What a shameful account by one of my ancestors Edward M Curr about a visit to Moira by police from Melbourne to abduct a proud Yorta Yorta man, Warri, from his country! Australian courts and government relied upon this pompous character to justify the biggest land grab in history, that of the Great South Land of so- called Australia. In Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, Edward Curr refers to Yorta Yorta country as the Bangerang.
My ancestor quite comfortably parodies the views of a visiting officer of colonial police from Port Phillip to his sheep run on Yorta Yorta country. This upstart’s story provides context to expropriation of the land, as would any member of the English gentry (like Lord Balfour, if he were alive today). Here is Curr’s aloof description of a visit by police onetime:
“In addition, it was charming also to notice, even on a short acquaintance, not only that the estimate in which this warrior (long since, poor fellow, a pilgrim to the happy hunting grounds) held civilians was, in the main, a low one; but also that—unknown to himself, probably—he regarded them as a very unimportant portion of the community, whose raison d’être might have been the erection of towns in which the military, in times of peace, might enjoy the usual agréments of society—of which the daughters of civilians to flirt with formed a prominent feature. Whilst, of course, in times of war, such places would be put to their proper purposes and be defended, battered, and sacked in the orthodox way, as we always read in history.“
Washing away the ‘tide of history’
It beggars belief that the Mr Justice Olney’s ruling privileged glib records like Curr’s, even when they conflicted with oral testimonies Yorta Yorta elders, concluding that the “tide of history” had washed away the “foundation of native title”. We include the chapter by my ancestor Edward M Curr entitled A Visit to the Moira in Company with the Police from his book, “Recollections of squatting in Victoria.” – Ian Curr, Editor, WBT.
As early as 1860 members of the Yorta Yorta demanded compensation from the Victorian authorities for the destruction of their natural fishing areas by paddle steamers. The demand was for a tax of 10 pounds ($20) to be imposed on each steamer passing up and down the river to be expended in supplying food to the natives in lieu of the fish which had been driven away (Victorian Aborigines Protection Board, 1861:19). These demands were obviously unsuccessful, but it does illustrate that as early as 1860 the Yorta Yorta ancestors were well aware of their inherent rights and were quick to exercise them.
Between 1860 and 1994 there were approximately 18 separate attempts to claim land and compensation by the Yorta Yorta community. The only land that has been returned is 1,200 acres of the former Cummeragunja Reserve, which was originally 2,965 acres. This land was granted to the Yorta Yorta by the New South Wales Government under its Land Rights Act, 1983. The land was granted as inalienable freehold title, but when measured against the traditional Yorta Yorta territories, it amounts to a tenth of 1 percent of the traditional lands of some 20,000 square kilometres.
The Yorta Yorta continued to assert their inherent rights and have shown through oral, documentary, and material evidence, that their social, spiritual, economic and cultural links with the area have never been broken. No Tide of History as it was used to deny the Yorta Yorta their native title claim will ever wash away the long and continued connections that the Yorta continue to hold with their ancestral lands (Yorta Yorta Land Claim, 1984:1).
Dr Wayne Atkinson
Yorta Yorta Elder
A Visit to the Moira in Company
with the Police
AFTER THE RETURN of my brother and myself from the Moira, we set to work to make preparations for occupying a block of country in that locality. Whilst so engaged, however, the solitude of Tongala was broken in upon by the arrival of several troopers, headed by the officer in charge of the native mounted police.
The detachment, rather a larger one than Usual, consisted, besides the officer, of four blacks and four white troopers. Such a visitation from the outer world, as a matter of course, somewhat fluttered us Volscians in Corioli. The station hands all turned out to gaze on the strange men and horses, as if such a sight had never met their eyes before, and bestowed on the removal of cloaks unslinging of carbines, watering of chargers, &c., their undivided attention; whilst the uniformity practised in such matters by the troopers, and their systematic clockwork-like mode of managing matters which Civilians are apt to look on as trifles, did not fail to elicit, sotto voce, uncomplimentary remarks from some of my men, to whom such methodical ways brought back unpleasant reminiscences of prison days.
The officer, who accompanied me to my hut after he had seen his men disposed of, carelessly unbuckled his sabre and pitched it and his foraging cap on to the sofa, and taking a chair, amused me a good deal as he rattled out, in the most dégagé manner, that he had received instructions “to put himself at the head of his present force, apprehend all troublesome Blacks, and restore quiet to the disaffected district; that a reinforcement m the person of Corporal Rolfe, a non-commissioned officer in whom he placed the greatest confidence, was momentarily expected; that his fellows were all of the night sort, specially trained indeed by himself; and that the service was thoroughly.
A visit to Moira .., from “Recollections of squatting in Victoria” by Edward M Curr
… read more at A visit to Moira with police
Reference
‘Truth telling’ and biography are not new, as the ridiculous account of squatting in Victoria by Edward M Curr would suggest.
Ian Curr
5 November 2025
End of history?
Australia and the Aboriginal past
by Bain Attwood •
Australian Book Review, November 2025, no. 481
The growth in understanding of the tens of thousands of years of this continent’s pre-colonial and post-colonial Aboriginal history has been one of the great intellectual achievements of postwar Australia. But if these two collections of essays are any guide, there are reasons to be gravely concerned about the future of this field of knowledge.
Many will probably regard Reframing Indigenous Biography and Deep History as examples of ‘truth-telling’. But insofar as moral categories such as these are useful – I doubt they are – these volumes might be regarded as exemplars of ‘untruthful history’.
Both books are testimony to the potentially corrosive effect the Australian Research Council is having on research in the Humanities as it pressures applicants to conceive grand projects that often lack substance. In the case of Reframing Indigenous Biography, the project’s chief investigators, who in turn became the volume’s editors, not only undertook to address the underrepresentation of Indigenous people’s lives in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). They also promised to reframe Indigenous biography by considering its history, practice, and possibilities.
Arguably, the very concept of ‘Indigenous biography’ is problematic as it ignores the fact that biography is a form and practice at odds with, even alien to, the kind of sociality and sense of collectivity that long characterised the Indigenous cultures on this continent. So, too, was adopting the ADB as the frame to critique the field of ‘Indigenous biography’, as this led the project to exaggerate the dictionary’s importance and influence as well as more generally that of academic history, which has rested on the written word. In the years after the ADB was founded at the Australian National University (ANU) in the late 1950s, numerous popular biographies by and about Aboriginal people were published which rested on the spoken word and so were in keeping with Aboriginal ways of relating the past. There is barely a peep about this work in Reframing Indigenous Biography.
Indeed, while its editors invoke the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner’s famous notion of ‘the great Australian silence’ in the course of criticising their predecessors in the field, they do some forgetting of their own. In telling a story about the history of Australian Indigenous biography, they undercount the paltry number of biographical articles the ADB published about Indigenous people in its first two volumes in 1966-67. They omit any reference to a fine article (about a man called Biraban) in one of those volumes. And they overlook the fact that the traditional academic practice of biography was already being challenged in a school of Pacific History created at ANU in 1949.
More egregiously, they omit from their history (a sentence or two aside) a period of some fifty years during which Indigenous biography was reframed at ANU. In the mid to late 1970s a journal, Aboriginal History, founded at the instigation of Pacific historian Niel Gunson, foregrounded Aboriginal subjects, agency, and perspectives, and to this end began publishing Aboriginal life stories. At the same time, its founding editor, Diane Barwick, launched several major Aboriginal biographical projects that comprehensively broke new ground in the field.
The editors and the contributors to Reframing Indigenous Biography similarly elide most of the work done in Indigenous biography in New Zealand and other smaller Pacific islands that also served to reframe Indigenous biography, not least in spatial and temporal terms.
Whatever the reasons for this erasure of earlier scholarship – I assume it is mainly the result of a rise in presentism, in the sense of a perception and representation of time compressed into the present – the editors’ claim that they have reframed Indigenous biography is quite unfounded. It reminded me of Bertrand Russell’s response to D. H. Lawrence’s Look! We Have Come Through! (1917): ‘Yes, but I’m not sure why we have to look.’
This volume is flawed in several other respects. For example, it conflates and so confuses the similar but different tasks that biography and history can perform. Grace Karskens asserts that the question of how the first generation of Aboriginal people after 1788 survived the devastating impact of British colonisation is a distinctly biographical one. Not surprisingly perhaps, in her beautifully crafted biographical essay she is unable to answer what is best conceived as a historical question. As this might suggest, while the renewed emphasis on good storytelling and fine writing has enriched history in recent decades, it has often been at the cost of argument and explanation.
Much of this volume is in keeping with the recent subjectivist turn in historical practice. This has profound implications for the role ‘distance’ – defined as something that ranges from detachment to intimacy – plays in it. This volume’s makers evidently regard Indigenous biography as subversive. Yet, as the Italian historian Enzo Traverso has recently pointed out, the rise of the autobiographical ‘I’ in historical writing is symptomatic of the transformation neo-liberalism has wrought in recent decades by making individualism ‘the habitus of our time’. This, he suggests, ‘explains the new need to write history as a story of the self in the present and the public’s appetite for works of history written in the first person’.
As Traverso observes, all this has contributed to a presentist regime of historicity that has undermined the sense of both a past and a future. It has also contributed to an erosion of serious political critique. Fuelled by the retreat into the private, individual sphere of intimacy, the expansion of the self in historical writing is causing a retreat from the collective and a narrowing of the ‘us’. However, as Traverso reminds us, ‘we must not forget that history is above all made of and by “we”’.
Like Reframing Indigenous Biography, Deep History promises to reframe its subject – in this case, history. It comes out of a scholarly project that had two principal goals. First, it undertook to create an account of this continent’s human history that is commonly believed to extend as far back as 65,000 years, but this was difficult, if not impossible, for practitioners of history to achieve as historians have neither the skills nor the methods required. The project’s other goal was conceptual in nature, that of rethinking the discipline of history, mostly by reflecting on the temporalities that underpin it.
Deep History is driven by three key terms: Indigenous knowledge, decolonising, and sovereignty. Its contributors assume that contemporary Australia’s Aboriginal peoples have a large, substantive, and distinct body of Indigenous knowledge about this continent’s deep past, often called The Dreaming. This is not the case, Australian anthropologists once argued. According to those who conducted ethnographical work in northern Australia between the 1920s and the 1960s, classic or traditionally oriented Aboriginal societies had a conceptual system that worked to affirm the realities of the present and suppress memory of the past.
In his famous essay ‘The Dreaming’, Stanner argued that history as Europeans understood it was not ‘involved in its meaning’. He pointed out that traditional Aboriginal people did not perceive this as a lack and contended that they were ‘a people who had been able, in some sense, to “defeat” history, [and] become a-historical in mood, outlook, and life’. He concluded that these traditionally oriented societies ‘do not allow anything whatsoever to be inferred concerning the remote past with which they purport to deal’.
Yet, without any explanation, the editors of Deep History claim that The Dreaming – and Aboriginal metaphysics more generally – amount to a ‘historical interpretation’ and thus to history. I assume they would claim that their reconceptualisation of The Dreaming provides a means of decolonising Australia or its history or both. But their insistence that the way Aboriginal people relate, and relate to, the past should be regarded as history could just as well be regarded as an act of recolonisation given that ‘history’ remains the master signifier.
At the same time, the volume’s contributors exaggerate the degree to which the ways most Aboriginal people represent the past differ from the ways most settler peoples do this. They overlook the fact that Aboriginal and settler ways of doing ‘history’, including the ways they figure temporality, have converged in some respects in the past fifty years as Aboriginal people have entered the discourse of history. Anthropological and historical scholarship points to the most important reason for this: a common (but today often unacknowledged) cultural heritage in the redemptive storylines of Judeo-Christianity.
If my account of Deep History’s argument for decolonising history confuses readers, this is because its argument is confused. And this cannot simply be attributed to the contradictory forces that are undoubtedly at work. Rather, the contributors just keep missing the mark, in one sense or other, with regard to changes that have been occurring in the field of Aboriginal history.
In claiming that the discipline of history in Australia needs to be decolonised (whatever that means), many contributors provide shallow one-dimensional accounts of past and present historical practice in regard to the Aboriginal past. Most significantly, they ignore the various changes that have taken place in recent decades. Given those changes and that Aboriginal people’s historical turn has largely served their cultural and political needs, one might wonder why there are ongoing calls to decolonise history. This is probably the case because, whereas Aboriginal people are relating, and relating to, the past in ways that resemble the ways their forebears did it, history practised in keeping with its disciplinary traditions can undermine the political, legal, and cultural claims Aboriginal people make on the basis of ‘continuity’ because it reveals that their societies and cultures have undergone radical change since 1788.
That Aboriginal people do the kind of ‘history’ they do is one thing. That many settler historians are now intent on practising it in the same ways and thereby producing accounts of the past that are ahistorical is quite another. In the name of decolonising history, many appear willing, indeed eager, to give up on history as it has largely been practised since it became a discipline. They treat all Aboriginal accounts of the past as though they are empirically sound and allow their readers to receive them accordingly. They defer to Aboriginal narrators who have recently accommodated a Eurocentric account of Australia’s black past that once briefly dominated the Australian academy but which differs from the morally ambiguous stories earlier generations of Aboriginal people told. And they repudiate their own authority, and the responsibility that goes with it, to tell the truth about the past. To what end? A kind of faux politics that only threatens to tear apart deep knowledge about Australia’s Aboriginal past.
As Attwood points out, ‘we have to get across the idea that to be equal you do not have to be the same as us.’