This Whispering in Our Hearts Revisited

By Henry Reynolds

"How is it our minds are not satisfied? What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?"

Listening to the whispering in his own heart, Henry Reynolds was led into the lives of remarkable and largely forgotten white humanitarians who followed their consciences and challenged the prevailing attitudes to Indigenous people. His now-classic book The Whispering in Our Hearts, constructed an alternative history of Australia through the eyes of those who felt disquiet and disgust at the brutality of dispossession. These men and women fought for justice for Indigenous people even when doing so left them isolated and criticised by their fellow whites.

In this new edition, Reynolds brings fresh perspectives to issues we grapple with still. This powerful book shows how much remains to be done to settle the whispering in our hearts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781742244310

Book preview

Henry Reynolds is one of Australia’s most recognised historians. He grew up in Hobart and was educated at Hobart High School and the University of Tasmania. In 1965 he accepted a lectureship at James Cook University in Townsville, which sparked an interest in the history of relations between settlers and Aboriginal people. In 2000 he took up a professorial fellowship at the University of Tasmania. His pioneering work has changed the way we see the intertwining of black and white history in Australia. His books with NewSouth include The Other Side of the Frontier (reissue), What’s Wrong with Anzac? (as co-author), Forgotten War, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize, and most recently Unnecessary Wars.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Henry Reynolds 2018

First published 2018

First edition published by Allen & Unwin in 1998

This edition published 2018

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

ISBN    9781742235622 (paperback)

9781742244310 (ebook)

9781742248745 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Luke Causby, Blue Cork

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

CONTENTS

Preface: Whispering

Introduction: 2018

1The concerns of gentlemen, 1790–1847

2Missionaries and protectors, 1810–49

3A reasonable share in the soil: Robinson and Threlkeld in New South Wales, 1824–48

4Great displeasure: Lyon and Giustiniani in Western Australia, 1829–38

5Agitation against assassination: Queensland, 1860–80

6The crusade of The Queenslander , 1880–90

7John Gribble goes west, 1885–87

8Two unlikely agitators: Angelo and Carley, 1880–90

9Modern massacre: Forrest River and Coniston, 1926–28

10 The Caledon Bay affair, 1932–34

11 Agitation and reform, 1920–40

12 Dramatic changes, 1945–72

13 Reconciliation and recapitulation, 1992–

Conclusion

Notes

Index

PREFACE: WHISPERING

Twenty years ago I wrote a book called This Whispering in Our Hearts. It differed from previous books I had published, which concentrated on the Aboriginal experience of invasion and settlement. One of the central themes of these earlier works had been the prolonged conflict between resident Aboriginal people and white intruders on the ragged fringes of settlement. It was by no means the only matter discussed, but it was by far the most controversial – and it attracted the considerable attention. This was not unexpected. The violence that accompanied Australian settlement had continually surprised me as I pursued my research among 19th-century records in libraries and archives all over the country. I knew nothing about it when I started my research. I had been taught little Australian history in either high school or university. And when I began teaching the subject as a junior lecturer at the then Townsville University College, I relied on the textbook that had been chosen by the senior academics in the University of Queensland and edited by Professor Gordon Greenwood, the head of the school to which I was nominally attached. It was a good book in many ways, and at the time was the most widely used text in universities and senior high schools. But there was nothing in the book about Indigenous Australians at all. They did not even merit an index entry.¹ Had I been teaching in other Australian universities, I may not have noticed the extraordinary absence. But matters of race were an everyday concern in North Queensland.

Nevertheless, I was often shocked and confronted when I read of a violent, troubled past I had known little about, although the everyday racial violence I saw all around me suggested that it was an outlier of a much older tradition. When I came to sum up almost ten years of research in my 1981 book The Other Side of the Frontier, I estimated it was reasonable to suppose that 20 000 Aboriginal people had been killed by the settlers during the outward thrust of the frontier. It proved to be a controversial suggestion, and perhaps was the clearest indication that the kind of history I was writing disturbed and even angered many people, who felt it was unearthing facts about the past best forgotten. They clearly believed that the honour of the nation was at stake and that history’s most important role was to infuse young people with pride and patriotism, whereas the new history of the frontier made them feel ashamed.

One of the most persistent complaints about the new revisionist history was that it evoked feelings of guilt whether or not this was the intention of the practitioners. It was a challenge with which I was presented on many occasions during both private conversations and public meetings. I was forced to think about it. While I was often shocked and confronted by the evidence that passed through my hands, I don’t think I ever felt guilty. Was I repressing feelings that others professed, I wondered sometimes? But even when I tried I could not discern the troubling emotion. I concluded that guilt pertained to personal responsibility, not to collective historical experience. And one of the most powerful lessons I drew from my research was that the great tragedy underlying our colonial experience was due to policies adopted and enforced by the Imperial government, over which no one in Australia had any control until the second half of the 19th century, by which time many violent, racist traditions had already taken deep root.

While the most persistent criticism I experienced came from one side of the national debate, I was often uneasy with people who were enthusiastic supporters of the new historical writing. There were the zealots who believed the story was all bad, that there were no redeeming features about Australia’s past. They were as uncompromising as the harshest critics of Aboriginal history. And while they approved of my books, and often told me so, I was keenly aware that historical research does not generally support stories of stark contrasts, of virtue on one hand and infamy on the other. I came to think that a detailed study of the past fostered an appreciation of nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity. But more to the point was the appreciation that the European colonists were a mixed bunch. In New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, the majority of the settlers during the first two generations were convicts who had no choice about being part of the destructive wave of dispossession. And the free settlers had a wide range of ideas about the Aboriginal people and the nature of Australian colonisation. They argued, debated and disputed. And one of the most telling facts is that much of the historical evidence about violence and brutality was provided by critics of the way settlement was unfolding.

Like any writer who has read the colonial newspapers, books, letters, speeches and sermons of the period, I was always aware of the men and women who worried about the fate of Aboriginal people. I had referred to them in a number of my works, but I concluded that the struggles of these dissidents were rarely understood or appreciated. They were what Indigenous Australians in the 1940s called ‘Different White People’.² I became convinced that they deserved a book of their own. This Whispering in Our Hearts was the result of that conclusion.

INTRODUCTION: 2018

Large moral questions underlie the history of settler Australia. They have been often overlooked. But they live on in the subsoil of national consciousness. They were present at the beginning of settlement and continue to surface episodically in national debate. Every generation since 1788 has dealt with them in its own inimitable way, finding the words and sentiments consonant with the times. But the sympathetic modern reader can readily identify with them because the central and persistent questions remain unchanged. They include the following.

Was British settlement morally justified? Was it legal? Was it invasion rather than settlement? Was the continent acquired by conquest? Was the persistent frontier conflict warfare, albeit of a distinctive kind? Why were no treaties negotiated in Australia? Why was Australia treated as a terra nullius? Why did the idea remain enshrined in Australian law until 1992? How and when did the British Crown acquire Indigenous sovereignty? Did the catastrophic decline of the Indigenous population amount to genocide or to willed extermination as it was termed throughout much of Australian history? To what extent can the catastrophe be sheeted home to the British government? Did Imperial policy predetermine the violent outcome? Did the nature of the frontier encounter directly foster the racism that cast the Aboriginal people as subhuman savages? Is there a case for reparations? Should a modern treaty or treaties be negotiated?

Many of these questions emerge in contemporary debate. But they are not primarily the product of recent obsessions or fashionable political correctness. In fact, they are among the most enduring features of Australian intellectual life. And if, as often happens at the moment, these concerns are dismissed as the result of adopting a ‘black armband’ view of history, we need to concede that this long-recognised symbol of mourning has been worn by men and women since the earliest years of our history.

In fact, two fundamental and portentous decisions were made during the first weeks of settlement. When the British formally annexed eastern Australia on 7 February 1788, they claimed sovereignty and, what was more exceptional, ownership of all the property as well. In one extraordinary proclamation, the Crown expropriated the land of perhaps half a million people over the eastern half a continent. Once done, it remained undone for more than 200 years, to be partially remedied in the High Court’s Mabo judgment of 1992. This was the inescapable birth stain that coloured everything else that followed. The problem was apparent to perceptive people at the time.

The political philosopher Jeremy Bentham published a pamphlet in 1803 highly critical of the legal and constitutional arrangements that had been instituted in New South Wales. Among numerous faults he noted that, legal obfuscation notwithstanding, the colony had been acquired by conquest. The Aboriginal people had been accorded no diplomatic power, nor had their representatives signed a treaty with the King. This created problems that, he believed, would be enduring. ‘The flaw’, he declared, ‘is an incurable one’.¹ In the colony itself, similar doubts surfaced. In 1807, for instance, the retiring Governor PG King prepared a memo for his successor, William Bligh, offering advice while summing up the knowledge he had acquired of the colony. In a section headed ‘Respecting Natives’ he observed that he had been unwilling to force the Aboriginal people to work because he explained he had ‘ever considered them the real proprietors of the Soil’.²

Bentham and King had perceived the two fundamental problems relating to the British claim to sovereignty and property that remain with us today. They had grasped the situation intellectually, but it is unclear if either of them felt a sense of personal responsibility for the tragedy that was already unfolding in the two fledgling colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. They may have been able to maintain a detachment that proved more difficult for increasing numbers of colonists who had made their decision to settle in the new societies and for their children born in the new world. In one way or another, they were confronted by the Aboriginal presence and above all by the persistent violence that accompanied the outward spread of settlement for well over a hundred years. Questions of private conscience and public morality were inescapable. They have been little studied, but they twist like an agitating current through Australian life. An English visitor of the 1840s observed that the ‘right to Australia’ was a ‘sore subject with many of the British settlers and they strive to satisfy their consciences in various ways’.³ At much the same time, the editor of the Launceston Examiner thought that his contemporaries could not ‘disburden their minds of the feelings of remorse in enjoying the soil’ once the ‘home of the exiled Tasmanian Aborigines’.⁴

We have no way of knowing how many men and women shared these feelings of remorse about the fate of the Aboriginal people. We cannot find a way to assess the manner in which some consciences were satisfied while others remained ruffled. We can start by looking at the forensic discourse and public controversies when participants spoke their mind or published letters or articles in the newspapers. Much of the material that helps us understand historical debates was confided to diaries and letters that were never intended for public viewing. But we can build up a picture of the intellectual and emotional life of a relatively small number of the men and women who became activists in the Aboriginal cause. How representative they were is hard to say. It is not possible to know how many people shared the views of the well-known and usually notorious agitators. We can assume there were sympathisers who shrank from the spotlight or avoided being openly associated with unpopular sentiments. Their private views and personal conversations can never be recovered. But even when we have to restrict our focus to the leading humanitarians, we can move a little closer to an understanding of the contours of what has arguably been the most enduring debate in Australian history.

Some of the prominent humanitarians were so troubled by what they saw around them that they devoted their lives to the amelioration of Aboriginal suffering or to the denunciation of violence and brutality. In doing so, they courted the anger, hostility and even hatred of their contemporaries. They voiced the unspeakable, exposed carefully cloaked self-deception, tugged at hidden hypocrisies. For their trouble they were declared to be self-righteous, disturbing, dangerous, obsessive or mad.

There was sometimes an element of truth in these accusations. The Aboriginal cause often did attract outsiders, eccentrics, obsessive personalities. In some circumstances, the cause itself overwhelmed its adherents as they steeled themselves to confront disbelief, suspicion and hostility. Few other things so ensured alienation from mainstream society than too great a concern for the ‘blacks’. Those truly zealous in the crusade came to view with horror the progress that others glorified. They came to hate their own society for its unfeeling brutality. Consequent isolation fed further embitterment.

To those hardened against, or indifferent to, the fate of the Aboriginal people, such commitment was tantamount to betrayal of community, race or nation. And it was even more than that. The humanitarians called so much into question. They cast doubt on the morality of the whole colonial venture. They burrowed beneath that sense of certainty necessary to push one’s fortune in the new world. They challenged brash pride in colonial achievements and the nascent patriotism of the native-born. Can there be any wonder at their unpopularity?

The ‘friends of the blacks’ were seen to gratuitously assume an air of moral superiority, to consider themselves more virtuous than the rest. Their enemies called them Exeter Hall enthusiasts, maudlin philanthropists, do-gooders, bleeding hearts, nigger-lovers and many other more abusive epithets. The pejorative labels changed, but the most common means of attack was to question the motivation of the humanitarians. They were often abused, ridiculed or patronised. Sometimes heads were broken. More commonly careers were endangered. But the Aboriginal cause was not only unpopular. It was often for activists a lonely calling. Many of them were probably unaware of other men and women who shared their convictions. Some took comfort from contacts made with the great missionary societies in Britain or with the equally distant Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection societies. But approving reference to British judgments of colonial manners was never a winning strategy in either the 19th or 20th centuries.

Local societies sprang up to promote the Indigenous cause or disseminate the Christian message among the dispossessed. But they often had short lives and rarely reached beyond the colonial or, later, state boundaries. Enthusiasm rose and fell, leaders came and went. Particular campaigns had their season and then slipped away into obscurity. But the Indigenous cause in the broadest sense persisted across the generations. It had parallels in the anti-slavery movements in Britain and the United States and the latter’s civil rights movement. But it has never received the recognition they have been accorded, nor the high historical status their leaders enjoy.

The activists, we have already noted, made their contemporaries feel uncomfortable and guilty. One common response was to demand that the critics of the colonial project prove their concern by returning to the homeland. Even mild remonstrance about the position of the Aboriginal people challenged the ethics of colonial progress, which was necessarily premised on the exploitation of erstwhile Aboriginal land and even on the eventual extinction of the race. The editor of the Rockhampton Bulletin observed in 1867 that ‘the disappearance of the black race before the face of the white man’ was an inevitable fate to which ‘we must necessarily submit as one of the conditions of successful colonisation’.⁵ The tough-minded recognised that colonisation was a brutal business.

It was easier to take up the cause in the cities than in the bush or on the swelling frontiers of settlement, where dissent was always difficult and often dangerous. Refusal to participate in the brutal business of dispossession and destruction was by implication a rebuke to those who did, and one that was hard to forgive or even forget. Tacit disapproval was bad enough. Open criticism was deeply provocative, profoundly contentious. Frontier solidarity was not merely comforting. It seemed necessary for survival. The shared guilt of the punitive expedition, the complicity in killing, bound participants together in close confederation. Dissenters who challenged the ways of the frontier were boycotted, bullied or banished. The prominent Queensland pastoralist Ernest Thorn refused to allow a party of neighbouring settlers to use his boat to facilitate a night-time attack on an Aboriginal camp. As a result, he acquired a bad name that, he explained, ‘followed me for many years, and rose up in judgement against me, in unexpected places, as a dangerous man’. His name, he believed, was ‘covered in opprobrium’ and he was branded as a man ‘who was false to his race, and unworthy of the confidence of decent white men’.⁶

Punitive expeditions, either official or conducted by parties of settlers, became the focus of humanitarian concern for 140 years. This was first manifested in the earliest years of the infant colony at Sydney Cove.

1

THE CONCERNS OF GENTLEMEN, 1790–1847

Australia’s first punitive expedition provoked the first clash of conscience. Following the spearing of one of his servants in December 1790, Governor Phillip decided to dispatch a military detachment to punish the tribe considered responsible. He instructed Captain Watkin Tench to take 50 men and capture two of the offending tribe, and to kill and decapitate ten others. Tench suggested less stringent measures – six Aboriginal men captured, of which two would be hanged and four transported to Norfolk Island. If they could not be taken alive they were to be shot and beheaded. Tench explained that the Governor had determined to ‘strike a decisive blow, in order, at once to convince them of our superiority, and to infuse an universal terror’ in Aboriginal society.¹

While Tench sought successfully to moderate the Governor’s instructions, his younger colleague, the 29-year-old Lieutenant William Dawes, objected to the expedition itself. Although on duty at the time, Dawes wrote to his commanding officer, Captain Campbell, refusing to take part in the venture. Both Campbell and Phillip pressed him to obey orders and threatened him with arrest. After consulting the settlement’s Anglican clergyman, Rev. M Johnson, Dawes agreed to march with the detachment but subsequently told the Governor he regretted his decision. While reporting the incident to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Grenville, Phillip remarked that Dawes had ‘very clearly showed that he would not obey a similar order in future’. A year later he refused to apologise to Phillip although requested to do so.²

It was a portentous clash of will, aspiration and conscience. Phillip was the man of Empire with a vision of flourishing colonial enterprise. If the Aboriginal people stood in the way they would be coerced, if necessary by means of terror. Dawes was an evangelical Christian, an enthusiast and humanitarian, a personal friend of William Wilberforce and associated with the nascent campaign against slavery that was soon to widen out and embrace the Empire’s indigenous people.

Premonitions of violence were borne out during the first generation of settlement. While it didn’t necessarily shake the confidence of governors and lesser officials in the colonial venture itself, they expressed deep disquiet about their inability to control the brutality unleashed on the frontiers of settlement. In 1810, just six years after arriving in Hobart, Governor David Collins issued an official statement deploring the ‘abominable cruelties’ that had been ‘practised’ upon the Aboriginal people by the Europeans.³ His successor, Thomas Davey, was similarly concerned when he learnt that Aboriginal resentment had been ‘justly excited’ by settler brutality. In a proclamation of June 1814, he declared:

Had not the Lieutenant Governor the most positive and distinct proofs of such barbarous crimes having been committed, he could not have believed that a British subject would so ignominiously have stained the honour of his country and of himself; but the facts are too clear, and it therefore becomes the indispensable bounden duty of the Lieutenant Governor thus publicly to express his utter indignation and abhorrence thereof.⁴

Tasmania’s third governor, William Sorell, reacted in a similar manner in 1819 when informed about the ways of up-country settlers. In a proclamation of 13 March he declared:

It is undeniable that, in many former instances, cruelties have been perpetuated repugnant to Humanity and disgraceful to the British character … The impressions remaining from earlier injuries are kept up by the occasional outrages of miscreants whose scene of crime is so remote as to render detection difficult; and who sometimes wantonly fire at and kill the men and … pursue the women for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their children. This last outrage is perhaps the most certain of all to excite in the sufferers a strong thirst for revenge against all white men.⁵

With settlement expanding rapidly in both New South Wales and Tasmania during the 1820s, frontier conflict spiralled. Many more frontiersmen were living in remote locations where detection of crime was beyond the powers of fledgling governments. But as the wave of colonisation fanned outward from the port cities, urban critics arose who questioned the behaviour and attitudes born of the lawless frontier. They were met by advocates of rapid development in a debate that has continued in one form or another ever since.

Conflict around Bathurst in 1824 inspired a vigorous exchange of letters in the Sydney Gazette that canvassed contending views about frontier settlement, attendant violence and the nature of both up-country settlers and the Aboriginal people. The exchange began in July with a letter from a correspondent who chose the name ‘Fidelis’ and lamented the fate of murdered stockmen: ‘so many defenceless and unprotected fellow men’ who were stationed ‘beyond the reach of succour, inhumanely murdered, robbed, or pillaged’. Fidelis called for the most determined measures to effect the ‘suppression of such wanton atrocity and horrid murder’ and to avenge the loss ‘of our murdered countrymen’. Did not such Aboriginal attacks,

call aloud for the extirpation of such lawless marauders? And do not lacerated remains of the unburied corpses, and mangled limbs of individuals, who have breathed their last in agony, in the lonely sequestered forests … kindle feelings indescribable in the breast of every generous member of our community and demand immediate punishment?

Fidelis believed that the attempt to reason with the Aboriginal offenders would be ‘attended with as much success, as would the application of eloquence to subdue or command any kind of un- domesticated cattle’. So mercy should be ‘unquestionably laid aside … until by a ‘true sense of our superiority they would discontinue their murder and rapacity’.⁶

The humanitarian riposte came quickly. In the next issue of the weekly paper, ‘Philanthropus’ denounced the view of Fidelis and introduced many of the themes that were to run through public discourse for many years. He began by affirming the humanity of Aboriginal people and the common origin of all peoples. ‘I think they have with myself, and all other men’, he declared, ‘one common ancestor’. He was, ‘therefore, willing to call them brethren, and to acknowledge them entitled to my compassion and fraternal respect’. Then in a direct challenge to frontier settlers he declared:

Hence, I have been led to estimate even the least one of these, my despised and injured brethren, at more value than all the sheep and cattle on Bathurst Plains; than all the flocks and herds in the territory of New South Wales; than all the animals in the whole world!

But the Aboriginal people had a further claim on the settlers. They were the original proprietors of the country to whom was owed ‘an equivalent, in such kind and manner as may afford or secure to them the greatest benefit’. This put their attacks on the Bathurst Plains stockmen in a different perspective. ‘If we do not approve of their conduct’, Philanthropus observed, how can we approve of the settlers’ own behaviour ‘in having first invaded their land, and, in a great measure, deprived them of their pleasure and subsistence’. He concluded with a flourish:

Rather than trespass any further, should we not endeavour now to make reparation, and so prove to them, and to all mankind, that we are not in principle, or in practice, less honorable than heathens; but that, on the contrary, we are humane and generous Christians – and really concerned for the welfare of these aborigines.⁷

Fidelis had another challenger three weeks later. ‘Amicitia’ was outraged by the suggestion that there should be a total extermination of the Bathurst tribes. While it might prevent further resistance, it would be ‘a needless, unmerited, and consequently a murderous destruction of our fellow men’. The ‘extinction of human life’ was an act ‘so transcendentally awful in its consequences’ that it could ‘only be justified by extreme necessity’. Unless that could be established, the massacre of Aboriginal people would be ‘foul and unpardonable murder’. And what, asked Amicitia, did Fidelis mean by vengeance? Directly addressing his adversary, he declared: ‘If you mean anything more than legal punishment, you mean more than you ought, more than can be sanctioned in a civilized and Christian country’. To be legal, punishment could only be inflicted on the guilty and be