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These three books on Aboriginal European relations are a reminder that the process of rewriting the history of contact of Australian Aboriginals (or should one say Aboriginal Australians?) has come a long way since C.D. Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, the work which started it all twelve years ago. Each is important in its own way. Lyndall Ryan’s book (The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 315 p., $22.50) demolishes once and for all what the author calls ‘the myth of the last Tasmanian’: the still widely held belief that Tasmanian Aboriginals perished in 1876 when Truganini died in Hobart. Judith Wright’s work (The Cry For The Dead, OUP, 301 p., $19.95 hb), although essentially a story of the tragic struggle or the author’s squatter forbears, is one of the few attempts ever made to incorporate Aboriginal perspective into the history of pastoral expansion, to run the white and black ‘versions’ of events side by side. Henry Reynolds’s epoch-making book (The Other Side of the Frontier, Penguin, 255 p., $6.95 pb, first published in hardback by History Department, James Cook University, 216 p., $7.50 plus postage) documents and interprets’ some of the Aboriginal responses to European invasion and settlement during the nineteenth century. All three are well written, although The Cry for the Dead is at times a bit irritating and difficult to follow, largely because of the lack of appropriate maps. All attack traditional wisdom and are therefore inescapably political, dealing as they do with highly emotional issues which have aroused a great deal of passion ever since 1788.
... (read more)Don Watson reviews 'Tubbo' by Paul de Serville, 'The Homestead' by Peter Freeman, and 'Homesteads of Southern New South Wales 1830–1900' by Maurice Canton
Primitive accumulation was a brutal process often performed by gentlemen. Not all pastoralists were brutes – unless they had to be. Not all Aboriginals were murdered – unless they had to be. Facades of normality were hurriedly erected to confound Karl Marx. For a moment the Australian pastoralists could build oases of sophistication on the Australian landscape. For a generation or so they managed to impose a uniquely Australian gentility around the waterholes and rivers. That the phenomenon was a passing one is symbolised by the life and death of James Bourke in the Riverina. A secondary pioneer, he died at the age of twenty-four. His brother Thomas, ‘a fine athletic man’ died of the booze aged twenty-six. The body of his step-uncle, James Peter, was found in the river a few days later: he had been in ‘a severe fit of the horrors’. All sorts of disasters of a man-made kind – from fatal flaws to death duties – combined with the elements to wash away the billabong dynasties.
... (read more)Test-Tube Babies edited by William Walters and Peter Singer
Selected Poems by John Tranter & Flowers of Emptiness. by Rudi Krausemann
Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861–1897 by Noel Loos
Beatrice and Sydney Webb are still alive, though failing. At least, that is the impression one gets from these five pamphlets, which mark the resurrection of the Victorian Fabian Society since 1980, after temporarily shaking off the mortal after coil.
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A grizzled, greying migrant, who was holidaying in Sicily after twenty years in Australia, attended a civic reception for participants in a seminar on Australian literature held in Piazza Armerina last January. His wife and three children were in Moonee Ponds. He was obviously pleased to speak with the Australians present as if they somehow confirmed his experience in a far-off land.
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