VALUE

In the volumes of hate speech contained in the colonial accounts of Australia, few writings had more influence than that of Charles Darwin. On his travels around Tasmania, Darwin remarked how, “[Tasmania] enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population”. Although he hinted that “wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal”, he concluded that the mistakenly perceived extinction of the Tasmanian by white colonists was explained as part of the struggle for life that favoured races by natural selection. As he put it, “the varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker”.[i]

 The commentary on the wood engraving “A Black Camp” of NSW, published in the London Illustrated News of 1852, begins with an update for its British audience on the nature and value of the Aboriginal people: “The Blacks of Australia are...the lowest and most irreclaimable of the native tribes with which we are acquainted”. Complaint follows that after 64 years of “strenuous efforts” by the colonisers, only a few Aboriginals could read and write and therefore ‘civilisation’ was beyond them. More recently, commentators on the morning entertainment show Sunrise publicly complained of the Aboriginal problem once more and suggested, straight-faced, that “just like the first Stolen Generations, where a lot of children were taken because it was for their well-being, we need to do it again, perhaps”.[ii] This continues an alarming trend of devaluing Aboriginal people’s lives and autonomy.

 The presumably Australian-based British correspondent who submitted the image for the engraving discussed above also supplied a philosophical reflection on the catastrophic implications of the Aboriginal First Nations not developing an exchange economy based on gold, like the wise and Christian British. As he articulated:

[T]he mysterious and wonderful arrangements of Divine providence are brought forcibly to our minds on viewing the modes of life of this peculiar people, existing without a wish beyond hunting the forests, and living precariously on food which they obtain by climbing the immense gum-trees, wholly ignorant that at their roots the most precious metal has been concealed for thousands of years; generation after generation of aborigines has passed away, unconscious of the riches concealed beneath the surface of their native hunting grounds, perchance sufficient to have made them the most powerful race under the sun. [iii]

 If only we had trawled our country for glittery clumps of metal. It would have catapulted our race to total black supremacy in the minds of violent and aggressive colonisers, who attempted to legislate that all the gold in Australia belonged to the Crown so as to stop ex-convicts and ex-working-class British subjects from gaining power by finding gold instead of attaining it through inheritance. Besides, we know how the Spanish respected Aztec peoples living in an empire awash with gold but without guns.

 (Ryan Presley Aug. 2019)

[i] Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London: Penguin, 1989 [originally published 1839]), page 212.

[ii] Sunrise, broadcast 13 March 2018, Channel 7 Australia.

[iii] “’The Black Camp’ of NSW, after the annual gift of blankets from the Governor” Illustrated London News, 24 April 1852 314.