The Original Australians
By Josephine Flood
Allen and Unwin, 2006
306 pages, $39.95
I approached this very attractive book, subtitled "Story of the Aboriginal People" with pleasure. It promises everything you would like to know about Indigenous Australians in an accessible, authoritative and straightforward style. It is refined and meticulously footnoted. I finished reading it in an entirely different state of mind. Josephine Flood's work is part of the conservative campaign to blame Aborigines for their suffering.
The Original Australians starts pleasurably enough, though oddly with European contact with Australia, not from Aboriginal contact with the continent (that point is dealt with later in the text). Flood carefully demolishes any "noble savage" illusions; Aboriginal life was tough and she emphasises reports of violent treatment of women within Aboriginal society.
She counterposes her realism to liberal illusions of a pre-colonisation utopia. She does not take up the Marxist analysis of primitive communism, which holds that Aboriginal society was based on shared poverty, depending on the collaboration of all its members. It was indeed primitive, which is the point, but it was also cooperative; Flood's straw argument with liberalism avoids the real issues.
Being the former director of the Aboriginal Heritage Section of the Australian Heritage Commission, Flood skilfully assembles a lot of interesting information about Aboriginal customs and social practice. But the political text disgraces the anthropology.
She presents a utopian vision of relations in the northern Australian pastoral industry. The "kings in grass castles" were interested in treating "Aboriginal stockmen fairly well and [looking] after their extended families", she writes.
That "happy time" ended, says Flood, when the Aborigines experienced the life of free workers as army labourers during World War II, then successfully achieved equal wages and the right to drink.
In fact, even the 1929 Commonwealth government Bleakley report noted: "… although recognising [the Europeans] absolute dependence upon the natives, there has been no attempt made by the people on these holdings to elevate or educate them … [Any] suggestion of improving the living conditions and wages of the young natives is met by the objection that the industry cannot stand any increase in the cost of production."
Ronald and Catherine Berndt, as young anthropologists, were hired by the Vesty Corporation in the 1940s to find out why their Aboriginal workers were dying off. Their findings are recorded in End of an Era: the food given to the workers was appalling and rations would be cut off if the camps didn't supply young women to the white overseers.
"Aboriginal people were regarded as one of the natural resources of the country, whose purpose in life was to serve the needs and desires of the Europeans", the Berndts observed.
Even the vile racist scourge of Aboriginal children, WA's notorious Chief Protector, A.O. Neville, gets a whitewash. Far from a brutal stealer of children, he had "a notion of happy, self-sufficient, prosperous Aboriginal farming communities", which, unfortunately "dwindled and died". In fact, says Flood, the label "stolen" should not be used for the removed Aboriginal generations, because it implies illegality!
Quentin Beresford's biography of Rob Riley, the heroic WA Aboriginal leader, meticulously drawing on primary sources, exposes Neville's real vision, through the story of Riley's grandmother, Anna Dinah.
Dinah was locked up in the Moore River Settlement from 1922 until her death in 1947 because she refused to surrender her children. "Her commitment to her children was her life's achievement, achieved at the expense of her independence", Beresford writes.
Flood's views on these matters left me shaking with rage. But things got worse.
T.J. Hickey, she says, died in Redfern in 2004 from riding his bicycle too fast because "he (mistakenly) thought he was being chased by police". The police car behind him had nothing to do with him rocketing into the gutter so fast that he shot metres into the air and died a hideous death impaled on a steel picket fence.
Cheerfully, for Flood, racist cops are not the problem in Redfern. "Antagonism to the police has little to do with race and everything to do with … protection of a lucrative heroin trade", she reports. Has Flood ever considered the role of the NSW police in Sydney's heroin traffic?
Rob Riley does not rate a mention in Flood's book, which is a pity. He said, in 1994: "Historically, the truth is that the Indigenous people of Australia have been subjected to more intense social engineering, and social and cultural genocide, than people from any other former British colony."
His suicide note, written two years later, said: "Understand white Australia that you have so much to answer for. Your greed, your massacres, your sanitised history in the name of might and right."
Josephine Flood has produced a sophisticated, hand-wringing version of just such a history.