in this
case the accused policemen’s families. He also thinks that ‘getting the story
as accurate as possible is important for the coherence and integrity of the
heritage of our Aboriginal fellow-citizens’.40
What Moran has found is that Gribble’s list of missing Aborigines
appears to be a complete fabrication—several turned up a week or two later
and others on the mission’s roll had not been seen at the mission for months
or even years before the alleged killings. (Between mid-1926 and mid-1927
only 150 of the 800 listed on the roll had visited the mission—where were
the other 650? Probably either dead from the flu epidemic raging locally in
1926–27 or simply ‘gone bush’.)41
Moran’s disassembly of evidence establishes that Wood’s findings were a
travesty. All forensic and ballistics evidence was negative. No human
remains were found even though the number of Aborigines said to have
been shot ranged from 1 to 1000.42 Burning the bodies would have been
physically impossible because of the lack of sufficient firewood in the
sparsely vegetated, sandstone-range country. (From my personal experience
of the Kimberley, this was my first reason for doubting mass cremations.) A
surveyor working in the area in 1926 found the trees so slight that there
were ‘[none] suitable for marking’.43
However, the myth of a Forrest River massacre lives on, although its
historian Neville Green now sees it as neither proven nor unproven but
merely as ‘probable … given the violent history of the Kimberley’. The
extent of the violence in this region is uncertain, pending detailed studies,
but Moran’s research on this and two other alleged massacres shows it may
have been exaggerated.44

Coniston massacre, Northern Territory (1928)

The last known massacre in Australia was a punitive police raid in reprisal
for the death of an old white dingo-trapper, Fred Brooks, on Coniston
station northwest of Alice Springs. While camping near an Aboriginal
group, Brooks accepted an Aboriginal man’s loan of his wife for the night
in exchange for food but then failed to provide the promised items. It was
the fourth year of the most severe drought ever recorded and desert
Aborigines were almost starving. Early the next day the irate husband and
his uncle set upon Brooks, hacked him to death, stuffed his body down a
large rabbit hole and quickly made their escape into the Western Desert.
Fearful retribution followed at the hands of settlers led by mounted
Constable George Murray, who was the only active policeman in 650,000
km2 (250,000 sq. miles) of Central Australia. Rumours had reached
Coniston that the Warlpiri were coming in to kill all whites and station
blacks, so Murray was given a free hand. The first party shot at least sixteen
Aboriginal men and one woman who intervened in a fight. Murray later
bragged to police in Darwin that ‘the number shot was nearer seventy than
seventeen’. Murray then rode out again, this time with settler Nugget
Morton, who was bent on revenge for an Aboriginal attack that almost took
his life. They spent three weeks hunting Morton’s attackers and admitted
killing fourteen Aboriginal men but made no mention of two ceremonial
gatherings they ‘dispersed’ with bloody slaughter well-remembered 50
years later. Amazingly, the subsequent Board of Inquiry exonerated Murray,
who admitted 31 killings but claimed they were all in self-defence. The
public outcry that followed ensured that Coniston was the last punitive
expedition.45

Oral history
The validity of oral history has become a controversial issue for those
trying to find out what happened in the past. Most Australian museums’
avowed policy is to ‘give primacy to Aboriginal voices’.46 Balancing oral
and written history has long been a problem for historians; as Bain
Attwood, a leading authority on Aboriginal history, has said, ‘If the oral
history is contradicted by written evidence, most of us are of the opinion
that we have to reject Aboriginal memory. But there is a second way of
proceeding … Can’t we ask, if they are telling these stories … Isn’t it
faithful to what was generally happening?’47
Three stories from the rich, continuing oral history of Gurindji of Central
Australia illustrate the deep gulf between Aboriginal and Western history.
They concern bushranger Ned Kelly, Captain Cook and American President
John F. Kennedy. One story tells us that Ned Kelly brought a billycan and
damper and came to the Victoria River district before any other whitefellas.
He taught them how to cook damper and make tea, and although there was
only one small damper and one billy, all the Gurindji were fed. Another
relates that Captain Cook—known as ‘Big England’—came to Sydney by
boat and then travelled inland to shoot Aborigines. Finally, it’s told that
Kennedy visited and they informed him of how badly English whitefellas
treated them. He promised to make a big war, and the Gurindji walked off
Wave Hill station in 1966 and started the land rights movement. This oral
history is not to be taken as literal truth—Kelly, Cook and Kennedy were
never in Central Australia. Instead, the stories are parables concerning the
bringing of Christianity and law to the region, dispossession, shooting and
finally international support for land rights.48

Causes of depopulation
Reynolds and Broome agree that new germs rather than guns had by far the
major impact.49 It is difficult to quantify their relative contributions to
depopulation, but in Central Australia historian Dick Kimber, an expert on
Aboriginal culture and long-time resident of Alice Springs, has come to the
rescue. He has rigorously pieced together written records and both white
and black oral history to produce estimates of Aboriginal casualties within a
400 km (250 mile) radius of Alice Springs. This is dry country where there
was strong competition for waterholes. It emerged that between 1860 and
1895 punitive patrols avenging the murder of whites and spearing of cattle
shot 650–850 Aborigines—almost all men. This is a horrifyingly high
casualty rate, averaging 18–24 murders per year, but introduced diseases,
especially influenza and typhoid, accounted for even more deaths. Kimber
estimates another 900 of an estimated original population of 4500 in the
early 1860s died from the new germs.50 The situation in the dry country of
Western Australia was probably similar.

Traditional violence
Another significant factor in Aboriginal depopulation was black-on-black
violence. Punishment duels, pitched battles and payback murders were
witnessed at first contact in Sydney and elsewhere. In Victoria: ‘Overall, at
least 250 Aborigines are known to have been killed by other Aborigines in
intertribal fights in the Port Phillip District between 1835 and 1850.51 Many
of these black-on-black deaths derived from the dispossession and
disruption that followed European arrival. These drove people into the
territory of traditional enemies, who tended to kill strangers on sight.
A graphic account of traditional violence comes from William Buckley,
an escaped convict who lived with Aborigines in Victoria from 1803 to
1835. He had fought in the French Revolutionary Wars but found
Aboriginal warfare ‘much more frightful’. How credible are Buckley’s
stories, which were told to a journalist twenty years after he emerged from
the bush? Some consider them fanciful and sensationalised, but fortunately,
shortly after coming back into colonial society he confided in Reverend
George Langhorne, a missionary for whom Buckley worked as an
interpreter. Langhorne wrote a four-page account of Buckley’s answers to
his questions, which has the ring of authenticity, but was not published for
80 years. Both it and the book fit well with data from other ethnographers,
according to leading anthropologist Les Hiatt.52
Buckley witnessed 50 violent deaths during his three decades among the
Wathaurong, a tribe of the Kulin nation in the Geelong–Ballarat region west
of Melbourne. His own clan’s casualties included nine women, seven men
and seven children, and ten enemies, including two children, were killed in
revenge attacks. All but two of the conflicts were disputes over women.
Buckley described his band being attacked by a war party of 300 men,
shaking their spears and ‘smeared all over with red and white clay’:
The fight began by a shower of spears … One of our men advanced singly, as a sort of champion;
he then began to dance and sing … Seven or eight of the savages … threw their spears at him; but
… he warded them off, or broke them every one … They then threw their boomerangs at him, but
he warded them off also, with ease. After this, one man advanced, as a sort of champion from
their party, to within three yards of him, and threw his boomerang, but the other avoided the blow
by falling on his hands and knees, and instantly jumping up again he shook himself like a dog
coming out of the water. At seeing this, the enemy shouted out in their language ‘enough’, and the
two men went and embraced each other.
A general fight now commenced … spears and boomerangs flying in all directions … At length
one of our tribe had a spear sent right through his body, and he fell. On this, our fellows raised a
war cry; … the women threw off their rugs, and each armed with a short club, flew to the
assistance of their husbands and brothers … Men and women were fighting furiously, and
indiscriminately, covered with blood; two of the latter were killed in this affair, which lasted
without intermission for two hours …
Soon after dark the hostile tribe left … ours determined on following immediately … On
approaching the enemy’s quarters … and finding most of them asleep, … our party rushed upon
them, killing three on the spot, and wounding several others. The enemy fled precipitately, leaving
their … wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs … The bodies of the dead they mutilated
in a shocking manner, cutting the arms and legs off, with flints, and shells, and tomahawks.53
 Most frequent were payback killings. A young woman was speared
through the thigh because she had absconded with a man from another
band; the man involved was seriously injured in a single contest. Another
dispute concerned a woman abducted by a man from another group four
years earlier. When the two groups chanced to meet, the woman was
forcibly returned to her original husband, but by night her jealous abductor
crept up, pinned the man to the ground with a jagged death spear and took
the woman away again. The avengers could not find the murderer, but on a
later hunting excursion accidentally encountered his band. A bloody battle
followed. The murderer escaped but Buckley’s band killed the murderer’s
two young children, for ‘when the parents cannot be punished for any
wrong done, they inflict it upon the offspring’. Revenge came immediately,
for that night the children’s murderer was killed, most of his flesh was cut
off and carried away on their spears and his mangled remains were roasted
between heated stones and eaten, accompanied by a continual ‘uproar of
dancing and singing’.
The next fight concerned avenging broken betrothal agreements. Often a
young girl was promised to one man but given to another, in which case her
firstborn child was ‘almost invariably killed at its birth’.54
The atrocities sickened Buckley. Eventually, he left the band after 60
hostile warriors killed all his ‘relations’. The cause was a fatal snakebite
that a man suffered when stepping over a fallen tree with Buckley’s group.
His ‘brother-in-law’ was blamed for this accident, because he ‘carried about
with him something that had occasioned his death … frequently they take a
man’s kidneys out after death, tie them up in something, and carry them
round the neck, as a sort of protection and valuable charm, for either good
or evil’. Buckley went and lived alone in a hut beside the River Barwon
where he built weirs and lived on fish.
Corroboration for high death rates from black-on-black violence comes
from Arnhem Land, where anthropologist Lloyd Warner estimated 200 men
were killed in twenty years (between 1909 and 1929). Of these deaths, 35
resulted from avenging expeditions. Another 27 men were murdered in
smaller raids. There were at least 72 pitched battles and in two of them two
lines of men stood twenty paces apart and threw short spears; neither side
was armed with shields and 35 men were killed. Formal pitched battles
were intended to put an end to chains of revenge killings, but the death toll
was horrendous. The region’s population was then about 3000—an annual
average casualty rate of 1:300.
Revenge attacks occur in all human societies. ‘The fundamental principle
underlying all the causes of warfare is that of reciprocity,’ Warner wrote; ‘if
a harm has been done to an individual or a group, they must repay … by an
injury that at least equals the one they have suffered’. Special factors
contributing to high Aboriginal death rates were constant raiding for
women, never-ending chains of payback killings, and the belief that most
deaths (except for those of infants and elders) resulted from an enemy’s
sorcery and must be avenged.55

Infanticide and abortion

A survey of 350 preindustrial societies concluded that abortion was an
‘absolutely universal’ practice. Australian women achieved miscarriages by
eating particular herbs or by applying heavy pressure to the stomach. Other
methods included pounding the stomach with stones or tying cord round the
belly and gradually tightening it.56 Infanticide—the deliberate killing of a
newborn infant—was similarly practised in virtually all early societies and
has been reported for most regions of Australia. Anthropologist Gillian
Cowlishaw found that two distinct main reasons emerged for infanticide—
the deliberate postponement of motherhood or close succession of children.
Early reports from South Australia, Victoria, western New South Wales,
Queensland and the Northern Territory show the killing of the firstborn
child or children was most frequent. The firstborn was often considered too
immature to live, or the mother too young to begin rearing a child. This
helps to explain why most traditional Aboriginal girls did not rear children
until some years after puberty and marriage.57
Mothers also needed to limit the size of their family, for only one child-
in-arms was manageable. A mother normally breastfed a child until the age
of three, and even a few five year olds were partly breastfed. Such
prolonged lactation inhibited ovulation, acting as a spacing mechanism
between children. If one birth followed another too closely, mothers
smothered the newborn, as the renewed milk supply benefited the
unweaned older child. Likewise, one of a pair of twins was killed at birth,
as was a deformed child or Siamese twins; according to oral tradition, in
Arnhem Land two pairs of Siamese twins were born and immediately
killed. Infanticide increased in times of hardship. A newborn baby was
strangled, had its head beaten against a rock or its mouth stuffed with sand.
Some groups, such as the Kurnai, simply left unwanted babies behind when
moving camp.
If the mother died in childbirth or of disease, the baby was also killed.
When a woman died of ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) in Sydney in early
1792, her body was put in a grave and then Colbee placed her infant
daughter beside her, dropped a rock on the child’s head and quickly filled in
the grave. Europeans there ‘had not time or presence of mind sufficient to
prevent it’, but Colbee justified it as a more humane death than starvation
for lack of a nursing mother as there were almost no alternative native foods
for infants.58 Before colonisation there were neither domesticated animals,
milk, containers in which to boil food nor soft native foods suitable for
babies, so mothers’ milk was all-important. Many women’s traditional
ceremonies aim to promote lactation, and circles found in women’s art often
signify breasts.
Aboriginal women lost some babies in childbirth. Evidence from
Ernabella Mission points to ‘a higher infant mortality at birth than had been
thought’, for example, all four Pitjantjatjara babies born within four days in
April 1965 suffered complications at birth, and survived ‘due only to their
mothers having come into the hospital for delivery’. Edward Curr recorded
that Bangerang women gave birth to between six and eight children, but
half these babies were killed or died at birth. Two ethnographers
independently said 30–50 per cent of South Australian babies were killed.59
Infanticide increased when the first mixed-race infants were born. At birth,
all Aboriginal babies are pink in colour but those of unmixed descent soon
become black. Daisy Bates, who lived with Aborigines at Ooldea, South
Australia, from 1910 to 1934, recounted the fate of three newborn mixed-
race children: ‘One was taken to the German mission … The other two
were destroyed in infancy.’60

Pre-contact health
In 1788 most Aborigines were described as healthy; they were almost
certainly in better shape than convicts and crew in the First Fleet. Although
infant mortality was high and life expectancy extremely low, Aborigines
who survived infancy were relatively fit and disease-free. The
measurements of Yarraginny, a tribal leader from Goulburn, were taken in
1848 by a doctor, who said ‘such a perfectly formed man would scarcely be
found in the British army’. Australia’s native foods supported a nutritious,
balanced diet of protein and vegetables with adequate vitamins and
minerals but little salt, sugar and fat. Life on the move kept people lean and
fit, if sufficient resources were available.
In coastal environments, families raised strong children, whereas in arid
regions, which cover 70 per cent (5.5 million km2/2 million sq. miles) of
the continent, frequent long droughts led to malnutrition and even death.
Malnutrition adversely affects women’s fertility. In undernourished
populations, wide birth-spacing is an ecological adaptation to reduced food
intake in bad years. Throughout the natural world, connections between
nutrition and fecundity are clear. Nomadic Aboriginal women became
pregnant only in good years when food was plentiful. This direct
association between the fertility of woman and nature was a powerful factor
in Aboriginal blurring of the dichotomy between humans and their
environment.61
What was Aboriginal life expectancy? Daisy Bates tells of tribal elders
leading active lives into their eighties, but a more realistic picture of
traditional life comes from early physical anthropologist, Andrew Abbie.
After twenty years of fieldwork in remote regions with bush-born
Aborigines he found:
Aborigines born under native conditions used to face a poor prospect. Some thirteen per cent of
all children were dead within their first year and twenty-five per cent by the end of the fifth year.
The best possible average expectation of life at birth was barely forty years. The probable order of
importance of causes of death was: injury (including warfare and murder), disease, magic, old
age. Relatively few survived the dangers of youth and middle age to enjoy any old age.62

Native Australians could expect ‘barely forty years’ of life but an average
life expectancy of 40 would have equalled that of Europe at the time. They
suffered from trachoma (a disease of the eyes), intestinal parasites, skin
diseases, hepatitis, arthritis, periodontal disease, tooth attrition, anaemia,
famine-induced stress and yaws. However, remoteness from the outside
world, low population density and nomadism impeded the spread of
infectious diseases. Healers developed a great store of knowledge on natural
medicine and remedies. Some could splint broken bones and successfully
amputate injured limbs, cauterising with clay, leaves or fire. Prehistoric
‘surgeons’ also treated head wounds by performing trepanations; drilled
holes have been found in skulls of three women, who all survived the
operations.

Ancient disease
Prehistoric human remains reveal evidence of ancient trauma, infections
and degenerative diseases. Palaeopathologist Stephen Webb analysed
ancient skeletons, focusing on stress indicators that correlate with diet,
dietary change, population growth, the degree of sedentism and crowding.
The term ‘stress’ is here used to indicate serious, even life-threatening,
physical conditions, not emotional stress.
Aboriginal health varied regionally, with certain common features.
Childhood deprivation was frequent, for growth arrest lines were found in
60–80 per cent of individuals, indicating growth stopped up to three times
during childhood. Australia’s desert nomads were healthiest, because they
avoided the infections that more sedentary, crowded groups suffered,
although their high incidence (71 per cent) of growth arrest lines reveals
periodic food shortages. Coastal people also suffered much less stress.
Murrayians—people of the crowded, central Murray River region—were
least healthy and more often than others died before their mid-thirties.
Webb’s explanation is:
The Murray has always been an area of plenty but it is likely that in the late Holocene [the last
10,000 years] there were increasingly more people sharing it. Under such circumstances it seems
that the diet of the central Murrayian was fast becoming one biased more towards a high
carbohydrate than a high protein intake … while bulk vegetable food fills bellies and is largely
always available, its quality and food value is not necessarily high. Further evidence for the
ingestion of large amounts of sticky carbohydrates comes from the presence of thick calculus
build-up around the teeth of these people. This is similar to the dental deposit on the teeth of New
Guinean sago traders … It … is probably due to the widespread use of the cooked Typha root
[bulrush] as a staple food.63

Murrayians lived close together on dense concentrations of mounds—

artificial raised areas formed by the deliberate heaping-up of earth from the
surrounding plain. Many such mounds have stone tools and fireplaces and
some had huts built on them. The mounds were up to 48 m (60 ft) in
diameter and rose 0.5–1.5 m (1½–5 ft) above ground level. Space was short
—95 mounds lie within 1 km2 (⅓ sq. mile). Some were communal cooking
‘ovens’ owned by a group of families, where early settlers saw 1000 kg (1
ton) of bulrush roots cooked at once.
This is the closest Australian hunter-gatherers came to sedentary life in a
‘village’, and archaeologist Elizabeth Williams has termed these mound-
dwellers ‘complex hunter-gatherers’.64 Ethnographers suggest each
extended family owned a particular mound and adjacent fish traps. One
disadvantage of such close, continuous communal living was poorer
sanitation, which created ideal breeding grounds for infections and
parasites. By 1788 the lower Murray and Darling river valleys were
probably the most densely populated parts of Australia, but overcrowding, a
sedentary lifestyle and food shortages took a severe toll on Murrayian
health.

Prehistoric trauma
Many prehistoric bone fractures resulted from violence; many forearms
appear to have been broken deflecting blows from clubs. Most parrying
fractures are on the left forearm held up to block blows to the left side of
the body from a right-hander. Parrying fractures were detected on 10 per
cent of desert men and 19 per cent of east coast women; for both these
groups, they were the most common type of upper-limb fractures. Desert
nomads also often broke their legs in the rocky terrain.
Fractured skulls were twice to four times as common among women as
men. The fractures are typically oval, thumb-sized depressions caused by
blows with a blunt instrument. Most are on the left side of the head,
suggesting frontal attack by a right-hander. Most head injuries are thus the
result of interpersonal violence, probably inflicted by men on women.65

Arthritis
Arthritis detected in prehistoric skeletons affected males more than females,
elbows more than knees and Murrayians more than others. Particularly
common was arthritis in the right elbow-joint of adult men, derived from
throwing a spear, with or without a spear-thrower. Women of the
Queensland coast had Australia’s highest incidence (15 per cent) of arthritis
of the knee because of their method of shellfish-gathering. Shellfish,
especially pipis (Plebidonax deltoides), were collected by digging into soft,
sticky mud and sand. Boring down with the toes to expose burrowing pipis
produced strong, twisting, mechanical stresses on knee and ankle joints.
Murrayian women suffered a different work-related arthritis; they used both
arms wielding heavy digging sticks to gather bulrush roots and suffered
chronic degeneration of both elbow-joints. Murrayian men were prone to
arthritis in both elbows from harvesting bulrushes but also suffered from
spear-throwing, as their right elbows were more affected than left.66

New diseases
Traditional society was not disease-free but its endemic diseases were
chronic, long-term ones, such as trachoma and yaws. Foreign microbes
from Asia and Europe met no resistance. Most lethal was smallpox, but
even in southern regions that smallpox didn’t reach, other new diseases
exacted a terrible toll. Both tuberculosis and syphilis survived the long
voyage from England. From 1828 Australia instituted tight quarantine
controls but, as faster ships were built, there were occasional outbreaks of
measles and influenza at various ports, some with severe impact on
previously unexposed Aborigines.

Smallpox
The first smallpox epidemic hit the new colony in April 1789 (see chapter
2). ‘How a disease, to which our former observations had led us to suppose
[the Aborigines] strangers, could at once have introduced itself, and have
spread so widely, seemed inexplicable’ to Watkin Tench, who asked:
1. ‘Is it a disease indigenous to the country?’
2. ‘Did the French ships under Monsieur La Perouse introduce it? Let it be remembered that they
had now been departed more than a year and we had never heard of its existence on board of
them.’
3. ‘Had it travelled across the continent from its western shore, where Dampier … formerly
landed?’
4. ‘Was it introduced by Mr Cook?’
5. ‘Did we give it birth here? No person among us had been afflicted with the disorder since we
had quitted the Cape of Good Hope, seventeen months before. It is true that our surgeons had
brought out variolous matter in bottles, but to infer that it was produced from this cause were a
supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration.’67
 The answer to the first question is ‘no’. All authorities agree that
smallpox was never endemic in Australia. Smallpox is a crowd-infectious
disease that evolved from animal diseases and arose with the growth of
large, dense populations in Europe and Asia generated by the development
of agriculture. A concentrated population of at least 200,000 was required
for the smallpox virus to sustain itself and become endemic, as the normal
incubation period was only 12–14 days.68
Among small or scattered societies, such as those in Australia, epidemics
were caused by close contact with infectious visitors from the outside
world. After smallpox had run its course, it died out until the next
introduction, leaving a legacy of heavily scarred, sometimes blind
survivors. Most victims’ faces, especially the noses, were covered with
large, depressed pockmarks. None of this distinctive pockmarking was seen
on Aborigines before the 1789 epidemic, when sailor Newton Fowell
‘conjectured that it [smallpox] was among them before any Europeans
visited the country as they have a name for it’. King and Hunter reported
the name as ‘gall-gall’, and Collins said: ‘From the native who resided with
us [Arabanoo] we understood that many families had been swept off by this
scourge, and that others, to avoid it, had fled into the interior parts of the
country … they gave it a name (galgalla), a circumstance that seemed to
indicate a preacquaintance with it.’69 This is not necessarily correct as ‘gall-
gall’ may simply mean ‘spots’ or ‘itch’. Across the continent, 28 names for
smallpox are known, for example ‘nguya’ (pustule) in South Australia,
‘boola’ (poison) in Western Australia, and ‘moo-nool-e-mindye’ (dust of
the Rainbow Serpent) in Victoria, where this Ancestral Being was blamed
for the affliction.
Did the French bring the disease? No, despite stories recorded by Obed
West, a friend of Kruwee, an elder who witnessed the First Fleet’s arrival:
From conversations I have had with old blacks, some of whom were strongly pockmarked, I
gathered that they contracted the disease [smallpox] from the men of La Perouse’s ships. On the
south side of the bay … there is … a cave. This was shown to me by the blacks as the place where
all who had the disease went. The blacks had a great horror of the disease and were afraid to go
near any who were suffering. The patients were made to go into the cave, and then at intervals
supplies of food, principally fish, were laid on the ground some little distance from the cave.
Those of the sufferers who were able, would crawl to the spot for the food and go back again.70

Remains of many smallpox victims were seen in caves at Botany Bay in

September 1789, but there was no smallpox aboard Lapérouse’s ships.71
Even if there had been, the virus could not have survived thirteen months
between the departure of the French and the onset of the epidemic.
If not the French, were the British responsible? Cook’s visit was too early
but what about British arrivals in 1788? There was no smallpox among the
First Fleet nor did any further ships (excepting that of Lapérouse) reach
Sydney before the outbreak. The voyage to Australia took so long—eight
months—that no ship from Europe reached Sydney carrying smallpox
cases.
The only other possible European source was ‘variolous matter in
bottles’ brought out by surgeons in case smallpox broke out on the voyage
or proved endemic in Australia. In Europe, dried smallpox scabs were
collected from mild cases, powdered and used to protect susceptible people
against the disease. In 1983 the British were accused of germ warfare by the
late Professor Noel Butlin, who claimed: ‘it is possible and, in 1789, likely,
that infection of the Aborigines was a deliberate extermination act’. Butlin
was an economic historian writing about population rather than disease and
was possibly unduly influenced by his reading of the fate of indigenous
North Americans, caused by the accidental, and perhaps occasionally
deliberate, spread of smallpox there.72 Butlin had no evidence for his claim,
but a headline on 7 January 1984 in The Age newspaper read ‘How English
settlers waged biological war on Aborigines’. Aboriginal activists took up
the story. Even after several academic authorities published refutations, the
myth was perpetuated by influential historians David Day and Henry
Reynolds. In 2001 Reynolds wrote: ‘one possibility is that the epidemic was
deliberately or accidentally let loose by someone in the settlement at
Sydney Cove. Not surprisingly this is a highly contentious proposition. If
true, it would clearly fall within the ambit of the Genocide Convention.’
Reynolds argued strongly for the theory of germ warfare, but produced no
historical evidence and ignored voluminous scientific research disproving
the possibility.73
When I began research for this book in 1997, I discovered that infection
of Aborigines with bottled smallpox scabs was not merely implausible but
impossible. The key work is Smallpox and its Eradication published in
1988 by the World Health Organisation, principally authored by Australian
virologist Frank Fenner, an authority on the disease. After reading much of
this 1400-page book, I went to see Professor Fenner in Canberra. My first
question was—‘Could the smallpox virus have come from an earlier
European case, lying dormant for fifteen months in human carriers or
material from ships?’ Fenner’s answer was an unequivocal ‘no’; smallpox
does not lie dormant and all cases among unvaccinated, susceptible people
are obvious. Even had contaminated material such as clothes or blankets
from an active but undiagnosed smallpox case been left ashore from French
ships, the virus would have been rapidly inactivated by heat, sunlight or
rain. My second question concerned the ‘shelf life’ of variolous matter
—‘Could it have survived a long voyage through the tropics and two
summers in Sydney’s hot, relatively humid climate?’ The answer again was
no.74
My final query was: ‘If, by some chance, the three-year-old English
variolous matter was still active, is Butlin’s scenario of accidental or
deliberate infection possible?’ Again Fenner’s answer was no. People
caught smallpox by inhaling airborne droplets of virus in face-to-face
contact with an active case or by infection from contact with blankets a
victim had recently used, but there had never been active smallpox among
Europeans or on any ships in Sydney.75
What then was the source of Australia’s smallpox? A northern, Asian
origin was suggested in various books and articles published between 1911
and 1966 by medical scientists Sirs Edward Stirling and John Cleland. The
1829–32 epidemic evidently spread to eastern New South Wales from the
northwest and Cleland wrote: ‘From this wide extent and outbreaks … I
believe the real solution lies in an introduction by Malays into Northern
Australia.’ Contemporary firsthand observers of the second epidemic in
1829–32, such as Dr Mair of Bathurst, agreed. George Clark (an escaped
convict then living with Aborigines) reported: ‘the disease proceeded from
the northwest coast, and spared none of the tribes as far as the Liverpool
Plains [near Bathurst], attacking 20 and 30 at a time, none escaping its
fury.’76 In 1829, explorer Charles Sturt saw active cases among Aborigines
on the Darling River.77 The epidemic travelled down to the mouth of the
Murray River, where in 1831 Sturt came across a mass of skeletons too
numerous to have been battle deaths, and unlike any other Aboriginal burial
ground.
Historian Judy Campbell has made a compelling case that all Australia’s
smallpox epidemics originated in Indonesia, where the disease was endemic
and outbreaks occurred in the 1780s, 1820s, 1860s and 1870s. Fenner
agrees that ‘origin from the Macassans is most likely’, as does Campbell
Macknight, an expert on the Macassans.78 Some academics still find a
smallpox epidemic fifteen months after British arrival just too much of a
coincidence, but in fact the outbreak of smallpox in Australia correlates
with the beginning of Macassan visits to northern Australia in the
eighteenth century. Although it is 2100 km (1300 miles) from the Gulf of
Carpentaria to Sydney, a network of Aboriginal trading routes spanned
Australia and in 4–6 years infection could have travelled across the
continent. The country is so flat that speedy progress was possible along
rivers and from waterhole to waterhole, even if people did not travel as far
during summer (November–April) to avoid tropical rains and desert heat.
Makassar’s population was too small to support endemic smallpox but
outside contacts occasionally brought it to this busy port. Smallpox was
increasingly prevalent in Indonesia in the nineteenth century. Severe
epidemics affected Sumatra, the eastern archipelago and southern Sulawesi
in 1780–83 and later. On the way to and from Makassar, there would have
been frequent contact with areas where the disease was endemic. Some
correlations have been suggested between smallpox epidemics in Sulawesi
and the four great epidemics in Australia—in the 1780s, 1820s, 1860s and
1870s.79
The voyage from Makassar to Australia took 10–15 days. As the normal
incubation period for smallpox was 12–14 days, it is very possible that
Macassans brought smallpox to Australia, where they had close contact
with Aboriginal people. Some of the Macassans Matthew Flinders met in
1803 bore telltale pockmarks, perhaps deriving from the 1780–83
Indonesian epidemic. Recollections of Jack Davis, an Arnhem Lander,
suggest smallpox struck Cobourg Peninsula in Arnhem Land long before
the second epidemic in 1829–32. Davis, who was born about 1830, told
how very old people recalled that when they were children, smallpox ‘killed
plenty black-fellows’.80 The name for smallpox in Arnhem Land is ‘purrer-
purrer’, a clear derivation from its Macassan name ‘puru-puru’.
In 1789 there were no European observers outside Sydney, but we know
smallpox affected much of southeastern Australia, including the whole
lower Murray River valley and Port Phillip (later Melbourne) region.
Smallpox’s impact often preceded European settlement, for colonists,
including doctors, reported blindness and distinctive pockmarks on people
with no previous contact with outsiders.
 The only groups of tribes in southeastern Australia never affected by
smallpox were the Kurnai of Gippsland and the Ngarigo of the Snowy
Mountains; their languages thus lack any word for the disease. These two
great confederacies were protected by their rugged terrain, a remote
location in the extreme southeast and by enmity with their neighbours. The
Kurnai were traditional enemies of the Kulin nation to their west, as were
the Ngarigo of Ngunawal and the Wiradjuri to their north. When Robinson
met these tribes on his journey from Melbourne through the Australian Alps
in 1844, he found no pockmarked or blind people at Omeo in the Victorian
Alps, Cooma on the high tablelands of the Monaro, or Yarralumla (now
Canberra) on the upper Murrumbidgee River, but the signs were numerous
among the Wiradjuri and Ngunawal at Yass only 50 km (30 miles)
downstream. The Ngarigo suffered over 90 per cent mortality through other
new diseases, however, beginning with a flu epidemic in the Monaro region
in 1839.81
Smallpox frequently travelled ahead of the settlers. Adelaide was not
established until 1836 but already the disease had struck the Kaurna.
Missionaries wrote: ‘They have no remedy against it, except the nguyapalti,
the smallpox song, which they learnt from the eastern tribes, by the singing
of which the disease is believed to be prevented or stopped in its
progress.’82
In the third outbreak, Aboriginal numbers on the Cobourg Peninsula
reduced from 200 to 28. This 1860–61 epidemic spread along Aboriginal
trade routes into northern Queensland, Central Australia and 2000 km (1250
miles) across the continent to the Great Australian Bight, where active
smallpox was recorded in 1867. A fourth epidemic began in the Kimberley
in the late 1860s and spread westwards to the Pilbara and down the coast to
Geraldton. Inland Northern Territory peoples were also affected. Indeed, the
terrible death toll caused by smallpox on Victoria River Downs station in
pre-contact times is well-remembered in oral history. Worst affected were
the Karangpurru grasslands people, whose numbers dropped from 500
people to just two men.83
Allan Young, a Karangpurru man, said that a very long time ago a terrible
sickness (smallpox) came upon the Karangpurru people. He identified the
place of origin as a sickness site; neighbouring people knew of the sickness
and erected brush walls in an attempt to inhibit the spread of the disease.84
 The severe effects of smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis and venereal
disease have often been underestimated by historians, who instead have
tended to overemphasise the role of conflict in the disintegration of
Aboriginal society, with a focus on invasion, frontier violence, genocide
and even slavery. Worldwide, the process of globalisation caused a drastic
decline in indigenous populations from the unintentional spread of killer
diseases to the new worlds of the Americas, Pacific and Australia. The
impact of new germs on people with no prior immunity was horrendous. In
the century after Columbus landed in America, smallpox evidently killed 95
per cent of the pre-Columbian population, the world’s greatest human
biological catastrophe. The New World was much more thickly populated
than Australia, for the environment was richer and crop production
widespread. Australia and North America are similar in size but much of
Australia is desert. Densely inhabited islands were particularly vulnerable.
Captain Cook’s ship inadvertently carried syphilis, tuberculosis and
influenza to Hawaii in 1779; typhoid epidemics followed and Hawaiian
numbers fell from around 500,000 to 84,000 by 1853, when smallpox
arrived and killed another 10,000. Even in modern Bangladesh and India,
where smallpox was endemic for 2000 years, a quarter of unvac-cinated
people usually died in each epidemic.85
Each smallpox epidemic ended when there were no new people to infect,
but their effects were severe. In Australia, Campbell estimates 60 per cent
mortality in a ‘virgin soil’ epidemic, 50 per cent in the tropics where there
was some prior exposure, and 25 per cent or less among small, scattered
family groups of the arid interior. Both the first and second epidemics
reached the Centre.86
Across southern Australia during the first 50 years of European
settlement, smallpox virtually wiped out a whole generation. Smallpox was
to Aboriginal Australia what the Black Death was to Europe in the Middle
Ages.

Venereal disease
Both gonorrhoea and syphilis came to Australia with the First Fleet.
Syphilis is a serious, sexually transmitted disease which first appears as
open genital sores. The secondary stage is marked by lesions in skin and
mucous membranes. Infection is transmitted from mothers to foetuses,
leading to frequent miscarriages and infant deaths. About half the foetuses
die and the rest are born with rashes, pneumonia and skeletal abnormalities.
Its final stage comprises progressive dementia, generalised paralysis and in
some cases blindness, deafness, severe tissue loss and facial disfigurement.
Today syphilis develops slowly and is treatable with antibiotics, but in a
previously unexposed population its effects were far more severe. Its impact
on Aborigines resembled that when syphilis first hit Europe in 1495: ‘its
pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to
fall off people’s faces, and led to death within a few months’.87 Gonorrhoea
was not identified as a separate venereal disease until the twentieth century,
but is longer-lasting and twenty times as common as syphilis. It involves
inflammation of mucous membranes of the genitals of both sexes, and often
leads to sterility. If gonorrhoea in women is untreated, uterine infection
becomes a chronic condition, sterilising and sometimes killing through
abscesses or peritonitis.
Venereal disease was a major factor in Aboriginal depopulation, since it
led to infertility. As settlement spread into areas beyond police control,
many convicts and shepherds formed liaisons with Aboriginal women, who
became carriers. Syphilis spread rapidly in Victoria with the influx of
settlers from Tasmania; by 1837, as police magistrate Foster Fyans
observed in Geelong, ‘large families of natives—husband, wife, boys and
girls—were eaten up with venereal disease. The disorder was an
introduction from Van Diemen’s Land, and I am of the opinion that two
thirds of the natives of Port Phillip have died from this infection.’88
In southeastern Australia, venereal disease was widespread by the 1840s.
Butlin estimated that by 1855 its steady spread had caused a 40 per cent
reduction in fertility among Aboriginal women. In Queensland, syphilis
spread so rapidly that by the 1890s half the Aborigines in some regions
were affected. There was no cure and little treatment, although Bates tells of
victims treated by burial up to the neck in wet sand. Syphilis was rife in
southern New South Wales in 1844 when Robinson, who was in Cooma on
his journey through the Snowy Mountains, wrote: ‘Syphilitic and other
European Disease among the Natives is prevalent, and their numbers are
rapidly decreasing.’ White people only settled the Cooma district in the late
1820s and smallpox never reached Australia’s mountainous southeast but
by 1866 only two full-descent Aborigines remained of 500 Ngarigo
people.89 The Aborigines of southwestern Western Australia also escaped
smallpox, but their numbers decreased rapidly due to venereal disease,
tuberculosis and measles.
By the 1890s, doctors sadly predicted that ‘syphilis alone would probably
suffice to exterminate the Aborigines’. British fears of this led to the
establishment of isolation hospitals in Western Australia, the Northern
Territory and Queensland. In 1908, the Western Australian Government set
up ‘lock’ hospitals on the northwest coast.90
Patients, often in neck chains, were marched by police to the nearest port
and shipped to Carnarvon. Men were confined on Bernier Island, women on
Dorre. Over a quarter died there, in what Bates called ‘tombs of the living
dead’. The lock hospitals were closed at the end of 1918, when treatment
for those in the final stages of syphilis became available.
Herbert Basedow, a medical practitioner and anthropologist, concluded
after visiting Darwin in 1911 that of all diseases, syphilis was ‘the most
formidable in bringing about the speedy decimation of Aboriginal tribes’.91

Yaws and treponarid

Two forms of endemic syphilis-like disease were widespread—yaws in hot,
damp northern regions and treponarid in the arid centre and temperate
south. Lesions on prehistoric crania identify both yaws and treponarid as
pre-colonial diseases. Cross-immunity between introduced syphilis and
endemic forms meant they did not occur together.
Yaws is a highly contagious, non-venereal disease, spread by close
physical contact. It is usually acquired by children, who generally recover,
leaving them immune from further attacks. Yaws neither kills nor sterilises
but may enter a third stage—gangosa—leading to blindness and facial
disfigurement, especially destruction of the nose and the roof of the mouth
and deformity of long-bones, causing lameness and ‘boomerang legs’
(bowed in side-view). Blind people ‘without noses’ were seen in tropical
Australia (for example, by Cadell in 1868 in Arnhem Land) and in the arid
centre (for example, early twentieth-century photographs by Spencer,
Basedow and Abbie). Arrernte (Arunta and Aranda) people in Central
Australia call this treponarid ‘erkincha’ and have a myth explaining its
origin. Ulcers were treated with bush medicines such as infusions of the
inner tree bark of Rhizopara stylosa in Arnhem Land.92
 Sturt’s description of ulcerated, blind, lame and noseless people matches
Abbie’s photographs. The incidence of Aboriginal yaws rose steadily before
the Second World War due to poor health and living conditions, and 1950s
blood tests showed that up to 75 per cent in some settlements had suffered
the disease. Subsequently, antibiotics proved effective and yaws has been
largely eradicated. The presence of yaws in tropical and arid Australia
restricted the early spread of syphilis to temperate regions. Syphilis was
rare in Northern Territory Aborigines until the 1970s, when yaws almost
disappeared and a generation reached adulthood without cross-immunity.

Other new diseases

Other serious new diseases were typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, influenza
and measles. These affected the whole Australian community but
particularly previously unexposed Aborigines. Mumps struck in 1824,
whooping cough in 1828, scarlet fever in 1833, diphtheria in 1858 and
measles in 1850. In 1875 measles killed 20 per cent of Aboriginal residents
at Coranderrk Mission, Victoria. When the 1948 measles epidemic reached
Ernabella Mission, South Australia, all 300 Aboriginal people there
contracted the disease, some also developed pneumonia, and at least 23
died. A second measles epidemic struck Ernabella in 1957 and 27 infants
died. The first ‘virgin soil’ outbreaks of measles killed a quarter of the
Aborigines who encountered it.93
Epidemics of influenza (called epidemic catarrh at the time) occurred in
1820, 1826–27 and 1838, but the worst was the Spanish flu. Indigenous
historian Gordon Briscoe wrote, ‘Spanish influenza lasted from early 1918
to late 1919 and was severe, killing more than 20 million people worldwide.
Approximately 12,000 people died of influenza in Australia during this
pandemic, of whom 1030 were Queenslanders. At least 30 per cent of the
Queensland death toll (315 people) were known to be Aborigines.’ It also
almost wiped out the Barkindji of the Darling River in New South Wales.
Later, Asian flu caused further mortality, for instance at Ernabella in
1957.94
Tuberculosis was another killer. Tuberculosis is a highly infectious
respiratory disease spread by sneezing, coughing or even just talking—and
thrives in crowded conditions such as Aboriginal camps and missions. It
was ‘probably the leading cause of death in the late nineteenth century for
Aborigines in many parts of the country’, Dr Neil Thomson wrote in a
review of Aboriginal health in 1991. At Point Pearce Aboriginal settlement,
South Australia, in 1880–99, tuberculosis caused 20 per cent of all
Aboriginal deaths. At first contact, Aboriginal mortality from tuberculosis
was about 10 per cent.95 A vaccine was developed in the 1940s and
tuberculosis has now been largely eradicated in Australia.
Macassans brought malaria to Port Essington, Northern Territory, in 1843
where it affected whites and blacks alike. (Aboriginal people in Cape York
may also have been affected occasionally through Torres Strait Islanders
who traded with malarial New Guinea.)96 Further outbreaks of malaria
followed as increasing numbers of Asians and South Sea islanders arrived.
By the 1890s, malaria was rife in tropical Australia but was eradicated in
the 1960s. In the 1870s, tropical Australia was also hit by the scourge of
leprosy (Hansen’s disease) brought from Asia by pearlers and gold
prospectors. To control infection, leprosaria were established on offshore
islands. By the 1950s leprosy had become the most serious Aboriginal
medical problem in the tropics; its incidence among coastal Aborigines was
one in twenty, the highest rate in the world. Aborigines called it the ‘big
sick’. Thankfully, modern medicine brought it under control and the last
leprosarium closed in 1985. Among new cases, Aborigines account for a
quarter, the rest being mainly asylum seekers from Asia.97

The small size of the original indigenous population and the subsequent
drastic decrease allowed massive transplantation of whites into sparsely
inhabited Australia. The Aboriginal population decreased until the 1930s,
when it was as low as 60,000, a reduction of between 80 and 90 per cent
from pre-contact times. It was modern medicine and the discovery of
penicillin that finally made the breakthrough, although in Tasmania
irretrievable damage had already been done. When effective treatment for
venereal disease became available in the 1940s, Aboriginal numbers began
to rise. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the development of antibiotics and
immunisation gradually led to a significant improvement.
 5

TRADITION
Indigenous life at first contact

Australian Aborigines have the oldest living culture in the world. The way
of life their ancestors developed in the ice age was ideally suited to the
continent’s unpredictable climate and often harsh environment. It survived
little-changed until disrupted by the impact of colonisation. One of the
colonists’ major mistakes was to assume that, because the Aborigines were
nomadic, they could readily move out of the way of settlers. Only gradually
did the newcomers learn more about traditional indigenous life, and begin
to recognise the strong ties binding ‘nomads’ to particular areas. In 1798
Collins remarked: ‘Each family has a particular place of residence, from
which is derived its distinguishing name … they have also their real estates.
Bennelong … often assured me that the island Memel, called by us Goat
Island, close by Sydney Cove, was his own property; that it was his father’s,
and that he should give it to Bygone [Bigon], his particular friend and
companion … He told us of other people who possessed this kind of
hereditary property.’1 In the 1830s, Reverend John Dunmore Lang wrote:
‘Their wanderings are circumscribed by certain well-defined limits, beyond
which they seldom pass, except for purposes of war or festivity. In short,
every tribe has its own district, the boundaries of which are well known to
the natives generally.’ As distinguished anthropologist Bill Stanner
expressed it in 1968:
No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and
its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it may be, does not match the
Aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’,
‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre …
To put our words ‘home’ and ‘land’ together into ‘homeland’ is a little better but not much. A
different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and
significance.2

Nowadays the word ‘country’ has been adopted, and many public events
commence with a ‘welcome to country’ by local traditional owners or
custodians. Some regions, such as the Yolngu territory in Arnhem Land,
were never settled by newcomers. Such tribal land provides physical and
spiritual sustenance. To Aboriginal eyes, no ‘natural’ features exist; every
hill, waterhole or cave was created by Ancestral Beings. Bill Neidjie, a
Gagudju elder, described the land as ‘like a history book’: ‘Our story is in
the land … It is written in those sacred places, that’s the law.’ Similarly,
Margaret-Mary Turner said: ‘that land is our spirit, or soul itself … You
aren’t just related to people, you are related to the country. And you look
after that country that you are related to, just as you look after the people.’3
Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s view, that ‘an Aboriginal deprived of his tribal
land is like a leaf torn from its tree’, has been widely quoted in the battle for
land rights—indigenous people owning and living on their traditional land.
Some anthropologists have found, however, that the pull of the new proved
even stronger than attachment to traditional country. For instance, in the
1930s Stanner discovered that the rich environment of the Fitzmaurice
River region in the Northern Territory had been deserted for 50 years, not
through conflict or disease, but by a voluntary, permanent exodus to places
where longed-for new stimulants of tea and tobacco could be obtained.
‘Eventually, for every Aboriginal who, so to speak, had Europeans thrust
upon him, at least one other had sought them out,’ he wrote.
Nowhere, as far as I am aware, does one encounter Aborigines who want to return to the bush,
even if their new circumstances are very miserable. They went because they wanted to, and stay
because they want to … There is a real, and an intense, bond between an Aboriginal and the
ancestral estate he shares with other clansmen. Country is a high interest with a high value; rich
sentiments cluster around it; but there are other interests; all are relative, and any can be
displaced. If the bond between persons and clan-estates were always in all circumstances of the
 all-absorbing kind it has sometimes been represented to be, then migrations of the kind I have
described simply could not have occurred.4

Spirituality
‘Did traditional Aborigines have a religion?’ Early ethnographers such as
Collins believed they didn’t, although he described initiation ceremonies
and mortuary rites involving belief in an afterlife. The first anthropologists
agreed. Anthropology—the study of the human species—arose as a
scholarly discipline between the 1850s and 1890s. Ethnographers studied
human societies through firsthand observation, but anthropology was seen
as an exciting, new ‘possible science of universal human custom’. In the
1890s, Walter Baldwin Spencer, an evolutionary biologist, and Frank
Gillen, an Arrernte-speaking postmaster in Alice Springs, began research in
Central Australia. They reported beliefs in reincarnation, spiritual
conception and totems—religious emblems from nature that indigenous
people see as part of their identity. In 1899 they published The Native
Tribes of Central Australia, a book highly praised by Sir James Frazer,
leading anthropologist of the time and author of The Golden Bough, a
treatise on the ‘evolution of the thoughts of man through the successive
stages of magic, religion and science’. Frazer regarded Aboriginal
Australians as lacking religion but possessing a belief system based on
‘magic’. This view was shared by Spencer and his ‘band of brothers’—
anthropologists Fison, Howitt, Gillen, Roth and Mathews—and later by
Durkheim and Freud.5 The idea of evolution from simple to complex forms
dominated nineteenth-century intellectual thought. Religion was seen as
having a progressive development, from primitive, non-rational, ‘magical’
belief systems to the great world religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism,
Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
Bill Edwards, teacher, Uniting Church minister and fluent Pitjantjatjara-
speaker, believes that Aboriginal beliefs constitute a religion because
‘Aboriginal systems of beliefs provide answers to the great universal
religious questions of humankind, the questions about origins, meaning,
purpose and destiny’.6 Stanner’s view was:
The Aborigines acknowledged that men’s lives were under a power or force beyond themselves;
that they venerated the places where such power or force was believed to concentrate; that they
 imposed a self-discipline to maintain a received tradition … we are dealing with lives of religious
devotion.7

Aboriginal stories reveal a religious interpretation of the natural world

focused on the maintenance of fertility of humans and nature and the
continuation of traditional society. Aborigines see traditional society as
based on the spiritual. For example, there are several ingenious
explanations for the moon’s waxing and waning. The Iuwalarai of New
South Wales told how there was a fertile green valley in the sky, peopled by
round, shining moons which came out one by one, only to fall victim to the
sun who cuts off thin slivers each night that become twinkling stars. Many
myths explain the sun’s setting and rising: the Wotjobaluk of northwest
Victoria said that ‘the sun was a woman, who, when she went to dig for
yams, left her little son in the west. Wandering round the edge of the earth,
she came back over the other side. When she dies she continued to do this.’8
Throughout Aboriginal mythology the moon appears to be male and the sun
female.
Ancestral Beings are the spirit powers who in the beginning emerged
from the earth, sky or sea and journeyed across the land, creating its form
and all living things. Some were able to transform themselves from human
to animal form or animate to inanimate object and back again. Ancestral
Beings interacted with human beings, gave birth to them, and gave them
language and the Law—correct social and religious practices. They are
believed to be the source of the conception spirits that initiate pregnancy,
their inherent power being released through rituals and ceremonies to
ensure health, growth and to maintain and increase food supplies.

Totemism and animism

Spencer saw Aboriginal rituals as pragmatic ‘hunting magic’. In ‘increase
ceremonies’ men mimed the actions of their totemic species in order to
maintain and increase its numbers. The propagating powers of Ancestral
Beings were concentrated in sacred increase sites, where ceremonies took
place. Aboriginal beliefs are therefore totemist and animist. Animists
maintain all natural objects possess a spirit or soul. Prime examples are
Inuit societies, where every beach pebble contains its individual soul, or the
Ainu of Japan, who regard every animal and plant as a spirit being. Tribal
Australians believe in the presence of spiritual life-essence in the world and
the interrelatedness of all living things, beliefs that are now called
‘spirituality’.
Totemism is a special ritual relationship between an individual or group
and an animal, plant or other natural phenomenon. Totems act as symbols in
a belief system linking the human, natural and supernatural worlds. (The
word ‘totem’ comes from a Native American language where it denotes
group membership; its literal meaning is ‘he/she/it is a relative of mine’.)
Tribal Aborigines see themselves as associated with particular living or
inanimate things and may share their names with their totems. It is often
forbidden to kill, harm or eat your totem. Clan totems were conferred
during the creation period and are inherited, symbolising the relationship of
clan members to each other, their ancestors and to particular places.
Personal totems are conferred at conception or birth, when the spirit of the
unborn child announces its identity.9
A person’s totem is the essence of their spiritual past and is part of them
from conception or birth. Leading Australian anthropologist Nicolas
Peterson considers that Aboriginal religion is not strictly ‘totemism’ but it
‘has many totems, and is probably unique in the degree of elaboration of its
totemic forms and relationships. These symbols play a central role in
religious ceremonies because they deal with people’s relations to each other,
to the landscape and to the ancestral past.’10 Scholars of comparative
religion agree.11

Dreaming
Tribal Australians have a unique concept of the world that Spencer and
Gillen immortalised as the ‘Dreamtime’ or ‘Dreaming’—a literal translation
of Arrernte ‘alcheringa’ or ‘altyerrenge’. ‘Alcheringa’ means the ‘Eternal’
or ‘Law’ but ‘Dreaming’ is also appropriate—just as dreams are real to
dreamers, so the doings of Ancestral Beings are real to believers. The
Dreaming is the era of eternal beings, who existed in the past and still exist
today.
Stanner preferred the term ‘Dreaming’ to ‘Dreamtime’ because the
creative epoch is timeless and cyclic; Western concepts of linear time are
alien to Aboriginal thought. Through ritual, each generation experiences the
present reality of the Dreaming.12
 The Dreaming is a complex network of faith, knowledge and ritual that
dominates all spiritual and practical aspects of Aboriginal life. The
Dreaming lays down the structures of society, rules for social behaviour and
ceremonies to maintain and increase the land’s fertility. A totem is often
described as ‘my Dreaming’. The Dreaming comes from the land; it is a
powerful living force that must be nurtured and maintained. Some
Aboriginal views are:
• ‘It’s all linked up with people, land, religion. It’s just like one big circle … The law is embedded
in the stories.’ (Emily Jane Walker, elder, Nambucca Heads, New South Wales, 1996)
• ‘The Dreaming means our identity as people. It is the understanding of what we have around
us.’ (Merv Penrith, Wallaga Lake, New South Wales, 1996)
• ‘By Dreaming, we mean the belief that long ago, these creatures started human society, they
made all natural things … These Dreaming creatures were connected to special places and
special roads or tracks or paths … the great creatures changed themselves into sites where their
spirits stay … All the land is full of signs.’ (Silas Roberts, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory,
1970s).13

The concept of the Dreaming does not suppose the world was created out
of nothing, but assumes a pre-existing substance, such as mud or a
featureless plain. Ancestral Beings lay dormant below the surface but then
emerged, assuming the bodily forms of various humans, animals, birds and
plants. They were neither wholly animal nor wholly human but in some
sense both. They were shape-changing beings of immense power, who
travelled across the land and sea, performing great deeds of creation, and
now lie quiet in focal points of the landscape.
Imberombera, the great ancestress of Gagadju people, came across the
sea to Arnhem Land. Her womb was filled with children and from her head
were suspended woven grass or fibre bags called dillybags in which she
carried yams, bulbs and tubers. She travelled far and wide, creating hills,
creeks, plants and animals, and left behind her many spirit children, giving
a different language to each group. In Central Australia, Kuniya, the carpet
snake, camped by a waterhole on a large flat sandhill that turned to stone
and became Uluru. Wilkuda the hunter threw down the skin of a giant
kangaroo he had killed and it became Lake Eyre. In his canoe, powerful
Ngurunderi chased the great codfish down the Murray River, where it
swished its tail, creating wide bends. When Ngurunderi at last caught the
cod in Lake Alexandrina, he sliced it into pieces and tossed them back into
the lake where they became new species of fish.14
Songlines
As Ancestral Beings travelled across the featureless land, they transformed
it: a snake’s meandering track became a river valley; eggs laid by the
Rainbow Serpent became huge, round boulders; a group of sisters was
chased up into the sky and became the constellation called the Pleiades.
Routes taken by Ancestral Beings are called dreaming tracks or songlines,
for the Ancestral Beings sang as they formed the land, laid down the Law
and ‘sang up’ the country into life. They left songs as a record of their
doings, teaching them to their human offspring. Each place where an event
occurred was marked by a named sacred site with its own story, called a
story place. It is believed that performing the right songs and ceremonies at
particular points along a ritual track gives people direct access to the
Dreaming.
A songline is a long sequence of short verses that form a sung map of an
Ancestral Being’s creative journey. Song cycles have many verses that must
be sung in the correct order. Each verse records the events of a particular
site and is repeated several times. Aboriginal elders travelled along
songlines with their young people, telling the stories and singing the songs
of the sites, so that children acquired a mental map of their country. The
words are often special song words in ceremonial language or from other
tribal languages. All Aboriginal men were expected to learn them, and the
process began at initiation. Elders took initiates to sacred sites at night and
chanted the relevant lines over and over until they were word-perfect. After
years of teaching, the man with the best memory became his clan’s main
‘songman’. Songmen also experienced new songs through dreams; this was
seen as the ‘finding’ of a pre-existing dreaming song. Epic tribal songs were
accurately preserved and knowledge of them conveyed great prestige and
power. There are still songmen and women in Central Australia, where
songlines commemorating the location of every waterhole were once vital
to survival.15 The Seven Sisters songlines are among the most extensive in
Australia, stretching right across the continent. In 2017 a splendid National
Museum of Australia exhibition and book on Songlines: Tracking the Seven
Sisters were created under the guidance of cultural custodians, traditional
owners and artists to explore the history and meaning of these ‘complex
pathways of spiritual, ecological, economic, cultural and ontological
knowledge—the stories written in the sand’.16
 Story places may be unmodified ‘natural’ features, such as waterholes, or
can be marked by stone arrangements or rock art. Some dreaming tracks
crossed hundreds of kilometres and several tribal territories. The final
stopping place on a mythological path may be marked by a rock where the
Creative Ancestor’s body was transformed into stone or by a rock painting,
where it painted its own image on to the wall. The ritual cycle ensured that
sites were renewed through regular visits, when sacred paintings were
touched up. Sadly, retouching has now virtually ceased, because the last
specialist rock-painters have passed away.

Oral tradition
Without written language, people rely on oral transmission to perpetuate
culture. Globally, there are three forms of oral traditions—history, legends
and myths—although they sometimes overlap. History is often based on
genealogies, but Aboriginal Australians were remarkably ahistorical in
outlook. Some Maori can recite their descent from the time their ancestors
reached New Zealand 800 years ago. Similarly in Greece, records of actual
events were passed down orally, as in Homer’s Iliad. Legends are semi-
historical narratives about the deeds of past heroes, for example King
Arthur, while myths are stories relating the doings of supernatural beings or
explaining the characteristics of living creatures.
This ‘just so’ story from the Gunbalang in Arnhem Land tells how turtles
got their shells and the echidnas their spines:
In the beginning, Echidna Woman and Freshwater Tortoise were in human shape. But one day
they quarrelled about a snail, for both wanted to eat it. At last Tortoise, in a rage, picked up a
bundle of light bamboo spears and threw them at Echidna; they stuck in her back and became
quills. Echidna retaliated by picking up a large flat stone and throwing it at Tortoise: it stuck to his
back, like a shell. That is how they became what they are today.17

Aboriginal stories and songs divide into secular and sacred, with a
progression from one to the other. Children heard ‘just so’ stories of how
the echidna (the porcupine of Australia) got his spines or why the crow is
black, and also frightening, cautionary tales of monsters, such as the
Bunyip, who lay in wait for children who dawdled or wandered off from
camp.
 8. THE DIDGERIDU
The didgeridu (also spelt didgeridoo), a drone pipe halfway between a
horn and a trumpet, is the main musical instrument of Aboriginal
Australia. Originally it was confined to tropical Australia, reflecting
the availability of wide-stemmed bamboo or straight, hollow pieces of
stringy-bark or ironwood, Darwin stringy-bark (Eucalyptus tetro-
donta) being particularly commonly used. The interiors have been
eaten out by termites (small insects like an ant but a relative of the
cockroach), reducing them to tubes with thin walls that give out a
ringing tone when flicked with a finger.
The didgeridu resembles the drone pipes of island Southeast Asia
made from wide-stemmed bamboo, which was also used there for
building rafts. In Australia there is only one wide-stemmed species of
bamboo, Bambusa Arnhemica, which only grows on north Australian
tropical coasts. It is water-loving and grows in Arnhem Land and in
the Adelaide River area south of Darwin. Bambusa Arnhemica grows
to 7.6 m (25 ft) high and has a maximum diameter of 100 mm (3.9
inches).
Didgeridus appear in cave paintings in Arnhem Land dated to the
Freshwater Period spanning approximately the last 1500 years. The
players are always male. Similar pictures are found in Kimberley rock
paintings of Wandjina spirit figures in a similar time period. The
onomatopoeic name was coined by Europeans in the early twentieth
century, because the sound it produces is ‘didjerry, didjerry’. In
northern Australia there are at least 45 different Aboriginal names for
the instrument among different tribal groups, each with its own
language. Perhaps significantly, the word for didgeridu of the Warray
tribe of the Adelaide River region is ‘bambu’ and that of the Nyul
Nyul tribe of the Kimberley coast is ‘ngaribi’, which means bamboo.
Australia’s first didgeridus may therefore be imports or copies from
Asia, from where the word bamboo originates. The didgeridu may
also have evolved from emu decoys—short, hollow wooden tubes
used to lure emus and brush turkeys by imitating their calls.
Didgeridus are made from tubes that average 140 cm (55 inches) in
length. Different lengths produce different sounds, and sometimes a
 resonator is used, the far end being placed in a big shell or, nowadays,
a metal bucket.
The largest didgeridus are 4.5 m (15 ft) long and need four men to
carry them. Painted decorations are added for ceremonial use.
Didgeridus have mouthpieces made of gum or beeswax, and are
traditionally played by a male performer encircling the mouthpiece
with his lips and blowing directly into it. His tongue lies flat and his
lips vibrate, producing two or three different notes. A continuous
sound is generated by circular breathing, whereby air is inhaled
through the nose by rapid sniffs while air held in the cheeks is
simultaneously exhaled into the instrument. Didgeridus were used in
both sacred and secular contexts and have now become pan-
Australian instruments now also occasionally played in secular
contexts by women.

As children grew older, there were more serious stories that explained
life and death, relations between people and the moral code, and the
Dreaming. Lighter ‘gossip’ songs dealt with everyday incidents,
particularly gossip about ‘sweethearts’.
A public or ‘outside’ version of major myths was told to the whole
community, but further, higher levels of meaning were revealed after
initiation. Sacred songs enshrined special beliefs or instructions from
Ancestral Beings, and some were acted out in ritual. The more important
myths were ‘owned’ by certain tribal elders. Among the Arrernte people,
only men who belonged to a certain stretch of country and owned the
associated stories were entitled to repeat them and perform the associated
rituals.
In Central Australia there is a tradition of group singing—men together
or women together or both. Songs consist of a short phrase repeated over
and over accompanied by boomerang clap sticks, the melodic lines being a
series of descending patterns. Further north there is more individual
singing. Most traditional songs are accompanied by clap sticks, the
didgeridu in Arnhem Land and, in part of Cape York, by skin drums.18
One of the most widespread beliefs concerns the Rainbow Serpent—a
powerful symbol of both the creative and destructive power of nature. The
rainbow is thought of as a great snake or serpent, sometimes male and
sometimes female. The Rainbow Serpent forms a link between earthly
places such as waterfalls, where he manifests himself, and the sky above, to
which he raises himself. His symbols are quartz crystals in the south and
pearl shell in the north—both brilliant, shimmering, iridescent substances
containing his power. Both are used in rain-making ceremonies, for the
Rainbow Serpent appears in the sky with the showers and storms that bring
the rain at the end of the dry season. In the Western Desert he guards
waterholes where pearl shells are stored, and brings rain and life to a thirsty
land. Whirlwinds are said to be the Rainbow Serpent’s head looking above
the earth as he crawls beneath. Everywhere the rainbow symbolises rain,
water and fertility. In the monsoonal north, rain-making rites were
conducted before the wet season. A whistling sound was heard before the
Rainbow Snake’s appearance—the noise of the storm whistling through his
horns. Many tribes believed that without the Rainbow Serpent the earth
would become parched and life would cease.19

Language
The main groupings of Aboriginal languages were as different from each
other as German and French or Hindi and Bengali (see chapter 6). There
was no common language across the continent, but there was extensive
contact between neighbouring language groups for trade, ceremonial life
and the exchange of marriage partners. Often children would have parents
who spoke different languages; they used their mother’s tongue in the
earliest years but most changed to their father’s language before reaching
puberty. Quite often they learnt three or four languages, and might be able
to understand several more. Indeed the Original Australians were possibly
the most multilingual people in the world.
Dialect chains enabled communication between different groups. Group
A understood group B, group B understood C, who understood D, but A
might not be able to understand C, or B understand D. Long dialect chains
existed in Central Queensland and the Western Desert, where dialect chains
extending 3000 km (1850 miles) have been identified. Sadly, over a
hundred Aboriginal languages have now disappeared, another hundred are
almost dead and less than twenty are still being learnt by children.
All Aboriginal languages have a rich vocabulary and complex grammar.
Linguistics professor Bob Dixon regards Australian languages as more
similar in their grammatical organisation to the classical languages of
Greek, Latin and Sanskrit than to modern ones such as English.20 They
have conjugation for verbs and declension for nouns, and many also have a
gender system for nouns. The Dyirbal language of north Queensland has
four genders—masculine, feminine, neuter and edible. The edible gender
refers to food plants, a useful grammatical category in a rainforest
environment with over 700 plant species, of which only-one third are edible
and many are poisonous. The edible gender was an ingenious way of
teaching children the difference.
Aboriginal languages each contain up to 10,000 words, a similar number
to spoken English. Special features are pronouns that distinguish not only
‘you’ singular and ‘you’ plural but also ‘you-two’, ‘you-many’, ‘we-two’,
‘we-many-of-us’, ‘they two’ and ‘they many’.
The languages vary widely in vocabulary and grammatical structure but
also generally resemble each other and usually employ a modest range of
speech sounds of similar type. Words tend to be of two or more syllables
and to end in a vowel. The main stress is usually on the first syllable. Some
consonants such as ‘s’ and ‘v’ are rarely used and ‘ng’ (as in singer) often
occurs at the beginning of a word. There are frequently only three vowels.
These are:

1. ‘a’ as in ‘mat’ or ‘but’, or sometimes long as in ‘far’ (written ‘aa’)

2. ‘i’ as in ‘bit’ (never as in ‘bite’) or sometimes long as in ‘steel’ (written
‘ii’)
3. ‘u’ as in ‘put’ or ‘boot’ (never as in ‘but’).

Word meanings were extended to cover new items. Horses became

known in the Sydney region as ‘yaraman’, meaning long-toothed one, and
this name spread quickly with the colonists. Money was termed ‘gadna’,
signifying pebble, by the Arabana of South Australia; telephone wires were
known as ‘yooroo’, a spider’s web, by the Gooniyandi of Western Australia.
Aeroplanes were called ‘kantyal’, meaning eaglehawk (wedge-tailed eagle)
by the Wunambal in the Kimberley. The Andegerebinha people of the
Northern Territory have also extended the meaning of their word for
eaglehawk—they use it to mean ‘policeman’, because ‘he swoops down and
grabs you’.21 There is now a revival in the teaching of indigenous
languages in New South Wales and other states where they had virtually
died out.

Medicine men
Healers, ‘clever men’ or medicine men possessed spiritual powers derived
from the Dreaming. Power came from an initiation ritual involving rebirth,
symbolised by new ‘insides’ and magical substances.
The public account of rituals adopted by Dreaming spirits in creating
Arrernte medicine men was that the candidate:
goes to the mouth of their cave, and when they notice him there at daybreak, they throw an
invisible lance which pierces his neck from behind, passes through his tongue, making a large
hole in it, and comes out through his mouth … he drops dead and is carried into the cave. The
spirits then remove his internal organs and provide him with a new set, together with a supply of
magical stones on which his power will depend. He later comes to life again but is for a time
insane. When he is partly recovered he is led back by the spirits to his own people.22

Ethnographic photographs of Arrernte medicine men show the telltale,

finger-sized round hole pierced through the tongue. Other rituals involved
putting the initiate into a trance. Some healers had earlier suffered an
extraordinary ordeal or near-death experience; there was no direct
inheritance of healing powers, although in some regions sons and brothers
of healers also became medicine men. Healers had special skills but were
not full-time specialists and did not hold political power. Their role was to
provide diagnosis, treatment, advice, explanation and reassurance, a role
comparable to Western psychiatrists.
Techniques used included ‘singing’ patients into the desired state or
‘extracting’ harmful items from the body by rubbing, sucking or
manipulation. The great value of such healers is their ability to provide
culturally relevant, authoritative explanations and reassurance in an
understandable, non-threatening way. The few healers who still exist have
therefore sometimes been employed as health workers in medical services
in outback Australia, but some preach strongly against injections,
painkillers and evacuation of infants with chronic diarrhoea or other
afflictions, and their employment by medical services is, as a result,
controversial.
Magic and sorcerers
There were three sorts of ‘magic’—‘productive magic’ (fertility rites,
increase ceremonies, rain-making and love magic), ‘protective magic’
(healing or counteracting the effects of accident or misfortune) and
‘destructive magic’ (sorcery intended to bring injury, illness or death to
others).
The role of a medicine man was usually distinct from that of a sorcerer.
Sorcerers were universally feared as causers of death and stealers of the
soul but some tribes thought power for good or evil resided in the same
person. Western Desert medicine men or ‘Men of High Degree’ both cured
sorcery victims and used sorcery themselves.
‘Pointing bones’—skewers made from the long-bones of men, emus or
kangaroos—are perhaps the most famous of Aboriginal artefacts. The tip
was sharply pointed and the butt covered with resin. String made from
human hair was attached to the butt. Pointing the bone caused evil force to
enter the victim’s body and extract the life essence, which flowed back into
the bone and was captured in the resin.
Bone-pointing was practised by sorcerers and other senior, initiated men
and women, who made sure the victims became aware of the evil spell,
sometimes by leaving the bone where they would find it. Given belief in its
power, the victim often fell ill and died, for this was a psychological
weapon. If it failed, it was explained that either the ritual was not performed
properly or the counteracting magic was too strong. In Central Australia
when a plane first flew overhead medicine men attempted to drive away the
monster by pointing bones at it. Belief in sorcery is so universal that most
deaths apart from those caused by accidents and fighting are still attributed
to it in traditional communities.23
Other objects associated with sorcery were kadaitja shoes, made from
emu feathers, marsupial fur string and sacred blood. The shoes were worn
by parties seeking to avenge an ill, as they disguised the identity of those
who went kadaitja, for such are the tracking abilities of desert Aborigines
that without emu-feather shoes the attackers’ individual footprints could be
identified. In Central Australia, the men who wore them first underwent the
painful ordeal of having their little toes dislocated. The little toes then acted
as ‘eyes’, seeing any roots or other obstacles in the way. In a typical
kadaitja raid, the avengers would creep towards the victim’s camp and the
sorcerer would throw an invisible spear into the victim’s back. Then the
sorcerer was believed to apply a magical stone to the wound, making it
disappear without trace. The kadaitja party then hid and watched, and if the
victim was not dead within two or three days, they went and killed him.
Sometimes the victim was warned of his peril in a dream. Myths tell how
dreams were made by birds, and when Willy-wagtail saw a bone being
pointed, he told Cockatoo, who put a dream inside the victim’s head, telling
him who was pointing the bone so that he might ask his own medicine man
to ward off the evil spell. Kadaitja raids were therefore usually performed at
night to keep them secret from the birds.

Shamans
Are there shamans in Aboriginal Australia? The word comes from Siberia,
where ‘saman’ is ‘one who is excited or raised’. Most writers use ‘shaman’
generically to describe a person who enters a trance-like state to gain
spiritual inspiration or effect mystical cures. Among hunter-gatherers this is
usually achieved through drumming, singing, dance and physical
exhaustion, without the use of hallucinogenic substances. Anthropologist
Matthias Guenther regards Australian medicine men as shamans and
Australia as sharing in two key shamanic concepts: a multilayered universe
and two periods of existence, the Dreamtime and the present day. The tiers
of the Australian universe are connected vertically by a rainbow, mountain
or cosmic tree.24
Australian Aborigines also present the most thorough instance of ‘world-
enchantment’, where the world of living people is strongly imbued with
spiritual significance. Landscapes bear the all-pervasive marks of Ancestral
Beings and totemic spirits, whose songlines cross the country. Burial sites
are particularly important, and funerals in traditional communities tend to
be lengthy rituals, extending for days or even weeks.

Women healers and bush medicine

Women played a major role in health care, for older women were the most
knowledgeable practitioners of bush medicine, herbal remedies and
midwifery. They also knew the properties of bush foods. Some plants are
poisonous unless specially treated. For instance, nuts of Macrozamia and
other cycads are toxic unless the poisons are removed by fermentation or
lengthy leaching in water. Cycad kernels are safe to eat only if frothy or
mouldy, when they are ground into a starchy ‘flour’ and baked into cycad
‘bread’. Other fruits are known for their health-giving qualities—the wild
plum (Terminalia ferdinandiana) is probably the world’s richest source of
vitamin C.
Many ailments, such as insect- or snakebites, wounds, boils, toothache,
constipation and diarrhoea, were treated with barks, roots, leaves or
minerals. A paste of ochre heals sores, rich goanna fat soothes burns, and
eucalyptus gum salves toothache and dental cavities. Soaked wattlebark
was drunk as cough medicine, gum leaves acted as poultices for snakebite,
headaches and boils, and stringy-bark was used as bandages. A common
treatment for snakebite was to suck the wound and bind the limb tightly.
Cramped legs were cured by ant bite. Wounds were treated with clay or
mud. A mixture of powdered white pipeclay, hot ashes and fat was
sometimes applied as a poultice, and spider’s web could be used to staunch
a flow of blood.25

Traditional life
Childhood
Aboriginal people realised the connection between sexual intercourse and
pregnancy but believed a spiritual event had to be involved for conception
to happen. Most thought a spirit child must enter the mother to give a baby
life. Spirit babies were believed to live on the branches of certain trees so
that women who walked underneath became mothers. In the Kimberley,
spirit children were supposed to live in waterholes and to enter a woman’s
womb after her husband had seen one in a dream. When a woman became
aware she was pregnant, she recalled the first signs of morning sickness and
attributed conception to the totem of the place where that had occurred.
Elsewhere, a woman who wanted a child would go to a spirit centre, such as
a waterhole, and wait with legs apart, or hope that a spirit child might
follow her back to camp.26
When birth was imminent, the mother and some other women left camp
for a birthing place, generally a shady rock-shelter with a soft earth floor.
There were special rituals to dispose of the afterbirth and to encourage
lactation. At birth, the skin of Aboriginal babies is light in colour, so ashes
and charcoal mixed with goanna fat or mother’s milk were applied to
prevent sunburn. After a few days, the skin darkens, except on the soles and
palms. Babies were breastfed for an average of 2–4 years. Toddlers were
fed eggs, bone marrow, grubs and cooked lizard tails. Babies slept in large
wooden ‘coolamons’ (oval carrying-dishes) filled with sand that could
easily be changed. On cold nights the mother scooped a shallow hole in
sand or earth, lit a small fire in it, and, when it had burned down, placed the
baby in the cradle in the fire-warmed hole and covered it with warm ashes.
Babies were carried everywhere on the hip, under the arm or slung across
the small of the back with feet through one arm and neck through the other,
where they slept peacefully. (Childless women carried dingo pups slung the
same way and used them for warmth on frosty ‘five-dog nights’.)
Babies were known by their relationship to others, such as ‘little sister’.
Later, nicknames were bestowed, some of which lasted a lifetime. Personal
names were not given until children began to walk. Names given to boys
during initiation remained secret and were never spoken aloud. When
Aborigines first met white people, they often asked to be named. Surnames
were frequently acquired by adopting the names of ‘bosses’ or cattle
properties or those of white fathers, which is why many Aborigines have
such English-sounding names. In tribal communities, traditional naming
continues, except that nowadays Christian first names are bestowed at birth
and totem, clan or ‘skin names’ may be used as surnames. ‘Skin names’ are
ways of subdividing people in broad communities numbering, usually,
thousands. I had the honour of receiving a ‘skin name’—Nangari—after
several years’ fieldwork with a tribal group in the Territory. Classificatory
family trees are exceedingly complicated but it only took elder Elsie
Raymond a minute to work out in her head my relationship with every other
person present. In fact, we all ended up in gales of laughter for I proved to
be the mother of one of my fellow researchers, linguist Francesca Merlan.
Traditional upbringing was reasonably carefree, but children learnt the
moral code of caring and sharing and skills for later life. They were taught
to recognise footprints in the sand, first those of their mother and then the
tracks of every Australian creature. As Basedow related: ‘One often has
occasion to walk into a camp and find a … pitifully howling little urchin
pleading to be taken to its mother. The only aid forthcoming from the
blacks will be to direct the attention of the child to the footprints of the
parent in the sand, and to urge it to follow them up.’27 Toddlers stayed with
grandparents in camp while their parents went out foraging, and soon began
learning stories, songs and dance steps.
Toys were few. Games for young children imitated adult activities.
Miniature spears were made for boys, who went out together hunting birds
and lizards or engaging in mock battles. Later they learnt to throw spears at
moving targets such as bark discs bowled along the ground. Cross-shaped
pieces of wood with arms of unequal length bounced along when bowled,
imitating a kangaroo’s hopping gait. Girls were given little digging sticks,
baskets, carrying-dishes or miniature grindstones and encouraged to help
gather and process fruits and seeds. They also had ‘dolls’ in the form of
twigs, twisted roots or pieces of clay, decorated for corroborees with red
and white paint. Desert girls played a game called ‘mani-mani’, using
leaves in the sand to re-enact incidents of camp life. String games (similar
to cat’s-cradle) were popular, using string made from natural fibre or human
hair. Some girls could make 200 complicated patterns, representing
crocodile nests with eggs or turtles on a log. Balls were made of grass or fur
tied with vines or string and covered with beeswax. One ball game was a
sort of aerial soccer; the ball was kicked into the air and the aim was to
keep it aloft using only the feet. Another game, which was a bit more like
rugby, involved two teams of about six players throwing the ball among
themselves until their opponents intercepted. In modern times indigenous
people, both men and women, excel at the AFL and NRL codes of rugby
league. In a Queensland game that resembled hockey, stone balls were hit
with bent-ended sticks. In Arnhem Land, boys would take a large, oblong
bark slab, heat it, bend its tip upwards and polish the underside with resin
and hot ashes. They could then stand on the small sledge, propel it with one
foot like a scooter and slide across soft mud at tremendous speed.28
Education involved children learning survival skills, appropriate ways to
behave towards other family members, their obligations to each other,
religion and kinship—the relationships that exist between relatives. By the
time children reached puberty, they had learnt a great deal and knew what
behaviour was expected of them. Boys and girls were treated much the
same when young, but this changed as they went through their respective
initiations into adulthood.
Social organisation
The smallest social unit was the family—a man, his wife or wives and his
children. Families were often self-contained, self-supporting units, and in
harsh environments might forage alone.29 Most Aboriginal children grew
up in an extended family, and a few such households camped and foraged
together. A typical band comprised three to six households averaging about
25 people, including three or even four generations. Often the men in one
band were from different clans, because young husbands usually did bride
service by going to live and hunt temporarily in the band of their wife’s
parents.
As they grew up, Aboriginal children learnt their family tree and how
they should address and behave towards each relative. As well as biological
relationships, there are ‘classificatory’ ones. Many Aboriginal children
appear to have several mothers and fathers, because they also call their
maternal aunts ‘mother’ and paternal uncles ‘father’.

Initiation of girls
A girl at puberty went through certain rituals to mark her transition to
womanhood, but because these were celebrated at the menarche, the timing
of which was unpredictable, ceremonies were small in scale. Northern
coastal tribes had the most elaborate rites, where a girl spent a few days
away from camp with close female relations. As Catherine Berndt
witnessed in Arnhem Land: ‘The girl is a striking figure as she comes out of
seclusion, smeared with red ochre and brightly decorated, her white
forehead band shining. At the climax, all the women escort her at dawn to a
freshwater stream or lagoon; and even the oldest among them forget their
age as they splash and sing in the shallows.’30 Afterwards the girl may
participate in women’s secret ceremonies relating to pregnancy, birth and
lactation. During initiation some girls were purified by a smoking ceremony
or ritual bathing. There was no tattooing but cicatrisation was widespread.
In order to demonstrate their conquest of fear and pain, during mourning or
simply as adornment, both boys and girls had cuts inflicted on their chests,
stomachs, thighs or buttocks with stone or shell knives; the weals rose in
pronounced ridges after ashes or clay were rubbed into the wounds. Body
decoration in the Western Desert included patterned burns, made by holding
hot coals against the skin. Some tribes removed two joints from the little
finger of a female-initiate; on the Daly River, a ligature of spider’s web was
used to cut circulation until the end dropped off. A similar operation using
cobweb was performed on girls of some east coast tribes and ‘when the
joint mortifies, the hand is held in an ant-bed for an hour or so, for the joint
to be eaten off’.31

Male initiation
Boys were usually initiated at puberty, when the beard began to grow. The
process involved lengthy separation from camp and the company of
women. Senior men took boys off to seclusion in order to train and learn
self-sufficiency. Women had an important role in the preparatory
ceremonies and in providing food for celebrants, but were rigidly excluded
from later sacred rituals. Initiation usually involved severe tests, which
caused fear and pain, and culminated in the ordeal of tooth avulsion,
circumcision or depilation to mark the novitiates’ passage out of women’s
control. It was a long period of physical and mental trial, testing and the
gradual learning of tribal lore. Initiation transformed boys into men,
allowing them to marry and father children, learn the sacred doctrines and
on maturity take a full part in the secret sacred life of the group.32
Initiation is a symbolic enactment of death and rebirth. Some tribes
believe the young boy is swallowed by an Ancestral Being, who eventually
vomits him out as a man. Others see the initiate as returning to the Fertility
Mother’s womb to be reborn, his foreskin being cut to symbolise severing
the umbilical cord. In some northern regions, circumcision was followed
later by sub-incision. Circumcision seems to have originated inland in the
Top End but it never reached the Darwin region and some coastal
Kimberley Aborigines whom Dampier met in 1688 had their foreteeth
missing but were not circumcised. Special artefacts widely used in
ceremonies were bullroarers—thin, oval pieces of wood, suspended from a
string at one end. When whirled round at arm’s length, bullroarers make a
weird, buzzing sound that becomes louder the faster they are swung.
Aborigines interpreted the strange, high-pitched whine as the voice of an
Ancestral Being. Bullroarers were used in many other countries and
throughout mainland Australia, except in the southwest and northwest
corners and Tasmania. Bullroarers are no longer sacred and are sold in
tourist shops. The most secret sacred Australian artefacts are ‘tjuringa’ or
‘churinga’—elongated, flat pieces of wood or stone incised with
predominantly geometric designs, particularly spirals and circles. Most
tjuringa are about 60 × 8 cm (24 × 3 inches) long. Traditionally, sacred
boards and stones were stored in remote caves, but now some special
‘keeping places’ have been built for security.
Education of initiates continued throughout life, for knowledge meant
power, responsibility and regular ceremonial duties. After initiation, usually
at about the age of fourteen, the young man was welcomed back to his own
group and was entitled to marry, although it might be many years before he
obtained a wife.

Marriage and sex

Kinship laws were designed to avoid incest, and marriage partners were
taken from outside the family group, although there were regions, such as
the Mitchell River, Queensland, where first and second cousin marriages
were preferred. Most Aboriginal regional communities were divided into
two named, ritually distinct, intermarrying halves (moieties) and some were
further subdivided. The divisions made it clear to everyone whom they
could marry. A spouse was selected from a different kinship group, usually
the other half of their society.
Arrangements in many groups were made by the girl’s maternal uncle. In
some northern tribes it was virtually compulsory for a married man to see
that his sister’s daughter was married to his wife’s mother’s brother. In
other words, there was an exchange of nieces between two men of
succeeding generational levels, or in Western terms, his niece married her
maternal great uncle. Not only did the bride have no say in the matter but
she was forced to marry a much older man. On the other hand, widows
were often given in marriage to younger men.
Strong taboos banned contact between a man and his mother-in-law, who
were forbidden to converse or even look at each other. The reason for
mother-in-law avoidance becomes clear in the context of the betrothal
system. At the end of an initiation ceremony, when the whole intermarrying
community was present, a meeting was held to arrange boys’ betrothals. A
woman in the correct kinship relationship to a boy was chosen—not to be
the man’s wife but to be the mother of his wife. The young man might have
to wait decades for her to produce a daughter, but meanwhile they could not
even look at each other. This was to prevent the possibility of sexual
intercourse between the two and the young man marrying his own daughter.
Girls were customarily promised as wives when they were babies, or
even beforehand to men old enough to be their fathers or even grandfathers;
a ten-year age gap was normal and sometimes it was twenty or even thirty
years. Young men normally had only one wife but many older men had at
least two wives. A man’s status depended on the number of his wives; the
maximum recorded among the Tiwi was 29. In western Arnhem Land, two
or three wives were the average, with the maximum about six, but in
northeast Arnhem Land ten or twelve wives were not unusual. In desert
regions, men usually had one or two wives, rarely three.
Polygamy still exists in Aboriginal society: about 40 per cent of
marriages in some northern and central tribes still follow ‘customary law’
and polygamous tribal marriages still occur. Over a lifetime, most tribal
Aborigines have more than one spouse, the difference between the sexes
being that women are allowed only one husband at once. Traditionally,
there were few or no unmarried women, for widows were usually
remarried, often to a deceased husband’s brother. This ensured that old
people always had relatives responsible for feeding them.
Many girls were married before puberty. Groote Eylandt girls went to
live with their ‘promised’ husband at the age of 8–9 years, Tiwi girls at 8–
10 years, and Warlpiri girls at 9–12 years. However, girls of the Central
Desert tribe did not marry until they reached puberty, which came later
because of their strenuous lives and malnourishment (14–15 years).33 Early
marriage for girls is readily explained in economic terms. Females were
economic commodities as well as sexual objects, valued both as active
foragers and as producers of the next generation of food-producers. A girl
therefore often married young, moved to her husband’s clan territory and
was ‘apprenticed’ to her older co-wives to learn the distribution of food in
her new home. Prior to marriage, the future bridegroom, unless he already
had one or more wives, might pay ‘bride price’, living in the unmarried
men’s camp and hunting to support himself and provide some food for his
future bride’s parents. Sometimes after marriage the couple stayed for some
years with the girl’s parents so that the son-in-law could hunt for them, but
later they moved back to the husband’s traditional territory. As producers of
the more reliable and larger part of food consumed, females were extremely
valuable economically. Women reached peak efficiency as food collectors
in middle age, when no longer tied down with pregnancy and child care,
whereas men’s greatest productivity as hunters came at about 25 years of
age, when they had become fit, strong, experienced hunters. The system of
marrying young girls to much older men meant that old men unable to hunt
received plentiful food from their wives and younger relatives.
Aboriginal marriage was usually devoid of elaborate rites. Often the
bride was simply handed over after she had been ritually deflowered. In
some northern tribes, female kinsfolk pierced the girl’s hymen with a
digging stick and then led her to her promised husband. Fire symbolised
marriage, and when the bride was to be handed over two firesticks were
tapped and placed beside the man, the bride came to him and together they
kindled a fire; the firestick and grooved timber symbolise male and female
union.34
Aboriginal concepts of beauty stress youth. Sexual attraction was not so
tied to appearance but was often ‘ensured’ by singing and ‘love magic’. The
most desirable man was a newly initiated youth; the most attractive girl was
one who had just reached puberty, a girl with small rounded breasts not yet
drooping from years of suckling. Other attractive features are a healthy
body, clear skin, a good crop of hair, a straight nose (in Arnhem Land), or a
broad nose and long legs and arms (in the Western Desert). To call a woman
‘bony’ or ‘skinny’ was to use a term of abuse, implying she was no good at
the food quest. (When Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited Uluru,
local Aboriginal women commented on her thinness—‘Poor lady, she can’t
afford to eat.’) Traditional hunter-gatherers were so active, however, that
most were very slim.35
Some couples eloped—a very dangerous undertaking, because once a girl
was promised or married to a man she was his property—and at times the
lovers were pursued and killed. On occasion, girls were captured and
carried off by men of another clan; some young men became frustrated by
the long wait for a wife and went on women-hunting raids, ignoring the
danger of payback killings to avenge the loss. Wives were lent, shared and
exchanged, premarital and extra-marital sex with ‘sweethearts’ was rife,
and there were many ‘affairs’ between wives of old men and young
bachelors. There was little or no homosexuality, but enthusiastic
heterosexuality. In many Aboriginal societies, such as those in the Great
Victoria Desert, intercourse before puberty and marriage was countenanced
and even encouraged; in Western Arnhem Land in the 1960s, ‘a girl may
have her first full sexual association at the age of about nine, sometimes
earlier, a boy not until twelve to fourteen or so’.36 This early sexual activity
continues and Aboriginal communities have extremely high rates of teenage
pregnancy.
Sex even came into punishment, for if a woman transgressed customary
law or some charge was trumped-up against her, she was offered a choice of
forfeiting her life or, ‘if she is willing to go out into the bush, making
herself available to all the local men for as long as they wish, the episode
will be overlooked and no more will be said.’ Stanner recounted that on the
Daly River in 1958 his friend Durmugam sadly told him that his second-
youngest wife had been gang-raped on the trumped-up charge of having
viewed a sacred bullroarer in his camp. She ‘had been sexually abused, a
traditional penalty, by a number of men, mainly Maringar [his enemies], on
the ground that she had illicitly seen a bullroarer in Durmugam’s camp—a
pretext, he said vehemently, a lie. Would he, who knew the dangers, be
likely to have a bullroarer there? They were all hidden in the bush.’37

Ceremonies
Apart from initiations, the major rituals are increase and rainmaking
ceremonies and funerals. Common elements are chanting, dancing, body-
decoration and headdresses such as huge ‘cones’ decorated with bird-down
in Central Australia or masks in the Torres Strait Islands.
One of the most elaborate increase ceremonies is the Kunapipi fertility
cult. Kunapipi is a great Earth Mother, the living essence and symbol of
fertility, and much of the ritual centres on procreation, pregnancy, childbirth
and eternal renewal. During the fertility ceremonies, ordinary kinship
taboos are ignored and a man may have sex with his tribal sister or mother-
in-law. In eastern Arnhem Land and on the Roper River, young girls were
deflowered with a specially shaped boomerang on the ceremonial ground,
followed by ritual plural intercourse. The Kunapipi cult and some of the
practices continue, for when I began fieldwork in the Northern Territory in
1988 I was strongly warned by the Sacred Sites Authority to beware of
invitations to participate in any ceremonies.
Many increase ceremonies were simple rituals performed to nurture the
creative powers of an Ancestral Being and thereby increase the population
of the natural species associated with that Being. For example, in the
Musgrave Ranges southeast of Uluru is a large, curiously eroded boulder
believed to be the totemic body of the pink cockatoo woman, Tukalili. By
pounding the boulder, Aborigines release the life essence of cockatoos,
which rises into the air in the form of rock dust and fertilises living female
cockatoos, causing them to lay more eggs.38
Equally important in the dry heart of the continent were rain-making
ceremonies, which were aimed at invoking the help of the Rainbow Serpent
or other Ancestral Beings. Procedures for making rain varied widely but
often involved the use of crystals of quartz or calcite or pearl shells, which
were sometimes placed in a waterhole. At Yiwarlarlay, the major rain-
making site of the Lightning Brothers southwest of Katherine, Northern
Territory, thousands of ‘rain cuts’ have been made in the soft sandstone of
an imposing rock outcrop. It seems that there were singing and dancing and
then each man present cut a groove in the rock to make ‘Old Man Rain’
bleed.39
All these ceremonies focus on continuance of life or life after death.
Death marks only the end of bodily existence, as the soul is indestructible.
Spirits may have two forms, the soul itself and a potentially malignant spirit
able to harm the living. When death comes, body and soul complete the life
cycle by returning to their ‘bone and soul country’, whence the spirit may
be reincarnated and again enter a woman’s body to be reborn. Rituals
enable undying spirits of the dead to return safely to a spirit home or
totemic centre by way of the sky, a waterhole or an offshore island. A
terrible fate in Aboriginal society was for one’s corpse to be left for animals
or birds to consume; interments were protected from dingoes by large stone
cairns. Enemies were left unburied but never kinsfolk, except in extreme
circumstances.
Aboriginal funerals are long and elaborate. At funerals, close relatives
wailed and injured themselves—the mother, daughters and wives of a dead
man scratched their faces or hit their heads with sharp stones until blood
flowed, and father, brothers and sons gashed their thighs. The dead person’s
possessions were ritually destroyed or buried in the grave and the place of
death was avoided. Western Desert people burnt the deceased’s shelter and
belongings and moved their camp far away. These customs arose partly
from grief and partly to keep evil, trickster spirits of the dead away from the
living.
 Burial methods included placement inside hollow trees, log coffins or
bark cylinders, cremation (sometimes used when burial had to be quick, or
one year after death as among the Wik, who used desiccation), interment or
mummification on freestanding platforms—the skull and long-bones were
then placed in a rock-shelter. When the body was interred, an aperture was
left in the earth mound to allow the soul to escape, and sometimes fires
were lit to keep it warm until it departed.40
Funerals of tribal elders continued for weeks. There are traditional
prohibitions on uttering the name of the dead person. For instance, when I
went to Uluru in the 1980s to help Aboriginal women record their dances
and ceremonies, I found that another Josephine had recently died, and I was
introduced as ‘kunmanara’—‘she whose name may not be spoken’.
Fortunately, such taboos last only for a period. Words resembling the
deceased’s name are also banned and often replaced by a different word
from a neighbouring tribe. Some Aboriginal organisations produce
obituaries of leading Aborigines without mentioning their names.
Photographs can also cause problems. My first experience of this came in
1980 when I was working for the Australian Heritage Commission on site
protection and visited Alice Springs to meet Aboriginal women about a
sacred site threatened by a development proposal. They were camping near
the site and asked me to take photographs in support of their campaign.
Tragically, one night a tent caught fire and a child died, so they asked me to
destroy all group photos. Nowadays, photographs of famous Aboriginal
people are everywhere, and it is considered neither desirable nor practicable
to withdraw those images when the person dies.

Elders
It took 30 or 40 years for Aborigines to be taught the whole encyclopedia of
spiritual knowledge. Gradually they learnt the full song cycles and dances,
visited all the sacred sites and were shown the sacred objects and designs
belonging to each ritual performance. Most Australian societies,
particularly in desert regions, were strictly segregated, and men’s and
women’s ritual life or ‘business’ were kept well apart. Those who
completed this long learning process were regarded with great respect as
leaders of their community. They bridged past and present and provided
guidance for the future by passing on their skills, knowledge and wisdom.
Authority rested with these legitimate keepers of ritual knowledge, and
tended to increase with age. This system has now generally broken down,
but initiation ceremonies are again being held in some outback regions,
having skipped a generation. Once initiation ceremonies ceased, the next
generation was not considered qualified to receive sacred knowledge that
then died with the elders, unless it was passed on to a non-Aboriginal. In
my own experience, elders have sometimes asked me to ‘book ’im’, that is,
write this information down before it is lost. Similarly, the only speakers of
some Aboriginal languages are now non-indigenous linguists.
Traditional Aboriginal society was egalitarian. No adult man regarded
himself as subordinate, because all had their Dreaming and ‘country’. It was
a classless, unstratified society, without any formal government. Unlike
Melanesia or Polynesia, there were neither chiefs nor headmen. Although
certain people might achieve prestige and power and build up a following,
nowhere in Australia was there a regular system of hereditary leaders,
chiefs, headmen or ‘bosses’ as they are now called. (When I was running
Earth-watch expeditions in the Northern Territory, I became known as ‘little
big boss’!) Decisions were made by consensus of male ruling elders. Not all
older men were included in this decision-making process, for some were
too old or ill or had transgressed tribal law. Typically there would be a
meeting sitting down in the shade and, after much discussion, agreement
would be reached on the right course of action. Such meetings have been
called ‘councils’ by some anthropologists, who drew attention to an
elaborate system of dispute resolution recorded in mid- to late nineteenth
century among Lower Murray River people, but the fact that women played
a prominent role in such meetings may indicate post-contact influences.
People of the Cape York Peninsula were significantly more hierarchical and
had a more developed system of individual authority than those of the
Western Desert.41
Decision-making in Aboriginal communities is an extremely lengthy
process—consultations with mining company executives have taken weeks,
months or years before a decision is reached, which may well later be
overturned by another meeting. Traditionally, women were excluded from
the decision-making, but nowadays Aboriginal women have achieved a far
greater voice in Aboriginal affairs.
Law and order
‘Law’ in a Western sense did not exist in Aboriginal Australia but there
were principles of communal regulation and punishment for transgressors,
now known as ‘customary law’. Well-understood rules of proper behaviour
were generally obeyed, because all children were taught that their infraction
would result in supernatural, personal punishment. Trivial offences were
dealt with by immediate family or kin, using ridicule or threats. Adultery
and other transgressions of personal rights were, and still are, dealt with by
the individuals concerned. This frequently brings those who mete out
punishment into conflict with Western law, but nowadays exile to a remote
community is often used as an alternative to imprisonment. Stealing (except
of women) was rare in traditional times but now theft from non-indigenous
people lands many Aboriginal youths in detention.
Punishments for serious offences were decided by ruling elders. Incest
and breaking sacred laws were major crimes. Some offences were
punishable by death or exile, with the alternative for women of mass rape.
Other crimes received a sentence of spearing in the thigh; offenders stood
and faced a squad of spearmen with only their dodging ability and perhaps a
shield to protect them, and some lost a leg or even their lives in the process.
Ruling elders also conducted inquests. Whether death came from snakebite,
shark or crocodile attack, illness or accident, it was attributed to evil spirits
working on behalf of an enemy. This belief also applies when a white
person dies; for instance, when a Northern Territory researcher, Howard
McNickle, died of cancer in the 1980s, local Aboriginal people told me they
believed it was because he had allegedly visited sacred sites without their
permission. Similarly, when Aborigines who accompanied us on fieldwork
became ill, they attributed their illnesses to kicking a dangerous rock or
taking ochre from a forbidden source.

9. FISHING METHODS
Aboriginal fishing was most advanced on the northern and eastern
coasts, using over fifteen different methods Australia-wide. The
largest sea creatures—turtles, sharks, codfish, dolphins and dugong—
were usually taken by rope-tailed harpoons from canoes. Sometimes
sea turtles were caught by men diving from a canoe, slipping a noose
over the flippers and towing them ashore. Another method used was
to turn the turtle on its back and hold it underwater to drown. Fish
were taken in rock-walled traps that caught them as the tide ebbed.
Some hunters cleverly used one creature to catch another. In the
tropics, a sucker-fish could be tethered to a long cord and released
near a large turtle; it would attach to the turtle, which could then be
towed ashore by means of the line. Elsewhere (in Moreton Bay,
Queensland and Proper Bay, South Australia) it was the practice to
feed and ‘tame’ dolphins and use them to catch fish. When fishermen
saw a shoal of fish, they ran to the shore and beat the water—their
normal way of calling dolphins to come and feed. The dolphins
headed for the shallows, driving the fish before them to be speared by
waiting fishermen, and were rewarded for their efforts by a good
meal.a
Australia has both the large, man-eating saltwater Crocodylus
porosus and the smaller, less dangerous freshwater Crocodylus
johnstoni. ‘Freshies’ were caught by two men diving into deep water,
one putting his hand underneath the crocodile’s jaw and his thumbs
over its eyes while the other grabbed the tail and kicked up to bring it
to the surface. Those on land put a strong kapok vine round the snout,
hauled it out hanging onto the hide, put a flat rock underneath its jaw
and killed it by hammering the head with a large stone. The crocodile
was then steamed in a ground oven.
Nets were widely used. Most were made from knotted vegetable
fibre. In Queensland, strong nets were fashioned from vines and
shaped into large bags, and men in canoes drove dolphins and
dugongs into the nets and drowned them.
Aboriginal men used buoyant multi-pronged fishing spears from
shore or canoe. Sometimes they dived underwater to transfix fish with
a short spear; others stood motionless in their flimsy canoes or lay
across them with their face in the water, ready to spear any fish
venturing within range.
Small canoes were used by just one woman, often with a toddler on
her shoulders clinging to her hair and a baby tucked between breast
and raised knees.b The early colonists often saw canoes with smoke
rising from within. The fire was kindled on a bed of clay, seaweed or
 sand, and fish were often cooked and eaten straightaway. Much
fishing was done at night when firelight attracted prey. As they fished,
women sang, ‘inviting the fish beneath them to take their bait’.c
Women fished with lines. Shell fishhooks were introduced from
Melanesia only 1000 years ago and line fishing is restricted to
Australia’s northern and eastern coast (with some gaps) as far south as
the Victorian border. Eora women made two-ply lines by rolling long
strips of inner Kurrajong bark on their thighs and twisting them
securely together. The lines were then soaked in bloodwood tree sap
to prevent fraying and could hold fish of up to 13 kg (30 lb).

Medicine men identified the person or group who had caused the death
by sorcery, and revenge followed. Battles were formal ‘set pieces’ between
two large groups of spearmen or single warriors at intertribal gatherings. In
Central Australia in 1875, before the area was settled, a great massacre
occurred at Irbmangara (Running Creek) involving a Western Desert attack
on the Arrernte, followed by much retribution. Between 80 and 100
Arrernte men, women and children were killed and infants’ limbs were
deliberately broken. Violence may have increased in contact times, due
partly to the influence of alcohol but also to a shortage of women caused by
the impact of new diseases. In southeastern Australia, raids to acquire more
women were frequent in the nineteenth century.
The most common forms of violence were revenge attacks and payback
killings. Some feuds continue down the generations but in northern Arnhem
Land there was a special peace-making ceremony, the ‘makarrata’ or
‘magarada’. The selected or self-confessed offender had to face a barrage of
spears, but once blood was drawn his accusers were satisfied and the feud
was over.
‘Customary law’ denotes ‘right practice’, rules and the proper way of
doing things. Aboriginal law is believed to derive from the Dreaming and
therefore to be unchangeable. Some Aborigines are now seeking federal
government recognition of Aboriginal customary law, saying they would
rather undergo a physical assault with spears and clubs from their peers than
spend months or years in prison. They also complain that they are often
punished twice for a crime—once by their tribal community and a second
time under Western law. However, there are huge difficulties in encoding
the many varying laws, which often survive in just a few regions. An even
greater problem is reconciling Aboriginal traditions with Western law;
human rights groups have denounced payback punishments as barbaric and
the police have become suspicious of tribal law. It is also the case that some
murders and sexual assaults have been labelled paybacks when in fact they
are nothing of the sort.42

Traditional economic life

Economy
Traditional economy was cooperative. Much food was shared. Staple food
was collected by a woman and distributed among her and her husband’s
immediate family while large game brought back to camp by a hunter was
divided among the whole foraging group—the same system as among
Kalahari bushmen. Aboriginal Australia’s economic system was relatively
simple, with a remarkably uniform mode of production and division of
labour across the continent. Digging was deemed to be women’s work,
hence men’s reluctance to demean themselves by gardening in colonial
times.43
Women gathered most of the carbohydrate and contributed on average 50
per cent to the diet in food-rich regions and 80 per cent in harsh
environments. Carbohydrates were seasonally localised, so Aborigines were
semi-nomadic even in the richest regions. Where food was scarce, as in the
desert, people ate whatever was available, but in good years and more
fertile regions they could afford to be more selective in their diet.
Favourites were sweet native honey known as ‘sugarbag’ and ‘honey
ants’—ants with abdomens distended to the size of a grape by honey stored
by worker ants. Other prized foods were sweet waterlily tubers, eggs,
witchetty grubs (which were full of protein and fat), dingo puppies, goannas
and echidnas.
Cooking methods were few and simple—the absence of pottery or metal
containers meant traditionally nothing was boiled. Fish were sometimes
steamed in large green leaves but in arid regions this was impossible. Most
small game was covered in coals, lightly roasted and eaten half-raw. Earth
ovens were used for large culls of small game such as flying foxes and for
big creatures like kangaroos, emus or turtles. Entrails were removed,
cooked and eaten separately. A hole was dug, a fire lit, green leaves placed
on the embers, the game laid on top with hot stones or clay-balls inside the
body cavity, then covered with more leaves or paperbark and a topping of
earth or sand. An emu’s neck might protrude from the top: when steam
came out of the beak it was ready to eat. Similar but more elaborate ground
ovens were used by Torres Strait and Pacific Islanders.
The complexity of cooking varied widely across different regions.
Anthropologist Peter Sutton found that the Wik living in the wetlands of
Cape York Peninsula ‘used condiments such as native curry root to flavour
oven-baked food, chose particular bark for its flavour in cooking, and
separated raw liver from stingrays and sharks, then washed and shredded
the flesh to remove the white liquid (usually only saltwater), lightly fried
the liver in a baler shell, then packed the oily liver inside the dry flesh and
bound the lot with bush string to cook slowly close to a fire, or give as a
prized gift to a kinsperson.’44
The same basic hunting methods were used throughout Australia. Most
game was stalked by a sole spearman, with mud plastered on his body to
disguise his scent. Other techniques used were pitfall traps, nets, decoys,
hunting-hides, communal drives, brushwood fences around waterholes to
direct animals within spear-range, and poisoning of waterholes with plants
to stupefy fish and creatures that came to drink.
Birds were an important food source, especially the ostrich-sized emu.
Although fleet of foot, emus are fatally curious and fall for such tricks as a
hunter hiding behind a bush raising a feather-decorated stick—the emu
comes to investigate and promptly has a noose slipped over its head. Other
birds were taken by hand. A common strategy was to lie down in water and
hold up a fish. When a hawk swooped to snatch the bait, the hunter grabbed
it by the legs and wrung its neck. An ingenious way of catching waterfowl
was for hunters to submerge themselves in a lagoon, breathing through
hollow reeds, creep up to ducks or swans and drag them underwater by the
legs so deftly that several birds were killed at once. Fowlers also threw a
returning boomerang above a flock of ducks or parrots and imitated a
hawk’s cry, driving the bewildered birds down to water level, where several
were decapitated at one blow from a well-aimed boomerang or caught in a
net slung across a river. Cockatoos were trapped in Queensland by smearing
viscous gum on tree branches so that, when the birds alighted, they could
not escape.
 Aboriginal people produced little above their day-to-day needs, so no
specialisation of labour developed or any centralised authority to organise
food distribution. Everyone was a hunter-gatherer. The only exception was
during ceremonies, when women produced yam ‘bread’ or other stored food
to feed participants. Such large gatherings necessitated a food surplus.
Some were opportunistic get-togethers to feed on a beached whale, others
were planned gatherings that exploited seasonally abundant food.
Each spring several hundred people from different friendly tribes
journeyed to the Snowy Mountains to feast on the Bogong moth—a protein-
rich food easily collected from rock crevices where millions of moths
aestivate annually to escape the heat of their breeding grounds on the inland
plains. Timing of annual moth migrations is variable so the host tribe
awaited the moths’ arrival before sending out messengers to summon others
to the feast. (Notched message sticks were carried by these emissaries as an
aide memoire and to prove their credentials.) Corroborees were held on
ceremonial grounds in mountain valleys and then, when they saw smoke-
signals on the peaks, moth hunters climbed up, scooped drowsy moths from
their resting places and each consumed a kilogram or more of moths a day
until the supply was exhausted. Ethnographers reported that emaciated
Aboriginal men headed for the mountains each year and returned looking
sleek and fat after weeks of feasting.45
Hunter-gatherer life alternated between feast and famine. Moth numbers
varied cyclically and sometimes the moth hunters went hungry. In desert
regions ten-year droughts were, and are, not uncommon; water became as
scarce as food and desert nomads were reduced to digging up frogs and
squeezing their bodies for water. (Before the water in desert pools dries up,
frogs swallow it and bury themselves in the mud to await the next rains.)

Exchange networks
The shared features of Australian tribes owe much to exchange networks
and regular contacts in what John Mulvaney has called ‘a chain of
connection’. Items, including food, were bartered between neighbouring
groups. Many objects, ceremonies, songs and dances travelled right across
the continent following chains of waterholes. Some resources such as ochre
quarries were owned by particular families, who carefully controlled the
trade; at Mt William axe quarry in Victoria the rate of exchange was three
pieces of axe-stone for one cured possum-skin rug.

10. TORRES STRAIT ISLANDERS

Torres Strait Islanders are Australian citizens, but have their own
distinctive identity, culture and flag. In the 2016 census 649,200
people in Australia identified as indigenous—91 per cent Aboriginal,
5 per cent Torres Strait Islanders and 4.1 per cent as of both
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent.a To be recognised as a
Torres Strait Islander one must be a traditional inhabitant of the
Torres Strait Islands or descended from a Torres Strait Islander. The
Torres Strait Islanders living on the eighteen inhabited islands of the
Torres Strait and the two communities (Seisia and Bamaga) on Cape
York number about 7000. Another 20,000 or so islanders live mainly
in Queensland.
Torres Strait lies in latitudes 11–9 degrees south, between Cape
York and southeastern New Guinea. More than 100 islands lie in the
strait where the Coral and Arafura seas meet. Torres Strait only came
into being 8000–6000 years ago, when the broad land bridge that
previously joined New Guinea to mainland Australia was flooded.
Sea levels stabilised around 3000 years ago, allowing extensive, food-
rich coral reefs to develop and the islands to be occupied by people
from the north.
In physical appearance and culture the Islanders resemble the
Melanesian peoples of New Guinea rather than Australian
Aborigines. They have strong cultural links with the Papuan region of
New Guinea, but trade extensively with neighbours on both sides of
Torres Strait. The language of the eastern group of islands, Meriam
Mer, is closely related to Papuan languages, but Kala-Lagaw-Ya,
which is spoken on the other islands, has Aboriginal as well as
Papuan features. Now a common Torres Strait Creole language,
Yumpla-Tok, is widely spoken. About 85 per cent of its vocabulary
was borrowed from English and 14 per cent from indigenous
languages.
 Torres Strait Islanders have always been ocean voyagers. In the
words of George Mye of Erub (Darnley Island), ‘We are the mariners,
the people who can navigate by the stars to small dots of islands
beyond the horizon, reading the winds and tides, the reefs and skies.’
The region was linked by vast trading networks, although there was
no political unity. Each community was independent and often both at
war and in fear of head-hunting raids from neighbouring islands or
the Papuan mainland. (Head-hunting was practised widely in
prehistoric New Guinea but not in Australia.) From the islands,
Australia received turtle shells, harpoons and food, such as dried fish;
from Papua, the Islanders received bows and arrows, drums and
sailing canoes, while Australia’s earliest exports to the Islands were
spears and ochre.
Only twenty islands have sufficient freshwater to support a resident
population, but all were visited, primarily for fishing and gathering
coconuts and wood. Marine turtles provide on average 130 kg (300
lb) of meat. Dugong—large, herbivorous, tropical sea-mammals rich
in oil—yield twice as much meat as turtles and are a favourite food.
Hunters built observation platforms in shallow dugong breeding
grounds in western Torres Strait and harpooned them from outrigger
canoes. This big-game hunting was extremely dangerous and hunting
and feasting were accompanied by many rituals and taboos.
Nowadays Islanders hunt from dinghies with motors, increasing
success and reducing human fatalities. Dugong survival is a
conservation issue and no commercial exploitation is now permitted,
but small-scale traditional hunting continues.
Northern and eastern Islanders have gardens and grow yams, taro,
sweet potatoes, bananas and coconuts. Pigs were imported from
Papua but rarely bred and never became a major food as in New
Guinea. Because of its dangerous, uncharted reefs and the inhabitants’
fierce reputation, Torres Strait was little visited until 1868, when thick
beds of pearl shell were discovered. Foreign pearlers thronged there,
for pearl shell was in great demand worldwide for buttons. Islanders
numbered 4000–5000 before this influx, but soon their population
halved, due to new diseases brought by Europeans, Malays, Pacific
Islanders, Filipinos, Chinese and Japanese.
 ‘The results of this influx of foreigners might have been worse but
for the arrival of the London Missionary Society in 1871’, said
anthropologist Jeremy Beckett; ‘within a few years the Society had
installed Pacific Islander teachers throughout the Strait … The
missionaries suppressed warfare … and enforced Christian morality
through island courts. The Islanders seemed to accept these changes,
abandoning many of their customs and throwing themselves into the
life of the church.’
As George Mye recounted: ‘We became Christians after 1871,
because Christianity provided us with the opportunity of continuing
the spirituality which our traditional religion, the zogo, embodied.
Unlike some indigenous peoples elsewhere, we were able to adapt our
beliefs and worships to Christianity, and so now we are committed
Christians.’b
In 1879, the colony of Queensland acquired legal responsibility for
the Torres Strait Islands. Waiben, now Thursday Island, became the
government and commercial centre and main port. The Torres Strait
Islanders Act 1939 sanctioned indirect rule through councils elected
by each island community. During the Second World War some 800
from a population of 3000 Islanders served in the Torres Strait
Defence Force, an invaluable contribution to Australia’s defence.
A unique Australian initiative in international diplomacy was the
1978 Treaty between Australia and Papua New Guinea on maritime
boundaries, which marked out a ‘Protected Zone’ in Torres Strait
extending to the Papuan shore. Opportunities for employment
decreased when plastic buttons largely replaced pearl, but a new
industry of crayfishing developed. Nevertheless, many people had to
leave to find work, and today four out of five islanders live and work
in mainland Australia.
Modern transport and communications enable ‘expatriates’ to
maintain their links with the islands and keep customs alive,
especially the acclaimed dance and music festivals. Another unifying
factor is Islanders’ determination to control their own destiny. In
1988, the Islander Council’s chairman demanded independence from
Australia and a billion dollars’ compensation for loss of land and
resources. The Australian Government delayed the decision, an anti-
independence group arose and independence was shelved, for most
islanders see regional autonomy within the Australian federation as a
better option. In 1994 the Torres Strait Regional Authority was
established and a separate federal budget allocation was granted,
giving a degree of practical but not legal independence. Torres Strait
Islanders’ national day is ‘July One’, the day on which the London
Missionary Society brought ‘the Light’ of the gospel, but to this
‘Coming of the Light’ festival has been added Mabo Day on 3 June
(see chapter 8).

Major exchange routes for pearl and baler shell. Pearl

shells were made into oval pendants that gained in
sacredness the further they were transported. From the Gulf
of Carpentaria, baler shell was transported over 1700 km
(1050 miles) south. Pearl shell from the Kimberley was
 traded across up to eight tribal territories, reaching the
Centre, Western Desert and Adelaide region.

There was also a roaring trade in pitcheri (a narcotic native tobacco), the
young leaves of the 2 m-(6 ft)-high shrub, Duboisia hopwoodii. The most
prized variety comes from Bedourie in southwestern Queensland, which
was traded north to the Gulf of Carpentaria and south to Port Augusta,
South Australia. It was transported in special bags, ground into fragments
and mixed with alkali ash derived from burnt wattle wood. Then it was
chewed or made into a wad and carried behind the ear, where thin skin
helped absorb the drug. Pitcheri has a higher nicotine content than a
cigarette, and is an addictive, psychoactive drug that can be used as a
painkiller and stimulant. One Aboriginal man walked 200 km (125 miles) in
two days sustained by nothing but ‘a chew of pituri’. When explorers Burke
and Wills were slowly dying in Central Australia in 1861, their one solace
was pitcheri.46

Aboriginal Australian society was remarkably homogeneous for a continent

of such varying environments. Basic social and economic organisation was
everywhere the same. Some influences diffused southwards from the north,
which was in contact with northern neighbours, but did not reach the
extreme southwest or Tasmania, where basic hunter-gatherer life continued
little changed since the arrival of the original Australians 2000 generations
earlier.
 6

ORIGINS
The last 65,000 years

We will never know when the first human footprint was made on an
Australian beach. While some oral traditions tell of creation heroes arising
from the land, others suggest overseas origins. Aboriginal elder Wandjuk
Marika said of his people, the Yolngu, in Arnhem Land:
The truth is … that my own people … are descended from the great Djankawu far across the sea
… Djankawu came in his canoe with his two sisters, following the morning star … They walked
far across the country following the rain clouds. When they wanted water they plunged their
digging stick into the ground and freshwater flowed. From them we learnt the names of all
creatures on the land and they taught us all our Law.1

To investigate the events related in these oral traditions, we first need to

have a look at the environmental changes that made migration between
continents possible. Global climate has been relatively stable for the last
11,700 years (the Holocene epoch) but we are living in a warm interglacial
period that is due to relapse into another ice age after a further 10 millennia
or so. About 2.6 million years ago, the world began to get colder, as the
warm, wet Pliocene era gave way to the Pleistocene ice epoch, during
which much of the world’s water was frozen into ice sheets at the poles. Sea
level fluctuated dramatically, producing about seventeen glaciations
interspersed with shorter interglacial periods, which happen roughly every
100,000 years.2
During glaciations, the mean annual temperature was up to 10 degrees
centigrade lower than today’s and vast glaciers made a third of the northern
hemisphere uninhabitable. Sea level dropped by as much as 120 m (395 ft),
exposing vast continental shelves—portions of continents that are normally
submerged under relatively shallow seas. The exposed shelves provided
easy lines of movement along coasts but inland areas, now further from the
sea, became drier.
We know humanity’s ancestors were African because the earliest
hominins—members of the group of closely related species that includes
modern humans, our ancestors and extinct ‘cousins’—have been found only
in Africa, and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, are African.3 To set
Australian Aboriginal origins in context we must therefore begin our story
in Africa, where the human lineage evolved.
The earliest move out of Africa was by Homo erectus (upright man)
some 2 million years ago when present-day deserts were grassland. These
early hunters needed to extend their home range to get enough meat, and
followed migrating animal herds, gradually colonising the Middle East,
southern Russia, India, the Far East and Southeast Asia. Human fossils have
been dated in Georgia to c. 1.8 million years ago and in Java in Indonesia to
c. 1.6 million years ago.4

People on the move

When sea level was at its lowest, Southeast Asia grew in land size by over 2
million km2 (775,000 sq. miles) of land. This area—now known as
Sundaland—was added onto Southeast Asia, joining Java to the mainland.
One could walk from Myanmar (Burma) to Bali, but not beyond. How do
we know? Because very different animals are found in Asia and Australia.
Had there not been a wide water barrier, tigers and monkeys would have
been found in Australia and kangaroos in Asia. Biologist Alfred Wallace
identified a line dividing Asian from Australian fauna. The only creatures to
cross Wallace’s line were those that could swim well, rats (which probably
rafted across on flotsam) and humans.
 Until 1998 it was thought that only Homo sapiens were smart enough to
build watercraft and get across the straits. It was therefore a great surprise
when Australian archaeologist Michael Morwood established that hominins
travelled 600 km (375 miles) east from Bali along the Indonesian island
chain to Flores. At the Mata Menge site, layers of volcanic debris above and
below stone artefacts and associated extinct fauna were radiometrically
dated to c. 700 kya (kya = thousand years ago). To reach Flores, people
must have crossed two straits of 19 km (12 miles) and 9 km (6 miles) of
open sea, although they were never out of sight of land. Almost certainly,
the first crossing was from Bali towards the Rinjani volcano on Lombok,
which was high enough to be seen from the Bali coast. Morwood maintains
that deep-water straits have always separated Flores from mainland
Southeast Asia. Some others argue volcanic activity may have created
temporary land bridges, but if so, why didn’t more Asian animals find their
way across? Ancient fauna in Flores was confined to rats and good
swimmers—pygmy elephants, komodo dragons and even bigger lizards.5 It
may be that people were fleeing a tsunami or violent volcanic eruptions in
the Pacific ‘rim of fire’, desperately paddling out to sea on logs and
accidentally being blown across to the next island. Such accidental voyages
required no planning or use of language, which was probably a rather later
development.
Early stone tools found in Flores resemble Javan tools, and residues and
use-wear marks on the edges of four Flores flakes—thin, sharp-edged
pieces of stone struck off a larger lump or ‘core’—show they were used for
grinding food plants.6 When the ocean was low, a series of stepping-stone
islands led from Flores to Timor, the widest gap being 15 km (9 miles).
Then only 60–90 km (37–55 miles) of open sea separated Timor from
Australia’s continental shelf, but hominins went no further than Flores,
which lies about halfway between Asia and Australia. Sea voyages without
a visible target destination were a massive advance that did not happen for
another 700,000 years.
A joint Australian–Indonesian research team made an astounding find in
2004. Homo floresiensis, a new species of human, the smallest found on
earth, was discovered in the large limestone cave of Liang Bua in western
Flores.7 A fully grown Homo floresiensis had a brain of c. 420cm3, the size
of a grapefruit, and was only 1.05 m (3½ ft) tall. The little humans,
nicknamed ‘hobbits’, seem to be descendants of a marooned, ancestral
hominin population. Dwarfing of animals is commonplace on islands where
food is in short supply and predators are few, but this is the world’s most
extreme example of human shrinking, which took place over perhaps a
million years. They stood no taller than a three-year-old child, weighed
about 25 kg (55 lb) and had arms almost reaching down to their knees.
Their brains were smaller than most chimpanzees’ and only a third the size
of ours. Physical anthropologist Peter Brown has shown they were
definitely human, and archaeologist Mike Morwood claimed they used
stone tools and cooked their prey of juvenile pygmy elephants and other
small animals.8
Remarkably, the hobbits survived until about 50 kya, when Homo
sapiens arrived on the scene. This and a later volcanic eruption at about 12
kya probably wiped them out in the west of the island but dating expert Bert
Roberts and archaeologist Doug Hobbs have found intriguing clues that
they survived in central Flores until at least 500 years ago. Village elders
told Roberts amazingly detailed tales of little, hairy, long-armed people
called Ebu Gogo—‘the grandmother who eats anything’.9

Out of Africa
The discovery of Homo floresiensis is relevant to debate over the origins of
modern humans—whether Homo sapiens evolved in several different parts
of the world from earlier populations, or as a recent, distinct African
species. The multiregional theory maintained that human evolution has
been continuous and parallel in Africa, Europe and Asia, but it has not
gained wide acceptance because it requires an improbably high degree of
parallel evolution among widely separated, large populations.10 The hobbit
puts perhaps the last nail in the multiregional coffin, for it is descended
from earlier hominins but no one can argue that it contributed to our own
species’ genetic make-up.
According to the Out of Africa model, our ancestors, Homo sapiens,
arose in Africa. Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum and
most other scientists now hold that modern humans are the descendants of
people who originated in northern Africa about 150 kya and subsequently
spread around the globe, replacing archaic human forms, with little or no
genetic mixing.11
 In 1987 the first human ‘family tree’ based on DNA (the molecule that
carries the genetic blueprint of living things) was published.12 Evolutionary
biologists have now improved their methodology and published many other
trees, including some of the Y chromosome, the paternal line. In a sample
of more than 12,000 contemporary East Asian men from 163 different
populations, including Australian Aborigines, New Guinea highlanders and
Pacific Islanders, ‘no ancient non-African Y chromosome was found in the
extant East Asian population’. The Chinese researchers concluded: ‘modern
humans of African origin completely replaced earlier populations in East
Asia’. Then, in 2002, geneticist Spencer Wells produced a TV documentary
and book entitled The Journey of Man: A genetic odyssey, tracing every
living man to an ancestral ‘Adam’ living in Africa. ‘There is more genetic
diversity in a single African village than in the whole world outside Africa,’
he says, ‘indicating humans have lived there longest.’13
Humans were few and far between in pre-agricultural times. Geneticists
estimate that, ‘About 20,000 years ago there were probably only one or two
million humans on earth, living in pockets quite isolated from each other …
All people living today are descended from a population living in Africa
some 150,000 years ago that may have numbered only 10,000 people.’14
Global population was reduced even more when the Toba volcano in
Sumatra erupted 74 kya—the world’s worst natural disaster of the last two
million years. This enormous eruption spewed ash to the northwest and
northeast, covering India, Pakistan and the Gulf region in a blanket 1–3 m
(3–10 ft) deep and spread as far as Greenland where traces appear in the
Greenland ice record. Wells thinks this catastrophe ‘reduced the world
population to between two and ten thousand’.15

11. GENOMIC MAP OF HUMAN SPREAD OUT OF

AFRICA
The spread of modern humans from Africa to other continents based
on genetic evidence. The DNA of all humans today points back to a
common origin in east Africa about 150,000 years ago. By comparing
mutations—or ‘markers’—in the genes of people across the globe and
mapping the results, scientists can see how people began to colonise
the planet during the last ice age. This map traces the main Y-
chromosome lineages around the world.a

The most ancient marker (M168) identifies the first modern

journey out of Africa some 70,000 years ago. Australian Aborigines
have the oldest lineage outside Africa. Their journey has been traced
through marker genes M168 and M130. M130’s descendants survive
in low numbers (5 per cent) in southern India and Malaysia (10 per
cent) but rise to 15 per cent in highland New Guinea and 60 per cent
in Australian Aboriginal men. (The high proportion of a particular
marker gene among Aboriginal men is explained by Spencer Wells as
 due to the emergence of prolific male breeders. ‘The norm throughout
evolution is for victorious males to create vast genetic legacies,’ he
noted in 2005. ‘Until modern times men were often squeezed out of
the mating game by stronger alpha males.’)
There is genetic and fossil evidence for the dispersal of modern
humans into Asia at least 62–75 kya. The genetic split of Australians
and Papua New Guineans is estimated at 51–72 kya, which fits well
with first occupation of Australia by about 65 kya at the site of
Madjedbebe (see below).b
Australian Senator Aden Ridgeway, who is of mixed Aboriginal
and European descent, agreed to take a DNA test to trace his
forefathers and proved to have the most ancient marker of all—–
M168—–which tied him back to Africa. He also possessed a more
recent 20,000-year-old marker—–M170—–from part of a migration
that moved into central Europe and the Balkans.

Blood groups
Before the discovery of DNA, blood groups were the main tool of
genetics, the science of heredity. Blood samples from 10,000 Aborigines
were analysed in the 1940s–1970s to make blood transfusion safer in
remote areas. Uniquely, full-descent Aborigines lacked A2 and B of the
ABO blood group system, S of the MNSs system and Rh negative genes r,
r’ and r’’. Western Desert people show a distinctive genetic pattern, with the
world’s highest value in the N gene of the MNSs system, implying a very
long period of isolation. Aborigines belong almost exclusively to A and O,
with only a little B in the extreme north, where it is an import from New
Guinea and Indonesia. Aboriginal Australians are possibly the world’s only
racial group completely lacking the S blood group antigen. Tellingly, in
blood groups Aborigines resemble Caucasians; Europeans are mainly A and
O whereas B is more characteristic of Asia. This evidence supports the Out
of Africa scenario based on DNA.16
In the 1980s, molecular biology added a new tool to genetic research—
DNA family trees. Sheila van Holst Pellekaan worked among indigenous
people in the Darling River region of western New South Wales and at
Yuendumu in the Central Australian desert. Leading by example, Pellekaan,
a nurse, analysed her own blood and that of Aboriginal women interested in
their own ancestry.17 The results, published in academic articles and ‘plain
English’ reports, were useful to both local Aborigines and researchers. The
implied common ancestry for the riverine and desert groups was c. 51,500
years, an estimate that fits well with archaeological evidence for first
penetration of inland Australia.18
Several ensuing DNA studies have added to the picture. All support a
common origin for New Guinea highlanders and Australians. Aborigines
form an extremely ancient lineage, most different from black Africans and
most similar to highland New Guineans. At that time, a land bridge
connected New Guinea with Australia but it was submerged between 8 and
6 kya. New Guinea’s highlanders were far more isolated than its coastal
people or Australians and were relatively unaffected by later migrations.
There was also very little contact between New Guineans and Australians
across Torres Strait.19
Comparative studies of several thousand fossil skulls support the
common origin hypothesis for the people of Greater Australia (Sahul),
placing Aboriginal Australians and highland New Guineans together in an
Australo-Melanesian group.20 In short, skeletal, DNA and other genetic
evidence indicates relative Australian homogeneity—initially, at least—
characteristic of a population isolated for a long period.

From Africa to Australia

Climatic change drove periodic migrations out of northeast Africa. Huge
portions of the globe were uninhabited, so migrants possibly encountered
few or no prior occupants. Hunters living by productive, shallow lakes in
northern Tanzania were probably forced to the ocean shore by occasional
prolonged droughts. On the coast they used food from the tidal zone,
moving onward as each area was depleted.21 The First Australians’
ancestors probably left Africa by the coastal route when the sea level had
dropped sufficiently to allow easy passage across the mouth of the Red
Sea.22
How fast did they move? Estimates range from 1 to 4 km (½ to 2½ miles)
a year. The beach-hugging route, which may have been used by earlier
hominins as well, is consistent with people who had adapted to a marine
environment and were able to use simple watercraft. The beach-huggers
took only a few thousand years to move along the shorelines of southern
Arabia, India and the Bay of Bengal into Southeast Asia. Entry into the
empty southern continent between 70 and 50 kya, a time of low sea level, is
therefore eminently feasible.23 Genetic studies of Andaman Islanders and
the Orang Asli, the original people of Malaysia, have shown that
‘mitochondrial DNA variation in isolated “relict” populations in southeast
Asia supports the view that there was only a single dispersal [of modern
humans] from Africa, most likely by a southern coastal route … The
primary dispersal process, at least from India to Australasia, was very
rapid.’ Vincent Macaulay, David Bulbeck, Stephen Oppenheimer and their
colleagues estimated it took people only about 3000 years to disperse from
India to Australia between 70–60 kya, a rate of 4 km (2½ miles) per year.24
The shortest land route from northeast Africa to Australia is about 15,000
km (9300 miles). Later, other modern humans headed eastwards by a route
north of the Himalaya. After 35 kya, Upper Palaeolithic (Stone Age) tools
are found in southern Siberia, northern China, Korea and Japan. In
northeast Asia, people eventually crossed the Bering land bridge into the
Americas. While some researchers have argued for much earlier occupation
of the Americas, the mass of archaeological, environmental and genetic
evidence favours a relatively late initial human occupation, between about
15 and 12 kya.25

Culture of the First Australians

Behavioural changes accompanied physical developments. In Africa,
innovations such as production of paint from ochre, blades (long, narrow,
sharp fragments of stone struck from a core) and the use of grindstones for
pulverising plant food go back to c. 280 kya.26 Africans were collecting
shellfish and trading artefacts at 140 kya and fishing at 110 kya. By 100 kya
bone tools and ‘art’ (symbolic markings) in the form of patterns incised on
ostrich eggshells were in evidence. By 80 kya some Africans were making
backed-blades—small stone knives resembling penknives. At 75 kya South
Africans wore snail-shell necklaces, the world’s oldest jewellery. Five
millennia later, one group developed microliths, tiny blades mounted on
shafts as barbs or projectile-points. They also buried their dead.
 Many but not all of these developments are found in early Australia.
Australia’s earliest sites contain ochre, signifying painting. Some also show
evidence of long-distance exchange networks, freshwater fishing, ritual
burial and personal adornment such as shell necklaces.27
Australia’s earliest stone artefacts are known as the Core Tool and
Scraper Tradition. Scrapers are flakes with sharp edges used for chiselling,
cutting or scraping, while core tools are hand-held, large choppers with
flaked margins. Those made from river cobbles are known as pebble tools.
These Australian tools vary regionally, but bear a general resemblance to
overseas stone industries of c. 100 kya, such as the Mousterian of Eurasia
and the African Middle Stone Age.
The distinctive stone tool of ice-age Australia is the ‘horsehoof core’—a
high-backed, flat-based core, dome-shaped like a horse’s hoof. Cores
resulted from removal of flakes from the circumference and often then
became hand-held chopping tools. In regions lacking fast-flowing rivers
and hence cobbles to use as pebble choppers, horsehoof cores performed
the same function. Both pebble tools and horsehoof choppers were still in
use in nineteenth-century Tasmania, where they were employed to fell
saplings for spears or hut-frames, prise off bark-sheets for canoes and cut
notches when climbing trees.
What the First Australians did not share was the Upper Palaeolithic
‘cultural revolution’ of 50–40 kya, for their ancestors had left Eurasia long
before.28 Ice-age Australia lacked the standardised, specialised artefacts of
ice-age Europe, and hafting (attaching a handle to an implement) and
microliths did not become widespread until about 5 kya. In Europe the
earliest representational paintings of animals—at Chauvet Cave in the
Ardèche region of France—date to about 35 kya. Australia’s oldest rock art
is of similar antiquity. It consists of hand-prints and hand-stencils made
with red ochre, cupules (small cup-shaped pits) and engravings
(petroglyphs) of circles, tracks (footprints), lines and other ‘geometric’
motifs hammered or abraded into the rock. Cupules are non-utilitarian,
symbolic marks for they were pounded onto vertical walls and even the
ceilings of rock-shelters. (A rock-shelter is a naturally formed overhang
sheltering a floor area.) Ice-age Australian art closely resembles the earliest
art of Eurasia. Cupules are in caves in southern India in contexts older,
possibly much older, than 100 kya, in Malaysian Sabah and in Myanmar.29
Neanderthals also made cupules; in La Ferrassie Cave in the Dordogne, an
infant was buried under a ‘tombstone’ bearing cupules in pairs. European
caves have many ‘geometric’ engravings such as the ‘macaroni’ of Peche
Merle. In Cosquer Cave near Marseilles the first phase of rock art was
dominated by finger-markings and hand-stencils. European rock art
gradually evolved from early prefigurative markings to splendid
representational paintings, and the sculptures in bone and stone of the
Upper Palaeolithic.30 Australian art also evolved and by some 20 kya
hunters were painting figures of humans and animals in tropical rock-
shelters but Aboriginal material culture never attained the complexity of
ice-age Europe. In Australia, hunter-gatherers instead put huge amounts of
time and energy into ‘hunting magic’ and the development of incredibly
elaborate ceremonies focused on the increase and maintenance of food
supplies.

The world’s first intercontinental crossing

When the sea reached its lowest levels, the amount of habitable land around
Australia grew by 2.5 million km2 (950,000 sq. miles). Land bridges
connected Tasmania and New Guinea to the mainland, forming the
supercontinent known as Sahul. The probable time of first human entry is
between 70 and 65 kya, a time of significantly low sea level.31
How did people reach the new continent? The deep sea trough between
Timor and Australia was around 80 km (50 miles) wide at lowest sea level
and around 150 km (93 miles) at 70–60 kya. Passage from Timor was
relatively easy because small islets acted as stepping stones and each
summer northwest winds blew strongly from Timor to Australia. At 60 kya,
this summer monsoon was at least as active as nowadays. Another possible
route was east to the Aru coast of New Guinea, but this demanded more
directional skill in sailing.32 The most likely colonisation pathways into
Australia were onto the northern or northwestern coast, and this is where
the earliest occupation sites have been found.33
The first migrants may have known land lay to the south, as from
Timor’s mountains the horizon distance is 175 km (110 miles). They may
have even been able to see smoke from lightning-lit fires, as smoke from
bushfires billows a long way into the atmosphere. Or they could have been
following the path of birds migrating south.
 The first people to reach Australia may have been accidental castaways,
blown out to sea in a flimsy craft or clinging to a log. Or they may have
been escaping from the volcanic winter that followed the super-eruption of
Mt Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia, 74 kya ago. It is probable that, throughout
prehistory, a trickle of people made landfall on Australia’s coasts, but
genome studies indicate that present-day Aboriginal Australians are
descended from the first people to appear in the Australian archaeological
record and that the founding population was very small, possibly numbering
only between 50 and 70 people.34
Were there deliberate migrations? Melbourne researcher Robert Bednarik
has replicated a Stone Age voyage from Timor to Australia.35 Using only
stone tools, in three months eight boat-builders constructed an 18 m (60 ft)
bamboo raft with wooden steering oar, vine ropes and a palm-leaf sail. With
five men aboard, this experimental craft reached Australia’s continental
shelf from Timor in just six days. Greater Australia (Melville Island) was
reached on day thirteen. Land remained invisible for nine-tenths of the
voyage. Bednarik proved what earlier computer simulation models had
suggested—bamboo rafts could sail from Asia to Australia using Stone Age
technology.

A one-way trip
What the First Australians did not know was that the trip to mainland
Australia was a one-way journey. They could not easily retrace their steps,
as Australia lacked materials for buoyant watercraft. There were very few
trees large enough to be suitable for making dugout canoes, as used in New
Guinea. There were also very few species of native bamboo and all were
too thin-stemmed for raft-building except one, Bambusa Arnhemica. Only
30 km (19 miles) of sea separate Bathurst and Melville islands from the
north coast, but when the sea reached its present level about 6.5 kya, Tiwi
people became almost completely isolated and now differ genetically,
linguistically and culturally from mainland Aborigines.

12. WATERCRAFT
 Rafts made from logs, bark, reeds or branches were common in
Australia, but some coasts lacked any watercraft. Instead, people
swam or used logs. The 10 km (6 miles) of sheltered water between
Great Keppel Island and the Queensland shore were crossed by men
alternately dog-paddling and resting on their ‘swimming log’. Flimsy
bark canoes were used on lakes, rivers and sheltered bays.a The most
seaworthy Australian watercraft were sewn-bark canoes, built from
two or three bark-sheets sewn together, plus stretchers and ribs. A
replica was once paddled 60 km (37 miles) in sheltered water. Along
the northwest coast dugout canoes gave way to sewn-bark ones,
mangrove rafts and finally ‘swimming logs’ off the Pilbara.
Thereafter there were no watercraft along 4000 km (2500 miles) of
coast as far south as the Murray River with its simple bark canoes.
In the Sydney region, a canoe could be made in a day, the bark
coming from Casuarina (a species of she-oak) or stringy-bark
eucalypts. Bark was more easily stripped from trees after rain, so in
winter to early spring Eora went upriver to make new canoes. The
bark was bunched at each end and tied with cords made from vines.
These craft of 3–4 m (9–12 ft) long and 1 m (3 ft) wide could hold
five people. They had only 15 cm (6 inches) of clearance from the
water but performed amazingly well.b They were poled or propelled
with paddles up to 60 cm (2 ft) in length. ‘These they use one in each
hand and go along very fast sitting with their legs under them and
their bodies erect,’ Bradley wrote. ‘I have seen them paddle through a
large surf without oversetting or taking in more water than if rowing
in smooth seas.’c

Settlement
Tantalising clues to the story of first human arrival in Australia emerge year
by year. Remaining traces of the very first Australians may lie underwater
on submerged continental shelves, but none have been found, in spite of
pioneering archaeologist Rhys Jones learning to scuba dive with army
cadets in the Duntroon swimming pool in Canberra to go and explore
submerged rock-shelters off the Arnhem Land coast in the hope of finding
stone tools.
 The current earliest evidence of Aboriginal settlement of Australia comes
from a rock-shelter in Kakadu National Park in Arnhem Land. Stone tools
are found throughout the earth floor of Madjedbebe (pronounced Maj-et-be-
be, with the stress on the first syllable). The shelter (then known as
Malakunanja 2) was first excavated in 1973 by Harry Allen and Joh
Kamminga and then in 1989 by Rhys Jones and Mike Smith. Promising
results from these early small-scale ‘telephone-box style’ digs led to major
excavations in 2012 and 2015 headed by Chris Clarkson of the University
of Queensland. With the benefit of the latest dating techniques and a large
expert team, the earliest occupation at Madjedbebe has now been dated to
about 65 kya (with the range at 95.4 per cent probability lying between 71
and 59 kya). After close scrutiny, Clarkson’s results have been widely
accepted. They fit well with results from other early sites in northern
Australia such as Nauwalabila. Having visited these sites, talked to the
excavators and examined some of the artefacts, which become increasingly
brittle with depth, I think there is every reason to believe that these two
rock-shelters contain evidence of the earliest human occupation yet found
in Australia.36
At 65 kya sea level was about 85 m (280 ft) below the modern level and
Madjedbebe and Nauwalabila lay more than 200 km (125 miles) inland in
rock-shelters in the Arnhem Land escarpment. Claims for even earlier
human occupation (as at Jinmium) have not withstood scientific scrutiny,
but several other sites more than 50,000 years old are now accepted, such as
Devil’s Lair south of Perth, Western Australia.37 Archaeologists Peter Veth
and Sue O’Connor have shown that many of Australia’s earliest dated sites
lie inland rather than on the coast. It seems the first colonists headed
slightly inland and exploited big game on the plains. As Peter Veth wrote in
2017: ‘Recent models for changing sea levels, voyaging success and genetic
foundations indicate one or several populations settled from the north, or
northwest, comprising at least 50 to 80 individuals.’ An increasing number
of sites (Boodie Cave, Riwi, Parnkurpirti, Serpent’s Glen, Waratayi, as well
as several new Pilbara upland sites) clearly register values overlapping the
50–45,000 BP (before the present) age bracket. These sites vary in contexts
from maritime deserts (Boodie Cave on Barrow Island), range uplands,
through to linear sand dunes and interior ranges. Together they span the
northwest, centre and southern extent of the arid core of the continent and
logically must represent the terminus ante quem (the latest possible date)
for occupation of Sahul.38
In 2018 Jo McDonald, Peter Veth and their team from the University of
Western Australia together with traditional owners published the
archaeology and rock art of Karnatukul (Serpent’s Glen rock-shelter),
revealing an antiquity of about 50,000 years. At that time it would have
been around 1000 km (620 miles) inland from the coast and is the oldest
known interior desert site in Australia. One surprising find among the
24,000 artefacts was a backed microlith (a small pointed tool with one sharp
edge blunted with small flakes, called backing, resembling a penknife)
found in a 43,000-year-old level. Such backed-blades proliferate in the
Holocene but clearly have a much greater antiquity than previously thought,
and are reminiscent of the toolkit of the Middle Stone Age in Africa.39
First occupation of Australia by about 65 kya fits comfortably with the
genetic split of Australians and New Guineans from their Eurasian
ancestors estimated to have occurred between about 72 and 51 kya, and
with fossil and genetic evidence for the dispersal of modern humans into
Asia between at least 75 and 62 kya. Clarkson concludes that ‘all current
genetic age estimates for the first Aboriginal Australians are consistent with
an age of c. 65 kya for modern humans at Madjedbebe’.40
The world’s oldest ground stone tools have also been found in tropical
Australia in the lowest layer of Madjedbebe. These are made of hard,
volcanic rock and have a sharp, bevelled cutting edge produced by grinding.
The blade would have been hafted into a wooden handle as an axe (with its
cutting edge and handle in the same plane) rather than an adze (with an
arched blade set at right angles to the handle). Adzes, typical of New
Guinea and Polynesia, are absent from Australia. Ground-edge, hafted axes
first appeared in tropical Australia 65 kya but became widespread only
about 4.5 kya. They were often used one-handed for chopping toeholds up
trees in search of honey.
Other exciting finds among the many artefacts in situ in the lowest layer
in Madjedbebe rock-shelter are grinding stones (for processing of labour-
intensive foods such as nuts, seeds and tubers), ground ochres and
fragments of decorative, shiny sheet mica—several of which were wrapped
around a large ground yellow ochre ‘crayon’. This practical and decorative
toolkit resembles the Middle Stone Age technology used by humans in
Africa, the Levant, Arabia and India between 100 and 50 kya.41
Lake Mungo
Almost all major archaeological discoveries in Australia have been
accidental. In 1968 Jim Bowler, a young geomorphologist studying ancient
sand dunes, was riding his motorbike on the lee shore of now dry Lake
Mungo when he came across broken, burnt human bones exposed by
erosion.42 The remains proved to be that of a gracile girl or young woman,
148 cm (4 ft 10 inches) tall. Importantly, this young woman had been
accorded the formal ritual of cremation and her remains treated with care
and respect. This is the world’s earliest known evidence of the rite of
cremation.
In 1974 Bowler found another skeleton nearby. This time the body was
buried, not cremated, and the remains were definitely adult, with an
estimated height of 170 cm (5 ft 7 inches). The pelvis and large femur-head
indicated a male. The right elbow was severely affected with osteoarthritis
—an affliction of spearmen. Mungo Man had also lost his two lower canine
teeth simultaneously when much younger, probably in the rite of tooth
avulsion during initiation. The hands were placed in the lap, probably
holding his penis—a common feature of historic Aboriginal burials. The
ochre on his body came from a source about 200 km (125 miles) away to
the north.
The burial of Mungo Man is perhaps the world’s oldest known burial
containing red ochre pigment. These burials are of tremendous importance
to Aboriginal people as well as scientists, and in 1981 the Willandra Lakes
region was listed as a World Heritage Area for its cultural and natural
significance to all humankind. As I wrote in the Australian Heritage
Commission’s nomination: ‘The Willandra Lakes system stands in the same
relation to the global documentation of the culture of early Homo sapiens as
Olduvai Gorge relates to hominid origins.’ After study, the human remains
have been returned with some ceremony to Lake Mungo visitor precinct,
controlled by local Aboriginal custodians. This concept of ‘reburial’ is that
the ancient Mungo people will lie in peace in their own country.
There has been much debate about the age of the Mungo remains;
palaeoanthropologist Alan Thorne claimed that they dated to 60 kya.43
Bowler therefore reanalysed his original samples. It took three years’ work,
twenty-five new dates and four separate laboratories, but in 2003 Bowler’s
team published revised ages for Mungo Man and Woman of about 42 kya in
the prestigious British scientific journal Nature, and this dating has been
generally accepted.44
The story began about 60 kya, when this inland region boasted thirteen
large freshwater lakes, grasslands and woodlands. Lake Mungo filled due to
a gradually cooling climate that meant less evaporation and greater river-
flows from the highlands.45 People reached the region perhaps about 50 kya
and camped on sand dunes on the eastern side of Lake Mungo, where
excavation revealed over 700 artefacts, charcoal from ancient campfires and
burnt bone. Stone tools were horsehoof cores, steep-sided scrapers and
flakes and Mungo shows classic features of the oldest Australian tradition
of toolmaking. The earliest stone artefacts found—eleven silcrete flakes—
are dated to 47–45 kya and the underlying deposits are culturally sterile.
This means that humans probably first reached Lake Mungo about 50 kya, a
timing that fits well with their earlier arrival in the north.
From 60 to 43 kya Lake Mungo was full of freshwater and the land
greener and more lush than at any stage since. Freshwater fish, shellfish,
small land animals, eggs and vegetable food were abundant. Analysis of
otoliths (fish earbones) indicates the First Australians used traps and fixed
gill-nets to catch fish of identical species and age in a single event, such as
a spring spawning run. Most otoliths came from golden perch, which are
difficult to catch by other means.46
For thousands of years people lived well at Lake Mungo, but then it
began to dry. At about 40 kya the drying trend accelerated and severe dust
storms blew from upwind sand dunes in the Red Centre. Evidence is the
layer of windblown dust and desert sand deposited above the graves. Water
level oscillated but was never as deep as before. People continued to live
there intermittently until the height of the last glaciation around 22–18 kya,
when the lakes finally dried up. Thereafter occasional visits were made, but
by then people had moved to permanent rivers elsewhere in this semiarid
region.
A remarkable discovery dating to this ancient time period was made
through the sharp eyes of a trainee Aboriginal ranger, Mary Pappin of the
Mutthi-Mutthi people. Standing on a dry lagoon north of Lake Mungo, she
exclaimed, ‘That looks like a footprint!’ Indeed, it was and now 563
complete prints have been found in 23 trackways or trails. Men, women and
children left the marks on the moist surface of an ephemeral lake about 21
kya. Pintupi people from Central Australia were invited to visit the site and
were able to explain all the marks left by the spear-wielding hunters.47 A
facsimile has been made of these ice-age footprints and may be viewed in
the Visitors Centre at Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage
area.

Origins
In January 2001, Aboriginal origins again hit the headlines.48 Thorne’s team
made startling claims that the world’s oldest DNA had been successfully
recovered from Mungo Man. Thorne’s ‘di-hybrid theory’ suggested that a
migration of gracile people from China preceded one of more robust people
from Java, the two then merging to form the modern Aboriginal population.
Mungo Man and Woman exemplified the gracile people, Kow Swamp in
northern Victoria the robust. Kow Swamp is a burial site beside a lake
where Thorne excavated 40 robust individuals, some buried with shells as
‘grave goods’.49
However, the original C-14 dating for Kow Swamp of 9–13 kya has been
revised to 19–22 kya by archaeologist Tim Stone, who sees the robust Kow
Swamp people as ice-age-adapted relatives of the gracile people of Lake
Mungo. As the height of the last ice age approached, drying of lakes
fragmented the small human population, groups became isolated and
skeletal diversity increased. A robust build was better adapted to the
increasing cold, for stockier people are better at retaining body heat. Most
Australian early prehistoric remains are robust rather than gracile, but there
was a significant decrease in body proportion after the ice age. Compared
with earlier populations, modern Aborigines are gracile.

Tri-hybrid theory
In 1993, population geneticist Joseph Birdsell published detailed data from
the 1930s on 3000 tribal Aborigines, showing a graded physical variation
across Australia. In the north, skin colour is darker, baldness rare and
greying of head hair earlier; in the colder southeast, bodies are stockier,
beards abundant and balding pronounced.50
Birdsell explained this diversity with his ‘tri-hybrid theory’ of three
waves of colonists—first came small, lightly built ‘Barrineans’, named after
Lake Barrine in the north Queensland rainforest, where they lived. They
were followed by ‘Murrayians’, of stocky build and abundant body hair,
and finally tall, dark ‘Carpentarians’, whose racial affinities were with the
tribes of southern India such as Dravidians.
Australian Aboriginal skin colour varies slightly. Human skin darkness
depends on the pigment melanin and is controlled by both genetic and
environmental factors. Colour has evolved to be dark enough to protect
against ultraviolet radiation, sunburn and skin cancer, radiate excess heat
efficiently and prevent sunlight destroying folic acid, a nutrient essential for
fertility and foetal development.51 In tropical and sub-tropical regions over
many generations, people with dark skin on average live longer and have
more successful families. As people expanded from the equator into higher,
less sunny latitudes, over many millennia their skin colour gradually
became depigmented and light enough to foster vitamin D production and
avoid rickets, a bone disease caused by lack of sunlight. A transect from
South Africa to Norway shows a clear gradation from dark-brown skin in
equatorial Africa to medium-brown (from 10 to 20 degrees north) and then
light-brown in North Africa and the Mediterranean countries, finally giving
way to depigmented, ‘white’ people north of 50 degrees north latitude in
Britain and Scandinavia.
Across Aboriginal Australia there is a gradation from dark-brown in the
tropical north and central deserts to copper-coloured, medium-brown
among Murrayians and around the southern coasts including Tasmania.
These differences appear to result from adaptation to climate over an
extremely long time period.52 Tasmania lies between 40 and 45 degrees
south, an equivalent latitude to Italy, but geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer
deems Italians to be light-brown but Tasmanians medium-brown. Why the
difference in skin colour in the same latitudes? The simplest explanation is
that the original Australians were all dark-brown but over 50,000 years
those in the south gradually became slightly lighter coloured, but not as
light as the inhabitants of Italy who had inhabited their peninsula for over
twice as long. Similarly, the extreme slowness of skin colour change
explains why Meso-Americans who have lived about the equator in the
New World for at least ten millennia are not as dark as equatorial Africans,
for their skin lightened over the much longer period they spent in temperate
Eurasia en route from Africa.
 Most scholars now regard Birdsell’s Barrineans and Murrayians as part
of the founding population, with subsequent variation resulting from
environmental factors. The one consensus among palaeoanthropologists is
that all Australia’s prehistoric human remains are Homo sapiens and
ancestral to modern Aborigines. There is variation over time and space but
also a basic unity and long continuity in Australoid physical form.

13. PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Many variations in appearance contribute to individuality but
Australian Aborigines of unmixed ancestry are readily recognisable.
Common features are exceptionally thin legs, a narrow face, broad
noses depressed at the root and fairly wide at the nostrils, chocolate-
brown skin, dark-brown hair, an erect carriage, long, narrow head,
retreating forehead and chin, pronounced brow ridges above deep-set,
fairly large, brown eyes, large teeth but not especially thick lips and a
projecting jaw.a
The original Australians have very lean bodies with the most
elongated legs found in humankind, a thermo-regulating adaptation to
a hot, dry climate. Height and build differ markedly between male
and female. At contact, Aboriginal men averaged 170 cm (5 ft 7
inches), and women 157 cm (5 ft 2 inches), but height varied
regionally. The tallest people were in the Kimberley, the shortest in
north Queensland rainforests, where men averaged only 155 cm (5 ft
1 inch), just 5 cm (2 inches) more than African pygmy populations.b
In tropical rainforests the usual build is lightweight and small.
Palaeoanthropologist Colin Groves points out that the low ultraviolet
light on the rainforest floor limits the skin’s production of vitamin D
for skeletal growth, leading to the evolution of small skeletons.
Similarly, short, broad noses are adapted to warm, humid conditions.
Australian Aborigines often have noses as wide as they are long while
African ‘pygmies’ have the widest noses in the world. Rainforests are
also poor in food resources, hence it is more efficient to be small and
eat less.c
Aboriginal head hair is usually wavy to straight but Barrineans and
Tasmanians have much crisper, springier, helically curled forms with
 oval rather than round hair shafts. Because of their distinctive hair,
dark skin and small stature, Birdsell termed Barrineans and
Tasmanians ‘Oceanic Negritos’ (‘little blacks’ in Spanish). Short,
lightly built Negritos inhabited Southeast Asia before Mongoloid
people arrived from the north. Negritos still survive, such as the
Semang of the Malay Peninsula, the Aeta in the Philippines and
Andaman Islanders in the Bay of Bengal. The latter have woolly,
‘peppercorn’ hair (disposed in tufts with bare areas) with a flattened
cross-section typical of Negritos. In height, Barrineans resemble
Semang adult males but Tasmanians did not live in rainforests and
were slightly taller. Australian Aborigines have more body hair than
Negroid or Mongoloid people but less than Caucasian, except for
Murrayians who had ‘a heavy growth of hair on their faces, arms,
chests and legs’. Curiously, Tasmanians lived in a much colder
climate than Murrayians but were far less hirsute.d
Some physical anthropologists emphasise differences, others
similarities, and, although there is an underlying homogeneity, both
modern and ancient Aborigines are physically diverse.

Genetics
DNA analysis has vindicated Birdsell’s Carpentarian migration, although its
timing seems to be mid-Holocene rather than earlier. Geneticists Alan Redd
and Mark Stoneking, who studied mtDNA from present-day Aborigines in
Arnhem Land and the Kimberley–Sandy Desert region, found them to be
ten times closer to Indians than to New Guineans.
The time of separation of Aboriginal Australians from southern Indians
was estimated at between 4000 and 5000 years ago.53 Pellekaan’s earlier
study linked two Aboriginal populations with southern Indians. The link
was closer with desert Aborigines than the more southerly Darling River
group, who were more remote from immigration points of entry. These
studies of mtDNA and the Y chromosome produced patterns consistent
with ancient separation between Australians and New Guinea highlanders
and much more recent links between Aborigines and South Asians.54 Who
were these Holocene immigrants? ‘Dravidians’ from southern India was the
answer I received from an Indian audience when showing slides of
Aborigines at a Science Congress in Delhi. Birdsell’s theory of a migration
of ‘Carpentarians’—tall, slim people originating in the sub-continent—was
based on similar body build and hair-form and now DNA studies have
proved him right.
The distribution of Aboriginal bio-genetic markers, such as blood groups,
fits well with the DNA evidence.55 Like indigenous people elsewhere,
Australian Aborigines are the product of intermarriage between different
populations originating in different parts of the world.

Impact on the environment

Humans had two major accidental impacts on the virgin continent—
transformation of the vegetation through burning and the extinction of
megafauna. Human burning of fire-sensitive vegetation caused a dramatic
decrease in trees and shrubs right across the arid zone, which covered 70
per cent of the continent during the ice age. The coasts were fertile but
when the first people moved inland, they encountered a totally unfamiliar,
arid environment. Even stranger were the animals, including megafauna—
giant species of marsupials, reptiles and birds. There were 3 m (10 ft) high
kangaroos, rhinoceros-sized wombats (Diprotodon), huge flightless birds
(Genyornis), land-crocodiles (Quinkana), the world’s largest lizards—7 m
(23 ft) long carnivorous Megalania, 50 kg (110 lb) snakes (Wonambi) and
massive terrestrial horned-tortoises. These giants became extinct, together
with all nineteen species of Australia’s marsupials that exceeded 100 kg
(220 lb) and 22 of 38 medium-sized species over 10 kg (22 lb). In all, 94
per cent of Australia’s large mammals were wiped out.56
Pleistocene animal extinctions happened worldwide. In North America,
mammoths, mastodon, giant sloths and other megafauna became extinct
12.5–11 kya. There, this coincided both with human arrival and rapid post-
glacial warming, whereas in Australia, human arrival and most if not all
megafaunal extinction occurred before the height of the last glaciation,
which occurred between about 22 and 18 kya.57 A breakthrough in dating
extinctions appeared to have come in 1999 when earth scientist Gifford
Miller obtained 700 dates on supposed Genyornis eggshells, apparently
showing that this giant bird died out c. 46 kya.58 However, a 2016 study by
Grellet-Tinner of a better preserved and more complete example of a
Genyornis egg has shown that Miller’s dated eggshell fragments did not
derive from Genyornis but from a much smaller non-megafaunal bird,
probably the mound-builder Progura gallinacea.59
There is therefore still much debate about the timing and causes of
Australian megafaunal extinction, which cannot readily be correlated with
climate change. Megafauna had previously survived even greater aridity (c.
140 kya) and the only new factor in Australia after 65 kya was human
arrival.
In both eastern and western Australia and Tasmania there is a remarkable
correlation between first human arrival and megafaunal disappearance
within a millennium or two. (In northern Australia acidic soils and the lack
of limestone caves to preserve bone deposits mean that there are almost no
data.) However, in the Willandra Lakes region there were at least 17,000
years of coexistence between modern humans and megafauna, where a
skeleton of Zygomaturus trilobus (a large wombat-like Diprotodontid about
the size and shape of a pygmy hippopotamus) has been dated to about 32
kya.60 It also seems very likely that some megafauna lasted longer in well-
watered, remote refuge areas. The prime example is Arnhem Land, where a
well-accepted rock painting of Genyornis exists and cannot be older than
13,000 years. Many other images of megafauna appear in northern rock art,
such as thylacines and Palorchestes—a large tapir-like marsupial.61
Megafaunal bones are also preserved in some dateable cave deposits, such
as limestone Cloggs Cave in eastern Victoria where in 1972 I excavated the
jaw of a giant kangaroo, Sthenurus, in a basal Pleistocene layer just below
the stone and bone tools of human occupation.62 It is hoped that planned
further dating of the deposit using modern methods will clarify the antiquity
of both the cultural and megafaunal remains.
Australian megafauna vanished long before similar extinctions in the
Americas, Madagascar and New Zealand. The only events with which all
these extinctions correlate is the arrival of a new predator: man. Giant moas
disappeared soon after the Maori arrived. In Mauritius the dodo survived
only 80 years after the Dutch arrived with guns and pigs that ate the eggs.63
Zoologists Tim Flannery and Peter Murray likewise attribute extinction
to big-game hunters’ arrival in virgin country with ‘naïve’ animals unafraid
of humans. (African megafauna survived because it co-evolved with
humans.) Even when animals had learnt to fear humans, Aborigines hunted
them successfully, and it is significant that the animals that were lost were
large and lumbering or, if middle-sized, were slow runners.64
 ‘As hunters,’ said Flannery, ‘the Aborigines were the primary carnivore
on the continent, taking the lion’s share of animal protein. Through the use
of fire they were also the top herbivore, with their fire consuming more
vegetation than any herbivorous species … So extensive and effective was
Aboriginal hunting that the large marsupials were rare at the time of
European contact.’65
Peter Murray concluded that: ‘A gradual attrition of these populations by
hunting … would seem to account for the differential nature of the
extinction pattern better than any drought or fire ecology argument … The
cause of megafaunal extinction … was probably due to a combination of all
the above agencies, but without the influence of Aboriginal man, the
megafauna would have survived until the arrival of the Europeans.’66
‘But where are the kill sites?’ you may ask. There aren’t any, for
Aborigines did not carry massive carcasses back to camp nor did they use
stone-tipped spears until much later, but they were accomplished hunters
who employed fire, pit-traps and ambushes to snare large prey. Red and
grey kangaroos are swift and large—the adult males stand 2 m (7 ft) high
and weigh 90 kg (200 lb)—but have been successfully hunted by
Aborigines using only wooden javelins or clubs. Tasmanians never
developed stone-tipped spears but still captured large kangaroos and emus.
Arrival of a new predator in a continent with an inherently low carrying
capacity for large mammals upset the fragile ecological balance and
gradually wiped out the megafauna by a combination of hunting and habitat
alteration through burning. Maori boast of their forebears’ successful moa
hunting, but Aborigines see themselves as conservationists and tend to deny
their ancestors’ big-game hunting.

Impact of the firestick

Charcoal in the lowest layers of living sites shows that fire was used widely.
Aborigines used it to cook, smoke animals from burrows, drive game into
ambushes and make fresh grass spring up to attract herbivores. Ashes act
like manure, and sweet, new shoots and leaves appear at the first good rain
after burning. In arid Australia, light burning of vegetation, patch by patch,
was done in early spring. The aim was hunting, ‘cleaning up the country’,
making travel easier and reducing risk of snakebite from snakes in the long
grass. Fire was also used for signalling and clearing ground for camping.
 Firesticks (slow-burning, smouldering torches of rotten wood or rolled
bark) were carried when travelling. Deliberate Aboriginal burning was
termed ‘firestick farming’ in 1969 by archaeologist Rhys Jones, based on
his Tasmanian research.67 There modern vegetation can be explained only
by prehistoric firing. In 1827 an Englishman exploring mountainous
northwest Tasmania climbed a high peak and saw to his amazement open
grasslands amid the rainforest. When Aboriginal firing ceased, the grass
was no longer being rejuvenated and rainforest reclaimed the area.
In Tasmania, fire was used to keep routes open along the west coast and
extend the narrow coastal strip of heathland, wet scrub and small grassy
plains. Temperate rainforest is not food-rich, whereas newly burnt forest is
rapidly colonised by native bracken fern, the roasted rhizomes of which
formed a carbohydrate staple. Open heathland provided orchids, berries and
starchy grass-tree trunks and a habitat rich in wallabies, possums,
bandicoots, mice and birds. Skilful burning thus increased the food supply.
Systematic landscape burning was linked with orderly, seasonal
exploitation of different environments, primarily to obtain game. In Arnhem
Land at monsoon end:
the main burning season began as [Gidjingali] people fanned out from the confinement of their
camps eager to taste new foods … They burnt the tall grass as they went, both to clear the ground
for easier walking and also as part of their hunting strategy. A fire lit late one morning in July
1972 on the grassy plains … crackled … across … six square km to die in a swamp. Behind the
flames, women using their digging sticks prodded the burnt-out holes of goannas, fat after the
rains, and dragged them out to break their necks by pressing their heads downwards against their
chests. That afternoon, 50 kg [110 lb] of goanna (Varanus sp.) and 10 kg [22 lb] of long-necked
turtle were obtained, and the following day a second party went over the same ground and got an
equivalent haul.68

Most tropical ecologists agree that ‘tropical savannahs are man-made by

fire, and could not have existed before man used fire for hunting’.69 In
northeast Queensland, palynologist Peter Kershaw has shown that a
dramatic increase in charcoal and the change from rainforest to eucalypt
species about 46 kya can only be explained by Aboriginal arrival.70
In Arnhem Land early in the dry season Yolngu hunters burn fire-breaks
around fire-sensitive monsoon forests to protect them from later more
severe fires. Fruit trees are also burnt to ensure a good supply of berries.
The result is a mosaic of burnt and unburnt patches. Such light, regular
burning is considered the mark of conservation-minded people in harmony
with their environment. Since the 1970s, controlled Aboriginal-style
burning has been used to manage national parks like Kakadu. Annual firing
there tends to be more efficient and therefore more severe than traditional
fire regimes, leaving nothing but vast expanses of blackened tree trunks. In
contrast I have seen much greater biodiversity in the adjacent Mount
Borradaile region that is owned by Aborigines but outside Kakadu National
Park and is never deliberately burnt.71
Flannery sees Australian vegetation as a vast Aboriginal artefact,
‘designed to provide maximal food and comfort to its inhabitants in the
most sustainable manner’.72 Captain Cook called Australia ‘this continent
of smoke’. In temperate Australia, firesticks produced the open ‘park-like’
country so admired by the colonists, but then pyrophobic Europeans,
anxious to preserve their wooden houses and fences, banned Aboriginal
firing. This led to increased fuel loads and the change from frequent low-
intensity burns to occasional disastrous firestorms.

Pattern of settlement
By 40 kya, people had spread all over Australia, including the Red Centre
and alpine grasslands of Tasmania. Life was more than merely a battle for
survival. In the earliest sites there are used pieces of ochre—evidence the
First Australians painted their bodies, artefacts or cave walls. They
cremated or buried their dead with some ceremony and possibly initiated
their young men by tooth avulsion. They practised art in the form of
engraving, painting, stencils and hand-prints. The ice-age art style known as
‘Panaramittee’, after the South Australian site where it was first recognised,
is found Australia-wide.73 It is a largely ‘geometric’ style, the main subjects
being circles and lines. Figurative motifs are almost confined to human
footprints and the tracks of animals, birds and reptiles. Ice-age Australians
also wore ornaments, such as shell necklaces and bone beads.
Stone artefacts were mainly ‘maintenance tools’ to fashion others of
wood, bone or shell. At Mungo we see an ice-age craftsman’s toolkit,
prehistoric equivalents of our axe, chisel and knife. This same basic toolkit
for chopping, scraping and cutting remained in use throughout Australian
prehistory. Some specialised tools also developed, as in ice-age Tasmania,
where wallaby hunters used small, sharp scrapers, the size and shape of a
thumbnail, to cut up carcasses.
 Gradually, stone tools became less massive and more efficient. Early
Australians also used wooden spears and digging sticks. Organic items
rarely survive in archaeological sites, so what is preserved is only a
fragment of the whole material culture. I was fortunate enough to find ice-
age bone tools in limestone Cloggs Cave.74 Most common were sturdy awls
made from kangaroo fibulae. A glossy sheen on the tips shows they were
used to pierce holes through animal skins, presumably to make skin cloaks
with kangaroo sinew as thread, as was still done in recent times. Awls were
also used to ‘sew’ canoes, for instance by the Wik people in Cape York.

Climate change
When humans first arrived in Australia, the climate was wetter and rather
cooler than now, with more surface water. Conditions deteriorated during
the last glaciation (c. 30–15 kya), when sea level dropped to minus 120 m
(395 ft), exposing wide continental shelves.75 This meant drier air masses
and less rainfall for the interior. Inland Australia became a dustbowl,
combining the harshest aspects of present-day Tierra del Fuego and Inner
Mongolia. At the peak of the last ice age, temperatures were at least 6
degrees centigrade colder than today. Most inland lakes dried up, deserts
expanded and sand dunes covered a third of the continent. Only Tasmania
was heavily glaciated, but small glaciers capped the Snowy Mountains in
the southeast and treeless plains replaced earlier woodlands.
Nevertheless, human occupation continued on the coasts, and the end of
the ice age at c. 14 kya saw only minor changes to traditional life. The
climate became milder when continental shelves were flooded. As the
coastline moved inland, rainfall increased, and this became more rapid after
10 kya. The new coastline gave richer opportunities for human settlement.
Stabilisation of sea level about 6.5 kya extended tidal reefs and estuaries,
with their accessible fish and shellfish resources. At river-mouths sandy
barriers now formed lagoons. Food-rich small bays developed in drowned
river valleys such as Sydney Harbour. Many regions became more
favourable for human exploitation, and population increased.
The most drastic post-glacial change was the flooding of one seventh of
Sahul. On the gently sloping northern plains, at times the rising sea
inundated 5 km (3 miles) of land annually. Even in the Great Australian
Bight, 1 km (⅔ mile) of coast disappeared every fifteen years. This
dramatic loss of habitable land drove people inland, causing greater
competition for resources. At the same time, as rainfall increased,
population levels went up. Rainfall and population size were closely
correlated in most of prehistoric Australia.
Displacement and population growth apparently led to increasing warfare
and territoriality, changes reflected in rock paintings. The earliest great
battle scenes in Kakadu paintings belong to the time of rising seas.
Anthropologist Bob Layton and others have argued that distinctive regional
rock art styles also developed as visual markers of clan identity, and
territorial organisation changed from flexible, cooperative and bonding to
the bounding type, with clear boundaries separating groups. They suggest
clan totemism—the use of inherited emblems to represent a group of people
related by descent from shared Ancestral Beings—developed as a more
effective means of local organisation, with groups firmly anchored in the
landscape and focused on the defence of local territories.76
Paintings of yams first appeared in post-glacial times, when tropical
rainfall increased to an annual average of more than 1200 mm (47 inches),
the critical threshold for their growth. The encroaching ocean may also
have engendered the myth of the Rainbow Serpent, which is believed to
have emerged from the sea to create the landscape and give birth to many
babies. Some became humans, others the first animals. The Rainbow
Serpent then created food, shelter and freshwater springs and became a
peacemaker, promoting alliance among local clans.77

Appearance of the dingo and new artefacts

New, specialised, composite artefacts known as the ‘Small Tool Tradition’
proliferated in post-glacial times.78 Typically, small blades were hafted onto
wooden handles, comprising stone points used as spear-tips and backed-
blades. Microlithic backed-blades occur in huge numbers—20,000 were
found in one small, arid area (Arcoona) near Lake Torrens, South Australia.
Functional analyses have shown that backed-blades served as spear-barbs
and teeth on saw-knives. They probably armed prehistoric death spears,
which have as many as 40 sharp stone flakes set into two grooves on the
shaft.
Backed-blades and stone points were alternative methods of arming a
spear for greater penetrating power. Both were weapons. Stone-armed
spears were effective, portable new projectiles that maximised hunting
success in unfamiliar environments. They were ideal for mobile hunters
combating high ecological risks while spreading into previously
uninhabited or little-used regions, such as sandy deserts. The two varieties
of stone-armed spear have different but overlapping distributions that
correlate with different raw materials, for stone-tipped spears were made
only where long reeds or other lightweight shafts were available.
Australian backed-blades and points closely resemble those of the
Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) of the far south of India and Sri Lanka,
another link to the Dravidians. The antiquity of geometric microliths in Sri
Lanka is as early as 28,000 years. Similar microlithic tools have been found
in the Andaman Islands, Java, Sulawesi and mainland Southeast Asia in
9000-year-old contexts.79 Diffusion from outside Australia therefore
seemed a possibility but now indisputable backed artefacts (of the type
known as geometric microliths) have been excavated from a 15,000-year-
old layer at Riversleigh in northwest Queensland.80 Backed-blades also
appear in Mussel Shelter in the Sydney region at 9000 years.
Archaeologists Michael Slack, Peter Hiscock and Val Attenbrow suggest
backing of artefacts was a technological strategy in operation at various
times in the past rather than the product of diffusion by a particular ethnic
group from overseas, but more data are needed to resolve this question.81
Australia’s stone points may tell a similar story of independent invention
followed by widespread proliferation in the mid-Holocene. The earliest
come from Kakadu about 7 kya, but further excavation and a larger sample
size may change the picture. The earliest stone points found in the
Kimberley are in coastal sites dating to around 5 kya and inland 1500 years
later.82 The renowned, pressure-flaked, bifacially worked Kimberley points
are a much later development.
Another artefact to appear in the Holocene was the multipurpose spear-
thrower. A stone tool was usually mounted with resin on the distal end
opposite the hook. In arid regions, this was a ‘tula’ flake for working hard
desert timbers. The Tiwi of Bathurst and Melville Islands, who were cut off
from the mainland about 6.5 kya, have no spear-throwers. Significantly,
simple javelin-type spears with barbs cut in solid wood are typical of these
islands and other regions that lack spear-throwers. Javelins were too heavy
to use with spear-throwers and seem an earlier type. This was confirmed by
the chance discovery of plain and single-barbed wooden javelins in Wyrie
Swamp peat bog, South Australia, where they lay in a 10,000-year-old
campsite with boomerangs and digging sticks. Everywhere javelins
preceded spear-throwers.83
The appearance of spear-throwers in late Bradshaw paintings allows us to
date their presence in the Kimberley to between 4.5 and 8 kya, and the Tiwi
evidence indicates introduction into Australia after 6.5 kya. Linguist Patrick
McConvell has discovered significant similarities in words used in various
Aboriginal languages for spear-thrower, pointing to its rapid diffusion from
Cape York Peninsula.
One indisputable import into Australia was the dingo or wild dog (Canis
familiaris dingo), which was not part of the continent’s native fauna.84
Dingoes were in Australia by 4 kya.85 They closely resemble the Asian
pariah dogs that are widespread in Indonesia, Bangladesh and India. The
mtDNA of all dingoes has proved to be extremely similar, indicating all
descend from a very small founding population brought from Indonesia 5–4
kya.86

New developments in rock art

Intriguingly, the equipment used by animated hunters painted on rock-
shelter walls in northern Australia mirrors the 10,000-year-old excavated
artefacts of Wyrie Swamp. Both the Dynamic figures of Arnhem Land and
the Bradshaws of the Kimberley hold boomerangs and plain or multi-
barbed javelins. (Bradshaws were named after Joseph Bradshaw, the first
European Australian to describe them, but they are now known by their
local Aboriginal name—‘Gwion Gwion’ or just ‘Gwion’). In both styles
hunters are small, finely drawn figures painted in red ochre, often of purple-
red or mulberry hue. Gwion figures average only 20–30 cm (10–12 inches)
in height. Both Dynamic and Gwion human figures are shown in profile
view, unlike virtually all other human representations in Australian rock art.
Profile figures continue up to the present in Arnhem Land art but not in the
Kimberley, where huge, frontal Wandjina spirits succeeded Gwions.
Both Dynamics and Gwions appear suddenly with no obvious precursors.
Rock art expert Grahame Walsh therefore suggested that Gwions mark ‘the
possible arrival of a different group’. He compared Dynamic and Gwion
style figures with overseas rock art and demonstrated remarkably close
similarities with North Africa.87 Walsh established a rock art sequence by
examining hundreds of superimposed paintings. The Gwion style ended
about 5 kya when hunters with spear-throwers and stone-tipped spears first
appear in paintings and the first stone points occur in occupation deposits.
Gwion paintings also depict extinct thylacines but not dingoes. The Gwion
style therefore lasted until 5–4 kya, but the Dynamic style finished rather
earlier as it does not show dingoes, spear-throwers or stone points.
Walsh argues for ice-age antiquity for Gwion paintings and Bert Roberts
obtained age-determinations on wasps’ nests overlying paintings by dating
pollen and quartz grains from deep inside. This gave a minimum age of
19.6±1.7 kya for a Gwion figure overlain by a wasp nest.88 Roberts has
produced preliminary dates of up to 35 kya for traces of earlier art
comprising hand and grass prints and hand-stencils. Early engravings in the
Kimberley are circles, tracks and cupules. The huge, naturalistic figures
painted in outline, known as the ‘Irregular Infill Animal Style’, may be of
similar antiquity, for shell associated with large engraved figures in the
Pilbara gave an age of 21 kya. It seems that tropical Australia was inhabited
early, but mostly abandoned during the arid peak of the last glaciation. Then
as sea level rose, people moved back again. Another feature of early
Australian petroglyphs are very weathered, engraved human faces. These
have pecked eyes surrounded by concentric circles, with mouths, noses and
ears set in generally heart-shaped heads. They appear in Central Australia
from the Burrup Peninsula to the Gibson Desert and Cleland Hills, and
some with indications of shoulders and the upper body are also found in
rock-shelters in the northern Victoria River district.89

Languages
The 250 distinct Aboriginal languages divide into a number of different
language families. Each family comprises languages related to each other in
pronunciation, grammar and shared vocabulary, which probably derive from
a common ancestral language. One of these language families covers almost
90 per cent of the continent and some words occur right across this vast
region, for example, ‘mara’ or ‘mala’ for ‘hand’ and ‘pina’ for ‘ear’. This
homogeneous family is termed Pama-Nyungan (PN) (pronounced pahma-
nee-oon-gan), after the words for ‘person’ at the northeastern and
southwestern ends of the linguistic region. The PN group contains
‘suffixing languages’: suffixes are added to the end of words to indicate
grammatical functions. The more complex non-PN varieties consist of 60
languages in nine language groups, spoken in the Kimberley, Top End and
Gulf of Carpentaria region. Non-PN languages have undergone
grammatical innovations and are profoundly dissimilar in lexicon to PN. In
particular, prefixes are added to verbs to indicate subject and object, using
elements that were formerly separate pronouns to make incredibly long
words.
Linguist Robert Dixon attributed the underlying similarity of Australian
languages to descent from an ancient proto-Australian language and the
differences between PN and non-PN as due to elaboration in the tropical
north. Others such as Patrick McConvell suggest PN expanded only about 6
kya from a homeland near the Gulf of Carpentaria.90 Vocabularies for
Tasmania, which has been separated from the mainland for 14,000 years,
are fragmentary but also indicate suffixes, and some words and the sound
system are very similar to those of Victorian languages.91
Have Australian indigenous languages any affinities with the outside
world? Dravidian of southern India is the only connection that deserves any
consideration, according to Dixon. Similarities between Australian and
Dravidian languages were noticed as far back as 1856 by Bishop Caldwell.
There are remarkable superficial resemblances, especially in sound systems,
but languages change so rapidly that after a few millennia, linguistic
connections are almost impossible to prove. Research has shown that in
Australia about 15 per cent of basic word stock changes after every 1000
years.92

New foods in the diet

In the last 4000 years, some new food management techniques were
adopted and people began to utilise new foods, such as starchy cycad seeds
that were highly toxic until poisons were leached out by prolonged soaking
or burial in soil. Others began to climb the Snowy Mountains each summer
to feast on huge aestivating masses of migratory Bogong moths, an easily
caught source of protein that taste like roast chestnuts when grilled on a
stone ‘hotplate’. Archaeological evidence shows that moth hunting is at
least 1000 years old.93
Stone-built traps were widely used to catch fish, both coastally and
inland. Large eels, Anguilla australis occidentalis, were particularly
abundant in western Victoria, where traps were built from basalt blocks. At
Toolondo in the Western District, Aborigines excavated an artificial channel
2.5 km (1½ miles) long to join two swamps, cutting through a low divide to
let water flow in either direction. This drainage system operated as a form
of swamp-management, retaining water in times of drought and coping with
excess during floods.94 Archaeologist Harry Lourandos calculates the
Toolondo system would have taken 13,000 hours of labour, and 3000 m3
(3924 cubic yards) of earth would have been excavated. Stone tools indicate
the channels were Aboriginal-built and prehistoric.
A thousand people gathered for a month or two’s eeling and ceremonies
at places such as the Lake Bolac outlet in western Victoria. Each family
built its own stone-walled trap and in the opening placed an eel-pot made
from strips of bark or plaited rushes with willow-hoop at its mouth. Men
standing behind the trap grabbed eels emerging through the narrow end of
the tapered pot. They killed the eels by biting them on the back of the head
and then threaded them onto a stick to take back to camp and roast on the
fire.
Large, stone-built eel-traps at nearby Lake Condah are 6600 years old,
the world’s oldest known fish traps, and they were still used until the early
20th century.95 At the beginning of the wet season each autumn, increased
water-flow triggers migration of eels that metamorphose from the yellow-
brown to the silver stage, enabling them to adapt from fresh- to saltwater
and swim down to the sea and their tropical breeding grounds. Eel hunters
spent March and April operating their traps and smoking the eels in hollow
trees. They traded the surplus with other groups and buried some in the
ground. Similarly, Wik people dried native plums for later consumption—
rare examples of short-term food storage.

Stone houses in villages

The Lake Candah area is littered with rough, football-sized lumps of basalt
from the local extinct volcano of Budj Bim (now Mt Eccles). The
Gunditjmara still recount the story of its eruption, although this happened
30,000 years ago. Aborigines heaped the basalt boulders into low,
horseshoe-shaped walls roofed with sticks and bark-sheets. Most huts
occurred singly and were 2–3 m (7–10 ft) wide, housing a family of four to
seven, averaging five. Hut size was proportional to the number of
occupants. One hut with a diameter of 4–5 m (13–16 ft) could house eleven
people.96
The inhabitants of this fertile region, later known as Australia Felix, were
more sedentary than most other hunter-gatherers, but still moved camp
several times each year. In March to April, several hundred people
assembled to exploit eels and each family built itself a temporary hut. Such
hut-groups were not permanent and to describe them as some have done as
‘villages of stone houses’ is a slight exaggeration. The term ‘village’
implies permanent residents living in a cluster of permanent homes in the
country. Nowhere in Aboriginal Australia did this happen; even in the
richest environments people moved camp several times a year as local food
supplies were exhausted. Even eel fishermen moved every month or so.97 In
poorer coastal regions, such as Australia’s southwest, the Nyungar seldom
stayed longer than two or three days in one place, almost never more than a
week and usually only one day. The main reasons for such frequent moves
were to obtain varied, fresh food and avoid the rubbish that built up and the
insect pests that were attracted when they camped in one place for too
long.98

Continuity and change

Australian Aborigines have been described as ‘an unchanging people living
in an unchanging environment’. However, change did occur even if it was
less revolutionary than on other continents.99 Over 60 millennia,
Australians adapted to significant climatic shifts. Between 30 and 20 kya
Central Australia became a waterless dustbowl and people were forced out
to the coastal fringe, only later to be driven inland again by rising glacial
melt-water. The sea’s advance was erratic, but at times it inundated
significant areas. On the shrunken landmass there were more mouths to
feed, and population also rose as food resources increased in favourable
warm, wet, post-glacial conditions. This led to greater competition for
resources and intensification of food collection strategies, such as
communal fish traps. Increased territoriality and regionalisation are clear
from the development of more distinctive rock art styles that feature scenes
of warfare. About 3.5 kya, further environmental stress began, and
continues today, with frequent severe droughts or floods, each occurring
once every 3–7 years. This led to the development of other survival
strategies, such as long-distance kinship networks that help desert people
migrate into other tribal territories during lengthy droughts.100

Why did food production, pottery, metallurgy, architecture or towns not

develop in prehistoric Australia? One reason was its isolation, but another
more telling factor was that Australians had no need to change; Australia
experienced far less drastic environmental change than the northern
hemisphere, where vast ice sheets made much of northern America and
Eurasia almost uninhabitable and only those who adapted by developing
new items such as clothing could survive. Unlike humans trapped in ice-age
France and Spain, nomadic Australians could adapt to climate change by
moving elsewhere in their vast island continent. Whereas most other
populations became food-producers of necessity, Australians were able to
continue opportunistic hunter-gathering to the present day. Their
fundamental adaptation to this driest of continents had been made over 65
kya by ancestors who developed a way of life ideally suited to Australia’s
harsh, unpredictable climate.
 7

ASSIMILATION
A time of trouble (1930s–1970s)

Before the 1970s, government policy towards Aborigines went through

three broad phases—protection assimilation and integration. From 1788, the
main thrust was protection from harmful colonial influences. Protection
varied over time and space; at its best it eased the transition from traditional
to modern Western society, at its worst it was coercive and racist. Then, in
the late 1930s, both humanitarians and Aboriginal leaders such as William
Cooper proposed the then radical policy of assimilation—the cultural
process of making similar. Assimilation aimed to enable indigenous people
to have the same levels of education, health, employment and material
comfort as the dominant society. The ends were held to justify the means,
which were the removal and education of mixed-race children for
intermarriage and absorption into Anglo-Australia. By the late 1960s,
assimilation had fallen into disrepute, because it involved forcible child
removal, institutionalisation and loss of racial identity.

Protection
In new colonies, missionaries were usually foremost in protecting
indigenous people, but not in Australia. Conversion of ‘heathens’ was not
among the motives for sailing to Botany Bay. Only one clergyman,
Protestant Reverend Richard Johnson, sailed with the First Fleet and it
wasn’t until 1815 that the first ‘native institution’ or mission was set up.
Christianity aimed to raise Aborigines from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’ by
education. Missionaries hoped that if ‘they were taught to think as we think,
to feel as we feel, to live as we live, then the Aborigines would be blended
with the general population’. They argued that ‘humanity and Christian
mercy constrained them to raise the Aborigines from their abject
wretchedness. They should also make some recompense for depriving them
of their lands. The best recompense, as they saw it, was to teach the
Aborigines to appreciate the advantages of Christian civilisation. The
difficulty was that … the Aborigines spurned the gift.’1 Missionaries
recognised colonial society’s terrible effects on those Aboriginal people
who had become urban fringe-dwellers. They sought government land
grants to provide refuges from alcoholism, violence, disease, prostitution
and begging, and offered rations, medical aid, education and training for
employment. However, very few missions were established. Tasmania had
none until Wybalenna in 1833, and missions in other states were too few,
too impoverished and too late. New South Wales had only seven missions
in over 800,000 km2 (300,000 sq. miles).
The first mission outside Sydney was founded in 1824 by Reverend
Lancelot Threlkeld near Lake Macquarie (now Newcastle). High costs
forced him to open a coal-mine nearby to support the initiative. Threlkeld
made few converts but mastered the now-extinct Awabakal language and
published a grammar in 1834—the earliest published systematic study of an
Australian language. He also translated some of the Anglican prayerbook
and New Testament. The mission closed in 1841, for its congregation had
vanished ‘from the Aborigines becoming extinct in these districts’.
Depopulation was caused by disease, conflict and voluntary movement to
towns for white men’s goods. Soon few Awabakal remained. Even
Threlkeld’s main assistant, Biraban, deserted the mission for urban
attractions and died an alcoholic.2 The second New South Wales mission,
founded at Wellington in 1825, closed in 1842 because of alcoholism and
depopulation. The death toll at missions was often high because measles,
tuberculosis and other infectious diseases affected all resident Aborigines
plus incomers seeking medical help, but mortality among the untreated was
even greater.
Why were Australia’s early missions so unsuccessful compared with
those on Pacific and Torres Strait islands? The Pacific crusaders were often
indigenous Christian converts who risked their lives to go and convert their
fellows, but Aboriginal Australia didn’t have fixed communities or a social
order readily able to adapt to new ways. Nomadic Aborigines were
unwilling to settle in one place and frequently deserted the missions, as
attendance was voluntary. Missionaries saw indigenous people as ‘children
of God’ in need of salvation, education and training, whereas Aborigines
saw no point in white men’s drudgery and little in education, although white
medicine and hospitals were appreciated. The gulf was too wide, even
though both Christians and southeastern Aborigines believed in an afterlife
and an all-powerful Father in the sky. Once their traditional culture was
undermined, tribal Aborigines became ‘the people in-between’—they
couldn’t continue to live their old life and didn’t fit readily into white
society.
In 1838 the Aborigines Protection Society was founded in London. A
British Government report from the same period recommended the
appointment of missionaries, reservation of hunting grounds, schooling for
the young and special laws to keep them safe. ‘No expenditure should be
withheld which can be incurred judiciously for the maintenance of
missionaries, who should be employed to instruct the tribes, and of
protectors, whose duty it should be to protect them.’ The committee was
well aware of the problems of colonisation without missionaries: ‘the
intercourse of Europeans in general … has been, unless when attended by
missionary exertions, a source of many calamities to uncivilised nations.’3
Nonetheless, missions were given little else but land until the 1950s.
Many of the 211 missions established in Australia survived only a few
years, but others like the Benedictine mission at New Norcia, Western
Australia (1847–1970s), and the Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg,
Northern Territory (1877–1982), were long-term successes.4 Hermannsburg
effectively prevented the destruction of the western Arrernte people in the
face of the advancing cattle industry, whereas eastern Arrernte, unprotected
by any mission, almost disappeared. Aborigines found missions useful
sanctuaries from black enemies and trigger-happy whites. Old people and
children could stay there in safety and medical help was available. Missions
provided a reliable food supply and a place to leave children temporarily
when going out bush. They kept kinsfolk together and became a home for
dispossessed people, establishing many communities that still survive.
Further mission stations were set up in southern Australia, such as Point
McLeay, South Australia (1859), Maloga, Victoria (1874) and Warangesda,
New South Wales (1879). Later, the mission years were seen as a golden
age when protection, land, food, health care, work, houses, schools,
churches, law and order were provided. Strength in numbers and shared
identity promoted Aboriginal solidarity. Missions fostered health, education
and the Christian moral code of non-violence. The downside was that some
Aboriginal men’s authority was usurped by European missionaries and
superintendents. Senior men’s role as educators was diminished by Western
education, and their status declined while women’s tended to increase.
Aboriginal women now often dominate the family and have become
community leaders, whereas many men have lost both status and self-
respect.
The best missions, such as Hermannsburg and Kunmunya in the
Kimberley, helped to preserve Aboriginal culture, but many tried to stamp
out Aboriginal customs, beliefs and language and treated Aborigines like
children. As late as 1977 at Kalumburu a Spanish Benedictine monk’s daily
greeting to a group of middle-aged Aborigines was ‘Good morning, boys
and girls’. Missionary Robert Love of Kunmunya, however, declared: ‘In
this mission we will never tolerate paternalism. These people are our equals
in intelligence, and our superiors in physique. The only differences are in
the colours of our skins and the fact that we have had centuries more
practice at becoming civilised.’5
During his 28 years at Hermannsburg (now Ntaria) from 1894,
missionary Carl Strehlow became fluent in Arrernte and translated the
scriptures. His son, Ted Strehlow, collected sacred artefacts for safekeeping,
now housed in a special ‘keeping place’ in Alice Springs. Christianity was
forcefully promoted—only Christians could eat in the communal kitchen.
This Lutheran policy led to 172 converts in 28 years.
Some were equivalent to ‘rice Christians’ in India but others were
genuine believers and a few became pastors. Aboriginal painter Albert
Namatjira was born there in 1902, educated in the boys’ dormitory and
became both a baptised Christian and an initiated elder, yet his sad story
shows the immense problems of trying to bridge two such different worlds
(see chapter 8). Many missionaries tried to prevent initiation ceremonies
that they deemed ‘barbarous’. Many also opposed polygyny, to which
Bishop Gsell on Bathurst Island developed a pragmatic solution—he bought
the infant brides. In his book The Bishop with 150 Wives, he recounts how
between 1921 and 1938 he used tobacco and metal axes to buy little girls
from the old men to whom they were betrothed, raised them as Christians in
the mission dormitory and then found them husbands among young men
who would otherwise have waited much longer for a wife. While this
satisfied Western objections to child brides, it disastrously disrupted the
traditional Aboriginal system of polygyny.6
Not all missions were unhappy places: I well remember Dick Roughsey
(Goobalathaldin, which means ‘rough sea’) fondly reminiscing by our
campfire in north Queensland about his days at the Scottish Presbyterian
mission on Mornington Island, where he learnt to read, write a beautiful
copperplate hand and sing hymns and folk songs in a Scottish brogue! He
trained as a stockman, but later became an artist, children’s book author,
chairman of the Australia Council’s Aboriginal Arts Board and won an
OBE. He also won major prizes for his children’s books, Giant Devil Dingo
and The Rainbow Serpent, and in 1971 published Moon and Rainbow: The
Autobiography of an Aboriginal.7 In northern Australia, twenty more
Christian missions were founded between the 1880s and 1920s, mainly on
islands or the coast, where supplies could be brought in by boat. The main
attraction of the missions was food and tobacco, provided as reward for
labour and church attendance. The response of the Nyul Nyul people of
Beagle Bay in the Kimberley to this moral blackmail was—‘no more
tobacco, no more h’Allelulia’!8
Twentieth-century pressure to shut down missions was intended to help
Aborigines but has achieved the opposite. Frequent criticisms were that
missionaries were too authoritarian, suppressed indigenous culture, customs
and language and undermined families by separating children from their
parents and making them sleep in single-sex dormitories. While these
criticisms have some validity, what has replaced missions is infinitely
worse. Outback communities may have achieved land ownership but there
has been a huge increase in substance abuse, domestic violence and crime
and a sharp decline in health, education and jobs. Missions still functioning
today are confined to the Torres Strait Islands and remote parts of the
Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia, especially the
Kimberley, where they provide a superb service in very difficult conditions.
Now only thirty ‘missions’ remain in remote regions (eighteen in Northern
Territory, two in South Australia and ten in Western Australia).

A dying race?
Missionaries aimed both to convert the ‘pagan savages’ and to ease the
passing of the Aboriginal race. In 1837 Bishop Broughton made a comment
that was to be extremely influential: ‘They appear … gradually to decay;
they diminish in numbers; … within a very limited period … they will be
extinct.’ Churchman J.D. Lang thought rapid population decline might be
due to ‘Divine Providence’, others to ‘some unknown force’.9
Colonisation’s terrible impact was known by 1858, when the editor of the
Melbourne Age newspaper told readers to try to ‘smooth the pillow of a
dying race’.
In 1836, the young Charles Darwin visited Australia on his round-the-
world voyage in the Beagle. His fascinating observations clearly strongly
influenced his later theories, but seem almost unknown among writers on
Aboriginal Australia. In the Bathurst region on the tablelands west of
Sydney, Darwin met ‘a party of a score of the black aborigines … each
carrying, in their accustomed manner, a bundle of spears and other weapons
… they were all partly clothed and several could speak a little English: their
countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far
from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been
represented. In their own arts they are admirable … In tracking animals or
men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard of several of their
remarks which manifested considerable acuteness.’
Yet Darwin’s favourable first impression was outweighed by pessimism
about their future:
It is very curious thus to see in the midst of a civilised people, a set of harmless savages
wandering about without knowing where they will sleep at night, and gaining their livelihood by
hunting in the woods … The number of aborigines is rapidly decreasing … This decrease, no
doubt, must be partly owing to the introduction of spirits, to European diseases … and to the
gradual extinction of the wild animals … Besides the several evident causes of destruction, there
appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod,
death seems to pursue the aboriginal … The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the
same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker … It was
 melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying that they knew the land was
doomed to pass from their children.10

This belief in the stronger always destroying the weaker, whether animal
or human, was expounded in Darwin’s books, especially The Descent of
Man published in 1871. Darwin’s ideas were developed by others into the
later disastrous theory of social Darwinism and the belief that Aborigines
were less evolved than Europeans and therefore doomed to extinction. The
inevitability of their disappearance became common doctrine, exemplified
in Daisy Bates’ 1937 book, The Passing of the Aborigines. What none then
understood was that Darwin’s ‘mysterious agency’ was nothing but the
devastating impact of new diseases, which he had significantly
underestimated. It was only the development of antibiotics and preventative
modern medicine that saved the situation. Only in 1939 was the decline in
tribal numbers halted and a slight increase recorded.

14. ERNABELLA/PUKATJA
Ernabella Mission (1937–74) in Central Australia was a model of
what the best missions should be. It resulted from the vision of a
Presbyterian surgeon from Adelaide, Charles Duguid, who
understood that tribal Aborigines’ survival depended upon being
given freedom and adequate opportunity to adapt to the inevitable
changes they would experience. They needed time to absorb new
ways, assess new values and choose new directions. There was to be
no compulsion, no imposition of Western ways and no interference
with tribal customs. They would need a new faith to sustain them as
old beliefs disappeared, but Ernabella’s firm policy was that
Aborigines should be free to accept or reject Christianity. In fact,
some did become Christians, the concept of the Dreaming or Law
—‘tjukurpa’—providing a ready link with the Bible’s teaching of ‘In
the beginning was the Word’.
Duguid believed that immediate medical help should be offered,
mission staff should be trained in particular skills and obliged to learn
the language, and responsibility should be quickly passed to the
Aborigines.a Teaching was in Pitjantjatjara for the first five years of a
child’s schooling, so that they could read and write their own tongue.
(Although there is very limited literature available in Aboriginal
languages, this literacy in Pitjantjatjara enabled them to write each
other letters in later years when away from the mission.) Arithmetic
was rudimentary, since in Pitjantjatjara there are no numbers beyond
four. There was no compulsion to wear clothes, which harbour germs
unless washed frequently—not easy in the desert. Schoolchildren had
fun each morning hosing each other down before settling to lessons
under the shade of paperbark trees in the sandy creek bed. Babies
were looked after in the traditional way. No nappies were used, but
Duguid recalls:
I remember seeing an Aboriginal tribal mother hold out her baby for a bowel
motion, and then clean its buttocks by scraping them gently with a flat stone. After
that she powdered them with fine sand. By contrast to this, my wife has told me of
the expression of disgust on one Aboriginal mother’s face when she was staying in
our home and was shown how a white mother used nappies for a baby and washed
them clean after use.

Teacher Winifred Hilliard described Ernabella’s early days and the

reaction of a Pitjantjatjara group when they came out of the desert in
1951 and saw their first whites: ‘They had their first sight of strange
people with fair skins, long noses and “weak” blue eyes, and were not
impressed.’b
Only a few changes were made to traditional ways. Aborigines
regarded it as a waste to give food to somebody near death when there
were others in greater need. The superintendent found one such case
in camp and undertook to supervise feeding the patient. The man
recovered and was ‘most grateful’. Infanticide was also banned.
When the first set of twins was born at the mission in 1961, it took a
week for the mother to agree to keep both babies and her husband
uttered some threats, believing that there must have been two fathers.
The mission provided employment opportunities for both men and
women and introduced them to wages and a cash economy. There was
a shop, where they learnt to buy food to cook in their camp. They
found white people’s routine and the long hours of labour
incomprehensible; there is no word for work in any Aboriginal
language. Nevertheless, men learnt fence-building, well-sinking,
carpentry, sheep-shearing and brick-making, and proudly built their
own houses of mud brick. One young man who had lost his leg after
being speared in a tribal fight was taught to touch-type and earned his
living preparing school materials. The women’s craft centre,
Ernabella Arts, produced a wide range of goods for sale and became
renowned for batik-dyed fabrics featuring Aboriginal designs.
Then came the 1970s and pressure for land rights, self-
determination and self-management. The result was that in 1974
administration of Ernabella was transferred to a local Aboriginal
council and subsequently the land was handed back under the
Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act of 1981. Under its new name,
Pukatja, Ernabella still exists and the craft centre continues, but
now Pukatja suffers the problems of so many outback Aboriginal
communities. Standards of nutrition, hygiene, health and education
have declined horrendously, petrol-sniffing and drunkenness are rife
and dedicated missionaries have been replaced by short-term
employees, who tend to ‘burn out’ in a couple of years.
Paul Toohey, a well-respected journalist, visited Pukatja, one of a
dozen communities of the Anangu-Pitjatjantjara Lands, in 2001. He
paints a horrifying picture of a community in crisis in ‘a shabby
desert town of filthy tin houses and office buildings that look more
like jail blocks’:
In the town of Pukatja, population 400, there are 60 petrol sniffers. They control
the town and everyone is frightened … there is no sense of community … Liquor is
banned but there are drunks. Petrol-sniffing is illegal but is now fully accepted as a
part of life. Sniffers roam town, all day, cans stuck to their faces … Petrol … is
sold to children by greedy relatives or even given by parents in order to protect
themselves from their children’s violent demands … White people work behind
iron doors or grilles because sniffers and drunks pull knives or star-pickets when
they don’t get their way … The Aborigines are almost entirely welfare-dependent
… There is no police presence on the Lands, apart from Aboriginal police aides.
Inevitably, these men have petrol-sniffing children or relatives … Relatives use the
powerful obligations inherent in the skin-family system to persuade aides not to
prosecute their own … The physical effect of petrol-sniffing is described by
doctors as ‘similar to an electrical short’, whereby fatty tissue on brain nerve-
endings wastes away, causing the ‘wires’ to flail about in the brain. Many sniffers
eventually lose the ability to stand upright. Those who manage to cheat death are
likely to find themselves wheelchair-bound and in full-time care. The
Ngaanyatjarra Council, representing remote communities in Western Australia, has
identified 40 young people from its area either dead or permanently intellectually
or physically disabled from petrol-sniffing in a 15-year period. It also reports a
prevalence of sexual violence and ‘an acutely high risk of exposure to HIV’ among
 sniffers, who tend to have ‘multiple sexual partners with similarly poor sexual
health’ …

‘In the worst cases,’ says Peter Morrison, a white community

development officer in the Lands for eight years, there are ‘nine-year-
old girls sniffing petrol and being pack-raped. That’s the reality of the
Lands … I’ve got no love for the Christians, but when they were here
there were butcher shops, vegetable gardens and people’s health was
better. They had something.’ … Nyaningu, a Pukatja elder and church
minister, says, ‘We want the work to come back, horses, cattle,
fencing, gardens, welding. We used to be busy. But whitefellas are
like a cloud. They come and go.’c

Jobs
The earliest jobs for Aboriginal men came from the pastoral and whaling
industries. By 1844, 300 Aboriginal whalers were employed in South
Australia and Eden, New South Wales, where two whaleboats were
successfully manned by all-Aboriginal crews.11 The adventure and variety
of whaling life appealed to Aboriginal hunters and they could go home for a
break each year in the off-season.
Most Aboriginal people were prepared to negotiate with the newcomers,
and were sufficiently wily to exploit them. They traded goods or did odd
jobs to fulfil their immediate needs. Fish, animal skins and feathers were
exchanged for food, tobacco and alcohol. In towns easy food was to be had
from bakers and butchers by hewing wood or fetching water, Aboriginal
women’s sexual services were always in demand and children became adept
at begging. By these strategies Aborigines could usually satisfy their hunger
for white men’s food, which acted like a magnet. For example, Protector
William Thomas set up Nerre-Nerre-Warren reserve 65 km (40 miles) from
Melbourne to keep Aborigines away from white men’s vices and disease,
only to find them always in town. Aborigines had ‘strong motives’ for
begging, he wrote in 1843:
On one day … in the public road [in Melbourne], I went up to four groups who had fires at
midday enjoying themselves; I counted their mendicant fare … there were 21 good white loaves,
 besides abundance of meat from the shambles [slaughter yards]; one of them holding up two
loaves exclaimed, ‘no good Nerre-Nerre-Warren, “marnameek” (very good) Melbourne’.12

The pastoral industry

Indigenous bush skills and local knowledge have always been highly
valued, and Aboriginal stockmen formed the backbone of the vast new
pastoral industry that developed between 1820 and 1900. Aboriginal men
outnumbered white stockmen by five or six to one on the cattle and sheep
properties or ranches known as stations, and Aboriginal women worked in
homesteads and tended vegetable gardens, goats and chickens. Frontier
districts always suffered from a severe shortage of labour, exacerbated from
the 1850s by goldrushes that drew white labour away. On northern cattle
stations Aborigines worked as drovers, stockmen and desert shepherds, for
example at Ernabella (including pre-mission Ernabella). Further south in
cooler, better-watered sheep country, they were needed as shepherds and
shearers.
Mary Durack vividly describes pastoral life in her book Kings in Grass
Castles, telling of generally good race relations in the outback during the
opening-up of western Queensland and the Kimberley to cattle. Accounts
by other pastoralists in the early phases of the cattle industry in north
Queensland and the Northern Territory paint a similar picture, once the
frontier phase was over.13 Most managers had good reputations among both
blacks and whites. ‘Bosses’ were viewed by Aboriginal employees as their
protectors. A good ‘boss’ or ‘missus’ was given a ‘skin name’. Often
Aborigines asked the ‘boss’ to give them a European first name and some
also adopted the ‘boss’s’ surname. Mutual respect, loyalty and trust
developed. ‘Bosses’ intervened to protect their stockmen from police
charges relating to tribal murders; the ‘missus’ entrusted her young children
to Aboriginal women’s care and white children learnt to speak the local
Aboriginal language.
Many rural Aboriginal people have fond memories of living in a station
community under a ‘good boss’, of horsemanship, corroborees each night in
the camp and three months’ wet season ‘walkabout’ when cattle-work was
slack and they reverted to hunting, visiting sites and holding ceremonies in
their own ‘country’. It was a rough life and some bosses were violent but,
because of the shortage of labour, it was in the manager’s interest to treat
his Aboriginal stockmen fairly well and look after their extended families.
The highest praise for a ‘boss’ was that a camp ‘never went hungry’.
‘Tucker’—the bush term for food—was Aborigines’ top priority; often it
was European ‘fast food’—bread, flour and beef—that first attracted them
to come in from the bush. At a station the Aboriginal ‘mob’, as it was
known, often numbered between 50 and 100 kinsfolk, in effect a whole
residential group or clan. In return for their labour and land, they expected
enough food for the whole camp, including the old and sick. When
supplemented with bush food, the diet was adequate and station Aborigines
were much healthier than urban fringe-dwellers, particularly because on
stations alcohol and opium were both banned and unavailable. Housing was
usually ‘humpies’—shelters made of corrugated iron and hessian sacking—
appalling to European eyes, but Aborigines considered their living
conditions ‘soft’ by bush standards.14
At first pastoral workers were paid in food, clothing and tobacco. Cash
was seldom used on stations—most European stockmen drew wages only
once a year before leaving for their annual holiday. Most Aborigines had
never seen money and didn’t want it nor did they want European-style
housing. What they did want was ‘plenty tucker’. This situation was
described as ‘workin’ longa tucker’, an expression identifying their
workplace with a food-gathering site. ‘Workin’ longa tucker’ was a strategy
that allowed Aborigines to fulfil their material and spiritual needs, to keep
relatives together and continue sharing among kinsfolk. It also gave them a
sense of pride. As historian Ann McGrath put it in her book Born in the
Cattle (an expression that referred to these men and women living on cattle
stations): ‘The mobility and status provided by horse-riding, stockwork and
mustering allowed stockmen and women as individuals, and the station
community as a whole, a certain feeling of pride. The vastness of most
cattle runs and the outdoor nature of the work allowed a sense of space and
liberty.’15
The period of paternalism but relative stability between 1910 and 1940
was generally considered a happy time—‘after the wild times, before grog,
before wages’, as Wardaman elder, Bill Harney recounted to me. It was also
‘before the Japanese war’ (the Second World War), when Darwin and other
towns on the north coast suffered disastrous Japanese bombing raids.
Initially Aboriginal pastoral communities considered cash-wages a problem
rather than an asset. This was because payment in kind—rations, clothes,
blankets and equipment—fitted well with the Aboriginal sharing ethic,
whereas cash paid to a few individuals did not. Nevertheless, without any
consultation regarding their wants or needs, various Aboriginal Acts were
passed (in Queensland in 1897, Western Australia in 1905 and the Northern
Territory in 1911) which laid down wage-rates for Aborigines in the
pastoral industry. Inevitably Aboriginal women received far less than men
and all were paid less than white workers; the best rate was two thirds, in
Queensland.
Pastoralists persuaded legislators that Aboriginal stockmen were less
competent and reliable than white ones, but this was far from the truth.
Aboriginal men, and some women, developed great skill at horsemanship
and station work, especially finding lost cattle. As a white ringer (an
Australian stock-worker or drover) pointed out: ‘A white man rides around
all day looking for cattle; an Aborigine rides around all day looking for
cattle tracks. When he finds the tracks he will find the beast; a white man
might wander for days and not see a beast.’16
Money was such a new phenomenon to Aboriginal pastoral workers that
many did not actually claim their due wages. Those who did immediately
shared with kinsfolk, for sharing is the most deeply ingrained of all
Aboriginal traditions. Thrift and savings are totally alien concepts to people
who generally did not even store food. In order, therefore, to provide a
cushion against unemployment or sickness, up to two-thirds of Aboriginal
adults’ earnings (if clothing was provided) were held in trust by the state.
By 1934, unclaimed Aboriginal trust funds amounted to £2400 in Western
Australia, £3000 in the Northern Territory and a massive £293,549 in
Queensland. Some protectors used trust funds to buy land for Aborigines,
but most unclaimed money, with interest, reverted to consolidated
government revenue. Aboriginal groups continue to lobby for the full return
of these funds and accrued interest.17

Changing times
The Australian Aborigines Progressive Association was formed in 1925 by
New South Wales part-Aboriginal Fred Maynard, who campaigned for the
right for Aborigines to be fully assimilated and left in control of their
children.18 The next year William Harris, a mixed-race farmer brought up in
an orphanage, founded a similar body in Western Australia. The 1930s saw
growing support for the Aboriginal cause from humanitarians, liberals and
anthropologists such as A.P. Elkin, Bill Stanner and Donald Thomson, who
sought to persuade the public that Aborigines were their intellectual equals.
Aboriginal affairs hit the headlines in 1933 when three Arnhem Land
tribesmen were gaoled for twenty years for killing five Japanese crewmen
at Caledon Bay and another, Tuckiar, received the death penalty for
murdering a white policeman. The federal government successfully
appealed to the High Court and in 1934 the four were released, although
Tuckiar disappeared while returning home. The government agreed to
Thomson’s request to send him alone into Arnhem Land to try to stop the
killings; he emerged unscathed and recommended that tribal Aborigines be
protected by strict segregation on large, inviolate reserves.
By the 1930s, tribal Aborigines were no longer living in southeastern
Australia but some articulate men of mixed descent were campaigning for
assimilation. At the time, assimilation was a radical policy that was not yet
accepted by most white Australians. Perhaps the earliest Aboriginal activist
and rights campaigner was Charles Frederick (Fred) Maynard (1879–1946),
who in 1925 in New South Wales founded the Australian Aborigines
Progressive Association, speaking for the rights of Aboriginal people and
their wish to integrate with society. Then in 1937, John Patten and William
Ferguson launched the Aborigines Progressive Association, also in New
South Wales. Patten was an itinerant labourer and professional boxer and
became a forceful public speaker. Ferguson left his mission school aged
fourteen to become a sheep-shearer. Both spent their later lives
campaigning for citizenship and better conditions on Aboriginal reserves. In
Victoria, William Cooper established the Australian Aborigines League in
1932 and later sent a petition to King George V seeking federal control of
Aboriginal administration and special Aboriginal electorates in federal
parliament. The latter is contrary to the Australian constitution but the
desire for federal rather than state responsibility for Aboriginal affairs led to
the successful 1967 referendum (see chapter 8). Cooper achieved
worldwide publicity when he orchestrated an Aboriginal ‘Day of Mourning’
on 26 January 1938, when white Australia was celebrating the 150th
anniversary of settlement. The 1938 protest influenced public opinion but
the Second World War destroyed its momentum, and the impetus was not
regained until the 1960s.
 During the Second World War there were several changes to outback
employment when Darwin, Port Hedland, Broome and other northern towns
were bombed, and Australia faced a possible Japanese invasion. Over 3000
Aborigines joined the Volunteer Defence Corps for service within Australia.
About 200 became de facto military personnel, patrolling northern coasts
and rescuing stranded airmen, while others worked as civilian labourers on
defence projects. They were fed army rations, housed and clothed and paid
cash wages, the first cash some had ever received. They related well to
regular troops and performed creditably. Another thousand mixed-race
Aborigines enlisted in the army and served overseas, and one, Reg
Saunders, became a commissioned officer. All were literate and of
substantial European descent, as were the 300 or so from New South Wales,
Victoria, South Australia and Queensland who served in the First World
War. In 1945 a grateful nation revised its ideas about Aboriginal people, and
in 1949 all Aboriginal ex-servicemen were given the vote in national
elections, together with all Aborigines in New South Wales, Victoria, South
Australia and Tasmania. Aborigines in these states had never been formally
excluded from voting, but few did so. Then in 1961 a Senate committee on
Aboriginal voting rights recommended that all Aborigines in all states and
territories be immediately given the vote in federal elections, and by 1965
all indigenous people of Australia, whether literate or not, were
enfranchised.19

First Aboriginal strikes

After the Second World War, attention turned to raising Aboriginal pastoral
workers’ pay and in 1947 the Northern Territory rate went up to 20 shillings
a week—a big rise but still below white rates. Meanwhile in Western
Australia the strike weapon came into play. In 1945 Aboriginal stockmen
gathered in the Pilbara for both sacred and secular ‘business’. They invited
locally born white well-digger, mineral prospector and Aboriginal
champion, Don McLeod, to attend the rituals and discuss how Aboriginal
wages and living conditions could be improved and traditional life
protected. McLeod suggested going on strike, as 30 stockmen from De
Grey station had done the previous year for better food. Aboriginal
decision-making involves long discussions until consensus is reached; after
six weeks a strike was planned and sacred boards were sent out to inform
all local Aboriginal communities. Co-organisers were McLeod, Dooley-
Bin-Bin, a ‘travelling Law man’ and Clancy McKenna, an Aboriginal
contractor. McLeod suggested they delay the strike until the Second World
War ended. Just before sheep-shearing seemed a good time and McLeod
symbolically chose May Day. The problem of getting isolated, illiterate
station-hands to act in unison was solved by making special calendars on
which they marked off the days.
On 1 May 1946, Aboriginal stockmen on 20 out of 22 Pilbara properties
went on strike, asking for 30 shillings a week plus keep. They survived by
hunting kangaroos and prospecting for minerals, but the leaders were
arrested and sentenced to three months’ hard labour for ‘enticing’
Aborigines from their place of employment. Bail for McLeod was set at
£300 (a year’s wages) but through his contacts in Perth, a Committee for the
Defence of Native Rights was formed and a protest meeting in Perth Town
Hall was well-attended by churchmen, women’s groups, academics,
humanitarians, trade unionists and communists. A lawyer was employed,
appeals lodged and the gaol sentences overturned. Aborigines learnt the
useful lesson that, unlike their own immutable Law, white men’s law could
be altered. Little wonder that the first Aboriginal tertiary students chose to
become lawyers!
In spite of harassment from police, pastoralists and government officials,
industrial action lasted until the 1949 award of £3 per week plus keep, twice
their original demand. However, only one in four Aboriginal stockmen
returned to pastoral work. The rest had a vision of ‘Narawuda’, a land of
promise and freedom, ‘a station of our own’ where they could make a living
off their own land by running cattle and prospecting, ‘a place for the old
people to stay’ and ‘a school for the kids’.20
‘The Group’, as the strikers became known, formed a cooperative mining
company. There was little equipment, money or even food, but lucrative
finds of wolfram and tin were made; 700 starving Aboriginal men and
women got picks and shovels and worked so hard that by 1951 they had
saved £9000 and purchased a cattle station, Yandeyarra. That year they
grossed £50,000! A new company, Pindan Proprietary Limited, was formed
in 1955 and the group became the ‘Pindan Mob’.
Success continued until 1960, when falling metal prices and other
problems sent the company bankrupt and it acrimoniously split into two.
One group set up Mugarinya Pastoral Company and later regained
Yandeyarra under lease from the Aboriginal Lands Trust (set up in Western
Australia in 1972). The other group formed Nomads Pty Ltd mining
company and in 1971 acquired the 76,000 ha (190,000 acre) Strelley station
in northeastern Pilbara. The Nomad Strelley Aboriginal community is
fiercely autonomous. An independent body handles outside grants and most
individuals contribute their social-security benefits to a group fund.
Fighting and traditional payback attacks are banned and rules on marriage
and mother-in-law avoidance have been relaxed. Traditional law and culture
are strong and initiations continue, but now circumcision is performed in
hospital to avoid infection.21

Equal pay
The worst abuses of Aboriginal employment ended after the Pilbara strike
but there was still no equal pay. The cause was taken up by a new pressure
group, the Federal Council for Advancement of Aborigines and Torres
Strait Islanders (FCAATSI). This began in 1958, with 30 members drawn
mainly from churches and trade unions, including just four Aborigines, but
Aboriginal membership grew to 200 in the next decade. FCAATSI lobbied
each Trade Union Congress until the 1963 Congress adopted a policy of
ending discrimination against Aboriginal labour. A test case on equal pay
for Northern Territory Aborigines was brought by the North Australian
Workers Union (NAWU) in 1965. The Commonwealth Arbitration
Commission visited cattle stations and heard pastoralists express grave
concerns about the problems equal pay would cause Aborigines, who would
lose their jobs because it would become impossibly expensive to pay them
equal wages and also feed their many dependants. To a large extent, this is
exactly what happened. However, the Commission believed it had no
choice, declaring that ‘there must be one industrial law, similarly applied to
all Australians, Aboriginal or not’.
The dilemma policy-makers faced was that Australian law could not
discriminate against Aboriginal stock-workers but ‘it was clear to everyone
that the institution of equal wages would result in the wholesale removal of
Aboriginal people from cattle station work to social security on the
settlements—and the latter path was chosen. Of course, with hindsight this
choice has had tragic consequences,’ judges modern Cape York Aboriginal
leader, Noel Pearson. Equal pay led to loss of contact with traditional lands,
massive cultural and social impacts, long-term welfare dependency,
passivity and disempowerment, leading to much of the present
‘dysfunction’ in Aboriginal communities. Pearson believes that a third
option was available to 1960s policy-makers—‘My own regret is that the
resources that were made available by the federal government, through the
social security system when people were removed to the settlements, were
not instead used to subsidise wages for continued work in the cattle industry
… I believe the social results would have been much better.’
The result of equal pay was that the Aboriginal communities of Cape
York and elsewhere went from almost nil reliance on government welfare in
1970 to almost 100 per cent. This lack of work has been the foremost cause
of the unravelling and near-destruction of Aboriginal society. There is a
saying that for happiness in life you need only two things—love and work.
And as another saying goes: ‘The road to hell is paved with good
intentions.’
In order to cushion the impact, the Commission decided to ease the
award in over three years. This delay angered some people and there were
further strikes, the focus of demands gradually changing from money to
land rights—owning and living on one’s traditional land.
The land rights movement had begun in 1963 when Yolngu tribesmen
from Yirrkala Reserve, Northern Territory, sent a bark petition to federal
parliament protesting against excision of 390 km2 (150 sq. miles) of their
land for bauxite mining (see chapter 8). Then in June 1966 Dexter Daniels
from Roper River, an Aboriginal NAWU organiser, encouraged Gurindji
stockman, Lupnga Giari or ‘Captain Major’, to bring Aborigines at
Newcastle Waters station, Northern Territory, out on strike for equal pay.
Twenty Aboriginal workers and 80 camp dependants left their rations and
living-quarters and walked off to the nearest small town, Elliott, where
trade union and welfare authorities provided food. Two months later they
organised another walk-off, this time of 200 fellow Gurindji from Wave
Hill station. Vincent Lingiari, a Gurindji elder, became their spokesman and
they moved to Wattie Creek (Daguragu) in the heart of ‘their own country’,
set up camp in the dry bed of the Victoria River and began to live off the
land.22
The Gurindji protest against poor pay and conditions rapidly turned into a
claim for return of their traditional land, which was Crown land leased by
the huge British company, Vesteys. This strike was of tremendous symbolic
and political significance. It marked a turning point in Aboriginal protest
politics from workers’ demands for better pay to a dispossessed people
campaigning for land. The Gurindji won widespread support. After two
years of pressure, the federal government agreed to give them 26 km2 (10
sq. miles) of land around Wattie Creek out of the 15,540 km2 (6000 sq.
miles) of Wave Hill station, where Vesteys retained their lease. This was the
first real government recognition of an Aboriginal land claim, although very
small. The Waterside Workers’ Federation placed a $1 levy on its members
and in 1970 presented the Gurindji with $10,000 to cover the costs of
fencing. Lord Vestey offered a further 90 km2, the cattle station Daguragu
was established and 2500 km2 of land was formally handed over in 1975 by
the prime minister, Gough Whitlam. Finally, Gurindji were granted
inalienable freehold title under the new Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern
Territory) Act of 1976. A sad footnote to this story is that since 1991
Daguragu has been deserted, along with some other leases that were
supposed to have provided various Aboriginal groups with an economic
base.23
Aborigines who walked off stations kept their dignity but lost their jobs.
The new award required both equal pay and good-quality housing to be
provided for Aboriginal employees and their families—too expensive a
package for cattle stations in such dry, rugged, unprofitable country. In
some regions a third lost their jobs when it became uneconomical for
pastoralists to employ Aborigines and support all their dependants, who
averaged four per employee whereas most white stockmen were single. The
Wave Hill drama had also raised fears of land rights claims, discouraging
pastoralists from having a large black ‘mob’ in residence. Station managers
reacted with more mechanisation, fencing and cattle-mustering by
helicopter rather than on horseback to reduce employee numbers. Many
Aborigines were evicted or simply walked off and set up fringe-camps
around the nearest towns. A Kimberley hospital administrator commented
in 1969: ‘The Award created a multitude of problems affecting the
[Aborigines] … as the stock work declined, more people drifted in … and
by the end of December there were some 500 people in Fitzroy Crossing …
Local names for this were and are the “ghetto” or “refugee camp”.’
Conditions there were inevitably much worse than on the worst station, and
fringe-dwellers were exposed to all the dangers of ‘grog’ (cheap port and
rum), gambling and prostitution.24
Employment to unemployment
‘Aboriginal employment history … was one few other Australians could
match’ was the wry comment of Richard Broome. ‘They moved from no
wages to small wages to “equal” wages and then to unemployment.’25 This
was in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of relative prosperity and full
employment for other Australians, including the huge post-war migrant
intake of displaced people from Europe. Yet Aborigines had become
‘refugees’ in their own land, existing on government handouts. Most of
their supporters then and now are urban-dwellers with little understanding
or experience of bush life and the policies they advocated were, and still
are, idealistic but at times misguided. These ‘bleeding hearts’, as they were
known, relentlessly promoted Aboriginal causes; as early as 1946
representations were made to the United Nations over the Pilbara strike.
This pressured Australian governments to avoid international censure and
the racist tag by going too far too fast with hasty, ill-conceived legislation.
The result of equal pay was not what anyone intended, neither pastoralists,
who valued their Aboriginal employees, nor Aborigines, whose ‘golden
age’ was replaced by payment of ‘sit-down money’—life on the dole. A
hard, active but enjoyable life riding horses and working stock in their own
‘country’ turned into a lifetime of living on the fringes of Western society,
waiting for pension day. Since the 1970s, 50–60 per cent of the Aboriginal
workforce has been unemployed, a rate ten times that of the general
Australian population and the 1950s Aboriginal rate (5 per cent) before
strikes for equal pay.
During my 50 years in Australia and much travelling in the Northern
Territory and all six states, I have been struck by how seldom one sees
Aboriginal people performing ordinary jobs apart from reserved positions in
Aboriginal organisations, settlements, visitor centres or national parks.
Travel writer Bill Bryson made the same comment in 2000 after several
weeks touring the continent, including such outback centres as Alice
Springs:
What is perhaps oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren’t there. You don’t see them
performing on TV; you don’t find them assisting you in shops … you would expect to see them
sometimes—working in a bank, delivering mail, writing parking tickets, fixing a telephone line,
participating in some productive capacity in the normal workaday world. I never have; not once.
Clearly some connection is not being made … I didn’t have the faintest idea what the solution to
 all this was; what was required to spread the fruits of general Australian prosperity to those who
seemed so signally unable to find their way to it.26

Many Aboriginal people are unable to find their way to prosperity

because they have different values and many choose not to work at ordinary
Western-style jobs. Certainly, Aborigines may still encounter some racial
discrimination if they search for a job, but Australia is now such a
multiracial society that there is no room for official discrimination,
particularly in view of the country’s tough, strictly enforced human rights
legislation enacted in 1975. There is a real scarcity of labour in the outback.
I have met New Zealanders who have saved enough to buy a house by
finding unskilled work in the mining industry; innumerable back-packers
and immigrants of all colours and ethnic groups—but few Aborigines—
work in cafes, shops, hotels, garages, farms and abattoirs. Some people
have assumed that Aboriginal people are naturally lazy, but this assumption
is incorrect; they work extremely hard and effectively at a task of their own
choosing. The problem is that they see no reason to do the more menial
Western-style tasks when they can live indefinitely on government
pensions, unemployment benefit, child-support allowance and so on; unless
they have completed an education, many better-paid jobs are closed to
them, leaving only the menial. Many Aboriginal people see no ‘shame’ in
living off government benefits, which they think of as their due as victims
of dispossession. This means that dependency on government welfare
services has become the norm in many Aboriginal communities. The result
is a continuing cycle of poverty.
A few Aborigines have managed to avoid the problems of the Western
world by continuing to live a traditional life out in the desert. In 1984, the
discovery of a ‘lost tribe’ caused much media excitement. Walimpirrnga
Tjapaljarri and his group of eight people lived a nomadic life within their
traditional tribal territory in the Western Desert until 1984, when they
walked out to the government settlement of Papunya. No one may go there
without a permit from the Central Land Council, so it was possible to
control media attention effectively. Fortunately, the group was reunited with
some relatives and went with them to the remote outstation of Kiwirrkura
over the Western Australian border.
There are believed to be one or two other isolated small groups or
individuals in the outback who still practise their traditional lifestyle and
eschew settlements. Only their footsteps have been seen and in 1999 Dick
Kimber told me that one was thought still to live alone with only a dingo for
company.
In 2001, after unusually heavy monsoonal rains, a vast inland sea
developed around Lake Mackay (now Wilkinkarra) in the Great Sandy
Desert. It remained there for three years. Anthropologist and consultant
archaeologist Scott Cane, who has spent long periods of time with desert
people, including some of the last hunter-gatherers on earth, travelled
through the region trying to make contact with Aboriginal nomads still
living traditional lives there, for ‘local Pintupi Kukatja people were
concerned about the welfare of these last nomads’.27

The ‘coming of the grog’

The ‘coming of the grog’, like the ‘Japanese War’, is a marker event for
Aboriginal elders in northern Australia when they talk about the past. As a
protective measure, Aboriginal drinking of alcohol had been banned
Australia-wide in the 1840s. A common belief is that Aborigines are more
susceptible to the effects of alcohol than Europeans, but there is no
physiological proof of this. The problems lie rather in binge drinking, which
increases the toxicity of alcohol. Urban Aborigines drank quickly to avoid
detection and a third of Melbourne’s Native Police died from alcohol abuse.
By the 1940s, Australian citizenship and the right to consume alcohol were
granted to Aborigines who held ‘exemption certificates’ complete with
photograph. These were given only to those ‘of good character and
industrious habits’ who spoke English, had ‘adopted the manner and habits
of civilised life’, forsaken Aboriginal ways and were free from alcoholism,
venereal disease or yaws. Aborigines derisively called them ‘dog licences’
or ‘beer tickets’, but they did help to confine Aboriginal alcohol
consumption to those well-motivated to avoid drunkenness, which could
lead to loss of the derided, but useful, certificate. This system of gradual
introduction of alcohol to well-educated and integrated Aborigines ended
prematurely in the 1950s, when Australia bowed to humanitarian pressure
to grant all its indigenous people full equal rights immediately.28
By 1964, bans on Aboriginal drinking were lifted everywhere except
northwestern Western Australia, where they lasted until 1971. Suddenly
Aborigines gained equality, unlimited access to alcohol and the power to
self-destruct. ‘The coming of the grog’ was a disaster. For example, in
Katherine the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO) successfully employed in its agricultural research
many Aborigines, who lived within the CSIRO camp there, but when the
Social Welfare Ordinance of 1964 legalised Aboriginal consumption of
alcohol, all hell broke loose. Anthropologist Francesca Merlan reported
that, ‘Levels of violence within the CSIRO camp increased … there was a
marked escalation in levels of violence toward women … most men who
worked there had died five years after grog came in.’ Similarly, Charles
Duguid observed the new law’s effect in Alice Springs: ‘In 1934 I used to
see drunken white men lying in the gutters; now [1964] it was the
Aborigines. The white man’s privilege had become the black man’s
curse.’29 Alcohol abuse has destroyed innumerable indigenous lives, and
continues to do so.

Segregation or assimilation?
In the 1840s, Aborigines were still sole occupants of the northern half of
Australia. If at that time large, permanent reserves had been set aside where
they could pursue traditional life without interference, would long-term
segregation have been successful? Northern Queensland was not settled
until the 1860s, Central Australia in the 1870s and the Kimberley in the
1880s. Even after the arrival of the first pastoralists and mineral
prospectors, these inaccessible, rugged areas were only very sparsely
occupied by non-indigenous people. Many northern regions, including
three-fifths of the Northern Territory, remained unoccupied by colonists and
in the early twentieth century huge reserves were declared.30 It was hoped
that Aborigines could be isolated from Western temptations and maintain a
traditional lifestyle on reserves that were, and still are, out of bounds to
non-Aborigines without special permits.
Nevertheless, the lure of the new was just too strong—Aborigines left the
reserves and drifted into towns. In 1937 anthropologist Donald Thomson
recommended Arnhem Land and other reserves be made into Aboriginal
sanctuaries, like those in New Guinea, but the suggestion won neither black
nor white support. By 1951 Arnhem Land still had 2000–3000 tribal
Aborigines, but more and more young people went to Darwin every year.
Drift is still occurring. The difficulty of keeping Aboriginal youths in
remote northeast Arnhem Land away from substance abuse was vividly
portrayed in the film Yolngu Boy, which tells the story of three youths’
departure for Darwin, alcohol and freedom from elders’ authority. It is the
same inevitable process that emptied crofts in remote Scottish highlands
and causes labour shortages in the American southwest, where ranchers
have a saying, ‘If you want to keep the boys on the ranch, don’t let them go
to town’.
Aborigines do not want to be protected in ‘anthropological museums’ far
from Western food, technology, medicine, transport and entertainment. This
issue has arisen in the management of Kakadu National Park, where
indigenous people want to hunt with rifles, dogs and vehicles. The park is
jointly managed by Parks Australia and local Aborigines, who have a
majority on the board of management.31 A compromise solution permits
rifles and off-road vehicles, but bans European dogs in the interests of
conservation of endangered native fauna.
The concept of several kin groups amicably sharing land was unrealistic.
Now smaller, clan-based reserves have been created, primarily in the
Northern Territory, where Aborigines form a third of the population and
possess almost half the land. There, many local groups inhabit outstations—
small, de-centralised, self-managing Aboriginal communities—and
allegiance to clan is still strong.

Reserves
In the 1830s, the concept of protective segregation on large reserves was
attacked by international humanitarians, who argued that keeping
Aborigines ‘out of harm’s way, as children’ was paternalistic and implied
inferior status.32 These early arguments for integration rather than
segregation were successful and paved the way for later government
policies.
The British Government tried to alleviate the problems of Aboriginal
dispossession in southern Australia by four measures—establishment of
small reserves, Aboriginal education, compensation from land-revenue
funds, and recognition of continuing rights to hunt and occupy uncultivated
land where blacks and whites would be joint occupiers. Many small
reserves were set up after the Imperial Crown Land Sale Act of 1842.
Secretary of State Earl Grey instructed all Australian governors to spend up
to 15 per cent of land-revenue ‘for the benefit, civilisation and protection of
the Aborigines’, and to create more Aboriginal schools and small reserves,
roughly 2.5 km2 (1 sq. mile) in size. Reserves were seen primarily as
‘central depots for the distribution of rations’. About 40 reserves were
established in 1850 in New South Wales, 59 in South Australia by 1860 and
six mission stations and a few government settlements in Victoria by 1867.
Grey assumed large Aboriginal reserves were impracticable because of
squatters’ needs to spread their flocks widely and move them during
droughts. He therefore issued an Order of Council in 1846 that pastoral
leases ‘give the grantees only an exclusive right of pasturage for their cattle,
and of cultivating such land as they require … but that these leases are not
intended to deprive the natives of their former right to hunt over these
districts, or to wander over them in search of sustenance … except over
land actually cultivated or fenced in for that purpose.’33 Aboriginal
customary, ‘usufructuary’ rights were to continue on land leased to
pastoralists; on all except cultivated land Aborigines could still hunt and
reside. (This imperial recognition of Aboriginal rights of occupancy or
communal native title to land was crucial to the High Court’s recognition of
native title in the Mabo case; see chapter 8.) Unfortunately, Grey’s
enlightened policies were never fully implemented, because British
responsibility for Aboriginal Affairs was almost at an end in all Australian
colonies except Western Australia, and they gave way to state governments
more sympathetic to pastoralists than Aborigines.34
Most reserves thrived. By 1880 those at Coranderrk and Framlingham,
Victoria, and Point Mcleay (renamed Raukkan) and Poonindie, South
Australia, were prosperous, stable, relatively happy havens of protection,
independence and initiative. Coranderrk Aborigines built their own
cottages, erected picket-fences around neat gardens of flowers and fruit-
trees, and furnished their homes with sofas, rugs, rocking-chairs, dressers,
clocks, pictures and even a harmonium. One visitor to Framlingham in the
1870s remarked their cottages were ‘equal to those of English workingmen
and superior to those of many selectors in the district’, and their young
people had ‘a better education than most of the farmers’ children’.35
(Between 1850 and 1900 government-funded primary education—free,
compulsory and secular—became well established in settled regions, but
half of Victoria’s Aborigines did not live on missions or settlements and so
tended to miss out, as did tribespeople in the outback.) Mission Aborigines
dressed smartly in European clothing and became virtually self-supporting
through selling farm produce and craft-work. Despite outward appearances,
they continued to forage for bush food and retained Aboriginal values of
sharing, kinship ties and obligations, Dreaming stories, burial rituals and
fear of sorcery.
A major problem of communal living on reserves was high mortality
from new diseases. Tuberculosis caused 40 per cent of deaths on Victorian
reserves between 1876 and 1912, and pneumonia, bronchitis, influenza,
gastric complaints, hydatids, whooping-cough and measles took a high toll.
Aboriginal numbers in Victoria dropped by 80 per cent (from c. 10,000 in
1835 to c. 1900 in 1853). New diseases accounted for 90 per cent of these
deaths. By 1921 Victoria’s Aboriginal population had declined to only 586.
Half the children born before 1900 on Victoria’s reserves died in infancy,
some from congenital syphilis. (Pre-contact infant mortality in Victoria has
been estimated at 300–500 per 1000 live births.)36 The advent of modern
medicine wrought miracles and by 1960 only 5 per cent of children born to
Victorian Aboriginal mothers were lost in infancy, a huge reduction but still
twice Anglo-Australian rates.
Reserves were havens for mixed-race orphans; most Victorian reserves
contained 8–40 per cent mixed-race Aborigines and by 1877 Coranderrk
had 62 per cent. By then Coranderrk was the only Aboriginal reserve to pay
its way and when funds were tight on the eve of the 1890s economic
depression, the Victorian Government decided ‘it was unreasonable that the
state should continue to support able-bodied [mixed-race] men who were
well able to earn their own living’. The Victorian Aborigines Protection Act
of 1886 laid down that only ‘half-castes’ aged over 34 years and ‘full-
bloods’ were entitled to live on reserves and receive government aid; the
rest were pushed into white society to fend for themselves. By 1920 only
one reserve, Lake Tyers, still existed in Victoria, under a blend of old
segregationist and new inclusionist thinking aiming to merge Aborigines of
mixed race into the general community. The 1886 Act first formalised
assimilation of people of mixed race, and virtually identical legislation was
adopted in all other mainland states by 1911.37 Coranderrk closed in 1924.

Aborigines of mixed race

The number of Aborigines on reserves, almost all of part-descent, had
grown markedly by the 1880s due to better diet and resistance to disease.
Anthropologists noted that ‘physically the Aborigines absorb readily and
rapidly into the white population. Indeed, three successive generations of
mating with full whites can suffice to eliminate all distinctive Aboriginal
traits.’38 The tendency of Aboriginal characteristics to disappear has led to
the present confusing situation where many people who identify as
Aboriginal have white skin, blue eyes, narrow noses and blond, brown or
red hair. Others resemble Japanese, Chinese, Melanesians, Polynesians or
Afghans, for in the nineteenth century many different ethnic groups came to
Australia to exploit gold and pearl shell or fulfil particular roles, such as
camel-driving, and of course nowadays Australia has become a
pronouncedly multiracial society.
At the time of Federation in 1901, Australian governments sought to
avoid the racial divisions engulfing South Africa with its three warring
races—blacks, whites and coloureds—or formation of an Australian
‘coloured north’ equivalent to the ‘Deep South’ of North America.
(Australia never had slaves, but many impoverished coloured people of
mixed parentage lived in the tropics.) What became known as the White
Australia Policy had three main elements: a belief that ‘mixed-blood’
Aborigines should be absorbed into the white population, that further non-
European immigrants should be excluded and that suitable white colonists
should be encouraged to settle. Although a very discriminatory policy, it
was conceived as a chance to create a brave new world in Australia, free
from the inequalities and interracial conflict that marred South Africa and
North America.
After Federation, Macassan fishermen’s visits were terminated and
‘Kanakas’, or New Caledonians and other Pacific Islanders, were deported.
Over 62,000 Melanesians had come to Australia between 1863 and 1904 to
work in sugarcane and cotton plantations. Some returned home but many
more stayed. Islanders’ entry was prohibited in 1904 and within a decade
over 7000 were forcibly repatriated. Many Pacific Islanders merged into
Aboriginal communities or were repatriated no further than the Torres Strait
Islands, and about 2000 remained in mainland Australia. Their descendants,
now known as South Sea Islanders, number around 20,000 and mostly live
in coastal Queensland.39
Absorption
Absorption is the process whereby a dominant cultural group takes a
minority group into their society, although cultural assimilation can occur
without full social integration. For example, western European Jews before
the Second World War adopted the languages and cultural mores of the
countries in which they lived while remaining socially rather distinct. Such
policies were in force in Australia from the 1860s to 1960s. From about
1910 to 1940 the federal government’s policy was to protect ‘fullbloods’
and absorb those of mixed race. It aimed to preserve the Aboriginal race
and ensure nomadic tribes had sufficient land to pursue their traditional life
undisturbed but to ‘collect half-castes and train them in institutions’. In
1935 it assured the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society: ‘In the
Northern Territory half-castes are collected at an early age from the
Aboriginal camps and taken to institutions where they are educated.’40
This policy of segregation/absorption was endorsed at the 1937 Native
Welfare Conference to try to cope with the rapidly increasing mixed-race
population. The increase was especially marked in the north, as Chief
Protectors of Aborigines, Cecil Cook (Northern Territory), John William
Bleakley (Queensland) and Auber Octavius Neville (Western Australia),
reported. As The Telegraph noted in May 1937:
Mr Neville holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the
half-caste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks
segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population. Sixty years ago, he said, there
were over 60,000 full-blooded natives in Western Australia. Today, there are only 20,000. In time
there would be none … The pure-blooded Aborigine was not a quick breeder. On the other hand
the half-caste was. In Western Australia there were half-caste families of twenty and upwards.

Although usually termed in past eras ‘half-castes’, by the 1930s many

Aborigines claiming government rations on reserves had a quarter, an
eighth or less Aboriginal ancestry.
Neville’s policy was: ‘If the coloured people of this country are to be
absorbed into the general community, they must be thoroughly fit and
educated at least to the extent of the three R’s … To achieve this end,
however, we must have charge of the children at the age of six years; it is
useless to wait until they are twelve or thirteen.’ Most, like Neville, saw
primary schooling as the key to assimilation, and some missionaries felt
that the younger the children, the better. They may have had in mind the
Jesuit saying—‘Give me the boy to the age of seven and I will give you the
man.’
The 1937 conference formally adopted a policy of absorption: ‘The
destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of the full-blood, lies in
their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth.’41
Contemporary administrators, anthropologists, doctors and scientists
regarded this 1937 policy of biological absorption as ‘“progressive” in
relation to the prevailing racism of the times, and indeed … the only
solution to rampant white prejudice’. We forget the terrible stigma then
attached to illegitimacy, the emphasis on female moral purity and the
widespread sexual exploitation of Aboriginal girls by both white men and
their own people. Welfare was always part of the rationale for indigenous
child removal policies, which is why throughout the program most
institutionalised children were illegitimate, fatherless, young mixed-race
girls.42
After the Second World War the emphasis changed to assimilation based
on welfare considerations. In 1951 Commonwealth Minister for Territories
Paul Hasluck called a Native Welfare Conference, which for the first time
extended the assimilation policy to all Aborigines. ‘Assimilation means, in
practical terms,’ Hasluck reported, ‘that in the course of time, it is expected
that all persons of aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live
like other white Australians do … Assimilation does not mean the
suppression of the aboriginal culture but rather that, for generation after
generation, cultural adjustment will take place.’ Hasluck saw assimilation
as ‘a policy of opportunity. It gives to the aboriginal and the person of
mixed blood a chance to shape his own life.’43
Hasluck aimed to uplift Aboriginal people in a crude forerunner of equal
opportunity policies. A 1965 conference redefined assimilation yet again:
‘The policy of assimilation seeks that all persons of Aboriginal descent will
choose to attain a similar manner of living to that of other Australians and
live as members of a single community.’44
Was the assimilation policy racist? Racism is discrimination on the basis
of perceived genetic superiority, so racists do not promote assimilation
since inferior genes of the minority group might pollute superior genes of
the ‘master race’. Thus, to keep the Aryan race pure, Hitler determined to
exterminate, not assimilate, Europe’s Jews. Second, Australia’s assimilation
policy assumed cultural, not biological, superiority. It was not so much
racist as ethnocentric and paternalistic—its authors believed their own
culture was superior. Also the policy disregarded Aboriginal values and
feelings because it was assumed that Anglo-Australian ways were superior
and that Aborigines would want to adopt these ways.45
The main problem with assimilation was that it led to wholesale
intervention—the management, control and institutionalisation of mixed-
race Aborigines, who were removed from their families, educated and
employed in the general workforce, with consequent loss of language,
identity and culture. This intensive social engineering resulted in constant
intervention in Aboriginal lives. By 1911, every state (except Tasmania
where Aborigines were thought to be extinct) had passed special Aboriginal
laws; by 1987 more than 700 pieces of state and federal legislation had been
enacted, incorporating over 60 definitions of Aboriginality.46
Extensive powers were given to missionaries, reserve managers and
police. These ‘bosses’ controlled Aboriginal child care, education,
marriage, employment, wages, travel, compulsory hospitalisation in cases
of syphilis and leprosy, and suppression of ‘injurious customs’ such as
infanticide.

The stolen generations

The foremost Aboriginal issue of the twentieth century was the policy of
removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their families to be educated
and assimilated into mainstream society, the so-called ‘stolen generations’.
Child removal officially ended in 1970, but two decades later the issue
hit the headlines when part-Aboriginal James Savage was convicted of the
rape and murder of an American woman in Florida. James was adopted in
Australia by an American couple after his fifteen-year-old Aboriginal
mother gave him to the Welfare Board at four days old. His later antisocial
behaviour, drug addiction and crimes were explained at his trial as resulting
from his removal as a child and subsequent confusion over identity.
Following the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (see chapter 8), a national inquiry into child
removal was set up. Its 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, makes horrific
reading. It contains the stories told by 535 Aborigines of mixed race who
were removed. So harrowing are these tales that when tabled in federal
parliament, it reduced the Leader of the Opposition to tears. One example
from Western Australia in 1935 gives the flavour:
I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie. They put us in the police ute and said they were
taking us to Broome … But when we’d gone [about ten miles] they stopped, and threw the
mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers’ backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But
the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and
drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were
screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the
Broome lock-up. We were only ten years old. We were in the lock-up for two days waiting for the
boat to Perth.

These girls were removed solely because of their mixed parentage and were
placed in Sister Kate’s Orphanage in Perth, a school for ‘lighter-skinned’
children.47
Bringing Them Home gives the impression that poor living conditions,
hunger and abuse typified all institutional life, but some people’s experience
was far more positive. For example, in 1996 Maureen Young, a Gnadu elder
of Norseman, Western Australia, recalled: ‘I was able to combine
Aboriginal traditional-way spirituality, as well as the Christian spirituality.
And I believe I really had a balance. And that’s what made me a leader
today … And I was really thankful that I did have the white man education
as well as the Aboriginal education.’ In similar vein, Beryl Carmichael, an
elder of Broken Hill, New South Wales, said: ‘The Aboriginal people were
willing to go forward and you know, I can honestly say that a lot of them
said the happiest times of their lives were on old Menindee mission.’48
The label ‘stolen’ for removed children is emotive but incorrect, since it
implies forcible removal—often but by no means always the case—and
illegality. In fact, the removals were in accordance with contemporary
Australian laws, although not with basic human rights. It must always be
wrong to take children from their families, except in the most dire cases of
abuse or neglect or, in the case of orphans, when no other relatives can care
for them. Some children were given to missionaries to save them from
starvation or death. In the 1930s Australia was in the grip of the Great
Depression and Central Australia was stricken by prolonged drought. As
settler Doug Fuller said, ‘even lizards were starving to death’. The desert
could not sustain many people, so when Aboriginal women discovered that
missionaries would look after children, they ‘would wait on the side of the
road for the mail truck to come along, to hand the kids over to the mail
driver. They couldn’t feed them, you see.’49
It was in such extreme circumstances in 1934 that two-year-old Lowitja
O’Donoghue was removed from her mother, along with her two older
sisters.50 Seven years earlier two other siblings had been removed. Her Irish
father with his brother had obtained leaseholds on two South Australian
stations of red earth and spinifex, which local Aborigines describe as
‘rubbish country’. Her father, Tom O’Donoghue, eked out a meagre living
as a ‘dogger’, trading with Aborigines for dingo scalps. By 1934 dingo
scalps had become almost a currency in Central Australia since a bounty of
7 shillings and sixpence had been placed in 1924 on each pair of dingo ears
to curb dingoes’ ravages on sheep, which settlers were trying to introduce
into the Centre. Settlers would trade tobacco, sugar and metal axes with
Aborigines in exchange for dingo ears to claim the bounty. O’Donoghue
built a tiny mud-brick cottage where he lived with Lowitja’s
Yankunytjatjara mother, Lily. Between 1924 and 1935 they had six children
but could not feed them all, and Tom gave all but the youngest to
missionaries at Oodnadatta. This small town was a staging-post on the
mailing route; the children were sent 1000 km (600 miles) away to a
mission home in Adelaide. When Lowitja returned and asked ‘Why was I
taken away?’, the response from her older relations was, ‘Things were
rough before.’ Fuller’s testimony bears this out; he took over the station
from Tom O’Donoghue, whom he described as ‘a good Catholic’ and not a
man to let his children starve to death. There was no Australian social
security system (and no contraceptive pill) until after the Second World
War; previously, in hard times only the churches and charities were there to
save children from the spectre of hunger and death.
In 1940 Tom O’Donoghue sold up and left Lily after being prosecuted
and fined for ‘habitually consorting’ with an Aboriginal woman. (Mixed
marriages were legal but not de facto, common-law relationships.) Lily then
moved to Oodnadatta where she was known as ‘a fine old lady and well
regarded in the town’. Sadly she became a heavy drinker after prohibition
was lifted.
Lowitja was brought up in Colebrook Home along with her older
siblings. She never saw her father again and was not reunited with her grief-
stricken mother for 33 years. Communication when they finally met was
difficult because she knew no Yankunytjatjara and her mother spoke no
English. Lowitja found Colebrook ‘stultifying’ and ‘joyless’ but a classmate
told the Inquiry: ‘We were all happy together, us kids. We had two very
wonderful old ladies that looked after us. It wasn’t like an institution really.
It was just a big happy family. Y’know they gave us good teaching, they
encouraged us to be no different to anybody else.’51 When Lowitja left at
sixteen to become a domestic servant—the normal lot of mission girls
—‘Matron had told me that “I’d get into trouble” (that is, get pregnant) and
that “I’d never make anything of my life”. I decided to prove her wrong.’
This she did. She overcame prejudice to become a trainee nurse and
graduate at Royal Adelaide Hospital, and joined the Aboriginal
Advancement League to fight for Aboriginal eligibility to take up
professions and apprenticeships. She also decided never to have children:
‘More than anything I think I felt inadequate—I couldn’t remember being
mothered myself and I was frightened of doing it badly.’ Lack of parenting
skills is a serious problem for institutionalised children, the effect extending
down the generations. Lowitja suffered another ordeal in 2001 when her
explanation that she was ‘removed’ rather than ‘stolen’ was ‘distorted’ by a
journalist and published as ‘Aboriginal leader’s shock admission’. In a
dignified press release she made clear that, even if she had not been ‘stolen’
(forcibly removed), ‘I know that my Aboriginal mother would have had no
legal recourse, nor any moral support, in resisting our removal. I also know
that her grief was unbearable.’52
Some Aboriginal mothers wanted a better life for their children and asked
missionaries to care for and educate them. Benevolent intentions were
mentioned, but only briefly, by the Bringing Them Home authors Sir Ronald
Wilson, humanitarian and retired High Court judge, and Aboriginal lawyer
Mick Dodson, Social Justice Commissioner. The latter, after being
orphaned at the age of ten, ‘agreed to go to boarding school in western
Victoria’ to be educated along with his older brother, Patrick, who was
ordained as a priest. Both have since held many public positions.53
The Bringing Them Home report presented a surprisingly one-sided
account of welfare policy from the 1930s to 1960s, for its authors failed to
cross-examine witnesses or call evidence from those who administered the
policy. For instance, Sister Eileen Heath, who devoted her life to caring for
part-Aboriginal children in missions in Western Australia, South Australia
and the Northern Territory, wrote a detailed submission to the inquiry but
was not called as a witness. A 2002 biography includes many tributes to
her. Rosalie Kunoth-Monks of Utopia station, Northern Territory, daughter
of a traditional mother and mixed-descent father, testified that, ‘Sister
Eileen gave dignity to people of mixed heritage, and she did it in the most
positive way … instilled into us, that we were worthwhile and that we could
do exactly what we wanted to do with our lives.’ (At the age of sixteen
Rosalie was chosen to play Jedda in Australia’s first full-length colour film
of the same name.) Likewise, Freda Glynn of Alice Springs said ‘Saint
Mary’s was my saviour and I want that to be in the book’.54 Kunoth-Monks
also personally witnessed in the 1940s the deaths of several mixed-race
babies who were not rescued by welfare patrol officers in time and
explained:
In a lot of situations not even the Aboriginal people wanted half-castes. Up this way, if they had
half-castes, they killed them … The children killed were from white man passing through,
abusing an Aboriginal woman for one night stands … and usually these young ladies were
promised to a husband, so they couldn’t have a half-caste child and then go into a relationship
with their promised husband … Grandmothers stepped on [the babies’] chests and smothered
them, crushed their chests …55

Part-Aboriginal children removed from their families suffered emotional

trauma but did learn to read and write, whereas those in the camps remained
illiterate, which made it difficult for them to get jobs in the mining or
pastoral industries. Almost all today’s national Aboriginal leaders are
people of mixed descent, and either they or their parents were educated in
an Anglo-Australian institution away from their families. The few leaders
of full-descent such as Galarrwuy Yunupingu of the Yolngu people in
Arnhem Land did some of their secondary education in distant boarding
schools. His younger brother, Mandawuy Yunupingu, received a similar
education and became principal of Yirrkala school, introducing ‘both ways’
learning there. In 1986 Mandawuy founded the acclaimed Aboriginal band,
Yothu Yindi. His vision was to develop a positive black–white relationship
through the language of music. ‘Through our music we are trying to bring
you into our mainstream … Our music is as strong as yours … It passes on
knowledge. We are trying to create music that will suggest a way for you to
come and be part of our world.’ Both brothers have been named Australian
of the Year (in 1979 and 1993).
Illiteracy was, and often still is, the price that ‘tribal’ Aborigines pay to
remain in their community. A classic example is Yidumduma Bill Harney,
born of a Wardaman mother and white father, William E. Harney, about
1936, when ‘Old Bill’ was building roads in the Territory. When the project
ended, his father left and young Bill and his sister, Dulcie, were cared for by
his mother and Aboriginal stepfather on Willeroo cattle station in their
traditional country. There was no school so Bill never learnt to read or
write. When Bill was four, his seven-year-old sister Dulcie was taken away
by ‘the Welfare’ but the policeman told his mother they couldn’t take Bill
—‘he’s too small’. Thereafter Bill was kept ‘undercover’, as he recounts:
My mum was very strict and careful that I didn’t get taken away. She used to get this blackcurrant
plum from the bush, and it makes your hair go black. My mum always used to crush the black
plum together with a big heap of charcoal and put it all over my skin to make me go black, and
when the Welfare would come along I’d be sitting right in the middle of those other blacks, and
the Welfare bloke would call out, ‘Any yella kids? Any half-caste kids around here?’
‘No, nothing ’ere,’ but I’d be sitting there with them all painted up
black.56

Dulcie was taken to Croker Island Mission off Darwin, but came back at
the age of ten to the Katherine horseraces in search of her family. She
identified her mother by her footprint, put her foot alongside and exclaimed
‘See my foot like yours! Look at the toes!’ There was a joyful reunion.
Dulcie returned to the Mission to complete her schooling but thereafter kept
in touch and often brought her children to see their grandmother. After a
traditional upbringing but no schooling, Bill worked as a stockman and
eventually head-stockman, mailman, saddler, well-sinker, windmill-rigger,
crocodile-hunter and fencer. Later he became an artist, tour-operator and
Chairman of Wardaman Aboriginal Corporation. He prides himself in not
drinking alcohol and never having been on the dole, has his own house in
Katherine, and, last time I saw him, had been foster-father to more than 70
Aboriginal children allocated to his care by local magistrates. He summed
up his life in his dictated book, Born Under the Paperbark Tree: ‘First was
the blackfella way … then I saw the different lifestyle of the European …
Now today I put the Aboriginal lifestyle and the European lifestyle together,
and I know both laws … There’s only a few old fellas left like me now … I
haven’t been to school, but I went to the university of the bush, under the
tree, under the stars … I come out top all round.’57
Among those removed from their families, there was triumph as well as
tragedy. Bob Randall was born to a Yankunytjatjara mother and white father
in 1934 on Angas Downs station, Northern Territory. When Bob was seven,
a policeman rode into their camp on a camel. The light-skinned boy was
offered a ride and was so excited he didn’t realise that he was being
‘rescued’ and would never see his mother again. Bob was taken to Alice
Springs and then Croker Island. There he was educated and later established
a career as a teacher. He also became a renowned singer and performer, and
his song ‘My Brown Skin Baby They Take Him Away’ became the theme
song for the stolen generations. He then went back to his roots and became
a registered traditional owner of Uluru and a Yankunytjatjara elder.58

Was it cultural genocide?

Modern activists have described child removal as cultural genocide, yet few
contemporary voices were raised against it. Anthropologists such as Donald
Thomson and Bill Stanner were well aware of the assimilation policy and
seemed to approve it for mixed-race people but they were strongly in favour
of remote reserves for those of full descent. It seems they considered that
only Aborigines of full descent should be encouraged to retain their culture.
During the 1950s and 1960s more and more mixed-race children were
removed for protection from alleged neglect, to be adopted out at birth, to
attend school in distant places, to receive medical treatment or to work as
maids in cities. By the late 1960s, institutions could no longer cope with the
increasing numbers and new welfare practice discouraged use of
institutions, so Aboriginal children at risk were placed with non-Aboriginal
foster families. However, in recent years cross-cultural adoption has also
become anathema to welfare authorities, who are now extremely reluctant
to remove any Aboriginal children, whatever the problems of the home
environment. In the past, cross-cultural adoption gave removed, abandoned
or orphaned Aboriginal children the chance of a loving home and good
education although they, like other adoptees, often experienced serious
identity problems.59 All lost their ‘culture’—the way of life built up by a
human group. Those removed from the outback also usually forgot their
language. The mother tongue of most urban Aborigines was already
English.
Many hard-hitting submissions were made to the Inquiry into ‘the stolen
generations’, the dramatic term coined in 1981 by historian Peter Read of
Link-Up (New South Wales) Aboriginal Corporation, whose submission
was liberally sprinkled with allegations of ‘holocaust, atrocities, ethnic
cleansing and genocide’.60 Bringing Them Home suggested: ‘The policy of
forcible removal of children from indigenous Australians to other groups
for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture
and people could properly be labelled “genocidal”.’61 Wilson later said he
regretted including the genocide accusation in the report. ‘We included it to
step up the pressure for reparation … [but] it gave people who were
opposed to the report an argument for objecting to it.’62
Others have termed child removal ‘cultural genocide’—a policy that aims
at rapid and complete disappearance of the cultural, moral and religious life
of a human group. This is in spite of its deliberate exclusion from the 1948
Genocide Convention because Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word
‘genocide’, convincingly argued that cultural genocide was much more than
‘just a policy of forced assimilation by moderate coercion’. At that time
assimilation was approved by Lemkin, his colleagues and most others,
including Australia’s earliest Aboriginal activists.63 However, by the 1960s,
forced assimilation was becoming anathema to indigenous and non-
indigenous people alike, because of the terrible emotional trauma it caused,
together with the loss of culture, language and identity.

Numbers removed
How many were removed? The guide to the Bringing Them Home report
stated in bold type that ‘not one indigenous family has escaped the effects
of forcible removal … Those affected include the children who were
forcibly removed, their families, communities, children and
grandchildren.’64
Wilson and Dodson wrote ‘we can conclude with confidence that
between one in three and one in ten indigenous children were forcibly
removed from their families and communities in the period from
approximately 1910 until 1970’, but these figures have not withstood
scrutiny. ‘The one in three upper limit for child removal suggested by
Bringing them Home is certainly wrong’, said respected political science
academic Robert Manne. ‘The lower estimate of one in ten is far more
soundly based.’ The total number of children removed was far lower than
the 100,000 initially claimed by Read. On the basis of a 1994 ABS survey
of self-identified indigenous people, Manne considers likely a figure of
20,000–25,000 over six decades (averaging about 390 per year).65
All three test cases and two appeals for compensation brought by stolen
generations members failed. The first, by Joy Williams, failed because her
mother had asked the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board to
declare baby Joy a ward of the state, had remained her legal guardian and
approved arrangements for her fostering. In the Cubillo-Gunner case in
2000 Justice O’Loughlin (in a 470-page judgment) dismissed their claims
primarily because of lack of any evidence of a policy of forced removal of
part-Aboriginal children against their families’ wishes. Both Lorna Cubillo
and Peter Gunner were deserted by their white fathers. Lorna was removed
in 1947, after her Aboriginal mother died, to a mixed-race institution in
Darwin, where she was so savagely beaten that a nipple was torn off. A
document with his mother’s thumbprint authorised Peter’s removal in 1956
and there was evidence of his earlier neglect. O’Loughlin accepted that the
station-owner, Mrs Dora McLeod, had found Peter as a one year old
‘unconscious’ and ‘totally neglected’ and just saved his life with medical
help. She also claimed that soon after his birth, his mother had left him in a
rabbit-hole to die.
The stakes were huge. In 2001 when the appeal to the High Court also
failed, there were 700 similar claims pending in the Northern Territory
alone, which could have cost the federal government several billion
dollars.66
The Bringing Them Home inquiry concluded that ‘all Australian
parliaments’ should make a formal apology, ‘there is an international legal
obligation’ to make reparation, ‘this obligation passes from the violating
government to its successors until satisfaction has been made’, and that
‘reparation be made to all who suffered because of forcible removal
policies’.67
Although there has been no official financial reparation, there has been
an outpouring of compassion from the general public and the government in
1997 allocated $63 million to Link-Up—state-based organisations
providing counselling, family-tracing, reunions, language-maintenance, and
archival and oral history programs.
In the nineteenth century, the policy of paternalistic protection of
Aborigines at missions and government settlements provided some degree
of security, health, education and employment but ended in
institutionalisation, erosion of traditional culture and loss of control over
their own lives. The twentieth century saw an enlightened movement
towards equality for all Australians, which led to equal pay and equal
access to alcohol, ‘advances’ that resulted in the unintended consequences
of unemployment, social degradation and innumerable alcohol-related
health problems. Similarly, the 1930s campaign for assimilation into
mainstream society was considered progressive and was supported by black
and white alike, but gave rise to the horrors of the stolen generations. The
well-meaning but ill-conceived policy of forced assimilation of mixed-race
Aborigines is now universally condemned for the trauma and loss of
language and culture it brought to the stolen children and their families.
Hopefully, we are now well on our way to true reconciliation and a better
future for indigenous Australians.
 8

RESURGENCE
The story continues

During the 1950s and 1960s the concept of a multiracial society developed.
Gradually the policy of assimilation was replaced by a policy of integration,
whereby Aborigines could maintain a distinct cultural identity while
pursuing equality of living standards and opportunity. Integration is still
Australian Government policy, for it enables indigenous people to retain
their identity in a pluralist society. Integration also provides a choice
between Western urban society and the more traditional but less
‘comfortable’ life in remote area communities.
Various new Aboriginal organisations sought revival of separate cultural
identity but also full equality, civil rights and integration. In the 1950s most
Aboriginal organisations were managed by whites but this gradually
changed as Aboriginal leaders came under international influences. In 1969
Queenslander Kath Walker attended an overseas conference on indigenous
people and came back convinced that Aborigines must control their own
organisations and distinguish themselves from the dominant white society
by cultural revival and assuming Aboriginal names. She adopted the name
Oodgeroo Noonuccal and went on to become an acclaimed poet, writer,
environmentalist, teacher and campaigner for Aboriginal affairs.
 15. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ABORIGINAL ART
A major factor in Aboriginal advancement in the mid-twentieth
century was the growing public recognition and appreciation of
indigenous art.a In 1944, the first Aborigine was listed in Who’s Who
in Australia. Although he died in 1959 he is still one of Australia’s
best-known Aboriginal artists. Albert Namatjira was born at
Hermannsburg Mission in 1902, and was educated there, but was also
initiated into Western Arrernte tribal lore. His traditional name was
Elea but he was baptised as Albert and later took his father’s name,
Namatjira, as a surname. At the age of eighteen he fell in love with a
young woman named Ilkalita, but she belonged to a kinship group
forbidden to him by tribal law. They eloped, travelling into the desert,
but three years later met some fellow tribesmen, who told them they
had been forgiven. They returned to the mission with their three
young children and Ilkalita was baptised Rubena.b
Albert worked as a stockman, blacksmith and camel driver, but his
true talent lay in art. He could draw animals well and decorated
wooden artefacts with pokerwork, using a heated wire or hot metal
tool, for the mission’s fledgling craft industry. In 1934, by one of
life’s lucky chances, he saw at the mission an exhibition of water-
colours by Rex Batterbee and John Gardner, and watched Gardner
painting a local landscape. He was fascinated and asked Pastor
Albrecht for paint and brushes, who in turn relayed the request to Rex
Batterbee. Two years later, Rex invited Albert on a two-month
painting expedition in Central Australia. He quickly learnt the skills
of brushwork, handling colour and portraying perspective, and,
amazingly, in 1938 held his first solo exhibition in Melbourne, where
his 41 landscape paintings sold out in just three days. The public
loved and still love his rich varied vision, warm colours and pictorial
realism. His paintings portray the dramatic landforms and vivid
purples, mauves, reds and blues of Central Australia.
Namatjira expanded the vision of our sunburnt country and gave us
new ways of seeing it. Rapidly he became a celebrated artist. In 1953
he was awarded the Queen’s Coronation Medal, and the following
year was flown from Alice Springs to Canberra to meet her in person.
He bore his celebrity status with dignity and composure, aided by his
wife. They had ten children, two of whom died in infancy, and all
their five sons became painters. However, the burden of fame took its
toll. In particular, the Northern Territory Administration made him
and his wife full citizens in 1957.c This was done with the best of
intentions but proved a disaster for it conferred the privilege of
drinking liquor. Now Albert could drink in hotels and take bottled
liquor home but his family could not. This anomalous situation
caused much stress and led to Albert’s arrest the following year for
sharing alcohol with a fellow tribesman. His sentence of six months’
imprisonment was later reduced to two months spent in ‘open arrest’
at Papunya reserve. Shortly afterwards, the angina that had troubled
him since 1947 resurfaced and he died from a heart attack and
pneumonia in Alice Springs hospital in 1959.
Before Namatjira, public knowledge of Aboriginal art was virtually
confined to traditional paintings on rock and sheets of bark in tropical
Australia. Bark paintings derived from the custom of decorating the
ceilings of bark shelters in the wet season. The overhead sheets of
bark were painted with finely drawn figures illustrating traditional
stories. Style, technique and subject matter resembled those of rock
art and the only major changes initiated by European collectors were
to commission artists to paint non-sacred subjects for sale, first using
portable rectangles of bark and more recently artists’ paper.d
The legacy of Albert Namatjira is immense: he paved the way for
acceptance of indigenous art by mainstream Australia. Importantly,
all Namatjira’s paintings are of landscape. He was using a modern
medium to portray places—mountain ranges, rocks and trees—to
which he or his fellow countrymen had ancestral connections.
Multilayered meanings are embedded in the scenes he painted. As
Galarrwuy Yunupingu, a senior Arnhem Land bark painter, later
explained:
When we paint—whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or on canvas for the
market—we are not just painting for fun or profit. We are painting as we have always
done to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and
responsibilities we have to it.e

This deep feeling for land gives Namatjira’s work a special quality.
Similarly, it inspires the dot painters, who later illustrated traditional
 stories of their own country in a different medium. Their distinctive
style of modern art also developed through a fortunate chance. In
1971, Geoffrey Bardon, a schoolteacher at Papunya, encouraged his
pupils to paint a mural on the school walls featuring traditional
Aboriginal motifs. When elders saw it they were dissatisfied and
proceeded to paint a large Honey Ant Dreaming mural there
themselves. This aroused intense interest and over the next year 50
men produced more than 600 paintings, using acrylic paint on
hardboard and, later, synthetic polymer paint or acrylic on canvas.
Like Namatjira, dot painters use modern media, but their style of art
is very different from Western paintings and symbolic and ‘abstract’
rather than realistic.
Dot painters use the imagery of circles and lines to tell their stories
and many paintings are ‘maps’ of their country and Dreaming sites.f
The images are a development from ceremonial ground mosaics made
from pellets of white clay or black charcoal, feathers, pebbles and
chopped leaves and flowers of the native daisy and other plants
coloured with powdered red or yellow ochre. A piece of ground is
prepared, the mosaic made and danced over during a ceremony, being
destroyed in the process. Some but not all ground mosaics are sacred,
and canvases may be painted by a man or woman, husband and wife
team or by men and women from one kinship group.
A few artists have achieved international acclaim for the quality
and complexity of their work, which often has a three-dimensional
quality through multilayering of dots on dots. Some of the most
prominent are Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Emily Kame Kngwarreye,
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and his daughter Gabriella, Jimmy Pike
and Rover Thomas. Dot painting has revitalised Aboriginal traditions
and also provided a profitable ‘cottage industry’ that enables artists to
earn a good income while staying on their traditional land. Beginning
with Namatjira, Aboriginal art has won worldwide fame and become
one of Australia’s best-known icons.

In the 1970s, the additional goal of self-determination was adopted—the

right of indigenous people to ‘decide within the broader context of
Australian society the priorities and directions of their own lives, and to
freely determine their own affairs’.1 Self-determination was intended to
enable indigenous people to set the course of change and agenda for action
in their communities and to control policy implementation. After 1975 a
policy of self-management was established to assist indigenous people and
communities to be self-managing in all aspects of their lives. It led to the
creation of community councils, housing cooperatives and other indigenous
federal, state and community organisations. Unfortunately, these desirable
objectives of self-determination and self-management brought some
problems in their wake, particularly a ‘hands-off’ policy by government
authorities that sometimes bordered on neglect.

Freedom Riders and the 1967 referendum

The 1960s were a watershed in Aboriginal affairs. Perhaps the greatest
catalyst for indigenous advancement was the student movement, which first
brought discrimination against Aborigines to public attention. Then, as now,
most non-indigenous Australians lived in southern coastal cities. It was
possible to see Aborigines in films and occasionally on television but I
spent three years in Canberra from 1963 before I met one. Equally rarely
were Aborigines mentioned in the press, but all this changed in February
1965, when 30 students set off from Sydney on a 3200 km (2000 mile)
‘Freedom Ride’ bus tour of New South Wales country towns to investigate
and highlight discrimination. The leader, one of only two Aborigines in the
group, was Charles Perkins, a charismatic, articulate 29-year-old. Perkins
was born in Alice Springs of mixed parentage, educated by Anglican
missionaries and later completed an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner. He
excelled at soccer, was spotted by a talent scout from English club Everton
and played for them in 1959 and later played for South Australia. In 1961
Perkins joined the Federal Council for Advancement of Aborigines and
Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), becoming vice-president and
completing a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney in 1964,
thus becoming Australia’s first indigenous graduate.
Perkins and his fellow ‘Freedom Riders’ found an informal colour bar
entrenched in some country towns—Aborigines were confined to separate
sections of cinemas, refused service in hotels and barred from clubs. In
Moree, Aboriginal children were excluded from the public swimming pool
unless with a school group. Witnessed by national media, students argued
with the pool manager and the mayor until they were allowed to escort six
Aboriginal children into the pool. Perkins took similar direct action in
Walgett. Soon atrocious Aboriginal living conditions were headlines in the
world press. The 1960s was the time of the Civil Rights campaign in the
United States and of growing enlightenment, multiculturalism and
prosperity in Australia, which has long seen itself as the land of ‘a fair go’,
a pluralist multicultural society where all deserve equality.
One major problem was that the federal government had legislative
responsibility only for Northern Territory Aborigines; only state
governments could enact legislation for Aborigines in each of the six states.
Only a referendum could change the Australian constitution to give it power
to coordinate national policy and legislation in Aboriginal affairs. In 1944
the Australian Post-War, Reconstruction and Democratic Rights
Referendum (commonly known as the Fourteen Powers referendum) was
put to the Australian people. An Aboriginal Affairs power was included in
the referendum after a campaign by Kim Beazley Senior and other
humanitarians who saw the need for the federal government to step in to
Aboriginal affairs and take some responsibility. However, because other
clauses of this referendum were distasteful to the public, the vote was no.
It was another 23 years before the question was put to the electorate
again. Perkins, FCAATSI and their supporters campaigned for
constitutional change and the government agreed to hold a referendum in
1967. This is the only referendum in which a ‘No’ case was not presented,
and it passed with an overwhelming majority. The result was that the
federal government determined concurrent powers with the states to
legislate in relation to Aboriginal people, and in the event of inconsistent
laws, the federal law would prevail.
After the referendum, the federal government set up an advisory body
called the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Existing definitions of
‘Aborigine’ were abandoned in favour of one with three elements—self
identification combined with biological descent and Aboriginal community
acceptance. ‘An Aborigine or Torres Strait Islander is a person of
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal
or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which
he or she lives.’ This was an important policy change that enabled people of
part-descent to assert their Aboriginality.2 The Council also influenced a
change in official policy from assimilation to integration, which recognises
that Aborigines have the right to live their own lifestyle rather than
expecting them to merge into Western society. The Council wanted tribal
groups to have time and scope to adjust to the dominant society.
To achieve a gradual adjustment and to be able to maintain cultural
traditions, land under assured title was needed. Land rights—owning and
living on one’s own land—became the principal rallying cry of the
Aboriginal cause, yet, as Perkins wrote in 1988—‘Although the land rights
issue has wide support from Aboriginal people across the nation, for
political reasons it has had limited support from Aboriginal and Islander
people living in urban areas. To them the issues of compensation and
adequate programs to restore a level of equity with non-Aboriginal
Australians take precedence.’3 This urban/bush divide continues through to
the present day.
The land rights movement began in 1963 at Yirrkala when the Yolngu
agitated for the return of their traditional land (see chapter 7). Although
Justice Blackburn’s 1971 decision rejected the Yolngu claim, he
recommended compensation, protection of sacred sites and preservation of
hunting rights. On Australia Day 1972, the Liberal prime minister, Sir
William McMahon, confirmed Blackburn’s judgment and ruled out land
rights based on traditional association. Aborigines’ patience snapped and
they set up an ‘Aboriginal Tent Embassy’ (initially one beach umbrella) on
the lawn in front of old Parliament House in Canberra to highlight
Aboriginal disadvantage and assert their desire to be treated as a sovereign
political entity. The encampment grew, a ‘Minister for Caucasian Affairs’
was appointed and the media had a field day. For six months, the presence
of Aboriginal protesters severely embarrassed the government, who
eventually sent police to demolish the ‘embassy’. (Today the Aboriginal
Tent Embassy still exists in the form of Reconciliation Place and a
decorated shed on the lawns opposite old Parliament House). McMahon lost
the next election in December 1972, and Gough Whitlam swept into office,
heading Australia’s first Labor government for 22 years.4
The Aboriginal flag was first flown on National Aboriginal and Islander
Day in July 1971 in Adelaide but became a strong, unifying symbol of
Aboriginal identity when flown at the Aboriginal ‘embassy’ in 1972. It was
designed by Harold Thomas of the Arrernte people of Central Australia.
Black symbolises Aboriginal people past, present and future; red the earth,
red ochre and Aboriginal spiritual relationship to the land; and yellow the
sun, bringer of life.

Self-determination and self-management

Whitlam’s Labor government was elected partly on a platform that included
human rights and Aboriginal self-determination—the right to determine and
control one’s own destiny. The goal was for Aboriginal communities to
decide the pace and nature of their future development as a significant
group within the dominant society. The ‘White Australia’ Policy, which
limited most immigration to European immigrants, had been abandoned in
1969 and the campaign against racism continued with the passing of the
Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which banned discrimination on grounds
of race, colour or ethnic origin in matters of employment, access to housing
or public places and provision of goods and services.
Whitlam established a federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA),
a National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) of elected
Aboriginal members to advise government and the Woodward Aboriginal
Land Rights Commission to examine the case for legislation on land rights
in the Northern Territory. He also froze uranium mining, which was often
on contested ground. After wide consultation, Justice Woodward
recommended enacting land rights legislation in the Northern Territory,
including setting up Aboriginal Land Councils and land claims mechanisms
and the vesting of inalienable, freehold, communal title in Aboriginal Land
Trusts in the Northern Territory, where claims were successful and in
relation to pre-existing reserves.
In May 1975 an Aboriginal Land Fund Commission was established to
buy land, and in August a parcel of traditional land at Wattie Creek
(Daguragu) was purchased and returned to the Gurindji in a moving
ceremony, where Whitlam poured sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hands to
symbolise the return of his people’s country. A land rights bill was drafted
but in November, only hours after its second reading, came Whitlam’s
dramatic, controversial dismissal by the Governor-General. (Whitlam had
refused to call a general election after the Leader of the Opposition,
Malcolm Fraser, blocked government finance bills. This is one of the
reasons for the strong Republican movement in Australia.)
 Fraser won the ensuing election and, to his credit, passed Whitlam’s
Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Importantly,
Northern Territory Aborigines were given a unique right of veto to prevent
mining on their land. (In Australia sub-surface minerals generally belong to
the crown.) Dealings between mining companies and Land Trusts are
mediated through land councils, and in return for consent to mine on
Aboriginal land, miners negotiate and pay royalties to traditional owners.
Aboriginal advocates and supporters hold up this legislation as a high-
watermark in land rights legislation in Australia.
Whitlam’s policy had aimed ‘to restore to the Aboriginal people of
Australia their lost power of self-determination in economic, social and
political affairs’.5 This ‘new deal’ involved massive spending. Federal
expenditure on Aboriginal advancement doubled in 1973 and doubled again
the following year. The Aboriginal budget continued increasing under
Labor and only decreased slightly under succeeding Liberal governments
(1975–83), because Fraser, a humanitarian, prosecuted a vigorous program
to improve Aboriginal living conditions, health, education and housing, and
also initiated a limited form of self-management for indigenous
communities. The federal government funded indigenous national, regional
and local community organisations, land councils and housing cooperatives,
many of which were formed through indigenous people’s own initiatives.
By 2001, the federal budget allocation for indigenous-specific programs
had risen to $2.3 billion, three-quarters of which was earmarked for
programs aimed at improving the Aboriginal standard of living.6
In 1980 the Aboriginal Development Commission (ADC) was set up to
fund Aboriginal land purchases, housing or business enterprises. ‘Freedom
Rider’ Charles Perkins ran the ADC until 1984, when he became head of
the DAA. There were teething troubles and frequent questioning of shaky
Aboriginal financial management and accounting. In 1988 Perkins was
asked to stand aside and later resigned, although cleared of any actual
wrongdoing. In 1990 the DAA was replaced by the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which combined ADC and DAA
functions. The chairperson, Lowitja O’Donoghue, and two commissioners
were initially government appointments, the other seventeen board
members were indigenous people elected by 388 regional councillors,
themselves elected by about 40,000 voters in a special indigenous election.
Voting in triennial elections was optional and voter turnout very low. Many
candidates had no widespread support; in the 2002 elections one regional
councillor was elected with a primary vote of only twelve. Some candidates
relied on patronage to maintain their power. Nevertheless, ATSIC enabled
indigenous decision-making and oversaw a substantial budget ($1.2 billion
in 2003) directed to a range of programs such as the Community
Development Employment Projects (CDEP), support for Aboriginal legal
and health services, housing and infrastructure programs and land
acquisition.
Finally, in 2004 ATSIC foundered on the rocks of dysfunctional
leadership, alleged financial mismanagement, lack of accountability,
nepotism and cronyism. Its abolition was supported by both the Howard
government and the Labor opposition, but in recent times there has been a
trend towards reconsidering ATSIC’s value, particularly at regional levels,
based on the success of its regional councils in reflecting local views. The
abolition of ATSIC was a hiatus in 32 years of elected indigenous
representation, leaving the Aboriginal community voiceless.7
Responsibility for provision of services to Aboriginal communities reverted
to regular government departments, in many areas impacting culturally
appropriate services. Under the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd Labor governments, the
National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples was established in 2010
(outside of government) and funded to represent indigenous views. Under
the succeeding Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison Liberal–National Coalition
governments, there was a reversion to an indigenous council to the prime
minister.

Land rights
Support for land rights peaked during the late 1970s, when the public saw it
as a quality-of-life issue. The Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act of 1981 gave
to the corporate body Anangu Pitjantjatjara inalienable freehold title to
103,000 km2 (40,000 sq. miles) of South Australian land, plus control of
entry and a share of mining royalties. This gave Aborigines control of 19
per cent of South Australia, but all in the dry north. In more closely settled
New South Wales, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 established land
councils and gave them title to existing reserves, the means to claim unused
Crown land and to purchase other land on the open market. A fund (7.5 per
cent of gross state land tax revenue for fifteen years) was set up to fund land
purchases and land council administration.
The Hawke Labor Government set aside a significant amount of money
each year to purchase land. From 1988 to 1992 I was doing fieldwork on
rock art and archaeology with traditional owners in the Katherine region of
the Northern Territory, when the privately owned cattle property on which
we were working came onto the market at a very reasonable price. I
therefore tackled the then Minister of Aboriginal Affairs in his office in
Canberra, and eventually persuaded him to buy it for the Wardaman people.
Bill Harney and his clan are now living there and running it as a successful
cattle property. Aborigines now have legal title to over 30 per cent (2.3
million sq. miles) of the continent.

Bicentenary protest
Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations in 1988 acted as a catalyst for
Aboriginal protest and in June, at the Barunga (Northern Territory) Festival,
Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Chairman of the Northern Land Council, presented
the prime minister, Bob Hawke, with the Barunga Statement. This set the
Aboriginal agenda for negotiations towards a treaty between indigenous and
non-indigenous Australians. This claim of Aboriginal rights, framed by a
bark painting, called for ‘a national system of land rights; permanent
control and enjoyment of our ancestral lands; compensation for the loss of
use of our lands; protection of and control of access to our sacred sites,
sacred objects, artefacts, designs, knowledge and works of art; the return of
the remains of our ancestors for burial in accordance with our traditions.’
Most of these rights have now been more or less achieved. Australia has
strong legal protection for Aboriginal sites, human remains, artefacts,
designs and works of art. Much of this protection dates from archaeologists’
efforts from the 1960s onwards. All Aboriginal stone tools now belong to
the Crown so, unlike in the United States, private collecting is illegal, even
on one’s own land. Permits (from state heritage authorities after Aboriginal
consultation) are required for any collection or excavation, and excavated
artefacts must be lodged in the regional museum or elsewhere according to
Aboriginal wishes. On recent excavations in the Northern Territory and
Western Australia Aboriginal people are invariably part of the research
team on site.
 There is ‘blanket’ protection for all Aboriginal ‘relics’, such as rock art
or burial places. Unmodified mythological sites are more problematic but
can be protected by registration. These ‘invisible’ story places are under
increasing pressure from new highways, pipelines, housing, mines and
reservoirs. The situation has improved with better legislation requiring site
surveys before development begins. Ideally, significant sites are registered
long before any threats arise. During my thirteen years working on
inclusion of Aboriginal sites in the Register of the National Estate,
registration provided 100 per cent protection—none of the more than 2000
Aboriginal sites registered by the Australian Heritage Commission in 1979–
91 was damaged or destroyed.8
The 1990s witnessed several Aboriginal attempts to halt major
development projects. The first battle was over a mining proposal affecting
southern Kakadu National Park where Coronation Hill contains gold,
platinum and palladium worth over $1.5 billion. The Jawoyn people were
divided between elders, for whom the area still held the ancestral spirit of
Bula, and those who valued the jobs and royalties mining would bring.
Hawke prevented mining at Coronation Hill and the ban continues.

The Mabo case

Opposition from state governments meant little progress towards national
land rights until the Mabo decision in 1992, when Australia’s High Court
overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullius and ruled that Eddie Mabo and
two other Torres Strait Islanders should be granted ‘native title’ to Murray
Island. Under the eighteenth century legal doctrines followed by Lieutenant
(later Captain) Cook, unimproved land over which no previous sovereignty
had been exercised, manifesting no sovereign power or visible government,
could be claimed by a sovereign power such as Britain and peacefully
annexed to the British dominions. ‘Native title’ was defined by Justice
Gerard Brennan as ‘indigenous inhabitants’ interests and rights in land,
whether communal, group or individual, under their traditional laws and
customs’.9 The case had taken ten years and sadly Eddie Mabo died of
cancer a few months before his victory. The Torres Strait Islands are
inhabited by people of mainly Melanesian stock with a language, culture
and sedentary lifestyle substantially different from those of Aboriginal
Australians, but in 1879 the islands were annexed to Queensland and now
form part of the Federation of Australia. The judges’ decision therefore also
applied to mainland Aborigines and determined that the common law of
Australia recognises native land title and that indigenous Australians have
rights to land based on prior occupation. Where they remain on their land,
these rights or ‘native title’ almost certainly survive.
This recognition of indigenous title to land is perhaps the most significant
legal decision in Australian history. Six out of seven judges agreed that,
where it had not been extinguished by inconsistent land grants by the
Crown, communal native title should be recognised as part of Australian
common law. This was a reversal of the British Government’s rejection of
Batman’s so-called treaty with Victorian Aborigines on the grounds that all
Australia belonged to Britain as Crown land.
The public response to the 1992 Mabo decision was immediate anger and
fear from pastoralists and mining interests and significant concern and
uncertainty across mainstream Australia. In response, the Keating Labor
Government passed the Native Title Act 1993. Following the passage of the
Act, the fears and concerns gradually lessened and resolved themselves.
Today, native title is an accepted part of the Australian legal system, and
Mabo Day is celebrated each 3 June.

The Wik decision

In the 1996 High Court’s decision in Wik Peoples v Queensland, High Court
judges ruled that native title was not automatically extinguished by
leasehold grants of land and that pastoral leases (covering 42 per cent of
Australia) do not necessarily extinguish native title. Instead, this meant that
native title—albeit nonexclusive—could potentially extend across vast
areas of outback Australia. Vigorous, sometimes bitter public debate
followed. Liberal Prime Minister John Howard put forward a ‘ten point
plan’ of changes to the Native Title Act, while his deputy toured the
outback promising ‘bucket-loads of extinguishment’.
The House of Representatives voted in favour of Howard’s ten points,
but some were rejected by the Senate. Finally, after 109 hours of Senate
debate and 314 amendments, a compromise was brokered and the Native
Title Amendment Act 1998 was passed. ‘Legislation by exhaustion’ is how
Frank Brennan, Jesuit priest and lawyer, described it, while expressing
confidence that ‘the major political parties will live with the detailed
compromise’:
‘There will be greater emphasis on negotiated agreements. Pastoralists’ … rights prevail over any
conflicting rights of native title holders … Native title claimants will have access to an
independent tribunal to put their case. The majority of Aborigines who could never establish a
native title claim will still have access to the Indigenous Land Fund, which enjoys bipartisan
support and which will reach $1.289 billion by June 2004, permitting annual payments of $45
million for land purchases and land administration’.10

The 1990s became the decade of reconciliation, sparked off by a rising

call from church leaders and humanitarians for a process of reconciliation
and by the final recommendation of the extraordinarily comprehensive
report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Under
federal legislation a council representing indigenous and other sectors of
society worked throughout the wider Australian community to institute
attitudinal and practical change. Prime Minister Paul Keating’s now famous
Redfern Speech on 10 December 1992 launched Australia’s impending
celebration of the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. The
point of the year, Keating explained, was to ‘bring the dispossessed out of
the shadows’. He called for an act of recognition and listed the burdens of
history, beginning with:
‘Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.’11

Aboriginal deaths in custody

In 1987 an inquiry was set up to investigate allegations against police and
prison officers in relation to high rates of Aboriginal deaths while in
custody. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
(RCIADIC) spent four years conducting numerous hearings and inquiring
into 99 Aboriginal deaths in police custody between 1980 and 1989. The
Commission found 46 per cent of deaths resulted from natural causes
(especially alcoholism and drug overdoses), 34 per cent from suicides, 15
per cent from injuries inflicted by non-custodians and only 5 per cent from
custodians’ actions, but ‘no person had deliberately caused a death or
deliberately inflicted harm’. The profile of Aborigines who died in custody
is that 88 per cent were men (average age 32), 83 per cent unemployed, 77
per cent unskilled, 40 per cent not educated beyond primary level, 43 per
cent had been removed from their families and 74 per cent had a criminal
record before the age of twenty. Most deaths occurred in Western Australia
(32), Queensland (27) and New South Wales (15); 60 per cent were urban-
dwellers and 21 per cent from rural Aboriginal communities. RCIADIC
made 339 recommendations, mainly aimed at lowering detention rates and
preventing suicides. A surprise finding was that Aboriginal men’s survival
rates were better in prison than outside.12
Although indigenous people make up fewer than 3 per cent of Australia’s
population, they comprise more than a quarter of Australia’s prison inmates
and half of the juvenile prison population. A contributing factor is the
relative youthfulness of the indigenous population, whose median age is
about fourteen years less than that of the general population. In the
Northern Territory 97 per cent of children locked up are indigenous. Most
of these come from the notorious impoverished ‘camps’ surrounding towns
such as Darwin and Alice Springs.
Over four times as many Aborigines as non-Aborigines die young, aged
15–34. Some of these deaths are suicides, some from interpersonal
violence, especially stabbings. The Northern Territory coroner reported in
2007 that ‘Alice Springs has the highest-reported incidence of stab wounds
in the world. There were 1440 cases there in a seven-year period’. Almost
all were in the town camps. Alcohol, overloaded cars, non-use of seat-belts
and riding unrestrained in the trays of open-backed utility vehicles are the
main causes.13

Reconciliation
In 1990 a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) was created and
given a decade to advance reconciliation between indigenous and non-
indigenous Australians. Within the 25-member council there was bipartisan
agreement that Australians needed to know more about both sides of the
country’s history, to apologise to indigenous people for past wrongs and
demand a better way forward. Ten years were spent on nationwide
consultation to promote cross-cultural understanding. A strong grassroots
movement arose of ‘Australians for Reconciliation’, ‘sorry books’ were
signed and ‘seas of hands’ planted. In 1997, to reflect their commitment to
justice for Australia’s indigenous people, 300,000 people put their names on
a sea of 120,000 plastic hands in the colours of the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait flag on the lawns below Parliament House in Canberra. This was
thought to be the largest national public art installation ever seen in
Australia. Thousands of ‘journeys of healing’ began and over a million
people participated in bridge-walks for reconciliation. At Corroboree 2000
held in the Sydney Opera House in May, John Howard, prime minister from
1996–2007, was presented with an ‘Australian Declaration and Roadmap
towards Reconciliation’. Key points of the Roadmap were:
• We, the peoples of Australia, … make a commitment to go on together in a spirit of
reconciliation.
• Reaffirming the human rights of all Australians, we respect and recognise continuing customary
laws, beliefs and traditions.
• As we walk the journey of healing, one part of the nation apologises and expresses its sorrow
and sincere regret for the injustices of the past, so the other part accepts the apologies and
forgives.
• We pledge ourselves to stop injustice, overcome disadvantage, and respect that Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples have the right to self-determination within the life of the nation.14

The Council’s final report of December 2000 to federal parliament and

the Australian people made six major recommendations to address
‘unfinished business’.15 The most important of these that is still an
outstanding issue is the need for a treaty or series of treaties or formal
agreements that protect the ‘political, legal, cultural and economic position’
of Australia’s indigenous people.
The Road Map also called for an apology from ‘one part of the nation’,
meaning an official federal government apology. In May 1997 at the
Australian Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne, Prime Minister John
Howard expressed his personal ‘deep sorrow for those of my fellow
Australians who suffered injustices under the practices of past generations
towards indigenous peoples’. When he refused to utter the actual word
‘sorry’, the Aborigines and almost everyone else in the audience turned
their backs to him. Howard stated that he did not subscribe to the ‘black
armband view’ of Australian history, and the then minister for Aboriginal
Affairs explained, ‘The government does not support an official national
apology. Such an apology could imply that present generations are in some
way responsible and accountable for the actions of earlier generations,
actions that were sanctioned by the laws of the time, and that were believed
to be in the best interests of the children concerned.’16
Howard maintained that one generation cannot assume moral
responsibility for its forebears’ mistakes. Popular opinion agreed. A major
Newspoll survey in 2000 showed a clear majority supported reconciliation
but opposed an apology or reparations.17 Although Howard’s refusal to say
an official ‘sorry’ denied the desired closure on the past, the choice of
outstanding Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman to light the flame at the
Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and indigenous themes in the opening
ceremony provided a fitting, inspirational end to the decade of
reconciliation.
The ‘fundamental bottom line’, wrote Evelyn Scott, last CAR
chairperson, is ‘equality, respect and social justice’.18 Social justice is so
open-ended a concept as to be almost meaningless, but Mick Dodson, the
first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner,
wrote:
Social justice … is awakening in a house with an adequate water supply, cooking facilities and
sanitation. It is the ability to nourish your children and send them to a school where their
education not only equips them for employment but reinforces their knowledge and appreciation
of their cultural inheritance. It is the prospect of genuine employment and good health: a life of
choices and opportunity, free from discrimination.19

How do we know when we have achieved reconciliation? Mick Dodson

saw the way forward as resting in human understanding:
It is my belief that when the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story of Australia is heard and
understood then there will be a true reconciliation. The abstract language of human rights and
justice will settle down on the realities of the lives and aspirations of individual men, women and
children who wish simply to have their humanity respected and their distinctive identity
recognised.20

Treaty?
The last ATSIC chairman, Geoff Clark, insisted: ‘A commitment from
government to negotiate a treaty is essential.’21 Clark was also deputy
chairman of the Aboriginal Provisional Government campaigning for
constitutional recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty and rights. The
secretary was Michael Mansell, a radical Aboriginal lawyer from
Tasmania.22 Both Clark and Mansell saw Australia as ‘two nations’,
indigenous people and ‘others’, who could only be reconciled through a
treaty. However, Evelyn Scott and others regard it as a divisive issue, liable
to undo the goodwill generated by a decade of reconciliation.23 It might
also be legally impossible, for, as former Chief Justice Harry Gibbs said, ‘a
treaty is between two different nations and we regard the Aboriginal people
as one people with us’.24
Treaties made elsewhere were either negotiated between two separate
peoples before they merged (for example, in the United States and New
Zealand) or with indigenous people still living in their own territory (such
as the Inuit in Canada). Canada’s small number of self-governing native
reserves are often held up as a model for Australia but very few live in them
because strict rules of eligibility apply. Australian governments could
certainly make domestic agreements with large Australian tribal groups
such as the Tiwi, Pitjantjatjara, Wik or Yolngu, but at least in the case of the
Yolngu, their past history recounted by Galarrwuy Yunupingu shows that it
might even be necessary to make a separate agreement with each clan.
However, Canada does not have a national treaty with its ‘first peoples’
because most are no longer identifiable as a separate group, as is the case in
Australia.25
Aspirations for separate sovereignty and self-government are even less
realistic in modern Australia, where most Aborigines have lost their
language and traditional lifestyle and over 75 per cent now live in towns
and cities. (Almost half live in Sydney, Brisbane and seven other coastal
cities.) Over 50 per cent of indigenous Australians have ‘married out’ or
have non-Indigenous partners.26 Ethnicity is now simply self-identification
as ‘a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who is accepted
as such by the community in which he or she lives’.27

A long way to go
Meanwhile, over the last few decades of the twentieth century, decades of
self-determination and improvements in the political and legal spheres, a
measureless human tragedy unfolded in many Aboriginal communities,
largely due to alcohol. Tackling Aboriginal disadvantage is the major
challenge of the new millennium.
In 1788, Aboriginal life expectancy resembled European, averaging 40
years. Since then both indigenous and non-indigenous rates have increased
significantly but now Aboriginal life expectancy is still significantly less
than non-indigenous, stuck at levels not seen in the rest of the Australian
population for a century.

Petrol-sniffing, alcohol and drugs

In the 1980s Papunya had succumbed to the petrol-sniffing epidemic
devastating outback Aboriginal communities. Children walked around like
zombies sniffing petrol from jam-tins round their necks and mothers even
used petrol-soaked rags to soothe babies to sleep. Heavy sniffing leads to
lead-induced brain damage, causing hallucinations, violent behaviour and
death through respiratory failure. By 2000, Central Australia had 500 full-
time sniffers and 20–30 teenage boys confined to wheelchairs.28
Petrol-sniffing was first seen in Alice Springs in the 1940s and on the
Cobourg Peninsula in 1950. Why do youngsters start sniffing? Among 42
Yolngu boys aged 12–16 from Ramingining, the surprising cause was a
1981 school visit to Singapore. The trip had backfired, turning the children
against their own families. They returned hating the fact that they were
Yolngu, black and ‘unlucky’ because their fathers could not give them beds,
cars or fashionable clothes. They were sniffing to forget who they were.
Fortunately, their elders asked Richard Trudgen, a Yolngu-speaking
development officer, for help. He spent eighteen months teaching the
community about the dangers of sniffing and the realities of Western
economic life, law and health. His masterstroke was to ask elders how they
would have solved such a problem without him. Their answer was to bring
back a particular ceremony that missionaries had stopped them holding.
‘Well, no one here is going to stop you now,’ Trudgen assured them. They
held the ceremony, taught both their ancient law and the new Western
knowledge in a ‘university of the bush’ and after three months petrol-
sniffing stopped. The community had discovered real answers to their
questions and so were empowered to take action to bring the problem under
control. Sadly, petrol-sniffing continues to be a problem in many other
Arnhem Land communities, many elders have lost their authority and
Yolngu-speaking Western educators are almost non-existent. Some
communities elsewhere such as Yuendumu, Northern Territory, have
instituted prevention programs, but the problem needs considerable human
and financial resources.29
In January 2005, a positive step towards eliminating petrol-sniffing was
taken by the company BP, which developed Opal, a low-aromatic, unleaded
fuel, to combat the problem. Sniffers say it ‘gives them nothing’. It is more
expensive than other fuel but the federal government subsidises it for
remote communities at the same price as ordinary petrol.30 A 2010 Senate
report showed that Opal’s introduction in 106 communities across remote
and regional Australia had led to a 70 per cent drop in petrol-sniffing in
those communities. By 2018 Opal was available in more than 175 fuel
outlets in Queensland, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western
Australia.
An even worse, continuing problem is alcoholism. As Noel Pearson said,
‘Ours is one of the most dysfunctional societies on the planet today; surely
the fact that the per capita consumption of alcohol in Cape York is the
highest in the world says something about our dysfunction.’31 The number
of indigenous men ‘at high risk’ from alcohol through binge drinking is
almost treble the national number.
Boni Robertson, leader of an indigenous women’s task force on violence
in Queensland, in 1999 found ‘alcohol and drug abuse were reported to be
primary factors in the level of violence and abuse being witnessed’ and
‘sexual, child abuse, physical, verbal, emotional, violent abuse happens
especially on pay nights when people get full of grog and smoking
marijuana’.32 The Queensland Government lifted the ban on sale of alcohol
to Aborigines in the 1950s, allowed alcohol consumption on reserves in the
1960s and erected reserve canteens in the 1970s under indigenous
management. In 1999 Robertson wrote that today public drunkenness is
condoned there. ‘Aboriginal children today are the first- and second-
generation legal drinkers, many of whom have grown up in communities
saturated and ruled by both alcohol and violence.’33
Alcoholism is clearly the major cause of the horrific levels of sickness,
mortality and violence in many Aboriginal communities. Drugs, especially
cannabis, are also playing an increasing role.
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) Action Plan
Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is a disorder caused by drinking alcohol
during pregnancy. Lifelong physical, neurodevelopmental and intellectual
impairments to the baby can result from the mother’s consumption of
alcohol, particularly binge drinking, when pregnant. There is no cure and
FASD affects both indigenous and non-indigenous people worldwide. It is
the outcome of parents either not being aware of the dangers of alcohol use
when pregnant, or not being supported to stay healthy and strong and to
keep ‘off the grog and ciggies’, and now cannabis, during pregnancy. After
‘the Coming of the Grog’ indigenous people were severely affected by FAS
because it was a totally new danger against which most of them were never
warned. (Similarly, many young Aboriginal children became deaf because
of previously unencountered and therefore unrecognised middle-ear
infections caused by overcrowding in new government settlements such as
Papunya in the 1980s.)
In Australia it was June Oscar, a Bunuba woman from Fitzroy Crossing,
who led the fight against FASD. Born in 1962 of mixed parentage and the
second of seven children, at the age of seven, because she was ‘clever’, she
was removed to the local Mission and then sent to high school in Perth. She
left at age sixteen and then devoted herself to improving indigenous lives in
her home town and various other remote communities. She held
innumerable high-level positions and became one of the most respected
indigenous leaders of the Kimberley and the nation.
In 2007 she was CEO of the Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource
Centre (MWRC) and organised the Annual Women’s Bush Meeting, which
led the large community group of Aboriginal women elders to agree that
MWRC should petition for effective alcohol restrictions in the town of
Fitzroy Crossing. There was opposition from some in the community with a
vested interest in the sale of alcohol but the elders got the Director of
Liquor Licensing and the Western Australian Police Commissioner on side.
A six-month trial was instituted (now extended indefinitely) that permitted
only low-strength beer to be sold at the takeaway liquor store in Fitzroy
Crossing. Full-strength beer, wine and spirits was to be available for
consumption only during opening hours in licensed premises, thus not
interfering with the tourist trade. These restrictions reduced both binge
drinking and alcohol-fuelled crime, and in 2016 the town of Halls Creek
followed suit. June Oscar was instrumental in bringing the FASD problem
into the public arena, leading to the federal government enacting a National
Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) Action Plan in 2013, and
allocating many millions of federal dollars to it.34
In her speech at the Western Australian Equal Opportunity Commission
Forum in Perth, 10 August 2009, Oscar stated that Aboriginal leaders in
Fitzroy Valley had taken their first steps on the path of reconstructing their
communities but now needed the government to support them:
It is a story of colonisation; the threat of losing our cultural authority to manage our societies; and
the despair that has come from that disempowerment. It is a story of grief and trauma and the
continued pain of living with grog, drugs and violence. It is a story that academics and journalists
write about us as though we are victims of history that we can do nothing about. And within their
stories about us is an acceptance that the paternal hand of government will determine the nature of
our welfare and even the nature of our rights. I want to tell a different story. It is about how
Aboriginal people can be the authors of our stories and not passive and powerless subjects in
stories told and written by others. I want to talk about how the leaders of the Fitzroy Valley in the
Kimberley are working together to create a pathway of hope and community vitality and
resilience. The start of the journey has depended on the leadership of the Aboriginal community
but the journey from this point on will largely be shaped by a partnership that we can create and
build with governments.

In the same year June Oscar was honoured with the Order of Australia
and in 2017 became the new and first female Australian Human Rights
Commission’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) Social Justice
Commissioner.35 Indigenous Australia needs many more leaders of her ilk.

Violence
ATSIC described the violence that was occurring in indigenous families as:
‘The beating of a wife or other family members, homicide, suicide and
other self-inflicted injury, rape, child abuse and child sexual abuse, incest
and the sale of younger family members for misuse by others as a way of
obtaining funds for drink or gambling … also verbal harassment,
psychological and emotional abuse and economic deprivation.’36
It was these horrific and increasing levels of domestic violence caused by
binge drinking of alcohol that led to the Little Children are Sacred report
and the ensuing federal government intervention (see below). A certain
level of violence, especially against women was present in traditional
Aboriginal societies but was not excessive until the Coming of the Grog. As
Trudgen recounts: ‘I lived for eleven years in … Arnhem Land among kind,
gentle people who looked after each other … It was only when alcohol
came into the communities in the middle to late 1970s that we saw the first
real acts of violence.’37 At the same time, many people lost their own
religion through the disruption of traditional education and initiation into
tribal law. Aboriginal religion is localised to particular sacred sites so when
people leave their own region, they tend to lose their religion as well. Many
have also rejected missions and missionaries, and those who cooperate with
white people are often accused of being ‘coconuts’—white on the inside.
However, Christian revival movements still sweep remote communities
from time to time and Torres Strait Islanders, as well as many Aborigines,
gain great strength from their Christianity. Nearly 70 per cent of the total
indigenous population have said they are Christian.

Noel Pearson speaks out

Until the late 1990s, indigenous problems were a taboo subject. A powerful
deterrent to publicising the indigenous ‘culture of alcohol, substance abuse,
violence and anarchy’ was fear of promoting negative stereotypes or being
called racist. In 1999 Boni Robertson wrote:
Indigenous women’s groups, concerned about their disintegrating world, have been calling for
assistance for more than a decade … At times, government representatives appeared to regard
violence as a normal aspect of indigenous life, like the high rate of alcohol consumption.
Interventions were dismissed as politically and culturally intrusive in the newly acquired
autonomy of indigenous communities … the broader Australian community … seemed oblivious
to the mayhem that was happening.38

It was Queensland Aboriginal leader and activist Noel Pearson who

finally broke the code of silence in 1999: ‘Our life expectancy is decreasing
and the young generation is illiterate’; ‘progressive’ thinking about
substance abuse holds it is ‘only a symptom of underlying social and
psychological problems … But addiction is a condition in its own right, not
a symptom. It must therefore be addressed as a problem in itself.’ The
‘symptom theory’ absolves people from their responsibility to deal with
addiction. ‘Worse, it leaves communities to think that nothing can be done
to confront substance abuse.’
 Pearson saw much ‘progressive’ thinking on Aboriginal issues as
‘destructive’. The ‘progressive’ response to the appalling level of
Aboriginal imprisonment has been to provide more legal aid, ‘with no real
belief that the outrageous statistics will ever be overcome’, whereas ‘the
real need is for the restoration of social order and the enforcement of law.
You ask the grandmothers and the wives … The only thing that happens
when crimes are committed is that the offenders are defended as victims [of
dispossession].’ Further, the ‘poison’ of passive welfare dependency needs
replacing with integration into the real economy.
We have to be as forthright and unequivocal about our responsibilities as we are about our rights
—otherwise our society will fall apart while we are still fighting for our rights … We have to
struggle to restore our traditional values of responsibility. Our traditional economy was real and
demanded responsibility (you don’t work, you starve), the white fella market economy is real
(you don’t work, you don’t get paid)—but there is no responsibility and reciprocity built into
welfare (something for nothing). This something for nothing economy goes against our traditional
principles of reciprocity and undermines these principles.39

In 2004, Pearson proposed a positive political program with five

measures:
1. Replacement of the service-delivery perspective on Aboriginal affairs with social enterprise.
Install real economic activity in Aboriginal communities, with welfare payments made to
communities rather than individuals. The aim is for ‘indigenous people to become self-
sufficient and take control of their own destiny’. [In 2000 Pearson, with the backing of the
Queensland Government, set up the Cape York Partnership Plan (CYPP), which has now
established productive partnerships with big business and non-government organisations.
CYPP has developed an indigenous business training institute and enterprises in ecotourism,
fishing, horticulture, arts and crafts, and consultancy work.]
2. Aborigines need to form a strong movement for the restoration of social and cultural order.
‘Dysfunction, violence and substance abuse can be defeated only by conscious promotion of
personal and collective responsibility.’
3. ‘We must create a demand for the best available primary education for our children …
Educational improvement … is driven by parental and community demand.’
4. We need to encourage geographic mobility among people in remote and regional areas, leading
to secondary and tertiary education, other training and working careers in urban areas.
Aboriginal social and economic integration is necessary, but the best way to achieve this is to
give young people the security of socially functional homelands to which they can return for
longer or shorter periods and make a contribution. This is not an assimilationist program.
Complete command of English and knowledge of European culture can be combined with an
Aboriginal cultural identity.
5. Sending indigenous high school students out of their communities to attend boarding schools in
the cities in order to train local leaders and prevent another generation being trapped in the
poverty that follows an absence of education. This is similar to non-Aboriginal children who go
away from farms and remote settlements to boarding school and go home for the holidays.
 This blueprint for social rescue by excising the poison of welfare
dependency has been widely accepted. In 2004 Pearson founded the Cape
York Institute for Policy and Leadership with financial help from the federal
and Queensland governments with the goal of empowering indigenous
communities to solve their own problems. While still supporting symbolic
reconciliation and recognition of indigenous rights, Pearson developed a
policy of ‘radical centralism, emphasising that ‘Australians do not have an
inalienable right to dependency; they have an inalienable right to a fair
place in the real economy.’ As Fred Chaney, co-chairperson of
Reconciliation Australia, put it: ‘The maintenance of cultural identity,
which is so important to Aboriginal people’s sense of self-worth, has to be
accompanied by the skills and capacity to experience that same self-worth
when they are operating in the mainstream culture.’40
How can these goals be achieved? A wealth of additional measures
beckons. Greater use of the army to improve outback infrastructure and to
provide more and more jobs in remote areas; better training, pay and
conditions for teachers and health professionals on long-term contracts in
indigenous communities; a volunteer civic corps of reconciliation
supporters; ‘twinning’ of indigenous with non-indigenous settlements; and
treating disadvantaged Aboriginal communities along the lines of AusAID
development projects (as suggested by Wesley Aird, the first indigenous
graduate from the Royal Military College, Duntroon). Another suggestion is
integration, and more than half the Aboriginal population have already
voted with their feet, heading for the cities and marrying out, but the vast
majority of their children do still identify as indigenous.41
Above all, as a top priority, alcoholism, drug addiction and domestic
violence must be removed from the traditional indigenous world at any
cost. Tools to tackle these afflictions are law enforcement, zero tolerance,
rehabilitation and education of both young and old. Alcoholism and its
associated violence is the most difficult problem to tackle, but Aboriginal
women in the Northern Territory attest that the situation has been much
improved by the provisions of the intervention, especially the quarantining
of welfare payments (see below).
The government could also assist by raising the tax and decreasing
alcohol content in cheap cask wine, which only costs about the same per
litre as lemonade, despite its role in the worst alcohol abuse in the nation.
(Regions with high consumption of cheap cask wine and regular-strength
beer suffer the most alcohol-related violence and illness.) During the four
years when cask wine was taxed in the Northern Territory before the High
Court unfortunately had to declare the tax illegal in 1997, road fatalities
dropped 35 per cent, alcohol-related deaths fell by 20 per cent and hospital
admissions for alcohol-related illness were down by 23 per cent. The
amount of cheap wine sold in Alice Springs almost doubled by 7000 5-litre
casks a week after the High Court decision. Cheap, strong alcohol is clearly
linked to higher levels of violence, illness and injury, but although
governments could act and measures such as those taken in Fitzroy
Crossing could be instituted much more widely, pleas from Aboriginal
women, church groups and health groups, including the Aboriginal-run
National Indigenous Substance Misuse Council, for too long fell on deaf
ears.42 As Robertson wrote in 1999:
We must commit ourselves to ongoing collaboration with non-indigenous people to achieve the
true principles of self-determination, reconciliation and reciprocity … We must no longer allow
ourselves to be portrayed as victims, but as proud and strong people. In our unique ability to
endure all odds, we have stood tall and we have survived. Through our collective efforts, we can
break the cycle of violence and we can work toward a future that allows our children to be proud
of their cultural identity and to live a life free of fear … These are the goals to which we must all
aspire.43

Representing indigenous people to government

A breakthrough came on 26–27 November 2004 at a meeting of a dozen
Aboriginal leaders held in northern Queensland. What emerged was the
non-partisan Port Douglas Accord, with the Dodson brothers, Noel Pearson,
Marcia Langton and others agreeing to move beyond the past and fuse the
rights and responsibilities agendas in order to tackle Aboriginal
disadvantage head-on, through a dialogue with government on reform and
mutual obligation or shared responsibility. Patrick Dodson pointed out that
‘the mutual obligation stuff has a lot of resonance within Aboriginal culture
and within Aboriginal notions of kinship. This concept has a grounding
within our culture and society.’ Mutual obligation programs should not be
trivialised, but may be simple yet effective incentives to school attendance,
such as ‘no school, no swimming pool’.44
Similarly, Pearson said, ‘There is no argument with the principle of
mutual obligation if we are going to get things fixed. The mistake we made
in the past was to think indigenous salvation came from legal and political
acts. This is part of it, but we must assume responsibility and recognise
these things are achieved through social and economic progress. You don’t
need to tell a parent who works that they need to wash their kid’s face or
feed their stomach.’
‘The romantic savage myth that white intellectuals have imposed on the
Aboriginal story—they lived in a paradise until cruel capitalism came along
and destroyed it—is false and damaging,’ Pearson says. ‘Aborigines want
the same things we all want—a job, a decent house and a good education
for our kids.’
Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australian football legend Michael Long
commenced a ‘Long Walk’ from Melbourne to Canberra to try to achieve a
‘laying down of spears and guns’. As a result, then Prime Minister John
Howard met with three of his fiercest critics—Michael Long, Patrick and
Mick Dodson—on 3 December 2004. The meeting ended with an
agreement to tackle indigenous social and economic problems together. As
Long said, ‘the state of Aboriginal Australia was everyone’s problem,
everyone’s disaster’.
The National Indigenous Council was established after this meeting as an
advisory body to the federal government, but it was dissolved only four
years later by a new government.

Little Children are Sacred report

In August 2006 the Northern Territory Government commissioned an
investigation into allegations of serious child sexual abuse in Aboriginal
communities. In June 2007 the shocking Little Children are Sacred report
was released. The Howard Government’s response was the release of the
proposed Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), which passed
into federal law on 17 August 2007 and came to be known as ‘the
intervention’. Soon after the intervention was announced by federal
Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, journalist Paul Toohey
interviewed Howard on the radio and recorded Howard saying: ‘It’s one of
these occasions in public life where you feel you can strike a decisive blow
to make things better for a weak and vulnerable section of the
community’.45 Brough and Toohey, who lives in Darwin, had seen the
dysfunction of the town camps and some communities firsthand, as had I on
numerous visits from the 1980s onwards. Howard decided to try to
mainstream all Aboriginal services, to end the administrative distinction
between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.46 On 24 November
2007 Howard lost his seat in the federal election and the Labor government
of Kevin Rudd came into power. The election was not about the
intervention but, as Paul Toohey wrote: ‘The election was about new
leadership and the ten- or eleven-year changing of the guard typical of the
Australian electoral cycle.’ However, on foreign policy, security and
indigenous policy, the pattern over many decades is for the two main parties
of government, Liberal/National Coalition and Labor to aim for
bipartisanship. Hence Labor leader Kevin Rudd had stated in the house
before the election that he would, without qualification, support every
aspect of the intervention.

The Apology 2008

Bipartisanship notwithstanding, Kevin Rudd overturned the approach of his
predecessor on one significant point. As one of his very first acts as the new
prime minister, on 13 February 2008 he made an official apology in the
federal parliament to all indigenous Australians (by this time all state
governments had issued formal apologies). He said:
the Australian Parliament on behalf of the nation apologises to Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples, in particular members of the Stolen Generation, for laws and policies of
successive governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss.47

This is displayed in Parliament House today, and the video and full
transcripts of all the speeches of apology made that day are available on the
internet. To watch the video is an emotional experience, for many of the
huge audience of invited indigenous people ended up in tears, as did some
politicians.

The intervention
The Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) enacted in August
2007 ‘provided that it would be in place for five years and the intervention
was to take place in three stages: an initial stabilisation period, which would
nominally last a year and seek to establish order through increased police
presence, changes to alcohol and pornography laws, the quarantining of
welfare, the gathering of population data, and explaining the intervention to
residents of 73 communities and 45 town camps; followed by the longer
normalisation stage, in which communities would—it was hoped—be
provided with the services they needed for good health, education and
infrastructure; and the final stage, which was the exit strategy.’48
In the ‘prescribed areas’, where Aboriginal people are in the majority,
alcohol and pornographic material were banned, there was an increased
police presence, children were provided with health checks and efforts were
made to enforce school attendance. The Commonwealth acquired five-year
leases over declared Aboriginal land, ‘community living areas’ and town
camps. Customary law was excluded as a factor in sentencing and bail
decisions, income management was applied to residents in prescribed and
other declared areas, and changes to permits allowed greater access to
Aboriginal land.
The lives of about 45,500 Aboriginal people were affected by the
intervention, together with more than 600,000 square kilometres of country.
Apart from Mal Brough’s considerable efforts, there had been a regrettable
lack of prior consultation, and some changes to the law were needed. The
Labor government of Julia Gillard therefore published an independent
review in October 2008, and then, after some consultation, legislated some
of these changes on 1 July 2010.
There was considerable opposition to these intrusive and draconian
measures, especially regarding the misguided abolition of the Community
Development Employment Projects (CDEP). Since 1977, CDEP had been
among the biggest and most successful programs in the indigenous affairs
portfolio; in 2004 it employed as many as 60,000 Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people on community development projects. These included
setting up Aboriginal enterprises, cultural tourism, arts and crafts, fishing,
agriculture and conservation of the natural environment, together with
training and employment of rangers in National Parks. The government’s
intention was to move people off welfare benefits into ‘real’ employment,
but there is a serious lack of normal Western-style jobs in remote
communities and so CDEP’s abolition led only to massive unemployment.
By 2016 Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott acknowledged that it had
been a ‘well-intentioned mistake’. It was then replaced by the Community
Development Program (CDP), essentially a work-for-the-dole scheme, but
this brought its own problems of far lower hourly rates and heavy fines for
absences from work, even if caused by necessary attendance at traditional,
lengthy funeral ceremonies. The main difficulty is that both governments
and Canberra public servants are still woefully ignorant about regional and
remote Australia and, without adequate consultation, try to find one easy
solution to fit all indigenous problems. The intervention is due to continue
to 2022.49 In some other areas, such as health checks and alcohol
restriction, there was approval, especially from Aboriginal women.
Particularly welcomed were the federal government’s child-health teams
across the Territory, which gave an estimated 15–17,000 Aboriginal
children their first proper but not invasive medical examination ever or
since they were babies. The teams found that 60 per cent of children
required referrals, often with serious ear, nose and throat problems; the
other half needed basic dental or skin treatment. Twelve children were
found to have holes in the heart and were referred to Darwin or Adelaide
hospitals for surgery. (Health care is generally free to indigenous people,
and free indigenous medical centres have been set up in urban centres such
as Redfern in Sydney.)
The other main success came through income management for welfare
recipients. Income management meant that in the prescribed areas half an
indigenous person’s welfare money went into a bank account and the other
half came in the form of a voucher card, which could be swiped for food or
essentials at any accredited store, but not for liquor or cigarettes. The
government rightly believed that not enough cash was being spent on food
or clothing but too much was going on grog, drugs, cigarettes and
gambling.
From indigenous people, there has been strident resentment of
government interference from many male leaders, but approval from many
women such as Marcia Langton and others like Bess Nungarrayi Price
based in Alice Springs, then a Northern Territory Member of Parliament,
who told ABC television in 2011:
I am for the Intervention because I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen women who now have voices.
They can speak for themselves and they are standing up for their rights. Children are being fed
and young people more or less know how to manage their lives. That’s what has happened since
the Intervention.
 Similarly, Mavis Malbunka, a spokesperson for Aboriginal women from
Hermannsburg in the Centre, after six months of living with income
management, said:
We see the benefits. There’s no money running out. Income management is a great help for
Aboriginal people—in Hermannsburg I hear no complaint about income management. I do know
people are buying more food.49

Mildred Inkamala added that ‘the people who oppose income

management are the drinkers. Men had lost half their liquor money.’50

Closing the Gap

In March 2008 the annual meeting of the Council of Australian
Governments (COAG) brought in Closing the Gap of Indigenous
Disadvantage: A Generational Plan of Action. A useful annual report
(published by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet), it
includes detailed statistics on indigenous health, school attendance, Year 12
attainment, employment, life expectancy and many other aspects of
indigenous people’s lives, both nationally and on a state-by-state basis. Not
surprisingly, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, the
regions with the most remote communities and indigenous town camps,
have the worst statistics for health, education and employment, but there
have been some improvements.
The 2018 report begins by stating the government’s dream for every
Australian is ‘safety, security and prosperity, and a fair go for all’.51 To this
end, the federal government’s per capita expenditure for mainstream
services to an indigenous person is more than twice that to a non-
indegenous one.
The gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians’ health,
education and employment is still far from closed, but much progress has
been made on certain fronts:

• The indigenous child mortality rate had declined by 35 per cent in 2016.
• Immunisations among indigenous children had risen to 95 per cent.
• About 14,700 (or 91 per cent) indigenous children are enrolled in early-
childhood education the year before full-time school, and there have been
improvements in literacy and numeracy.
• School attendance had risen in 2017 to 83 per cent of indigenous children.
• Year 12 attainment by indigenous children rose from 47.4 per cent in 2006
to 65.3 per cent in 2016.
• Indigenous university enrolments have more than doubled since 2006, and
in 2018 18,000 indigenous students were attending 40 universities in
Australia. As well as the Abstudy scheme (introduced in 1969) to assist
indigenous Australians with both their secondary and tertiary education, in
2017 government introduced the Indigenous Student Success Program
(ISSP) providing scholarships, tutorial and other assistance to tertiary
students, to try to prevent the high drop-out rate.
• The indigenous employment rate is up by 4.2 per cent but in 2016 was
only 46.6 per cent compared with the non-indigenous rate of 71.8 per cent.
• Indigenous smoking fell 9 per cent between 2002 and 2015.
• Indigenous drinking during pregnancy halved between 2008 and 2015.
• The indigenous mortality rate had declined by 35 per cent by 2016.
• Indigenous people in Australia on average are living longer than ever
before.
• The eye disease of trachoma has been eradicated in New South Wales and
Queensland and the target for total elimination from Australia is 2020.52
This has been achieved primarily by the action of one humanitarian, Dr
Fred Hollows, an eye doctor who, when he himself was dying of cancer in
1999, decided to set up a charitable foundation to focus on avoidable
blindness and indigenous Australian health. Trachoma is also known as
‘sandy blight’ and is particularly prevalent in Australia’s Central Desert,
where the same Aboriginal word is used for old and blind. Australia is the
only developed country to still have trachoma, but the Fred Hollows
Foundation together with the World Health Organization have developed
the SAFE strategy to eliminate it. This includes: surgery to correct the
inward eye lashes (S); antibiotics to reduce levels of infection (A);
promotion of facial cleanliness to stop transmission (F); and
environmental improvements in water and sanitation (E).
• In 2009 the rate of trachoma in Aboriginal children in endemic areas
ranged between 15 and 20 per cent but by 2015 there had been a massive
drop to 4.6 per cent. Of equal importance is the dramatic reduction in the
number of communities with trachoma. More than 150 of the 200 or so at-
risk communities no longer have trachoma and there are only a small
 number with high rates. These hot spots are mainly in and around Central
Australia.

Resilience
Some Western Desert communities have managed to keep their customary
way of life and culture intact on their own land while adopting the comforts
of modern materialism and benefits of Western technology. The Spinifex
people, as archaeologist Scott Cane called them, changed only when change
served to enhance operation of their existing traditions. Communities such
as Tjuntjuntjara in the Great Victoria Desert, Western Australia, now use
electricity, water-bores, modern medicine, four-wheel-drive vehicles and
satellite communications. Babies are born in distant Kalgoorlie hospital,
children attend Tjuntjuntjara bilingual school and adults live on payments
from work with government and mining companies, federal work-for-the-
dole schemes, pensions and family allowances. Western-style houses are
provided, but ‘a three-bedroom house with running water, satellite TV and a
fence does not, to the distress of many people in government agencies, turn
the Spinifex recipient into a happy, hygienic Western nuclear family’. The
house will be used like a traditional ‘wiltja’ (windbreak): ‘People will camp
outside, no lawn will be planted … cooking will be done on an open fire,
hardware will be damaged and left unrepaired.’53

16. SCHOOLING
Education is generally thought to be the key to a better future and
quality of life. Strelley, Australia’s first Aboriginal-controlled school,
opened in 1976 in the Kimberley. Nowadays the ‘Strelley Mob’ own
several cattle stations. Their schools are government-funded but teach
children traditional culture in the Nyangumarta language, using
textbooks prepared by elders assisted by non-Aboriginal teachers.
Adults are taught to read before their children, thus avoiding erosion
of their authority. Parents are committed to children ‘growing up
Aboriginal’. They believe that survival depends on isolation, both
physical and philosophical, from dominant white society. Children are
taught in Nyangumarta about their own history, spiritual beliefs,
sacredness of the land, customary law and kinship, together with the
value of Western-style work and English language, literacy and
mathematics. The School Board’s charter to non-Aboriginal teachers
is ‘Teach good Nyangumarta and good English’. Neither Christianity
nor social studies is taught but children are encouraged to avoid
alcohol and crime.
Stephen Harris and other educationalists hold Strelley up as an
inspirational example of bi-cultural or ‘two-way’ schooling, enabling
learning of a second culture without destroying or demeaning the
first. The technique used is ‘cultural domain separation’—a culturally
compartmentalised ‘two-way’ school in which pupils learn ‘to adopt
appropriate roles in each cultural context, while maintaining personal
and primary identity in the home culture’.
Nonetheless, Strelley has had its problems; some teenagers, as
young as thirteen, have rejected their parents’ conservative utopia in
favour of the bright lights, alcohol and entertainment of Port Hedland.
The Strelley Mob have reacted pragmatically by doubling the distance
between their headquarters and town, but isolation is ever harder to
maintain, given easier travel and the encroachment of electronic
media and the internet.a
Strelley continues, but successful two-way schooling is now rare.
Until the 1970s, missionaries dedicated their lives to learning the
local language to teach Aborigines to live in two cultures. Then
outside pressures towards land rights and self-determination closed
the missions, even though elders said they were not yet ready to go it
alone. In 2000, Richard Trudgen vividly portrayed the catastrophic
descent into illiteracy, unemployment, ill-health, substance-abuse and
crime of the Yolngu of Arnhem Land in the three decades after the
closure of the missions.b Teachers no longer learnt local languages,
and on average stayed less than two years. Overall, Northern Territory
school attendance declined; employer bodies advised that ‘more than
ever before, they are unable to find [Aboriginal] people who meet
basic literacy and numeracy entry criteria for employment and
training’; Aboriginal elders repeatedly stated that ‘their children and
grandchildren have lesser literacy skills than they do’.c
The main problem was truancy. Why? Many Aboriginal youngsters
find school an alien place, parental discipline is often weak and police
cannot or do not enforce attendance of Aboriginal children as they do
all others, for fear of the ‘racist’ label. The Yolngu have all the same
problems as New South Wales Aborigines, although they have never
lost their land, language or culture.
Provision of bilingual, two-way schooling is often impossible
because of too few staff and the presence of different languages in the
same community, for example, the school in Katherine has Aboriginal
pupils from twelve different language groups. In such situations,
children speak Creole and Aboriginal languages die out. Happily, the
last few years have seen a turnaround in indigenous schooling, as
Aboriginal leaders and parents have come to see that education is the
all-important means for their children to overcome the problems of
chronic poverty and unemployment. For example, after Aboriginal
Chris Sarra became principal of Cherbourg State School in rural
Queensland in 1998, the level of regular attendance rose from 50 to
95 per cent, literacy was boosted by 63 per cent, the progression of
students from Year 1 to 7 increased from 52 to 75 per cent and school
morale soared. Sarra said the secret of his success, as with all good
educators, was simply believing in his students. ‘I put in place a new
team, who actually believed they could make the children in our
school stronger and smarter. We also convinced the children that they
could be stronger and smarter by making them feel great about being
Aboriginal. Importantly, we got them to understand that they can be
successful and they can still be Aboriginal.’d
The Strong and Smart program has now spread nationwide and
Cherbourg School continues on its journey towards more positive
approaches to learning. Chris Sarra moved on to become director of
the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute and now leads the
Queensland Government’s Department of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Partnerships, but his legacy endures. As the early
principal, Jo Ross, explained on their website:
For us when we say ‘Strong’ we mean being proud to be Aboriginal. When we say
‘Smart’ we mean working hard enough so we can ‘mix it’ with any other student
from any other school.
We are an almost completely Aboriginal school and so we embrace
Aboriginality every day in a true and positive sense. We are extremely proud to
know that Aboriginal people are connected to the very first Australians. As we
 warmly embrace Aboriginality, we make sure that we do not reject other people’s
whiteness.
The key to our success in the past few years is having teachers, indigenous and
non-indigenous, who believe that our children can learn, and are prepared to get on
with the job of effective learning and teaching. This is greatly enhanced by the
presence of Aboriginal teacher aides from the local community who are valued and
respected for the knowledge they bring to the school.e

Yet Tjuntjuntjara ‘conveys a sense of peace and companionship’, of a

happy community that has successfully adapted the dominant culture of
non-indigenous Australia to their unchanging primary traditions.
Remoteness has helped. Tjuntjuntjara is a ‘dry’ (alcohol-free) settlement
with little violence or crime. Communities are sufficiently small, closely
knit and egalitarian for anti-social behaviour, violence and crime to be rare,
the sanctions being shaming, reproach, ostracism, revenge, ritual spearing
in the thigh and fear of sorcery. Another successful self-help story in remote
Australia has been achieved by brothers Mandawuy and Galarrwuy
Yunupingu of the Yolngu and their family in eastern Arnhem Land. As long
ago as 1988 they were campaigning for a treaty, and the famed band of
Yothu Yindi led by Mandawuy Yunupingu composed the song ‘Treaty’ in
1991, with verses in both English and the Yolngu language.54
In 1990 Galarrwuy Yunupingu founded the Yothu Yindi Foundation
(YYF), the vision of which is ‘For Yolngu and other indigenous Australians
to have the same level of wellbeing and life opportunities as non-indigenous
Australians’.
The Yothu Yindi Foundation has identified three primary objectives to
drive the achievement of its vision of financially, physically and culturally
sustainable indigenous Australians, each vital for social cohesion, cultural
identity, community development and maximised economic development.
These objectives are to:

1. provide contemporary environments and programs to practise, preserve,

maintain and present traditional knowledge systems, cultural traditions
and cultural practices (such as traditional dance, song, art and ceremony);
2. develop economic opportunities for Yolngu through education, training,
employment, enterprise and personal and community development,
 including community leadership development; and to
3. facilitate the sharing of knowledge and culture, thereby fostering a
greater understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous
Australians.

In 2008 they founded the splendid Garma Festival of discourse, music

and dance each August in Yolngu country in remote Arnhem Land, which
anyone interested in Aboriginal Australia should have on their ‘bucket list’.
Garma is run by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, a not-for-profit charitable
public benevolent institution.55

Is Australia racist?
Racism is officially and legally unacceptable in Australian society or
politics. When Australia was under the world media spotlight at the 2000
Olympics and at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Queensland,
commentators such as the BBC were agreeably surprised at the relative
absence of racism in modern Australia’s multicultural society and the
prominence given to the rich indigenous culture. Yet racism still exists—
witness Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation party and a notorious
senator from Queensland, who uses parliamentary privilege to make no
secret of her antipathy towards Aborigines, immigrants from Asia and
Africa, and Muslims.
Racism also sometimes manifests itself on sporting fields. This happened
to outstanding indigenous player, Adam Goodes. He was one of the best
players ever in the AFL (Australian Football League, colloquially known as
Aussie Rules) and won the Brownlow Medal for the ‘season’s best and
fairest player’ twice, in 2003 and 2006. The origins of AFL are linked to an
ancient Aboriginal game called Marngroo. Controversy about Goodes arose
in 2013 when he was playing for the Sydney Swans in the AFL’s annual
indigenous round and a thirteen-year-old girl, a white Collingwood
supporter, sitting close to the pitch called him an ape with persistent
gestures to match. He perhaps inadvisedly pointed her out to the match
security stewards, who overreacted and promptly evicted her. He had not
requested her eviction but the crowd began booing and carried on booing
him at subsequent matches. He said he was ‘gutted’ and withdrew from the
game. Then the tide of public opinion changed, the girl apologised and said
she had not realised her gesture was racist and there was an outpouring of
support on social media. Goodes was elected Australian of the Year in 2014
for his community work and advocacy against racism. He finally retired
from the game in a blaze of glory the following year at the age of 35.56

Australia Day
In recent times, the fact that Australia Day is celebrated on 26 January, the
day in 1788 when Governor Phillip first raised the British flag at Sydney
Cove, has upset many indigenous and non-indigenous Australians alike,
who see this as a celebration of an ‘invasion’. In recent years protests have
begun to seriously disrupt Australia Day, taking the focus away from the
celebration of a successful, multicultural, united nation. The solution
suggested by Noel Pearson is to institute a First Peoples Day on 25
January.57

Reconciliation?
For decades there has been discussion about the possibility of a treaty or
treaties and a referendum involving constitutional reform, and in 2015 the
then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull set up a Referendum Council to
work towards ‘meaningful recognition’ of indigenous people in the
constitution.
On 9 June 2016 a meeting of the National Congress of Australia’s First
Peoples was held in Redfern in Sydney, producing the Redfern Statement.
This addressed both indigenous disadvantage and possible constitutional
reform, emphasising indigenous peoples’ desire for genuine meaningful
engagement with prospective governments in order for them to be equal
partners in decisions about their lives. Indigenous leader Jackie Huggins,
co-chair of the National Congress, formally delivered the Redfern
Statement to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Parliament House on 14
February 2017. Three months later after the National Constitutional
Convention at Uluru, a four-day gathering of some 300 indigenous people,
their Statement from the Heart was delivered at Uluru to then Prime
Minister Turnbull.58
Statement from the Heart, Uluru, 26 May 2017
‘We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from
all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:59
Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign
Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it
under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the
reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law
from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years
ago.
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land,
or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return
thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the
ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or
extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for 60
millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the
last two hundred years?
With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe
this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of
Australia’s nationhood.
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are
not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their
families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for
them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They
should be our hope for the future.
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our
problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.
We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful
place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our
children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will
be a gift to their country.
We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the
Constitution.
Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a
struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with
the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice
and self-determination.
We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-
making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our
history.
In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base
camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with
us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.’

Reaction to the Statement from the Heart

The Statement, delivered on 26 May 2017 at the heart of the nation, at the
base of the Rock at Mutitjulu, was the culmination of a Referendum
Council–led process of deliberative dialogues across Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander communities over six months. It was a dramatic departure
from the conventional wisdom on ‘recognition’. Indigenous people called
instead for a Voice—a single alteration to the text of the constitution
enshrining a voice, and extra-constitutional reforms in legislation
establishing a Makarrata Commission to facilitate truth-telling about their
history. The Voice could have multiple functions, the most important being
direct input into decisions that are made about law and policy that affect
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
On 30 June 2017, the Referendum Council delivered its final report to
Malcolm Turnbull, then Prime Minister of Australia, and Bill Shorten, the
Leader of the Opposition. The Report recommended:60

1. That a referendum be held to provide in the Australian Constitution for a

representative body that gives Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First
Nations a Voice to the Commonwealth Parliament. One of the specific
functions of such a body, to be set out in legislation outside the
Constitution, should include the function of monitoring the use of heads
of power in section 51(xxvi) and section 122. The body will recognise
the status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first
peoples of Australia.
2. That an extra-constitutional Declaration of Recognition be enacted by
legislation passed by all Australian Parliaments, ideally on the same day,
to articulate a symbolic statement of recognition to unify Australians.
 On 26 October 2017, Prime Minister Turnbull in a brief press release
gave the Uluru proposal a downright ‘no’. He maintained that it was neither
‘desirable nor capable of winning acceptance at referendum’, was
inconsistent with democratic principles because only indigenous
Australians would be able to be elected or to elect members of the
representative body, and would ‘inevitably become seen as a third chamber
of parliament’. Instead, the government announced a joint parliamentary
committee to consider the Uluru Statement in the context of other proposals
for constitutional reform.
Noel Pearson termed Turnbull’s rejection of the Statement a ‘betrayal’.
For seventeen years, Pearson had been inspired by Keating’s policy of the
‘Radical Centre’. Pearson’s ‘long game’ had been ‘trying to get good-willed
Australians from across the political and cultural divide to support
ambitious indigenous reform in the “Radical Centre”’, but now he deemed
his seventeen-year odyssey had been brought to an end and Turnbull had
burnt the bridge of bipartisanship.61 It seems that the Cabinet had been
divided on the issue, but Turnbull was vehemently opposed to a
referendum, having been deeply involved in the lost 1997 referendum on
Australia becoming a Republic. It is not easy to win a referendum on even a
slightly controversial measure; only 8 out of 44 referendums since
federation in 1901 have been approved.
Pearson saw the proposed ‘Voice’ as the establishment of a separate
constitutionally entrenched body to represent indigenous people, but one
that could not be legally abolished by changes of government. One
possibility is that the indigenous Voice to parliament should be provided by
establishing an advisory body similar to ATSIC. ATSIC was a form of
direct representation to federal government from Aboriginal people elected
by their communities. Such a body would also have regional councils that
could make agreements on behalf of government with First Nations. (One
of ATSIC’s original regional authorities still functions—the Torres Strait
Regional Authority, set up in 1994.) This simple solution of a reformed
ATSIC was also suggested by Lowitja O’Donoghue in 2009 and endorsed
by Stan Grant in 2019.62
Megan Davis, an indigenous constitutional lawyer and one of the main
authors of the Uluru Statement, in her paper ‘To Walk in Two Worlds’ has
called the present time ‘the protection era’, in which we are rendered
‘childlike figures, sidelined players in our own lives, in an era of new
protectionism where our disadvantage sustains a billion-dollar industry of
which very little hits the ground or changes the direction of the indicators
known as Closing the Gap.’63
Others are more optimistic about the future. Turnbull is no longer prime
minister and hopefully there could be a revival of a bipartisan approach. In
a talk on the 2018 Garma Festival’s theme of truth-telling, indigenous
writer Richard Flanagan gave a speech entitled ‘The world is being undone
before us. If we do not reimagine Australia, we will be undone too’.
The Uluru statement is a way of re-inventing our country in a way that makes us stronger, more
democratic and more inclusive. Though the Uluru statement has been denied, it is not dead.
We are now entwined peoples, by custom, by humour, by friendship, by love, by work and by
sport, in art, in music, in words and through the land; in all these ways we have over 200 years
found ourselves in each other. Black and white, we have become kin. We cannot be selfish.64

Others such as Galarrwuy Yunupingu have put forward a clear statement

of what Aboriginal people want:
What Aboriginal people ask is that the modern world now makes the sacrifices necessary to give
us a real future. To relax its grip on us. To let us breathe, to let us be free of the determined control
exerted on us to make us like you … Let us be who we are—Aboriginal people in a modern world
—and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past has thrown at
us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people—our
full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful
way.65

Resurgence
A great cultural renaissance has taken place in Australia since the 1970s
and now Aboriginal people are proudly introducing others to their land,
way of life and arts. When the world came to Sydney in 2000, the moment
when leading Aboriginal athlete Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame
symbolised this renaissance and, at the least, the beginnings of
reconciliation. Cathy sees herself as a ‘proud Aboriginal Australian’ and ran
her victory laps draped in both the Aboriginal and Australian flags. Since
then there have been many celebrations of indigenous culture and lavish
formal celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum and the
25th anniversary of the Mabo judgment.
The last few decades have witnessed an indigenous resurgence in
Australia. Such resurgence is an international and quite political
phenomenon across First Nations people. In Australia it seems to be
becoming an empowering focus for a range of different campaigns and
activities involving indigenous people taking back responsibility for their
destiny rather than focusing activism on lobbying government. Many
indigenous organisations, enterprises, festivals and sporting events have
come into being and there has been a great increase in cultural tourism,
which is now a major contributor to the Australian economy.
People commenting on this resurgence note that significant numbers of
adults of indigenous background are now middle-class Australians and high
achievers in mainstream urban society but value their indigenous identity
very highly. One of the outstanding examples of this combination of
indigenous and mainstream culture is Stan Grant, who is a highly regarded
journalist on top ABC television news programs. He has also written a
superb autobiography recounting his life’s peripatetic journey combining
his Wiradjuri and non-indigenous heritage.66
In a 2019 article on Closing the Gap, Grant writes of ‘the emerging
Indigenous middle class—not assimilated but culturally strong and
empowered’. A hand up not a handout is the way to close the gap, he
maintains, and tells how: ‘A little bit of help went a long way in my life. It
is how government is meant to work: just enough involvement in our lives
to make a difference but not make us dependent’. Sadly, he acknowledges
that there is another indigenous ‘Embedded Society’, where people are still
the most impoverished and imprisoned in Australia, but with a hand up, he
hopes that they will become happy, healthy and educated and will walk in
two worlds, their culture a gift to their country.
The hand up that Prime Minister Scott Morrison has given in 2019 is in
indigenous education, which he believes is the key to skills, jobs and a good
life. Forty per cent of indigenous students are at school in the Northern
Territory but attracting and keeping more high quality teachers in remote
and very remote areas needs major new incentives. These are now promised
immediately. He has also given an ‘extra $200 million in support for
scholarships, academies and mentoring for indigenous students’.
In his statement on the 2019 Closing the Gap report, Morrison also
reported that in December 2018 COAG agreed to include a coalition of 40
peak indigenous bodies as equal partners in decision-making on the Closing
the Gap strategy. This historic agreement is one step closer to giving
Australia’s First Nations people a voice in government.67
 Indigenous Australians have shown outstanding courage and resilience
throughout. Notwithstanding the disruption of colonisation, the world’s
oldest living culture has thrived and remains defiantly resurgent and
resolutely committed to ensuring the survival of indigenous culture as a
core and essential part of the modern, multiracial and prosperous Australian
nation.
 Dancers in this depiction of a corroboree from 1854 hold
boomerangs and shields. Their knees are wide apart and
their arms raised in the distinctive Aboriginal men’s dancing
style. (Terra Cognita, 1859, by W. Blandowski, courtesy of
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.)
 A lithograph by Augustus Earle (1793–1838) showing a
group of Aborigines affected by drink in Sydney Town.
(Courtesy of Dixson Library, State Library of New South
Wales.)

Woorrady, Robinson’s main informant and Truganini’s

husband, in 1834. Painting by B. Duterrau. (Courtesy of
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.)
 Truganini, or Trugernanner, assisted Robinson 1829–1834.
Truganini became known as ‘the last Tasmanian’, a title
strongly rejected by today’s Tasmanian Aborigines. She died
in Hobart on 8 May 1876. (Painting by T. Bock, 1832–33,
courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.)

Frontier violence: attack by Aboriginal warriors on a

shepherd’s hut, Port Lincoln, South Australia, 1864.
(Courtesy of National Library of Australia.)
 Nahraminyeri, a Ngarrindjeri woman from Point Macleay,
South Australia, photographed c. 1880, is wearing a full-
length possum-skin cloak with a pouch for her child and is
carrying a digging stick. Cloaks made from as many as 80
possum skins were worn by Aborigines in the colder parts of
mainland Australia. (Taplin collection, #AA319, South
Australian Museum. Courtesy of Ngarrindjeri Heritage
Committee.)
Aborigines fishing from a canoe on the Hastings River in
northern New South Wales c. 1890s. (T. Dick Collection,
courtesy of the Australian Museum.)

Aborigines in neck chains (c. 1890) in the Kimberley.

Before roads or gaols existed, police used neck chains to
 prevent prisoners and witnesses escaping during the long
trek back to a police post. After a public outcry, neck chains
were banned in 1937. (Courtesy of The Battye Library
7816B, State Library of Western Australia; collection of S.
Stretch.)

The Aboriginal village at Yarrabah Mission south of Cairns,

Queensland, c. 1900. This Anglican mission was founded in
1892. Initially benign, the church regime became
increasingly harsh and all traditional activities were banned.
In 1960 the church handed over Yarrabah to the Queensland
government. (Photographer unknown; courtesy of Mitchell
Library, State Library of New South Wales.)
 Aboriginal men of the Kolaia tribe, Cambridge Gulf,
Western Australia, in the 1920s. They have cicatrices (scars)
on their bodies and wear their hair bound around a pad of
emu feathers, enabling small sacred objects to be carried
hidden from view. (Photo by Dr H. Basedow, National
Museum of Australia.)
A hut decked with porcupine grass in the Arltunga district of
Central Australia, c. 1920s. (Photo by Dr H. Basedow. Used
with the permission of the Central Land Council in Alice
Springs. Courtesy of National Museum of Australia.)

Aboriginal girls with decorative cicatrices in the Kimberley,

Western Australia, 1930s. Burns were made with hot coals,
firesticks or heated stones and cuts were incised with sharp
 stones or shells. Filling cuts with ashes or clay mixed with
grease produced raised scars. Children usually received their
first scars at puberty, with more added until adulthood.
(Photo from Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt.)

An Aboriginal toddler in a wooden coolamon. These dishes

were used to transport food and water as well as babies.
(Photo by C.P. Mountford, c. 1940s, National Library of
Australia.)
A man makes fire using the drilling method. (Photo courtesy
of DAA.)
 Didgeridu played by Wadamu on Elcho Island, Northern
Territory. (Photo by D. Baglin, AIATSIS.)

Charles Perkins (fourth from left) and 30 university students

on their 3200 km ‘Freedom Ride’ bus tour of New South
Wales country towns in February 1965. The students aimed
to investigate and highlight discrimination—their journey
received worldwide media attention and paved the way for
the 1967 referendum. (Photo from Alamy Stock Photo.)
 Faith Bandler (second from left) and lobbyists from the
Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and
Torres Strait Islanders meeting Prime Minister Harold Holt
in February 1967. Faith Bandler was one of the most high-
profile leaders in the campaign for the 1967 referendum to
remove discriminatory provisions from the Australian
Constitution. (Photo by Australian News and Information
Bureau; courtesy of National Archives of Australia.)
Australia’s oldest known human remains were found in this
crescentic sand-dune on the downwind side of extinct Lake
Mungo in western New South Wales. (Photo by P. Clark.)
Nipper Kapirigi fashions a stone tool in Kunawengayu rock-
shelter, Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. (Photo by G.
Chaloupka.)

Namarakain spirit figure painted at Mt Borradaile, northwest

Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. (Photo by J. Flood.)
Pukumani poles or grave-posts on Melville Island, Northern
Territory. In the Pukumani rituals, Tiwi dancers wear
elaborate ornaments and body decorations and
commemorate events in the life of the deceased through
dance. Carved and decorated poles are erected around the
grave during the rites. (Photo by E. Harvey, 1955,
AIATSIS.)
 Rock paintings of a kangaroo and men with guns in
Wynbarra rock-shelter, Northern Territory. (Photo by J.
Flood.)
Wandjina site north of Gibb River in the Kimberley region,
Western Australia. (Photo by G. Walsh.)

The marsupial thylacine or ‘Tasmanian tiger’, distinguished

by its striped back and tapering hindquarters, has been
extinct on the Australian mainland for about the last 4000
years. This rock painting in Kakadu National Park, Northern
Territory, depicts a thylacine with its cub. (Photo by G.
Chaloupka.)
Anthwerrke, an Arrernte caterpillar dreaming site in a small
gorge in Emily-Jesse Gap Nature Park east of Alice Springs,
Northern Territory. (Photo by J. Flood.)
Wandjina and snakes panel, Mandangarri rock art site near
Gibb River homestead, Kimberley, Western Australia.
(Photo by H. McNickle.)

Nawarla Gabarnmang is one of the most dramatic rock art

sites in the world. Excavations at the site began in 2010.
(Photo by J. Delannoy, with permission from M. Katherine.)
 Broad, thin, spear-deflecting shields from Victoria with
zigzag designs and finely incised cross-hatching. (Photo by
A. Massola, AIATSIS.)
A Macassan prau with crew and four dugout canoes painted
on bark by the artist Nakinyappa on Groote Eylandt and
collected in the 1960s. A replica of a prau can be seen in the
Northern Territory Museum, Darwin. (Photo by J. Flood,
courtesy of SA Museum.)

Painting by F. Péron of canoe-rafts and Schouten Island,

Tasmania. (Courtesy of Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, Le
Havre, France.)
George Augustus Robinson on his ‘Friendly Mission’ in
Tasmania, in The Conciliation, 1836, by B. Dutterau.
(Courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.)
 From April 1828 illustrative boards were nailed to trees
around the settled districts in Van Diemen’s Land. In this
example, the upper two panels depict harmonious relations
between black and white, who are on an equal footing; the
lower ones show that the penalty for murder, whether by
black or white, is hanging. (Painting by T. Davey, c. 1828–
30, Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales.)
 Aboriginal women collecting water lilies, Cape York
Peninsula, Queensland. Small, sweet tubers of water lilies
(Nymphaea sp.) are eaten after they are lightly roasted in hot
ashes. The ripe seeds are also eaten raw or stored and later
ground into flour to make damper—unleavened bread baked
in wood ashes. (Photo by J. Flood.)
 Fish trap built by Anchor Gulunba in 1978 on the Bulgai
Plains between the Liverpool and Tomkinson Rivers,
Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. The conical fish trap is
positioned in the gate when the tide turns and water begins
to flow out, capturing fish. (Photo by P. Cooke, AIATSIS.)
 Madjedbebe rock-shelter, Kakadu National Park, Northern
Territory, the oldest known occupation site in Australia.
65,000-year-old stone tools were found in the base of the
excavation pit where archaeologist Chris Clarkson is
speaking with Djurrubu Rangers (from left to right) Vernon
Hardy, Mitchum Nango, Jacob Baird and Claude Hardy.
(Photo by D. O’Brien, 2015, with kind permission of the
Djurrubu Rangers and Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation.)
Nauwalabila rock-shelter in Kakadu National Park, Northern
Territory, excavated by Rhys Jones, Ian Johnson and
traditional owners in 1981. Further excavation and OSL
dating revealed occupation dating back about 50,000 years,
making it one of the oldest sites in Australia. (Photo by R.
Jones, 1981.)

Aboriginal woman from Central Australia decorated for a

corroboree—a combination of dance, song and dramatic
performance. (Photo courtesy of DAA.)
 Bill Harney (left) applying white pipe-clay body decoration
to fellow Wardaman men for a corroboree at the rain-making
site of the Lightning Brothers, Yiwarlarlay, Northern
Territory. (Photo by J. Flood.)
 Famous watercolourist Albert Namatjira painting near
Burgundy Mountain, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, c.
1940–50. (Photo from V. Megaw collection, AIATSIS.)

Witchetty grubs in the centre of a large dot painting by Billy

Stockman Tjapaltjarri. Witchetty grubs are a highly valued
 protein source for desert communities. (Photo by J. Flood
with the painter’s permission, 1980, Papunya.)

Dancers at Homeground festival, an annual celebration of

First Nations culture hosted at the Sydney Opera House with
dance, music, art and workshop events. (Photo by
Shutterstock.)
Indigenous artwork projected onto the sails of the Sydney
Opera House in 2016 during Vivid, an annual festival of
outdoor light installations. (Photo by N. Jooris-Ancion,
iStock by Getty Images.)
 An Aboriginal woman cooking bush tucker (food). Many
indigenous people now earn their living on their traditional
lands, passing on their bush skills through tourism and eco-
tourism projects. (Photo by L. Mead, courtesy of
Mamabulanjin Aboriginal Corporation.)

AFL (Australian Football League) is ingrained in

contemporary indigenous culture. In 2018, ten per cent of
players within the national Toyota AFL Premiership
competition identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait
Islander. (Photo by Shutterstock.)
 An Aboriginal teacher giving a reading lesson at an
indigenous school in Central Australia. Successful bi-
cultural or ‘two-way’ schooling, the practice of learning a
second culture without destroying or demeaning the first, is
rare in Australia due to staff shortages and the wide variety
of dialects within communities. (Photo by B. Bachman,
Alamy Stock Photo.)
 Reconciliation march across Sydney Harbour Bridge, 28
May 2000. It took five hours for the crowd of about 400,000
people to walk across the bridge in an expression of
goodwill and support for Aboriginal people, probably the
largest turnout on a single day for a particular cause in
Australian history. (Photo by R. Stevens, Fairfax.)

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd greeting indigenous

representatives after he delivered the National Apology to
the Stolen Generations at Parliament House in Canberra on
13 February 2008. Members of the Stolen Generation were
seated in the gallery of the House of Representatives and
millions of Australians watched the live television
broadcast. (Photo by AAP Image, AAP POOL.)
 Indigenous leaders Megan Davis (left), Pat Anderson and
Noel Pearson with the Statement from the Heart at Uluru in
May 2017. The Statement calls for the establishment of a
‘First Nations Voice’ to be written into the Australian
Constitution and a Makarrata Commission to facilitate
‘truth-telling’ and ‘agreement-making’ between Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian
government. (Photo by J. Croucher, Newspix.)
 APPENDIX

PLACES TO VISIT, FESTIVALS

AND TOURS TO EXPERIENCE
AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS
CULTURE
Northern Territory
• Museum and Art Gallery of NT, Conacher Street, Darwin
(www.magnt.net.au)
• Garma Festival, Gulkula, Nhulunbuy, northeast Arnhem Land, four days
each August (www.yyf.com.au)
• Barunga Festival, Barunga, Katherine, three days each June
(www.barungafestival.com.au)
• Mahbilil Festival, Jabiru, Kakadu National Park, one day in late August–
September (www.mahbililfestival.com)
• Kakadu National Park (World Heritage listed), Bowali Visitor Centre,
Jabiru. Visit in dry season, May–Sept. Main rock art at Ubirr and
Burrungkuy (previously Nourlangie)
(https://parksaustralia.gov.au/kakadu/do/rock-art/)
• Mount Borradaile Amurdak sacred site, Arnhem Land (north of Kakadu)
rock paintings. Access only with Max Davidson’s Arnhem Land Safaris
(www.arnhemland-safaris.com)
• Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Cultural Centre and Walkatjara Art Centre
(www.environment.gov.au/parks/uluru;www.travelnt.com)
• Ewaninga engravings, Alice Springs (https://nt.gov.au/leisure/parks-
reserves/find-a-park-to-visit/napwerte-ewaninga-rock-carvings-
conservation-reserve
• Emily Gap rock paintings, East MacDonnell Ranges, Alice Springs
(https://nt.gov.au/leisure/parks-reserves/find-a-park-to-visit/yeperenye-
emily-jessie-gaps-nature-park; www.macdonnellranges.com/emily-jessie-
gap-visitors-information-guide.htm)
• N’Dhala Gorge, East MacDonnell Ranges, Ross River, 6000 rock
engravings (https://nt.gov.au/leisure/parks-reserves/find-a-park-to-
visit/ndhala-gorge-nature-park)

Queensland
• Queensland Museum and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
(www.qagoma.qld.gov.au)
• Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair, Cairns, each July (www.ciaf.com.au)
• Tjapukai Cultural Centre, Cairns, (www.tjapukai.com.au)
• Laura Dance Festival, Laura, Cape York, biennial, June 2019
(www.anggnarra.org.au/our-country/laura-dance-festival)
• Quinkan Reserve, rock art, Laura (www.quinkancc.com.au/rock-art-sites-
tours)
• Carnarvon Gorge National Park, Injune, rock art
(www.npsr.qld.gov.au/parks/carnarvon-gorge/culture.html)

New South Wales

• Australian Museum, College Street, Sydney (australianmuseum.net.au)
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Domain, Sydney
(www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au)
• Bangarra Dance Theatre (www.bangarra.com.au)
• Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, engravings, northern Sydney, Bobbin
Head Visitor Centre (https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/visit-a-
park/parks/kuringgai-chase-national-park;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku-ring-gai_Chase_National_Park)
• Jibbon Aboriginal rock engravings, Bundeena, Royal National Park, south
Sydney (https://www.sydneycoastwalks.com.au/jibbon-aboriginal-
 midden/)
• Mungo Visitors Centre, Mungo National Park, Willandra Lakes World
Heritage area, Pooncarie (www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/visit-a-
park/parks/mungo-national-park)
• Mutawintji (Mootwingee) Aboriginal engravings, Mutawintji National
Park, northeast of Broken Hill, western NSW (https://tristate.com.au/1-
day-mutawintji-np-tour/)

ACT
• National Museum of Australia, Lawson Crescent, Acton Peninsula,
Canberra (www.nma.gov.au)
• National Gallery of Australia, Parkes Place, Canberra (www.nga.gov.au)
• Visitor Centre, Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, Birrigai rock-shelter
(www.tidbinbilla.act.gov.au)
• Yankee Hat and Rendezvous Creek rock paintings, Namadgi National
Park
(visitcanberra.com.au/attractions/596d976ec9d4859822a7fd98/yankee-
hat)

Victoria
• Melbourne Museum, Carlton, Melbourne
(www.museumsvictoria.com.au/bunjilaka)
• Brambuk National Park and Cultural Centre, Halls Gap
(www.brambuk.com.au)
• Grampians National Park rock art
(https://parkweb.vic.gov.au/explore/parks/grampians-national-park)
• Lake Condah eel traps at Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape,
southwest Victoria
(www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/budj-bim),
(http://www.visitportland.com.au/mount-eccles-national-park-budj-bim/)
• Bataluk Cultural Trail, Gippsland sites of the Ganai/Kurnai. Visitor
Information centres at Orbost, Lakes Entrance, Bairnsdale, Maffra and
Sale (www.batalukculturaltrail.com.au)
Tasmania
• Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Dunn Place, Hobart
(www.tmag.tas.gov.au)
• Bay of Fires (Larapuna) stone arrangement and Mount William
(Wukalina), from Launceston, northeast Tasmania
(www.wukalinawalk.com.au)

South Australia
• Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, 253 Grenfell Street,
Adelaide (www.tandanya.com.au)
• South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide
(www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/)
• Art Gallery of South Australia, North Terrace, Adelaide. Tarnanthi festival
held there each October (www.artgallery.sa.gov.au)

Western Australia
• Western Australian Museum, Perth (closed till 2020), Fremantle, Albany,
Geraldton, Kalgoorlie–Boulder
• Mowanjum Festival each July, Mowanjum Art and Culture Centre, Gibb
River Road, Derby (www.mowanjumarts.com)
• Kimberley rock art sites, Kimberley Foundation
(https://www.kimberleyfoundation.org.au/kimberley-region/)
• Rock art, Munurru, King Edward River Crossing, Gibb River Road,
Kimberley
• Woodstock-Abydos Reserve rock engravings, Yule River region
(www.budadee.org.au/woodstock-abydos-protected-reserve/)

Torres Strait Islands

• Coming of the Light Festival, National Day, 1 July (tsra.gov.au)
• Gab Titui Cultural Centre, Thursday Island, Queensland
(www.gabtitui.gov.au)
 ABBREVIATIONS TO
THE NOTES

AA Australian Archaeology
AAH Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra
AAS Australian Aboriginal Studies
ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra
AGPS Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra
AH Aboriginal History
AHC Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra
AHRC Australian Human Rights Commission, Sydney
AIAS Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra
AIATSIS Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander
Studies, Canberra
ANH Archaeology & Natural History Publications, ANU,
Canberra
ANU Australian National University, Canberra
AO Archaeology in Oceania
APAO Archaeology & Physical Anthropology in Oceania
A&R Angus & Robertson, Sydney
ASP Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra
ATSIC Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commission,
Canberra
A&U Allen & Unwin, Sydney
CAJ Cambridge Archaeological Journal
C. of A. Commonwealth of Australia
CUP Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
DAA Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra
HRA Historical Records of Australia
HRNSW Historical Records of New South Wales
HUP Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
JAS Journal of Australian Studies
JCU James Cook University, Townsville
JHE Journal of Human Evolution
ML Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales,
Sydney
MUP Melbourne University Press, Melbourne
NGA National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
NLA National Library of Australia, Canberra
NMA National Museum of Australia, Canberra
NPWS National Parks & Wildlife Service
OUP Oxford University Press, Oxford
Sci. Am. Scientific American
SMH Sydney Morning Herald
SUP Sydney University Press, Sydney
Trans. and Transcripts and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South
Proc. Roy. Australia
Soc. SA
UCP University of California Press, Berkeley
UNE University of New England, Armidale
UNSW University of New South Wales, Sydney
UOS University of Sydney
UQP University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Brisbane
UWA University of Western Australia, Perth
WHO World Health Organization, Geneva
 NOTES

Footnotes to the boxed text can be found below, at the end of the chapter in
which they appear.

CHAPTER 1—EXPLORATION
1 It has been suggested that the Chinese were the first non-Aboriginal people to reach Australia,
but there is no firm evidence for the claims made by Gavin Menzies in his book, 1421: The Year
China Discovered the World, Bantam Press, London, 2002.
2 Sharp, A., The Discovery of Australia, Clarendon, Oxford, 1963; Kenny, J., Before the First
Fleet: Europeans in Australia 1606–1777, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1995; Ward, R., Australia
Since the Coming of Man, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 22–5; Williams, G. and Frost, A.
(eds), Terra Australis to Australia, OUP, 1988, pp. 1–38, re. Portuguese pp. 39–82; Smith, B.,
European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A study in the history of arts and ideas, OUP,
1960.
3 Kenneth McIntyre put forward the case for Portuguese ‘discovery’ of Australia in 1977 in The
Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese ventures 200 years before Captain Cook, Souvenir
Press, Adelaide and Pan Books, Sydney, 1982, but W.A.R. (Bill) Richardson has strongly
disputed these claims in The Portuguese Discovery of Australia: Fact or fiction? NLA, 1989.
4 Hardy, J. and Frost, A. (eds), European Voyaging Towards Australia, AAH, 1990, p. 128;
Heeres, J.E., The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765, Leiden,
London, 1899, pp. 18–44; Schilder, G., ‘New Holland: The Dutch discoveries’, in Williams and
Frost, Terra Australis, pp. 83–116. ‘New Guinea’ is used to indicate the whole island—now
divided into Irian Jaya in the west and Papua New Guinea in the east. The Spice Islands are the
Maluku Islands, previously called the Moluccas, and the Banda Islands; Milton, G., Nathaniel’s
Nutmeg: How one man’s courage changed the course of history, Hodder and Stoughton, London,
1999.
5 Hercus, L. and Sutton, P. (eds), This Is What Happened: Historical narratives by Aborigines,
AIAS, 1986, p. 89; Heeres, The Part Borne By the Dutch, p. 37.
6 Carstenz [1623] quoted in T. Flannery (ed.), The Explorers, Text, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 19–20.
7 Sharp, A., The Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman, Clarendon, Oxford, 1968, p. 110; Tasman, A.,
Journal of a Voyage to the Unknown Southland in the Year 1642, presented in translated extracts
in E. Duyker, The Discovery of Tasmania, St David’s Park Publishing, Hobart, 1992, p. 15;
Mulvaney, D.J., Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985, UQP,
1989, pp. 29–37; Major, R.H. (ed.), Early Voyages to Terra Australis, Now Called Australia …
 Hakluyt Society, London, 1859; re. smoke see M. Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, London,
1814, vol. I, p. v.
8 Dampier, W. [1697] (ed. A.E.M. Bayliss), Dampier’s Voyages, Sydney, 1945, quoted in Flannery,
The Explorers, p. 27; Mulvaney, Encounters in Place, pp. 18–21; Dampier, W. [1697] (ed. M.
Beken), A New Voyage Round the World: The journal of an English buccaneer, Hummingbird
Press, London, 1998, pp. 220, 218–19, 222; Dampier, W. [1703], A Voyage to New Holland in
the Year 1699.
9 Dampier (ed. Beken), p. 219; Dampier (ed. Bayliss), pp. 143–4; Mulvaney, Encounters in Place,
pp. 18–21.
10 Dampier (ed. Beken), pp. 220–1.
11 Van Delft [1705] quoted in Kenny, Before the First Fleet; Schilder, G., ‘New Holland: The Dutch
discoveries’, in Williams and Frost, Terra Australis, pp. 83–115.
12 Gonzal, J.E., report, quoted in Kenny, Before the First Fleet, pp. 112–13.
13 Macknight, C.C., The Voyage to Marege: Macassan trepangers in northern Australia, MUP,
1976; Macknight, C.C., The Farthest Coast: A selection of writings relating to the history of the
northern coast of Australia, MUP, 1969; Macknight, C.C., ‘Macassans and Aborigines’,
Oceania, 1972, 42: 283–321; Macknight, C.C., ‘Macassans and the Aboriginal past’, AO, 1986,
21(1): 69–75; Macknight, C.C., personal communication, 2005; Mulvaney, Encounters in Place,
pp. 22–8; Macknight, C.C., ‘Pre-1770 external contact’, in S. Bambrick (ed.), The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Australia, CUP, 1994, pp. 82–6.
14 The town is Makassar but the name of the people and language is Makasar. Australian historian
Campbell Macknight has made an exhaustive study of the Macassans’ contracts and sailing
passes, and my account is based on his work.
15 Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, vol. II, pp. 228–33; Flannery, T. (ed.), Terra Australis:
Matthew Flinders’ great adventures in the circumnavigation of Australia, Text, Melbourne,
2000, pp. 203–7; Fox, J.J., ‘Maritime communities in the Timor and Arafura region’, in S.
O’Connor and P. Veth (eds), East of Wallace’s Line: Studies of past and present maritime
cultures of the IndoPacific region, Balkema, Rotterdam, Brookfield, USA, 2000, pp. 344–54,
esp. pp. 348–9.
16 Wallace, A.R. [1872], The Malay Archipelago, 4th edn, London, reprinted Gloucester, MA,
1962, p. 431.
17 Keen, I., Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the threshold of colonisation, OUP,
2004, p. 167.
18 The inhabitants of Tahiti and New Zealand were separated by over 2500 kilometres (1550 miles)
of ocean but spoke dialects of the same Polynesian language. Archaeological evidence and
Maori oral traditions show that 800 years ago New Zealand was settled by Polynesians in a
series of remarkable voyages from Ra’iatea in the Society Islands 200 kilometres (125 miles)
west of Tahiti: Pritchett, N., Maori Origins: From Asia to Aotearoa, Auckland Museum, 2001;
Evans, J., The Discovery of Aotearoa, Reed, Auckland, 1998, pp. 21–3; Irwin, G., The
Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific, CUP, 1992.
19 Cook, J. [1768–79] (ed. J.C. Beaglehole), The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages
of Discovery, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1955–67, vol. 1, p. 273; Cook, J. (ed. P. Edwards),
The Journals of Captain Cook, Penguin, London, 1999, p. 117. At this time it was still unclear if
the land Vanuatu (New Hebrides) that Spaniard Pedro de Quiros discovered in 1606 and named
Austrialia del Espiritu Santo was the northern tip of Terra Australis, a separate island group or
part of New Holland’s eastern coast.
20 A modern myth is that the fires Cook saw were signals warning of his arrival. Aboriginal
Australians did use smoke signals to communicate but not to the same degree as indigenous
North Americans. Smoke was used to signify the presence of water, game or a kill, to warn of
intruders or to announce one’s own imminent arrival at a camp or ceremony. By using dry or
 green fuel, pale or dark smoke was produced and thin or thick smoke columns created by varying
the amount of fuel, spirals by whirling a burning branch around and puffs by passing a bark-
sheet across the fire: Magarey, A.T., ‘Smoke signals of Australian Aborigines’, Reports of
Australasian Association for Advancement of Science, 1893, vol. 5, pp. 498–513.
21 Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, p. 305; Cook (ed. Edwards), pp. 123–30.
22 Re. poison see F.D. McCarthy, Australia’s Aborigines: Their life and culture, Colorgravure
Publications, Melbourne, 1957, p. 87, and Howitt, A.W. [1904], The Native Tribes of South-East
Australia, ASP, 1996, pp. 362–3; Banks, J. [1771] (ed. J.C. Beaglehole), The Endeavour
Journals of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, A&R, 1972, vol. II, pp. 122–37, quoted in Kenny, Before
the First Fleet, pp. 127–32; re. spears see B.J. Cundy, ‘Formal Variation in Australian Spear and
Spear-thrower Technology’, S546, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 1989.
23 Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, p. 312.
24 Banks, vol. II, pp. 91–137; Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, pp. 357–63, 395–9.
25 Parkinson, S., A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, London, 1773, p. 146.
26 Dixon, R.M.W., The Languages of Australia, CUP, 1980, pp. 8–9; Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I,
pp. 398, 411; Banks, vol. II, p. 137.
27 Banks, vol. II, p. 130; Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, pp. 399, 509; Smith, European Vision, pp.
6–7, 25, 72, 251.
28 Cook, J. [1768–71] (ed. W.J.L. Wharton), Captain Cook’s Journal During his First Voyage
Round the World: Made in H.M.S. Endeavour 1768–71, Elliot Stock, London, 1893, p. 38; Cook
(ed. Edwards), pp. 403–4 (25 and 26 December 1774); Darwin, C., Journal of Researches into
the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
Round the World, T Nelson & Sons, London, 1890, pp. 259, 260, 264, 280; Jones, P., ‘Ideas
linking Aborigines and Fuegians: From Cook to the Kulturkreis school’, AAS, 1989, 2: 2–13.
Fuegians are now known as Yahgan.
29 Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, p. 387; Reynolds, H. [1987], The Law of the Land, Penguin,
Melbourne, 1992, pp. 7–54.
30 HRA, series I, vol. I, pp. 13–14.
31 Pritchett, Maori Origins; Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, p. 305.
32 Banks, vol. II, p. 122.
33 Ibid., p. 128.
34 Ibid., pp. 122–3.
35 Service, E., Primitive Social Organisation, Random House, New York, 1962; Service, E.,
Origins of the State and Civilisation, Norton, New York, 1975; Diamond, J., Guns, Germs and
Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, Chatto & Windus, London, 1997,
pp. 265–70; Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1970,
pp. 14–15.
36 Keen, Aboriginal Economy, pp. 106, 307–8, 427.
37 Ibid., pp. 276–7, 421, 425–6. Most clans were ‘patrifilial’ (members gaining their identity from
their father or father’s father), but matrifilial clans existed in southeastern Australia.
38 Peterson, N. and Long, J., Australian Territorial Organization: A Band Perspective, Oceania
Monograph 30, UOS, 1986; Peterson, N., ‘Introduction: Australia’, in R.B. Lee and R. Daly
(eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, CUP, 1999, pp. 317–23; Tindale,
N.B., Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, UCP, 1974, pp. 4, 11, 30–3; Rumsey, A., ‘Language and
territoriality in Aboriginal Australia’, in M. Walsh and C. Yallop (eds), Language and Culture in
Aboriginal Australia, ASP, 1993, pp. 191–206, esp. pp. 199–204.
39 Under the Waitangi treaty’s terms Maori people ceded their governorship and the sole right of
purchasing their land to the British monarch in return for numerous ‘presents’, the full rights and
privileges of British subjects and guaranteed possession of their lands, forests and fisheries. The
treaty document in English and Maori was signed by 46 chiefs on 6 February 1840 at Waitangi in
 the Bay of Islands, and then carried around both islands so that over 500 Maori leaders could add
their mark.
40 Locke, J. [1690] (ed. P. Laslett), Two Treatises of Government, New American Library, New
York, 1965, pp. 327–41.
41 Vattel, E. de, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law, J. Newbury, London (trans.
from the French), 1760, p. 91.
42 Re. terra nullius, see Reynolds, The Law of the Land, passim, but Reynolds’ work relies on his
own definition of terra nullius that, without justification, adds a second meaning of ‘a territory
where nobody owns any land at all, where no tenure of any sort existed’. See M. Connor, ‘Error
nullius’, The Bulletin (26 August 2003) and Dawson, J., ‘The nullius ideal’, Quadrant, 2004,
XLVIII: 24–33; Connor, M., The Invention of Terra Nullius: Historical and legal fiction on the
foundation of Australia, Macleay Press, Sydney, 2005; Connor, M. ‘High Court challenged’,
Weekend Australian, 4–5 February 2006, pp. 17, 22.
43 Macknight, C.C., personal communication, 2005; Heeren, J.E. (ed.), ‘Abel Janszoon Tasman’s
Journal’, Project Gutenberg Australia, 2006, <gutenberg.net.au>.
44 Butler, K., Cameron, K. and Percival, R., The Myth of Terra Nullius: Invasion and resistance—
the early years, Aboriginal Curriculum Unit (Pt 4), Board of Studies NSW, Sydney, 1995; Frost,
A., Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s convict beginnings, MUP, 1994, p. 187.
45 Reynolds, The Law of the Land, p. 21.
46 Frost, Botany Bay Mirages, pp. 188–9.
47 Cook (ed. Beaglehole), vol. I, p. 397.
48 Plants domesticated in Southeast Asia and endemic in northern or Central Australia include roots
of taro (Colocasia esculenta) and Polynesian arrowroot (Tacca leontopetaloides), potato-like
tubers of round and parsnip yams (Dioscorea bulbifera rotunda and elongata), seeds of wild rice
(Oryza rufipogon) and native millet (Panicum decompositum), at least two fruit trees—
Bloomfield cherry (Antidesma bunius) and Manilkara kauki—and three nut trees: country
almonds (Terminalia catappa), candlenut trees (Aleurites moluccana) and macadamia
(Macadamia).
49 Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes, p. 109.
50 Altman, J.C., ‘Hunter-gatherer subsistence production in Arnhem Land: The original affluence
hypothesis re-examined’, Mankind, 1984, 14(3): 179–90; Meehan, B., Shell Bed to Shell Midden,
AIAS, 1974.
51 Berndt, R.M. and C.H., The World of the First Australians, ASP, 1988, p. 108.
52 Mitchell, T.L., Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Boone, London, 1839,
vol. I, pp. 290–1.
53 Allen, H., ‘The Bagundji of the Darling Basin: Cereal gatherers in an uncertain environment’,
World Archaeology, 1974, 5(3): 309–22, esp. p. 314.
54 See J. Flood, [1983], Archaeology of the Dreamtime, A&R, 2001, pp. 59–61.
55 Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes, pp. 96–7.
56 Globally, crop production arose in several different regions—wheat, barley, peas, lentils and
melons in the fertile crescent of the Middle East; maize, beans and squashes in Mexico; potatoes,
beans and squashes in South America; rice, millet and soybeans in China; sorghum, millet,
groundnuts, yams and watermelon in equatorial Africa; taro and yams in New Guinea. Gradually
animals, too, were domesticated. First was the dog (c. 10,000 BC in Southwest Asia, China and
North America), then sheep and goats (c. 8000 BC in Southwest Asia), pigs (c. 8000 BC in
Southwest Asia and China) and cows (c. 6000 BC in Southwest Asia and India); Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 125–8, 167; Cavalli Sforza, L.L. and F., The Great Human
Diasporas: The history of diversity and evolution, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1995, pp.
140, 144.
57 Macmillan Encyclopedia, Macmillan, London, 1981.
58 Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes, pp. 110–11; Reynolds, H., The Other Side of the Frontier, JCU,
1981, pp. 98–9; Reynolds, H., Frontier: Aborigines, settlers and land, A&U, 1987, pp. 29–30,
53.
59 Butlin, N.G., Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal populations of southeastern Australia 1788–
1850, A&U, 1983; White, J.P. and Mulvaney, D.J., ‘How many people?’ in D.J. Mulvaney and
J.P. White (eds), Australians: A Historical Library, Australians to 1788, Fairfax, Syme &
Weldon, Sydney, 1987, pp. 114–17; Mulvaney, D.J. and Kamminga, J., Prehistory of Australia,
A&U, 1999, pp. 68–9; Kefous, K., ‘Butlin’s bootstraps: Aboriginal population in the pre-contact
Murray–Darling region’, in B. Meehan and R. Jones (eds), Archaeology with Ethnography: An
Australian perspective, ANU, 1988, pp. 225–37.
60 Re. desert population, see S. Cane, ‘Desert demography: A case study of pre-contact Aboriginal
densities in the Western Desert of Australia’, in B. Meehan and N. White (eds), Hunter-Gatherer
Demography, Oceania Monograph no. 9, UOS, 1990, pp. 149–59; Diamond, Guns, Germs and
Steel, p. 306.

Box 2—A lack of coconut trees (pp. 32–33)

a Foale, M., The Coconut Odyssey: The bounteous possibilities of the tree of life, Australian Centre
for International Agricultural Research, ANU, 2003, pp. 23–32; Smith, J., Australian Driftseeds,
UNE, 1999, p. 27; Hynes, R. and Chase, A., ‘Plants, sites and domiculture’, AO, 1982, 17: 38–
50.

CHAPTER 2—COLONISATION
1 HRA, series I, vol. I, p. 1.
2 The name Eora (or Iyora) is the Sydney language term for ‘person’ and since c. 1950 has been
used by linguists as a name for speakers of the Sydney language. Eora is used here for people of
the Sydney coastal region. To their west Darug speakers occupied the forested Cumberland
Plains and were known by the British as ‘woods people’: Troy, J., ‘The Sydney Language’, in
Macquarie Aboriginal Words (eds N. Thieberger and W. McGregor), Macquarie Library, Sydney,
1994, pp. 61–78. Attenbrow, V., Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the archaeological and
historical records, UNSW Press, 2002, pp. 30–6; Smith, K.V., Bennelong, Kangaroo Press,
Sydney, 2001, pp. 74, 109–12.
3 Tench, W. (ed. T. Flannery), 1788 Watkin Tench: A narrative of the expedition to Botany Bay and
a complete account of the settlement at Port Jackson, Text, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 40–1; Egan, J.,
Buried Alive: Sydney 1788–1792, Eyewitness Accounts of the Making of a Nation, A&U, 1999;
Flannery, T. (ed.), The Birth of Sydney, Text, Melbourne, 1999. The name Australia was not used
until 1814, when navigator Matthew Flinders published a map of the continent entitled ‘Terra
Australis’, or Australia.
4 Collins, D. [1798] (ed. B.H. Fletcher), An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales,
Reed, Sydney, 1975, vol. I, p. 2.
5 Tench (ed. Flannery), pp. 42–3; White, J. [1790] (ed. A.R. Chisholm), Journal of a Voyage to
New South Wales by John White Esq., Royal Australian Historical Society, A&R, 1962, pp. 110–
11, 152–4.
6 Tench, W. (ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge), Sydney’s First Four Years …, Library of Australian History,
Sydney, 1979, pp. 82–3.
7 King. P. [1790] (eds P.J. Fidlou and R.J. Ryan), The Journal of Philip Gidley King, Lieutenant
R.N. 1787–1790, Australian Documents Library, Sydney, 1989.
8 HRA, series I, vol. I, p. 25.
9 Hunter, J. [1793], An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea, 1787–1792, Bach,
London, A&R, 1968, p. 77; Cobley, J., Sydney Cove 1788, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1962.
10 Aboriginal views are from Mahroot, NSW Legislative Council Votes and Proceedings, in Report
from the Select Committee on the Condition of the Aborigines, Sydney, 1845.
11 Eliade, M., Australian Religions, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1973, pp. 60–1.
12 Stockdale, J. (compiler) [1789], The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, with an Account
of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island … (facsimile),
Australiana Society, Adelaide, 1950.
13 Bradley, W. [1792], A Voyage to New South Wales: The Journal of Lieutenant William Bradley
RN of HMS Sirius 1786–1792 (facsimile), Ure Smith, Sydney, 1969.
14 Fowell, N. [1790], The Sirius Letters 1786–90 (ed. N. Irvine), Fairfax Library, quoted in K.
Butler et al., The Myth of Terra Nullius: Invasion and resistance—the early years, Board of
Studies NSW, Sydney, 1995, p. 52.
15 Collins, vol. I, pp. 13–14; Lapérouse’s story is vividly told in Lapérouse Museum, Botany Bay.
16 Bradley [1788], quoted in Flannery, Birth of Sydney, pp. 53–8; Clendinnen, I., Dancing with
Strangers, Text, Melbourne, 2003.
17 Bradley, A Voyage, pp. 84–5; HRA, series I, vol. I, p. 293; Connor, J., The Australian Frontier
Wars 1788–1838, UNSW Press, 2002, p. 26.
18 Anon. [1790–1], ‘Vocabulary of the language of New South Wales in the neighbourhood of
Sydney’, MS 41645, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
19 Worgan, G.B. [1788], Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, Library of Australian History, Sydney,
1978, pp. 28–9.
20 White, Journal, p. 118.
21 Collins, vol. I, p. 29.
22 Hilliard, W.M., The People in Between: The Pitjantjatjara People of Ernabella, Hodder &
Stoughton, London, 1968.
23 Governor Phillip to Lord Sydney, 10 July 1788, HRNSW vol. 1(2), pp. 179–80.
24 Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, p. 17.
25 Tench (ed. Flannery), p. 242; Worgan, p. 22; Re. winter fish scarcity personal communication in
2005 from Robert Williams and Charles Gray of Cronulla Fisheries Centre, NSW Department of
Primary Industries. Gray ‘believes there is a movement to deeper water of estuarine fish in
winter’. This is based on natural phenomena described by Williams as: ‘(1) Radiative transfer of
heat out of the shallows during winter and hence what we assume to be a movement of fish into
offshore and/or deeper and warmer water; (2) Increase in water clarity during winter and hence a
reduction in ambush efficiency by spearing or trapping.’
26 Collins, vol. I, p. 27; Poiner, G., ‘The process of the year among Aborigines of the central and
south coast of New South Wales’, APAO, 1976, 9(3): 186–206; Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal
Past, pp. 63–6. The fern is from Blechnum spp.
27 Mahroot [1845].
28 Tench (ed. Flannery), p. 244.
29 Bradley, A Voyage, pp. 84–5; Stanner, W.E.H., White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–
1973, ANU Press, Canberra, 1979, p. 175; Convict’s letter of 11 November 1791 published in
Ayre’s Sunday London Gazette, 15 July 1792, ms F980/A, ML.
30 Collins, vol. I, pp. 35–6.
31 Ibid., p. 53.
32 Campbell, J., Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and other diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1780–
1880, MUP, 2002; re. Boorong see Smith, Bennelong, pp. 60–2, 65–8; information on the
number of victims of smallpox is from Bennelong, quoted in Governor Phillip to Lord Sydney,
13 February 1790, HRNSW, vol. 1(2), pp. 304–10; Collins, vol. I, pp. 496–7; Hunter, p. 134.
33 Hopkins, D.R., Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in history, University of Chicago Press, 1983,
pp. 3–13, 47–50, 58–61, 74–81; Collins, vol. I, p. 54.
34 Variolation gave inoculees a mild case of smallpox (Variola major). Some died, but the death
rate in England of 1 in 48 to 60 cases of inoculated smallpox compared very favourably with that
of 1 in 6 cases of natural smallpox, and all survivors acquired long-term protection. Variolation
was introduced into England in 1721 and became accepted medical practice; in 1746 the London
Small-Pox and Inoculation Hospital was established and, with the Foundling Hospital, offered
free variolation. It was ten years after the first settlers arrived in Australia that Edward Jenner
introduced in England much safer, simpler, cheaper, life-long protection against smallpox by
vaccination with cowpox (Vaccinia), a relatively mild disease of cattle. Vaccinia virus proved
much more stable and heat-resistant than that derived from Variola cases, and was successfully
transported to NSW in 1804 where children were immediately vaccinated: Goldsmid, J., The
Deadly Legacy: Australian history and transmissible disease, UNSW Press, 1988; Stearn, E.W.
and Stearn, A.E., The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian, Bruce Humphries,
Boston, 1945, p. 53; Fenner, F. et al., Smallpox and its Eradication, WHO, Geneva, 1988, pp.
115–16, 209–44, 253–62.
35 Tench (ed. Flannery), pp. 125–6.
36 Ibid., pp. 134–9.
37 Collins, vol. I, pp. 110–11; Smith, Bennelong, pp. 53–9; Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers,
pp. 110–32.
38 Collins, vol. I, pp. 249, 263, re. Norfolk Island p. 317, re. language p. 506; Macarthur, E., letter
of 7 March 1791 to Miss Kingston, quoted in F. Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia:
Volume 1, Colonial Australia 1788–1840, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1980, pp. 39–40.
39 Collins, vol. I, p. 495; Tench (ed. Flannery), p. 102.
40 ‘Pe-mall’ or ‘bamal’ means earth or clay: Troy, in Macquarie Aboriginal Words, p. 68; Smith,
Bennelong, p. 84.
41 Collins, vol. I, pp. 117–19; Phillip, Voyage, 13 December 1790.
42 Tench (ed. Flannery), pp. 164–9; Collins, vol. I, p. 118; Reece, R.H.W., Aborigines and
Colonists: Aborigines and colonial society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s, SUP,
1974, p. 8.
43 Hunter, February 1791; Collins, vol. I, p. 461.
44 Collins, vol. I, pp. 121–2.
45 Tench (ed. Flannery), pp. 184, 264.
46 Ibid., p. 118; Macarthur, letter quoted in Crowley, A Documentary History, vol. 1, p. 40.
47 Collins, vol. I, pp. 485, 488–9, vol. II, p. 9.
48 Arago, Jacques, Souvenirs d’un aveugle: Voyage autour du monde, Paris, 1839, tome 4, pp. 51,
87, 93.
49 Collins, vol. I, pp. 463–4, 466, 485–6.
50 Ibid., vol. II, p. 25.
51 Collins, vol. II, pp. 25, 90, vol. I, 498–9; Tench (ed. Flannery), pp. 264–5; Stanner [1963], ‘The
history of indifference thus begins’, in Stanner, White Man, p. 189.
52 Collins, vol. I, pp. 466–86.
53 Ibid., vol. I, pp. 499–504; Smith, Bennelong, pp. 123–6.
54 King to Banks (25 October 1791), Letter Books 1788–96, 1797–1806, and papers, Mss. A1687,
C187, ML; Tench (ed. Flannery), p. 271.
55 Hunter, July 1789, pp. 150, 153. ‘Yam’ was a generic name used by Hunter and others for all
tubers, but the walnut-sized tubers seen by Hunter were daisy ‘yams’ (Microseris lanceolata,
previously scapigera), a staple food in Southeast Australia: Gott, B., ‘Microseris scapigera: A
study of a staple food of Victorian Aborigines’, AAS, 1983, 2: 2–18. Only one true yam
(Dioscorea transversa) occurred in the Sydney region and this has small, carrot-shaped tubers
and grows on vines in woodland: Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, pp. 41, 76–8, plate 4.
 The fern root chewed by Sydney Aborigines was native bracken, bungwall (Blechnum indicum)
or gristle fern (Blechnum cartilagineum).
56 Collins, vol. I, pp. 348–9; Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 35–82.
57 Atkins, R. (May 1795), quoted in Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 36, 134 note 4.
58 Kohen, J., The Darug and their Neighbours, Blacktown and District Hist. Soc., Sydney, 1993;
Kohen, J., ‘The Dharug of the western Cumberland Plain: Ethnography and demography’, in B.
Meehan and R. Jones (eds), Archaeology with Ethnography: An Australian perspective, ANU,
1988, pp. 238–50; Turbet, P., The Aborigines of the Sydney District Before 1788, Kangaroo
Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 4.
59 Willmot, E., Pemulwuy: Rainbow Warrior, Weldon, Sydney, 1987; Collins, vol. II, p. 96; King to
Lord Hobart (30 October 1802), in HRNSW, vol. 4, p. 867.
60 Willey, K., When the Sky Fell Down, Collins, Sydney, 1979, p. 167.
61 King to Lord Hobart (20 December 1804), HRA, series I, vol. V, pp. 166–7.
62 King, proclamation of June 1802, in HRA, series I, vol. III, pp. 592–3.
63 Atkins, Judge Advocate, to Governor King (8 July 1805), in HRA, series I, vol. IV, p. 653.
64 Flannery, T. (ed.), Terra Australis: Matthew Flinders’ great adventures in the circumnavigation
of Australia, Text, Melbourne, 2000, pp. xxi–iii, 189–92. The Aboriginal rescue of lost crew was
at Keppel Bay, Queensland, and the fatality was on Woodah Island, Northern Territory.
65 Flannery, Terra Australis, pp. 152–5.
66 Sydney Gazette, 17 April 1819.
67 Sydney Gazette, 7 July 1829; Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, pp. 273–9.
68 Macquarie in HRA, series I, vol. VIII, pp. 368–9, 338.
69 Whitaker, Anne-Marie, Appin: the story of a Macquarie Town, Kingsclear Books, Sydney, 2005.
70 Sydney Gazette, 4 May 1816.
71 Leigh, S., appendix 2, The Reverend Samuel Leigh’s account of the Aborigines of New South
Wales, written about October 1821 in N. Gunson (ed.), Australian Reminiscences of Papers of
L.E. Threkeld, Missionary to the Aborigines, 1824–1859, vol. 2, pp. 333–7; AAS, no. 40,
Ethnohistory Series 2, AIAS, Canberra.
72 Field, B., Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales, London, 1825, p. 224.

Box 4—Boomerangs (pp. 68–9)

a Sydney Gazette, 23 December 1804.
b Jones, P., Boomerang: Behind an Australian icon, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 1996;
Musgrove, P., ‘Why a boomerang returns’, New Scientist, 1974, 61: 186–9; Musgrove, P., ‘Pre-
historic aeronautics’, Hemisphere, 1975, 19(9): 10–14; Drake, F., ‘What goes around comes
around’, Sunday Telegraph, 29 August 2004.

CHAPTER 3—CONFRONTATION
1 Re. French explorers see C. Dyer, The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians 1772–
1839, UQP, 2005, pp. 1–2 (my spelling of French names follows Dyer); Lovejoy, A.O., and
Boas, G., Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1955, p.
240.
2 Ryan, L. [1981], The Aboriginal Tasmanians, UQP, 1996, p. 49; Smith, B., European Vision and
the South Pacific 1768–1850, OUP, 1960, p. 25.
3 Plomley, N.J.B., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian journals and papers of George Augustus
Robinson 1829–1834, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1966, pp. 38–9.
4 Smith, European Vision, p. 87.
5 Re. Aboriginal speculations on ships see P. Clarke, Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an
Aboriginal landscape, A&U, 2003, p. 191.
 6 Bonwick, J., The Last of the Tasmanians, London, 1870, pp. 18–19; Clark, J. [1983], The
Aboriginal People of Tasmania, Tasmanian Museum, Hobart, 1986, pp. 47–65; Plomley, B., and
Piard-Bernier, J., The General: The visits of the expedition led by Bruny d’Entrecasteaux to
Tasmanian waters in 1792 and 1793, Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston, 1993, pp. 283–4.
7 Plomley, N.J.B., The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, Blubber Head Press,
Hobart, 1983, plate 4 (Petit plate 20.021.4); re. pustules see Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 533;
re. hunchback see Samwell on Cook’s 1777 expedition, quoted by Plomley, Baudin Expedition,
pp. 199–200.
8 Labillardière, vol. I, pp. 127, 303, 308–9.
9 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 581–2.
10 James Backhouse in N.J.B. Plomley, Weep in Silence, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987, p. 225;
Labillardière, vol. I, pp. 127, 303, 308–9; Cook, J. [1768–79] (ed. J.C. Beaglehole), The Journals
of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1955–67, vol.
3, pp. 54–6; Péron in Plomley, Baudin Expedition, pp. 57–60.
11 Re. heights, figures come from measurements made on the Dufresne, d’Entrecasteaux and
Baudin expeditions and at Wybalenna c. 1836, see Plomley, Baudin Expedition, p. 165
(Plomley’s imperial figures are correct but his metric equivalents were wrong and have been
corrected here); re. hair, see Dyer, French Explorers, pp. 37–8.
12 Pardoe, C., ‘Isolation and evolution in Tasmania’, Current Anthropology, 1991, 31: 1–21, and
personal communication, 2004; Pardoe, C., ‘Population genetics and population size in
prehistoric Tasmania’, AA, 1986, 22: 1–6; Presser, J.C. et al., ‘Tasmanian Aborigines and DNA’,
Papers & Proc. Roy. Soc. Tas, 2002, 136: 35–8.
13 Flood, J. [1983], Archaeology of the Dreamtime, A&R, 2001, pp. 118–38, 195–211; re. artefacts
see R. Jones, ‘The Tasmanian paradox’, in R.V.S. Wright (ed.), Stone Tools as Cultural Markers,
AIAS, 1977, pp. 189–204.
14 Plomley, Baudin Expedition, pp. 184–94; Flood, Archaeology, pp. 118–120, 196–211, 205; re.
nomadism, bag-making and grass ropes see J. Backhouse in Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp. 223,
244, 263–4; Jones, R., ‘Man as an element of a continental fauna: The case of the sundering of
the Bassian bridge’, in J. Allen, J. Golson and R. Jones (eds), Sunda and Sahul: Prehistoric
studies in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia, Academic Press, London, 1977, pp. 317–86,
esp. p. 325.
15 Vanderwal, R.L., and Horton, D.R., ‘Coastal southwest Tasmania’, Terra Australis, ANU, 1984,
9; Bowdler, S., ‘Hunter Hill, Hunter Island’, Terra Australis, ANU 1984, 8; Jones, ‘Man as an
element’, in Allen, Golson and Jones, pp. 326–7, 331; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 183 (re.
swimming to Doughboys and Trefoil), 379, 554.
16 Robinson’s invaluable field journals were discovered in Britain in the 1950s, edited by Brian
Plomley and analysed by Rhys Jones; Plomley, Friendly Mission; Jones, R., ‘The demography of
hunters and farmers in Tasmania’, in D.J. Mulvaney and J. Golson (eds), Aboriginal Man and
Environment in Australia, ANU Press, 1971, pp. 271–87; R. Jones, ‘Tasmanian tribes’, in N.B.
Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, UCP, 1974, pp. 319–54.
17 Jones, ‘The demography of hunters’, in Mulvaney and Golson, Aboriginal Man, pp. 280–1;
Lourandos, H., ‘Aboriginal spatial organisation and population: Southwestern Victoria
reconsidered’, APAO, 1978, 12: 202–25, esp. p. 220; for revised figures see J. Critchett, A
Distant Field of Murder: Western District frontiers 1834–1848, MUP, 1990, pp. 68–85, esp. pp.
74–5.
18 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 970–5, 1971 supplement to Friendly Mission, map 4 and pp. 21–
2; Jones, ‘Tasmanian tribes’, in Tindale, pp. 323–30, map on p. 327; Jones, ‘The demography of
hunters’, in Mulvaney and Golson, Aboriginal Man, pp. 280–5.
19 Duclesmeur quoted in Dyer, French Explorers, p. 2; Windschuttle, K., The Fabrication of
Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, Macleay Press, Sydney, 2002,
 pp. 364–72, quote is on p. 371.
20 Jones, R., ‘Hunting forbears’, in M. Roe (ed.), The Flow of Culture: Tasmanian studies, AAH,
1987, pp. 14–49, esp. pp. 28–9.
21 Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 85.
22 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 113, 225, 526; Robinson to Colonial Secretary (6 August 1831),
Colonial Secretary’s Office 1/318.
23 Physical anthropologist Colin Pardoe has argued for a much higher population because of the
lack of physical differences between Tasmanians and mainlanders, but this cannot be quantified
and has not been substantiated: Pardoe, C., ‘Isolation and evolution in Tasmania’, Current
Anthropology, 1991, 31: 1–21.
24 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 57, 742.
25 Dyer, French Explorers, p. 154; Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 280.
26 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 187.
27 Ibid., p. 529.
28 Ibid., p. 83.
29 Ibid., pp. 560, 888.
30 Flood, J., Rock Art of the Dreamtime, A&R, 1997, pp. 223–39; re. circles see Plomley, Friendly
Mission, p. 581–2 note 69; re. west coast engravings see ibid., p. 915, note 49; re. post-contact
art see S. Brown, ‘Art and Tasmanian prehistory: Evidence for changing cultural traditions in a
changing environment’, in P. Bahn and A. Rosenfeld (eds), Rock Art and Prehistory, Oxbow
Monograph 10, Oxbow Books, Oxford, 1991, pp. 96–119; Aboriginal Heritage of the Tasmanian
Wilderness World Heritage Area 2017, <www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au>.
31 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 373–7.
32 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 373; Maddock, K. ‘Myths of the acquisition of fire in northern and
eastern Australia’, in R.M. Berndt (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, UWA Press, 1970,
p. 177.
33 Flood, J. [1990], The Riches of Ancient Australia, UQP, 1999, pp. 331–4, 358.
34 Labillardière quoted in Plomley, The General, p. 293; re. violin ibid., p. 281; David, B.,
Landscapes, Rock-Art and the Dreaming: An archaeology of preunderstanding, Leicester
University Press, London, 2003, pp. 13–110.
35 Anderson, W. in Cook, Journals, vol. III, pp. 54–6.
36 McGregor, R., Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and doomed race theory, 1880–1939,
MUP, 1997.
37 Chappell’s most recent estimate of when Tasmania was isolated from the mainland is 14,000
years: Lambeck, K., and Chappell, J., ‘Sea level change through the last glacial cycle’, Science,
2001, 292: 679–86.
38 Tip-damage on bone points is ‘consistent with damaged spears being repaired at these sites and
with tips being returned to them inside game carcasses’: Webb, C., and Allen, J., ‘A functional
analysis of Pleistocene bone tools from two sites in southwest Tasmania’, AO, 1990, 25: 75–8.
39 Flood, Archaeology, pp. 205–8, 133; Jones, ‘The Tasmanian paradox’, in Wright, Stone Tools, p.
194.
40 Colley, S., and Jones, R., ‘New fish bone data from Rocky Cape, northwest Tasmania’, AO,
1987, 22(2): 67–71.
41 Allen, H., ‘Left out in the cold: Why the Tasmanians stopped eating fish’, Artefact, 1979, 4: 1–
10; Horton, D., The Pure State of Nature: Sacred cows, destructive myths and the environment,
A&U, 2000, pp. 39–52; Lourandos, H., Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New perspectives in
Australian prehistory, CUP, 1997, pp. 274–7.
42 Jones, R., ‘Why did the Tasmanians stop eating fish?’ in R. Gould (ed.) Explorations in
ethnoarchaeology, University of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1978, pp. 11–47 (p. 41 re.
Arnhem Land); re. using fish as threat see Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 653.
43 <www.fishingcairns.com.au>; Colley and Jones, ‘New fish bone data’. To avoid being poisoned,
stick to safe fish such as mullet, whiting, bream and flathead, never eat or handle red bass,
chinaman-fish, paddle-tail or Moray eels and do not eat any fish if your hands sting or feel numb
after cleaning it!
44 Ferguson, W.C., ‘Mokaré’s domain’, in D.J. Mulvaney and J.P. White (eds), Australians: A
historical library, Australians to 1788, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, Sydney, 1987, pp. 120–45, esp.
p. 124; Anderson, D.M., ‘Red tides’, Sci. Am., 1994, 271(2): 52–9.
45 Isaacs, J. (ed.), Australian Dreaming: 40,000 years of Aboriginal history, Lansdowne Press,
Sydney, 1980; Dixon, R.M.W., The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland, CUP, 1972; Flood,
Riches, p. 128. The volcanic lakes are Lakes Eacham, Barrine and Euramoo.
46 Flinders, M., A Voyage to Terra Australis (21 March 1802), 1814, p. 169.
47 Jones, ‘The Tasmanian paradox’, in Wright, Stone Tools, pp. 202–3; re. climate see Lourandos,
Continent of Hunter-Gatherers, pp. 265–81.
48 Jones, R., ‘Tasmanian Aborigines and dogs’, Mankind, 1970, 7(4): 256–71.
49 Backhouse, J., A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, Hamilton Adams, London,
1843, p. 58.
50 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 264, 487, 647–52.
51 Hobart Town Courier, 14 January 1832, p. 2.
52 Plomley, Baudin Expedition, p. 127.
53 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 296–7.
54 Ibid., p. 82.
55 Bowden, K.M., Captain James Kelly of Hobart Town, MUP, 1964, pp. 35–44.
56 Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp. 13, 22.
57 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 357; Bartolomé de las Casas [1542] (ed. A. Pagden), A Short
Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Penguin, London, 1992 (this book became well known
in Britain after 1583, when it was translated into English). My discussion of atrocities in
Tasmania is based on Windschuttle’s re-examination of Robinson and other sources:
Windschuttle, Fabrication, pp. 29–60, 379–86.
58 Details in Windschuttle, Fabrication, pp. 32–40.
59 Ryan, L., Colonial Frontier Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788–1930, University
of Newcastle, <https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/>.
60 Péron, F. [1802], Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes, ch. 12, quoted in translation in
Plomley, Baudin Expedition, pp. 32, 37; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 187, 529, 560, 888, 966;
Jeffreys, C., Van Diemen’s Land: Geographical and descriptive delineation of the island of Van
Diemen’s Land, London, 1820, pp. 118–19.
61 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 652–3.
62 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 71. Cape Barren Island was returned to Aborigines in 2005.
63 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 175–6; Baudin, N. [1802], The Journal of Post Captain
Nicolas Baudin (trans. C. Cornell), Libraries Board of SA, Adelaide, 1974, p. 345; Calder, J.E.,
Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, etc. of the Native Tribes of Tasmania, Hobart,
1875.
64 West, J. [1852] (ed. A.G.L. Shaw), The History of Tasmania, A&R, 1971, p. 262, quoted in
Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 75.
65 Minutes of evidence taken before the Committee for the Affairs of Aborigines, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 1830, vol. 4, pp. 53, 209, 223, 225; Windschuttle,
Fabrication, pp. 16–28; Tardif, P., ‘Risdon Cove’, in R. Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith
Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Schwartz, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 218–24.
66 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 75; Reynolds, H., Fate of a Free People: A radical
reexamination of the Tasmanian Wars, Penguin, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 76–7; ‘Copies of all
correspondence … on the subject of the military operations … against the Aboriginal inhabitants
 of Van Diemen’s Land’, Military Operations, Parliamentary Papers, Great Britain, 1831, vol.
19, no. 259, pp. 47–55; Walker, J.B., Early Tasmania, Government Printer, Hobart, 1902, pp. 48–
52; Crowther, W.E.L., ‘The passing of the Aboriginal race’, Medical Journal of Australia, 1934,
vol. 1: 147–60; Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, pp. 32–6.
67 McGowan, A., Archaeological Investigations at Risdon Cove Historic Site 1978–1980, NPWS,
Hobart, 1985, pp. 35, 69; Contos, N., Pinjarra Massacre Site Research and Development
Project, Murray Districts Aboriginal Association, Pinjarra, WA, 1998.
68 Elder, B., Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since
1788, New Holland, Sydney, 1988, pp. 31–3.
69 Tardif in Manne, Whitewash, p. 222.
70 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 45, 47; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 81, 508, 510, 891;
Windschuttle, Fabrication, p. 78.
71 Hiatt, B., ‘The food quest and the economy of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, Oceania, 1968–9, 38:
99–133 and 190–219.
72 Twenty-six Aboriginal children were baptised (i.e. their existence in settlers’ homes was
registered) between 1809 and 1819: HRA, series I, vol. III, p. 510; Windschuttle, Fabrication, p.
56.
73 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 78–9; Windschuttle, Fabrication, p. 56.
74 Calder, J.E. (ed.), The Circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land in 1815 by James Kelly and in
1824 by James Hobbs, Hobart, 1984, pp. 21–34.
75 Only 3.1 per cent of the land had been formally granted; the rest was occupied by leaseholders
holding tickets of occupation or by ex-convicts and others illegally: Ryan, Aboriginal
Tasmanians, pp. 79, 87–8, 90; Boyce, J., ‘Fantasy Island’, in Manne, Whitewash, pp. 17–80.
76 Plomley, N.J.B. (ed.), Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, Blubber
Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p. 63.
77 The quote is from the Colonial Times, 3 September 1830.
78 Windschuttle, Fabrication, p. 129; William Darling (commandant of Aboriginal exiles in Bass
Strait 1832–34) to Governor Arthur (4 May 1832), ML, ms A2188; Reynolds, Fate of a Free
People, p. 32.
79 Broome, R., ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal–European warfare, 1770–1930’, in M.
McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two centuries of warfare, Canberra, 1988, pp. 97–9;
Connor, J., The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838, UNSW Press, 2002, pp. 18–19.
80 Robinson Report (30 April 1838), Robinson Papers, ML, ms A7044.
81 Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 219; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 186, 837;
Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 49; Clark, Aboriginal People, p. 46; Ryan, Aboriginal
Tasmanians, pp. 150–1.
82 Arthur to Murray (12 September 1829), HRA, series I, vol. XIV, p. 446, quoted in Reynolds,
Fate of a Free People, p. 66; Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 552.
83 Calder, Some Account, p. 7; Jorgenson to Burnett (24 February 1830), Colonial Secretary’s
Office 1/320, p. 375, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 36–7.
84 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 175–6, 181, 182–3, 231–2, quote is on p. 183; for detailed
reexamination of the Cape Grim massacre see Windschuttle, Fabrication, pp. 249–69 and Ian
McFarlane, ‘Cape Grim’, in Manne, Whitewash, pp. 277–98, esp. p. 289.
85 McFarlane, in Manne, Whitewash; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 577–8, 700 note 159, 927, 936
notes 2 and 4, 937 notes 5 and 7.
86 Arthur to Goderich (10 January 1828), quoted in C. Turnbull, Black War: The extermination of
the Tasmanian Aborigines, Melbourne, 1948, p. 83.
87 Military Operations (1831), p. 4; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 92–4.
88 Anstey to Burnett (4 December 1827), Colonial Secretary’s Office I/320, quoted in Reynolds,
Fate of a Free People, p. 123.
 89 Military Operations (1831), pp. 4–7, 24–5, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 105–
7.
90 Military Operations (1831), p. 11, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 108; the
definition of martial law is from the Macquarie Dictionary.
91 Executive Council (27 August 1830), p. 570, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 117–
92.
92 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 277.
93 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 77.
94 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 174.
95 Willis, H.A., ‘A tally of those killed during the fighting between Aborigines and Settlers in Van
Diemen’s Land 1803–34’, 2002, <www.historians.org.au/>; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp.
81–2; Windschuttle, Fabrication, pp. 86–7, 361–4.
96 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 52, re. motto p. 816 note 147; Robinson Papers, vol. 40, ML, mss.
A7061, A7042, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 132–3.
97 Calder, in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 142.
98 Curr to Lee-Archer (27 July 1841), Governor’s Office 1/45, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free
People, p. 44, and see Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 197–9.
99 Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp. 938–42, 946–47; Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal
Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1970, p. 52.
100 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 182–203; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 159–89; Board
of Inquiry (March 1839), report, Colonial Secretary’s Office 5/180/4240.
101 Hughes, R., The Fatal Shore: A history of the transportation of convicts to Australia, 1787–
1868, Harvill Press, London, 1986, pp. 83, 423; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 185; Plomley,
Weep in Silence, pp. 224, 262, 281.
102 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 191; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 165–6.
103 Ibid., pp. 169–74.
104 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 79, 124; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 142.
105 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 175–6; Plomley, Baudin Expedition, pp. 201, 204 (the French
word translated as ‘yaws’ is pian, meaning Mediterranean yaws or framboesia); Plomley, Weep
in Silence, pp. 943, 945; Webb, S., Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians: Health and
disease across a hunter-gatherer continent, CUP, 1995, pp. 138, 143–4; Meyer, C. et al.,
‘Syphilis 2001—A palaeopathological reappraisal’, Homo, 2002, 53(1): 39–58.
106 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 77, 132: ‘Loathsome disorder’ was the euphemism used by
Robinson and his contemporaries for venereal disease but in the Bruny Island Mission journal
his clerk, Sterling, called it venereal disease.
107 Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp. 937–47; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 193; Journal of George
Robinson, jr., Robinson Papers (28 March 1839), vol. 50, ML A7071. Robinson left Tasmania in
1839 to become Protector of Aborigines in New South Wales, based in Melbourne.
108 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 534, 556–7.
109 Arthur to Spring-Rice (27 January 1835), Select Committee on Native People, British
Parliamentary Papers, vol. 7, no. 425, p. 126, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 122.
110 Military Operations (1831), pp. 82, 84, 79, 111; Flannery, T., The Explorers, Text, Melbourne,
1998, pp. 163–70.
111 Flannery, T., The Explorers, Text, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 163–170.
112 The treaty is displayed in NMA, Canberra. The treaty text is in G. Dawson [1881], Australian
Aborigines, George Robertson, Melbourne (facsimile by ASP), 1981, pp. 111–12; Barwick, D.,
‘Mapping the past: An atlas of Victorian clans 1835–1904, AH, 1984, 8: 100–31, quote is on p.
107; Reynolds, H. [1987], Law of the Land, Penguin, London 1992, pp. 125–8.
113 Morgan, J. [1852], The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, ANU Press, 1980, pp. 33, 119–
20; Flannery, T. (ed.), The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Text, Melbourne, 2002;
 Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp. 408, 410.

Box 5—Fire-making (pp. 76–7)

a Gott, B., ‘Fire-making in Tasmania: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, Current
Anthropology, 2002, 43(4): 650–6; Plomley, N.J.B., The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian
Aborigines, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1983, pp. 188, 201–2; Volger, G., ‘Making fire by
percussion in Tasmania’, Oceania, 1973, 44: 58–63; Plomley, The General, pp. 270–3;
Labillardière, J.J.H. de (ed. J. Stockdale), An Account of a Voyage in Search of La Perouse,
Debrett, London, 1800, vol. I, p. 177; Furneaux quoted in G.W. Anderson, A New, Authentic and
Complete Collection … of Captain Cook’s First, Second, Third and Last Voyages, London, 1784,
p. 131; Cox, J., in G. Mortimer, Observations and Remarks Made During a Voyage to … Maria’s
Island … , London, 1791, p. 17; William Bligh in R.W. Giblin, The Early History of Tasmania:
The Geographical Era 1642–1804, London, 1928, p. 93.
b Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 113.
c Ibid., pp. 399, 567, 837; Bonwick, J., Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, Sampson, Low,
Son & Marston, London, 1870, p. 205.
d Banks, vol. II, pp. 123–37.
e Mountford, C.P. and Berndt, R.M., ‘Making fire by percussion in Australia’, Oceania, 1941,
XI(4): 342–4; Calley, M., ‘Fire-making by percussion on the east coast of Australia’, Mankind,
1957, 5(4): 168–71; Volger, ‘Making fire’, p. 61.

Box 6—Grave-robbing (pp. 112–13)

a Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 214–17, 220; Petrow, S., ‘The last man: The mutilation of
William Lanney in 1869 and its aftermath’, AH, 1997, 21: 90–112.

CHAPTER 4—DEPOPULATION
1 Worgan, G.B. [1788], Journal of a First Fleet Surgeon, Library of Australian History, Sydney,
1978, p. 10.
2 Blaxland, G., A Journal of a Tour of Discovery across the Blue Mountains in New South Wales,
London, 1823; Richards, J.S. (ed.), Blaxland–Lawson–Wentworth, Blubber Head Press, Hobart,
1979, quoted in T. Flannery (ed.), The Explorers, Text, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 111–15; Perry,
T.M., Australia’s First Frontier, Melbourne, 1963; Stockton, E., Blue Mountains Dreaming: The
Aboriginal heritage, Three Sisters Publications, Winmalee, 1993, pp. 118–19.
3 Macquarie, L. Journal, quoted in B. Elder [1988], Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and
maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788, New Holland, Sydney, 1998, pp. 51–2; Read,
P., A Hundred Years War, ANU Press, 1994, pp. 2–3; Tindale, N.B., Aboriginal Tribes of
Australia, UCP, 1974, p. 201; Pearson, M., ‘Bathurst Plains and beyond: European colonisation
and Aboriginal resistance’, AH, 1984, 8: 63–79.
4 Robinson, G.A., to La Trobe (30 December 1843), ‘Aborigines (Australian Colonies), Return to
an Address’, British Parliamentary Papers, 1844, vol. 34, p. 282.
5 McMillan, A. [1898], in T.F. Bride (ed.), Letters from Victorian Pioneers, Heinemann,
Melbourne, 1969, p. 204.
6 Elder, Blood on the Wattle, pp. 49–63; Clayton, I., and Barlow, A., Wiradjuri of the Rivers and
Plains, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 51–62; Read, A Hundred Years War, pp. 5–11.
7 Grassby, A., and Hill, M., Six Australian Battlefields, A&R, 1988, pp. 134–68; Elder, Blood on
the Wattle, p. 59; Sydney Gazette, 29 July, 12 August 1824.
8 Governor’s Proclamation (14 August 1824), HRA, series I, vol. XI, p. 410; Coe, M.,
Windradyne: A Wiradjuri koorie, Blackbooks, Sydney, 1986, p. 53.
 9 Connor, J., The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838, UNSW Press, 2002, pp. 53–62; letter
Brisbane to Bathurst (31 December 1824), HRA, series I, vol. XI, p. 431.
10 Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 59–61; Sydney Gazette, 16 September, 14 October, 25
November, 30 December 1824; Australian, 30 December 1824; letter Brisbane to Bathurst (31
December 1824); Governor’s Proclamation (11 December 1824), HRA, series I, vol. XI, pp. 431–
2.
11 Sydney Gazette, 30 September 1824; Coe, Windradyne, pp. 56–7.
12 By 1981, historian Michael Pearson had completed his PhD on European colonisation and
Aboriginal resistance in the Bathurst region, and found no evidence of these three alleged
massacres: Pearson, M., ‘Seen through different eyes: Changing land-use and settlement patterns
in the upper Macquarie River’, PhD thesis, ANU, 1981; Pearson, M., ‘Bathurst Plains and
beyond: European colonisation and Aboriginal resistance’, AH, 1984, 8: 75; Windschuttle, K.,
‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian history, Parts I–III’, Quadrant, 2000, 44: 8–21,
17–24, 6–20.
13 Re. Threlkeld’s alleged massacre, see N. Gunson (ed.), Australian Reminiscences and Papers of
L.E. Threlkeld, Missionary to the Aborigines, 1824–1859, AIAS, 1974, 1, p. 49.
14 Suttor, W.H., Australian Stories Retold, Glyndwr Whalan, Bathurst, 1887.
15 Gresser’s local history, The Aborigines of the Bathurst District, was serialised in the Bathurst
Times in 1962. Under the headline ‘Massacre’ Gresser wrote, ‘An old resident … told me years
ago that “hundreds of blacks” had been rounded up and shot at Bells Falls … Probably, if not
undoubtedly, some were shot there, but in the course of time the number would become greatly
exaggerated.’ This vague tradition did not feature in any of William Suttor Senior’s stories as he
guided G.C. Mundy, who published stories about the Sofala area in 1853, i.e. this ‘local
tradition’ was unknown to the leading local family. Gresser’s annotated copy of his manuscript
reveals he later decided all Aborigines escaped the soldiers in 1824. This retraction was omitted
in the 1971 book, Windradyne of the Wiradjuri: Martial law at Bathurst in 1824 published by
Wentworth Books, Sydney, under the names of T. Salisbury and P.J. Gresser, although Gresser
had died in 1969. All subsequent versions of the Bells Falls massacre are based on Gresser’s
1962 story, e.g. Mary Coe, Windradyne. See D.A. Roberts, ‘Bells Falls massacre and Bathurst’s
history of violence: Local tradition and Australian historiography’, Australian Historical Studies,
1995, pp. 615–33; Roberts, D.A., ‘The Bells Falls massacre and oral tradition’, in B. Attwood
and S.G. Foster (eds.), Frontier Conflict: The Australian experience, NMA, 2003, pp. 150–7.
16 Windschuttle, K., ‘How not to run a museum’, Quadrant, 2001, 45(379): 11–19; Davison, G.,
‘Conflict in the museum’, in Frontier Conflict, 2003, pp. 201–14.
17 Read, A Hundred Years War, p. 11; Grassby and Hill, Six Australian Battlefields, p. 167.
18 Ibid., p. 146.
19 Wills Cooke, T.S., The Currency Lad: A biography of Horatio Spencer Howe Wills 1811–1861,
T.S. Wills Cooke, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 42–54; Wilson, G., Murray of Yarralumla, OUP, 1968;
Durack, M., Kings in Grass Castles, Constable, London, 1959; Durack, M., Sons in the Saddle,
Constable, London, 1983, pp. 50, 84, 137, 192–3; Gunn, Mrs Aeneas, We of the Never-Never,
Hutchinson, London, 1907.
20 Governor King to Earl Camden (30 April 1805) in HRA, series I, vol. V, pp. 306–7.
21 Pike, D.H., ‘The Diary of James Coutts Crawford: Extracts on Aborigines and Adelaide 1839
and 1841’, South Australiana, 1965, 4(1): 4.
22 Broome, R., ‘Aboriginal victims and voyagers: Confronting frontier myths’, JAS, 1994, 42: 70–
7; any incident involving a convict had to be reported, for instance.
23 Broome, R., Aboriginal Victorians: A history since 1800, A&U, 2005, pp. xxiv, 80–1; Broome,
R., ‘The statistics of frontier conflict’, in Frontier Conflict, pp. 88–98, esp. pp. 90–7; Clark, I.,
Scars in the Landscape: A register of massacre sites in Western Victoria 1803–1859, ASP, 1995.
24 Meyrick, H.H., Letters, H15789–15816, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria,
Melbourne, 1846; Pepper, P., and De Araugo, T., The Kurnai of Gippsland, Hyland House,
Melbourne, 1985, pp. 58–9; Morgan, P., ‘Gippsland settlers and the Kurnai dead’, Quadrant,
2004, 410: 26–8.
25 Curr, E.M. [1883] (ed. H. Foster), Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Robertson, Melbourne,
1965, p. 106 (son of the E. Curr mentioned in ch. 4); Bride, Letters, pp. 132, 187.
26 Flood, J., The Moth Hunters: Aboriginal prehistory of the Australian Alps, AIAS, Canberra,
1980.
27 Reynolds, H. [1981], The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 121–5.
28 Green, N., Broken Spears: Aborigines and Europeans in the southwest of Australia, Focus
Education, Perth, 1984, Appendix 1.
29 Lang, G.S., The Aborigines of Australia, 1865, Melbourne, pp. 41–2.
30 Blainey, G., ‘Drawing up the balance sheet of our history’, Quadrant, 1993, 37(7–8): 11, 15.
31 Knightley, P., Australia: Biography of a Nation, Jonathan Cape, London, 2000.
32 Roberts, A.J., Frontier Justice: A history of the Gulf country to 1900, UQP, 2005, pp. 65–7, 235,
230–44.
33 Green, N., ‘Windschuttle’s debut’, in R. Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s
Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Schwartz, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 187–98; Connor, The
Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 76–83.
34 HRA, series I, vol. XX, p. 440; Milliss, R., Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of
1838, George Gipps and the British conquest of New South Wales, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood,
1992; Ryan, L., ‘Waterloo Creek, northern New South Wales, 1838’, in Frontier Conflict, pp.
33–43; Elder, Blood on the Wattle, pp. 74–82; Windschuttle, K., ‘The myths of frontier
massacres in Australian history, Part I’, Quadrant, 2000, 44(10): 8–21; Connor, The Australian
Frontier Wars, pp. 102–22.
35 Elder, Blood on the Wattle, pp. 83–94; Milliss, Waterloo Creek, p. 66.
36 Reid, G., A Nest of Hornets, OUP, 1982; Elder, Blood on the Wattle, pp. 135–48; Wood, J.D. (10
April 1862), remarks on the Aborigines, letter to Queensland Colonial Secretary, 1118 of 1862,
Qld State Archives, quoted in Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 81–2.
37 Elder, Blood on the Wattle, pp. 149–58; Mulvaney, D.J., Encounters in Place: Outsiders and
Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985, UQP, 1989, pp. 95–104.
38 Green, N., The Forrest River Massacres, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle, 1995, but see R.
Moran, Massacre Myth: An investigation into allegations concerning the mass murder of
Aborigines at Forrest River, 1926, Access Press, Bassendean, WA, 1999, pp. 17–18, 18–20, 23;
re. Royal Commission see SMH, 9 December 1926, 16, 19, 23, 24 and 26 March 1927.
39 Moran, Massacre Myth, pp. 186–202; Elder, Blood on the Wattle, pp. 168–76; Rowley, C.D., The
Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1970, pp. 200–2; Reynolds, H., This
Whispering in Our Hearts, A&U, 1998, pp. 191–200; Knightley, Australia: Biography of a
Nation; Shaw, B., My Country of the Pelican Dreaming, AIAS, 1981.
40 Moran, R., Sex, Maiming and Murder: Seven case studies into the reliability of Reverend E.R.B.
Gribble, Superintendent, Forrest River Mission 1913–1928, as a witness to the truth, Access
Press, Bassendean, WA, 2002, p. xiii.
41 Moran, Massacre Myth, pp. 45–7, 192, 201.
42 All Aboriginal stories about the massacre conflict with proven facts, e.g. Frank Chulung claimed
his father found a ‘massacre site’, but Gribble’s search party recorded in the Mission journal, ‘no
traces of natives having been shot’: Moran, Massacre Myth, pp. 227–8, 232–8.
43 Moran, Massacre Myth, pp. 121–4, 200, re. firewood pp. 108–12, 190; Moran, Sex, Maiming and
Murder, pp. 111–31.
44 Green, N., ‘The evidence for the Forrest River Massacres’, Quadrant, 2003, 398: 39–43, but see
R. Moran, ‘Grasping at the straws of “evidence”’, Quadrant, 2003, 401: 20–4. Websites are full
 of massacre stories, but when compared with written records, most are found to be untrue or
implausible. For example, in 2001 the Governor-General attended a remembering ceremony for
Mistake Creek massacre victims in the Kimberley. No whites were involved in the massacre,
which was an entirely Aboriginal affair. In 1915, two Aborigines (Joe Wynn and Nipper
Carogbiddy) stole rifles from their white boss, Mick Rhatigan. They then found and shot another
Aboriginal man, Hopples (who had stolen Wynn’s wife) and seven other Aborigines, including
two children. The three women in the group were forced to collect fuel to burn the corpses
before being killed. Others survived but Wynn was shot trying to escape and Carogbiddy
surrendered. Eyewitnesses all testified that Mick Rhatigan was not involved. Carogbiddy was
charged but he could not be prosecuted as the witnesses escaped from Wyndham gaol. The event
was well-documented in a contemporary 84-page official report, and writer Ion Idriess, in his
book Tracks of Destiny, published by Angus & Robertson in 1961, gave a factually correct
account based on statements taken in 1915. Another supposed massacre by poisoning at Bedford
Downs station was portrayed in a play Fire, Fire Burning Bright, but there is no evidence or
even hearsay that it took place: Clement, C., ‘Mistake Creek’, in Manne, Whitewash, pp. 199–
214; Moran, R., ‘Was there a massacre at Bedford Downs?’ Quadrant, 2002, 391: 48–51.
45 Cribbin, J., The Killing Times: The Coniston Massacre, Fontana, Sydney (and film of the same
name), 1984, pp. 42, 91, 163–4.
46 Moran, R., ‘Paradigm of the postmodern museum’, Quadrant, 2002, XLVI(383): 43–9; Moran,
R., ‘Millennia-old oral culture puts down written roots’, West Australian, 2 April 1994.
47 Attwood, quoted by A. Stevenson, ‘Trio’s role a turn-up for history books’, SMH, 17 December
2001.
48 Rose, D.B., ‘Oral histories and knowledge’, in Attwood and Foster, Frontier Conflict, pp. 120–
31.
49 Reynolds, H., Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian experience, Cassell Australia, Melbourne,
1972, ch. 5; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 91–2.
50 Kimber, R., ‘The end of the bad old days: European settlement in central Australia 1871–1894’,
State Library of NT, Occasional Papers, vol. 25, 1991, p. 16; Kimber, R., ‘Smallpox in Central
Australia: Evidence for epidemics and postulations about the impact’, AA, 1988, 27: 6;
Reynolds, H., An Indelible Stain? The question of genocide in Australia’s history, Viking,
Melbourne, 2001, p. 134.
51 Broome, R. [1982], Aboriginal Australians: Black responses to white dominance, A&U, 2001, p.
64; Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, pp. 86–7.
52 Flannery, T. (ed.), The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Text, Melbourne, 2002, pp. xi,
xii, 189–200. Some historians blame Aboriginal violence on the disruption of traditional society
caused by the 1789 smallpox epidemic. Pockmarked survivors were seen at Port Phillip Bay in
1803 but the Wathaurong were not affected. Buckley had suffered smallpox himself in England
but commented that in Australia, ‘I never observed any European contagious disease prevalent,
in the least degree … There was at one time, however, I now recollect, a complaint which spread
through the country, occasioning the loss of many lives, attacking generally the healthiest and
strongest … It was a dreadful swelling of the feet, so that they were unable to move about, being
also afflicted with ulcers of a very painful kind’: Morgan, J. [1852], The Life and Adventures of
William Buckley, ANU Press, 1980, pp. 94–5. This sounds like hearsay about the aftermath of
smallpox among distant groups and it seems clear that none of Buckley’s own group had been
afflicted.
53 Morgan, Buckley, pp. 49–51, 68–9, 74, 75, 76, 81.
54 Ibid., pp. 81–3; re. betrothal pp. 72–3.
55 Warner, W.L. [1937], A Black Civilization: A social study of an Australian tribe, Harper and
Row, London, 1958, pp. 148, 155, 159, 163; Blainey, G., Triumph of the Nomads, Macmillan,
Sydney, 1975, pp. 108–11.
56 Berndt, R.M. and C.H. [1964], The World of the First Australians, ASP, 1988, pp. 153–4;
Howitt, A.W. [1904], The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, Macmillan, London, 1996, and
ASP, pp. 748–50.
57 Cowlishaw, G., ‘Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia’, Oceania, 1978, XLVIII(4): 262–83, esp.
264–7.
58 Re. infanticide, see Collins, vol. I, p. 504.
59 Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads, pp. 95–100; Hilliard, W.M., The People in Between: The
Pitjantjatjara People of Ernabella, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1968, p. 237; Curr,
Recollections, p. 116.
60 Bates, D., The Passing of the Aborigines, Murray, London, 1937, pp. 192–3 (this book is
reasonably reliable on infanticide, but not on cannibalism); Hall, R., ‘Fantasies in the desert: The
unhappy life of Daisy Bates’, in Hall, R., Black Armband Days, Random House, Sydney, 1998,
pp. 147–70.
61 Rose, F.G.G., Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines, A&R, 1987, pp. 38,
194–5, 217. Malnutrition adversely affects women’s fertility, as shown by studies in Bangladesh
and of Kung bushwomen in Africa. Well-nourished women have shorter birth-spacing and suffer
fewer miscarriages and stillbirths than poorly nourished ones. Among the malnourished,
menarche (onset of menstruation) is later and amenorrhea (cessation of menstrual cycle) more
frequent. Amenorrhea through starvation is well-documented. It also often occurs when women
are very active, for example, ballet dancers, runners and Himalayan mountaineers. Among
hunter-gatherers, women’s collecting was inevitably strenuous and amenorrhea common, leading
to greater spacing between births. Frequent and prolonged suckling of a child prevented
ovulation for a long period among IKung and nomadic Australian Aboriginal women: Scott,
E.C., and Johnston, F.E., ‘Science, nutrition, fat, and policy: Tests of the critical-fat hypothesis’,
Current Anthropology, 1985, 26(4): 463–73.
62 Abbie, A.A., The Original Australians, Reed, Sydney, 1969, p. 95.
63 Marks of childhood suffering from famine or disease are visible on X-rays of leg-bones as
‘Harris lines’, dense lines of bone laid down when growth temporarily ceases. Since the bones
continue to grow from each end, these ‘growth arrest’ lines are left behind and last well into
adulthood. The most logical reason for formation of multiple Harris lines, according to Webb,
lies in annual ‘nutritional deprivation, or a regime of feast and famine’. The other main
indicators, anaemia and dental enamel hypoplasia, suggest a longer episode of stress: Webb, S.,
Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians: Health and disease across a hunter-gatherer
continent, CUP, 1995, pp. 279–80.
64 Webb, Palaeopathology, pp. 278–81; Williams, E., Complex Hunter-Gatherers: A late Holocene
example from temperate Australia, S423, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 1988.
65 Webb, Palaeopathology, pp. 188–216.
66 Ibid., pp. 161–87.
67 Tench (ed. Flannery), pp. 103–4.
68 Fenner, F. et al., Smallpox and its Eradication, WHO, Geneva, 1988, pp. 115–16, 209–44, 253–
2; Campbell, J., Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and other diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780–
1880, MUP, 2002.
69 Fowell in Butler, The Myth of Terra Nullius, p. 113; King, in Hunter, p. 270; Hunter, p. 272;
Collins, vol. I, p. 53.
70 Marriott, E.W., The Memoirs of Obed West: A portrait of early Sydney, Barcom Press, Bowral,
1988. The ‘large overhanging rock’ forming a cave ‘about 200 yards back from the beach’ is at
Long Bay.
71 Bradley, A Voyage, p. 118. Lapérouse stopped in Canton from 1 January to 5 February 1787 and
took on Chinese sailors there, but smallpox could not have survived on board for 12 months
before reaching Australia.
72 Butlin, N.G., Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal populations of southeastern Australia 1788–
1850, A&U, 1983, pp. 21, 22, 63–70, 175; Butlin, N., ‘Macassans and Aboriginal smallpox: the
“1789” and “1829” epidemics’, Historical Studies, 1985, 21(84): 315–35; Stearn and Stearn, The
Effect of Smallpox, pp. 44–5 et passim.
73 Frost, A., Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s convict beginnings, MUP, 1995, pp. 190–
210; Wilson, C., ‘History, hypothesis and fiction’, Quadrant, 1985, 29(3): 26–32; Wilson, C.,
Australia: The creation of a nation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1987, pp. 75–84; Day, D.
[1996], Claiming a Continent: A new history of Australia, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2001, p. 43;
Reynolds, H., An Indelible Stain? The question of genocide in Australia’s history, Viking,
Melbourne, 2001, p. 36.
74 Smallpox was not finally eradicated until 1977. Experiments in Bangladesh showed smallpox
scabs were adversely affected by high temperatures and humidity, and even at only 26°C and 10
per cent relative humidity, the virus was inactivated after 12 weeks. Similarly, Fenner attested in
his 1988 WHO publication that in Afghanistan, where variolation was still practised in the
1970s, even when smallpox virus was kept in jars in cool caves, ‘most variolators stated that it
was necessary to obtain new material each year’. Both temperatures and humidity are high in
summer in Sydney. Hunter and Dawes kept records for 1788: maximum temperatures in the open
air were 34°C in October, 39°C in November and 44°C in December. Surgeon Arthur Bowes
said that on 20 February 1788 ‘in the hospital tent the temperature was up to 105 degrees [F]’
(40°C). This is 15°C hotter than maximum outside temperature recorded for that month. On the
voyage out, cabin temperatures were sometimes high enough to melt pitch sealing the timbers;
Fenner, F.,personal communication, 2001.
75 Fenner, Smallpox, pp. 115–16, 192, 480, 682–3.
76 Stirling, E.C., ‘Preliminary report on the discovery of native remains with an enquiry into a
pandemic among Australian Aboriginals’, Trans. and Proc. Roy. Soc. SA, 1911, 35: 4–46;
Cleland, J.B. [1911], ‘Some diseases peculiar to, or of interest in, Australia’, in Cumpston,
J.H.L., The History of Smallpox in Australia, 1788–1900, C. of A, Melbourne, 1914, pp. 163–70;
re. Dr Mair, pp. 150–4; re. Clark, pp. 151–2; Cleland, J.B., ‘Ecology, environment and diseases’,
in B.C. Cotton (ed.), Aboriginal Man in South and Central Australia, Govt. Printer, Adelaide,
1966, pp. 111–58, esp. pp. 155–6.
77 Butlin, N.H., Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal populations of southeastern Australia 1788–
1850, A&U, 1983, pp. 34–5; Fenner, F. et al., Smallpox and its Eradication, WHO, Geneva,
1988, pp. 194, 480; Campbell, J., ‘Smallpox in Aboriginal Australia, 1829–31’, Historical
Studies, 1983, 20(81): 536–56; Sturt, C. [1833] (ed. L. Hiddins), Two Expeditions into the
Interior of South Australia, Corkwood Press, Adelaide, 1999, pp. 58, 65.
78 Campbell, J., and Frost, A., ‘Aboriginal smallpox: the 1789 and 1829 epidemics’, Historical
Studies, 1985, 21(84); Campbell, Invisible Invaders, passim; Macknight, C.C., personal
communication, 2005.
79 Flinders, A Voyage to Terra Australis, pp. 228–33; Brown, R. [1803], Journal, quoted in C.C.
Macknight, ‘Macassans and Aborigines’, Oceania, 1972, 42: 292.
80 Foelsche, P., ‘Notes on the Aborigines of North Australia’, Trans. & Proc. Roy. Soc. SA, 1881–
82, 5: 8.
81 Flood, Moth Hunters; Mackaness, G. (ed.), George Augustus Robinson’s Journey into South-
Eastern Australia, 1844, Australian Historical Monographs, XIX, Review Publications, Dubbo,
1978.
82 Teichelmann, C.G., and Schurmann, C.W. [1840], Outlines of a Grammar, Vocabulary and
Phraseology of the Aboriginal Language of South Australia … (facsimile edn), Tjintu Books,
Largs Bay, 1982.
83 Rose, D.B., Hidden Histories: Black stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and
Wave Hill Stations, ASP, 1991, pp. 5, 75–8, 113–18.
84 Ibid., p. 75.
85 Diamond, J., Guns, Germs, and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13 000 years,
Chatto & Windus, London, 1997, pp. 21, 197–205; Moorehead, A., The Fatal Impact: An
account of the invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1966;
Goldsmid, J., The Deadly Legacy, UNSW Press, 1988; Stearn and Stearn, The Effect of
Smallpox, pp. 44–5 et passim.
86 Campbell, Invisible Invaders, passim.
87 Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 210, 357.
88 Ibid., p. 210; Fyans, in Bride, Letters, p. 181.
89 Flood, Moth Hunters, pp. 32, 37, 42, 43.
90 Davidson, A., Geographical Pathology, Pentland, Edinburgh, 1892; Mulvaney, Encounters in
Place, pp. 183–94; Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, p. 57; Sturt, Two Expeditions, pp.
57–8, 65, 192, 209; Butlin, Our Original Aggression, pp. 38–9; Eyre, E.J., Journal of an
Expedition of Discovery into Central Australia, Boone, London, 1845, vol. II, pp. 379–80;
Westgarth, W., Australia Felix, London, 1848, pp. 81–2; Webb, Palaeopathology, pp. 154–5.
91 Basedow, H., The Australian Aboriginal, Preece, Adelaide, 1925, p. 194.
92 The scientific name for yaws is Treponema pallidum pertenue, and treponarid is Treponema
pallidum endemicum. Symptoms are ulcers and large crusty sores on hands, feet, the face, anus
and groin: Hackett, C., ‘The human treponematoses’, in Diseases in Antiquity (eds D. Brothwell
and A.T. Sandison), Thomas, Springfield, IL, 1967; Moodie, P. M., Aboriginal Health:
Aborigines in Australian Society, ANU Press, 1973, pp. 163–8; Webb, Palaeopathology, pp.
135–60. Webb found lesions from endemic treponemal infection on prehistoric skeletons,
especially in arid and tropical regions. Frequencies in relatively crowded settlements on the
central Murray River reached 16 per cent. He concluded yaws or treponarid ‘had a much wider
distribution than we have previously thought’. It affected people in northern Western Australia,
Northern Territory, South Australia, western Queensland and western New South Wales and
‘possibly further east’: Webb, Palaeopathology, p. 155.
93 According to Fenner, ‘measles caused the deaths of about 25 per cent of Fijians when introduced
by Indian immigrant workers brought to the island by the British, then settled back to a lower
fatality rate’. The pattern in Australia was probably similar.
94 Briscoe, G., ‘Queensland Aborigines and the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–1919’,
AIATSIS, 1996, Occasional paper 3.
95 Thomson, N., ‘A review of Aboriginal health status’, in J. Reid, and P. Trompf (eds), The Health
of Aboriginal Australia, Harcourt-Brace-Jovanovich, Sydney, 1991, pp. 37–79.
96 Black, R.H., Malaria in Australia, AGPS, 1972; Spencer, M., Malaria: The Australian
Experience 1843–1991, Australasian College of Tropical Medicine, JCU, 1994, pp. 10–14, 80–1;
Groube, L., ‘Contradictions and malaria in Melanesian and Australian prehistory’, in M. Spriggs
et al. (eds), A Community of Culture …, ANU Press, 1993, pp. 164–86.
97 Hargrave, J., ‘Leprosy in the Northern Territory’, in Reid and Trompf, Health, 1991, pp. 61, 62–
3.

Box 7—Native police (pp. 128–9)

a Fels, M., Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1837–1853,
MUP, 1988.
b Quoted in Elder, Blood on the Wattle, p. 135.

CHAPTER 5—TRADITION
1 Collins, D. [1798] (ed. B.H. Fletcher), An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales,
Reed, Sydney, 1975, vol. I, p. 497.
 2 Stanner, W.E.H., After the Dreaming, Boyer Lecture, ABC, Sydney, 1968, p. 44, reprinted in
W.E.H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973, ANU Press, 1979, p. 230.
3 Rose, D.B., Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness,
AHC, 1996; Neidjie, B., Story about Feeling, Magabala Books, Broome, 1989; Neidjie, B.,
Davis, S., and Fox, A., Kakadu Man: Bill Neidjie, Mybrood, NSW, 1985.
4 Stanner [1958], ‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, in White Man, pp. 41–66, quotes
on pp. 48–9.
5 Stanner [1962], ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’, in White Man, pp. 109–14; Guenther, M.,
‘From totemism to shamanism: Hunter-gatherer contributions to world mythology and
spirituality’, in R.B. Lee and R. Daly (eds), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers,
CUP, 1999, pp. 426–33.
6 Edwards, W.H., An Introduction to Aboriginal Societies, Social Science Press, Wentworth Falls,
1988, p. 66.
7 Stanner, W.E.H. [1976], ‘Some aspects of Aboriginal religion’, in M. Charlesworth (ed.),
Religious Business: Essays on Australian Aboriginal spirituality, CUP, 1998, pp. 1–24, esp. p.
14.
8 Reed, A.W. [1969], An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Life, Reed, Sydney, 1974, p. 16;
Howitt, A.W. [1904], The Native Tribes of SouthEast Australia, ASP, 1996, pp. 426–34.
9 Elkin, A.P. [1938], The Australian Aborigines: How to understand them, A&R, 1954, pp. 287–8;
Berndt, R.M., and C.H., The World of the First Australians …, ASP, 1988; Eliade, M., Australian
Religions, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1973; Freud, S. [1913], Totem and Taboo (trans. J.
Strachey), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1960.
10 Peterson, N., ‘Introduction to Australia’, in R.B. Lee and R. Daly (eds), Cambridge
Encyclopedia, 1999, pp. 317–23.
11 Guenther, ‘From totemism’, p. 426.
12 Stanner [1953], ‘The Dreaming’, in White Man, pp. 23–40; also in W.H. Edwards (ed.) [1987],
Traditional Aboriginal Society, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 227–38.
13 Walker and Penrith interviews recorded under the Oral History Program for the Australian
Museum, Sydney, exhibition, Indigenous Australians: Australia’s First Peoples, 1997; Roberts,
quoted in Edwards, An Introduction, p. 21.
14 Isaacs, J., Australian Dreaming, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1980, pp. 35–38.
15 Chatwin, B., Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London, 1987; Berndt and Berndt, The World, pp. 368–
81.
16 Neale, M. (ed.) Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, National Museum of Australia Press,
Canberra, 2017.
17 Berndt and Berndt, The World, p. 392.
18 Isaacs, J. (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Music, Aboriginal Artists Agency, Sydney, 1979, pp. 8–9,
15–18, 237.
19 Stanner, W.E.H. [1961], On Aboriginal Religion, Oceania Monographs 36, UOS, 1989, pp. 81–4;
Berndt, R.M., and C.H., The Speaking Land: Myth and story in Aboriginal Australia, Penguin,
Melbourne, 1988, pp. 73–125; re. whirlwind see W.E. Harney, Life among the Aborigines,
Robert Hale, London, 1957, p. 36.
20 Dixon, R.M.W., The Languages of Australia, CUP, 1980.
21 Blake, B.J. [1981], Australian Aboriginal Languages: A general introduction, UQP, 1991.
22 Elkin, A.P., Aboriginal Men of High Degree: Initiation and sorcery in the world’s oldest
tradition, UQP, 1977.
23 Edwards, An Introduction, p. 75; Reed, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, pp. 56, 123–5.
24 Guenther, ‘From totemism’, p. 429.
25 Isaacs, J., Aboriginal Bush Food and Herbal Medicine, Weldon, Sydney, 1987.
26 Berndt and Berndt, The World, pp. 150–66.
27 Quoted in Flood, Rock Art, p. 164; Basedow, H. ‘Aboriginal rock carvings of great antiquity in
South Australia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1914, vol. 44, pp. 95–211, esp.
p. 201.
28 Reed, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, pp. 19–20, 72–3, 81, 142, 151.
29 Dunlop, I., Desert People, Film Australia, Sydney, 1967. For anthropology, see I. Keen,
Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the threshold of colonisation, OUP, Melbourne,
2004.
30 Berndt, R.M., and C.H. [1952], The First Australians, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1974, p. 52; Berndt
and Berndt, The World, pp. 180–9.
31 Berndt and Berndt, The World, p. 182; Howitt, A.W. [1904], The Native Tribes of SouthEast
Australia, ASP, 1996, pp. 746–7; re. Western Desert, Sutton, P., personal communication, 2005.
32 Berndt and Berndt, The World, pp. 166–80.
33 Rose, F.G.G., The Traditional Mode of Production of the Australian Aborigines, A&R, 1987, p.
29; Maddock, K. [1972], The Australian Aborigines: A portrait of their society, Penguin,
Melbourne, 1982, pp. 67–75.
34 Berndt and Berndt, The World, pp. 181–2, 185. Re. Central Australia: Spencer, B., and Gillen, F.
[1899], The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Macmillan, London, 1938, pp. 92–4, 269, 458–
65.
35 Berndt and Berndt, The World, pp. 191–2.
36 Ibid., p. 193.
37 Berndt and Berndt, First Australians, pp. 106–7; Stanner [1959], ‘Durmugam: A Nangiomeri’,
in White Man, pp. 91–2.
38 Mountford, C.P., Nomads of the Australian Desert, Rigby, Adelaide, 1976, p. 213 and plate 206.
39 Arndt, W., ‘The interpretation of the Delamere lightning paintings and rock engravings’,
Oceania, 1962, vol. 32, pp. 163–77; Flood, J., and David, B., ‘Traditional systems of encoding
meaning in Wardaman rock art, Northern Territory, Australia’, The Artefact, 1994, vol. 17, pp. 6–
22.
40 Berndt and Berndt, First Australians, pp. 115–18; Reed, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, pp. 30–2.
41 Berndt and Berndt, The World, pp. 347–50; re. northern hierarchy, Sutton, P., personal
communication, 2003.
42 Squires, N., ‘Aborigines seek return of tribal justice’, Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2005.
43 Harney, Life among the Aborigines, p. 19.
44 Sutton, P., personal communication, 2005.
45 Flood, J., The Moth Hunters: Aboriginal prehistory of the Australian Alps, AIAS, 1980. The
moth-hunters were the subject of my doctorate and my first archaeological book. The research
involved experimental archaeology, including eating moths! The recipe is—cook them on a pre-
heated granite slab for a minute on each side, pick them out of the fire with a pointed stick and
winnow away the ashes. The abdomens are only peanut-sized but full of oily protein and taste
like roast chestnuts.
46 Mulvaney, D.J., ‘The chain of connection: The material evidence’, in N. Peterson (ed.), Tribes
and Boundaries in Australia, AIAS, 1976, pp. 72–94; McCarthy, F.D., ‘Trade in Aboriginal
Australia’, Oceania, 1939, 9: 405–38, 10: 80–104, 171–95; Watson, P., This Precious Foliage,
Oceania Monograph, UOS, 1983.

Box 9—Fishing methods (pp. 192–3)

a Reed, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, pp. 11, 24, 83–6, 125, 160, 166–7.
b Hunter, p. 44.
c Collins, vol. I, p. 499.
Box 10—Torres Strait Islanders (pp. 198–201)
a ABS 2002, Population Distribution Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians 2001,
ABS.4705.0, C. of A.
b Beckett, J.R., Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and colonialism, CUP, 1987; Sharp, N., Stars of
Tagai: The Torres Strait Islanders, ASP, 1993.

CHAPTER 6—ORIGINS
1 Isaacs, J. (ed.), Australian Dreaming, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1980, p. 5.
2 Interglacial periods happen about every 100,000 years, when variations in the Earth’s orbit and
tilt of its polar axis cause polar ice to melt. The last interglacial was about 125 to 110 kya
(thousand years ago).
3 Oppenheimer, S., Out of Eden: The peopling of the world, Constable, London, 2003, pp. 51–3;
re. ‘hominin’, previously we used the word ‘hominid’ to describe humans and their ancestors,
but recently a better understanding of the evolutionary relationship between humans and the
other great apes has led to re-classification. ‘Now, the African apes, including humans, are
separated from orangutans and lumped together in the sub-family Homininae. This group is
further divided into Hominini (humans plus their ancestors and extinct “cousins”), making
“hominin” the new word for “hominid”’: New Scientist, 18 June 2005, p. 41.
4 Gabunia, L. et al., ‘Earliest Pleistocene hominid cranial remains from Dmanisi, Republic of
Georgia: Taxonomy, geological setting and age’, Science, 2000, 288: 1019–25; Gore, R., ‘New
Find’, National Geographic, 2002, 202(2): i–x; Swisher, C.C., Curtis, G.H., and Lewin, R., Java
Man: How two geologists’ dramatic discoveries changed our understanding of the evolutionary
path to modern humans, Scribner, New York, 2000; Huffman, O.F., ‘Geologic context and age of
the Perning/Mojokerto Homo erectus, East Java’, JHE, 2001, 40: 353–62; Simanjuntak, T.,
Prasetyo, B., and Handini, R. (eds), Sangiran: Man, culture and environment in Pleistocene
times, National Research Centre of Archaeology, Jakarta, 2001, pp. 160–7; Morwood, M.J. et al.,
‘Revised age for Mojokerto 1, an early Homo erectus cranium from East Java, Indonesia’, AA,
2003, 57: 1–4. For genetic evidence, see A.R. Templeton, ‘Out of Africa again and again’,
Nature, 2002, 416: 45–51; for archaeological evidence see G. Burenhult (ed.), The First
Humans: Human origins and history to 10,000 BC, UQP, 1993.
5 Morwood, M.J. et al., ‘Fission-track ages of stone tools and fossils on the east Indonesian island
of Flores’, Nature, 1998, 392: 173–6; Bednarik, R.G., ‘Seafaring in the Pleistocene’, CAJ, 2003,
13(1): 41–66; elephants are superb long-distance swimmers—one African herd swam 48 km (30
miles) at sea, averaging 2.7 km per hour; Johnson, D.L., ‘Problems in the land vertebrate
zoogeography of certain islands and the swimming powers of elephants’, Journal of
Biogeography, 1980, 7: 383–98.
6 For tools see Burenhult, The First Humans, pp. 64–5; Simanjuntak, Sangiran, pp. 143–70, 375–
99.
7 Brown, P., Sutikna, T., Morwood, M.J., Soejono, R.P. et al., ‘A new small-bodied hominin from
the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia’, Nature, 2004, 431: 1055–61; Morwood, M.J., Soejon,
R.P., Roberts, R.G., Sutikna, T., Turney, C.S.M. et al., ‘Archaeology and age of a new hominin
from Flores in eastern Indonesia’, Nature, 2004, 431: 1087–91; New Scientist, 30 October 2004,
pp. 5, 8–10; Morwood, M., Sutikna, T., and Roberts, R., ‘The people time forgot’, National
Geographic, 2005, 207(4): 2–15; Wong, K., ‘The littlest human’, Scientific American, 2005,
292(2): 40–49; Kohn, M., ‘The little troublemaker’, New Scientist, 18 June 2005, pp. 41–5.
8 Lahr, M.M., and Foley, R., ‘Human evolution writ small’, Nature, 2004, 431: 1043–4. Adult
status was diagnosed from tooth eruption and wear.
9 Weekly Telegraph, 9 November 2004, no. 693, pp. 9, 23; SMH, 28 October 2004, pp. 1, 4; Wong,
‘The littlest human’, pp. 42, 49; Forth, G., in Anthropology Today, 2005, 21(1): 22.
10 Thorne, A.G., and Wolpoff, M.H., ‘The multi-regional evolution of humans’, Sci. Am., 1992,
266(4): 28–33 and update in Sci. Am., 2003, 13(2): 46–53; Thorne, A.G., and Raymond, R., Man
on the Rim: The peopling of the Pacific, A&R, 1989; Templeton, A.R., ‘Out of Africa again and
again’, Nature, 2002, 416: 45–51; Tattersall, I., ‘Out of Africa again … and again?’ Sci. Am.,
2003, 13(2): 38–45.
11 Stringer, C., and McKie, R., African Exodus: The origins of modern humans, Jonathan Cape,
London, 1996. For ‘Eve’ and ‘Adam’ see Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, pp. xx, 37–43, 46, 84,
141–2, 171.
12 There are two types of DNA, nuclear and mitochondrial. Nuclear DNA is in the nucleus inside
each cell and is passed to us from both parents. Other DNA is in bean-shaped, energy-producing
parts outside the nucleus called mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA clones itself rather than
recombining and is passed to the next generation only by the mother. There are many more
mitochondria in the body than cell nuclei, so they are easier to find and mitochondrial DNA
mutates twenty times faster than nuclear DNA. The mtDNA mutation rate is about one mutation
per 20,000 years along a single lineage, but timings on the molecular clock are very much
approximations: Sykes, B., The Seven Daughters of Eve, Corgi Books, Transworld, 2001, p. 197.
13 Two species descended from a common ancestor start out with identical DNA, but gradually
changes accumulate. The more different the DNA, the longer since the two populations split.
DNA analysis has answered the question Thor Heyerdahl sailed a raft across the Pacific to try to
solve—Polynesians came from Southeast Asia, not South America as he suggested: Hagelberg,
E. et al., ‘DNA from ancient Easter Islanders’, Nature, 1994, 369: 25; Cann, R.L., Stoneking,
M., and Wilson, A.C., ‘Mitochondria, DNA and human evolution’, Nature, 1987, 325: 31–6;
Wilson, A.C., and Cann, R.L., ‘The recent African genesis of human genes’, Sci. Am., 1992, 266:
68–73 and update in Sci. Am., 2003, 13(2): 54–61; Relethford, J.H., Genetics and the Search for
Modern Human Origins, Wiley, New York, 2001; Ke, Y. et al., ‘African origin of modern
humans in East Asia: A tale of 12,000 Y chromosomes’, Science, 2001, 292: 1151–3. For the Y
chromosome, one single mutation (M168) on the African tree defines all non-African lineages:
see P.A. Underhill et al., ‘Y-chromosome sequence variation and the history of human
populations’, Nature Genetics, 2000, 26: 358–61; Wells, S., The Journey of Man: A genetic
odyssey, Penguin, London, 2002; Wells quoted by Callaghan, G., ‘State of Origin’, Weekend
Australian Magazine, 30 July 2005, pp. 24–30.
14 Foley, R., and Lahr, M., quoted in S. Woodward, ‘Out of Africa’, Cambridge Alumni Magazine,
2003, 38: 14–16; Schultz, H. et al., ‘Correlation between Arabian Sea and Greenland climate
oscillations of the past 110,000 years’, Nature, 1998, 393: 54–7.
15 Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, pp. 80–2, 355; Wells, The Journey of Man, p. 30.
16 Kirk, R.L., Aboriginal Man Adapting, OUP, 1981, pp. 112–13, 118.
17 van Hoist Pellekaan, S. et al., ‘Mitochondrial control-region sequence variation in Aboriginal
Australians, American Journal of Human Genetics, 1998, 62: 435–49.
18 Ibid., p. 446.
19 Lambeck, K., and Nakada, M., ‘Late Pleistocene and Holocene sea-level change along the
Australian coast’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1990, 89: 143–76;
Ingman and Gyllensten, ‘Mitochondrial genome variation’; Wells, Journey of Man, pp. 73–6,
104; Wells, quoted by Callaghan, Weekend Australian Magazine, pp. 29–30.
20 Howells, W.W., Skull Shapes and the Map; Craniometric analyses in the dispersion of the
modern Homo, HUP, 1989, pp. 37–79; Pietrusewsky, M., ‘Pacific-Asian relationships: A
physical anthropological perspective’, Oceanic Linguistics, 1994, 33: 407–29.
21 Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, pp. 67–76, 78–82; Taylor, B.W, personal communication, 2003;
Bellwood, Prehistory, pp. 88, 100. At low sea-level the strait of Bab-al-Mandab is reduced to a
narrow channel only a few kilometres wide, broken up by islets and reefs.
22 From 80–60 kya was the second coldest period of the last 100,000 years and sea level fluctuated
from-50 to -85 metres (-160 to -260 ft). At 62 kya sea level was minus 85 m ± 5 m: Lambeck, K.
and Chappell, J., ‘Sea level change through the last glacial cycle’, Science, 2001, 292: 679–86;
Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, pp. 79, 156; Wells, Journey of Man, p. 59.
23 Foley, R., and Lahr, M.M., ‘Technologies and the evolution of modern humans’, CAJ, 1997,
7(1): 3–36; Stringer, C., ‘Coasting out of Africa’, Nature, 2000, 405: 24–6; Rowley-Conwy, P. in
Burenhult, The First Humans, p. 62.
24 SMH, 14/15 May 2005; Macaulay, V. et al., ‘Single rapid coastal settlement of Asia revealed by
analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes’, Science, 2005, 308: 1034–6;
<http://arts.anu.edu.au/bullda/S_Asia_Austral_homepage.html>.
25 Neves, W.A., Powell, J.F. and Ozolins, E.G., ‘Modern human origins as seen from the
peripheries’, JHE, 1999, 37: 129–33; Dillehay, T.D., The Settlement of the Americas: A new
prehistory, Basic Books, New York, 2000; Dillehay, T.D., ‘Tracking the first Americans’,
Nature, 2003, 425: 23–4; Gamble, C., Timewalkers: The Prehistory of Global Colonisation,
Penguin, London, 1993, pp. 203–14; Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, pp. 270–342, but see Wells,
Journey of Man, pp. 134–45.
26 McBrearty, S., and Brooks, A.S., ‘The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin
of modern human behaviour’, JHE, 2000, 39: 453–63.
27 Flood, J. [1983], Archaeology of the Dreamtime, A&R, 2001; in Australia, pierced shell beads
have been found in four WA sites (Mandu Mandu, Riwi, Carpenter’s Gap rock-shelters and
Devil’s Lair Cave) dated to c. 40 kya: Jane Balme, UWA, personal communication, 2004;
Henshilwood, C., d’Errico, H., et al., ‘Middle Stone Age shell beads from South Africa’,
Science, 2004, 304: 369, 404; Wong, K., ‘The morning of the modern mind’, Sci. Am., 2005,
292(6): 64–73. Blades are twice as long as wide, microliths are less than 3 centimetres long.
28 Eurasia includes the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and Central and South Asia.
29 Flood, J., Rock Art of the Dreamtime, A&R, 1997; Bednarik, R., ‘The origins of navigation and
language’, The Artefact, 1997, 20: 16–56; Tacon, P.S., Aung, D.Y.Y., and Thorne, A., ‘Myanmar
prehistory: Rare rock-markings revealed’, AO, 2004, 39: 138–9.
30 Bahn, P.G., and Vertut, J., Images of the Iceage, Windward, London, 1988; Clottes, J., and
Courtin, J., La Grotte Cosqueur, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1994.
31 For latest sea-level estimates, see K. Lambeck and J. Chappell, ‘Sea-level change through the
Last Glacial Cycle’, Science, 2001, 292: 679–86; Chappell, J., ‘Pleistocene seedbeds of western
Pacific maritime cultures and the importance of chronology’, in S. O’Connor and P. Veth (eds),
East of Wallace’s Line: Studies of past and present maritime cultures of the IndoPacific region,
Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia, 16, Balkema, Rotterdam & Brookfield, USA,
2000, pp. 77–98; see also Oppenheimer, Out of Eden; Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Genes, Peoples and
Languages, Penguin, London, 2000, p. 94.
32 Flood, Archaeology, pp. 31–2; re. antiquity of monsoon, see Chappell, ‘Pleistocene seedbeds’,
pp. 88–9, and Magee, J.W. et al., ‘Stratigraphy, sedimentology, chronology and palaeohydrology
of Quaternary lacustrine deposits at Madigan Gulf, Lake Eyre, South Australia’,
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1995, 113: 3–42.
33 Norman, K., Inglis, J. and Clarkson, C. et al., ‘An early colonisation pathway into northwest
Australia 70–60,000 years ago’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2018, 180: 229–39.
34 Dortch, J., and Malaspinas, A.S., ‘Madjedbebe and genomic histories of Aboriginal Australia’,
2017, AA 83(3): 174–7; Tobler, R. et al., ‘Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of
regionalism in Australia’, Nature, 2017, 544(7649): 180–4.
35 Bednarik, R.G., ‘The origins of navigation and language’, Artefact, 1997, 20: 16–56; Bednarik,
R.G., et al., ‘Nale Tasih 2: Journey of a Middle Palaeolithic raft’, International Journal of
Nautical Archaeology, 1999, 28: 25–33; at 3–4 kya, Polynesian colonists headed out into the vast
Southern Ocean, their sophisticated outrigger sailing canoes laden with food plants and animals
 to sustain them on the distant islands they hoped to discover. Navigating by stars, currents and
birds, these Argonauts of the Pacific crossed incredible expanses of ocean to reach Hawaii, Tahiti
and even remotest Easter Island: see P. Bellwood, [1978], The Polynesians: Prehistory of an
island people, Thames & Hudson, London, 1987; Irwin, G., The Prehistoric Exploration and
Colonisation of the Pacific, CUP, 1992.
36 Clarkson. C. et al., ‘Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago’, Nature, 2017,
547: 306–10; Clarkson, C. et al., ‘Reply to comments on Clarkson et al.’ (2017); Clarkson, C.,
‘Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago’, AA, 2018, 84(1): 84–9. Beyond
10 kya, age determinations are accurate only within a few thousand years. The main methods
used in Australia are radiocarbon dating, which measures the decay of minute traces of naturally
radioactive carbon atoms within the organic remains, and luminescence dating of naturally
deposited sands to date the time since artefact-bearing quartz sand was last exposed to sunlight.
Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of single grains of quartz sand is the most
accurate of the luminescence methods. The lowest artefacts at Nauwalabila I have OSL dates
between 53.4+5.4 and 60.3+6.7 kya; at Madjedbebe the OSL dates are 65±6 kya.
37 Turney, C.S.M., et al., ‘Early human occupation at Devil’s Lair, southwestern Australia 50,000
years ago’, Quaternary Research, 2001, 55: 3–13.
38 O’Connor, S. and Veth, P., ‘The world’s first mariners: Savannah dwellers in an island
continent’, East of Wallace’s Line, 2000, pp. 99–137; Veth, P., ‘Breaking through the radiocarbon
barrier: Madjedbebe and the new chronology for Aboriginal occupation of Australia’, AA 2017,
83(3): 165–7; Tobler, R. et al., ‘Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in
Australia’, Nature, 2017, 544(7649):180–4.
39 McDonald, J. et al., ‘Karnatukul (Serpent’s Glen): A new chronology for the oldest site in
Australia’s Western Desert’, PLOS ONE 13 (9): e0202511, 2018,
<https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202511>.
40 Clarkson. C. et al. ‘Reply to comments on Clarkson et al. (2017) ‘Human occupation of northern
Australia by 65,000 years ago’, AA, 2018, 84(1): 86–7; re. Australian genomic history see A.
Malaspinas, M. Westaway et al., ‘A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia’, Nature, 2016,
538(7624): 207–14.
41 Re. artefacts see Clarkson, 2018, op.cit. p. 87.
42 Bowler, J.M., Jones, R., Kirk, R.C. and Thorne, A.G., ‘Pleistocene human remains from
Australia: A living site and human cremation from Lake Mungo, western New South Wales’,
World Archaeology, 1970, 2: 39–60; Bowler, J.M. and Thorne, A.G., ‘Human remains from Lake
Mungo: Discovery and excavation of Lake Mungo III’, in R.C. Kirk and A. Thorne (eds), The
origin of the Australians, AIAS, 1976, pp. 127–38; Bowler, J.M., ‘Willandra Lakes revisited:
Environmental framework for human occupation’, AO, 1998, 33: 120–55.
43 Thorne, A.G., Grun, R., Mortimer, G., Taylor, N., and Curnoe, D., ‘Australia’s oldest human
remains: Age of the Lake Mungo 3 skeleton’, JHE, 1999, 36: 591–612.
44 Bowler, J.M., Johnston, H., Olley, J.M. et al., ‘New ages for human occupation and climatic
change at Mungo, Australia’, Nature, 2003, 421: 837–40. According to Bowler, Mungo Man was
buried 40±2 kya, i.e. between 42,000 and 38,000 years ago. The grave, which was 80–100
centimetres deep, was dug into sands OSL-dated to 42±3 kya and the overlying unit sealing the
grave to 38±2 kya. The editors of Nature and its American equivalent Science will not publish
new discoveries unless different laboratories have replicated the results, and Bowler’s results are
now well accepted.
45 Barrows, T.T. et al., ‘Late Pleistocene glaciation of the Kosciuszko Massif, Snowy Mountains,
Australia’, Quaternary Research, 2001, 55: 179–89.
46 Flood, Archaeology, ch. 3.
47 Webb, S., ‘Further research of the Willandra Lakes fossil footprint site, southeastern Australia’,
Journal of Human Evolution, 2007, 52, pp. 711–15; Flood, Archaeology, 2010, pp. 2–3.
48 Australian, 9 January 2001; Adcock, G.J. et al., ‘Mitochondrial DNA sequences in ancient
Australians: Implications for modern human origins’, Proc. National Academy of Science USA,
2001, 98(2): 537–42.
49 Thorne, A.G. and Macumber, P.G., ‘Discoveries of Late Pleistocene man at Kow Swamp,
Australia’, Nature, 1972, 238: 316–19; Thorne, A.G., ‘Mungo and Kow Swamp: Morphological
variation in Pleistocene Australians’, Mankind, 1971, 8: 85–9; Stone, T., and Cupper, M.L., ‘Last
glacial maximum ages for robust humans at Kow Swamp, southern Australia’, JHE, 2003, 45:
99–111; Thorne in The Age, 8 January 2004; Stone, T., ‘Robust and gracile’, Australasian
Science, 2004 (March), 18–20.
50 Birdsell, ‘Preliminary data’; Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns, pp. 22–3; Photographs of
Barrineans are reproduced in K. Windschuttle and D. Gillin, ‘The extinction of the Australian
Pygmies’, Quadrant, 2002 (June), pp. 7–18; Groves, C., letter, in Quadrant, 2002 (September),
p. 5; Gillin, T., reply, in Quadrant, 2002 (October), pp. 5–7; re. links with India see van Holst
Pellekaan, ‘Mitochondrial control’.
51 Jablonski, N.G. and Chaplin, G., ‘Skin deep’, Sci. Am., 2002, 287(4): 50–7; Jablonski, N.G., and
Chaplin, G., ‘The evolution of human skin coloration’, JHE, 2000, 39(1): 57–106; Oppenheimer,
Out of Eden, pp. 198–200.
52 Birdsell, ‘Preliminary data’, pp. 120–1.
53 Redd, A.J., and Stoneking, M., ‘Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA variation in Aboriginal Australian
and Papua New Guinean populations’, Am. J. Human Genetics, 1999, 65: 808–28.
54 van Holst Pellekaan et al., 1998; Kayser, M. et al., ‘Independent histories of human Y
chromosomes from Melanesia and Australia’, Am. J. Human Genetics, 2001, 68: 173–90;
Underhill, P.A. et al., ‘The phylogeography of Y chromosome binary haplotypes and the origins
of modern human populations’, Annals of Human Genetics, 2001, 65: 43–62.
55 White, N., ‘Genes, languages and landscapes in Australia’, in P. McConvell and N. Evans (eds),
Archaeology and Linguistics: Australia in Global Perspective, MUP, 1997, pp. 45–81.
56 Flood, Archaeology, ch. 12; Webb, R.E., ‘Megamarsupial extinction: The carrying capacity
argument’, Antiquity, 1998, 72: 46–55; Flannery, T., The Future Eaters, Reed, Melbourne, 1994.
57 Barrows, T.T. et al., 2002, ‘The timing of the last glacial maximum in Australia’, Quaternary
Science Reviews, 21: 159–73; Barrows, T.T. et al., ‘The timing of late Pleistocene periglacial
activity in Australia’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2004, 23: 697–708.
58 Miller, G.H., Magee, J.W. et al., ‘Pleistocene extinction of Genyornis newtoni: Human impact on
Australian megafauna’, Science, 1999, 283: 205–8; Magee, J., Miller, G., and Johnson, B., ‘Why
did Australia’s megafauna become extinct?’ Australasian Science, 1999 (August), pp. 27–32;
Miller, G.H. et al., ‘Ecosystem collapse in Pleistocene Australia and a human role in mega-
faunal extinction’, Science, 2005, 309: 287–90.
59 Grellet-Tiller, G., Spooner, N.A., and Worthy, T.H., ‘Is the ‘Genyornis’ egg of a mihirung or
another extinct bird from the Australian dreamtime?’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2016, 133:
147–64.
60 Westaway, M.C., Olley, J., Grun, R., ‘At least 17,000 years of coexistence: Modern humans and
megafauna at the Willandra Lakes, South-Eastern Australia’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 2017,
157: 206–11.
61 Barker, B. et al. ‘Archaeology of JSARN-124 site 3, central-western Arnhem Land: Determining
the age of the so-called “Genyornis” painting’, in B. David et al. (eds), The Archaeology of Rock
Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia, Terra Australis 47, 2017, pp. 423–96; Tacon, P.S.C, and
Webb, S., ‘Art and megafauna in the Top End of the Northern Territory, Australia: Illusion or
reality?’ in B. David, et al. (eds), The Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land,
Australia, Terra Australis 47, 2017, pp. 145–61.
62 Flood, Archaeology, pp. 15–26.
63 Martin, P.S., and Steadman, D.W., in R.D.E. MacPhee (ed.), Extinctions in Near Time: Causes,
contexts and consequences, Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York, 1999, pp. 17–55.
64 Taylor, B.W., personal communication, 2003; Flannery, Future Eaters, pp. 180–6, 199–207;
Flannery, T., ‘Debating extinction’, Science, 1999, 283: 182–3; Nolch, G., ‘Where is the smoking
gun?’, Australasian Science, 2001 (September), pp. 19–20; Murray, P., ‘Pleistocene megafauna’,
in P. Vickers-Rich et al. (eds), Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia, Monash University,
Melbourne, 1991, pp. 1072–164.
65 Flannery, T., Beautiful Lies: Population and environment in Australia, Quarterly Essay, Black
Inc., Schwartz, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 40–1.
66 Murray, ‘Pleistocene megafauna’, p. 1142.
67 Jones, R., ‘Fire-stick farming’, Australian Natural History, 1969, 16: 224–78; Hallam, S., Fire
and Hearth: A study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in southwestern Australia,
AIAS, 1975; Jones, R., ‘The neolithic, palaeolithic and the hunting gardeners: Man and land in
the Antipodes’, in R.P. Suggate and M.M. Cresswell (eds), Quaternary Studies, 1975, Roy. Soc.
NZ, Wellington, pp. 21–34.
68 Jones, ‘The neolithic’, p. 25.
69 Taylor, B.W., personal communication, 2003. At a 1964 UNESCO conference, ecologists
reached consensus that tropical savannahs resulted from man’s use of fire.
70 Kershaw, A.P., ‘Climatic change and Aboriginal burning in northeast Australia during the last
two glacial/interglacial cycles’, Nature, 1986, 322: 47–9; Flood, Archaeology, chs 7 and 8.
71 Roberts, D.A, and Parker, A., Ancient Ochres: The Aboriginal rock paintings of Mount
Borradaile, J.B. Books, Adelaide, 2003.
72 Flannery, Future Eaters, pp. 217–36; Flannery, Beautiful Lies, pp. 20–1, 38–42.
73 Flood, Rock Art, pp. 178–222.
74 Flood, J., The Moth Hunters: Aboriginal prehistory of the Australian Alps, AIAS, 1980, pp. 254–
75.
75 Lambeck and Chappell, ‘Sea-level change’.
76 Flood, Rock Art, pp. 278–85; Layton, R., Australian Rock Art: A new synthesis, CUP, 1992, p.
245; Tacon, P.S.C., and Chippindale, C., ‘Australia’s ancient warriors: Changing depictions of
fighting in the rock-art of Arnhem Land, N.T.’, CAJ, 1994, 4: 211–48; Tacon, P.S.C.,
‘Regionalisation in the recent rock-art of western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory’, AO, 1993,
28: 112–20.
77 Tacon, P.S.C., Wilson, M., and Chippindale, C., ‘Birth of the Rainbow Serpent in Arnhem Land
rock-art and oral history’, AO, 1996, 31: 103–24.
78 Flood, Archaeology, ch. 15; Mulvaney, D.J., and Kamminga J., Prehistory of Australia, A&U,
1999, pp. 223–56.
79 Kennedy, K.A.R., GodApes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology in South Asia, University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2000; Bulbeck, D. et al., ‘The contribution of South Asia to the
Peopling of Australasia …’, Bulletin Soc. Suisse d’Anthrop., 2003, 9(2): 49–70, esp. pp. 59–60.
80 Slack, M.J., Fullagar, R.L.K., Field, J.H., and Border, A., ‘New Pleistocene ages for backed
artefact technology in Australia’, AO, 2004, 39: 131–7.
81 Hiscock, P., ‘Pattern and context in the Holocene proliferation of backed artefacts in Australia’,
Archaeological Papers of American Anthropological Association, 2002, 12: 163–77; Hiscock, P.,
and Attenbrow, V., ‘Early Holocene backed artefacts from Australia’, AO, 1998, 33: 49–62.
82 O’Connor, S., 30,000 Years of Aboriginal Occupation: Kimberley, North West Australia, ANH,
1999, pp. 74–5, 137; Walsh, G.L. and Morwood, M.J., ‘Spear and spearthrower evolution in the
Kimberley region, N.W. Australia: Evidence from rock-art’, AO, 1999, 34: 45–58.
83 Flood, Archaeology, pp. 146–7.
84 Tacon, P.S.C., and Pardoe, C., ‘Dogs make us human’, Nature Australia, 2002 (Autumn), 53–61.
85 The earliest reliable radiocarbon date for dingo bones is 3450 ± 95 years BP (the present being
1950). This date calibrates to c. 4000 calendar years.
86 Gollan, K., ‘The Australian dingo: In the shadow of man’, in M. Archer and G. Clayton (eds),
Vertebrate Zoogeography and Evolution in Australasia, Hesperian Press, Perth, 1984, pp. 921–7;
Gollan, K., ‘Prehistoric dogs in Australia: An Indian origin?’ in V.N. Misra and P. Bellwood
(eds), Recent Advances in IndoPacific Prehistory, Oxford and IBH, New Delhi, 1985, pp. 439–
43. Research on dingo DNA was by Dr Alan Wilton of Biotechnology Department, UNSW,
reported at ‘Modern Human Origins: Australian Perspectives’, conference, UNSW, September
2003 and SMH, 30 September 2003.
87 Walsh and Morwood, ‘Spear and spearthrower’; Walsh, G.L., Bradshaw Art of the Kimberley,
Takarakka Nowan Kas Publications, Toowong, Qld, 2000, pp. 420–4; re. Arnhem Land see G.
Chaloupka, Journey in Time, Reed, Sydney, 1993.
88 Roberts, R., Walsh, G. et al., ‘Luminescence dating of rock art and past environments using
mud-wasp nests in northern Australia’, Nature, 1997, 387: 696–9; Watchman, A., ‘Perspectives
and potentials for absolute dating of prehistoric rock paintings’, Antiquity, 1993, 67: 58–65.
89 Gum Tree Valley excavated by Michel Lorblanchet; date on trumpet shell 18, 500 BP, see Flood,
Rock Art, p. 323; Tacon, P.S.C., and Brockwell, S., ‘Arnhem Land prehistory’, in J. Allen and
J.F. O’Connell (eds), ‘Transitions: Pleistocene to Holocene in Australia and Papua New Guinea’,
Antiquity, 1995, 265, pp. 69, 676–95; Morwood, M.J. and Hobbs, D.R., ‘Themes in tropical
Australia’, ibid., pp. 747–68; McDonald, J., ‘Archaic faces to headdresses: The changing role of
rock art across the arid zone’, in P. Veth et al. (eds) Desert Peoples: Archaeological
Perspectives, 2005, pp. 116–41.
90 Dixon, R.M.W., The Languages of Australia, CUP, 1980; McConvell, P., ‘Backtracking to Babel:
The chronology of Pama-Nyungan expansion in Australia’, AO, 1996, 31: 125–44; McConvell,
P., ‘Language shift and language spread among hunter-gatherers’, in C. Panter-Brick, R. Layton
and P. Rowley-Conwy (eds), Hunter-Gatherers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, CUP, 2001,
pp. 143–69, esp. pp. 158–60.
91 Blake, B.J. [1981], Australian Aboriginal Languages: A general introduction, UQP, 1991, pp.
61–2.
92 Ibid.
93 Flood, Archaeology, pp. 212–20; Flood, Moth Hunters.
94 Lourandos, H., Continent of Hunter-Gatherers: New perspectives in Australian prehistory, CUP,
1997, pp. 218–22; Lourandos, H., ‘Swamp managers of southwestern Victoria’, in D.J.
Mulvaney and J.P. White (eds), Australians: A historical library, Australians to 1788, Fairfax,
Syme & Weldon, Sydney, 1987, pp. 292–307.
95 McNiven, I.J., ‘The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid’, The
Conversation, 8 February 2017, <www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/budj-bim>.
96 Williams, E., ‘Estimation of prehistoric populations of archaeological sites in southwestern
Victoria: Some problems’, AO, 1985, 20(3): 73–80.
97 Flood, Archaeology, ch. 16; Williams, E., Complex Hunter-Gatherers: A late Holocene example
from temperate Australia, S423, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 1988.
98 Ferguson, W.C., ‘Mokaré’s domain’, in Mulvaney and White, Australians, pp. 121–45, esp. pp.
128–9, 134.
99 Pulleine, R.W., Presidential address at anthropological congress in Tasmania in 1928.
100 Ross, A., ‘Archaeological evidence for population change in the middle to late Holocene in
southeastern Australia’, AO, 1985, 20(3): 81–9; Rowland, M.J., ‘Holocene environmental
variability: Have its impacts been underestimated in Australian prehistory?’ The Artefact, 1999,
22: 11–48; David, B., Landscapes, Rock Art and the Dreaming, Leicester University Press,
London, 2002, pp. 154–213.
Box 11—Genomic Map of Human Spread out of Africa (pp. 208–9)
a Map by Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A genetic odyssey, Penguin, London, 2002.
b Dortch, J. and Malaspinas, A.S., ‘Madjedbebe and genomic histories of Aboriginal Australia’,
AA, 2017, 174–7.

Box 12—Watercraft (p. 216)

a Edwards, R., Aboriginal Bark Canoes of the Murray Valley, Rigby, Adelaide, 1972; Davidson,
D.S., ‘The chronology of Australian watercraft’, Polynesian Society Journal, 1935, 44: 1–16,
69–84, 137–52, 193–207.
b Hunter, p. 63.
c Bradley quoted in Flannery, Birth of Sydney, pp. 54–5.

Box 13—Physical characteristics (pp. 224–5)

a Abbie, A.A., The Original Australians, Muller, London, 1969; Elkin, A.P. [1938], The Australian
Aborigines: How to understand them, A&R, 1954; Birdsell, J.B., Microevolutionary Patterns in
Aboriginal Australia: A gradient analysis of clines, OUP, 1993.
b Groves C., personal communication, 2004.
c Bellwood, P., Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, Academic Press, Sydney, 1985, pp.
69–101, 132–3; Venkateswar, S., ‘The Andaman Islanders’, Sci. Am., 1999, 280(5): 72–8.
d Tindale, N.B., and Lindsay, H.A., Aboriginal Australians, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1963, p. 34;
Birdsell, Microevolutionary patterns, pp. 207–46; Birdsell, J.B., ‘Preliminary data on the
trihybrid origins of the Australian Aborigines’, APAO, 1967, 2(2): 100–55, esp. plates 1–6, pp.
123–4.

CHAPTER 7—ASSIMILATION
1 Clark, M. [1963], A Short History of Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1995, p. 75; Harris, J., One
Blood: 200 years of Aboriginal encounter with Christianity, a story of hope, Albatross,
Sutherland, NSW, 1990.
2 Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1970, p. 100.
3 Select Committee on Aborigines. British settlements. 21 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp.
138–44; Report, British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, vol. 7, Rowley, C.D., The Remote
Aborigines, ANU Press, no. 425, pp. 10–11, 83, quoted in F. Crowley, A Documentary History of
Australia: Volume 1, Colonial Australia 1788–1840, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1980, pp. 112,
526.
4 Mulvaney, D.J., Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985, UQP,
1989, pp. 41–5, 88–94.
5 Broome, R. [1982], Aboriginal Australians: Black responses to white dominance, A&U, 1994,
pp. 30–5, 71–96, 101–19.
6 Gsell, F.X., The Bishop with 150 Wives’: Fifty Years as a Missionary, A&R, 1956, pp. 22, 24, 34,
152.
7 Roughsey, D., Moon and Rainbow: The autobiography of an Aboriginal, Reed, Sydney, 1971;
Roughsey, E., An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne,
1984.
8 Durack, M., The Rock and the Sand, Constable, London, 1969, p. 52; for information on
Missions see AIATSIS Mission and reserve records see <https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/finding-
your-family/>.
9 Lang, J.D., An Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, Sampson Low, London,
1875, vol. 1, p. 28.
10 Darwin, C. [1839], Journal of Researches …, published in C.W. Eliot (ed.), Charles Darwin:
The Voyage of the Beagle, P.F. Collier & Son, Harvard Classics, 1909–14, vol. 29, ch. XIX,
entries for 16 January 1836, 6 March 1836.
11 Reece, R.H.W., Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and colonial society in New South Wales
in the 1830s and 1840s, SUP, 1974, p. 21.
12 NSW Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1843, p. 542.
13 Durack, M., Kings in Grass Castles, Constable, London, 1959; Durack, M., The Rock and the
Sand, Constable, London, 1969; Holthouse, H. [1973], S’pose I Die: The Evelyn Maunsell Story,
A&R, 1994.
14 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 122–3.
15 McGrath, A., Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in Cattle Country, A&U, 1987, pp. 100–1, 122–3,
141, 150–1.
16 Stevens, F., Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry, ANU Press, 1974, p. 164.
17 McGrath, A. (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, A&U,
1995, pp. 24–5; Reynolds, H., and May, D., ‘Queensland’, in McGrath, Contested Ground, pp.
168–207, esp. pp. 198–9; McGrath, ‘Born in the Cattle’, pp. 138–9; re. stolen wages see R. Kidd,
In the Land of the ‘Fair Go’: Black lives, government lies, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2000.
18 Horton, D. (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, AIATSIS, 1994, pp. 672–3.
19 Rowley, C.D., Outcasts in White Australia, Penguin, 1972, pp. 401, 403–5, 414.
20 Wilson, J., ‘The Pilbara Aboriginal social movement’, in R.M. and C.H. Berndt (eds), Aborigines
of the West: Their past and present, UWA Press, Perth, 1980, pp. 151–68, esp. p. 166.
21 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 138–44; Rowley, C.D., The Remote Aborigines, ANU
Press, Canberra, 1970, pp. 167–70, 251–62.
22 Rowley, The Remote Aborigines, pp. 337–43.
23 Tatz, C., quoted in P. Howson, ‘Land rights—The next battleground’, Quadrant, 2005, vol. 417:
24–33.
24 Quoted by Toussaint, S., ‘Western Australia’, in McGrath, Contested Ground, pp. 240–68, esp.
259–60; Broome, Aboriginal Australians, p. 141.
25 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 56–8.
26 Bryson, B., Down Under, Doubleday, London, 2000, p. 283.
27 Kimber, R., personal communication, 1999.
28 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 174–5.
29 Saggers, S., and Gray, D., Dealing with Alcohol: Indigenous usage in Australia, New Zealand
and Canada, CUP, 1998; Merlan, F., Caging the Rainbow, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu,
1998, p. 41; Duguid, C., Doctor and the Aborigines, Rigby, Adelaide, 1972, pp. 202–3.
30 Reynolds, H. [1987], The Law of the Land, Penguin, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 133–42; Reserves
were in Cape York Peninsula, Central Australia, Arnhem Land, Daly River and the Kimberley;
Rowley, Destruction, pp. 60–3, 247–54.
31 Singh, S. et al. (eds), Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, Lonely Planet
Publications, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 212–24.
32 Maconochie, A., ‘Observations on the treatment of the Aborigines, New South Wales’, in
Extracts from the Papers and Proceedings of the Aborigines Protection Society, London, 1839,
vol. 1, pp. 109–15.
33 Reynolds, The Law of the Land, pp. 146–53.
34 Cane, S. First Footprints, p.79. By the late 1850s, there were six Australian colonies. Detached
from New South Wales were Victoria (1851) and Queensland (1859). The others were South
Australia (founded 1836), Tasmania (founded 1855, previously Van Diemen’s Land) and
Western Australia (founded 1829). Each colony had its own representative government and
parliament. The governor of New South Wales became Governor-General, but the colonies did
not federate until 1901. South Australia had administrative authority for the Northern Territory
 from 1863 until 1911, when the federal government assumed responsibility, although the
Territory now has its own parliament.
35 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 75–87; Barwick, D., ‘And the lubras are ladies now’, in F.
Gale (ed.), Woman’s Role in Aboriginal Society, AIAS, 1974, pp. 51–63.
36 Barwick, D., ‘Changes in the Aboriginal population of Victoria, 1863–1966’, in D.J. Mulvaney
and J. Golson (eds), Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, ANU Press, 1971, pp. 288–
315, esp. p. 313; Moodie, P.M., Aboriginal Health, ANU Press, 1973, p. 38.
37 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 86, 101–4. Legislation governing reserves was enacted in
Queensland in 1897 (Queensland Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium
Act), Western Australia in 1905, South Australia and Northern Territory in 1911.
38 Abbie, A.A., The Original Australians, Frederick Muller, London, 1969, p. 13.
39 Jupp, J. (ed.) [1988], The Australian People: An encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their
origins, CUP, 2001, pp. 51, 610–14.
40 Quoted by Neill, R., White Out: How politics is killing black Australia, A&U, 2002, p. 126.
41 Conference Report (1937), quoted in H. Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The question of genocide
in Australia’s history, Penguin, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 153–4; Anon., Aboriginal Welfare: Initial
Conference of Commonwealth and States Aboriginal Authorities, 1937, Commonwealth
Government Printer, Canberra, 1937, p. 5.
42 Haebich, A., Broken Circles: Fragmenting indigenous families, 1800–2000, Fremantle Arts
Centre Press, Perth, 2000.
43 Stone, S. (ed.), Aborigines in White Australia: A documentary history of the attitudes affecting
official policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1974, p. 196;
Hasluck, P., Native Welfare in Australia, Patterson Brokenshaw, Perth, 1953, p. 16.
44 Lippmann, M., Generations of Resistance: Aborigines demand justice, Longman Cheshire,
Melbourne, 1991, p. 29.
45 McConnochie, K., Hollinsworth, D., and Pettman, J., Race and Racism in Australia, Social
Science Press, Wentworth Falls, 1988, pp. 27, 30, 182.
46 McCorquodale, J., Aborigines and the Law: A Digest, ASP, 1987.
47 Wilson, R. and Dodson, M., Bringing Them Home: National inquiry into the separation of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission, Commonwealth of Australia, 1997, p. 6.
48 Australian Museum, ‘Indigenous Australians’, Oral histories exhibition, Sydney, 1999.
49 Rintoul, S., ‘Going home’, The Australian Magazine, 21 April 2001, pp. 12–17.
50 O’Donoghue, L., ‘A journey of healing or a road to nowhere?’ in M. Grattan (ed.),
Reconciliation, Black Inc., Bookman Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 288–96, esp. pp. 289–91.
51 Bringing Them Home, p. 17.
52 O’Donoghue, ibid., p. 290; Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, 23 February 2001; O’Donoghue, press
release, 1 March 2001.
53 Keefe, K., Paddy’s Road: Life stories of Patrick Dodson, ASP, 2003.
54 Roberts, A., Sister Eileen—A life with the lid off, Access Press, Bassendean, 2002, pp. 30–5, 37–
9, 161, 192–3, 282–3.
55 Ibid., pp. 176–7.
56 Harney, B. (Yidumduma) and Wositsky, J., Born Under the Paperbark Tree: A man’s life, ABC
Books, Sydney, 1996, pp. 73–7.
57 Ibid., pp. 196–7.
58 Randall, B., Songman: The story of an Aboriginal elder of Uluru, ABC Books, Sydney, 2003.
59 Bringing Them Home, p. 13.
60 Ibid., pp. 21, 285.
61 Ibid., pp. 275, 280–3.
62 Jopson, D., ‘G-word a “distraction” from stolen generation’, SMH, 7 June 2001, p. 13.
63 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain, pp. 21–3; Lemkin, R., Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Washington, 1944, pp. 79, 147.
64 Bringing Them Home, pp. 4, 29.
65 Bringing Them Home, pp. 35–7; Manne, R. ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right’,
Quarterly Essay, Schwartz, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 24–7.
66 Manne, ‘In Denial’, pp. 77–85; Neill, White Out, A&U, 2002, pp. 116–20, 140–1.
67 Neill, White Out, p. 75; Bringing Them Home, p. 37; The Australian, 16 May 2001, p. 11; SMH,
26 May 2000, p. 21.

Box 14—Ernabella/Pukatja (pp. 250–3)

a Duguid, Doctor, pp. 115–16.
b Ibid., p. 167; Hilliard, W.M., The People in Between: The Pitjantjatjara People of Ernabella,
Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1968, p. 141.
c Weekend Australian Magazine, 24 November 2001, pp. 24–8.

CHAPTER 8—RESURGENCE
1 ATSIC definition of self-determination, quoted in R. Neill, White Out: How politics is killing
black Australia, A&U, 2002, pp. 23, 47.
2 Australian Law Reform Commission <alrc.gov.au>.
3 Perkins, C., ‘Political objectives’, in J. Jupp (ed.), The Australian People, A&R, 1988, pp. 233–
9.
4 Principal political parties in Australia are Labor on the left and the Liberal Party on the right,
which is usually in coalition with the National Party (previously the Country Party). The federal
government ministry is known by the name of the Prime Minister, e.g. the Whitlam Government.
5 Whitlam, G., 6 April 1973 speech in House of Representatives, quoted in G.F. Gale and A.
Brookman (eds), Race Relations in Australia: the Aborigines, McGraw-Hill, Sydney, 1975, pp.
100–2.
6 McLaughlin, H., ‘Are we headed in the right direction?’ in G. Johns (ed.) Waking up to
Dreamtime, Media Masters, Singapore, 2001, pp. 125–51.
7 Weekend Australian, 17 May 2004, p.16, 6 November, 2004; Australian, 8 November, 9
November 2004; SMH, 12 November, 15 November 2004.
8 Flood, J., ‘Tread softly for you tread on my bones: The development of cultural resource
management in Australia’, pp. 79–101 in H.F. Cleare (ed.), Archaeological Heritage
Management in the Modern World, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989; Flood, J., ‘Cultural resource
management in Australia: the last three decades’, in M. Spriggs et al. (eds) A Community of
Culture, ANU Press, Canberra, 1993, pp. 259–65; Sullivan, S. (ed.), Cultural Conservation:
Towards a national approach, AHC, AGPS, 1995.
9 Butt, P. and Eagleson, R., Mabo, Wik and Native Title, Federation Press, Sydney, 1998; Attwood,
B. (ed.), In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia, A&U, 1996.
10 Brennan, F., The Wik Debate: Its Impact on Aborigines, pastoralists and miners, UNSW Press,
1973.
11 Reynolds, H., This Whispering in Our Hearts Revisited, NewSouth Publishing, UNSW Press,
Sydney, 2018, pp. 228–9; Korff, J., ‘Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech’, Creative Spirits, 20
November 2018, <www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/paul-keatings-redfern-
speech>.
12 Johns, G., ‘The poverty of Aboriginal self-determination’, in G. Johns (ed.), Waking Up to
Dreamtime, pp. 20–45; Howson, P., ‘Land rights: The next battleground’, Quadrant, 2005, 417:
24–9; McDonnell, J., ‘Land rights and Aboriginal development’, Quadrant, 2005, 417: 30–3;
 Hughes, H. and Warin, J., A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote
Communities, Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney, 2005.
13 Johnston, E., National Report, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 5 vols,
AGPS, Canberra, 1991; Cuneen, C., The Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody:
An overview of its establishment, findings and outcomes, ATSIC, Canberra, 1997; Statistics from
ATSIC <www.atsic.gov.au>, Australian Institute of Criminology <www.aic.gov.au> and
Australian Bureau of Statistics <www.abs.gov.au>; SMH, 21 February 2004; re. car crashes, data
are from Western Australia in 1999: The West Australian, 19 March 1999; Toohey, P., Last
Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention, Quarterly Essay 30, 2008, p. 14.
14 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Reconciliation: Australia’s Challenge, Commonwealth of
Australia, 2000, pp. 109–14.
15 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Reconciliation: Australia’s Challenge, Commonwealth of
Australia, December 2000.
16 Weekend Australian, 9 December 2000, p. 4.
17 Newspoll, Saulwick and Muller, 2000; Mackay, H., ‘Public opinion on Reconciliation’, in
Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation, pp. 33–52, esp. pp. 39–40.
18 Scott, E., ‘A personal reconciliation journey’, in Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation, pp. 18–24; SMH,
22 May 2000, p. 2.
19 Dodson, M., First annual report of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social
Justice Commissioner, HREOC, AGPS, Canberra, 1993; Ridgeway, A., ‘An impasse or a
relationship in the making?’ in Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation, pp. 12–17, esp. p. 14.
20 Dodson, First annual report, p. 19.
21 Clark, G., reported in SMH, 29 May 2000, p. 17.
22 Mansell, M., quoted in ‘Trouble among the tribes’, SMH, 8 June 2000.
23 SMH, 30 May 2000, 6 June 2000.
24 Weekend Australian, 9 December 2000, p. 4; Brennan, S., Behrendt, L., Strelein, L. and
Williams, G., Treaty, Federation Press, Sydney, 2005.
25 Jull, P., ‘Embracing new voices: Reconciliation in Canada’, in Grattan (ed.), Reconciliation, pp.
220–7; SMH, 22 May 2000, p. 19; re. Mohawks, SMH, 12 May 2001, p. 22; Flanagan, T.,
‘Aboriginal orthodoxy in Canada’, in Johns (ed.), Waking Up to Dreamtime, pp. 1–19, esp. pp.
6–7, 16–17.
26 Australian, 19 February 2001; re. marrying out, Peterson, N. and Taylor, J., ‘Aboriginal
intermarriage and economic status in Western New South Wales’, People and Places, 2002,
10(4): 11–16; Heard, G., Burrell, B. and Khoo, S.E., ‘Intermarriage between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians’, People and Places, 2009, 17(1): pp. 1–11.
27 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act 1989.
28 SMH, 15 August, 21 August 2000; Weekend Australian, 5 August 2000; Australian, 6 January,
21 February 2001; Squires, N., ‘Shameful secret in the shadow of Uluru’, Daily Telegraph, 13
August 2005.
29 Trudgen, R.I., Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, Aboriginal Resource and Development
Services, Darwin, 2000, pp. 239–44.
30 Information from < www.bp.com.au/news_information/press_releases/opal.pdf>.
31 Pearson, N., quoted in B. Robertson, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on
Violence Report, Gumurri Centre, Griffith University, Brisbane, 1999, p. 71.
32 Ibid., pp. xxviii, 5, 65, 147; re. heroin, SMH, 17 May 2004.
33 Robertson, ATSI (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Women’s Task Force on Violence Report,
pp. 30–1.
34 SMH, 17 February, 17 May 2004, Apter, 2004; Australian National Council on Drugs, The
harmful use of alcohol in Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander communites, 2012, Submission
94, attachment 2, <www.nidac.org.au>.
35 <www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/commission-general/june-oscar-ao-aboriginal-and-torres-
strait-islander-social-justice>
36 Robertson, ATSI Women’s Task Force on Violence Report, 1999, p. 91.
37 Trudgen, Why Warriors, p. 174; re. Christianity see N. Peterson et al., ‘Social and cultural life’,
in W. Arthur and F. Morphy (eds), Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia, Macquarie Press,
Sydney, 2005, pp. 88–107, esp. pp. 101–7.
38 Robertson, ibid., p. x.
39 Pearson, N., Our Right to Take Responsibility, Discussion Paper, Noel Pearson and associates,
Trinity Beach, Qld, 1999; Pearson, N., ‘Light on the Hill’, Ben Chifley Lecture, Bathurst, NSW,
2000; SMH, 16 August, 19 August, 25 August, 24 October 2000, 6 July 2002; Australian, 7
August 2002; Pearson, quoted in Weekend Australian, 30 October 2004.
40 Chaney, F., quoted in ‘Lessons from Redfern can be put to use’, SMH, 23 February 2004;
Australian, 20 April 2004.
41 ‘Best of both worlds: mixed marriages blooming’, SMH, 6 April 2009.
42 SMH, 18 August 2000.
43 Robertson, ATSI Women’s Task Force on Violence Report, p. viii.
44 Weekend Australian, 4 December 2004; re. mutual obligation see J. McDonnell, ‘Land rights and
Aboriginal development’, Quadrant, 2005, 417: 30–3.
45 Toohey, P. Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention, Quarterly Essay 30,
2008, p. 17.
46 Ibid., p. 18.
47 Reynolds, H., This Whispering in our Hearts Revisited, NewSouth Publishing, 2018, pp. 231–2.
48 Toohey, p. 57.
49 Ibid., pp. 90–1.
50 Ibid., pp. 79, 88.
51 <https://closingthegap.pmc.gov.au/joint-council>; Jordan, K., Better Than Welfare? Work and
Livelihoods for Indigenous Australians After CDEP, ANU E PRESS, 2016; Altman, J., ‘Making
a Living Differently’, Inside Story, December 2016, <www.insidestory.org.au>.
52 Fred Hollows Foundation, <www.hollows.org>.
53 Cane, S., Pila Nguru: The Spinifex people, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2002, pp.
158, 203, 215–21, 217.
54 Treaty (song) <en.wikipedia.org>.
55 Yothu Yindi Foundation, <www.yyf.com.au>; McKenna, M., Moment of Truth: History and
Australia’s Future, 2018, Quarterly Essay 69, p. 5.
56 <www.theguardian.com/sport/adam-goodes>, 10 September 2017.
57 Pearson, N. ‘Diversity in unity best balm for our conflicting identities’, The Weekend Australian,
26–27 January 2019, p. 24.
58 AIATSIS, The Little Red Yellow Black Book: An introduction to Indigenous Australia,
Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 4th edn, 2018, p. 173;
<https:antar.org.au/campaigns/redfern-statement>.
59 <www.yyf.com.au>; McKenna, M., Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s Future, Quarterly
Essay 69, 2018, p. 5.
60 <www.referendumcouncil.org.au>.
61 Pearson, N, ‘Betrayal’, <www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/december/1512046800/noel-
pearson>.
62 O’Donoghue, L., ‘We should have kept ATSIC’, The Australian, 22 October 2009; Grant, S., ‘A
hand up not a handout the way to close the gap’, SMH, 16 February 2019.
63 <www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/july/1498831200/megan-davis/walk-two-worlds>.
64 Flanagan, R., <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/05/the-world-is-being-undone-
before-us-if-we-do-not-reimagine-australia-we-will-be-undone-too>, 4 August 2018.
65 Galarrwuy Yunupingu, ‘Rom Watangu: The Law of the Land’, The Monthly, July 2016, pp. 18–
29, <www.themonthly.com.au/author/galarrwuy-yunupingu>.
66 Grant, S., Talking to My Country, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2016; Grant, S., ‘A hand up not a
handout the way to close the gap’, SMH, 16 February 2019.
67 Statement to the House of Representatives—Closing the Gap 2019.
(www.pm.gov.au/media/statement-house-representatives-closing-gap-2019).

Box 15—The development of Aboriginal art (pp. 288–90)

a Caruana, W. [1987], Aboriginal Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 2003; Morphy, H., Ancestral
Connections: Art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge, Chicago University Press, Chicago,
1991; Morphy, H., Aboriginal Art, Phaidon, London, 1998; Sutton, P. (ed.), Dreamings: The art
of Aboriginal Australia, Viking, Penguin, Ringwood, 1988; Kleinert, S. and Neale, M. (eds), The
Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, OUP, Melbourne, 2000.
b Batty, J.D., Namatjira: Wanderer between two worlds, Hodder & Stoughton, Melbourne, 1963,
pp. 19–32.
c French, A., Seeing the Centre: The art of Albert Namatjira, 1902–1959, NGA, 2002, pp. 2–12,
18–21.
d Edwards, R. and Guerin, B., Aboriginal Bark Paintings, Rigby, Adelaide, 1969.
e Quoted from Yunupingu, G., ‘The black/white conflict’, in W. Caruana (ed.), Windows on the
Dreaming, NGA, Ellsyd Press, Sydney, 1989, p. 14.
f Bardon, G., Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert, McPhee Gribble, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic,
1991; Stokes, D., Desert Dreamings, Heinemann Library, Reed, Melbourne, 1997; Mahood, K.,
‘The artistic revival at Papunya Tjupi Arts’, The Monthly, October 2018,
<www.themonthly.com.au>.

Box 16—Schooling (pp. 324–6)

a Harris, S., Twoway Aboriginal Schooling: Education and cultural survival, ASP, 1990, pp. 1, 15,
55–8.
b Trudgen, Why Warriors, pp. 44–5, 178.
c Ibid., p. 122; NT Department of Education, Learning Lessons: An independent review of
indigenous education in the Northern Territory, Darwin, 1999, p. 2.
d <strongersmarter.com.au/> the State of Queensland, Dept. of the Premier and Cabinet, 2005.
e Cherbourg State School, <www.cherbourgss.eq.edu.au>.
 FURTHER READING

AIATSIS with Bruce Pascoe, The Little Red Yellow Black Book: An
introduction to indigenous Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press,
Canberra, 2018 (4th Edition).
Arthur, W. and Morphy, F. (eds), Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia,
Macquarie Library, Sydney, 2005.
Beckett, J.R., Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and colonialism, CUP, 1987.
Berndt, R.M. and C.H., The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal
Traditional Life—Past and Present, ASP, 1988.
Berndt, R.M. and C.H., The Speaking Land: Myth and story in Aboriginal
Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1989.
Blainey, G., Triumph of the Nomads, Macmillan, Sydney, [1975] 1988.
Broome, R., Aboriginal Australians: Black responses to white dominance,
A&U, [1982] 1994.
Burenhult, G. (ed.), The First Humans: Human origins and history to
10,000 BC, UQP, 1993.
Cane, S., Pila Nguru: The Spinifex People, Fremantle Arts Centre Press,
Fremantle, 2002.
Cane, S., First Footprints: The epic story of the First Australians, A&U,
2013.
Caruana, W., Aboriginal Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993.
Chaloupka, G., Journey in Time, Reed, Sydney, 1993.
Charlesworth, M., Dussart, F. and Morphy, H. (eds), Aboriginal Religions in
Australia: An anthology of recent writings, Ashgate, Aldershot, Hants,
England, 2005.
Chatwin, B., Songlines, Jonathan Cape, London, 1987.
Clarke, P., Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal
landscape, A&U, 2003.
Clendinnen, I., Dancing with Strangers, Text, Melbourne, 2003.
David, B., Tacon, P.S.C., Delannoy, J-J. and Geneste, J-M., (eds), The
Archaeology of Rock Art in Western Arnhem Land, Australia, Terra
Australia 47, ANU Press, Canberra, 2017.
Diamond, J., Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the
last 13,000 years, Chatto & Windus, London, 1997.
Edwards, W.H. (ed.), Traditional Aboriginal Society, Macmillan,
Melbourne, [1987] 1998.
Edwards, W.H., An Introduction to Aboriginal Societies, Social Science
Press, Wentworth Falls, NSW, [1988] 2004.
Elkin, A.P., The Australian Aborigines: How to understand them, A&R,
[1938] 1954.
Flood, J., Rockart of the Dreamtime, J.B. Books, Adelaide, 1997.
Flood, J., The Riches of Ancient Australia, UQP, [1990] 1999.
Flood, J., Archaeology of the Dreamtime, J.B. Books, Adelaide [1983],
2010 (7th edition).
Gammage, B., The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made
Australia, A&U, 2012.
Grant, S., Talking to My Country, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2016.
Grant, S., The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming, Quarterly
Essay 64, 2016.
Grattan, M. (ed.), Reconciliation, Black Inc., Bookman Press, Melbourne,
2000.
Griffiths, B., Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, Black
Inc., Melbourne, 2018.
Hallam, S., Fire and Hearth: A study of Aboriginal usage and European
usurpation in southwestern Australia, AIAS, 1975.
Harney, B. (Yidumduma) and Wositsky, J., Born Under the Paperbark Tree:
A man’s life, ABC Books, Sydney, 1996.
Harris, J., One Blood: 200 years of Aboriginal encounter with Christianity
—A story of hope, Albatross, Sutherland, NSW, 1990.
Harris, S., Twoway Aboriginal schooling: Education and cultural survival,
ASP, 1990.
Hilliard, W., The People in Between: The Pitjantjatjara People of
Ernabella, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1968.
Hiscock, P., Archaeology of Ancient Australia, Routledge, London, 2008.
Horton, D. (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, AIATSIS, 1994.
Isaacs, J., Aboriginal Bush Food and Herbal Medicine, Weldon, Sydney,
1987.
Isaacs, J. (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Music, Aboriginal Artists Agency,
Sydney, 1979.
Isaacs, J. (ed.), Australian Dreaming: 40,000 years of Aboriginal history,
Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1980.
Jupp, J. (ed.), The Australian People: An encyclopedia of the nation, its
people and their origins, CUP, [1988] 2001.
Kauffman, P., Travelling Aboriginal Australia: Discovery and
reconciliation, Hyland House, Melbourne, 2000.
Keefe, K., Paddy’s Road: Life stories of Patrick Dodson, ASP, 2003.
Keen, I., Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the threshold of
colonisation, OUP, 2004.
Langton, M., Welcome to Country: A Travel Guide to Indigenous Australia,
Hardie Grant Travel, Melbourne, 2018.
Latz, P., Bushfires and Bushtucker: Aboriginal plant use in Central
Australia, IAD Press, Alice Springs, 1995.
Layton, R., Australian Rockart: A new synthesis, CUP, 1992.
Maddock, K., The Australian Aborigines: A portrait of their society,
Penguin, Melbourne, [1972] 1982.
McGrath, A., ‘Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in cattle country, A&U,
1987.
Morgan, S., My Place, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1987.
Morphy, H., Aboriginal Art, Phaidon Press, London, 1998.
Muecke, S. and Shoemaker, A., Aboriginal Australians: First Nations of an
ancient continent, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004.
Mulvaney, D.J., Encounters in Space: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians
1606–1985, UQP, 1989.
Mulvaney, D.J. and Kamminga, J., Prehistory of Australia, A&U, 1999.
Neale, M. (ed.), Songlines: tracking the Seven Sisters, National Museum of
Australia Press, Canberra, 2017.
Neidjie, B., Story about Feeling, Magabala Books, Broome, 1989.
Neidjie, B., Davis, S. and Fox, A., Kakadu Man: Bill Neidjie, Mybrood,
NSW, 1985.
Neill, R., White Out: How politics is killing black Australia, A&U, 2002.
Pilkington, D. (Nugi Garimara), Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, UQP,
1996.
Randall, B., Songman: The story of an Aboriginal Elder of Uluru, ABC
Books, Sydney, 2003.
Reed, A.W., An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Life, Reed, Sydney,
[1969] 1974.
Reynolds, H., The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, Melbourne, [1981]
1995.
Reynolds, H., This Whispering in Our Hearts Revisited, NewSouth
Publishing, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2018.
Rose, D.B., Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape
and wilderness, AHC, 1996.
Stanner, W.E.H., White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973, ANU
Press, Canberra, 1979.
Taylor, R., Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island,
Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA, 2002.
Toohey, P., ‘Last Drinks: The impact of the Northern Territory
Intervention’, Quarterly Essay 30, 2008.
Trudgen, R.I., Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, Aboriginal Resource and
Development Services, Darwin, 2000.
 INDEX

Abbie, Andrew 144, 157

Abbott, Tony 320
Aboriginal Advancement League 279
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) 296–7, 333
Aboriginal Development Commission (ADC) 296
Aboriginal flag 294
Aboriginal Land Fund Commission 295
Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act (1976) 263, 295
Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (NSW) 297
Aboriginal Lands Trust (WA) (1972) 261
Aboriginal Provisional Government 305–6
Aboriginal Tent Embassy (1972) 294
Aboriginality 276, 293, 326
Aborigines Progressive Association (NSW) 258
Aborigines Protection Society, London (1838) 245
abortion 142–3
absorption policy 273–5
activism 334
Africa 21, 24, 204, 218, 219, 223, 328, 319
human evolution 206–12
The Age 150
agriculture 26, 29, 30, 35, 69, 148
Ainu 165
Aird, Wesley 315
alcohol 8, 34, 54–5, 70, 111, 267–8, 306–9, 310–16
alcoholism 308–9
 ban 267
endemic cider gum 111
stations ban on 255
Alice Springs (NT) 129, 136, 138, 163, 189, 247, 265, 268, 280, 283, 288–
9, 291, 303, 307, 315, 321
Allen, Harry 87, 217
Altman, Jon 27
anarchy 312
Ancestral Beings 21, 28, 30, 85, 89, 162–8, 171, 177, 188, 233
ancient disease 145–6
Andaman Islands 234
Anglo-Australians xx
animal domestication 26–7
animals, see fauna
animism 165–6
annexation 42
anthropological museums 269
anthropology xiv, 163
Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society 273
Apology (2008) 318
apology for past injustices 285, 304
appearance see physical characteristics
Appin Massacre (NSW) 70
Arabanoo 48–9, 54, 55, 59
archaeological sites 212, 217–22, 227, 231, 298–9
archaeology 218, 297
arid zone 35, 226
Arnhem Land 10–11, 26–8, 35
fisherman 88
peace-making ceremony 194
population drift 268–9
smallpox 152–3
Arnhem Landers 10, 26, 32
Arrernte (Arunta and Aranda) people 157, 166, 171, 174–5, 193, 246–7,
294
arson 66
art 288–90
 painting see painting
rock art see rock art
artefacts
baked microlith 218
‘churinga’ 183
footprints 221
new 233–5
pointing bones 175–6
protection 298–9
stone 212–13, 218–19, 220, 231, 298
Tasmanian 86–7
‘tjuringa’ 183
Arthur, Governor 102–4, 106–7, 111
Asia 16, 26, 31, 147, 148, 159, 170, 204–12, 215, 218, 234, 328
assimilation policy 243, 257–9, 275–6, 286
see also ‘stolen generations’
Atherton Tableland (Qld) 89
atrocities 93, 129, 141, 284
Attenbrow, Val 234
Attwood, Bain 137
Australia
first human entry 214–15
map viii–ix
settlement 216–19
Australia Day 329
Australia Felix 239–40
Australian Aborigines League (Vic) 258
Australian Aborigines Progressive Association (NSW) 257–8
Australian Football League (AFL) 328
Australian Heritage Commission xv, 189, 299
Australian Post-War, Reconstruction and Democratic Rights Referendum
292
Awabakal, the 62, 244
axes 59, 67, 79, 119, 219, 247, 278
Ayers Rock see Uluru

babies 64, 110, 134, 142–3, 178–9, 184, 233, 250–1, 280, 326
 infanticide 142
mixed-race 55, 280
spirit babies 178
bamboo 16, 67, 169, 170, 215
bands see social organisation
Baneelon (Bennelong) 47
Bangai 58
Bangarra Dance Theatre 338
Bangerang, the 127, 143
Bangladesh 154
Banks, Joseph 11–20, 25, 37, 41
Barangaroo 59
Bardi people 6, 7
Barkindji, the 158
Barrineans 222
barter see trading
Barunga Statement 298
Basedow, Herbert 157, 179
baskets 76, 79, 92, 180
Bass, George 94
Bates, Daisy 143–4, 253
Bathurst Times 122
Batman, John 113
Batman’s treaty 113–15
Batterbee, Rex 288
Baudin, Nicolas 74
Bay of Fires (Tas) 85
beards 5–6
beauty 186
Beazley, Kim (senior) 292
Bednarik, Robert 215
‘beer tickets’ 267
begging 53, 244, 254
beliefs
Rainbow Serpent 172, 233
reincarnation 163
spiritual conception 163
 sun and moon 164–5
Tasmanian 85–6
totems 163, 165–6
Bells Falls Gorge massacre myth 122–3
Benedictine mission at Norcia (WA) 245
Bennelong 50–8, 59–60, 161
betrothal 141, 184
bicentenary protest (1988) 298–9
Bigon 58, 161
Birdsell, Joseph 222
birth 55, 141–2, 165–6, 178–9, 182, 233, 283
black armband historians xii, 304
‘Black Line’ 103–4
Blacktown (‘Black Town’) 70
Blainey, Geoffrey xii
Bleakley, John William 274
‘bleeding hearts’ 264
blindness 5, 153, 155, 157, 323
blood groups 209–11
Blue Mountains 63, 117
body decoration 64–5, 182, 187
bone tools 87, 212, 227, 231
bone-pointing 176
Bonwick, James 96
boomerangs 68–9
Booroloola (NT) 130
Boorong (Abaroo) 49
bosses 179, 190, 255, 276
Botany Bay 12, 14, 17, 25, 37–9, 41, 43–7, 56, 68, 149, 244
Bourke, Governor 114
Bourke, Maz xv
bow and arrow 16
Bowdler, Sandra 80
Bowen, John 94–5
Bowler, Jim 219–20
Bradley, William 44
Bradshaw paintings 235
Brennan, Frank 301
bride service 181
Bringing Them Home report 276–7, 280, 284–6
Brisbane, Governor 121
Briscoe, Gordon 158
British Colonial Office 119
Broken Bay 60, 67, 70
Brooks, Fred 136
Broome, Richard 125–6, 264
Brough, Mal 317, 319
Broughton, Archdeacon (later Bishop) 248
1830 inquiry into violence towards Tasmanians 93, 95–6
Brown, Peter 206
Bruny Island 94, 109
Bryson, Bill 265
Buckley, William 115, 139–41
Budj Bim volcano (Vic) 239
Bulbeck, David 211
bullroarer 183
Bungaree
circumnavigation of Australia 67
settlement attempt 69–70
Bunyip 171
burial
grounds 29, 93, 151, 177, 222, 299
methods 189
Mungo Man, of 220
rituals 271, 298
burning see fire
bush medicine 177–8
bushrangers 98, 104, 128
Butlin, Noel 34–5, 150

Cadigal people 49
Cairns 32
Calder, James 100
Caldwell, Bishop 238
camels 272, 283
Campbell, Judy 152, 155
Canada 306
Canberra 69, 124, 127, 150, 153, 217, 288, 291, 294, 298, 303, 317, 320,
339
Cane, Scott 266–7, 323–6
canoes 13, 18, 192–3, 199, 213, 215–16, 232
see also watercraft
Maori 80
Cape Grim 101–2
Cape Keerweer 2
Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership 314
Cape York Peninsula 2, 191, 195, 235
Carmichael, Beryl 277
Carpentarians 222
Carstensz, Jan 2–4
casualty rates 125–9
cattle, cattle-spearing 70, 97, 114, 120, 125, 131, 134, 138, 179, 246, 253,
254, 256, 260–4, 270, 298
Caucasians 210
census 108, 198
ceremonial grounds 197
ceremonies 187
food 196–7
funerals 188–9
hunting 214
increase 187–8
initiation 62, 85, 181–3
marriage 185–6
peace-making 194
rain-making 188
Chaney, Fred 314
charities 279
Cherry-Garrard, Apsley xiii
childbirth 142–3, 178
children
deprivation of 145
 education 180–1
fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) 309–11
games 180
infant mortality 143
infanticide 142–3
initiation 181–3
medical examinations 320
mixed-race orphans 271
school 69
toys 180
traditional life 178–81
victims of violence, as 60, 311–18
China and Chinese 8, 21, 28, 117, 127, 199, 207, 212, 221, 272
Christianity 69, 109, 138, 164, 200, 244, 247, 250, 312, 324
cicatrices 15
ciguatera poisoning 88
circles (in art) 84, 143, 183, 213, 231, 236, 290
Circular Quay (‘Warran’) 41
circumcision 183, 261
citizenship 267
clan-based reserves 269
clap sticks 62, 64, 68, 171–2
Clark, Geoff 305–6
Clark, George 151
Clark, Ian 126
Clark, Robert 82
Clarkson, Chris 217, 218
Cleland, John 151
climate change 211, 227, 232–3, 241 global 203–4
Cloggs Cave 227, 231
Closing The Gap 321–3, 335–6
clothing 78
clubs 16, 58, 61, 68, 79, 95, 99, 146, 194, 228, 292
coastal people 88, 145, 210
Cobourg Peninsula 152–3, 307
coconut trees, absence of 32–3
coexistence 97–8
Colbee 50–3, 56, 70
Colebrook Home (SA) 279
Collins, David 39, 44, 46, 47, 53–4, 57–8, 94, 161
colonisation
British expansion 63
circumnavigation of Australia 67
conflict 47–8
culture clash 69–71
first year 44–6
hunger and kidnapping 50–1
land conflict 63–7
Lapérouse 43–4
legal position 67
new arrivals 38–43
Phillip’s spearing 51–3
primary motivation 37–8
reliance on settlers 53–5
settlement of Australia 118
smallpox epidemic 48–9
spiritual life 61–2
violence 55–9
winter food shortages 46–7
women, treatment of 59–61
‘coming in’ 53–5, 106
Committee for the Defence of Native Rights (WA) 260
‘common land’ 23, 24, 35
common law 42, 300, 330
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
267–8
communal living 6
crowding 146
new diseases 271
communication problems 113
communities, traditional 62, 64, 176, 177, 179, 183, 191, 252
Community Development Program (CDP) 320
conflict, interracial 63, 273
congenital defects 77
Coniston massacre (NT) 136–7
Connor, John 131
consensus 19–20
conservatism 30–1
continental shelf 206, 215
convicts
flogging 59
grant of land to 63
punishments 55
transportation 37
Cook, Captain James 11–20, 24–5, 41, 88, 137–8
Cook, Cecil 274
cooking methods 195–6
Cooktown (Qld) 14, 76
Cooma (NSW) 153, 156
Cooper, William 243, 258
Coranderrk reserve (Vic) 270–2
Coronation Hill mining (NT) 299
corroboree 62, 64–5
Council for Aboriginal Affairs 293
Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) 303–5
‘country’ 162
cremation 31, 62, 78
crime 248, 310, 324–5, 327
Croker Island mission 282
cross-cultural adoption 283
crystals (quartz or calcite) 172, 188
Cubillo, Lorna 285
Cubillo-Gunner case 285
Cullinlaringo massacre (Qld) 133–4
cultivation 25–30
cultural tourism 335
culture clash 69–72
Curr, Edward 126–7
customary law 184, 186, 191, 194, 319, 324
customs
death 62
 funerals 61
marriage 60
offering wives 41
wearing deceased kin bones 78

d’Entrecasteaux, Bruny 74
Daguragu station (NT) 263
Daly River 182, 187
Dampier, William 5–7
dancing 44, 62, 64, 98, 109, 141, 187, 188
Daniels, Dexter 262
Daringa 59
Darling River (NSW) 28, 151, 158, 210, 225
Darug, the (woods tribe) 63, 65
Darwin, Charles 18, 248–53
David, Bruno xvii
Davis, Jack 152–3
Davis, Megan 333
Dawes, William 54, 57
Day, David 150
Day of Mourning 258
de Torres, Luis Vaes 2
De Vattel, Emerich 23
deafness 155
death 62
death penalty 257
deaths in custody 302–3
Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) 294, 296
depopulation 138, 244
depression (economic) 271, 278
Derwent River (Tas) 94
desert people 266–7, 323–7
didgeridu 170–1
digging stick 185, 203
dillybags 167
dingo 41, 56, 58, 195, 233, 235, 266, 278
disadvantage 294, 304, 307, 316, 329, 333
discrimination 261, 265, 275, 291, 294
disease 34, 130, 144
ancient 145–7
arthritis 147
healers 144–5
influenza 82, 158
leprosy 159
malaria 159
measles 158
modern medicine, effect of 159, 253, 271
new 147–59, 253, 271
peridontal 29
pulmonary 109
sexually transmitted 109
smallpox 10, 48–9, 82, 123, 148–55
syphilis 10, 109
Tasmania, in 82–3, 109–11, 116
teeth 29
treponarid 157
tuberculosis 158–9
venereal 94, 155–7
yaws 157–8
dispossession 23, 38, 111, 130, 138–9, 266, 269, 313
Dixon, Robert 237
DNA 78, 207–9, 221, 225–6
DNA family trees 210–11
Dodson, Mick 280, 284–5, 305, 316–17
Dodson, Patrick 280, 316–17
‘dog licence’ 267
dogs 58, 79, 90–1
domestication 26–7, 30
Dooley-Bin-Bin 259–60
dormitory system 106
Dravidians 222, 225, 234
Dray (Drayduric) 106, 110
dreams 166, 168, 176
Dreamtime (Dreaming) 30–1, 86, 166–7
drought 29, 117, 120, 136, 228, 238, 278
drugs 307–10, 320
Duclesmeur, Chevalier 73–4
Dufresne, Marion 73–4
dugong 7, 192, 199
Duguid, Charles 268
Durack, Mary 254
Durack family (WA) 124
Durmugam 187
Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)) 2
Dutch explorers 2–4, 8
Dyirbal language 173
Dynamic figures 235

East Asia 207

East Indies 2, 10, 24
echidnas xvi, 97, 169, 195
economy 31, 313, 314, 335 traditional 194–202, 313
education see schooling
Edwards, Bill 164
eel traps 238–9
Elder, Bruce 122, 135
elders 189–91
Elkin, A.P. 257
employment 128, 200, 243, 244, 251, 258, 260, 261, 264, 276, 286, 294,
305, 319, 321–2, 328
Emu Bay people 100
emus 16, 26, 65, 109, 170, 175, 195, 196, 228
Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia 135
environmental impacts 226–31, 241
Eora people 38, 42–3, 47, 49, 51, 55, 59
equal opportunity 275
equal pay 261–5
equal rights 267
Ernabella mission (Pukatja) (SA) 143, 250–3, 254
ethnicity 306
Europe 94, 144, 147, 148, 150, 155, 207, 209, 213, 214, 264
European voyages of discovery 3
exemption certificates 267
exports 199
extinctions xiv, 226–8, 249
eyesight 5–6

famine 197
farms, European 65, 99, 120, 266
fauna 28, 84, 205, 235, 269
Federal Council for Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders
(FCAATSI) 261, 291–2
Federation (1901) 272–3, 333
Fenner, Frank 150–2
Ferguson, William 258
fertility 144
fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) 309–11
Field, Barron 71
fire
impact of 26, 42, 87, 229–31
making 76–7
stick 229
first encounters 2–36
First Fleet 38
First Nations xx, 331–4, 336
First Peoples Day 329
fishing methods 192–3
Fitzmaurice River 162
Fitzroy Crossing 264, 309, 310, 315
flag
Aboriginal xix, 198, 294, 303
British 42, 329
Flanagan, Richard 333
Flannery, Tim 228
flies 5–6
Flinders Island 107–9, 111
Flinders, Matthew 9, 67, 94
floods 117, 238, 240
Flores (Indonesia) 205–6
flying-foxes (fruit bats) 68
food 6, 14–15, 25–30
birds 196
Bogong moth 197, 238
coconut 32–3
colonists’ rations 51
cooking methods 195–6
desert regions 197
eel 238–9
European, preference for 53, 55, 99, 254–5
fish 46, 238
hunting/gathering 194–7
kangaroo 47
living larders 29
native 143–4, 195
plants 47
storage 239
taboos 87–9
water 197, 238
winter shortages 46–7
yams 65
Forrest River massacre (WA) 134–6
Fourteen Powers referendum 292
Fowell, Newton 44, 49
Framlingham reserve (Vic) 270–1
Fraser, Malcolm PM 295–6
Fraser family 133
Freedom Riders 291–4
Freeman, Cathy 305, 334
French explorers 43–4, 73–4
Friendly Mission (Tas) 106–7, 116
fringe dwellers 244, 255, 264
frontier violence 124–5, 130
Frost, Alan 25
Fuegians 19
‘full-blood’ 112, 274
Fuller, Doug 278
funerals 61, 188–9

Gagadju, the 167

gambling 264, 311, 320
games 180
Garden Island 45, 70
genetics 225–6
genocide xii, xiv, 116, 127, 130, 154, 156
cultural 283
question of 283–4
Genocide Convention 150, 284
Genyornis 226–7
Giari, Lupnga (Captain Major) 262–3
Gibbs, Chief Justice Harry 306
Gidjingali people 27, 229
Gillard, Julia 319
Gipps, Governor 132–3
Gippsland (Vic) 126, 153
Glynn, Freda 280
goldfields 130
Golson, Jack xv
gonorrhoea 155
Gonzal, Jean Etienne 8
Goodes, Adam 328–9
Goolagong-Cawley, Evonne 122
government policy
assimilation 243
integration 243
protection 243–8
government welfare, reliance on 262, 264–6
grains 28–9
Grant, Stan 333, 335
‘grave goods’ 222
grave-robbing 112–13
Great Sandy Desert 266
Green, Neville 136
Grellet-Tinner 226–7
Gresser, Percy 122
Grey, Earl 270
Gribble, Reverend 134, 135
Groote Eylandt (NT) 185
Grose, Major Francis 63
group size 21
Groves, Colin 224
Gsell, Bishop 247
Gulf of Carpentaria 9, 152, 202, 237
Gunner, Peter 285
Gurindji protest 262–3, 295

hair and hair style 78–9

‘half-caste’ see mixed-race Aborigines
Hancock, Sir Keith xvi
Hanson, Pauline 328
Harney, Bill (Yidumduma) 256, 281–2, 298
Harney, Dulcie 281–2
Harney, William E. 281
Harris, William 257
Hasluck, Paul 275
Hawke, Bob, PM 297–9
Hay, Frederick 134
healers 144–5
health 143–59
Heath, Sister Eileen 280
Hermannsburg mission (Ntaria) (NT) 246–7
Hiatt, Les 139
Hilliard, Winifred 251
Hiscock, Peter 234
‘History Wars’ xiii
HIV/AIDS 253
Hobbes, Thomas 25
‘hobbits’ 206
Hobbs, Doug 206
Hollows, Dr Fred 323
homicide 311
hominin 206
Homo erectus 204
Homo floresiensis 206
Homo sapiens 205, 206, 207, 220, 223
homogeneity 211, 225
honey 65, 79, 97, 195, 219
Hornet Bank massacre (Qld) 133
horticulture 26
hospitals 156, 245, 320
Houtman Abrolhos Islands 4
Howard, John, PM 301, 304–5, 317–18
Huggins, Jackie 329–30
Hughes, Robert 108
human evolution 204–9
human spread out of Africa 208–9, 211–12
human rights legislation 265
humanitarians 117, 243, 257, 260, 269, 292, 301
humpies 255
huner 27, 28, 46, 50, 53, 254, 277, 279
Hunter Island 80, 90
Hunter, John 42, 44, 49, 63–7
hunter-gatherers 194–7, 228
hunting methods 196–7
hunting rights 81, 114, 293
hygiene 111, 252

ice age 31, 79, 84, 86, 116, 161, 203, 208, 213–14, 221–2, 226, 231–2
illegitimacy 275
illiteracy 281, 325
Imperial Crown Land Sale Act (1842) 270
incest 183, 191, 311
inclusionist policy 272
income management 320–1
‘indigenous Australians’ xix
indigenous Land Fund 301
infant mortality 143, 271
infanticide 142–3
influenza 34, 82, 100, 110–11, 138, 147, 154, 158, 271
initiation 62, 85, 181–3
Inkamala, Mildred 321
inquests 191
integration policy 269–73, 287–91
internet 318, 324
interpreters 2, 50
Intervention 315, 317–21
Inuit people (Eskimos) 21, 165, 306
‘invasion’ 57, 119, 154, 329
Irbmangara massacre 193–4
isolation 13, 79, 87, 90, 110, 116, 210, 241, 324

Jansz, Willem 2
Java, Indonesia 2–4, 204, 221, 234
javelins 235
Jawoyn, the 299
Jedda 280
jobs see work
Johnson, Reverend Richard 244
Jones, Rhys xv, 27, 216–17, 229
Jorgensen, Jorgen 100

kadaitja shoes 176

Kakadu National Park (NT) 269
Kalumburu mission (WA) 246
Kamilaroi people 131–2
Kamminga, Joh 217
kangaroo 17, 91, 99, 167
beliefs 85
eating 76
giant 227
skins 90, 98
thread from 231
Kangaroo Island (SA) 89, 94
Keating, Paul, PM 301
Kefous, Keryn 34
Kelly, Ned 137–8
Kennedy, John F. 137–8
Kershaw, Peter 230
kidnapping 48
Kimber, Dick 138, 266
King, Governor 66–7, 94
King George III 37
King George V 258
King, Philip Gidley 39, 41, 44
king plates 70
kinship 42, 128, 181, 183–4, 187, 240, 271, 288, 290, 316, 324
Kirkby, John 133
Knightley, Philip 130, 135
‘Koori’ 125
Kow Swamp (Vic) 221–2
Kulin, the 139, 153
Kunapipi cult 187
Kunmunya mission (WA) 246
Kunoth-Monks, Rosalie 280–1
Kurnai of Gippsland 153
kya 205–7, 209, 210–15, 217–22, 226, 227, 230–2, 234–7, 240–1

Lacey, James 63
Lake Eyre 167
Lake Mungo (NSW) 219–21
Lake Tyers reserve (Vic) 272
land
conflict over 63–7
feelings for 161–3
grant 70
hereditary property 161
homelands 161–2
rights see land rights movement
land rights movement 262–4, 293–4, 297–302
Lang, G.S. 129
Lang, J.D. 248
Lang, Reverend John Dunmore 161–2
Langhorne, Reverend George 139
Langton, Marcia 130, 316, 321
language 17, 20, 54, 172–4, 237–8
Lanney family 107
Lapérouse, Jean-François de 43–4
law
Aboriginal Law 30, 165, 166, 168, 194, 250, 260, 261, 311
British 25, 55, 67, 121, 132
common law 42, 300, 330
customary 184, 186, 191, 194, 319, 324
enforcement 312, 315
federal 293, 317
martial 103–4, 121, 123
rule of law 25, 125
Western 191, 194, 260
law and order 191, 246
Layton, Bob 233
legal aid 312
legends 169
legislation 113, 264, 265, 272, 276, 292, 295, 299, 301, 331, 332
Leigh, Reverend Samuel 71
leisure 27
Lemkin, Raphael 284
life expectancy 143–4, 306–7
Lingiari, Vincent 263, 295
Link-Up (New South Wales) Aboriginal Corporation 284, 286
literacy 108, 250, 322, 324–5
Little Children are Sacred report 311, 317–18
Lock, Maria 69
Locke, John 23
Long, Michael 317
‘lost tribe’ 266
Lourandos, Harry 81, 238
Love, Robert 246
Lumbia 134–5
Lutheran converts 247
Mabo case 270, 299–300
Mabo, Eddie 299–300
Mabo Day 300
Macarthur, Elizabeth 54, 60
Macarthur, John 54
Macassans 8–11, 152–3, 273
Macaulay, Vincent 211
McConvell, Patrick 235, 237
McDonald, Jo 218
McEntire (convict) 55–6
McFarlane, Ian 102
McGrath, Ann 256
McKenna, Clancy 260
McLeod, Don 259–60
McLeod, Dora 285
McMahon, Sir William 293–4
McNickle, Howard 193
Macquarie, Lachlan 69–71, 119
magic 175–6
Mahroot 47, 63
Malbunka, Mavis 321
malnutrition 144
Maloga mission (Vic) 246
Manly Cove 41
Manne, Robert 285
Mansell, Michael 305–6
Maori 11, 14, 18, 22, 24, 71, 74, 169, 227, 228
Marco Polo 3
marijuana 308
Marika, Wandjuk 203
Marine Corps 55
marriage 183–7
mother-in-law avoidance 184, 187, 261
Tasmania, in 83–4
martial law 103–4, 121, 123
massacres 95–6, 101–2, 122–3, 130–7, 193–4
Maynard, Charles Frederick (Fred) 257–8
medicine
bush 177–8
men 174–5
Meehan, Betty 27
megafauna, extinction of 226–8
Melbourne Age 248
Melville, Henry 105
Merlan, Francesca 268
Meyrick, Henry 126
Miller, Gifford 226–7
missions 244–8, 277–8
Mitchell, Sir Thomas 28
mixed-race Aborigines 271–3, 276–86
monogamy 61, 83
Moran, Rod 135–6
Morrison, Scott 335
Morton, Nugget 137
Morwood, Michael 205, 206
moth hunting 238
Mugarinya Pastoral Company 261
Mulvaney, John xv
Mungo Man and Woman 219–20, 221–2
Munro, James 92–3
Murray family 124
Murray, George 136–7
Murray, Peter 228
Murrayians 145–6, 147, 222
music 85–6
Musquito 99
mutual obligation policy 316–17
Myall Creek massacre (NSW) 132–3
Mye, George 198, 224
myths 89, 176
Namatjira, Albert 247
names 179
Nanbaree 49, 51, 67
‘Narawuda’ 260
Narragingy 70
National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) 294–5
National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples 296, 329–30
National Constitutional Convention 330
National Indigenous Council 317
Native Institution, Parramatta 69
Native Police 128–9
native title 299–300
Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) 300
Native Title Amendment Act 1998 301
Nerre-Nerre-Warren reserve 254
Neville, Auber Octavius 274
New Guinea (Papua New Guinea) 35 ancient lineage 210–11
New South Wales 19–20
New Zealand 11
Ngarigo of the Snowy Mountains 153
‘noble savage’ 61, 73
Nomad Strelley Aboriginal community 261
nomadism 31–3, 239–41
Nomads Pty Ltd mining company 261
Norfolk Island 38, 51, 54, 63, 99
North Australian Workers Union (NAWU) (1965) 261
Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) 317–21

O’Connor, Sue 217

O’Donoghue, Lily 278–9
O’Donoghue, Lowitja 278–80, 296, 333
O’Donoghue, Tom 278–9
O’Loughlin, Justice 285
obituaries 189
Oppenheimer, Stephen 211, 223
opium 255
oral traditions 137–8, 169–72, 203
origins 203–41
orphans 271, 278
Oscar, June 309–11
Out of Africa theory 204, 206–10
outstations 269
Pacific Islanders 127, 195, 199, 207, 273
painting 64, 169, 212, 214, 289, 298 art see art
dot painting 290
Panaramittee style 231
Palaeolithic period 212–14
Palorchestes 227
Panaramittee art style 231
Pappin, Mary 221
Papua see New Guinea
Papunya (NT) xvi
Parkinson, Sydney 15
pastoral industry 254–64
pay 255–7, 259, 261–4
strikes 259–61
paternalism policy 246, 256
Paterson, William 63, 96
Patten, John 258
Patyegarang 54
Pearson, Noel 262, 308, 312–17, 329, 332
Pellekaan, van Holst, Sheila 210, 225
Pemulwuy 56, 66
Perkins, Charles 291–3, 296
Péron, François 74, 93–4
petrol-sniffing 252, 253, 307–8
Phillip, Arthur 38, 44, 45–8, 50, 51–3, 55, 63
England, return to 54, 63
punishment expedition 55–8
photographs 189
physical characteristics 5, 14–15, 78–9, 186, 222–5, 272
Pindan Mob 260–1
Pindan Proprietary Limited 260–1
Pinjarra, Battle of (WA) 131
pitcheri 202
Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act 1981 297
Plomley, Brian 105
Plunkett, John Hubert 132–3
Point Macleay mission (SA) 246, 270–1
pointing bones 175–6
police, Aboriginal 134, 252
polygyny 61, 184–5, 247
Poonindie reserve (SA) 270–1
population
1840s 50
density 33–5, 46, 81
pornography 319
Port Douglas Accord (2004) 316
Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) 41
Portuguese explorers 1–2
possums, possum skins 42, 65, 68, 79, 97, 112, 114, 119, 197, 229
poverty 266, 314, 325
prehistoric trauma 146–7
prehistory xx, 31, 215, 231
Price, Bess Nungarrayi 321
Prince Charles 186
Princess Diana 186
prison 107, 194, 302
prison officers 302
‘progressive’ 275, 286, 312
prostitution 99, 124, 244, 264
Aboriginal women 55
protection policy 243–53, 286
Protectors of Aborigines 60, 115, 126, 130, 245, 255, 257
punishments 53
duels 71, 138
payback 194
serious offences, for 191
sex and 187–7
traditional 59, 71, 191–4

quarries 90, 197

Queensland Commonwealth Games (2018) 328

race relations 44, 49, 61, 71, 113, 254

Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) 294
racism 328–9
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 34–5
‘Radical Centre’ 332
raids 66, 91–4, 120, 126, 134, 141, 176
Aboriginal raids on huts, farms, etc. 132
reprisal 60, 133
traditional Aboriginal 91
women, for 61, 91, 186, 194
rainbow, beliefs concerning 177
Rainbow Serpent 89, 149, 167, 172, 188, 233
rainforest 27, 87, 106, 173, 222, 229, 230
rain-making 172, 175, 188
Randall, Bob 282–3
Ranken, George 121
rape 93, 133, 191, 276, 311
Raukkan reserve (SA) 270
Raymond, Elsie 179
Read, Peter 284
reburial of human remains 220
reciprocity, traditional 141, 313, 316
reconciliation 49, 303–5, 329
Reconciliation Australia 314
Redd, Alan 225
Redfern (NSW) 320, 329
Redfern Speech 301–2
Redfern Statement 329, 330
referendum (1967) 258, 292–3
Referendum Council 329, 331–2
Regan, Denis 134
regionalisation 240
relations, interracial 44
religion 31, 62, 163, 164, 166, 181, 311
religious conservatism 30
remote communities 252, 308, 309, 311, 320, 321
removal of children 284
Renaissance 1
reparations 304
reserves, establishment of 269–72
resistance 12, 66, 92, 96, 124, 125, 129, 147
resurgence 334–6
revisionist historians xii, 57
Reynolds, Henry xii, 34, 127, 130, 135, 150
Ridgeway, Aden 209
rights, indigenous 314
Risdon Cove massacre 95–6
ritual see ceremonies
road fatalities 315
Roberts, Bert 206, 236
Roberts, David 122
Robertson, Boni 308–9, 312, 315–6
Robinson, George Augustus 80, 82, 86, 87, 91–3, 101–2, 106–7
rock art 213–14, 227, 233, 235–7 Tasmanian 84
rock-shelter 178, 189, 213, 217–19, 235
Rocky Cape Cave (Tas) 87, 88
romantic savage myth 316
Roper River (NT) 187, 262
Roughsey, Dick (Goobalathaldin) xiii, 247
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 18, 61, 73–4
Rowley, Charles 130, 135
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) 276, 301,
302–3
Rudd, Kevin 317–18
Ryan, Lyndall 105, 130, 132

sacred artefacts 247

sacred sites 168, 190, 193, 293, 298, 311
Sacred Sites Authority 187
Sahul 211, 214, 218, 232
Sandy Desert 225
Sarra, Chris 325, 326
Saunders, Reg 259
Savage, James 276
schooling 324–6, 335
Schouten, Willem 24
Scott, Evelyn 305–6
sculpture 10, 89
sea level 86, 204, 211, 214, 217, 232, 236
sealers 90–4
sealing, Aboriginal 82, 87, 90, 94
seals 63, 79, 80, 87, 90, 92, 97, 108
Second World War 157, 200, 256, 258, 259, 260, 273, 275, 279
sedentism 145
segregation policy 268–9
self-determination 291, 294–7
self-identification 306
self-management 251, 291, 294–7
self-sufficiency 18, 101, 182
settlement 216–19, 231–2
sex
marriage and 183–7
punishment and 186–7
sexual abuse of children 311, 317
sexual relations 186–7
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) 109, 155
shamans 177
shared responsibility policy 316
sharing ethic 256
sheep 6, 29, 55, 97, 101, 108–9, 114, 120, 125, 278
shellfish gathering 147
shields 16–17, 141
Shorten, Bill 332
shyness, timidity 7
Sister Kate’s Orphanage (WA) 277
‘sit-down money’ 265
sites, archaeological 69, 231
skin cloaks, capes and rugs 47, 86, 231
skin colour 222–3
skin names 179, 255
skin-working 87
Slack, Michael 234
slavery 94, 113, 130, 154
smallpox 10, 48–9, 82, 123, 148–55
Smith, Mike 217
smoke from Aboriginal burning 14, 34, 117, 214
smoke signals 4, 12, 197
smoking ceremonies 182
smoking, rate of 322
Snowy Mountains 153, 156, 197, 232, 238
Social Darwinism 86, 249–53
social engineering 276
social justice 305
social organisation 181
bands and tribes 21–2, 46, 51, 81, 181
egalitarian 190–1
family 181
hearth group 80
kinship laws 183–7
marriage arrangements 183–5
Tasmanian 80–1
social security system 261, 262, 278
Social Welfare Ordinance (1964) 268
Solander, Daniel 12
songlines 167–9
songmen and songwomen 168
songs and singing 10, 86, 168, 169, 171–2, 197
sorcerers 175–6
sorcery 62, 141, 175–6, 193, 271, 327
South Sea Islanders 71, 159, 273
sovereignty 23
Spanish explorers 1–2, 93
spear shields 16–17
spear-thrower 234–5
spears 13, 15–17, 56, 79, 99, 231, 234–5
specialisation of labour 196
Spencer, Walter Baldwin 163, 165, 166
Spice Islands 2
spider’s web 174, 178, 182
Spinifex people 323–7
spirits 13, 42, 165, 174, 177, 188, 189, 183
see also Ancestral Beings
spirituality 61–2, 163–5
sport 328
racism and 328
squatters 125, 126, 133, 270
St Jack, James 134
Stanner, Bill 130, 162, 164, 257, 283
stars, beliefs concerning 85
starvation 47, 51, 130, 143, 278
Statement from the Heart (2017) 330–1
reaction to 331–4
Sthenurus 227
Stirling, Edward 151
stockmen 254
‘stolen generations’ 276–86
Stone, Tim 222
stone houses 239–40
stone tools see tools
Stoneking, Mark 225
storage of food 30
Strehlow, Carl 247
Strehlow, Ted 247
strikes 259–61
string, thread 176, 180
Stringer, Chris 207
Strong and Smart program 326
student movement 291–4
Sturt, Charles 151
substance abuse 248, 269, 312, 313, 325
see also alcohol, drugs, petrol-sniffing
suicide 311
Sulawesi (Celebes) 8, 9, 152, 234
sun 54, 62, 78, 164, 294
Sundaland 204
Sutton, Peter xvi, 195
Suttor, George 122, 123
Suttor, William 122
sweethearts 171, 186
Sydney, Lord 37
Sydney basin
breaking out from 117–18
Sydney Cove 42
Sydney Gazette 120, 121
Sydney Harbour 41, 46, 68, 70, 117, 232
Sydney region 40
Sydney Town 49, 70
Sydney 2000 Olympic Games 305, 328, 334
syphilis 10, 147, 154–7
taboo 87–9, 121
Tahitians 11, 18
Tarner 85
Tasman, Abel 4
Tasman Peninsula (Tas) 104
Tasmania
see also Van Diemen’s Land
Bay of Fires 85
French expeditions 73–4
Hunter Island 80, 90
map 75
oldest site 86
Tasmanian Aborigines
artefacts 86–7
Batman’s treaty 113–15
beliefs 85–6
Cape Grim massacre 101–2
clothing 78, 86
coexistence 97–8
colonists, arrival of 94–6
depopulation 107–11
disease 82–3, 107–11, 116
fish taboo 87–9
food 97, 99
 free settlers 98–101
Friendly Mission 106–7, 116
marriage 83–4
martial law and ‘Black Line’ 103–6
population 81–3
reserves 102–3
rock art 84
sealers and whalers, impact of 90–4
social organisation 80–1
society 77–80
survival 89–90
trading women 91–3, 97
treaties, question of 111–15
vocabularies 237
women, violence towards 83–4, 93–4
Tasmanian tiger 109
tattooing 14, 182
tax 70, 297, 315
tea 90, 94, 97, 99, 108, 109, 137, 162
The Telegraph 274
Tench, Watkin 38–9, 44, 46, 50–1, 57
terminology xix–xx
Terra Australis Incognita 1
terra nullius 23–5, 299
territoriality, tribal 233, 240
theft 59
Thomas, Harold 294
Thomas, William 254
Thompson, George 53
Thomson, Donald 257–8, 268, 283
Thorne, Alan 220, 221–2
Threlkeld, Reverend Lancelot 121–2, 244
Thursday Island (Waiben) (Qld) 200
thylacine 109, 227, 236
Tierra del Fuego 19, 77, 232
Timor 2, 205, 214, 215
Tindale, Norman 34
Tiwi people 215
Tjuntjuntjara settlement (WA) 326–7
tjuringa (churinga) (sacred boards) 183
tobacco 10, 55, 70, 90, 94, 97, 99, 107–9, 162, 247–8, 253, 255, 278
endemic (pitcheri) 202
Toohey, Paul 317–18
tools
awls 231–2
clubs 79
digging sticks 79, 231
ice-age craftsman’s toolkit 231
scrapers 231
‘small tool tradition’ 233–5
spears see spears
stone 212–13, 218–19, 220, 231, 298
tooth avulsion (removal) 6, 43, 62
Torres Strait Islanders 67, 198–201, 299–300
land rights 299–300
totemism 165–6
tourism 319, 335
trachoma 5, 144, 147, 323
tracks and trackers 128–9
trading 63, 67, 91, 98, 197–202, 253–4, 278
tradition
bush medicine 177–8
dreaming 166–7
land, attachment to 161–3
language 172–4
magic and sorcerers 175–6
medicine men 174–5
oral 169–72
shamans 177
songlines 167–9
spirituality 163–5
totemism and animism 165–6
women healers 177–8
traditional economic life
 economy 194–7
exchange networks 197–202
exchange route map 201
traditional life 178–94
ceremonies 187–9
childhood 178–81
choosing to live 266–7
desert people 266–7, 323–7
elders 189–91
initiation 181–3
law and order 191–4
marriage and sex 183–7
social organisation 181
traditional violence 138–41
traps 6, 29, 33, 87–8, 146, 192, 196, 221, 238–40
treaties
Batman’s treaty 113–15
possibility of 22–3, 111–13, 305–6
‘Treaty’ 327
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) 1
Treaty of Waitangi (1840) 22
tree-climbing 4
trepang (bêche-de-mer) 8–10
tri-hybrid theory 222–3
tribes see social organisation
truancy 325
Trudgen, Richard 307–8
Truganini 106–7, 109
trust funds 257
tuberculosis 34, 110, 142, 147, 154, 156, 158–9, 245, 271
tucker 108, 255–6
Tuckiar 257
Tupaia 11, 13, 14, 20
Turnbull, Malcolm 329–33
turtle 7, 192, 199, 230

Uluru (Ayers Rock) (NT) 167, 186, 187, 189, 283, 330
Uluru Statement 332–3
unemployment 264–7
United Nations 264
unmixed race 47
urban Aborigines 267, 283
utopia, concept of 27, 61
Utopia station 280
van Delft, Maarten 8
Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) 4, 24, 73, 109, 113, 156
venereal disease 94, 155–7
Vesteys 263
Veth, Peter 217–18
Victoria River district (NT) 137, 237
Victorian Aborigines Protection Act (1886) 272
vigilantes 132
violence 311–6
see also massacres
Voice, the 331–4
Volunteer Defence Corps 258–9
voting rights 259

wages 256–7, 259

Walgett (NSW) 292
Walimpirrnga Tjapaljarri 266
walkabout 255
Walker, Emily Jane 166
Walker, Kath (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) 287
wallabies 26, 86–7, 97, 108, 229
Wallace, Alfred 10, 205
Walsh, Grahame 236
Walyer 91–2, 100
Wandjina spirits 170, 236
Warangesda mission (NSW) 246
Wardaman people xvi, 21–2
warfare xii, 25, 100, 139, 141, 200, 233, 240
Warlpiri, the 136, 185
Warner, Lloyd 141
watercraft 7, 17–18, 215, 216
canoes 13, 18
Tasmanian 79–80
waterhole 21, 33, 152, 162, 167–8, 178, 188
Waterhouse, Henry 52
Waterloo Creek massacre (NSW) 131–2
Wathaurong, the 115, 139
Wattie Creek (NT) 263, 295
Wave Hill station (NT) 138, 263
weapons
mainland 79
Tasmanian 79
Webb, Stephen 145
welfare policy 280
welfare dependency 262, 313–14
Wells, Spencer 207
Wentworth, W.C. 96
West, John 96
Westaway, Mike xvi
Western Desert 5, 35, 136, 172, 173, 175, 182, 186, 188, 191, 193, 210,
266, 323
whalers see sealers and whalers
whaling industry 63, 253
White, Edward 95
White, John 38
White Australia Policy 272–3, 294
Whitlam, Gough, PM 263, 294–5
Wik, the 189, 195, 232, 239, 306
Wik Peoples v Queensland (1996) 300–2
Willandra Lakes region (NSW)
coexistence 227
World Heritage Area 220
Willemering 52–3
Williams, Elizabeth 146
Williams, Joy 285
Willis, H.A. 105
Wills, Horatio 133
Wills family 124
Wilson, Sir Ronald 280, 284–5
windbreak 327
Windradyne 120, 123
Windschuttle, Keith xii, 82, 105
Wiradjuri country
accommodation with settlers 123–4
conflict 119–21
martial law 121–3
Sydney basin, breaking out from 117–18
Wiradjuri country, white settlement into 117–19
witchetty grubs 195
women
food gathering 194–5
healers 177–8
physical characteristics 224
sexual exploitation of 254
trade of 91
violence towards 59–61, 83–4, 146–7, 186–7, 311–6
white, raids for 91
Wood, George 134–6
wooden artefacts 288
Woodward Aboriginal Land Rights Commission 295
woomera (spear-thrower) 16
Woorrady 84, 85
Worgan, George 44, 46
work 7, 253–4, 264–6
‘world enchantment’ 177
World Heritage Area 220–1
World War I 259
World War II 258–9
Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment (Tas) 82, 107–9, 244
Wyrie Swamp (SA) 69, 235

Y chromosome 207, 208, 225

Yandeyarra station (WA) 260–1
Yankunytjatjara, the 278, 279, 282, 283
Yemmerrawanyea 54
Yirrkala Reserve (NT) 262
Yolngu Boy 269
Yothu Yindi 281, 327
Yothu Yindi Foundation (YYF) 327–8
Young, Allan 154
Young, Maureen 277
Yuendumu (NT) 210, 308
Yunupingu, Galarrwuy 162, 281, 298, 327–8, 334
Yunupingu, Mandawuy 281, 327–8
Zygomaturus trilobus 227