An uncomfortable truth

THE British stole this land. It is unambiguous. Just ask French expeditioner Nicolas Baudin. In 1802 Baudin was leading a scientific expedition in Bass Strait off what we now know as Tasmania when he was met by a British vessel.

New South Wales Governor Philip King had sent acting Lieutenant Charles Robbins from Port Jackson (Sydney) to find Baudin because of fears the French were going to stake a claim.

Robbins found Baudin’s expeditioners near King Island. He hastily raced ashore and raised the British flag up a gum tree. Baudin observed it from his vessel moored offshore.

In a private letter to Governor King a month later, Baudin protested.

“To my way of thinking,” Baudin wrote. “I have never been able to conceive that there was any justice or even fairness on the part of Europeans in seizing, in the name of their government, a land they have seen for the first time when it is inhabited by men who did not always deserve the titles of ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ that have been lavished on them, whereas they were still only nature’s children and no more uncivilised than your Scottish Highlanders of today or our peasants of Lower Brittany ... not only do you have an injustice to reproach yourself with in seizing their land but you have also transported to a land, where the crimes and diseases of Europeans were unknown, everything that could retard the progress of civilization.”

Governor King had been told.

His response was to set up a camp on the shores of the River Derwent to occupy the land. Within months the colonists had a fatal clash with Aborigines.

By the 1820s Aboriginal resistance had grown into guerrilla warfare. The man in charge, Governor George Arthur, sent despatches to England with concerns.

British secretary of state for the colonies, Sir George Murray, replied from Downing Street: “The great decrease which has of late years taken place in the amount of the aboriginal population renders it not unreasonable to apprehend that the whole race of these people may at no distant period become extinct. But with whatever feelings such an event may be looked forward to by those of the settlers who have been sufferers by the collisions which have taken place, it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occupation of the island as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity or even with principles of justice and sound policy; and the adoption of any line of conduct having for its avowed or for its secret object the extinction of the native race could not fail to leave an indelible stain on the character of the British government”.

Governor Arthur had been told.

His response was to arrange for about 240 Aborigines, said at the time to be the last surviving members of their race, to be exiled to an island in Bass Strait where most died.

In 1837, a Select Committee of Inquiry investigated, conceding the land had been stolen by force but blaming Aborigines: “Such, indeed, is the barbarous state of these people and so entirely destitute are they even of the rudest forms of civil polity, that their claims, whether as sovereigns or proprietors of the soil, have been utterly disregarded,” the committee wrote. “The land has been taken from them without the assertion of any other title than that of superior force …”

Writer Clive Turnbull explained in his 1948 book The Black War that the Aborigines “were driven from their land because the colonists wished to occupy it; and when they retaliated they were taken from the island to get them out of the way”.

There are mitigating factors for settlers thrust into war after being enticed here by stories of wealth and opportunity that failed to mention Aborigines. The same can be said of convicts dragged to the island against their will, and of soldiers and sailors doing their duty.

But mitigation does not erase the theft nor undo the crime.

English novelist H.G Wells, who erroneously thought Tasmanian Aborigines extinct, used them in 1897 as examples in The War of the Worlds about a Martian invasion of Earth.

Of the Martians, Wells wrote: “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians … were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of 50 years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

If Martians stole the Earth, imposed their law, banned our culture, called us miserable wretches and killed nearly every one of us, would we doubt they were invaders or celebrate the day they arrived?