‘the tide of history has indeed washed away any real acknowledgment of their traditional laws and any real observance of their traditional customs’ – Justice Howard Olney, 18 December 1998, in the Yorta Yorta case.
Edward Curr senior wrote a book, An Account of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (1824), advising British immigrants on their prospects of making a new life in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. In his younger years Curr was infused with idealism and pioneering spirit. Was he to shape a new Rome in New Holland? He quoted Virgil’s Aeneid in the frontispiece of the book:
“… quas vento accesserit oras; qui teneant, nam inculta videt, hominesne, feraene, quaerere constituit, sociisque exacta referre” which translated means: “to seek out what regions he has reached by the wind, to seek out who occupies the land (for he sees it is uncultivated), whether humans or wild beasts, and to report his discoveries to his companions.] – Virgil in the Aeneid“.
However Edward Curr’s book, written at sea on his way back to London, was a cautionary tale warning immigrants of the dangers they faced, including the hostility of the original inhabitants.
At his death, Curr was referred to as the ‘father of separation‘ as the colony of Port Phillip separated from the colony of Botany Bay. By the 1850s, Australia’s federated structure had begun taking shape. Van Diemen’s Land, Port Phillip, Botany Bay, and Moreton Bay were to become the states of Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland. Curr’s oldest son Edward Micklethwaite Curr wrote two books about colonisation: Recollections of Squatting in Victoria and The Australian Race (in 4 volumes). I include Volume I of the Australian Race here to demonstrate that the authors of the Australian constitution were aware of the diverse languages and customs of the original inhabitants yet, strangely, omitted them from it. For example, when Henry Parkes delivered his famous Tenterfield Oration in 1889 he was aware of this book by Edward M Curr. Indeed Parkes contributed to it. Yet during the Constitutional Convention in 1891, the first of a series of meetings that led to the federation of Australia, aborigines and women were excluded entirely.
The contents of Recollections of Squatting in Victoria became the cornerstone of the dispossession of the Yorta Yorta people from their country on the Murray and Goulburn Rivers in Northern Victoria and southern New South Wales.
‘Edward M Curr and the tide of history‘ by Samuel Furphy
Samuel Furphy, in his book Edward M Curr and the tide of history, has described how this came about. In a neo-colonialist move the Keating Labor government sought ‘bucket loads of extinguishment’ of land rights mainly for mining interests through its native title legislation and the courts interpretation of that in a post-Mabo world. Under Native Title mining trumps all as has been shown with state and federal government approval for the Adani coal mine.
The irony was that nowhere in the writings of Edward M Curr or his father was to be found any suggestion that they were engaged in the dispossession of the original people of this land. Nowhere in the many volumes of books, dairies, correspondence with the Van Diemen’s Land company and the governors of the colonies was there a single reference to terra nullius. It was as if the legal justification for 20th century rights to land, rivers, seas, mines and pasture, terra nullius was the stuff of historical fiction, myth, and propaganda.
People may say that I am being rash in stating that, from the outset, ‘terra nullius‘ was not the real basis upon which aboriginal land was stolen by the Crown. I have recently become aware of the Proclamation of Governor Bourke upon which it is claimed the doctrine of terra nullius rests. Was British settlement based upon such a claim and did this reinforce the notion that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown taking possession of it. I say not. At no stage do any of the early settlers write that there were no blackfellas on the land. How could they? The Aboriginal people stood on the land in front of their eyes, every day. By the time the colonists began their myth of terra nullius, the invasion was over; the killing times were not, but the decimation of the original inhabitants nearly complete. It is only in my lifetime (b. 1950) that there has been a resurgence of first nations people and those that identify with them.
As far as detailed research of this question goes, people may wish to read the memoir of my grandfather, Fred Curr (b 1865) about being a ‘pioneer’ in the Gulf of Carpentaria, or that of his relatives Edward Curr (senior): “An Account of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (1824)” or that of his son, Edward M Curr: “Recollections of squatting in Victoria” (particularly pages 49-61) and, of course, The Australian Race.
It was the Federal and High Courts in the Yorta Yorta case that misread “Recollections…” (or did not read the many other books, letters and first hand accounts of the time. It should be borne in mind that “Recollections …” were a memoir of someone who had only just passed his teens recollected many years later. The judges used them as a tool for dispossession of the Yorta Yorta is shameful proof of the judges ignorance and bias. People can read about that particular, but not isolated, legal injustice in ‘Edward M Curr and the tide of history’ by Samuel Furphy.
When the colonial office invented the fiction ‘Terra Nullius‘ it certainly did not come from the people who occupied the frontier. Also there were migrants here in Australia in the 19th century who had no history of dispossession of others from their land (e.g. Syrians, Chinese and others).
In this case it was the English that came up with such a racist and absurd construct as ‘terra nullius’. See https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/books/the-curr-family-in-far-north-queensland-1862-1925/
I commend this book ‘Edward M Curr and the tide of history‘ by Samuel Furphy to readers interested in how Australia was setup. Two hundred and fifty years after the landing of James Cook at Botany Bay the nation state of Australia still carries the burden of that historic fiction regardless of how it was constructed. I include excerpts of the both books by Edward M Curr and Samuel Furphy below.
Always was …
Ian Curr
1st of May 2020
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Prologue: ‘Claim sunk by pen of a swordsman’
When the High Court of Australia rejected the final appeal in the Yorta Yorta native title case in December 2002, a headline in The Age announced: ‘Claim sunk by pen of a swordsman’. [Fergus Shiel, The Age, 13 December 2002.]
The man in question was Edward M. Curr (1820-1889), who was certainly fond of fencing in his youth, but is better known as the author of Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (1883), an engaging account
of his early life as a pastoralist on the Goulburn and Murray rivers. In 1841 Curr was among the first squatters to occupy land belonging to ancestors of the Yorta Yorta people, described by Curr as ‘the Bangerang Tribe’.*
His nostalgic memoir is one of very few written accounts of Indigenous life in the early years of the pastoral invasion of northern Victoria. The apparent failure of Yorta Yorta people to maintain traditions identifiable with those that Curr had described was a key reason for the defeat of their native title claim.
Born in Hobart in 1820, Curr was the first son of English-Catholic immigrant parents. His father was an influential businessman and politician, who played a prominent role in the early colonial affairs of Van Diemen’s Land and the Port Phillip District of New South Wales (later Victoria). Curr himself was educated in England and France before managing his family’s squatting runs for a decade.
His pastoral endeavours were highly successful and the dispossession of the Indigenous owners was swift. He later experienced financial failure but recovered to forge a successful career as a government official in Victoria, rising to the senior position of Chief Inspector of Stock. From 1875 he was an influential member of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines during a highly controversial period; he doggedly pursued the closure of the Coranderrk Aboriginal reserve near Healesville, publicly displaying a profound paternalism and disregard for the wishes of the Indigenous people concerned.
In the same period, he pursued an interest in Aboriginal languages and ethnology. …
Samuel Furphy
* Throughout this book I use terms for Indigenous groups that were common among nineteenth century writers, notably those preferred by Edward M. Curr, including ‘Bangerang’, ‘Towroonban’, ‘Wongatpan’,
and ‘Ngooraialum’. Other terms such as ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Indigenous’, ‘Maori’, and ‘Native’ are used advisedly, recognising both their conceptual limitations and their broad utility.
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Excerpt from Recollections of Squatting in Victoria by Edward M Curr.