Whitefella comin': Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia
By David S. Trigger
Cambridge University Press, 1992. 250 pp. $45 (hb)
Reviewed by Andrew Honey
Trigger's book focuses on Doomadgee, a mission settlement on the Nicholson River in the Queensland gulf country 80 km west of Burketown, established by Open Brethren in 1936. It is an interpretation of social life up to 1983 based on original research.
After pastoralists drove Aborigines off their land, the northern Protector regularly issued rations in the 1890s, which "engendered a form of accommodation" to state coercion and land dispossession and led to the pauperisation of the Aborigines.
However, only with the establishment of Doomadgee have Aborigines been subject to "forces of hegemonic domination". It is this part of Trigger's study that breaks new ground.
The missionaries saw the poor physical conditions combined with "moral danger": At Burketown "no little girl is really safe, such is the depraved condition of the people here", whereas at Doomadgee there was the "pure, clean atmosphere of a Christian home".
The "girls" (some were 24 years old!) were locked up overnight and forbidden to leave the mission unaccompanied during the day.
Social distance
There was a physical division between the "mission", which contained the houses of the white staff, the school and the clinic, and the "village", which contained Aboriginal housing and none of the service facilities.
This physical separation and the retention of services in the white domain is reproduced in many places where there appear to be two separate towns, for example Toomelah and Boggabilla in northern NSW.
Trigger argues that Aborigines seem more committed than whites to maintaining this social distance. He believes Aborigines exclude whites as part of a "defence against constant administrative intrusiveness and attitudinal ethnocentrism".
The internal politics of the "village", he concludes,
involved the "attribution of social status" in a manner totally different to that of non-Aboriginal society, centring on language, country and kin.
A valuable aspect of Trigger's study is his discussion of conflict, which he describes as quite common, and its resolution independent of the "village" administration. This reinforces the interpretation of Aboriginal "dispute processing" advanced by Marcia Langton in "Medicine Square" (1988).
Trigger attempts to ascertain the extent to which Aborigines have imbibed the racial ideology shared by the missionaries and the racist governments of Queensland and the Northern Territory.
This was that "mixed-race" children on cattle stations and in fringe camps should be separated from "full-bloods" because they were more assimilable into white society.
At Doomadgee, Aborigines referred to those of mixed descent as "half-caste", "quarter-caste" and "Yellafella" and considered them a separate social group.
The attribution of "Yellafella" status depended on a person's skin colour, knowledge of their parents and grandparents and their general behaviour and usual associates.
Trigger found that persons attributed "Yellafella" status were twice as likely to be in employment, more than six times as likely to have access to a vehicle and were favoured in obtaining newer housing.
Trigger believes that Aboriginal thought has not embraced the white ideology that attributes inherent characteristics to skin colour or ancestry, but rather that it emphasises the "importance of mixed-descent people having been provided with different opportunities by the world of white officialdom and employers".
Christianity
Did Christianity legitimate the domination over Aboriginal society or provide a basis for resistance?
The steps to become a Christian were first to approach a church elder and make a "profession of faith" or be "saved", then to be baptised and finally to live an "authentic Christian life".
Only a few of the large number of Aborigines who had been "saved" and baptised were in fellowship at any one time,
in 1982 constituting 30 or 40 out of 260 adults.
In an aspect that Trigger does not explore further, there seems to be a female bias in the numbers of both those baptised (59%) and those attending Brethren meetings (67%). This seems to call for further explanation, given that women could not speak at church meetings or become elders.
Many Christian Aborigines opposed initiation ceremonies because they regarded Aboriginal law as dangerous "in some spiritual sense". As a result, there was considerable tension between Christians and those committed to Aboriginal law.
Trigger argues that Aborigines have not kept the two traditions "intellectually separate". That a number of law experts have over the years been baptised and that "square up" rituals followed the deaths of Aborigines, including church elders, are cited as examples of the considerable tolerance of aspects of Christian belief among the broad group of Aborigines not in fellowship.
In material terms, those who were regular churchgoers were four times more likely to be living in newer housing than irregular churchgoers, and all churchgoers were three times more likely than non-churchgoers to be living in newer housing.
Overall, Trigger finds that among converts, "Christianity has operated as a powerful legitimating ideology for White authority". But after 50 years, the Aboriginal domain and the distinctly Aboriginal form of politics still formed part of a "culture of resistance". The tactical management of social distance, the failure of the evangelical endeavour to embrace more than a minority of Aborigines and the failure of the management ethos to convince most Aborigines of its legitimacy are evidence of this.
The great merit of Trigger's book is not simply to have moved away from interpreting Aborigines as mere victims, but to have explored, following Genovese and others in Afro-American history, original material on different forms of resistance and accommodation. He has given both an original account and a unique interpretation.