1990 saw the publication of an important book with a provocative title: A Distant Field of Murder, by historian Jan Crichett, (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne). The book is about contact between europeans and aboriginal people in the Western District of Victoria between 1834 and 1848. The title is important as it is a direct quote from a Westminster Parliamentarian in the early 1840’s and effectively puts the lie to the apologists who argue that we should only judge the actions in the context and values of the times. That murder was being committed was widely recognised and publicly stated in Britain whilst being swept under the carpet in Australia. No wonder Australian of the Year Adam Goodes is aghast at this ongoing white-wash.
The book generally paints an interesting and positive picture of aboriginal life at contact, lauding their diplomacy, their governance, their connection to specific lands and their permanent (if only seasonally used) dwellings.
Although initially impressed with the book I’ve come to have some misgivings. (This is most certainly not to deny it as an important book.)
There are a few lines in the book that make it seem to almost belittle aboriginal experience, to excuse and indeed venerate the squatters, and to indicate and extremely prejudicial view of class.
“Life with their own people brought some comfort to the Aborigines……..” (p 112.) This is said of Aborigines brought to missions at Framlingham and Lake Condah from throughout the Western District. Yet earlier in the book Critchett had been at great pains to detail the importance of clan, tribe, unit; that mixing was not undertaken lightly, formalities were needed to be observed and most particularly people had “their own country”. In the quote above there is surely a suggestion that all Aborigines belong together. The recognition of difference so clearly spelt early in the book is all but forgotten.
In talking of the squatters, of landholders (not owners), she invariably calls them “gentlemen’. “Those who went out armed to deal with the Aboriginals were not only brutalised convicts and ex-convicts but our most respected pioneers – men who would not have done so without a good cause (my emphasis). (p 187) And the ‘good cause’? Economic. Without the Aborigines the costs of running a grazing enterprise could be slashed and the threat to their ‘ownership’ of the land extinguished.
Convicts and ex convicts are invariably portrayed as low life, as scum, squatters, managers and authority figures as ‘gentlemen’.
The bibliography in this book is most useful and comprehensive. Critchetts work early in the book is especially insightful in developing the theme of separate clans. It shows that each clan is distinct, that it has its own ‘country’. It show that there were recognised protocols for travel to or through others country, and that these protocols were rigorously observed. She also detailed how these protocols were disregarded by white people, and were almost impossible to observe when fleeing bullets, and searching for food once traditional food and water sources had been destroyed or made inaccessible to the traditional owners. Yet having done such a great job of showing that there were numerous distinct nations the seems to revert to the generic “Aboriginal” as a coverall for the indigenous population.
The book also fails to discuss the impact of the legal situation for and of the squatters.
My real concern is that the book, in the end somehow, after so much good work regresses and excuses the deplorable facts of colonisation, and diminishes the indigenous whom she had earlier exalted. By doing this the book continues to allow expression in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of what Critchett, in another place calls ‘the extreme ethnocentrism’ of the nineteenth century. This is what I see as the great pity.
Still, the book is highly recommended to anyone wishing to understand more of our history and why, perhaps, it seems we owe our standard of living so much to the proceeds of the theft of Aboriginal land, the destruction of their culture and the wretchedness in which we paint them.
by Cecil Poole