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