I got into writing history in an odd way, simply because I am science-trained. As a young bushwalking botanist, I saw walking tracks that were maintained by walking feet and wondered if those tracks had been formed by the feet of the first Australians.
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| Budawang Ranges: see the track? |
The tracks must have been formed before 1788, because within a few days of landing in
1788, some convicts walked along “the road to Botany Bay”, an established foot
track through the bush. Once there, they asked commodore La Pérouse to give them a passage
back to Europe. La Pérouse refused their request.
That was history, yet as a schoolchild, I learned only about "intrepid explorers" forcing their way through "impenetrable bush" when, as they admitted in their journals, they just followed established tracks. I thought this was a story worth telling, so I told it in Australia's Pioneers, Heroes and Fools.
I heard about massacres in colonial Australia, and looked for hard evidence. It was there: in 1883, Emily Creaghe travelled from Normanton to Darwin, exploring in the Northern Territory, and she wrote in her diary on 8 February 1883, about Hann and Watson’s Lorne Hill station, where there were “40 pairs of blacks’ ears nailed round the walls”.
Writing about this, I somehow acquired the label “historian”. The National Library of Australia asked me to write history for younger readers, and my science-biased Australian Backyard Explorer came out and won an award, so they asked for more. The Big Book of Australian History includes Gondwana, the extinct megafauna and the role of steam and electricity in shaping modern Australia. It also told a few truths about how the Indigenous people were treated.
If there is ever a fifth edition, I plan to shoehorn these two S. T. Gill images in:
In gold rush times, Indigenous people could see their dispossession. In 1853, an Indigenous man at Sofala asked a mounted police sergeant “how it would be if a black fellow went to England and ‘turn em Queen out’?
The original Australians were in the same position as the Saxons in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The Norman invasion lacked guns, bands and flags, yet we call 1066 an invasion, because of the way they looked around and took the land, changed the laws and the language. Social disruption is what invasion is about, and it happened here.
Face it: 1788 was an invasion, and white Australia needs to be courteous. We need a less offensive date for Australia Day than January 26, but the present holiday comes at a useful time of the year, so I’ve been looking, idly, for a more neutral date.
Some years back, I met a real historian, Inga Clendinnen, when she won an award for her Dancing With Strangers. Looking at early white and Indigenous contacts, she tells of the first meeting of significant groups of invaders and what she calls “the Australians”. I mentioned Clendinnen’s story of how they danced in my first edition.
The fourth edition comes out soon, and I wanted to add more detail on the dancing from William Bradley’s journal, the source for Clendinnen’s story. I photographed the relevant pages at the State Library, and headed home on the Manly ferry.
Crossing the Heads, I read that the dancing with strangers took place on a beach at the eastern end of Middle Harbour. Unarmed Indigenous men had used their woomeras to point to a good landing place, which I realised, just had to be Castle Rock, going on Bradley's wording. When his party landed, “… these people mixed with ours & all hands danced together.”
The sailors slept at anchor that night, which was 29 January 1788, and next day, they crossed the harbour to Spring Cove. They may have landed on Quarantine Beach, but my bet is that it was Collins Flat: both of these lie within 'Spring Cove'. Prout's 1843 water colour, Spring Cove, shown below, appears to show Quarantine Beach.
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| John Skinner Prout, 1843, Spring Cove. SLNSW DG SSV1A/26 |
While they were there, three men in canoes came in and landed, leaving their spears in the canoes. “Our people and these mixed together and were quite sociable, dancing & otherwise amusing them,” Bradley wrote.
I realised in a flash that as we passed North Head, I was sitting directly between the two dancing places: there was an easy fix for the casual insult lying within white Australia’s celebration of the anniversary of the invasion as ‘Australia Day’. The practicality: we need a late summer public holiday, so what can we hang our ‘day off’ on?
I dashed off this paragraph for the very end of The Big Book of Australian History”:
“One thing that must change during this century is the insensitive date for ‘Australia Day’ of 26 January. Surely, our national day of celebration should be 29 January, the anniversary of the day on which old and new Australians first danced together, in harmony?”
Perhaps the youngsters will care? Mind you, 30 January would do even better as Australia Day, because on 30 January 1788, the dancing was quite deliberate, and on that date in 1813, the word "Australia" appeared in print
for the very first time. This pre-dated that Matthew Flinders' use, the one that second-rate pompous politicians cite, later in that same year. Here is the passage, in a rather dreadful piece of "poetry" by Michael Massey Robinson: note the fourth line.
FROM Albion's blest Isle have we cross'd the wide Main,
And brav'd all the Dangers, of Neptune's Domain—
The Hurricane's Whirlwind, the Tempest's loud Roar,
An Asylum to find on Australia's rude Shore
For the Genius of Britain sent forth a Decree,
That her Sons should be exil'd—once more to be free!
Source: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/628623
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