Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black

Author:Jeremy Black [Black, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

6

AUSTRALIA, CANADA, AND NEW ZEALAND

On Australia Day, January 26, 2018, Aboriginal (indigenous) activists defaced monuments dedicated to Captain James Cook and other British explorers of Australia. A statue of Cook in Melbourne was covered in pink paint with the words NO PRIDE painted beneath his feet alongside the Aboriginal flag. Paint was thrown on a monument to an expedition across inland Australia in the nineteenth century, and the word STOLEN was added. Statues of Lachlan Macquarie, the most prominent colonial governor of New South Wales, have also been defaced. Alan Trudge, the Citizenship Minister, declared on radio, “These people are trashing our national heritage.” The date of Australia Day is that when, in 1788, the “First Fleet” of British convict ships arrived and Captain Arthur Phillip claimed the land for George III, which was a form of compensation for the loss of the Thirteen Colonies. To some, it is what they termed “invasion day” and a celebration that whitewashes earlier history.

The attack on statues, a form of public re-inscription, is not new, and George III suffered in statue form during the War of American Independence, losing his perch in New York. In August 2017, a statue of Cook in Hyde Park in Sydney was given the additions CHANGE AND DATE and NO PRIDE IN GENOCIDE. Politics as usual are involved. Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister in early 2018, criticized activists, while his Labour opponent, Bill Shorten, backed a change to the inscription which claims that Cook discovered “this territory,” which, in 1879 when it was erected, meant the colony of New South Wales. Cook was indeed the first person to see the entire coast of New South Wales. Turnbull has argued for debate, not censorship: “A free country debates its history – it does not deny it. It builds new monuments as it preserves old ones, writes new books, not burns old ones.” In 2018, the Australian government decided to build a monument in Botany Bay, where Cook had arrived in 1770 on his voyage of exploration.

In 2011, new tensions had arisen when the Left-dominated Sydney City Council insisted that the words “European arrival” be replaced in official documents with the term “invasion or illegal colonisation.” This decision was reached after pressure from the council’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Panel, and the council voted 7–2 in favor of the change. Academic opinion was divided, the historian Alan Frost pointing out that the intentions of William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister from 1783 to 1801 and from 1804 to 1806, could not be accurately described as an invasion:

My notion of invasion is armed forces arriving to dispossess someone else. What happened to the Aborigines subsequently was dispossession but that was not the intention of the Pitt Administration. For the first 15 to 20 years, Sydney was just a tiny thing on the edge of a vast continent. It seems to me that to use the word “invasion” to describe it is an abuse of language.1

Such an abuse is very common, and Frost correctly focused on the misuse and impact of language.

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