Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney by Paul Irish

Author:Paul Irish
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Missing the links

While misinformed popular views of authentic Aboriginality affected the lives of Aboriginal people, what mattered more was whether their small but influential group of locally born European acquaintances recognised their ongoing connections to coastal Sydney. Aboriginal people had cultivated relationships with these people since the early 19th century by visiting them, working for them, supplying them with food, passing on traditional knowledge, hunting and fishing with them, and sometimes living on their properties. These Sydneysiders potentially had a far greater insight into the nature of Aboriginal life than the general population; an opportunity to see continuities and connections as well as changes, and to reject popular myths. We have no direct record of how most of them felt about local Aboriginal people, but we can learn something of this from the actions of members of the Sydney Aborigines Committee.

As we have seen, the committee was formed in 1844 to address the welfare needs of Aboriginal people around coastal Sydney. It remained active until at least the early 1860s and its key members were Bob Nichols (1809–1857), George Hill (1802–1883), Daniel Egan (1803–1870) and George Thornton (1819–1901), who are shown in Figure 5.10. Though all of these men shared a common background of local birth, convict roots and a long association with Sydney, this did not result in uniform attitudes towards local Aboriginal people. Europeans involved in Aboriginal affairs across Australia in the 19th century have long been assumed to be ‘benevolent’ simply for having an interest in Aboriginal issues, but as historians are now discovering, each had their own reasons for the particular approaches to Aboriginal welfare they favoured.40 In the case of the Sydney Aborigines Committee, the divergent views of Bob Nichols and George Thornton had lasting effects on local Aboriginal people.

Bob Nichols had founded the committee in 1844 and remained its key figure until his death in 1857. As a colonial radical and supporter of causes such as emancipation, he was probably naturally sympathetic to the downtrodden, but there are few specific clues to the origins of his attitudes to Aboriginal people. His general sympathies can be seen from statements he made as a lawyer and parliamentarian. In his 1834 defence of Hunter Valley Aboriginal man and accused murderer Wong-ko-bi-kan (Jackey) for example, he argued for acquittal on the grounds that Aboriginal people were ‘the primary tenants of the soil’ and that it was illegal for Europeans ‘to disturb them in possession of these natural rights’.41 Even allowing for the hyperbole of a defence lawyer, this was a line of thinking that was far from typical at the time. A more revealing episode was his argument against the prohibition of alcohol sales to Aboriginal people as a member of the Legislative Council in 1849. Apart from believing that prohibition was ineffective, Nichols argued that it was discriminatory because ‘many of the blacks were industrious, and comparatively civilized [and] consequently […] had a right to equal liberty with the whites’.42 As he made his speech, it is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.