Early Australia

Australia has been home to its Aboriginal population for more than 50,000 years, and to Europeans for a mere 200 years. For Aborigines this represents 2000 generations of living, hunting and gathering in this often harsh environment. There are estimated to have been about 300,000 Aborigines living in Australia in 1788 when Europeans arrived. This population was spread across over 500 tribes, each with its own dialect, history, culture and territory. While all tribes were semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers moving across their specific territory with seasonal purpose, the size of their tribal grounds varied from 500 square kilometres in generous coastal areas to 100,000 square kilometres in desert areas (Broome 2002). Land connection was and is fundamental to Aboriginal being and features in their stories, songs and paintings. In particular, ‘the lives of the Aborigines were shaped by their Dreamtime stories which were both an explanation of how the world came to be, and how people must conduct their behaviour and social relations’ (Broome 2002, p 19).

From the time the Dutch navigated to what is now known as Indonesia in the 16th century there had been tales of rich southern lands, and ships from many countries sought these lands. A Spaniard, de Torres, navigated the straits between northern Australia and New Guinea in 1606. In 1616 the Dutch commander Hartog found the western Australian coast. There followed many more ships from Holland, finding and naming land along the southern Australian coast. Tasman found what was to become Tasmania and named it van Diemen’s Land after the Governor of the East Indies in Java, then a Dutch colony. Then, rather than travelling north along the Australian coast, Tasman sailed further east and found the coast of New Zealand. But as these ships were in search of gold and spices, their discoveries of land that appeared undeveloped and lacking in riches was not valued by their home countries.

At the end of the 17th century an Englishman, Dampier, voyaged to western Australia but again reported he had found little of value, little water and little available food. Some signs of European life were found on the edges of the continent but were the flotsam and jetsam of wrecked ships and sailors who had perished.

So Australia became known to the European world piece by piece in multiple voyages from many different countries, but was coveted mainly by the British. When the British government sent Captain Cook to the South Seas, ostensibly to study an eclipse from the oceans near Tahiti in order to help problems of navigation, the opportunity presented itself to search for the southern land and take possession of it for Britain. International law at the time required a ‘new’ country to be taken only after permission was sought from the ‘natives’, that is, unless the land was either uninhabited or inhabited by a people who did not appear to use the land. In 1770 James Cook ‘discovered’ Australia’s eastern coast and he and his party landed in what has become known as Botany Bay. The ship’s name and date were carved on a tree and the British flag planted in the soil. After many reported attempts to engage peacefully with the ‘natives’ Cook recorded in his diary, ‘All they seem’d to want was for us to be gone’ (Clark et al 2000, p 20). He recorded the lack of interest of the Aborigines in the trinkets, ribbons and cloth that he had left for them, and their lack of clothing, organised housing or land usage—thus attempting to justify, according to the law of the time, his taking of the land, as it had no organised system of government with whom to negotiate. Cook arrived back in England in 1771; the government, far from being uninterested in his ‘discovery’, began to make plans to use this new land as a penal colony as England’s gaols were overcrowded and they could no longer sell their prisoners to America, as had been their most recent solution to their social problem (Clark et al 2000).

Here we have the first of many of the significant differences in the development of Australia and New Zealand as neighbouring but distinctly different countries. The organised system of Māori living, recognised by the Europeans as familiar, led to the development and signing of a treaty, rather than just a taking of ‘empty’ lands.

In January 1788 the 11 ships of the First Fleet entered the harbour in Botany Bay carrying 759 convicts and 200 marine guards, the chaplain and the captain who was to govern them, Captain Arthur Phillip. This was the place Cook had detailed in his week-long visit in a wet autumn 18 years earlier. But as any antipodean knows, Sydney in January is quite a different picture to the cool of autumn, and the harsh reality of what they had before them in setting up a colony must have been a terrifying thought. They quickly realised the place they had landed would not support them and moved just north to Sydney Cove with its fresh water source and more-fertile plains. But accidents of history are amazing. Within days of the English landing, a French ship under Captain La Perouse landed. What would have happened had storms or winds delayed the First Fleet and La Perouse attempted to claim the land for France, we will never know. How different might the outcome for the Indigenous population have been? Again we cannot know, but given the similar patterns of constructing European communities one can imagine a contest would still have occurred for the best and most productive lands and for sources of fresh water.

Accounts of the early days of the settlement are of Aborigines being frightened off their lands by musket-discharging soldiers, and convicts and soldiers being frightened by spear-throwing ‘natives’. Two groups of people thrust together in a harsh environment, with no understanding of the way of life of the other, no common language and each with a determination and need to survive. The early 1800s saw the senior members of the European colony discussing the ‘native problem’ and seeing ‘civilising’ the natives as the only solution. But these discussions concerned a fairly small colony around the area of Sydney. The rest of Australia remained relatively untouched by European settlement. That is, until the stroke of a pen on the other side of the world resulted in the slashing of duty for Australian wool compared with that of European wool producers. By 1850, some 200,000 migrants had moved from the United Kingdom to fell trees, clear land and graze sheep. By 1860, about 4000 Europeans with 20 million sheep occupied the prime river-fed land from southern Queensland to South Australia (Broome 2002). An itinerant male workforce working in rough country with a male to female ratio of 40 men to every woman framed the beginnings of the nation that ‘grew on the sheep’s back’, as it was colloquially described. A nation of burly men, of mateship and of women being seen as ‘damned whores and God’s police’, a situation so colourfully captured by Anne Summers (1994) in the title of her book chronicling women’s lives in early Australia. The small number of women compared with that of men throughout the early days of European settlement had predictable consequences for the Aboriginal people, as the Indigenous women became ‘useful’ to white men as domestic servants and at times in sexual relationships, both consensual and non-consensual.

As white men moved further away from the coast, they increasingly disrupted the tribal grounds of individual Aboriginal groupings and forced them onto the traditional grounds of others. This progressively disrupted the seasonal movements across the lands and brought Aboriginal tribal groups into conflict with each other as well as with the white ‘settlers’. But far more devastatingly, it disturbed a way of life that had existed for thousands of years, with rules of kinship and community and spirituality that were difficult to sustain out of the more nomadic lifestyle. Nutrition and infection control in the form of sanitation were adversely affected by a static form of living and resulted in poor diet, ear, eye and chest infections and diarrhoea. Also negatively affected was the sense of purpose in what were the daily rituals associated with hunting and gathering. European infections of smallpox, influenza, measles and even the common cold also damaged the Indigenous communities, who had no resistance to these new and foreign organisms. Fighting was particularly intense on the frontiers, with many deaths on both sides, but the balance of musket and spear was irrevocably disturbed by the introduction of the repeating rifle in 1870.

Aborigines were forced to live either on distant government-controlled reserves, in church-run ‘missions’ or close to but on the edges of white settlements in order to provide their families with safety, food and shelter. It is estimated that by the early 1900s, the Aboriginal population was only a quarter of that of 1788.

Variations on the New South Wales experience were repeated throughout the country. In 1829 Captain Fremantle annexed 7000 kilometres of the western Australian coast for Britain and settlement began. By 1830, over 1500 British immigrants had landed in the Swan River region of western Australia. However, unlike the beginnings in New South Wales, the Western Australian experience was of young people and families coming to start new lives, not of convicts and soldiers and a virtually all-male environment. In 1836 a further colony was begun, this time in South Australia at a site close to the mouth of the River Murray. This too was a settlement of ‘free settlers’. Settlement by families had the potential to create very different societies to those dominated by men and may hold some explanation of the more ‘cultured’ reputation of Adelaide.

Other settlements that were to become state capitals grew at around the same time. They all experienced similar hardships and conflicts with those Aboriginal tribes who also valued the land where rivers meet the sea and which are the most fertile. But there are stories of settlements with better race relations than others. Captain George Grey, for example, had developed a genuine respect for and understanding of the Aborigines after having experienced an accident in the north of Western Australia. He had been sheltered and fed by the ‘natives’ there and had come to hold them in higher esteem than his predecessor British colonial officers. Captain George Grey’s ‘success’ with the natives resulted in several of his subsequent government postings, first to Adelaide as Governor and then to New Zealand, as the Māori Wars were causing British nervousness about the stability of that new country. We will meet up with Governor Grey later, in New Zealand, as he was to very nearly play an interesting role in Māori health and wellbeing post-colonisation.

Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species and his notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ was well known in Australia by the late 1800s and provided what was at the time an acceptable, ‘logical’ and ‘scientific’ explanation for the racism that had come to dominate Australian attitudes to its Indigenous people by the latter part of the 1800s and early 1900s.

Broome (2002, pp 92–93) paints this picture of misunderstanding:

Federation of the colonies into a nation: a Commonwealth of Australia

On 1 January 1901 the six colonies that had developed around the coastline of Australia became a federated nation: the Commonwealth of Australia. Its population was recorded at the time as 3.75 million. Aborigines were not counted as part of this census; nor, when the parliament was set up, were they permitted to vote. Indeed it was not until 1962 that Aborigines were allowed to vote.

The perception of many Australians is of politics having been male-dominated from its inception, but a study of the political history of Australia tells a different story. From the beginning of Federation, women were nominated for parliament, with three women being nominated for the senate as early as 1903, although it was 41 years before a woman was elected to federal parliament (Sawer & Simms 1993). Clearly, women were anxious for the role but not elected into it. Thus parliament may have been male-dominated but politics was not—women used the elections as opportunities to voice their concerns and lobby for change.

The new Australia was seen as full of promise and potential wealth, and as the dominant view was that the Aborigines would soon die out, it was seen to be a country for and of white people. Two of the first pieces of legislation passed in the new federal parliament were restricting immigration to white people (the language used at the time to describe what is now referred to as Anglo-Celtic or European). Unofficially this legislation became known as the ‘White Australia Policy’. This was not the first legislation to keep out or restrict the rights of those who were not white. In the mid-1800s, gold had been found in New South Wales and the gold rush began, doubling the population in less than 10 years. With wool and gold, Australia looked like the land of opportunity. People began to come not only from Europe—Chinese people flooded in, in their tens of thousands, for gold. Consequently, legislation was passed to limit Chinese immigration; those who were already here were not permitted to be naturalised and were to be regarded for generations as ‘foreigners’. This dismissal of the Chinese as legitimate citizens occurred in spite of the fact that in the Northern Territory by 1879 there were only 400 Europeans but 3500 Chinese.

Federation was seen as a mechanism for integrating the whole of Australia under a British parliamentary structure and hence ensuring its ‘white’ future. This situation is perplexing when one looks at the already existing ethnic mix. Clark et al (2000, p 127) quote the following demographics at the time of Federation:

The First World War

The First World War was important in the formation of a sense of a national Australian identity and an identity separate from Britain. By 1914, more than 20,000 men had joined the armed forces and had landed in Egypt for training. The Australians landed at the same time as the troops from New Zealand, and collectively they became known as the ANZACs (the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). Together they met some of the most ferocious fighting, particularly at Gallipoli, in Turkey. The way in which these men dealt with their dire and tragic situation led to the development of what became known as the ANZAC spirit; more than 26,000 Australians and over 7500 New Zealanders died at Gallipoli, but the stories of the determination, mateship and bravery during that time are now legend. Following the debacle of Gallipoli, many of the survivors were taken to Europe to fight at the Western Front against the German army in different but equally atrocious conditions. The conditions faced on the Western Front are graphically represented by Sebastian Faulks (1993) in his book Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War, a harrowing but accessible account of the kinds of hardships the Australians and New Zealanders would have faced.

Many Australian women joined the war effort as nurses, but women were not allowed to be part of the war in any other formal capacity. They were left to undertake all the everyday jobs that had previously been the province of men, particularly in the country, including fencing, shearing and heavy farm work.

Wars waged between Indigenous peoples and the colonial invaders

As explained above, the ANZAC legend and its associated myths have had a profound effect on Australian identity. Indeed, many authors contend that ‘The legend of the Australian fighting man … blossomed into full flower on the bloody razorback ridges of Gallipoli during 1915’, in the words of Firkins in Australians in Nine Wars (1973).

Interestingly, the nine wars described by this author do not include the battles waged between Australia’s first citizens and their country’s invaders. The bloody and prolonged battles that accompanied colonial invasion of Australia, and claimed at least 20,000 Indigenous lives, rate barely a mention on Canberra’s Australian War Memorial, built to honour Australian deaths in battle. There are similar war memorials throughout the country in almost every community. Unlike New Zealand where the wars that accompanied colonisation are widely recognised, in Australia there are only a handful of reminders of the many brutal events which occurred on Australian soil. Indeed, a monument to 28 Aborigines, mainly women and children, who were massacred in 1838 at Myall Creek in New South Wales was erected only in 2003. The Australian frontier wars are not part of the ANZAC legend, with its emphasis on mateship, service and sacrifice. Peter Stanley, who was the Australian War Memorial’s chief historian, called them ‘guerrilla wars … sordid and secret’.

Authors such as Raymond Evans and Henry Reynolds (whose works on colonial violence and Indigenous resistance started appearing in the 1970s), Anna Haebich and Robert Manne (who have published extensively on the issue of stolen/removed children), and Russell McGregor and Tim Rowse have brought the ‘dirty wars’ to the public’s attention. The seven-part documentary First Australians (SBS 2008) chronicles the birth of contemporary Australia as never told before—from the perspective of its first people. First Australians explores what unfolds when the oldest living culture in the world is overrun by the British Empire. Chronicling the experiences of Indigenous Australians, from first contact with whites in Botany Bay in 1788 to Eddie Koiki Mabo’s 1993 legal challenge to the British terra nullius declaration, First Australians is the most exhaustive account of Aboriginal history so far broadcast on Australian television, and makes a compelling case for the argument that the invaders and, later, the Australian government introduced a number of genocidal policies which aimed to eradicate Aboriginal communities. From the Tasmanian Black War, in which Aboriginals were systematically shot, raped and eventually exiled to Flinders Island, to the policies of assimilation, under which ‘half-caste’ children were stolen from their families and imprisoned in Christian missions, every conceivable strategy has been employed to ‘delete’ Aboriginal people and their cultures and traditions from history.

The documentary also describes the personal and political options available to Indigenous peoples fighting against policies leading to colonial dominance, dispossession, relocation and threatened extinction. It refutes the argument that Indigenous Australians accepted the theft of their land; rather, they actively resisted the white settlers’ land grab. For example, Windradyne from Bathurst and Jandamarra from the Kimberley led fierce guerrilla wars against the colonists. The Coniston Massacre of 1928 was the last recorded ‘official’ massacre of Aboriginal people by white Australians. In Alice Springs, JC Cawood sent Constable WG Murray to Coniston Station to arrest the murderers of settler Fred Brooks and any Indigenous Australians who had been spearing the cattle of the European settlers. The official death toll was 31, including women and children; however, Aboriginal oral tradition records almost 90 dead. It is generally agreed that the police killed up to 100 Indigenous Australians across six sites. Although none of the perpetrators of the crime were brought to justice, public outrage ensured that the deliberate and officially sanctioned slaughter of innocent people was never repeated. The impact of the killings on the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye peoples resulted in major cultural dislocation: the killings destabilised land tenure and religious groups through disruptions to ceremonial life, exchange networks and religious ceremonies.

To this day, Indigenous Australians still fight for the return of their land, evidenced for example by the Cummeragunja Walk-off in 1989, the Freedom Rides of the 1960s and the ongoing struggle for land rights.

Australian identity

The Australian identity has long been a contradictory one. Described by Ward in The Australian Legend over 50 years ago as ‘the rough, honest, easy-going bushman, laconic, resourceful, loyal to his mates, uncomfortable with parsons and women, facing adversity with a stoical joke’ (summarised in Hudson & Bolton 1997, p 1), to which could be added ‘Anglo-Celtic bloke’, this view still permeates society despite the multicultural nature of the Australian population and the fact that more than three-quarters of the population live an urban life in coastal cities.

Hudson and Bolton (1997) exhort us to look to Australia’s multiple personalities rather than find attachment in a single, perhaps only briefly existing, ‘rural ideal’ and to be cognisant of the amazing diversity that is the essence of the different regions within Australia. What it is to be Australian and live in Australia is very different if one is in inner-city Sydney or in Bourke or Broken Hill, and different again if one is in Perth or Broome. Even within the large cities there are now suburbs with such ethnic homogeneity that the shop signs are in Vietnamese or Arabic or Greek, and the norms of behaviour and identity vary in each.

The single Australian story may have been male, with the female either absent or as the shadow behind the man, but the women’s history is a varied one too. Early attempts to tell a women’s story, such as Miriam Dixon’s The Real Matilda (1993; first published in 1976), paint a picture of an oppressed group. The introduction to Dixon’s book begins, ‘In this exploratory book I propose that Australian women, women in the land of mateship, “the Ocker”, keg-culture, come pretty close to top rating as the “Doormats of the Western World” ’(Dixon 1993, p 11). But the women’s story is populated also by gutsy feminists at the turn of the 20th century standing for parliament, fighting for peace and for pensions for the aged and invalided. These women broke down the barriers to women’s entry to medicine (1897), law (1903) and architecture (1889), but had to wait until after the Second World War to enter the other male bastions of the Church, the armed forces and engineering. In 1902 Vida Goldstein went to Washington to the founding conference of what was to become the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, and served as its secretary. Women were also internationally published authors, such as Miles Franklin (1965), who gives us a glimpse into a gutsy heroine in Sybylla Melvyn in My Brilliant Career (published 1901). Jesse Street in 1946 was the Australian delegate to the United Nations. These women were part of the first wave of feminism; the second wave was to come in the 1970s.

If there was one constant in the interruption to the development of women and their voices in Australian history, it is war. War created the ANZAC legend, reinforcing the mateship ethic as central to being ‘dinky-di’ Australian. It gave women the unsung role of keeping the urban and rural productivity going while the men were overseas, but they were expected to relinquish these positions when the men returned and to adjust to living with a generation of men brutalised by their experiences of the inhumanity of war. Following the Second World War, women again left the jobs they had been doing—but this time they not only were childbearing but were also expected to join the workforce without the advantage of the same educational, occupational and economic opportunities as men.

The need for the country to have a single common image to relate to is seen by White (1981, 1997) to be a construction of a market that had products to sell. He writes of the relationship between the market and a sense of being a nation, citing as examples the Heidelberg school of painting’s need to be iconic, as they had to be saleable to galleries rather than private collectors; the Bulletin’s need for a single popular market; and latterly in the 1980s and 1990s, the advertising agencies’ need to sell beer, collectively contributing to over a hundred years of image reinforcement. Women did not control the spending power and were thus rendered invisible in all but domestic commercials and image portrayals.

Thus, the quintessential Australian became a construction that was male, of mateship, of exhibiting a laconic sense of humour and, while predominantly white, of ‘tolerance’ to others.

The Anglo-Celtic Australian notion of multicultural tolerance is questioned by Curthoys (1997, p 35). ‘Tolerance’ suggests two elements: the tolerators and the tolerated.

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