“We do need to reimagine Australia Day, there’s no question about that because the 26th of January represented the day Captain Cook landed at Port Botany ...” ACT Attorney General Shane Rattenbury (Greens) – in The Canberra Times and on ABC radio last week.
The Greens leader later corrected his error. Meanwhile Labor Prime Minister Albanese is in Alice Springs saying he wants to do something about NT alcohol abuse and violence in a rerun of Howard’s intervention which received bipartisan support from Labor. The NT Intervention took the form of an economic war against the Arrernte people (for example) through the introduction of the Basics Card and the dismantling of the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP). Both schemes, the CDEP and the Intervention were racist attacks on people who still had their culture, their language and their lore. It was taking colonisation to another level against the oldest living culture on earth. Despite this Penny Wong, Peter Dutton and Antonio Albanese continue to lecture the Chinese government on human rights abuses in that country.
In response to Shane Rattenbury’s gaffe, Humphrey McQueen identifies the confusion surrounding the history of Australia Day. – Ian Curr, Ed., 25 Jan 2023.
When did Invasion happen?
That the ACT Attorney-General and leader of the Greens in the Legislative Assembly thinks that Australia Day is when Lt Cook sailed past Sydney Harbour without noticing its existence, is to be expected. More concerning are the implications of ‘invasion’ to account for what did happen on January 26, 1788 – eight days after Phillip had come ashore in Botany Bay to find it barren.
The settlement was not an invasion but an incursion.
The fleet had been sent to set up a refitting station en route to China. The British government and the East India Company, which held a monopoly over trade in the entirety of Asia – and Australasia – feared that the Dutch East India Company, with its powerful navy, would block access through the Malacca Strait. Britain and the Netherlands had been at war on and off for decades.
Among the Imperial designs was access to China, not to buy its teas in exchange for Indian opium, as happened by force from the early 1830s, but to sell the Chinese millions English processed goods.
To that end, Lord Macartney led an embassy to Peking in 1792, loaded with gifts, to be thanked, and told to go away since nothing Britain had to offer was of the least interest to the Celestial Court.
All this and more had been made clear by the 1960s by the Tasmanian historian, K.D. Dallas, and collected in his Trading Posts or Penal Colonies (1969). Geoffrey Blainey acknowledges his debt to Dallas in The Tyranny of Distance.
Dallas also knew enough economic and naval history to know that the Admiralty would dump convicts when it needed them for all manner of public works, such as dredging the Thames – which is why they were on hulks. The value-adding resource of convict labour was no longer sent to the United States as a punishment for rebellion.
What happened in and around Sydney, and then Hobart from 1803, were moves in the hundreds of years of warfare between Britain and France.
Hence, 1788 was an incursion as part of a blue-water strategy. Invasion gets under way twenty-five years later as Britain emerges from the anti-French wars as the only Great Power – leaving aside the land-locked Czarist Empire.
Not that the above will have any place in an era of truth-telling when the criterion will be ‘well, anyway, that’s my story’ as to whether it was Cook or Phillip who invaded on any date you can’t remember from primary school.
Humphrey McQueen
25 Jan 2023
Reference
ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury admits error over Australia Day history
Just doing some trawling and it seems Bourke’s concerns were not with the Wurundjeri or terra nullius but with Squatters such as Batman with no right to make deals about Crown land. It was Batman and the squatters who were trespassing, not the Wurundjeri. Bourke created an occupation license system to contain and regulate the squatters and protect the Crown’s profits from land allocations and his 1835 letter enforced that.
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bourke-sir-richard-1806
John,
Please see https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2023/01/27/first-treaty/
Ian Curr
26 Jan 2023
I am not convinced by Humphrey’s distinction between a 1788 incursion and a later invasion. Merchant ships carrying convicts were exempt from the requirement to get a license from the East India company to sail to China. As a result most of the first fleet ships sailed onto China after dropping off the convicts and soldiers at Sydney Cove. While Australia was a secondary consideration for the merchant captains, the only purpose of the 1788 military operation was to establish a base/port for invasion and occupation.
And furthermore, Britain had no conflict with France in the Indo-Pacific at the time, that had all been settled in the Treaty of Paris of 1763. The only conflict with France in 1788 was borderlines in Europe and the American revolution. Humphry is wrong to interpret the first fleet as part of war with France. There was a French ship accompanying the first fleet and observed the landing.
Perhaps what Humphrey has lost sight of is Joseph Banks’s plan for Australia. The first fleet should be interpreted in that context.
Hello John,
Don’t you think this discussion about what happened on Australia Day is a bit Euro and Sydney-centric? There were frontier wars breaking out everywhere in the 19th century as a result of European invasion: in Van Diemens Land, on Yuggera and Toorubul Country in Meanjin/Brisbane and the war against the Badtjala people of K’gari (Fraser Island), to name only a few.
Take the Van Diemen’s Land war (aka The Black War), it did not start until the 1830s. This was a genocidal guerrilla war with many lives lost on both sides.
In Meanjin, Captain Patrick Logan, the brutal commandant at Moreton Bay Penal settlement in the 1820s, fell victim to guerrilla tactics by Yuggera, Dalla and Jinibara people near Esk. This was doubly ironic as Captain Logan fought in the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon in 1811-13 albeit as part of British regular forces. The Spanish people employed guerrilla tactics against the French in those wars.
Taking up Humphrey’s point, Captain Logan was able to brutalize convict and aboriginal people alike because he had learnt these methods in the Peninsular Wars against the French.
Biting the Clouds
Of course the frontier war went on throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. For example, the colony of Queensland passed the The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act in 1897 driving aboriginal people onto reserves. Fiona Foley’s book ‘Biting the Clouds’ describes how opium was being used as payment for Aboriginal labour and sex.
Ian Curr
25 Jan 2023
When was ‘Terra Nullius’ first brought into the equation?
Everything that happened after 1788 including the native police was part of Bank’s plan devised since the Endeavor voyage. Banks built the Australian Merino flock from king George’s private flock, Australia riding on the sheep’s back was his idea.
As I understand it……. The concept of terra nullius is as old as Rome but had particular importance in international law created by the 1763 treaty of Paris, where the European empires divided the rest of the known world up amongst themselves. The “doctrine of reception” is that an imperial power’s law does not apply in a colony unless one of the following is the case – a) the colony has been conquered by military force, b) there is a treaty with the tribes or c) the land is terra nullius. This is why the Australian program was genocide not slavery. Banks reported healthy athletic Aboriginal people in 1770 but as a leading scientist he was as influenced by social Darwinism as much as Marx and Engels were and reached similar conclusions – backward Aboriginal society must inevitably die out, therefore Australia was terra nullius. Banks predicted that the Aboriginal “race” would have died out by the time of the first fleet and the first fleet were very surprised to find otherwise and the new colony had to put a lot of energy into killing off the natives to maintain terra nullius status, and they failed.
Why was Banks so convinced the Aboriginal race would have died out within 20 years of the Endeavour voyage? https://paradigmoz.wordpress.com/2007/02/27/captain-cook-joseph-banks-and-smallpox/
Sorry, John, I meant when was ‘Terra Nullius’ first used in relation to your claim that Humphrey McQueen is wrong about 1788 being a mere incursion and not an invasion. You state above that “the only purpose of the 26 January 1788 military operation was to establish a base/port for invasion and occupation.”
As it turns out the “terra nullius‘ justification was not proclaimed by the colonial authorities until John Batman used the ploy of trying to con the Wurundjeri people to hand over rights to the land around Port Phillip (the present site of Melbourne) in exchange for rations.
This attempt by Batman was quashed by the proclamation of ‘Terra Nullius‘ issued by the Colonial Office and sent to Governor Sir Richard Bourke on 10 October 1835. This enabled the colonial office in New South Wales to prosecute for trespass all people found occupying land without the authority of the government. [NB: at that time Port Phillip Bay settlement was still under the control of NSW colonial rule]. The colony in Victoria did not break free of rule by the governor of NSW until 1850.
Anyway, doesn’t the first use of terra nullius proclamation, 47 years after the arrival of the first fleet at Botany Bay on 26 January 1788, suggest the genocidal frontier invasion came some time after the arrival of the first fleet.
The exploration and occupation of Terra Australis occurred in different places at different times for differing purposes. Banks may have envisaged a country riding on the sheep’s back but this was not the first industry at Port Jackson. Ship or more correctly boat building was the first industry. This was to supply the sealing industry in the south around Bruny Island, Bass Strait and the seas around Van Diemen’s land.
“The first cohort were sealers from Port Jackson who, between 1797 and 1806, were funded by merchants in the first significant commercial activity in the colony which was not conducted by the Colonial authority.
The merchants were licensed to charter ships and engage workers of good character and repute to travel to Bass Strait for 3 to 5 months each year to harvest seals for their skins and oil.
The importance of good character and repute arose from the fact that the sealers were in a remote area without any law enforcement who had assigned to them valuable equipment and who had possession of the valuable product of their labours.
As it happened, the aborigines of North East Tasmania chose to have nothing to do with these sealers and there was virtually no contact. These sealers eventually depleted the stocks of seals such that the industry was no longer viable in Bass Strait in its initial form.” – Review of Grease and Ochre by Patsy Cameron
Having Australia Day on 26 January makes no sense. The Commonwealth of Australia was formed on 1 Jan 1901. If there is to be an Australia Day it should be on the first of January each year.
Ian Curr
26 Jan 2023
Bourke’s letter about Batman’s treaty refers to vacant crown land not terra nullius.
Terra Nullius was never proclaimed, it is a common law presumption – and still is despite Mabo, Murray Island land rights were only recognized as rights under British common law.