Re: {OzArch} A New Historiography of Black & White Australia

[john...@ozemail.com.au]

 

Totally agree with you.

It would seem best termed war.   At least in Tasmania.   Still am undecided re the Hawkesbury .. but if not war it was at least strong "pay back" practice .. as much practiced for the old countries .. esp. Gaelic ones.   I have waded through some of this writing on Tasmania, but not as much as you.   Still going on the Hawkesbury, and just today went to library to get in on transfer Jan Barkly-Jack's book on first settlement there, which I had recommended to me to read.   I've read others, and there are websites which have collected a large amount of the Government and other records thereon.   For anyone interested, the Appin massacre site I estimate they have memorialised at the wrong spot, a km or so too far downstream.

Cheers, John

----- Original Message -----

From:

oza...@googlegroups.com

To:

"OzArch" <oza...@googlegroups.com>

Cc:

Sent:

Sat, 5 Aug 2017 01:15:01 -0700 (PDT)

Subject:

{OzArch} A New Historiography of Black & White Australia

The Australian  is hardly the newspaper I would associate with anti-establishment revisionist histories.

However, last week the paper published a review of three recent historical works, which it depicted as:

" A new historiography of black and white Australia is remaking the way we think about our past". (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/book-reviews-hidden-in-plain-view-dark-emu-vandemonian-war/news-story/1b8ba942884be79a05b69f20b5b447ab).

The first is Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu which came out in  2014, the second is Paul Irish's Hidden in Plain View (2017), and the third is Nick Brodie's The Vandemonian War that was released just last week (personally I'd add Gammage 2011 to these works).

I've just finished Brodie's book which at ~400p is by far the bulkiest of the three. 

Its probably a more detailed history of the Tasmanian 1828-1832 military campaign against Aboriginals than most archaeologists need to wade through in entirety (Brodie has for the first time gone through the Government archives of the times in considerable detail).

Nevertheless, a couple of themes do stand out to me.

1) The scale and nature of this military campaign was a war - not the sort of raggedy settler and militia semi-official activities that are often presented as the nature of violence against Aboriginals. 

If 3,500 armed men advancing across Tasmania in a line isnt a tactic of war, then I'm not sure what is.

But for me and probably other archaeologists, Brodie's most interesting evidence is mentioned in passing, ties in well with passages from Mitchell cited by Pascoe (2011) and strengthens my questioning of whether the ethnographies we have long relied upon, should be relied upon at all.

Pascoe (2011) cites Mitchell mentioning solidly built Aboriginal huts, including one containing a ton of harvested native seed, miles of grain grasses stooked for harvest and miles of land under cultivation for murnong (yam daisy / Microseris lanceolota / scapierii).

Brodie (2017) cites 1820-30's military intelligence reports of Aboriginal villages in Tasmania with dozens of robustly constructed huts, including mention of one hut capable of holding 50 people.

Your thougts?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OzArch" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ozarch+un...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to oza...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/ozarch.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[John Pickard]

Hi Michael,

 

I’m not sure about having any “thougts” on what is obviously evidence-based revisionist history. Shouldn’t be any other kind.

 

But this is not news. Read what Edward Micklethwaite Curr had to say about it in 1886

 

https://archive.org/details/australianracei01currgoog Chapter IX “Remarks on some of the works which treat of the Aborigines of Australia”

 

Although he praises R. Brough Smyth’s “The Aborigines of Victoria” (pp. 237-238), Curr then details several things that he thinks are outright incorrect, and caused by a lack of any field work by Smyth (children suckling while carried on back, children forced to swim or sink, causes of infanticide, ... (pp. 238-244).

 

Revisionist history in 1886! Who’d a thought it?

 

I’m sure that someone will respond with details of Curr’s mistakes.

Cheers, John

John Pickard
john.p...@bigpond.com

[Jeannette Hope]

John,

 

I couldn’t resist such as easy challenge!   

 

Briefly, see

Diane Barwick’s work: She noted that  while Curr criticised Smyth because he wasn’t a bushman, much of Smyth’s information came William Thomas who had lived with Aboriginal communities for many years.  See Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria,  Boucher and Russell, for a summary of Barwick’s work.

 

Deborah Bird Rose 2004  Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation.   

 

Samuel Furphy 2013 Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History. This includes an analysis of how the Yorta Yorta land claim was lost in 1998  due a  controversial interpretation of Curr’s work.  A quote:  “Deborah Bird Rose has argued that ‘the evolutionary theory that the savage is only partially separated from nature … runs through Curr’s work in a way that is so predictable as to be laughable’. She rightly suggests that taking every word of Curr’s book at face value is a dangerous historiographical approach.”

 

Furphy’s book can be downloaded from: http://press.anu.edu.au/node/191/download.

 

[Why was Curr so critical of Smyth?  Well, being the ‘expert’ on Aborigines was very prestigious for gentlemen, and very, very competitive.]

 

Cheers

 

Jeannette

 

---

This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software. www.avg.com