The Making of the Aborigines by Bain Attwood

Author:Bain Attwood [Attwood, Bain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780043701850
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1989-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

the reserve and better paternalistic management; on the first issue they did not argue in terms of the land being theirs from time immemorial but claimed instead that it was granted to them as compensation by a former governor, and that they would further legitimise their right to the property by using it productively and making themselves self-supporting; on the second matter, they demanded ‘some man over us’, preferably the founding manager, John Green, who had ruled them sympathetically. They emphatically rejected the Board’s intention of removing them from Coranderrk and condemned its appointee managers. A number of factors made for their unprecedented protest. They had been disadvantaged by the policies of faceless bureaucrats and the practices of harsh managers, more so than any other mission, and had come to see clearly that they had interests which conflicted with the Board’s. Their sense of common cause sprang from their shared experience of oppression on the reserve and this was reinforced by their traditional clan affiliations. As they battled the Board over several years, though, they increasingly developed a different consciousness of themselves, as ‘Coranderrk Aborigines’ rather than ‘the Kulin’.51

Their well-organised agitation had a legitimacy which won much political support and which the Board found difficult to counter. During these years it was consequently in an embattled position, lurching from crisis to crisis and at times fighting for its very survival.52 This made radical policy changes difficult to achieve, even if the Board and the missionaries had been committed to a thoroughgoing program of reform, which they were not. In the early 1880s they continued to look for measures to strengthen ‘the missionary system’ while also considering some minor reforms along inclusionist lines. Hagenauer sought a way for tackling what he called ‘the somewhat difficult question’ of ‘the people of mixed blood’ but was yet to accord it special significance.53 These piecemeal moves towards radical reform were, in any case, characterised by uncertainty about whom they should refer to. In particular there was disagreement over whether young single women could go off the missions into apprenticeships, as philanthropist and pastoralist Ann Bon recommended. The Board and the missionaries opposed this. The missionaries’ segregationist policy had owed much to their middle-class Christian view of working-class male sexuality: they believed that Aboriginal women would be exploited by rapacious European men unless kept within the sanctuary of the reserves and under missionary protection.54 (The Board and the missionaries’ rejection of any scheme to send girls or young women away also owed something to their hostile attitude to its promoter, a very independent-minded widow who was one of the Board’s most fierce and effective critics.)55

On this issue a stalemate developed, one which remained until Hagenauer stepped forward in 1884, determined now on a new policy and ready to play the politics of expertise. This Moravian missionary was an ambitious man, more than he himself realised or would allow; he loved to be at the political centre and was a brilliant strategist and operator. By the

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