Callum Clayton-Dixon’s Surviving New England

As my first post for the new year, I am publishing the book review originally published in the Armidale and District Historical Society Journal in October last year. I am publishing it here because the Journal is not on-line. Callum's book deals with the frontier warfare period on the New England Tablelands. 

I think that's it's an important book written from an Aboriginal perspective focused on the Aborigines as people with agency. These stories need to be told at regional level. If we examine Callum's work with other studies such as Mark Dunn's Convict Valley we have a much better chance of building a coherent story that includes inter-regional interactions. I wish someone would do a similar study of the North Coast.   

Book Review: Callum Clayton-Dixon’s Surviving New England

Callum Clayton-Dixon’s Surviving New England: A history of Aboriginal resistance and resilience through the first forty years of the colonial apocalypse[i] is an important book, although some find it discomforting.

Clearly and simply written, the book discuses  the impact of European occupation on the life of the Aboriginal peoples living on Australia’s New England Tablelands from the 1830s into the 1860s. In doing so, it focuses on the Aboriginal experience in a particular area at a critical point in time.

Background: the importance of regional studies

We sometimes talk of the “Australian Aborigines” as though they were and are a single entity. We know that this is not true, but the habit lingers, affecting the way we approach both policy development and historical analysis.

We now know that the Aboriginal and Papuan ancestors arrived on the mega-continent we now call Sahul perhaps 65,000 years ago. This was the Pleistocene, a geological epoch marked by recurrent ice ages during which sea levels fell and rose as the ice advanced and retreated. With lower sea levels, Papua-New Guinea, the current Australian continent, Tasmania and much of the continental shelf were joined in a single great continent. 

By 42,000 to 40,000 years ago, all of Sahul from the Papuan Islands in the north to Tasmania in the south had been at least lightly occupied. Around 21,000 years ago a cold and desolate period known as the Last Glacial Maximum began. Sea levels fell to perhaps 130 metres below present levels, temperatures fell dramatically on land and in the sea, rainfalls declined sharply.  This forced the Aboriginal ancestors to retreat and regroup and may have threatened the very existence of human occupation of Sahul.

Around 15,000 years ago a warmer period known as the Holocene began, As the glaciers melted, the seas rushed back separating Papua and Tasmania from the Sahul mainland, submerging large areas of the continental shelf. This period is recorded in Aboriginal folk lore referencing great floods.

By 1788, a complex Aboriginal society had emerged across the new Australian continent. This society was not uniform, but varied from area to area in culture and relationships with the landscape. This society would now be torn apart, a process that varied across space and time depending on the spread of European settlement, local conditions and the policies of the emerging colonial jurisdictions.

I make these points because a proper understanding of our history and especially Aboriginal history requires a focus on local and regional experiences.

As I read Callum’s book, I thought just how well it fitted into the New England historiography tradition. 

Both the Armidale Teachers’ College (later the Armidale College of Advanced Education) and the New England University College (now the University of New England, UNE) were founded in part to study and preserve the history and culture of Northern NSW, the North.

When Isabel McBryde came to Armidale in 1960, she was the first tenured Australian university staff member to have the word prehistory in her title. The students she recruited to study the ethnography and prehistory of the broader New England would form the first archaeology and prehistory honours class in Australia,

From the beginning and under the influence of her mentor John Mulvaney, Isabel focused on the creation of a regional historical sequence. She and John believed that the variety in Aboriginal culture and society meant that you could not understand the history without a focus on regional studies. In parallel, the English Department’s Bill Hoddinott began the documentation of Aboriginal languages within Northern NSW.

In 1962, Robin Walker published an article discussing the relations between Aborigines and settlers in New England 1818-1910.[ii]  

In 1966, two years before W E H Stanner coined the phrase the Great Australian Silence to describe the absence of Aboriginal history in Australian history, Walker published Old New England, a history of the Northern Tablelands from 1818 to 1900.[iii] While Walker focused on the settler experience, the book begins with an outline of Aboriginal life prior to European occupation. Later, it explicitly recognises the existence of frontier warfare including massacres and retaliatory killings and the damage done to Aboriginal society as a consequence of disease and disruption.

In 1981, Geoff Blomfield published the first edition of Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing[iv], a study of warfare, massacres and frontier violence in the Falls’ country of Southern New England.

Callum’s Perspective

These few examples suggest the importance of regional studies, as well as showing early recognition of both frontier warfare and the impact of European occupation on Aboriginal society. However, they were all written by non-Aboriginal people.

Callum writes from an Aboriginal perspective. His focus is more personal, more political. It centres on the Aborigines as people with agency, people who responded to invasion by fighting back against overwhelming odds.

This is a very different perspective from the sometimes simple minded focus on the Aborigines as victims. To Callum, his ancestors were warriors who in the end survived. In writing, he seeks to instil pride in an often oppressed group.  

 Callum’s position is clearly set out the book’s Introduction. It begins with his discovery of his Aboriginal ancestry, of his return to the country of his ancestors, of his attempt to discover and reconnect with country.

Callum writes from a particular post-colonial mental structure. As Callum discovered his own past, he became involved with groups such as the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance who were determined to tear down the mental, social and legal barriers that prevented proper recognition and reconstruction, the reinstatement of the rights of all the Aboriginal peoples.

Callum’s position is not limited to Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, but indigenous peoples everywhere. To his mind, justice demands the deconstruction of structures created by colonialism and their replacement by new structures that properly recognise indigenous ownership and rights.

This approach could leave him open to the charge that his book is a polemic, a political statement, rather than a piece of historical research. That would be unjust. This is good history. I say this for several reasons.

All historians write from particular perspectives. This affects the questions they ask and evidence selected. Often, these positions have to be inferred. By contrast, Callum tells us where he is coming from. We can therefore make our own judgements on approach and evidence presented. Here Callum has been careful to document his evidence, allowing us to follow up, to check his sources and again form our own views.

A mark of good history is the extent to which it provides insights that allow us to see patterns, to develop new ideas. Callum’s book passes this test.

Setting the Scene

Having outlined his personal position, Callum discusses key questions that set a framework for the following story of resistance. What was the Aboriginal population of the Tablelands at the time of British occupation? How rapidly did occupation proceed? What was the impact of British occupation on the Aboriginal peoples and population?

 When I made the first estimates of the distribution of Aboriginal populations across Northern NSW, I worked (as Callum does) from settler and official records.[v] In doing so, I was unaware of the impact of diseases such as smallpox, influenza, measles and venereal infections that spread far beyond the moving frontier. This affected population size directly through deaths and then through reduced fertility rates within surviving populations.

Taking this into account, Callum estimates the Tablelands’ population as between 1,100 and 1,200 people. Accepting that the Tablelands were not as productive in Aboriginal terms as the coast and western slopes and immediate plains, I suspect that this is an underestimate. I say this because the number of recorded languages and their supporting dialects, the number of recorded Aboriginal groups, is quite high. A simple division of these numbers into the population estimates gives figures too small to be viable units in demographic terms.

Perhaps wisely given the population uncertainties, Callum does not attempt to scope the number of warriors (men of fighting age) at the time of European occupation. This is an important issue because it helps scope the scale of the conflict that followed. If we exclude women, children and older men, a population of 1,200 suggests perhaps 400 warriors spread across multiple local groups.

Using graphs, Callum charts the rapid growth of the settler population across the New England Tablelands from 1830 to 1850. European occupation began in the early 1830s with the squatters coming in two streams, one inland from the Hunter, the second from Port Macquarie where Archibald Clunes Innes had established his headquarters.

This expansion was driven by demand for the wool required to feed the growing British textile industry. It was also driven by a speculative fever as the new settlers sought to build their fortunes.

The New England Tablelands may have been a relatively poor territory in Aboriginal terms, but it was well suited to wool growing. The result was a settlement explosion.  By the time Crown Lands Commissioner Macdonald established his headquarters in 1839 at the place now called Armidale, much of the New England was at least lightly occupied. By 1841, the European population had reached 1,115, rising to 2,231 in 1846. The Aborigines were now in a minority. The effect is more pronounced still if we consider the male population, for in this period there were few women in the European population. This meant that the number of European men of what we might call military age outnumbered the number of Aboriginal warriors well before the European population outnumbered the Aboriginal population. 

Patterns of Aboriginal Resistance

European expansion had devastating effects on Aboriginal traditional life. Beyond the effects of disease, beyond losses in frontier warfare, came the effects associated with destruction of habitat as the Aboriginal peoples were denied access to the traditional lands, forced to retreat to marginal areas. Callum calls this process ecocide, the sometimes deliberate destruction of the economy and environment on which a people depends for their survival.

Callum explores the Aboriginal response in a number of chapters plus an appendix that lists all the examples of frontier violence that he has found from the records as well as Aboriginal memories, some 41 items in all. Unlike the University of Newcastle’s Colonial massacres project which focuses on specifically defined massacres[vi], Callum’s focus on the Aboriginal response means that he is as interested in all types of Aboriginal response against the European invasion.

I think that this is very important in opening new areas of historical analysis, although I think that there are weaknesses in Callum’s analysis, areas that he does not address.

This may sound like a criticism. It is not. Callum has proven his basic point, that the Aboriginal peoples were people with agency who fought back. He has opened new ground for historical research, new questions and structures that I find interesting. He and we can build on his research to tell new stories.

To extend my argument, using Callum’s structure we can think of the Aboriginal response in terms of three phases, sometimes uneasy co-existence, resistance and then survival. We can also think of this in terms of the structure of Aboriginal society, the structure of European colonial society and the way the two played out in the pattern of frontier life. We can also think of this in regional and local terms. Here we can learn much from other regional studies such as Mark Dunn’s The Convict Valley, the story of early European settlement on the Hunter[vii].These regional studies allow us to learn much about different patterns over space and time, but also allow us to see interconnections between different areas.

If you look at the patterns of early Aboriginal resistance, they included attacks on isolated individuals with attacks on stock. The Aborigines were selective in such attacks, focusing on individuals who had done them wrong. As resistance gathered strength, you had large scale attacks on people and stock.

In both the Hunter and on the New England, the European response forced Aboriginal groups to the more remote and rugged country where horses could not easily penetrate. There different Aboriginal groups came together to mount larger scale attacks on people and stock. On the New England, for example, growing European settlement on the coast seems to have forced coastal Aborigines to the west where they joined with Tablelands’ groups including traditional enemies to mount large scale attacks. The patterns created last to this day.

The exact patterns including regional linkages are poorly understood. As Callum notes, he had to develop his synthesis from a variety of often fragmented early settler and official records, records written from the other side of the conflict.

Reading Callum’s work in conjunction with other studies such as Mark’s. I thought that there that there is so much more that we might say. We will never know of course, we have to infer so much, but Callum’s work gives us another block to build from.

Publication Details:

Jim Belshaw, “Book Review: Surviving New England”, Armidale and District Historical Society Journal and Proceedings, No 64, October 2021, pp 102-106

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[i]  Callum Clayton-Dixson, Surviving New England, Aniawan Language Revival Program, Armidale 2019. Reprinted NEWARA Aboriginal Corporation, Armidale 2020

[ii] R B Walker,  ‘The Relations between Aborigines and Settlers in New England 1818-1900, Armidale and District Historical Society Journal, 4, 1962 pp1-18

[iii] R B Walker,  Old New England: A history of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales 1818-1900, Sydney University Press, 1966

[iv] Geoff Blomfield,  Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing, Apcol, 1981

[v] Jim Belshaw, The Economic Basis of Aboriginal Life in Northern New South Wales in the Nineteenth Century, BA Hons thesis, University of New England, 1966; J Belshaw, ‘Population distribution and the pattern of seasonal movement in northern New South Wales’, in Records of Times Past, I McBryde (ed.). Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra: 1978, pp.65-81

[vi] Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930, University of Newcastle, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/

[vii] Mark Dunn The Convict Valley The bloody struggle on Australia's early frontier Allen & Unwin June 2020

Archibald Clunes Innes, a major figure in New England's early colonial history, reflects the the rise and fall of Port Macquarie

Lake Innes House, Port Macquarie, 1839, where Archibald Clunes Innes entertained in lavish style.

The rise and subsequent decline of Port Macquarie from the centre of British civilization in the North to quiet backwater is captured in the rise and fall of one man, Archibald Clunes Innes. His story tells us much about New England’s early colonial history.  

Innes (1800-1857)  was born at Thrumster, Scotland, the son of Major James Innes, a distinguished soldier. At thirteen, he joined the army as an ensign, serving in the Peninsular War against Napoleon. 

Innes arrived in Sydney in 1822 as captain of the guard in the convict ship Eliza. There he quickly moved up the colonial hierarchy, including six months as commandant of the Port Macquarie penal colony. 

In 1829 at one of the most magnificent weddings that the colony had then seen, Innes married Margaret, daughter of the colonial secretary, Alexander McLeay. 

McLeay, the builder of Sydney icon Elizabeth Bay House, was one of Sydney’s wealthiest and most prominent men. The Macleay River carries his name. 

Having resigned his commission in 1829, Innes became police magistrate at Port Macquarie in 1830 and was granted 2568 acres (1039 ha) of land and contracts to supply the convict population with food.

By 1840, Innes was one of the wealthiest men in the colony. 

Working from his initial base, he had acquired sheep and cattle stations all over Northern New South Wales, among them Yarrows on the Hastings, Brimbine and Innestown on the Manning, Waterloo, Innes Creek, Kentucky and Beardy Plains on the Tablelands. His acquisition of Furracabad and the creation of the store on that station would provide the base for the development of Glen Innes. 

To support his growing empire he created stores, would build the first convict built road onto the Tablelands and began exporting wool from Port Macquarie to Sydney. In his mind, I think, he saw Port Macquarie developing as a major commercial centre and port servicing the New England. 

As a sign of his growing wealth, Innes used convict labour to build Lake Innes House, a grand new home suitable to his aspirations. There he entertained lavishly supported by staff including a butler, musicians, maids and stable hands. The staff included New England’s first Spanish settlers. 

As Innes’s interests developed, Port Macquarie became an immigration centre bringing in new and especially Scottish settlers who would move onto the Tablelands. Among those who came were his cousin William Tydd Taylor and wife Margaretta Lucy Lind who would take up what became known as Terrible Vale Station.  

Archibald Clunes Innes was now at the peak of wealth and power, but disaster lay ahead. 

Note to readers: This post was prepared as a column for the on-line edition of the Armidale Express. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015,  here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018, here 2019, here 2020, here 2021 

Port Macquarie: the centre of British civilization in the north

Port Macquarie, 1832, by convict artist Joseph Backler.

I wonder how many New Englanders know that for more than a decade Port Macquarie was the centre of British civilization on Northern NSW? 

Maitland (1829) together with its adjoining river port at Morpeth (1831) would develop into the largest urban conglomeration in the North, but this still lay ahead. 

The penal colony at Newcastle had been established in 1804 as a place of secondary punishment for re-offending convicts, but problems soon emerged. 

Newcastle was just too close to the Sydney fleshspots, to accessible by land, providing the incentive and means for absconding. There was also pressure to open up the Hunter for European settlement. 

There were initial land grants under Governor Macquarie, but these were limited to small grants to ex-convicts. However, further south the settlers on the Hawkesbury and in the Sydney Basin were seeking new pastures for their growing flocks and herds. As a consequence, the Hunter was opened up for European settlement in 1822. 

Explorer John Oxley had discovered and named Port Macquarie in 1818. This seemed a suitable site for a new penal colony to replace Newcastle, although Macquarie was initially uncertain. Finally, in 1821 the decision was made to proceed. 

In seeking to discover that far country called the past, we are all bound by current mind-sets in ways that we do not always understand. Port Macquarie is a case in point. 

I had always thought of Port Macquarie as a minor penal settlement founded from and close to Sydney, something equivalent to the establishment of the jail at Grafton many years later. The reality is different.

To begin with, the number or convicts sent to Port Macquarie was roughly similar in scale to those sent to Port Jackson in the early days. This was not a small settlement.

Like Port Jackson, convicts were expected to build the necessary infrastructure including barracks required to support the colony. Like Port Jackson, they were expected to grow their own food. And like Port Jackson, the Government was interested in exports from the new colony that might yield economic gain. 

The new colony was expected to be a punishment colony, a feared place of secondary punishment. But to accommodate the needs of the new colony, convicts volunteering to build Port Macquarie were offered special treatment.

Later, convicts sent to Port Macquarie were also granted special privileges in the treatment of things such as their own gardens. This, too, had happened at Port Jackson, but it created a fundamental problem. This can be put simply.

Port Macquarie was a place of secondary punishment, a place to be feared. How, then, do your reconcile the special treatment required to establish and then maintain the colony?

There were no easy answers to this question. It led to fluctuating treatment of the convicts as official balance switched between punishment and remediation. Meantime, a new town had emerged. 

Note to readers: This post was prepared as a column for the on-line edition of the Armidale Express. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015,  here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018, here 2019, here 2020, here 2021 

New England Travels: journeys through space and time

Paper delivered by Jim Belshaw in the University of New England’s Humanities seminar series, 13 April 2018

This morning I am going to take you on a journey through the history of New England {1} It’s a vast canvas spanning more than 30,000 years of human history. I can do no more than give you a taste. Think of it as a history dégustation:  the careful, appreciative tasting of elements of our history that might encourage you to go further, to explore for yourself.

I talk as a public historian. While I am connected with the academy, I remain somewhat outside. My primary audience is those interested in or who might be interested in New England history. My platforms are my newspaper columns, my blogs, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as my sometimes academic papers and book contributions such as my chapters in Came to New England published to mark the 75^th anniversary of the foundation of the New England University College (2).

I seek to attract, to entertain, to involve, to teach. My readers give me feedback and leads. Some become very close to research assistants.

First threads: introducing social change, New England thought, the influence of UNE

When I write as a professional historian, I try to observe the canons of the discipline as taught to me at this place all those years ago. It was a very strong department with 16 staff excluding three vacant positions. Student numbers were smaller, making for an intense experience. Today we talk of history method. Then all honours students were required to study a course on the theory as well as method of history, a philosophy of history course taught by Ted Tapp.

A poet as well as an historian, Ted was a quiet, serious man who sometimes went beyond his students’ comprehension. I’m not sure quite how much I understood, but that plus Philosophy I were two of the most important courses in forming the intellectual views I now hold.  They told me how the towering intellectual constructs we work with, all the frames of our intellectual and moral beliefs, are humanly determined and can be analyzed. I learned the difference between correlation and causation. Perhaps most importantly from Ted, I learned following Karl Popper that we cannot know for certain, that all knowledge based on evidence is only knowledge if it is potentially refutable. If it cannot be refuted, it is not knowledge but belief. For that reason, the professional historian must provide the evidence on which conclusions are based so others can check and follow up.

In saying this, I am not denying the importance of faith, nor of ideas based on faith. This was a matter of considerable interest to us as students, for we were a religious lot. In my case, I was an active member of the Methodist Youth Fellowship, attended Student Christian Movement activities including its national conference in Adelaide and had friends who were active in the Evangelical Union. We argued and debated about religion and its implications for life, action and reform. Then came great changes, changes documented in part by Don Beer, a member of the history department, in his article, ‘The Holiest Campus’, its Decline and Transformation: The University of New England, 1946–79(3)

.

These changes were profound and deep, part of a broader set of changes that affected every aspect of New England life. Mathew Jordon’s book Spirit of True Learning: The Jubilee History of the University of New England explores some of the changes at the University, while Kenneth Dempsey's Conflict and Decline: Ministers and laymen in an Australian country town (4), a sociological study, looks at the impact  in the Barool Methodist parish, in fact the Uralla-Arding parish. Dempsey, a postgraduate student at UNE, the son of a Methodist minister and himself a Methodist minister, places local changes and tensions in the context of broader changes taking place in the Methodist church.

In This Land of Promise. The Ursuline Order in Australia 1882-1982(5), Ursuline sister and history department staff member Pauline Kneipp in part considers the impact of global changes on the order and on the life of the sisters. One effect was the shift of the Ursuline’s national headquarters from Armidale to Canberra and the closure of the Armidale school that had been the original reason for their existence in this country.

Don Aitkin's What was it all for? The Reshaping of Australia takes a different approach (6). Don did the Leaving Certificate, the precursor of the High School Certificate, at Armidale High School in 1953 before studying at UNE. Fifty years later, he went back for a reunion of the class of 53. This led him to think of an article that became a book looking at change in Australia since the Second World War through the prism set by the experiences and attitudes of the class of 53. It’s a fascinating book, one that draws out a deep weariness in the group at the pace and extent of change.

I may seem to have drifted, but I have just given you an initial taste of number of threads in New England history, threads that will recur. One is the nature and importance of social, cultural and economic change across the history of New England from Aboriginal times to today. A second is the existence of New England thought, a distinct cultural, political and intellectual tradition. A third is the influence of the Armidale Teachers’ College, UNE and later the other colleges and universities on New England thought, culture and life, as well as on students who carried the New England experience across the world.

Second threads: geography, environmental change, new states, what’s in a name?

To this point, I have been using the term New England without defining it. So where and what is New England? There are two parts to this question: the geographical area covered and the names attached to that area. My answers will introduce you to further threads in the history of this place that I call New England.

In geographical terms, the area covered is the Northern or New England Tablelands and the river valleys that extend from the Tablelands to the north, south, east and west. Defined in this way, we have a natural geographic unit that exists independent of political or administrative boundaries.

This is a large area. From Lake Macquarie in the south to Tweed Heads on the Queensland border is over 700 km (434 miles), from Coffs Harbour on the coast to Bourke on the Darling River is almost 900 km (559 miles) by road. To provide an international comparison. London to Edinburgh is around 666 km (414 miles) by road, New York to Washington a mere 364km (226 miles). Putting this another way, depending upon the precise boundaries adopted, New England at around 166,000 square kilometres (64,000 square miles) is 25 per larger than England.

This large territory contains a number of distinct bioregions each containing multiple micro-environments. This creates a hierarchy that cascades from the broad area down to the bioregions and then the microenvironments within them, each with its own history.

We can see this pattern if we look at Aboriginal New England at the time of European occupation, something I explored in more detail in my 2010 paper to the Armidale and District Historical Society on the distribution of Aboriginal languages across New England (7). To the west, we have the riverine language groups extending down the Western Slopes and flowing onto the Western Plains of which the Gamilaraay were the largest. On the east, we have coastal language groups such as the Bundjalung, the Yaegl, the Gumbaingirr and the Daingatti to name a few. Then in the middle we have the smaller Tablelands languages such as the Anaiwan squeezed between the bigger language groups on each side.

The territories of the main language groups are related to river catchments, while within them we have a cascade from the main language groups through dialects to hordes or clans and then family groups whose territory is determined by both catchments and local environmental conditions, my microenvironments. The nature of interaction between groups within the hierarchy including trade were determined by relative resources and cultural links, making for a complex pattern that we do not fully understand.

We now come to another thread in New England history, the nature of environmental change. We do not know when people first arrived in New England. My present best guess based on dating patterns is between 30 and 32,000 years ago (8). The millennia since have seen many dramatic environmental changes. Sea levels have varied from perhaps 60 metres below current levels to 120 plus metres below to one to two metres above. Rainfall, wind and temperature patterns have varied greatly over this long period, with consequent changes to vegetation and animal life. Water courses have shifted, changed.

There is a saga here of human adaptation, of survival and change. To understand this, to explore the deep New England past, requires us to drill down, to look at the detail of change. It also requires us to put aside sometimes deeply held preconceptions. The geographic and human patterns that existed in 1788 were not the same as those that existed 6,000 or 30,000 years before. The visual images we hold today provide no real guidance to that past.

To illustrate this, take your picture of the Tablelands and strip away most of the current vegetation, replace it with tundra with periglacial conditions in spots. Or perhaps as an even more dramatic example, replace your images of the beaches, rivers, forests and estuaries of the entire North Coast with a more rugged coastline dropping sharply to a cold and more distant sea.

I now turn to the second part of the question I posed earlier, the names attached to that area I am calling New England, in so doing introducing further threads in the history of New England.

I note that  my use of the term “New England” is broader than current usage which tends to limit the term to the Tablelands or to Tablelands and Western Slopes. The broader entity has been variously called the North, the Northern Provinces, the Northern Districts and then, increasingly, New England from 1932 when the New State Movement first adopted the name for the North. This created a distinction between the Tablelands, the New England, and the broader new state area.

The Northern Separation, later New England New State, Movement is another key thread in the history of New England in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.(9). It began in the period leading up to the separation of the Moreton Bay colony, now Queensland, in 1859. It continues today if in a presently low key way especially via Facebook, making it the second oldest political movement in Australia after the union movement.  

Agitation has proceeded in surges. The colonial period saw separatist agitation established as a vehicle for protest. Then last century came major surges in the 1920s, the 1930s and then in the 1950s and 1960s culminating in the narrowly lost 1967 plebiscite. The waves created by each surge ultimately crashed against the barriers created by constitutional structures and existing vested interests, but each left a benefit behind. We would not be at this place today without those waves.

The effective collapse of the organised new state movement after the plebiscite loss and the political infighting that followed coincided with dramatic social and economic change from the 1970s including loss of industry, progressive structural decline and the rise of the coast. The regional social, cultural, political and media infrastructure that had supported cooperative action collapsed. The local parochialism that been one of the bedevilling features of New England life since the emergence of the towns reasserted itself, while the sense of Northern or New England identity declined, as did external recognition of that identity.

At a personal level, I find the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of this century hard to research and write about because of a pervading sense of personal loss at our relative decline.(10)  I hope as a professional historian that I do follow those tenets I talked about before, allowing the evidence to dictate conclusions. However, as a public historian, I see part of my role as equivalent to a historical rescue dig, seeking to preserve and present a past, to show its texture and value before the next range of social and economic change rolls over the top.

With the decline, use of the term New England shrank from its broader coverage back towards the Tablelands. However, while I use other terms such as the North where appropriate, I retain New England for practical as well as sentimental reasons.

The terms Northern Districts, Northern Provinces or just the North all have their own problems. To begin with, they are Sydney centric terms defined by their relationship to Sydney. Initially, the use of the terms expanded with European occupation progressively extending towards the Gulf of Carpentaria. The separation of Queensland in 1859 put a hard barrier in place. Queensland now had its own north.

Some years ago I coined the term border myopia to describe the way borders affect our thinking, blinding us. Queensland promotes the Granite Belt as a special unique area. Few realise that the Granite Belt is in fact part of the New England Tablelands. Tenterfield is about 44 minutes by road south of Stanthorpe. Had the border been shifted south just a little bit, Tenterfield would now be the southern part of the Granite Belt and part of Queensland tourism promotion.

The Commonwealth Games opening ceremony featured in part the Yugambeh Aboriginal nation because of its Gold Coast linkages. Less well recognised is that Yugambeh-Bundjalung, also known as Bandjalangic, is the Aboriginal language group that stretched from the north bank of the Clarence into South East Queensland including what is now the Gold Coast. When the Queensland border was created, the hard political line created not only divided Aboriginal groups placing related people under different legal jurisdictions but also affected the way we see relationships. You cannot write a history of the Aboriginal peoples within Northern NSW without addressing cross-border linkages.

Following the creation of Queensland, the coverage of the terms Northern Districts, Northern Provinces or just the North shrank in NSW to the area up to the new political border, setting up its own inconsistencies. You can see this easily if you look at terms in use today.

What does the term the North mean? It doesn’t mean all of Northern NSW but actually the north-east of NSW. The term North Coast was used to describe the area from the border to the Hunter. Then came a short gap to the Central Coast followed by another gap around Sydney and then the South Coast. Today we have the term Mid North Coast to describe the area from the Northern Rivers to the Hunter. But where is the South North Coast? Or, indeed, the North Coast? It remains easier to use the term New England unless the context demands otherwise.

Third Thread: prehistory and Aboriginal studies, multidisciplinary studies, challenges for regional historians

I have already referred to the importance of  geography and the environment in New England history and thought. I now want to extend this discussion using my own experiences as a base, placing it in the context of multidisciplinary studies and the challenges faced by regional historians in integrating and tailoring broader research to regional stories.

In Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, Billy Griffiths explores the history of Australian archaeology (11). There he wrote of the work and influence of Isabel McBryde at the University of New England and beyond.

Isabel came to UNE in 1959 as the first tenured lecturer in Australia to carry the word prehistory in her job title. Her 1966 honours class in prehistory of which I was a member was, I think,  the first honours class of its kind in Australia.

Isabel was introduced to archaeology and Australian prehistory by John Mulvaney at the University of Melbourne who became her mentor[12]. Like Mulvaney, she went to Cambridge to study in Professor Grahame Clark’s Department. Clarke is arguably the most important global prehistorian of his generation. He emphasised the importance of exploring economies and environmental conditions if you were to understand prehistory.

Later, Clarke and the Cambridge School would be criticised by Mulvaney and others for its geographical determinism and its excessive influence on Australian prehistory. A particular criticism was that the approach ignored the way in which culture and human choice affected life. Prehistoric peoples were not just passive actors, but active participants in the ways they chose to respond to and manage the world around them.

I don’t think that Isabel was ever limited by the Cambridge School. I say this, partly from my direct personal experience, partly from what I learned later about her overall approach. There were four distinct elements in her approach:

•  A belief under John Mulvaney’s influence that prehistorians and archaeologists had to move away from generalised continent wide conclusions to focus on regional sequences
• A focus on the collection of existing historical and ethnographic material that might inform prehistoric research
• The deliberate use of local contacts, historical societies and increasingly Aboriginal people themselves as informants and guides
• A conscious choice to tap the widest possible range of specialist support within UNE and beyond that might inform her research.

The result was a period of incredible productivity. By 1978, UNE students had written at least 22 theses on the Aborigines. Isabel herself was awarded her PhD in 1967, laying the basis for a 1974 book  Aboriginal prehistory in New England: an archaeological survey of northeastern New South Wales (Sydney University Press).  This was followed in 1978 by book of essays, Records of Time Past: ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England tribes (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies) mainly written by her former students. There were also journal articles and monographs, including her 1972 study with geologist R A Binns, A petrological analysis of ground-edge artefacts from northern New South Wales (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies) This pioneering multidisciplinary study analysed the chemical composition of stone artefacts in various collections to determine their original source, thus indicating patterns of trade and contact in prehistoric New England.

Isabel’s approach fitted with my own interests. I chose as my history honours thesis topic a study of Aboriginal economic life in Northern NSW as revealed by the ethnographic and historical record (13). This was totally consistent with Isabel’s approach in seeking to mine all the early contact records, the later anthropological and ethnographic studies, to create a picture that might help inform the deeper past. I also wished to apply tools and approaches drawn from economics to inform the questions I asked.

I was influenced here by a previous debate between my cousin Cyril Belshaw, then professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and the economist, historian and anthropologist  Karl Polanyi. Polanyi took the view that economics was only relevant to societies that used money as a means of exchange. Belshaw disagreed, drawing in part from his experience in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. I took Belshaw’s side because I believed that the questions asked by economists were relevant.

My approach took me outside the conventional bounds of history, something that I think made some of the department including Russell Ward uncomfortable. Isabel backed my approach. It was productive as you can see from the topics I addressed: population distribution, the patterns of seasonal movement, trade, private property, specialisation, capital formation and farming. These are all topics of current debate.

In writing, I drew from the work of UNE academics outside the history department. Geographer Eric Woolmington was of particular importance, introducing me to a concept that I still use today, that of the marchland.

Eric and Jo Woolmington came to Armidale in 1956 when Eric accepted a lecturing position at UNE (14). Jo enrolled at UNE and became part of our history group. One of our first if not the first assignments was to prepare a summary of some work by Gordon Childe on prehistory - Jo did hers in verse! Later, Jo became a member of the history department and principal of Mary White College. Her sensitivity to the Aboriginal cause, and its ambivalent relationship with Christianity, focused her research for two decades on the Aboriginal situation and the state of religion in the first half of the 19th century. This work remains relevant today.

In 1958, UNE’s Belshaw Block was destroyed by fire. “Belshaw’s done his block” said the sign in Prosh, the student procession later that year. That was funny, but the fire was no laughing matter for those affected. In Eric Woolmington’s case, it destroyed all copies of his about to be submitted PhD thesis and his research notes. He had to begin again.

Eric’s new study was an examination of the geographic basis of support for the New England New State Movement (15). This choice was partially determined by events at the time but also reflected the University’s role. Its founders had seen it as the university of the North, a view shared by the foundation staff. It was, in the words of Acting Warden Belshaw, to be a powerhouse of the North. Both founders and staff saw it too as an international community of scholars.

Outside the academy, there was considerable interest in educational advancement, decentralisation, economic development, regional studies, local history, scientific farming and environmental protection among the Northern leadership group. Organic farming can be taken as a little known example. This term appeared first in Lord Northbourne’s manifesto on organic farming, Look to the Land, published in London in May 1940. The book reached Australia quite quickly and was widely and favourably reviewed, attracting attention from that linked group of New England farmers and graziers already interested in scientific farming  as well as other Northern causes.

In 1944, the world’s first organic farming organisation, the Australian Organic Farming and Gardening Society, was formed. Its periodical, the Organic Farming Digest, was the first organics advocacy journal. Harold White from Bald Blair was a key figure in its formation and became an avid contributor to the journal.

The self-government movement itself had to explain why separation was desirable, justified. In doing so, it articulated a theory of governance based partly on geography. Writing in 1926, David Drummond, the Movement’s main constitutional theorist, suggested that constitutional entities must be based on community of interest (16). Without that, oppression of the minority by the majority was inevitable. By this, Drummond was not referring to the democratic process whereby the majority view on particular issues triumphs, but circumstances where particular groups are consistently disadvantaged because their interests will normally conflict with the majority. The solution lay in restructuring government to better reflect community of interest.

The net result of all this was a flood of New England studies inside and outside the academy: conferences, pamphlets, theses, books and articles.

In exploring the geographic base of separatist support, Eric's central thesis was that New England was a marchland area, an area of economic competition between Sydney and Brisbane. Using a variety of techniques, he attempted to measure the natural economic boundary and then compared this to the actual boundary. The natural economic boundary lay far to the south of the actual boundary. He suggested that this area of overlap, contested territory, represented the natural heart of the movement.

I took Eric’s marchland concept and attempted to apply it to what Professor Iain Davidson has called that bit in the middle, the Northern Tablelands during Aboriginal times. Some aspects of my then interpretation were wrong, the tablelands were occupied during winter, but it remains a useful tool in explaining the relationship between Aborigines on the Tablelands and those in the river valleys to the west and east.

  

The Tablelands remain a bit of a mystery in archaeological terms because of the absence of evidence. Faced with this, Professor Wendy Beck (a fellow member of the Heritage Futures Research Centre),  adopted an approach that Isabel would have approved of: looking at the Tablelands’ lagoons and wetlands, she asked what population they might have supported? Wendy will be talking later in this seminar series so I will leave the answer to that seminar!

I spoke earlier of multidisciplinary studies and of the challenges faced by regional historians in integrating and tailoring broader research to regional stories. The last ten or so years has seen an explosion of research results, an explosion that has accelerated over the last two years, about the deeper human past including new skeletal remains, DNA and linguistic analysis. These results have changed, in fact upset, our understanding of the processes of human evolution and dispersal across the globe, replacing our previous linear picture with a still emerging multi-linear one. They include:

•  The discovery of new hominid species including Homo Floresiensis, Homo Naledi and the Denisovans
•  The realisation that other hominid species overlapped with modern humans far more than was previously realised and that modern humans include various admixtures of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes
•  Dating evidence from the Madjedbebe rock shelter that has pushed back  the date of human occupation of Sahul, the name given to the previous mega-continent combining New Guinea, the present Australian continent and Tasmania to 62,000+ years ago
• The discovery that modern Aboriginal and Papuan people carry some Denisovan genes, suggesting contact with a South-East Asian branch of the Denisovans prior to occupation of Sahul.

This is all fascinating stuff. However, as a regional historian I seek to understand how the emerging patterns might mesh with my evolving synthesis about Aboriginal occupation of New England. Here I confess to a degree of discomfort because of conflicts between different types of evidence.

In March this year, for example, Remco R. Bouckaert, Claire Bowern & Quentin D. Atkinson released research results suggesting that the Pama-Nyungan family of languages, the languages spoken in New England, arose just under 6,000 years ago around what is now the Queensland town of Burketown (17).. They suggest this language family spread across Australia as people moved in response to changing climate. I really struggle with this conclusion because I cannot reconcile it with other evidence.

Final Threads

I said at the outset that this talk was something of a history dégustation, a tasting of different elements in our history. In these last few minutes I want to stand back to look briefly at some broader issues, pulling threads together.

It will be clear, I think, that my historical focus is not local or even regional but rather the study of a group of interconnected regions joined by geography. Here I am concerned with patterns, with relationships, linkages, similarities and differences that can only be seen in a broader study.

In chronological terms, the study breaks into three parts. Aboriginal New England up to 1788, colonial New England and New England in the twentieth century. I chose 1788 as a cut-off for the first part to avoid entanglement in later issues such as the frontier wars. We know the darkness is coming, but we can still see the sunlight. I chose the end of the twentieth century as a cut-off to give a degree of separation from later events. Even then, later developments do intrude. When I began work, questions of paedophilia and child abuse had yet to emerge. Now I have to decide how much weight to place on them within the overall work.

  

Major events or periods broadly dictate a chronological framework across all three parts. However, my focus is specifically New England. External events are dealt with only to the extent that they affect New England. Within the broad chronological framework there are also themes that link periods.

The new state movement is an example. This movement along with the Progressive later Country Party form part of what I call the country movements. There is a second stream, the industrial union stream that began in the coal mines of Newcastle and the lower Hunter. The interaction between the two forms one of the recurring motifs in New England history.

As the project  proceeded, I became more aware of the distinctive elements within New England history and life including the existence of distinct forms of thought and culture. As a consequence,. the scope has widened from an original political and economic focus to one more broadly reflective of social, cultural and intellectual life.

There are issues here of balance and focus. I can’t cover everything!

As an historian, I am dependent on the hundreds of pieces of previous work expressed in theses, books and articles, work that encapsulates the New England historiographic tradition. Not all this work is to be found in academic studies, for it includes local and family histories, memoirs and autobiographies. We are truly blessed to have such depth.

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(1)Paper delivered by Jim Belshaw in the University of New England’s Humanities seminar series, 13 April 2018

(2) James Belshaw, “A university for the north”, pp14- 34, “The Parthenon on the Hill”, pp287-292, in J S Ryan and Warren Newman (eds), Came to New England, University of New England, Armidale 2014
(3) Don Beer, “The Holiest Campus’, its Decline and Transformation: The University of New England, 1946–79”, Journal of Religious History, Volume 21 Issue 3, Pages 318 – 336, published on-line 09 October 2007

(4) Kenneth Dempsey Conflict and Decline: Ministers and laymen in an Australian country town, Methuen Australia, North Ryde, 1983 .

(5) Pauline Kneipp, This Land of Promise. The Ursuline Order in Australia 1882-1982, University of New England History Series 2, Armidale, 1982

(6) Don Aitkin's What was it all for? The Reshaping of Australia, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005

(7) An Exploration of New England’s Aboriginal Languages, Paper delivered to a meeting of the Armidale & District Historical Society, Armidale 20 July 2010

(8) We know from dating at Warren Cave in Tasmania that the Aborigines had reached Tasmania around 35,000 years ago while dates from Willandra Lakes in South West New South Wales suggest occupation as early as 40 to 41,000 years ago. The dates we have for New England are all later.

The Cuddie Springs site near Brewarrina suggests occupation as long ago as 35,000 years BP. However, dates here have been subject to considerable dispute and there appears to be no agreement on the issue. Excluding Cuddie Springs, we have a date of greater than 20,200 years BP from a hearth at Glennies Creek 35 kilometres north of Branxton in the Hunter, while a site on a former terrace of Wollombi Brook near Singleton suggested a date range of 18,000-30,000 years BP. At Moffats Swamp near Raymond Terrace, a date of 17,000 years BP was obtained. On the Liverpool Plains, Aboriginal occupation has been dated to at least 19,000 years BP. Further north in South-East Queensland, the Wallen Wallen Creek site shows continuous occupation from about 20,000 years ago.

The dates suggest a consistent pattern of Aboriginal occupation across New England from perhaps 20,000 years ago, with possible visits if not occupation from perhaps 30,000+ years ago

(9) One of the surprising gaps in New England historiography given its importance is the absence of a full history of the self-government cause.

(10) Social Change in Australia’s New England 1950-2000, the seminar paper I gave in the Humanities seminar series, 8 April 2011, looks at social change in more detail. The paper is currently in revision.

(11) Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia,. Black Inc, February 2018). The section on Isabel McBryde  is repeated in Billy Griffiths, “Haunted Country”, Inside Story, 23 March 2018 http://insidestory.org.au/haunted-country/

(12) I reflect on John Mulvaney’s life in a post on my history blog, Reflections on the life of John Mulvaney, 5 November 2016. http://newenglandhistory.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/the-death-of-professor-john-mulvaney-on.html. The post includes links to some key documents for those who would like to read further.

(13) Jim Belshaw, The Economic Basis of Aboriginal Life in Northern New South Wales in the Nineteenth Century, BA Hons thesis, University of New England, 1966

(14)  A post on my New England blog, More UNE Passings - death of Jo Woolmington (7 January 2008) provides a personal perspective on Jo including some of her work http://newenglandaustralia.blogspot.com.au/2008/01/more-une-passings-death-of-jo.html

(15) E R Woolmington, The Geographical Scope of Support for the New State Movement in Northern New South Wales, PhD thesis, University of New England, 1963. See also E R Woolmington, A spatial approach to the measurement of support for the Separatist Movement in Northern New South Wales, Monograph Series No.2, Department of Geography, University of New England, 1966.

(16) Drummond, D.H., Constitutional Changes in Australia: Current Problems and Contributing Factors, Glen Innes Examiner, Glen Innes, 1926.

(17) Remco R. Bouckaert, Claire Bowern & Quentin D. Atkinson, “The origin and expansion of Pama–Nyungan languages across Australia”, Nature Ecology & Evolution, volume 2, pages 741–749 (2018) Published online:12 March 2018 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0489-3