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.
(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/
(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
(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
