The Words that Made Australia by Chris Feik

Author:Chris Feik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2012-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

AFTER THE DREAMING

W.E.H. Stanner

1968

In 1932 I went to a remote place in the Northern Territory to study some little-known tribes. It was a broken-down settlement which might well have been the Illawarra or the Hawkesbury of a hundred years or so before. There was an exiguous scatter of farmers, cattlemen and miners with leaseholds over lands still lived on by the remnants of the local tribes, which nevertheless still felt that they had an ancient and unbroken title to the lands.

On the outskirts of the settlement there were a few groups of ‘myalls’ (bush natives) who were as wild as hawks, timid and daring by turns, with scarcely a word of English, and in two minds what to do: drawn towards the settlement because the break in the tribal structure had reached them too, but unreconciled to the prospect of a sedentary life. Some of them were being tempted in, others pushed away, as the need, fear or expediency of the Europeans dictated in almost Phillipian stops and starts. There was bad blood, frequent fighting, and much talk of sorcery and poison, between the bush and the sedentary groups, and no love between any of them and the Europeans, so that cautious friendship alternated with covert or open hostility. In the space of a couple of years two Europeans in the vicinity were speared to death, and several Aborigines were killed or wounded by others of their own kind.

I have some letters and reports which I wrote at the time. They help to bridge the gap a little, but not wholly. The letters are filled with sympathy for the plight of the natives, with respect for their quality of mind and social personality, and with real affection for several who had become personal friends. But they show very much the same attitudes towards the bushmen I had met, many of whom also had befriended me. It is clear that I gave a lot of weight in the scales of judgement to the hardship, loneliness and privation of their lives, and to their unyielding struggle to keep going. The reports are rather different. Somehow, in them, I seem to have managed to draw a screen over at least the worst things of that frontier. There is no obvious sign of trying to put a good face on things; no indication of saving the eyes or ears of those to whom I was reporting; no palpable effort to write, as it were, for history; but on the other hand a very interesting absence of declamation. The tone of my comments is rather reminiscent of the flat, emotionless remark that Spencer and Gillen had made thirty years earlier when they said that ‘… taking all things into account, the black fellow has not perhaps any particular reason to be grateful to the white man’. Apparently what lay before my eyes seemed to me a natural and inevitable part of the Australian scene, one that could possibly be palliated, but not ever changed in any fundamental way.

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