Slaves To Misinformation
Balanced and informed history demands acceptance of the inconvenient fact colonial Australia was not the fatal shore but a land of redemption. By Nick Cater.
Scott Morrison’s insistence that slavery was not part of the Australian colonial experience might have been the opportunity for the truthful discussion the ABC keeps telling us we need to have.
Instead, Radio National Breakfast wheeled out Bruce Pascoe to confirm the ABC’s prejudices and tell us why the Prime Minister was wrong. “It’s pretty obvious that when you chain people up by the neck and force them to march 300km and then to work on cattle stations for non-indigenous barons, then that is slavery.”
Semantic carelessness, conflated half-truths and a slap-happy interpretation of evidence were the best Pascoe could muster to build a case against Morrison. Yet presenter Hamish Macdonald felt no need to offer a countervailing opinion, let alone correct Pascoe’s factual mistakes. A “pretty obvious” case is good enough for a mind that is already made up.
A progressive view of the world demands we take a dim view of our forebears so that our own compassion shines. It requires a conviction that no generation has been as enlightened as ours and no one who came before us saw the world with such clarity.
There is no shortage of brutal episodes to make this self-aggrandising point. Chattel slavery, however, the ownership of human beings as personal property who can be exchanged as commodities, has always been illegal in Australia. Children have never inherited slave status from their mother, nor been sold like cattle in open markets. Unlike the US, Australia didn’t need a civil war to decide the matter. As governor Arthur Phillip wrote to the Home Office: “There can be no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves.”
Balanced and informed history demands acceptance of the inconvenient fact colonial Australia was not the fatal shore but a land of redemption.
Characterising Australia by the incidence of criminal behaviour is disingenuous. The unlawful killing of Aborigines occurred at the frontiers of settlement and was never sanctioned by the state.
A nation’s moral fibre should not be measured by its most shameful moments but by how it responds to them. Do brutal acts accelerate a downward spiral of general degeneracy, as it did in the Belgian Congo, for example? Or are we committed to the liberal ideal of continuous self-improvement?
The word slavery is a relatively new arrival in Australian history books, whether written by scholars from the left or right. Manning Clark drew a long bow to claim that the European convicts were slaves, but the word appears in no other context in his six-volume history of Australia.
The existence of slavery is not acknowledged in Alan Atkinson’s The Europeans in Australia, except in the negative. There is no index entry for slavery in the Cambridge History of Australia (2013) edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre.
If there is something these learned scholars missed, then revisionists such as Pascoe must front up with the evidence. This they have been unable to do. Their claims are more rhetorical than empirical, stretching the definition of slavery to break its meaning.
It takes a historian with backbone to stare unflinchingly at Australia’s past and wrestle with the moral ambiguity of a nation settled by enlightened people with the highest intentions in which not everything has gone to plan.
David Kemp’s five-volume history of freedom in Australia, three of which have been published, rises above the ABC history-war clickbait to do just that.
The cruelty of some frontier settlers he describes competes with the worst accounts of lynch mobs in America’s deep south. He cites Henry Parkes’s account of an incident from the Hawkesbury River during the early days of the colony when settlers were said to have seized a native boy, dragging him repeatedly through a fire until his back was charred before throwing him into a river and shooting him dead.
Kemp, unlike others who have ventured into this field, does not seek to draw immoral equivalence between Australia’s history and that of other colonies when describing the hostile lawlessness on the frontier.
The violence was not sanctioned by the government, and liberal reformers such as Samuel Griffith made it their mission to impose the rule of law and a civilised frontier morality.
“The Queensland frontier was not the heart of darkness of the Belgian Congo, where there was essentially no liberal influence,” Kemp writes.
As it happens, the suffering of the indigenous people of the Congo, who had the misfortune of being colonised by the Belgians in the late 19th century, was discussed on Radio National Breakfast recently. The item was prompted by the West Australian government’s decision to rename the King Leopold Ranges in the western Kimberley.
King Leopold II was not the great explorer Alexander Forrest imagined him to be when he named the ranges in his honour in 1879. He was the absolute ruler of the Congo Free State, controlling a mercenary army in which the severing of a hand was regarded as mild punishment. Estimates of how many Congolese were killed range up to 15 million.
The narrative of history favoured by muddle-headed progressives is a rogues’ gallery of bad old white men in which colonialism is characterised by its most illiberal, brutal form.
All are portrayed as irredeemably evil with little distinction and without reference to facts or context. The mob defacing Winston Churchill’s statue in London ignorantly brands him a racist, blind to his courage in resisting and defeating the tyranny of Adolf Hitler.
These are dangerous times to be undermining Australia’s moral foundations and the values and institutions that underpin its success. Nor can we afford to be diverted by more symbolic debates on our history while the hard work of practical reconciliation remains undone. Justice should be sought in attending to the causes of educational and welfare disadvantage in regional and remote communities rather than by defaming our ancestors.