Farmers, Hunter Gatherers or Ideologues? : The New Dreaming - Part 1
Anyone who has read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu with a critical mind, followed by some basic literature research, will agree with The Sydney Morning Herald’s Stuart Rintoul, when he reviews the new book by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate,
‘In page after page, Sutton and Walshe accuse Pascoe of a “lack of true scholarship”, ignoring Aboriginal voices, dragging respect for traditional Aboriginal culture back into the Eurocentric world of the colonial era, and “trimming” colonial observations to fit his argument. They write that while Dark Emu “purports to be factual” it is “littered with unsourced material, is poorly researched, distorts and exaggerates many points, selectively emphasises evidence to suit those opinions, and ignores large bodies of information that do not support the author’s opinions”.
“It is actually not, properly considered, a work of scholarship,” they write. “Its success as a narrative has been achieved in spite of its failure as an account of fact.” - (SMH June 12th 2021 )
We at Dark Emu Exposed are in agreement with Sutton and Walshe’s book where it confirms, in more scholarly detail, what we and others (Note 1) have been pointing out for the past two years, namely that Pascoe’s book is so shallow and erroneous that it should be withdrawn from the school curriculum.
In particular, Sutton and Walshe criticise Pascoe’s redefinition of certain words or labels, that have precise economic or anthropological meanings, to suit his own particular political narrative. Words such as ‘horticulture’, ‘agriculture’, ‘foraging’, ‘fishing’, ‘aquaculture’, ‘cultivation’, ‘farming’, ‘garden’, ‘house’, ‘hoe’, ‘crops’, and ‘irrigation’ amongst others.
Sutton and Walshe, state that their,
‘own working definitions [of these words] used in this book are both readily understood by non-specialists and compatible with definitions given in the authoritative, Dictionary of Anthropology (Barfield, 1997)’. -(ibid., p.7).
The reader gets the impression that Sutton and Walshe might think that they, unlike Pascoe, are suitably credentialled and experienced to use these words in the context of their proper meanings.
But then, almost unbelievably, Sutton and Walshe, on page 1 of their book, promptly proceed to commit the very same ‘label crimes’ that they accuse Pascoe of, when they venture into the field of 18th and 19th century International Law, a field we suspect is not their forte. In this particular aspect, we would say that Sutton and Walshe’s book is no better the Pascoe’s Dark Emu.
Below are pages 1 and 2 of Sutton and Walshe’s book. The knowledgable reader will note the way Sutton and Walshe brazenly use the very Pascoesque technique of ‘word-creep’ - manipulating the meanings of the words, ‘settlement’, ‘conquest’, ‘nations’, ‘First Nations’, ‘discoverers’, ‘descendants’, ‘land owners’, ‘subjugation’, ‘pioneers’ ‘settlers’, ‘First Australians’ to mean something other than what those words were, and still are, recognised to mean in a legal and/or historical context.
In this blog post we will focus on the way Sutton and Walshe want to redefine the meaning of words, ‘settle / settled / settlement.’
They want us to believe that Australia was not ‘settled’ but was established by ‘conquest’ - it was ‘conquered’.
As evidence that historians, jurists, politicians and the public at large for the past 250 years have, silly them, been using the wrong word to describe Australia’s foundation, Sutton and Walshe offer the reasoning that,
‘Settlement’ is accurately applied to the occupation of previously uninhabited lands,...’
No it’s not.
Just as Sutton & Walshe accuse Pascoe of misusing words and labels because he does not know his topic sufficiently well (he lacks true scholarship), we say that Sutton & Walshe lack sufficient scholarship in history and the law, so they should not ‘just make up” new meanings for well established words, a la Pascoe to suit their own narratives.
Now, and I can’t believe I am agreeing with Bruce Pascoe (!) on this, Sutton and Walshe are entitled to their own historical and legal opinions, but that doesn’t mean they are right and we have to believe them.
So let’s see how some other, true scholars in history and the law use the word, ‘settle’ and what meanings they apply to it in a colonising context.
An Historian’s Viewpoint
Historian Dr Arnold J Toynbee uses the word ‘settlement’ and ‘settled’ with the following meanings,
‘The two rivals of pre-Alexandrine hellenism were the…Phoenicians and…the Hittites. In the competition…for the dominion of the Mediterranean Basin…this three cornered contest, which opened in the eighth century B.C, [had as] prizes…the shores of the Western Mediterranean, whose culturally backward natives were no match for any of the three rival intruding societies…The Hellenes’ expansion [had] an explosive force and stimulated them to follow up the establishment of trading posts overseas by making this new world into a Magna Graecia through the rapid and intensive settlement of Hellenic agricultural colonists on the land'.’ (Ref 1 p 204)
and
‘The historic Jewry was a diaspora…[but] [l]ater-day Jewish Westerners…were breaking with this historic past and…deserting the diaspora collectively in order to build up a new nation settled on the land [of Palestine]…but what the future had in store for the ‘Israelis, as the Palestinian Jews now called themselves, only the future would show. The surrounding Arab peoples appeared to be determined to expel the intruder from their midst…’ (Ref 1, p178)
Ref. 1 Toynbee, A.J. A study of History, Abridgement of Vol VII-X (by D.C Somervell) OUP, 1957
Toynbee seems to be quite happy to accept that an intruder can ‘settle’ in a land which already has inhabitants (ie, ‘culturally backward natives’ and ‘surrounding Arab peoples’). This is an accurate and historically accepted use of the word. ‘Settlements’ are not restricted only to uninhabited lands, as Sutton and Walshe claim.
Therefore, if we follow Toynbee, it should be accurate to say,
‘The colony of New South Wales was founded by the British as a penal settlement in 1788’.
‘New South Wales (Australia) was not founded by an act of conquest or invaded as an act of war. It was not ‘ceded’ by treaty-making. It was settled, even though Aboriginal natives were present when the British arrived.
A Legal Viewpoint
A good summary of why Australia is considered a ‘settled’ country, and not a ‘conquered’ or ‘ceded’ one, despite the fact that Aborigines were living here at the time, is provided on the Australian Government, Law Reform Commission webpage.
‘39. The Application of British Law to Aborigines.
With the colonisation of Australia after 1788, a new legal regime was applied, based on the common law. The Colonial Office treated Australia, for the purposes of its acquisition and the application of English law, as a settled colony, that is, one uninhabited by a recognised sovereign or by a people with recognisable institutions and laws.
Thus there were no treaties concluded with an Aboriginal group, and no arrangements were made with them to acquire their land, or to regulate dealings between them and the colonists. They were treated as individuals, not as groups or communities. The decision to classify the ‘new’ country of Australia as a settled colony, rather than as conquered or ceded, meant that the new settlers brought with them the general body of English law, including the criminal law….’
The Australian Law Reform Commission in its analysis seems to have no problem with a ‘settlement’ occurring amongst native peoples who were already here.
Another Legal Viewpoint
When the British established their penal settlement at Sydney Cove, they were acting under the internationally recognised and legal definitions of what it meant to ‘settle’ as enunciated by jurists, such as Sir William Blackstone (Ref. 2)
Blackstone speaks of the the rights to, ‘colonise and settle’, set up ‘plantations or colonies’ and ‘occupy’ as ways that a European government may occupy the ‘desert and uncultivated’ lands even though ‘tribes of savages’ were living there.
If the country had been found to be ‘already cultivated’, the British would have had to acquire New South Wales by conquest or treaty. As Sutton and Walshe have definitively shown, Aboriginal societies were not farmers or soil cultivators.
Hence, according the Blackstone’s definitions, New South Wales was settled not conquered.
Of the three legal options available to the British for the colonisation of NSW, ‘settlement’, not ‘conquest’ or by ‘treaty’ was legally the correct one.
Excerpt from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England
Excerpt from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England
Ref 2. Blackstone, W., Commentaries on the Laws of England, Click here to see more of this book
Archaeological & Anthropological Viewpoints
Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood from the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology. Source
1. Peter Bellwood, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra tells us that,
‘Arnhem Land and Kimberley Aborgines also had contact with male Indonesian maritime collectors and traders (“Macassans”)…[whose] visits to northern Australia for beche-de-mer collection since perhaps the 16th century seem to have been frequent enough for Macassan-Aboriginal trade pidgins to form, and some Aborigines were even taken by ship to Macassar (Ujung Pandang). But in this case, the Indonesians did not settle permanetly or farm in Australia.’
- Bellwood, P., First Farmers, Blackwell, 2005, p35.
Bellwood uses the term ‘settle’ to describe the potential actions of the Macassan’s should they have decided to stay permanently in a new land inhabited by semi-nomadic Aboriginal hunter-gatherers.
He does not use the word ‘conquest’ as Sutton and Walshe would have us believe when they say,
‘‘Settlement’ is accurately applied to the occupation of previously uninhabited lands,...’
Obviously, Professor Bellwood doesn’t think so.
2. A Younger Peter Sutton
In 2008, academic Peter Sutton (University of Adelaide; South Australian Museum; Institute of Archaeology, University College London) seemed to have had the same understanding of what the word ‘settle’ meant, in the context of colonisation, as many of us still do today.
In his chapter in the book, Strangers on the Shore, Early coastal contacts in Australia, Sutton writes,
‘Globalisation of trade and the subsequent race for colonies made it inevitable that New Holland would at some stage come under the permanent attentions of a foreign power. Had it not been the British it could have been their eighteenth-century competitors the French…[or] the Russians…the Germans…the Japanese…[or] the modernising Indonesians.
As it happened, the colonial power that annexed Nova Hollandia, although not Dutch, was one whose social, legal, political and cultural institutions came from the same part of Europe and shared a largely common heritage and future trajectory towards industrialised liberal democracies. Had the Dutch settled rather than kept sailing, it is doubtful that the historical outcome would have been greatly different’.
- Sutton, P. Strangers on the Shore, Early coastal contacts in Australia, National Museum of Australia , Edited by Peter Veth, Peter Sutton and Margo Neale, 2008, page 55
To us at Dark Emu Exposed, this looks like Peter Sutton, the 2008 objective scholar, is saying that if the Dutch arrived to live amongst the semi-nomadic, tribe and clan-based Aboriginal hunter-gatherer peoples of New Holland, they would have come as ‘settlers’ and set up their settlements on the basis of the legal, political and cultural institutions of the time with a trajectory that would ultimately have led to an industrialised, liberal democracy.
The modern Australia we know today would have turned out much the same, whether it was the British or the Dutch who settled here amongst the Aboriginal peoples..
But is the Peter Sutton of 2021 now joining Bruce Pascoe’s Ideology band-wagon, by using a bit of ‘word-creep’ here and bit of word redefining there?
Is he now in 2021 saying that, given the arriving party was not Dutch but British, then the historical facts need to take on a new narrative? Modern Australia’s foundation becomes, as he now writes, an, ‘uninvited imperial invasion’ and a ‘conquest’ of ‘Australian First Nation territories’ and an ‘ursurpation’, ‘subjugation’ and ‘displacement’ of ‘Indigenous Australian land owners’.
The only settlers left standing now are the ‘real discovers, pioneers and early settlers of Australia…who arrived 50,000-55,000 years ago…They are rightly called the First Australians…accurately refered to as First Nations People.’
Who would have thought that scholarship could be so rubbery and fashionable!
So in our opinion at Dark Emu Exposed, Sutton and Walshe can fantasize all they like about New South Wales being colonised by ‘conquest’ and not ‘settlement.’ However, like Bruce Pascoe when he makes pronouncements in a field in that he doesn’t know much about, they too seem to be straying into new fields - Colonial history and International Law - which are outside their areas of expertise.
In our view, it is no good trying to make up some lame argument about how it was, ‘all the fault of the sneaky British’ who robbed the Aborigines in 1788 of the treaties they deserved.
Australia is one of the few, if not the only British colony that was not established by conquest or treaty. Essentially every other act of British colonisation around the world, during the period when NSW was settled, resulted in a treaty being struck with the native inhabitants. See the extensive list of British-related (incl. US) Treaties here.
Britain and its colonists were obviously mentally and practically capable of forming treaties with native peoples, which in fact was the preferred British legal framework for colonisation.
Why then was Australia the odd one out?
What is the one factor that is different for the Australian situation? - Obviously the other bargaining party in the treaty-making process - the native Australian Aborigines.
The real question therefore becomes, why didn’t, or couldn’t, the ‘Old People’ in 1788 rise to the challenge and negotiate a treaty with the British? The Maori could, and did; the majority of the North American Indians, Africans, and Asian States could, and did.
But not even one of the 500-odd Australian Aboriginal societies or ‘First Nations’ rose to the challenge, and as they say, the rest is history.
Sad, but that’s life. Time to move on and stop trying to delegitimise the establishment of our modern Australia.
Editor
Dark Emu Exposed
Further Reading
Note 1 : A criticism that we have of Sutton and Walshe’s book is that it doesn’t really cover any extra topics that weren’t already known to readers of our website, Dark Emu Exposed, or to readers of a number of articles in Quadrant Magazine and Peter O’Brien’s book, Bitter Harvest.
True, given that both Sutton and Walshe are accredited academics, their book is rightly considered ‘scholarly.’ But scholarship, or the lack of it, is only one aspect of the Dark Emu story.
Dark Emu is actually a literary hoax, put forward into the non-academic domain to push an ideological narrative. That is why simple websites such as Dark Emu Exposed, with admittedly blunt, but researched and very well illustrated blog-posts, could have such an impact in pushing back against the Dark Emu Hoax in mainstream Australia.
Similarly Peter O’Brien’s forensic checking of the explorers journals with respect to Pascoe’s claims, quickly exposed the manipulation of the historical record that Pascoe was willing to undertake to allegedly push his particular political narrative. In fact, the ‘fact-checking’ of the explorer’s journals that Sutton and Walshe use in their book is very much less comprehensive than what had already been published by O’Brien.
