Down Under (30 page)

The question that naturally arises – but is seldom asked – is how you get breeding stock out of this. If it’s a lone fisherman who is carried off to Australia, then clearly he must find his way back to his homeland to report his discovery and to persuade enough people to come with him to start a colony. This suggests, of course, the possession of nautical skills sufficient to shuttle back and forth between invisible land masses – a prowess few prehistorians are willing to grant. If, on the other hand, the trip was one-way and accidental, then it must necessarily have involved a community of people of both sexes swept out to sea, either all together on a large raft (thought very unlikely) or in a flotilla of small rafts, and after successfully weathering a storm and at least a few days at sea, they were washed up on proximate parts of the north Australian coast where they regrouped and established a society.

You don’t need vast numbers of people to populate Australia. Joseph Birdsell, an American academic, calculated that a group of twenty-five founding colonists could have produced a society of 300,000 in a little over 2,000 years. But you still need to get those initial twenty-five people there – more than can be plausibly accounted for with a raft or two blown off course.

Of course all of this may have happened in any number of other ways, and it may have taken generations to get fully under way. No one can possibly say. All that is certain is that Australia’s indigenous peoples are there because their distant ancestors crossed at least sixty miles of fairly formidable sea tens of thousands of years before anyone else on earth dreamed of such an endeavour, and did it in sufficient numbers to begin to start the colonization of a continent.

By any measure this is a staggeringly momentous accomplishment. And how much note does it get? Well, ask yourself when was the last time you read anything about it. When was the last time in any context concerning human dispersal and the rise of civilizations that you saw even a passing mention of the role of Aborigines? They are the planet’s invisible people.

A big part of the problem is that for most of us it is nearly impossible to grasp what an extraordinary span of time we are considering here. Assume for the sake of argument that the Aborigines arrived 60,000 years ago (that is the figure used by Roger Lewin of Harvard in
Principles of Evolution
, a standard text). On that scale, the total period of European occupation of Australia represents about 0.3 per cent of the total. In other words, for the first 99.7 per cent of its inhabited history the Aborigines had Australia to themselves. They have been there an almost unimaginably long time. And here lies their other unappreciated achievement.

The arrival in Australia of the Aborigines is, of course, merely the start of the story. They also mastered the continent. They spread over it with amazing swiftness and developed strategies and patterns of behaviour to exploit or accommodate every extreme of the landscape, from the wettest rainforests to the driest deserts. No people on earth have lived in more environments with greater success for longer. It is generally accepted that the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture in the world. It is thought by some – the respected prehistorian John Mulvaney, for instance – that the Australian language family may be the world’s oldest. Their art and stories and systems of beliefs are indubitably among the oldest on earth.

These are obviously important and singular achievements, too. They provide incontestable evidence that the early Aboriginal peoples spoke and cooperated and employed advanced technological and organizational skills at a time much earlier than anyone had ever supposed. And how much notice do these achievements get? Well, again, until recently, virtually none. I had this brought home to me with a certain unexpected forcefulness when, after leaving Alan and Carmel and flying to Sydney, I went for an afternoon to the State Library of New South Wales. There while browsing for something else altogether I came across a 1972 edition of the
Larousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology.
Curious to see what it had to say about the findings at Lake Mungo three years earlier, I took it down to have a look. It didn’t mention the Mungo findings. In fact, the book contained just one reference to Australia’s Aborigines, a sentence that said: ‘The Aborigines also evolved independently of the Old World, but they represent a very primitive technical and economic phase.’

That was it – the entire discussion of Australia’s indigenous culture by a scholarly volume of weight and authority, written in the last third of the twentieth century. When I say these are the world’s invisible people, believe me these are the world’s invisible people. And the real tragedy is that that is only the half of it.

From the first moment of contact the natives were a source of the deepest wonder to the Europeans. When James Cook and his men sailed into Botany Bay they were astonished that most of the Aborigines they saw sitting on the shore or fishing in the shallows from frail bark canoes seemed hardly to notice them. They ‘scarce lifted their eyes
from their employment’, as Joseph Banks recorded. The creaking
Endeavour
was clearly the largest and most extraordinary structure that could ever have come before them, yet most of the natives merely glanced up and looked at it as if at a passing cloud and returned to their tasks.

They seemed not to perceive the world in the way of other people. No Aboriginal language, for instance, had any words for ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’ – extraordinary omissions in any culture. They had no chiefs or governing councils, wore no clothes, built no houses or other permanent structures, sowed no crops, herded no animals, made no pottery, possessed almost no sense of property. Yet they devoted disproportionate efforts to enterprises that no one even now can understand. All around the coast of Australia the early explorers found huge shell mounds, up to thirty feet high and covering at the base as much as half an acre. Often these were some distance inland and uphill. The Aborigines clearly had made some effort to convey the shells from the beach to the mounds – one midden was estimated to contain 33,000 cubic metres of shells – and they kept it up for an enormously long time: at least 800 years in one case. Why did they bother? No one knows. In almost every way it was as if they answered to some different laws.

A few Europeans – Watkin Tench and James Cook notably – viewed the Aborigines sympathetically. In the
Endeavour
Journal Cook wrote: ‘They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. They live in a tranquillity which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition: the earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all things necessary for life . . . they
seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them, nor would they ever part with anything of their own.’ Elsewhere, he added with a touch of poignancy: ‘All they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.’

Unfortunately, few others were so enlightened. For most Europeans, the Aborigines were simply something that was in the way – ‘one of the natural hazards’, as the scientist and natural historian Tim Flannery has described it. It helped to regard them as essentially subhuman, a view that persisted well into the twentieth century. As recently as the early 1960s, as John Pilger notes, Queensland schools were using a textbook that likened Aborigines to ‘feral jungle creatures’. When they weren’t subhuman, they were simply inconsequential. In the same period, a Professor Stephen Roberts produced a fat and scholarly tome entitled
A History of Australian Land Settlement
, which managed to survey the entire period of European occupation and displacement without mentioning the Aborigines once. Such was the marginalization of the native peoples that until 1967 the federal government did not even include them in national censuses – did not, in other words, count them as people.

Largely for these reasons no one knows how many Aborigines were in Australia when Britons first settled it. The best estimates suggest that at the beginning of occupation the Aboriginal population was about 300,000, though possibly as high as a million. What is certain is that in the first century of settlement those numbers fell catastrophically. By the end of the nineteenth century the number of Aborigines was probably no more than 50,000 or 60,000. Most of this decline, it must be said, was inadvertent. Aborigines had almost no resistance to European diseases: smallpox, pleurisy, syphilis, even
chickenpox and the milder forms of influenza often cut swathes through the native populations. But where Aborigines remained, they were sometimes treated in the most heartless and wanton manner.

In
Taming the Great South Land
, William J. Lines details examples of the most appalling cruelty by settlers towards the natives – of Aborigines butchered for dog food; of an Aboriginal woman forced to watch her husband killed, then made to wear his decapitated head around her neck; of another chased up a tree and tormented from below with rifle shots. ‘Every time a bullet hit,’ Lines reports, ‘she pulled leaves off the tree and thrust them into her wounds, till at last she fell lifeless to the ground.’ What is perhaps most shocking is how casually so much of this was done, and at all levels of society. In an 1839 history of Tasmania, written by a visitor named Melville, the author relates how he went out one day with ‘a respectable young gentleman’ to hunt kangaroos. As they rounded a bend, the young gentleman spied a form crouched in hiding behind a fallen tree. Stepping over to investigate and ‘finding it only to be a native’, the appalled Melville wrote, the gentleman lifted the muzzle to the native’s breast ‘and shot him dead on the spot’.

Such behaviour was virtually never treated as a crime – indeed was sometimes officially countenanced. In 1805, the acting judge-advocate for New South Wales, the most senior judicial figure in the land, declared that Aborigines had not the discipline or mental capacity for courtroom proceedings; rather than plague the courts with their grievances, settlers were instructed to track down the offending natives and ‘inflict such punishment as they may merit’ – as open an invitation to genocide as can be found in English law. Fifteen years later our old friend
Lachlan Macquarie authorized soldiers in the Hawkesbury region to shoot any group of Aborigines greater than six in number, even if unarmed and entirely innocent of purpose, even if the number included women and children. Sometimes, under the pretence of compassion, Aborigines were offered food that had been dosed with poison. Pilger quotes a mid-nineteenth-century government report from Queensland: ‘The niggers [were given] . . . something really startling to keep them quiet . . . the rations contained about as much strychnine as anything and not one of the mob escaped.’ By ‘mob’ he meant about one hundred unarmed men, women and children.

The wonder of all this is that the scale of native murders was not far greater. In the first century and a half of British occupation, the number of Aborigines intentionally killed by whites (including in self-defence, during pitched battles and in other rather more justifiable circumstances) is thought to be about 20,000 altogether – an unhappy total, to be sure, but much less than one-tenth the number of Aborigines who died from disease.

That isn’t to say that violence wasn’t casual or widespread. It was. And it was against this background, in June 1838, that a dozen men on horseback set off from the farm of one Henry Dangar, looking for the people who had stolen or driven off some of their livestock. At Myall Creek they happened on an encampment of Aborigines who were known among the white settlers of the district as peaceable and inoffensive. Almost certainly they had nothing to do with the rustled cattle. None the less their captors tied them together in a kind of great ball – twenty-eight men, women and children – led them around the countryside for some hours in an indecisive manner, then
abruptly and mercilessly slaughtered them with rifles and swords.

In the normal course of things, that would almost certainly have been that. But in 1838 the mood of the nation was changing. Australia was becoming an increasingly urbanized society, and city dwellers were beginning to express revulsion for the casual slaughter of innocent people. When a campaigning Sydney journalist named Edward Smith Hall got hold of the story and began to bray for blood and justice, Governor George Gipps ordered the perpetrators tracked down and brought to trial. When arrested, two of the accused protested, with evident sincerity, that they hadn’t known killing Aborigines was illegal.

Despite clearly damning evidence at the subsequent trial, it took a jury just fifteen minutes to acquit the defendants. But Hall, Gipps and the urban public were not lightly pacified and a second trial was ordered. This time seven of the men were found guilty and hanged. It was the first time that white people had been executed for the murder of Aborigines.

The Myall Creek hangings didn’t end the slaughter of Aborigines so much as drive them underground. They went on sporadically for almost another century. The last was in 1928 near present-day Alice Springs when a white dingo hunter named Fred Brooks was murdered in uncertain circumstances and at least seventeen and perhaps as many as seventy Aborigines were chased down and killed by mounted constabulary in reprisal. (A judge in that case declared that the police had acted within the law.) But the Myall Creek case was undoubtedly a defining moment in Australian history. Though it gets at least a mention in almost all history books these days, I hadn’t
met anyone who had been there or even quite knew where it was, and it seemed apparent from the descriptions I had read that the authors had drawn exclusively from historical sources. I wanted to have a look.

It takes a little finding. From Macksville the next morning I drove sixty miles up the Pacific Highway to Grafton, then headed inland on a steep and lonely road up and through the Great Dividing Range. Four hours later, in hot and empty sheep country, I reached Delungra – a petrol station and a couple of houses with long views over mostly treeless plains – and there I turned down a back road that followed a twisting, sometimes nearly washed-out course on its way to the small town of Bingara twenty-five miles to the south. A couple of miles short of Bingara, I came to a small rickety-looking bridge over a half-dry creek. A little sign announced it as Myall Creek. I pulled the car into the shade of a river gum and got out to have a look. There was no memorial, no historical plaque. Nothing at all to indicate that here, or at least somewhere in the immediate vicinity, was where one of the most infamous events in Australian history took place. To one side of the bridge was a forlorn rest area with a pair of broken picnic tables and a good deal of shattered bottles in the stubby grass around the edge. In the sunny middle distance, perhaps a mile away, stood a large farmhouse, surrounded by fields of unusually verdant crops. In the other direction, and much closer, an overgrown track led to a white building. I walked along it to see what it was. A sign announced it as the Myall Creek Memorial Hall. It wasn’t much of a monument to a terrible slaughter, but at least it was something. Then on a wall of the building I noticed a hand-painted sign and discovered that it had nothing to do with the slaughter; it was a memorial for the dead of two world wars.