In “Blood Meridian,” Cormac McCarthy’s great gothic novel, the character named the Judge asks his audience of killers the following question: “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?” Cormac McCarthy constantly has the “Kid,” the central character, question what the Judge says. For the Kid, the Judge is not to be believed, but instead he is to be feared and resisted, but only in ways that might maintain the Kid’s survival. This is what “the Kid” tries to do, but ultimately he fails. Born bereft in the bush, the Kid is lost between good and evil and knows only the simplest of truths. He cannot transcend his ignorance due to his ignorance, and at no stage has he access to any form of higher knowledge beyond the lies of the Judge.
In contrast, the Judge is a sovereign agent. He roams the countryside like a calculating monster. Nevertheless, the Judge is a well-educated monster. He speaks sophisticated lies and distorts the truth, even as he seeks lordship over the globe. He is like a great white Leviathan, a powerful lord without any regard for others and without feeling any compunction to protect anyone. The decision regarding life or death is his alone. He is entirely self-serving and insists ordinary people either be in his thrall or be his victims. The Judge represents both the gods and the devils of the Western Civilisation and is the embodiment of the inexorable advance of western power in the world at large.
Interestingly, one of the gang members in “Blood Meridian” is a Vandemonian convict who went to America to escape penal servitude on the prison island. Although his name is Bathcat, he is usually just referred to as “the Vandemonian.” He becomes a mercenary killer and wears a necklace of human ears around his neck. The novel is set in the 1840s on the American frontier, the same decade in which the Southwest was taken over by the squatters.
One day in the mid-1960s, during a visit to the beach, Lionel pointed out the large shell pile on which we were sitting. He said it was an Aboriginal midden, made of discarded shells taken from the nearby tidal rock pools. The author recalls thinking of how many hundreds or perhaps thousands of years it would have taken to accumulate such a mound. At the time, the author knew enough to presume the custodians of the middens were likely killed in conflict or died from diseases brought by the Europeans. After conflict “The Aborigines” were consigned to the fringes of towns and had then been removed to reserves such as Framlingham. This understanding was mostly gleaned from stories circulating in the family and the community rather than from books.
On drives in the family car, the author would sometimes look out the window and wonder about the first people, thinking about what they felt, and what the country might have looked like when those people had control of it for themselves alone. It must have been beautiful, as early European reports suggest. There was never a feeling that those people were part of us.
The school text books of the day were a puzzle. The authorized texts of the 1960s and 1970s either largely ignored the frontier violence, or made it seem that the unfortunate Aborigines had mostly all just got sick and died. Some who survived were protected by the squatters, or so the texts told us, which seemed a strange thing to assert given what we knew. The author knew there was much more to the story than that. People from the district generally knew the gist of what had happened. There was no great sense of denial. The differing views were in relation to just how people should feel about this historic memory.
At boarding school, the author became aware that there were multiple views of our history. The authorised view was in marked contrast to the oral stories that had been passed down. The topic was sensitive and was tied to notions of social class and sectarian divides. Through the 1970s, people became more careful in what was said.
The progressive movement known as the Counter Culture had an impact on what it was acceptable to say in public, especially among the young. Television brought a wider range of views and a process of forgetting took greater hold as people realised that the older ways of expressing things were not acceptable in Australia’s new intellectual landscape.
The counterculture was anti-establishment. The author felt quite excited by this beath of fresh air, although it was a divisive movement which tended to split generations. It was characterized by alternative lifestyles, rock music, and opposition to the Vietnam War. In the end, the counterculture declined as a cultural force and is barely relevant in the Western District. Aspects of its surf subculture remain.
In the Southwest and other locations the issue of historic violence has come to the fore in recent years in ways which are divisive and confusing. Forgetting is at least as important as remembering when it comes to social cohesion. Forgetting is important in overcoming pain and trauma. The process of “re-remembering” opens old wounds but to what purpose? This unasked for attention to such a sensitive topic has not been particularly helpful for local communities. There is a mental health cost and there is resentment. It seems like someone else’s agenda, with people being guided to think a particular way but feeling uncertain about what this outside innovation is meant to achieve.
In the 1970s, when frontier violence was mentioned in the high school texts of the day, it was in the context of behavior that could never have been done by any person historically connected to the young readers of the textbooks. It was written as if involvement in such historic misdeeds could never have been the actions of people of the student’s own cultural background. In the textbooks, frontier violence was always alluded to as something done by other groups rather than by those who might actually be reading the texts. The perspective was wholly metropolitan and of the liberal middle-class.
It crossed the author’s mind that perhaps we were the people being so dismissively “othered”. Phrases used in association with frontier violence included “the dregs of European society” and “the criminal underclass”. The violence of British respectability was absolved, when examined at all. There was some token handwringing but nothing more serious than that.
At school in Hamilton in the early 1970s, it was clear boys from Southwest properties and from Wimmera and Mallee farms had heard stories of frontier violence from their elders. When the topic in our history lessons turned to what had happened to the “Aborigines”, we would look at each other as if to say, “What are they on about?”
The writers of the official curriculum were meant to be historians, so they were either deliberately deluding themselves, as well as their readers, or they were fobbing off blame to others rather than having it land where it belonged. When it came to blame, it seemed to us that responsibility surely rested with the squatters and the colonial government.
It may be fortunate that most young people in the Southwest never formally studied Australian History. Many children left school quite early and so were spared the official lies of the History Curriculum. In the end, it is doubtful whether “the truth” can be agreed upon. Truth telling is only of value if it allows for multiple accounts to coexist and mingle.
For many, the Voice Referendum of 2023 was asking people to adopt a position that seemed counterintuitive. For most people living in the Southwest, Aboriginal people are not present in their lives, in their cultural events, or in everyday social interactions. People tend to believe that the country belongs to those who have lived there for generations. It seems counterintuitive to suggest that the country belongs to a set of others that are largely unknown. It seemed perverse that others should presume to tell people what they should feel about the historic events of their district.
The genocide has not been adequately addressed because it points so directly to the colonial state and its ruling class. The Commonwealth of Australia is a federated state derived from the British colonial governments. This national government emerged through an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one. The ruling class remained in place throughout the process and has never been held to account, even as the rules of the discussion have morphed over time.
Uncle Jack Charles said in a television interview that Australians are “uniquely racist”. The Australia the author grew up in was deeply and profoundly racialized, almost as if the nation’s whiteness was its reason to exist at all.
The legacy
The names of squatters are everywhere on the maps of the Western District. The pioneers strode valiantly across the country to open the land for British Settlement bringing civilization and prosperity through virtue and toil. There are many sides to every story.
Aboriginal people were hardly considered part of society at all. We rarely saw them, apart from show day when they came into town to watch the boxing show in the big tent. At these annual events the bass drum would boom and the spruiker would yell, “Who’s gonna fight the darkie, step right up boys.” The author was inside the boxing tent only once, with older male relatives and other men of the town. It was predictably horrifying, although fascinating in its contrived brutality.
Occasionally the author would see Aboriginal men sneak to the back door of certain pubs to obtain grog, and sometimes a furtive Aboriginal woman was spotted in the company of a white man. These were infrequent but disturbing experiences, but beyond that we never saw Aboriginal people. We were led to believe that they were best avoided. There were varying degrees of hostility, mistrust, and outright racism, obviously. Many people were casually racist. Racism was ingrained, and not so much on the surface, although it could manifest in cruel commentary often not consciously apprehended as such by the speaker or his audience. White nationalism was thoroughly mixed into our identity. This aspect of life gradually changed.
There was no reason to think that the stories of massacres were not based on some historical facts. Not all had heard these things. Some people just did not wish to know. What good does it do to dwell upon the past, and these grim tales were the events of more than one hundred years ago, after all.
Particular stories seemed to have been kept alive because of their notorious nature, kept fresh and perhaps altered through retelling down the generations. The retellings were not contextualized in a way that made any sense to a young child. The author was never quite sure who amongst us was responsible and how close they were to us.
During his visit to the Southwest in 1841, George Augustus Robinson described the Koroit Gunditj settlement located at the outlet of Tower Hill as “a native village” and as an “assemblage of huts”. By 1857, the Aboriginal village at the outlet near Crossley was gone.
James Bonwick in 1857 described how Marcus McCartney, the landowner and a relative of James Atkinson, had altered the level of the outlet by constructing a low dam wall. “Mr. Macartney in good taste threw back the water by an embankment, and a broad expanse, covered with wild fowl, now forms the distinguishing ornament of his estate on the bank. The water drains off into, what is called, the Tower Hill marshes, and so gradually reaches the river Moyn. The outlet is on the south-western side.”
The place where the village stood has been farmland for some one-hundred and eighty years. In over sixty years of visiting this site the author has never observed any sign of Aboriginal occupation and nor is there any acknowledgement of the former village. Nevertheless, he has always been aware that this was the country of those people.
Genocide and the state
Did a genocide occur in the Southwest or did it not. What does it mean to admit genocide? Uncle Archie Roach, who as a child lived at the Framlingham Mission and who was removed from his mother’s country, certainly thought genocide had occurred. In his song “Munjana” he sings: “And if the truth be told when all have testified, Another crime that happened here was genocide”.
There seems an understandable reluctance to use the word genocide. Some may feel that the logic of genocide is such that by admitting its historic reality then any claims to an ongoing connection with country are undermined. For this and other reasons it can be remarkably contentious to claim that genocide is a fact of our history.
To be clear about definitions, genocide is defined as the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. These five acts are: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. In a genocide, victims are deliberately targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly. Examples pointed to as indicative of the genocide of indigenous people include mass killings during frontier wars, forced removals of children, and policies of forced assimilation by Government agencies that seek to extinguish indigenous identity and cultural practices.
In terms of what happened in the Southwest, it is quite clear that a genocide by this definition did occur. What may be more controversial is the contention that the genocide occurred primarily through the actions and policies of the British Crown and its agents, the squatters being amongst the foremost of these.
The Commonwealth of Australia is the inheritor state to the British Crown in Australia. The changes in our constitutional arrangements were incremental and not brought about through revolutionary means. The Australian Constitution was passed by the British Parliament and given Royal Assent by the Monarch. It follows that acknowledgment of this nation’s genocide should be recognized in the constitution together with any proposed recognition of prior occupancy of the continent by First Nations people.
How can we say that Indigenous Australians are the original people of the land without also acknowledging the genocide to which Indigenous people were subjected to in so many places? It is the absence of this historic accountability that begs too many questions when it comes to constitutional recognition of prior occupancy.
Some Australians might argue that genocide is never legitimate so how can it be referenced in the Constitution, even in the context of historic behavior? Would not such recognition undermine the sovereignty of the Commonwealth of Australia? This is perhaps a real dilemma. It would be tantamount to admitting that the British settlement of Australia was not legitimate. Nevertheless, that it happened should be stated clearly.
Senator Lidia Thorpe called out the current unsatisfactory situation for what it is when in 2023 she wrote a letter to King Charles. A section of her letter is as follows: “Over 200 years ago, a war was declared on my people, and the First Nations people of this country, through the invasion of our lands. We didn’t have firearms and armies to counter your ancestors’ invasion. Ever since then, our people have been feeling the impact of the diseases brought to our land, the dispossession, the displacement and the cultural disconnection forced upon us.” Senator Thorpe points to the eradication of almost all the clans of the Gunditjmara, the people of the Southwest to whom she is connected. Senator Thorpe calls it an attempted genocide, which is a reasonable reaction from her perspective. Destruction on this scale was genocide as defined by the criteria laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide.
In the aftermath of her action at a ceremony at Parliament House in 2024 which the king attended, Senator Thorpe said she tried to hand Charles “a notice of complicity in genocide”. She declared that Charles “was not her king.” Although controversial, it seems perfectly reasonable that Senator Thorpe should see the British monarch in this light. Senator Thorpe was assailed by both by indigenous and non-indigenous Australians for speaking out on these matters in the presence of the King and was disparaged and vilified.
Tony Abott has asserted that some form of European settlement of this continent was inevitable. The argument goes that if it had not been the British it would have been some other European power or perhaps a nation such as China or India, for example. While the inevitability of colonial conquest may be a reasonable view to maintain, it still does nothing to address the issue of how to confront this legacy.
To claim, as Abbott does, that it was fortunate that Australia was colonized by the British rather than some other power is disingenuous. Abbott writes: “Whichever European people had settled Australia first, almost certainly the Indigenous population would have suffered from disease and occasional violence,” adding, “indeed settler violence would almost certainly have been worse under any other European power.” In terms of the Southwest it is hard to imagine a situation that would have been worse. Can there be anything more dire than Genocide for a people? Matters of degree hardly come into it.
Inga Clendinnen, a distinguished author native to Geelong and well-acquainted with the Western District has contributed a compelling article titled “Reading Mr Robinson,” which is published and freely accessible in the Australian Book Review. Drawing upon her analysis of George Augustus Robinson’s journals from 1841, Clendinnen provides an intense literary account that portrays the brutal reality. During his extensive journeys through the Port Phillip District, Robinson recorded his observations in his journal. The notes he compiled trace the swift and systematic destruction of traditional Aboriginal society in Western Victoria in the period between 1837 and 1847. What happened was not the result of a random or unanticipated series of incidents, but rather the product of a deliberate and systematic process. These events represent a grave injustice that should never have occurred.
Furthermore, Britain should not have dumped its poor on distant foreign shores, on someone else’s land. The transportation of convicts to Australia was a profound wrongdoing in and of itself. The mass transfer of people from one part of the British Empire to another as part of a plantation project was a grave historical injustice.
Many conservative commentators stress that a nuanced approach to history requires us to refrain from passing quick judgment on historical figures based on our own era’s moral standards. Nevertheless, it seems quite problematic to justify practices such as slavery and genocide on the grounds that such things were part of the different moral standards of earlier periods. Abbott deals with this dilemma primarily by stressing the role British Abolitionists played in ending slavery and by pointing to the British government’s policies designed to protect Aboriginal people, which for him represents a moral vindication of the British nation.
Some conservative academics hold that on balance British colonization of Australia had largely good outcomes, despite the many unfortunate things that happened. These conservative voices believe that reparations or institutional responses are unnecessary and not even beneficial to society at large. When British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was asked in 2023 whether he would offer a full and meaningful apology for Britain’s role in slavery and colonialism and commit to reparatory justice, the Prime Minister declined, observing that the country should be “inclusive and tolerant of people from all backgrounds”, and that “trying to unpick our history” was not “the right way forward”. Commentators who take this pro-British viewpoint include former politicians such as Abbott, John Anderson and John Howard, among others.
Contemporary societal debates concerning historical issues such as slavery, genocide and coerced transmigration underscore the difficulties involved in probing the past. Public discussions have become highly polarized, leading many Australians to avoid engaging with historical events altogether or to resort to expressing only those sentiments they believe will be well received by their pet audience. The persistent debates in the community reflect an ongoing uncertainty about how best to acknowledge both the harms and the achievements of the past. The History Wars seem far from over.
Millions of poor and marginalised Europeans left their home countries for the new world. Volition varied enormously. The decision to leave was always made within some wider context beyond the individual. There were always multiple factors at play. For many poor people, emigration to Australia was a last hope when confronting a dire situation. There were many push factors that resulted in a long journey to Australia. It was often better to leave while one was able to rather than remain at home with the likelihood that life would get even tougher. Many aspects of life were beyond a person’s control.
Many forebears in this story were illiterate and largely unschooled when they arrived. Prior to leaving, the idea of Australia must have been something indistinctly understood and vaguely imagined. Australia was a place where other people had gone and most never returned, a condition that was not true for a more privileged set. Dependency on assisted passage meant that there was a bureaucratic, financial and administrative processes to navigate. People were persuaded that they could go as part of an assisted emigration scheme. The benefits of emigration to Australia were widely publicized by the authorities and their agents.
Somehow multitudes of poor people of the servant and laboring classes understood that they should go. Emigration agents were traveling the counties spruiking for customers for various emigration programs. Emigration offices were opened in all the major port cities. From the 1830s, local parish authorities were working in conjunction with the agents of various emigration programs to offload the poor of the parish onto emigration ships. Landlords and their agents were paying to have unwanted tenants removed from their estates. Agents would facilitate the paperwork involved in moving individuals to the colonies. There was a vast infrastructure, regulated by the government, which administered and ran the business of migration. The role of the British Colonial Office and the policies of the Emigration Commission based in London were pivotal.
The deliberate transmigratory nature of what was undertaken has largely not been given its due by most local history and heritage groups. Much local history writing has focused on individual stories within discreet families. For the imperial and colonial authorities who designed, administered and financed the migration programs, the prime consideration was not the welfare of the emigrants but rather how best to address labor imbalances. There was a commitment to engineer specific demographic outcomes for the benefit of the Empire and a desire to plant a loyal population on the Australian continent.
The forebears of Lionel and Patricia did not participate in the bureaucratic and political decision-making but they have left their mark and it remains for each of us to decide what to make of these stories. Theirs is a fascinating and challenging account of ordinary people coping in extraordinary circumstances.
End
