“Aboriginal Sin?” — I don’t think so

Literary titles matter — on the spine of a book or the head of an article they tell the essence of the tale. Changing them without informing the author is a tricky business and can betray his intentions: think of what happened to Montaigne’s friend La Boétie. His 16^th century book On Voluntary Servitude is a study of the psychology of passive submission; it is of general interest and not meant to favor this side or that. During France’s religious wars, however, it was forcibly recruited to the protestant cause and given a new and inflammatory title. The book was not in essence a partisan work. But under a variety of new and deceptive names La Boétie’s text was opportunistically misrepresented by the Huguenot interest — though being dead by then I don’t suppose the author cared.

On a more trivial scale something similar happened recently to a review of mine. A discussion of Keith Windschuttle’s new book The Stolen Generations, appearing in the June 2010 issue of the highly esteemed New Criterion, it was sent for publication with the title “Stolen Children and Academic Lies”. I think it’s pretty clear from this who is being blamed and who are the sinners — the usual suspects in the universities. The lies objected to are academic; they have nothing to do with Aborigines.

Imagine my surprise when for some reason or other “Stolen Children and Academic Lies” was changed without notice to “Aboriginal sin?” What the folk at the New Criterion were thinking of when they came up with this I’ll never know. It flatly contradicts the moral point and meaning of the original title, and is gratuitously provocative as well. Anyway I feel that comment and correction are due: the word “sin” as here applied to Aboriginal conduct is as inappropriate as the word “stolen” used to describe the child removal program in Keith Windschuttle’s indispensable book.

The nature of frontier societies

All Australians know that Aborigines have been more sinned against than sinning. But in any case the concept of sin is here woefully out of place. The varied legislation involved in Australian child removal programs was designed for a frontier society where encroaching pastoralism and mining impinged on tribal life —especially on Aboriginal family life. And in case you haven’t heard or didn’t notice, frontier societies were amoral through and through.

True, missions and missionaries tried to offer a more inspiring human prospect. True, there were a handful of hard-working, caring pioneers living in orderly homesteads where books were read and a piano in the corner might sometimes be gathering dust. But these were islands of civility in the wilderness. For the period that concerns us, from roughly 1830 through to 1930 in northern Australia, and at various other times in New Zealand, in the American West, in South Africa, in Canada, and in parts of Brazil today, the men and women of these frontier societies were a very wild bunch indeed.

Drifters, drop-outs, escapees and petty-criminals on the run, adventurers, opportunists, loners, slaughter-house workers and hard-drinking miscellaneous toughs, along with all the rough-necks working sheep and cattle in godforsaken stretches of barren country, or prospecting for gold on patches of stony ground — these are the human types, often brutal and violent, that confronted the tribal world. Their enjoyments were drinking and whoring, and for many of them home life consisted merely of brothels and saloons. In New Zealand around 1820, before a better class of colonist arrived to settle the land and impose law and order, frontier society consisted of little but odoriferous whalers and sealers, grog-shops, and a ready supply of local prostitutes. In Australia, survival for the Aborigines meant dealing for long years with a kindred social milieu.

In this disreputable company who was free from sin? Is it any wonder that some indigenes became indistinguishable from their unsavory surroundings — that they became what they beheld? Is it any wonder that alarm was felt for children born into this world, or that governments considered it their responsibility to take children away for their own good? Is it any wonder, finally (in case this is what the New Criterion means by “Aboriginal sin”) that those coming from this background often do their utmost to conceal the fact, to lie about it, and pretend they were “stolen” when that was not the case?

Frontier society, in Australia as elsewhere, was a cruel and miserable place where vice proliferates and virtue is thin on the ground. The vocabulary of the Sunday school does not help us understand its denizens. Those who ignorantly imagine otherwise — or on the other hand fill their minds with fantasies about the cultural glories of tribal life, whether traditional, or in the tattered shanty-towns of the fringe-dwellers — should read what Windschuttle has to say in Chapter Four, “The Culture of the Camps”. It is a study of universal degradation. It is also an unsparing account of decades of child neglect and child abuse demanding action, and is the best antidote to the nonsensical myth that either racism or cultural genocide underlies the child removals which every state government felt compelled to undertake.

Welfare and mission staff on the frontier

Something might also be said about those who volunteered to staff the settlements where Aborigines gathered, finding refuge from the harsher world outside. Those of us who knew them fifty years ago (I was a documentary film-maker at the time) remember men and women with sundry minor failings, but they were invariably good people, doing their best in difficult circumstances according to their lights.

It is of course a crying shame that the modern academics who excoriate these men and women did not themselves volunteer to go into the tropics and work on behalf of the wretched and oppressed. Why didn’t they themselves choose careers in welfare work if they’re so keen to judge those who did? Plainly, the army of censorious professors have a purity of motive, a clarity of moral vision, and a depth of social compassion that is sorely needed in Australia’s north — today even more than in the past. Anyway, in the circumstances prevailing yesterday, those despised missionaries and settlement administrators did a lot to alleviate the misery and confusion of indigenes caught up in tumultuous change. Much more, it might be added, than any academic has ever done.

Finally, among the over-excited responses to the review of The Stolen Generations in The New Criterion was the indignant denial that the tale of the “stolen children” constitutes a “myth”. So here’s my own view of the matter. That children were removed from what were considered unsafe and unsatisfactory situations is a historical fact. That laws existed requiring their removal is a historical fact. That welfare staff acted to remove them, and sometimes with a degree of coercion, is a historical fact. That some removals succeeded in providing better lives, that some did not, and that some were abject failures, is a historical fact. For all those reasons the story of the policy embracing these activities is properly described, in plain English, as “child removal and its consequences.”

To describe these activities as driven by racism, let alone by motives of genocide, is the mythologizing of history by urban intellectuals who wantonly subject facts, and their description, to conspiratorial fantasies of evil and doom. The imaginative story of Australian “genocide” is only the latest of these. That is why the documented account of the child removal program by Keith Windschuttle is in my view historical, but wild talk of stolen children and genocide and planned extermination is not only myth, but a pernicious myth that betrays and incriminates thousands of ordinary Australian citizens, now dead, who cannot defend themselves.