So, today is the 231st anniversary of the first British convict fleet landing in Sydney Cove. This was the beginning of the British invasion of Australia, but far from the end of it. In my home town, home of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, and the surrounding country of peoples including the Quandamooka, Kabi Kabi and Mununjali, the invasion did not start in earnest until 1823. In November of that year the surveyor Lieutenant John Oxley sailed through Quandamooka waters and slowly rowed up the Maiwar River, surveying as he went. Unaware that the river already had a name, he renamed it the Brisbane River after his boss Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of NSW. In consequence the surrounding land, originally called Meanjin, also came to be called Brisbane.
Among more peaceful encounters with the land's owners was an ugly confrontation which resulted in a young Aboriginal man being shot and possibly killed. A year later a small party of convicts and soldiers arrived to found a convict settlement and the invasion began in earnest.
Today I joined members of the Meanjin Aboriginal community, and many non-Aboriginal supporters, at a rally and march to mark this occasion, known variously as Invasion Day, Survival Day or Day of Mourning. We heard from Aboriginal people old and young, from veteran activists who have been doing this for decades, to young men and women who were speaking at their first protest. They spoke in the languages of their ancestors as well as in English, they celebrated their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, their survival, even as they mourned what had been lost and what continues to be lost.
I was born in England and came to Australia at the age of six in 1967, settling in Meanjin/Brisbane with my family in 1968. It has been my home, more or less, ever since. For the last 25 years I have lived just a short walk from the Maiwar River and often walk or ride my bike along its shores.
When I went back to England for the first time in 1993 one of things that excited me was the sense of history everywhere I went. 500 or even 1,000 year old buildings were still in use, and the remains of even earlier times were everywhere. You had a sense of a continuous civilisation going back for thousands of years.
By contrast, my experience of Australia was of a place where the history is only skin deep, where we stress over heritage buildings that are more than a century old and nothing goes back beyond 200 years. I was living, it seemed to me, in a place without roots.
It's funny how it can take time for what you know to change how you feel. By that time, I had been out of the Australian school system, with its misleading history curriculum, for 15 years. I had been exposed to the truth of Australian history at university. I had read CD Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, and had listened to the music of Kev Carmody. I had got to know quite a few Aboriginal people. I knew what the British had done to the people whose country we invaded.
Yet some lessons are hard to unlearn. I still believed, somewhat foolishly, that Aboriginal people had left nothing behind; that these nomadic hunter-gatherers had walked lightly on the earth and that what we had destroyed was physically ephemeral. I knew the invasion was criminal, but I felt that the physical heritage that surrounded me was entirely created post-1788. Sure, there were cave paintings out in the desert, but that was far away and hardly relevant to me.
Which, I have since learned, is nonsense.
First of all, even in the European mindset that grounds my thinking, it is not true that Aboriginal people left the country untouched. They intensively managed the land, using fire and strategic planting to create a patchwork of different game and plant habitats and secure their food supplies year-round. As Bruce Pascoe shows us, they practiced agriculture, built fish traps and fish breeding ponds, sunk wells, built villages with permanent houses and storage structures for their surplus grain, and created beaten paths along their most frequently travelled routes.
Such a settled culture could hardly fail to leave a trace. The invaders failed to notice much of it - they thought, or claimed, that the seed grasses and yam fields grew naturally and that the carefully tended waterholes came about without assistance. But even they could hardly fail to notice the houses and wells. It simply did not suit them to preserve them. The project of colonisation required the denial of this settled culture, the myth of the roaming hunter-gatherer. We spend millions preserving trivial items of European heritage but ignore any Aboriginal items.
Just down the road from me, right here in suburban Meanjin, is a grooved stone that was once used to sharpen stone knives. For how long was it in use? And more importantly, how has this monument been preserved and celebrated? Preserved, only by the grace of the current landowner. Celebrated - not at all until last year when a local history group held a low-key event.
But this is not history, this is just the physical signs of its passing. Each place has its stories, each people has its ancestors and their tales. The country is criss-crossed with songlines which people would follow to travel from place to place. Each place has its language and its spirits. Each place has its own ecological imperative, duties incumbent on its custodians to sustain it for all its inhabitants, human or not. Much of this has been lost, to our detriment, but much lives on. The main testimony to Australia's 65,000 year history is the continued presence of the descendents of those original Australians.
It need hardly be said that these descendents do not celebrate the anniversary of Phillip's landing. For them it symbolises the murder of their ancestors and the theft of their land. The European celebration of this event feels to them like people dancing on their ancestors' graves. It is an occasion of mourning and grief, and of resistance and hope.
This is not ancient history. Aboriginal people only became equal before the law in the 1970s, gaining rights like the freedom to live where they choose and the right to equal pay for equal work. They are still trying to recover wages stolen from them by the Queensland government when the trust fund into which they were paid was used to fund public infrastructure like roads and hospitals. They are still struggling with shorter life expectancy, poorer health, lower incomes, shocking rates of incarceration and youth suicide. Aboriginal communities around Australia, including here in Meajin, are still hurting.
But also, they have not magically disappeared, they are still here. Despite the neglect and ignorance of most of us, they are working hard to rebuild their communities, to preserve and revive their languages, to educate their children, to educate the rest of us about the true history of this land.
If we celebrate anything today, let's celebrate that.
Among more peaceful encounters with the land's owners was an ugly confrontation which resulted in a young Aboriginal man being shot and possibly killed. A year later a small party of convicts and soldiers arrived to found a convict settlement and the invasion began in earnest.Today I joined members of the Meanjin Aboriginal community, and many non-Aboriginal supporters, at a rally and march to mark this occasion, known variously as Invasion Day, Survival Day or Day of Mourning. We heard from Aboriginal people old and young, from veteran activists who have been doing this for decades, to young men and women who were speaking at their first protest. They spoke in the languages of their ancestors as well as in English, they celebrated their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, their survival, even as they mourned what had been lost and what continues to be lost.
***
I was born in England and came to Australia at the age of six in 1967, settling in Meanjin/Brisbane with my family in 1968. It has been my home, more or less, ever since. For the last 25 years I have lived just a short walk from the Maiwar River and often walk or ride my bike along its shores.
When I went back to England for the first time in 1993 one of things that excited me was the sense of history everywhere I went. 500 or even 1,000 year old buildings were still in use, and the remains of even earlier times were everywhere. You had a sense of a continuous civilisation going back for thousands of years.
By contrast, my experience of Australia was of a place where the history is only skin deep, where we stress over heritage buildings that are more than a century old and nothing goes back beyond 200 years. I was living, it seemed to me, in a place without roots.
It's funny how it can take time for what you know to change how you feel. By that time, I had been out of the Australian school system, with its misleading history curriculum, for 15 years. I had been exposed to the truth of Australian history at university. I had read CD Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, and had listened to the music of Kev Carmody. I had got to know quite a few Aboriginal people. I knew what the British had done to the people whose country we invaded.
Yet some lessons are hard to unlearn. I still believed, somewhat foolishly, that Aboriginal people had left nothing behind; that these nomadic hunter-gatherers had walked lightly on the earth and that what we had destroyed was physically ephemeral. I knew the invasion was criminal, but I felt that the physical heritage that surrounded me was entirely created post-1788. Sure, there were cave paintings out in the desert, but that was far away and hardly relevant to me.
Which, I have since learned, is nonsense.
First of all, even in the European mindset that grounds my thinking, it is not true that Aboriginal people left the country untouched. They intensively managed the land, using fire and strategic planting to create a patchwork of different game and plant habitats and secure their food supplies year-round. As Bruce Pascoe shows us, they practiced agriculture, built fish traps and fish breeding ponds, sunk wells, built villages with permanent houses and storage structures for their surplus grain, and created beaten paths along their most frequently travelled routes.
Such a settled culture could hardly fail to leave a trace. The invaders failed to notice much of it - they thought, or claimed, that the seed grasses and yam fields grew naturally and that the carefully tended waterholes came about without assistance. But even they could hardly fail to notice the houses and wells. It simply did not suit them to preserve them. The project of colonisation required the denial of this settled culture, the myth of the roaming hunter-gatherer. We spend millions preserving trivial items of European heritage but ignore any Aboriginal items.
Just down the road from me, right here in suburban Meanjin, is a grooved stone that was once used to sharpen stone knives. For how long was it in use? And more importantly, how has this monument been preserved and celebrated? Preserved, only by the grace of the current landowner. Celebrated - not at all until last year when a local history group held a low-key event.
But this is not history, this is just the physical signs of its passing. Each place has its stories, each people has its ancestors and their tales. The country is criss-crossed with songlines which people would follow to travel from place to place. Each place has its language and its spirits. Each place has its own ecological imperative, duties incumbent on its custodians to sustain it for all its inhabitants, human or not. Much of this has been lost, to our detriment, but much lives on. The main testimony to Australia's 65,000 year history is the continued presence of the descendents of those original Australians.
It need hardly be said that these descendents do not celebrate the anniversary of Phillip's landing. For them it symbolises the murder of their ancestors and the theft of their land. The European celebration of this event feels to them like people dancing on their ancestors' graves. It is an occasion of mourning and grief, and of resistance and hope.
This is not ancient history. Aboriginal people only became equal before the law in the 1970s, gaining rights like the freedom to live where they choose and the right to equal pay for equal work. They are still trying to recover wages stolen from them by the Queensland government when the trust fund into which they were paid was used to fund public infrastructure like roads and hospitals. They are still struggling with shorter life expectancy, poorer health, lower incomes, shocking rates of incarceration and youth suicide. Aboriginal communities around Australia, including here in Meajin, are still hurting.
But also, they have not magically disappeared, they are still here. Despite the neglect and ignorance of most of us, they are working hard to rebuild their communities, to preserve and revive their languages, to educate their children, to educate the rest of us about the true history of this land.
If we celebrate anything today, let's celebrate that.
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